Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2022

Declarations of faith in the Church of Scientism

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

Chris Bray points out the hard-to-miss similarities between traditional religious beliefs and the modern beliefs of the congregations of the Church of Scientism:

Christian churches tend the bust out the HE IS RISEN banner on Easter Sunday, and here’s a version of the central declaration of faith from another religion, the Church of Scientism:

“We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccine.” These hang from every lamppost on the sizeable campus of a major research hospital in Los Angeles, an identical recitation of faith that appears before the eyes of the medical pilgrim every thirty steps or so. You can chant it in a rhythm, if you’re so inclined, as ye performest thine Stations of the Vaccine. The true penitent will park on Robertson, to walk past the maximum number of signs, but mark ye the parking restrictions, for the ways of Los Angeles parking enforcement are cruel, and many are they who suffer the penalties.

If this isn’t a declaration of a faith, then what is it? The call and response, the this-therefore-this:

Priest: Because of science, we save lives every day.

Congregation: We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccines.

You can hear the chanting in your head, can’t you? The repetition, the delivery of a mantra in a form that allows you to perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it yet again before ye makest thine turn onto San Vicente. When you say it often and identically, it wears grooves; it patterns the dailiness of life with the avenues of belief. It’s Benedictine Scientism.

Or, you know, not. My bet is that most people never notice these signs, or never notice them twice, but the choice to make them and to display them is compellingly bizarre and creepy. I wish I could have witnessed the meeting of medical administrators that led to that choice, because I’m fairly confident that it played like a Paddy Chayefsky movie IRL.

I’ve been reminded over and over this week how important Substack has become. This absolute must read post from el gato malo discusses the complete implosion of popular trust in the mRNA injections, from the sharp decline in booster uptake to the “that parrot is dead” numbers regarding mRNA uptake in children under the age of five. Flatly, people aren’t taking this shit anymore, and they’re for damn sure not having it injected into their children.

QotD: No, your baby isn’t racist

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

Look, it’s not even racial, but it is tribal. Because human beings are tribal. By evolution and inclination, humans associate most with people they’re used to, and they feel safe amid a small number of people they know well.

The insanity of all the “your baby is racist” studies is thinking that babies prefer people who look like THEM. This is not the case. They prefer people who look like those they identify as parents. Take a Chinese baby, at birth, and have him raised by Maori and they’ll react badly to people who look Chinese. Think of it in terms of the band of human (or pre-humans.) If a baby found himself amid a group that didn’t look like its caretakers chances were it was dead and/or lunch. Sending up a distress signal in the form of wailing is its only hope its caretakers will come and rescue it. (“It” because I’m including pre-humans. This applies — with bells on — to baby chimps, btw, who are just human-adjacent.)

Sarah Hoyt, “They’re Out To Get You”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-09.

July 11, 2022

Well, we were overdue for another “Great Awakening”, but this time it’s woke

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

In the Neo-Ciceronian Times, Theophilus Chilton outlines why it’s more sensible to regard today’s progressives as devout cultists rather than persuaded political activists:

You may not have been aware of it, but a religious revival has been sweeping America for the past few years. However, rather than the old-time religion of Christian piety, it’s a new religion with new idols and a new direction. Yet, not entirely new — it’s the latest phase in an evolving revolutionary belief system that has consciously set itself against every aspect of traditional American culture and society. Whereas earlier progressivism made an effort to appear to integrate itself into earlier American paradigms even as it was acting to overturn them, the current religion of Woke Progressivism has completely excised itself from any pretension of respect for previous Americanism.

Some on the Right balk at the terminology of referring to woke progressivism as a “religion”. After all, hasn’t the modern Left been characterised by a rejection of religion? By an increasingly overt atheism that not only denies traditional religion, but actively subverts and mocks? Yet, unlike European modes of leftism that have remained more within the boundaries of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, official atheism has never been able to gain more than a toehold in the United States. The American temperament is a religious one and therefore requires some object of piety towards which it is directed.

For the Left, this new object of piety was channeled into cultural Marxism, a form of New Leftism that has successfully managed to take over nearly every institution — government, corporate, cultural — in this country. It did so by providing a more comprehensive program, one that was as much cultural subversion and replacement as it was “traditional” economic leftism, than older forms of socialism. This new leftism, which in its full floruit is the woke progressivism we see today, provides a totalising replacement ideology that seeks to sweep away everything that came before it.

But is this new belief system a religion? I believe that it definitely can be thought of as one, since it displays all the typical sociological patterns found in religions as they have been found throughout history, plus a few that are typical of cult groups as they’re observed today.

