Quotulatiousness

September 28, 2022

There are two kinds of people online talking about mental illness: those suffering with mental illness and those glorying in the attention they get for faking it

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

Freddie deBoer on the phenomenon of mental health culture online and the two primary kinds of participants (my headline over-dramatizes the case he’s actually making):

I was not, at first glance, inspired with confidence by this Washington Post piece on online mental illness culture. The piece has a header image of a “mental illness influencer” lounging in bed, taking a selfie. I’m someone who’s committed to de-glamorizing mental illness, and I’ve been begging people to stop romanticizing pathology for a long time. I suppose there’s an implied critique in that photograph, but it’s not ideal.

On substance, Tatum Hunter’s piece fails the way so many others have failed in this milieu: it studiously avoids the possibility that some people who talk about their mental illnesses online don’t really have them. I’m not specifically talking about simple fraud and lies, which I suspect are rare, but rather the weird combination of hypochondria, Munchausen’s syndrome, and social contagion that we see all around us in these spaces. Spend any time at all in these communities on Tumblr or Tik Tok and you will find many people, most of them young, who are using mental illness as a means to self-define, to differentiate themselves from the hordes of other people they see online who are just like them. I’ve written again and again about why it’s a bad idea to want to be your mental illness, and it’s even worse to want to be mentally ill, period – not just bad for other people, but bad for you. But there are people who have become influencers and garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on their apps of choice by performing mental illness. People use their disorders to chase clout. That’s just reality.

Hunter considers the problems of misdiagnosis, of self-diagnosis, of people undertaking mental health care on the advice of internet randoms rather than under the care of a doctor, but nowhere does she seriously consider the possibility that the basic problem for many people is that they believe they have mental disorders they don’t in fact have. I think doing so is seen, at this point, as a kind of identity crime, and thus unlikely to be found in the Washington Post.

But hypochondria exists. Munchausen’s syndrome exists. Psychosomatic illness exists. I can get people to admit to those realities in the abstract, now, but they stay entirely in the abstract – to suggest that any group of people is suffering under those conditions, rather than under authentic mental illness, is treated as a sin. This was my biggest disappointment with Ross Douthat’s book on his chronic illness, which I quite liked overall; Douthat never stops his narrative to ask whether any of the people who believe themselves to be sick from chronic illness actually aren’t. (Surely he himself suffered, but because of the woo and mysticism found in that space, an accounting was necessary.) And I don’t know how we confront the spiraling number of people claiming to have illnesses for which there are no objective tests without being frank about the existence of hypochondria, Munchausen’s, and psychosomatic illness – particularly when people insist on deepening the social incentives by giving the sick more and more attention.

Even for the authentically ill, online culture is fraught. The meta-problem with pieces like that in WaPo, obviously, is that by giving certain members of this community the glamour shot treatment (literally in this case), they’re creating direct incentive for people to make illness their identity -and to not get better. Young people understand the allure of being seen; they don’t yet understand the horror of being frozen in other people’s gazes. They don’t understand the costs of being defined. There have been many opportunities for me to make myself the mental illness guy, certainly including financial opportunities. Perhaps I’ve already fallen into that trap, despite my efforts to remain a generalist. But I’ve fought to avoid that because I know just how painful and limiting self-definition can become. I’m sorry to pull wizened old guy here, but young people don’t understand. They don’t understand that pinning yourself down that way can produce a kind of horror.

September 24, 2022

The end of crisis culture – “[Y]ou can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it”

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

Chris Bray on the inevitable endgame of “all crisis, all the time” culture:

The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”. What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.

The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide“), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.

All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.

The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters … but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:

The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.

September 20, 2022

Hannah Arendt in postwar Germany

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Roger Berkowitz discusses what Hannah Arendt found when talking to Germans after the Second World War, which she characterized as their collective “escape from reality”:

In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”. This “escape from reality”, as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing”.

The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig”. What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion”. The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter”. Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality”.

The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism“), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea. Nazism is an ideology that blames economic disaster, political loss, and the evils of modernity on the Jews — inhuman flotsam who must be exterminated to allow a master race to flourish. Bolshevism, on the other hand, “pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away”. The bourgeoisie are not simply class traitors, they are a dying class, and killing them only supports a law of history. As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience”. The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality”.

Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated”, it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood”. As reality recedes, ideologies organize society to transform their ideas into living reality. If antisemitism as an ideology says that all Jews are beggars without passports, the fact of wealthy and established Jews must be eliminated. If Bolshevism says that the bourgeoisie are corrupt, they must admit their corruption or be killed. The realization of such ideological realities can be accomplished, of course, through terror.

But even before a totalitarian movement takes power and mobilizes the secret police in the machinery of terror, ideological movements can employ propaganda to deny and nullify facts, or change them. The Nazis, she writes, “did not so much believe in the truth of racism as desire to change the world into a race reality”. Similarly, the Bolshevist ideology that classes were dying was not something real, but something that had to be made real. The purges and terror that Stalin unleashed were supposed to “establish a classless society” by exterminating all social groups that might develop into classes. In both instances, the purpose of the ideology was to transform a mere opinion — race consciousness or class consciousness — into the “the lived content of reality”.

The point, as Arendt concludes, is that “ideological consistency reducing everything to one all-dominating factor is always in conflict with the inconsistency of the world, on the one hand, and the unpredictability of human actions, on the other”. What ideology demands is that man — an unpredictable and spontaneous being — cease to exist as such, that all humans be subjected to laws of development that follow ideological truth. That is why the turn from an unreliable reality to coherent fantasy requires an absolute elimination of human spontaneity and freedom.

September 19, 2022

There’s a difference between “caring what kids think” and “pandering for kids’ attention and affection”

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

Rob Henderson wonders why so many adults these days are clearly desperate for the approval of young people:

During my recent re-watch of the entirety of Mad Men, which takes place in the 1960s, a recurring thought entered my mind: This was the last generation where young adults behaved like they were older than their real age. Don Draper is around thirty-five at the start of the series, and carries himself in a more adult manner than many 45 year olds today.

Recently, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who stated that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys”.

Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age.

Which is perhaps one reason why boomers are so easy to mock. They don’t act their age.

[…]

About two years later, I was at a breakfast gathering with some other students on campus. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious, and spent most of the time answering questions from students.

And in his answers, he continually returned to variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been, because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.”

This mystified me. This guy was well into his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experiences in leadership roles, was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was a little older) that older adults are relying on them.

In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. It was okay to give feedback, of course. Commanding officers would regularly consult lower ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that happens only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.

I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all of you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis).

My 17-year-old brain heard that thought, yeah, he’s probably right. I thought of the bus loads of other ungainly young guys I saw stepping off and being confronted with “Pick ’em up, and put ’em down” and other mind games from the instructors while waiting in the endless in-processing lines.

So then I got to college and learned that even though any seat, at least at selective schools, can be filled immediately with a bright applicant (top colleges reject thousands of them each year), students are never ejected for disrespecting professors or anyone else. In the military the first message was, you are a peon and less than nothing and we can easily have you replaced (this changes as you advance in rank, of course — at least to some degree). In college, the first message was, you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (and marginalized and erased) and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.

[…]

Older adults crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them.

This desire for esteem may be why older adults won’t exert any authority in response to energetic young conflict entrepreneurs who yell at them or threaten them.

Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent”, every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.

September 16, 2022

The rise of the “golden penis”

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Look folks, there are some headlines that just write themselves, but it’s not my coining — here’s Janice Fiamengo to explain where that … memorable term … came from:

We’ve been told for years that the future is female, that everyone benefits from female leadership and everything improves when women take charge.

Any man on a college campus who has ever objected to the plethora of special university programs and women-only scholarships and pro-woman propaganda was told he had a problem with gender equality.

But now it turns out that some women themselves are not entirely happy with the deal feminists engineered for them, which sees them outnumbering men at close to 3-2 at most English-speaking universities, and thousands of words have already been devoted to the idea that college women deserve a more satisfactory dating experience.

According to Monica Greep in an article from last fall for the Daily Mail, “How Golden Penis Syndrome is ruining dating for university women”, the “deficit of male students” at college “means men develop inflated egos and become Casanovas who cheat — despite a lack of social and sexual skills”.

The formulation reminds me of an old Woody Allen joke from his movie Annie Hall. In my updated version, two women are discussing college dating: “The guys are awful, egotistical schmucks who think they’re really great,” says one. “I know,” says the other, “And there are so few of them!”

If these men are so lacking in “social and sexual skills”, as the article tut tuts, then why are the women upset that there are not more of them? If the women don’t want guys who are Casanovas, they don’t have to date them. But admitting that women have any role in creating the hookup culture being decried is impossible for most commentators today; the fault must always be found in the men. There is even a “relationship therapist” quoted in the article who tells us that Golden Penis Syndrome “speaks of the delusional belief that you are unusually and uniquely gifted as a man”.

Really? Did any of these analysts interview any young men who actually said that about themselves, or is this a case of women projecting onto men their own self-delusions, angry because the men have failed to respond to them as they, the women, would prefer?

As has become typical of pronouncements about men and women, the article blames men for being in the minority at college: at some institutions, they make up only 25% of the student body (see Mark Perry’s charts, for example here, showing the decades-long gender asymmetries; and see his proof that women outnumber men in STEM fields too). The shortage apparently causes men “to see themselves as a prize to be won by female suitors”.

What articles such as this one won’t admit is that these guys are “prizes to be won”, and increasingly so in light of the reported imbalance.

It is well known that college-educated men who marry are, on average, likely to work the longest hours, seek promotion most aggressively, and become high earners focused on supporting their wives and families (even post-divorce, as too often happens). A woman who is fortunate enough to marry a man like this stands to secure a materially better life, often at her husband’s expense of health and leisure, than she would have had if she had depended solely on her own earning power and work ethic (women are famously more interested in “work-life balance” than men are). Now with these men in the minority, women are having to compete for the men’s attention, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them.

Of course the alleged problem has an obvious solution: the women could date and marry non-university-educated men. Why won’t they? The article mentions this somewhat embarrassing reality in gender-neutral terms by noting that “At the same time [that] university sex ratios have been skewing female, there’s been a simultaneous increase in what academics call ‘assortative mating’.” The article explains, “That’s a fancy way of saying that college grads only want to date and marry other grads.”

Wrong.

It’s not male college grads who won’t marry anyone other than a female college grad. As a 2019 study confirmed, it is almost exclusively women who insist on the need for their mates to earn more. In a sane age genuinely committed to “gender equality”, we might criticize women for their stereotypical behavior, for perceiving men as “success objects”. But we never criticize women for acting out of self-interest.

Only men are criticized for that, as well as for uncouth dating behaviors that everyone knows women also engage in when circumstances favor them: playing the field, cheating, “ghosting”, and so on. Being picky, demanding, and often downright rude are all recognized as a woman’s prerogative because women ARE seen as inherently valuable.

September 15, 2022

“Presentism is … a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu”

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

Jeff Minick on the mental attitude that animates so many progressives:

My online dictionary defines presentism as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts”. To my surprise, the 40-year-old dictionary on my shelf also contains this eyesore of a word and definition.

To be present, of course, is a generally considered a virtue. It can mean everything from giving ourselves to the job at hand — no one wants a surgeon dreaming of his upcoming vacation to St. Croix while he’s cracking open your chest — to consoling a grieving friend.

But presentism is altogether different. It’s a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu. The latter spreads by way of a virus, the former through ignorance and puffed-up pride.

Presentism is what inspires the afflicted to tear down the statues of such Americans as Washington, Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee for owning slaves without ever once asking why this was so or seeking to discover what these men thought of slavery. Presentism is why the “Little House Books” and some of the early stories by Dr. Seuss are attacked or banned entirely.

Presentism is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.

Presentism accounts in large measure for our Mount Everest of debt and inflation. Those overseeing our nation’s finances have refused to listen to warnings from the past, even the recent past, about the clear dangers of a government creating trillions of dollars out of the air.

Presentism has led America into overseas adventures that have invariably come to a bad end. Afghanistan, for example, has long been known as the graveyard of empires, a cemetery which includes the tombstones of British and Russian ambitions. By our refusal to heed the lessons of that history and our botched withdrawal from Kabul, we dug our own grave alongside them.

H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.

September 11, 2022

QotD: De-institutionalization

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

[In Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness, Andrew] Scull stresses the degree to which external pressures have shaped psychiatry. “Community psychiatry” supplanted “institutional psychiatry” in part because of professional insecurity. Psychiatrists needed a new model for dealing with mental diseases to keep pace with the advances that mainstream health care was making with other diseases. Fiscal conservatives viewed the practice of confining hundreds of thousands of Americans to long-term commitment as overly expensive, and civil libertarians viewed it as unjust.