To begin, woke progressivism has a precisely defined and systematically enforced body of doctrines which are to be believed, not rationalised. The fluidity of gender, the naturalness of homosexuality, the evil of whiteness — all of these and much more are to be received by simple faith. But these aren’t randomly chosen. They have overarching doctrinal bases that fit within the larger progressive ideological agenda. Put together, these constitute an interlocking body of progressive doctrine that provides a comprehensive ideology to its followers.

Yet at the same time, woke progressivism does have a means of receiving new revelation and new interpretation via its own body of canonical authorities who then pass on this doctrine to the larger body of the woke “church”. This is done primarily through means of the narrative-shaping performed by major media outlets working in conjunction with elements within government, NGOs, and academia (the complex of which is what neoreactionaries often refer to as “the Cathedral”). Indeed, that process has been at work for decades — e.g. it is how the Afrocentrism of the 1980s went from being an odd, laughable academic quirk to being received doctrine which naysaying can cause you to lose your job. Have you ever noticed how when some new element of the progressive narrative hits, whether it’s a fundamental element of ideology or simply how to think about some current news event, that progressives seem to adopt it all at once?

There’s a reason for that. Once a change or addition is decided, the doctrine is swiftly promulgated to all of the local parishes and becomes a received and accepted part of the faith.

QotD: The sad plight of the academic

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are lots of explanations for why college folk are the way they are. I’ve offered several of them myself. But when it comes right down to it, all the various explanations are just symptoms of the same fundamental disease: They’re boring, and they know they’re boring.

Boredom is, in fact, the modern West’s signature pathology. Nobody with a rich, full life — a rewarding job, some hobbies, family and friends — bothers about “intersectionality” and whatnot. That’s not to say that Normals don’t get bored. However, for us boredom is a temporary feature of life. We know how to handle it; we have a zillion ways of killing time. What’s more important, we know that boredom’s just a part of life; it happens to the best of us.

For them, each episode of boredom is an existential crisis. They’ve convinced themselves that they have all the answers, that to be #Woke is to be a god among men. So if their lives aren’t 100% wonderful and fulfilling all the time — every second of every minute of every hour of every day — it throws the fundamental premise of their entire existence into question. It it any wonder, then, why they’re constantly hyperventilating about everything? Without a constant infusion of drama, they have to face the fact that they’re just people, buggering through life with the rest of us.

Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.

July 7, 2022

Coping with the excesses of ideologists

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

In New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers how best to cope with fanatics bearing ideology and demanding your compliance and self-abasement:

Theodore Dalrymple on 24 September 2007.
Photo by jaapstronks at Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.

Ideologists are inherently totalitarian, especially when a still small voice tells them that their opinions are vulnerable to criticism. Shrillness then becomes the mental white noise with which they drown out their own doubts. They can’t allow any corner of the world to escape their attention. Uniformity will both demonstrate their correctness and, if it lasts long enough, make criticism unthinkable. Just as the white noise of shrillness once did, so will perpetual silence eventually allay their doubts.

Surrender is wrought by cowardice and, slightly less dishonorably, by boredom. What intelligent person wants to spend his life disputing evident absurdity? […]

There are one of two possible responses (other than outright opposition) to the Augean stable of ideological folly.

The easiest thing to do in both cases is to give in to the monomaniacs; but the first response is to go into what Germans in the time of Hitler called “inner emigration”, that is to say, to try to find a niche in which to get on with one’s life undisturbed by the surrounding idiocy and viciousness, for example by laying low and taking up an interest that flies below the ideological radar.

This method can’t be a hundred percent successful, because the ideological monomaniacs demand not merely the absence of dissent from their ideology, but also some proof of positive adherence to it: for example, by signing up to policies on equality, inclusion, and diversity.

By signing up to such self-contradictory nonsense, of course, the person who seeks inner emigration feels soiled; he has undermined his own probity. But at least, or so he hopes, he will then be free of interference. This hope is usually dashed because, to quote another poem:

    … that is called paying the Dane-geld;
    But we’ve proved it again and again,
    That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
    You never get rid of the Dane.

In other words, the ideologist always comes back for more self-abasement: Today it’s transgenderism, tomorrow it will be — what? The glories of incest, the social necessity and benefit of infanticide? It doesn’t matter: The aim is not improvement, it’s the exertion of power, for one of the cultural or psychological characteristics of the age, at least among the educated, is the belief that, in human relations, everything is a matter of power and therefore that only power counts or is to be trusted.