Deinstitutionalization began slowly at first, in the 1950s, but the pace accelerated around 1970, despite signs that all was not going according to plan. On the ground, psychiatrists noticed earlier than anyone else that the most obvious question — where are these people going to go when they leave the mental institutions? — had no clear answers. Whatever misgivings psychiatrists voiced over the system’s abandonment of the mentally ill to streets, slums, and jails was too little and too late.

That modern psychiatry is mostly practiced outside of mental institutions is not its only difference from premodern psychiatry. Scull devotes extensive coverage to two equally decisive developments: the rise and fall of Freudianism, and psychopharmacology.

The Freudians normalized therapy in America and provided crucial intellectual support for the idea that mental health care is for everyone, not just the deranged. Around the same time as deinstitutionalization, Freud’s reputation, especially in elite circles, was on a level with Newton and Copernicus. Since then, Freudianism has mostly gone the way of phlogiston and leeches. That happened not just because people decided the psychoanalysts’ approach to therapy didn’t work but also because insurance wouldn’t pay for it. Insurance would, however, pay for modes of therapy that were less open-ended than the “reconstruction of personality that psychoanalysis proclaimed as its mission”, more targeted to a specific psychological symptom, and, most crucially of all, performed by non-M.D.s. Therapy was on the rise, but psychiatrists found themselves doing less and less of it.

As psychiatry cast aside Freudian concepts such as the “refrigerator mother”, which rooted mental illness in psychodynamic tensions, it increasingly trained its focus on biology. Drugs contributed to, and gained a boost from, this reorientation. Scull loathes the drug industry and only grudgingly allows that it has made improvements in the lives of mentally ill Americans. He divides up the vast American drug-taking public into three groups: those for whom they work, those for whom they don’t work, and those for whom they may work, but not enough to counter the unpleasant side effects. He argues that the last two groups are insupportably large.

Stephen Eide, “Soul Doctors”, City Journal, 2022-05-18.

September 9, 2022

Britain’s “Lord of Misrule” at the end of the “Borisarchy”

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

In Quillette, John Lloyd considers the parts of Boris Johnson’s personality that allowed him to achieve the premiership but not to retain it:

The respectable consensus on Boris Johnson’s resignation is that the Lord of Misrule was an opportunist who rose to power amid the mayhem of Brexit that he’d helped to create, but that his fecklessness finally caught up with him. There’s something in that, but more in what’s not. Although his critics will refuse to admit it, what’s mostly missing is the laughter, which is now a more important factor in British public life than before.

Much of public and media life in the UK — and it isn’t unique in this — is a search for laugh lines, and Johnson — instinctively but also with calculation — played heartily into this. He always had. In a largely affectionate biography, Andrew Gimson, Johnson’s former colleague at the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph, writes that, “To make people enjoy being led by him was an aspect of leadership which Boris mastered at a very young age. He made people helpless with laughter, and so great was their enjoyment that they scarcely cared what he did with their support, as long as he kept on amusing them.”

With the laughter came Johnson’s inchoate libertarianism — a strong aversion to condemning activities in which others like to indulge, especially those in which he likes to indulge himself, such as adultery. He is fond of telling the story of when Churchill, Johnson’s lodestar as a public figure, was taken aside during his second administration (1951–55) by his chief whip and told that a cabinet minister had been discovered having sex with a guardsman in Hyde Park at 3am on a freezing morning in February. The press had found out, which the whip advised, meant the minister would have to resign. “Caught with a guardsman?” Churchill asked. “Yes Prime Minister.” “In Hyde Park?” “Yes Prime Minister.” “On a park bench?” “That’s right, Prime Minister.” “At three o’clock in the morning?” “That’s correct, Prime Minister.” “In this weather! Good God man, it makes you proud to be British!”

To Johnson, this is evidence of Churchill’s goodhearted tolerance and defiance of narrow prejudice (this was a time when homosexual acts were quite severely punished), which are matched only by his own in generosity and wit. To be generous and broadminded in his speech (he is said to be quite mean with his money) is attractive to the many sinners among us. We see in the Prime Minister a person with the moral outlook of Casanova and yet (or, and so) finds attractive women willing to dally with him — a cheering thought. As one of these, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who became his first wife, later admitted, “at least he made me laugh.”