Another way of dealing with the ideologists is to obey the old slogan that if you can’t beat them, join them. People therefore join up to what is, in effect, a new secular religion, and since most people who do so are not out-and-out villains or opportunists, they have to persuade themselves that they actually do believe the tenets of the new religion; and, as is often the way with converts, they become fanatics, not merely to persuade themselves, but to expunge their wicked past in which they were not believers and were quite possibly mockers.

June 27, 2022

QotD: Perfectionism

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

Perfectionism should be classified as a disability.

It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than mis-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has. […] If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.

The way it blights lives is … interesting. As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing. Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing. And then … and then you’re 65 and you’ve done nothing and achieved nothing in your life, and it’s a miracle if you came close to supporting yourself. (And the only reason you’ve done so is because you did some job you considered was menial and didn’t matter, so your perfectionism didn’t infect THAT.)

If you’re a true perfectionist, you also never had any relationships. Because even though you’re far from the ideal mate, you judge every potential by tagging up defects. If you can’t have perfection, why bother.

The very smart are extremely susceptible to this, but everyone can fall into the trap. If you care or know enough about any field, the flaws in your own (and others) work will stand out glaringly and in relief and then you can’t do ANYTHING.

Of course, the more you practice and know the more flaws you see. And it eventually shuts you down. I catch myself in this trap frequently to the point of being amazed when semi-pro anthos buy my work, because I’m sure it’s the worst thing ever written. And I can shut myself down for years. (I’m not alone, I know you know other writers with this problem.)

Sarah Hoyt, “The Flaw in Flawless”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-27.

June 24, 2022

“… most of the ‘mental health crisis’ is just loneliness”

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

Ed West believes we’re suffering so many social ailments because we’re social creatures, evolutionarily speaking, and modern society has reduced or eliminated so many traditional community social gatherings — made far, far worse by arbitrary lockdown rules and harsh enforcement during the Wuhan Coronavirus panicdemic. He’s talking specifically about Britain and Europe, but the same definitely applies here in North America:

“Procession for Corpus Christi” attributed to Master of James IV of Scotland (Flemish, before 1465 – about 1541), illuminator.
Original illumination in the Getty Center Collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, for example, most of continental Europe got a holiday to mark Corpus Christi, once a huge event in England but killed off by the Reformation. Why can’t we have a holiday too? It was 27 degrees in London last Thursday — it would have been great.

We’re all aware, on some subconscious level, that there is a need for communal feasts and holidays, and in some ways the idea of a June procession to celebrate the official religion has made a comeback with Pride. The feast-shaped hole in our lives is why, from time to time, the great and the good come up with very boring ideas for substitutes feasts, the latest being “Celebration Day”. The idea is for “one day in the year when we can all take a pause in our busy lives to reflect, remember and celebrate the lives of people no longer here”. You mean, like the feast of All Saints’ and All Souls’, which again was a huge part of our calendar once and is still marked in Catholic countries? Like that one?

[…]

Contrary to the fashionable Noughties takes about the evils of supernatural belief, religion has huge psychological benefits. There is a vast array of evidence showing that attending religious ceremonies increases dopamine responses in the brain. Overcoming our fear of death is not even the key part; it is meeting other people and taking part in a common ritual, which has huge benefits, including reduced risk of suicide or addiction. Religious attendance is “associated with lower psychological distress” and “related to higher well-being”.

Modernity, diet and substance abuse may have slightly increased rates of extreme mental illness such as schizophrenia, while social media has allowed people with personality disorders to become prevalent, especially in politics. But most of the “mental health crisis” is just loneliness. People attend fewer communal events because of the decline of religion, they see other people less regularly and they have fewer friends — of course they’re unhappy! Humans are not just social mammals, we are ultra-social by the standards of other species; that’s why we need common rituals and why we’re chasing that religious feeling everywhere and can’t find it. It is why, as Madeline Grant wrote in the Telegraph this week, that as well as progressive institutions adopting religious-type feasts, even exercise classes increasingly resemble Mass.

Lockdown, traumatic though it was, was merely an extreme version of the trend towards solitude already underway (with working from home, online shopping and various other lockdown activities on the rise before 2020). Most traditional societies would consider our everyday lives in non-Covid times to be a form of lockdown, with historically very unusual levels of isolation. That is why the extreme loneliness of lockdown gave rise to ersatz rituals such as Clap for Carers.

Yet you just can’t beat the real thing. As Parker wrote at the time, ritual decline was a real sadness in our lives: “From the Middle Ages until the first half of the 20th century, Whitsun and the week that followed was the chief summer holiday of the year in Britain. It was a time for all kinds of communal merry-making, varying over the centuries but consistent in spirit: the season for feasts and fairs, dancing and drinking, school and church processions, and generally having a good time.”