[…]

Accustomed to lying to wriggle out of embarrassments like the discovery of an adultery, he continued to mislead when he joined aides for impromptu parties at No. 10, when the strictest lockdowns and prohibitions on the public were in force. How could a man of such intelligence fail to realise that his bluster would unravel almost as soon as they were uttered? He had, it seemed, an inbuilt arrogance — a conviction that he was able to avoid consequences that brought others down, but which only made him stronger.

In the end, he ran out of that road. Ironically, what finished him was denying that he knew that a government whip, Chris Pincher, had a history of groping other men. Johnson refused to take the scandal seriously enough to fire Pincher, as his senior colleagues pressed him to do — an echo of the Churchill joke he liked to tell, and a reaction which accorded with his libertarian instincts. However, his colleagues finally wearied of delivering statements to the media that made them look ridiculous within days or even hours. It was the last straw.

When Lord Dannatt, a former head of the British Army, was confronted with the (admittedly faint) possibility that Johnson would be considered for the post of NATO Secretary General, he was quoted as saying: “There is no doubt that [Johnson] has done a lot of good, and our full support for Ukraine is just fantastic. But I am afraid that these are personal things, a lack of integrity, a lack of trust. Frankly, we do not want to put Boris Johnson on the international stage for further ridicule. He is a disgrace to the nation.”

September 7, 2022

QotD: Gender Dysphoria

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

My lifelong gender dysphoria has certainly been a primary inspiration for my entire career as a researcher and writer. I have never for a moment felt female — but neither have I ever felt male either. I regard my ambiguous position between the sexes as a privilege that has given me special access to and insight into a broad range of human thought and response. If a third gender option (“Other”) were ever added to government documents, I would be happy to check it. However, I have never believed, and do not now, that society has any obligation to bend over backwards to accommodate my particular singularity of identity. I am very concerned about current gender theory rhetoric that convinces young people that if they feel uneasy about or alienated from their assignment to one sex, then they must take concrete steps, from hormone therapy to alarmingly irreversible surgery, to become the other sex. I find this an oddly simplistic and indeed reactionary response to what should be regarded as a golden opportunity for flexibility and fluidity. Furthermore, it is scientifically impossible to change sex. Except for very rare cases of intersex, which are developmental anomalies, every cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth sex for life.

Beyond that, I believe that my art-based theory of “sexual personae” is far more expansive and truthful about human psychology than is current campus ideology: who we are or want to be exceeds mere gender, because every experimental persona that we devise contains elements of gesture, dress, and attitude rich with historical and cultural associations. (For Halloween in childhood, for example, I defiantly dressed as Robin Hood, a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, and Hamlet.) Because of my own personal odyssey, I am horrified by the escalating prescription of puberty-blockers to children with gender dysphoria like my own: I consider this practice to be a criminal violation of human rights. Have the adults gone mad? Children are now being callously used for fashionable medical experiments with unknown long-term results.

In regard to the vexed issue of toilets and locker rooms, if private unisex facilities can be conveniently provided through simple relabeling, it would be humane to do so, but I fail to see why any school district, restaurant, or business should be legally obligated to go to excess expense (which ultimately penalizes the public) to serve such a minuscule proportion of the population, however loud their voices. And speaking of voices: as a libertarian, I oppose all intrusion by government into the realm of language, which belongs to the people and which evolves organically over time. Thus the term “Ms.” eventually became standard English, but another 1970s feminist hybrid, “womyn”, did not: the populace as a whole made that decision, as it always does with argot or slang filtering up from ethnic or avant-garde subgroups. The same principle applies to preferred transgender pronouns: they are a courtesy that we may choose to defer to, but in a modern democracy, no authority has the right to compel their usage.

Camille Paglia, “Prominent Democratic Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton ‘Exploits Feminism’”, Washington Free Beacon, 2017-05-15.

September 6, 2022

QotD: The fitness club

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

Yesterday we looked at what happens when a cult becomes a movement. I said there are two fundamental, structural problems that arise. The first is that the leadership’s goals start diverging from, and eventually run counter to, the cult’s dogma. That’s where the eco-scam finds itself these days. It doesn’t bother the Green True Believers that their leadership flies around in private jets — see yesterday’s discussion of disconfirmation — but it does put a damper on recruiting. We’re a stupid, spoiled, star-struck generation, but even we expect our leaders to walk the walk for a mile or two every now and again.

The second problem, though, is: What to do with the True Believers?

Let’s return to the metaphor of the gym fitness club. As we noted yesterday, the real money isn’t in the hardcore people who actually do the exercising. It’s in all the lardasses who sign up, and keep paying the membership fee, but never actually go. This leads to the perverse-seeming conclusion that the best gym, from the gym-owner’s perspective, is one that stands empty — gleaming, never-used equipment that just sits there, one mute inglorious depreciation tax writeoff, un-maintained by no paid staff. See what I mean? The whole point of owning a gym — the cult dogma, as it were — is to get people in shape, but the optimal gym from the cult leader’s perspective is a group of perpetual fatasses, buying themselves workout indulgences at $75 a month.

I trust that the analogues in the eco-scam are obvious, so let’s move on. Even the most optimal-for-the-owner gym, though, is going to have a few True Believers who are in there day after day, grinding out sets and jogging on treadmills and doing whatever those CrossFit freaks do.* If you let them, they’ll take over everything. Ever been in a gym and seen a piece of equipment designed to isolate one muscle that you’d never think could be worked out in the first place? Congrats, your gym’s got a True Believer. Just stake out the Urethra-cizer for a few hours; you’ll see her; she’s unmistakable. She’s pushing 50 but has the body of a 20-year old, except made out of beef jerky …

… anyway, the point is, savvy gym owners know how to handle True Believers. You don’t buy ’em off with new equipment; you buy ’em off with new exercises. P90X is for pussies. Do Ultra-Kegels, and in just 60 days you’ll be able to lift an entire can of paint with your …

* Obviously I can’t write about gyms and cults without taking a cheap shot at CrossFit. They’re probably chock full of lessons on how to business-optimize your cult without letting it go mainstream, but I’m too terrified to look. Honest to God, there are some days where the only exercise I get is dodging and weaving away from the CrossFit cultists at the office.

Severian, “If the UFO Actually Comes, Part II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-26.

September 5, 2022

“In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice”

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

Chris Bray uses the example of a new Disney show featuring the literal daughter of Satan — for the LULs — to illustrate just how unhinged our culture has become:

Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.

[…]

But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.

Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.

So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.

See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”

    Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us …

    When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.

We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.

After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?

September 3, 2022

Theodore Dalrymple on snobbery

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the various forms of snobbery:

“Snob” by Oldmaison is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Snobbery is the feeling of social superiority on the grounds of some quality over which the person believed to be inferior has little or no personal control, such as birthplace or parenthood. If this feeling is conspicuously displayed rather than merely felt, it is likely to provoke furious resentment, far more so than actual injustice. Disdain causes the rawest of wounds, which seldom heal. That is why people who triumph over snobbery in practice nevertheless often retain within themselves a strong core of resentment toward those of the type (not necessarily the actual individuals) who formerly disdained them. And this resentment often impels them to do seemingly self-destructive things.

In human affairs, it is seldom that there are clear-cut boundaries, so that it is not surprising that snobbery can shade into justified disdain or condemnation, at least for certain kinds of behavior if not for the human beings who display it. Those kinds of behavior are not equally distributed in all social groups, so that it is easy to transfer the disdain from the behavior to the social group itself, and assume that a member of that group will, ex officio, behave in the reprehended fashion.

It is probable that intellectual and aesthetic snobbery are now more prevalent than the more traditional forms that attach to place of birth and parentage. Many of us are appalled by the tastes and interests of others and secretly, and not so secretly, congratulate ourselves on our superiority to them. I am far from immune myself from such feelings. I have to control myself not so much in my outer behavior—that is a relatively easy thing to do — but in my inner feeling, that is to say to limit my own feelings of superiority to the people whose tastes I despise. After all, there is more to people than their tastes or enthusiasms, and I have never talked to anybody who struck me as anything other than an individual. Just as we are enjoined to hate the sin but not the sinner, so we have to try to dislike the bad taste but not the person who displays it. This requires the overriding of emotion by conscious thought and self-control.

The fear of appearing snobbish also has its deformations, as does inverted snobbery. The latter is harmful because it undermines aspiration to anything better or higher than that which the inverted snob already knows or likes. Inverted snobs sneer at what they sense instinctively to be above them, calling it pretentious and elitist. Incidentally, the word elitist is often misused or elided with social exclusivity. Not even the most anti-elitist of persons objects to the elitist selection of sports teams on the basis of superior performance and ability of players, nor does anyone object to being operated on by the best surgeon available, so that only if sport, and to a lesser extent surgery, is of such importance that it is an exception to the necessary suppression of elitism can this exception be justified.