June 22, 2022

Puberty, “white guilt”, and social contagion helps drive huge numbers of teen girls to think they are transgender

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

Until a few years ago — a blink of the eye in social terms — most individuals who wanted to transition to the other gender were born male. That is no longer the situation in North America, as vast numbers of young teens have been hammered with accusations of “privilege” for being white, while already undergoing the stresses and social disruption of puberty, seem to be deciding in groups that they must have been “assigned the wrong gender” at birth. In City Journal, Leor Sapir tells some of their stories:

Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege”, how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color”. Plagued by guilt, the children — almost all of them girls — rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.

The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story. Decades of gay rights activism have taught us that being gay or lesbian is not something one chooses. The mainstream narrative of transgenderism — promoted aggressively in the context of civil rights policymaking — holds that even being transgender is something people have little control over. Gender identity, experts have argued in Title IX lawsuits, is innate, immutable, and “primarily dictated by messages from the brain”. Thus, membership in the “LGBTQ+ community” would seem to be nonvoluntary. One is either “born that way” or not.

[…]

Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. As Kate Julian has written in The Atlantic, America is going through a “sex recession”. Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality” in which the sexual side of our nature is purely a private experience. The 1960s sexual-liberation movement has somehow bred asexual atomism.

June 17, 2022

Oikophobia run rampant

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

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the prevalence of oikophobia in western culture:

In an article for the American Mind, Daniel Mahoney draws our attention to a recent book on the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country or culture, which now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.

It seems to me that Mr. Mahoney’s analysis can be extended. The first question to ask is why oikophobia should now be so prevalent. To this, I should tentatively reply that it is because of the mass intellectualization of society consequent upon the spread of tertiary education. Intellectuals have an inherent tendency to be oppositional to all received opinion or feeling, for there is no point in going to the trouble of being an intellectual if one ends up thinking and feeling what the great mass of the people around one think and feel. Love of country and inherited custom is so commonplace as to appear almost normal or natural, and much of it, of course, is unreflecting.

But intellectuals are supposed to reflect. That is their function, and they are inclined to reject received opinion, not because it is wrong but because it is received. It goes without saying that received opinion can be wrong and even wicked or evil, in which case the strictures of intellectuals are necessary and salutary; but intellectuals themselves may promote wrong or even wicked opinions, partly from the a priori need to distinguish themselves from the run of mankind.

The phobia in oikophobia is the fear of being taken for one of the common run of mankind.

The second question about oikophobia is the old one of cui bono? Again, one must not confuse the psychological or social origin or function of an opinion with its justification or correctness in the abstract, but once one has decided that an opinion is mistaken or deleterious in its effect, it is natural to ask where it comes from and what interests it serves.

In my opinion, oikophobia is generally bogus, that is to say insincere, as is its cognate, multiculturalism. The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens. The reason for their lack of real interest in other countries is not difficult to find and is of very common application. The fact is that it is very difficult genuinely to enter into a culture, or subculture, other than one’s own, even when that culture or subculture is close to or adjacent to one’s own.

The dark side of Tim Berners-Lee’s statement “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination”

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

In The Critic, Tom Farr wonders about the wider meaning of the Eugenia Cooney story:

Eugenia Cooney in 2016.
Photo by Lilg54g – CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Journalist and author Mandy Stadtmiller shared a new article last week on her excellent Substack series Rabbitholed entitled: “Why is Jeff Bezos Allowing Millions of Teenage Girls to Watch the Severely Anorexic Influencer Eugenia Cooney Slowly Kill Herself On Stream?”

The article itself received widespread attention for its harrowing coverage of the story of Eugenia Cooney, a 20-something Twitch streamer and YouTuber, who has built a global fanbase off vlogs featuring her cosplaying, and giving makeup and beauty tips amongst other things, as well as her distinctive early 2000s emo aesthetic.

Cooney is also severely anorexic. As Stadtmiller’s article succinctly explains:

    Cooney’s horrific skeletal appearance is documented lavishly by her sick and enabling mother, Debra Cooney, who is seemingly keeping her daughter trapped and isolated at home with almost no contact with the outside world outside of the online predatory men who pay her daughter tips to spin around, crawl around on the floor, act like a cat and show how weak she is when trying to lift things.

Whilst Cooney’s story warrants attention, that isn’t the purpose of this article. In order to understand fully the social apparatus that allows and encourages Cooney’s mother to disturbingly parade her young daughter around for tens of thousands of digital voyeurs, no better explanation can be found than the one that actually answers Stadtmiller’s original question: Just why is Jeff Bezos allowing millions of teenage girls to watch Eugenia Cooney slowly kill herself on stream?