Fear of appearing snobbish is harmful because it threatens the willingness to make judgments between the better and worse; and since the worse is always easier to produce, it contributes to a general decline in the quality of whatever is produced. This fear of appearing snobbish and therefore undemocratic is now very strong and pervades even universities (so I am told), in which one might have supposed that elitism, in the sense of a striving for the best that has been said and thought, would be de rigueur.

One of the forms that snobbery now commonly takes is disdain of simple, repetitive, and unskilled jobs (which are generally ill-paid as well). The educated can imagine no worse fate than to be employed in such a job, no matter how necessary or socially useful it might be — the person at the supermarket checkout (increasingly redundant, of course) being the emblematic example. With a singular lack of imagination and sense of reality about their fellow creatures, they simply put themselves in the place of these people and imagine thereby that they are being empathic. But of course there are people for whom such jobs are not unpleasant and are even rewarding. Not everyone wants to be, or is capable of being, a master of the universe.

August 30, 2022

NYT op-ed – “Maternal instinct is a social construct devised by men to keep women subordinate”

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

Jerry Coyne responds to a New York Times op-ed by Chelsea Conaboy (author of a forthcoming book from which the op-ed was adapted):

The recent article […] from the New York Times (of course), is one of the worst of the lot. It bespeaks a lack of judgment on the part of the author — who ignores biology because of her ideology — as well as on the part of the newspaper, which failed to hold the author’s feet to the scientific fire. Let this post be my rebuttal.

Author Conaboy, who apparently hasn’t done enough scientific research, maintains that “maternal instinct” doesn’t exist, but is a social construct devised by men to keep women subordinate.

The immediate problem is that Conaboy never defines “maternal instinct”. It could mean any number of things, including a greater desire of women than men to have children, a greater desire of women than of men to care for those offspring, the fact that in animals mothers spend more time caring for offspring than do fathers, a greater emotional affinity of women than of men towards children (including offspring), or the demonstration of such a mental difference by observing a difference in caring behavior.

I will define “maternal instinct” as not only the greater average tendency of females than males to care for offspring, but also a greater behavioral affinity towards offspring in females than in males. The term involves behavioral response, not “feelings”, which are demonstrable only in humans. Thus one can look for difference in “parental instincts” across various species of animals.

But even in this sense, Conoboy is partly (but far from wholly) correct when she discusses humans. It’s undoubtedly true that women were socialized into the sex role as offspring breeders and caretakers, with men assuming the “breadwinning” role. It’s also true that women were often denied access to work or education because their vocation was seen as “reproducer”, or out of fear that they would spend less time working and more on children, or even that they’d get pregnant and would leave jobs. Further, it’s also true that this role difference was justified by being seen as “hard-wired” (i.e., largely the result of genes, which, I argue below, is true), and that “hard-wired” was conceived as “unable to be changed”. The latter construal, however, is wrong, and that is what really held back women. The socialization of sex roles, which still occurs, goes on from early ages, with girls given dolls and boys toy cars, though, as society has matured, we’re increasingly allowing girls to choose their own toys and their own path through life. I of course applaud such “equal opportunity”.

But to claim that women don’t have a greater desire than men to care for offspring, or have a greater emotional affinity towards offspring, is to deny biology, and evolution in particular. (I freely admit that many men love their kids deeply, and that some men care for them as much or more as do mothers, but I’m talking about averages here, not anecdotes.)

There are two reasons why Conaboy is wrong, and both involve evolution.

The first is theoretical, but derived from empirical observations. It thus explains the second, which is wholly empirical and predictive. How do we explain the fact that, across the animal kingdom, when members of only one sex do most of the childrearing, it’s almost invariably the females? (Yes, in many species males share the duties, and in a very few, like seahorses, males provide more parental care; and there are evolutionary reasons for that.)

The reasons for the statement in bold above involves the biology of reproduction. It is the female who must lay the eggs or give birth, and there is no way she can leave her genes behind unless she does that. It’s easier for males to take off after insemination and let the females care for offspring. Given that females are constrained to stick with the fertilized eggs, their best strategy is to take care of the gestation and resultant offspring, which of course allows males to seek other mates. Not only must females carry the fetuses, lay the eggs, and so on, but they are also constrained to see out the pregnancy until offspring are produced and then suckle or tend them in other ways. In some cases it’s the best evolutionary strategy for a male to stick around and share the child-rearing, but often it’s not.

This disparity in behavior holds not just in humans, of course, but in many animals: it’s a prediction — largely verified — of evolutionary psychology.

August 29, 2022

“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Health, Law, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.

August 17, 2022

To understand Justin Trudeau, you need to look at his relationship with his mother

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo on how a lot of Justin Trudeau’s personal quirks may be directly traced to his upbringing and particularly his relationship with Margaret Trudeau:

Malia and Sasha Obama talk with Prime Minister Trudeau and his mother Margaret Trudeau during a reception on the Truman Balcony, 10 March, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.

Cue the popularity of Justin Trudeau, who at first seemed all sincerity, even to the point of public spectacles of tearfulness and child-like ebullience. He was the first Canadian leader to march in the Gay Pride Parade as if it were his natural milieu, not merely a vote-seeking opportunity. His enthusiasm for Bollywood-style gyving, Hindu fancy dress, and participation in Islamic prayer, though heavily criticized, seemed genuine, at least in a high-school drama teacher way.

When he refused to give a real answer to the question of why it was necessary to appoint a gender-equal cabinet as one of his first actions upon assuming office in 2015, his insouciant quip “Because it’s 2015” suggested an unstudied feminist commitment. His comments after the Boston bombings emphasized that empathy rather than harshness was the appropriate response to murderous acts of terror.

But there has always been a harsher side to Trudeau, a fondness for dictators, an attraction to brute power, and an inability (or unwillingness) to hide his contempt for political opponents. Perhaps his empathy for the Boston bombers was respect or even admiration for their willingness to use violence. Many were shocked by his open admission that one of the countries he most admired was the “basic dictatorship” of China. When churches burned across Canada in the summer of 2021 in response to the alleged discovery of “mass” graves at a residential school (a discovery that has not yet yielded a single body), Trudeau condemned the arson but hastened to say it was “understandable”. About Canadians who chose not to take the Covid-19 vaccines, he could not control his impatience, unleashing a volley of stigmatizing, scapegoating rhetoric. For the truckers who camped out in Ottawa amid a sea of Canadian flags and bouncy castles demanding vaccine mandates be revoked, he had a brutal contempt.

Which is he: the soft feminist with the fancy socks, joy in Gay Pride, and empathy for the marginalized? Or the hard, contemptuous leader who could oversee without flinching a violent RCMP crackdown on the Convoy protest that saw an Indigenous woman trampled under the hoofs of a police horse?

The answer is: both. A clue to his doubleness may be found in his relationship with his mother.

I recently watched an old interview with Margaret Trudeau that offers some illuminating glimpses into the character of the woman who mothered Justin. The interview took place in 1979, after Margaret had left Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, who was Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 until 1982. Pierre had primary custody of their three young children.

The interview shows a very beautiful woman whose consciousness of her attractiveness is a paramount part of her identity. She is not, as has sometimes been claimed, stupid; many of her answers to the interviewer are clever in the manner of a wayward adolescent convinced she can get away with nearly anything so long as she charms. At times she flirts openly, smiling suggestively, tongue protruding through her lips, confident in her sexual power.

The overall impact of her answers is horrifying for a viewer who fails to be enchanted. This is a woman who takes herself seriously but evidently does not take seriously her position as a mother to three young sons (all of them under 10 years old at the time) — and certainly not her position as estranged wife to the leader of the country.

She boasts girlishly about smoking marijuana, listening to psychedelic music, and giving up guilt over failing to meet others’ expectations. Spouting feminist rhetoric about being true to herself, she makes clear that she is more interested in having lovers than in looking after her children. She dismisses her husband’s shock at her unfaithfulness as owing to “old-fashioned principles of fidelity”, and indicates that Canadian society would be better off if more people heeded their “feelings” rather than stodgy moral precepts.

I cringe to think of Justin Trudeau, even today, watching this interview. The woman who presented herself therein — self-preoccupied, proudly promiscuous — must also have been evident to the son who watched her flamboyantly “find herself”, feminist-style, as his parents’ marriage crumbled.

H/T to Brian Peckford for the URL.

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