Whilst Jeff Bezos could and should be skewered for his role in amassing grotesque, Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth at the expense of anyone with the temerity to want to use the toilet during their working hours, in this instance he is merely a symptom of a deeper rot that has taken hold of our society, aided in part by the explosion of the internet in the late 90s.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, once said: “When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination.” Berners-Lee was not wrong, but it would be unfair to stick him with the responsibility for what the depraved depths of some individuals’ “imagination” have conjured up in the subsequent decades since the web’s mass adoption.

Those of us who grew up in the 90s and early 2000s — ostensibly the first generation to be exposed from an early age to the internet in its more rudimentary form – will surely remember the sporadic emergence of individual “shock videos”: from the fairly benign (“Meatspin”, anyone?) to videos of murder (“Three Guys One Hammer”), the internet was a developing digital territory that its early adopters were still testing the limits of. These videos were occasionally linked to entire websites that would host videos depicting varying degrees of degeneracy, but they operated mainly in the darker corners of the web, reliant on people sending links to each other on MSN with a description that would lull the recipient into a false sense of security in order to get them to click on it.

Such content ran, if not explicitly then certainly conceptually, parallel to another early-2000s meme: Rule 34. In short, Rule 34 stated: “Rule #34 There is porn of it. No exceptions.” It doesn’t really require Einstein’s intellect to parse what was meant by this aphorism: as the porn industry was finding its footing in the new digital age, the type of pornographic content that was readily available was also breaking new ground. Initially, those shock videos existed in a slightly separate orbit to that of more mainstream pornography, but their intersection was by no means a rarity, even in those early days. This somewhat grimly operates as the perfect example of Berners-Lee’s observation that the creativity fostered by the internet is only constrained by our collective imaginations.

June 16, 2022

QotD: The Guardian and “capitalism”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The displacement of responsibility is a Guardian staple, with society or capitalism (or “late capitalism”, or “neoliberalism” or whatever) being blamed for the columnist’s own hang-ups and incontinence. Tanya Gold did it two or three times during her time at the paper, as did Madeleine Bunting, Oliver James, VJD Smith and God knows how many others. Diane Abbott once claimed that capitalism is the reason she got fat, and still is.

It’s practically a rule. If a Guardian contributor drinks too much, eats too much, buys too many shoes … well, obviously, they’re the victim because consumerist peer pressure somehow made them do it against their will, such as it is. The premise is generally “capitalism made me fat”, followed by “capitalism made me anxious about being fat”, followed by “tax such-and-such to buggery, or ban it altogether, and then I’ll be thin”.

David Thompson, from the comments to “Reheated (55)”, DavidThompson.com, 2019-04-01.

June 14, 2022

Gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia

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

Once upon a time, in the dark recesses of ancient history (say, 2015 or so), most of the people expressing dissatisfaction with their birth gender were male. Shortly after that, the numbers inverted significantly and today it’s predominantly females demanding “gender affirming” treatment:

Girls who reject femininity or self identify as male or “non-binary” actually have a form of body dysmorphia. Rejecting their feminine body parts, for instance by flattening their chests, shows repulsion toward the areas they feel are not fit for acceptance. The trend of “binding” to produce a flat, androgynous body is dangerous, cutting off the air supply and possibly causing permanent damage, but it is encouraged as a precursor to transitioning from female to male.

In fact, transgendered people who were born women tend to suffer from eating disorders in an “extremely high proportion”, according to the Duke University Health System.

Make no mistake, a young woman who is dieting obsessively does not wish to look feminine or capable of having children. Many women who achieve their desired weight by extreme dieting cease to have periods and even grow downy hair on the face which resembles the incoming beard of a pre-pubescent man.

So is gender dysphoria essentially interchangeable with body dysmorphia? The woke people working at the NHS and gender reassignment clinics would never admit it, and would deny any correlation despite the statistics. But they are seeing more gender dysphoric young women than ever.

According to this article, entitled “Why Are So Many Females Coming out as Trans/Non-Binary?” in recent years the proportion of young women coming out as trans as opposed to men has increased dramatically. This shows a reversal from the previous trend years ago of more men wishing to become the opposite sex. But the incidence of actual transitions carried out does not show a corresponding rise for women, and that should prove many young women eventually grow out of identifying as trans, or “desist” from the desire to become male. “Desistance” refers to the situation where a young person who experiences gender dysphoria eventually “grows out of it” and decides not to go through with a sex change.

The occurrence of desistance among youngsters supports the position that they should not be allowed to undergo irreversible operations such as mastectomy or be pumped full of hormones (including puberty blocking “treatments”) which they are likely later to regret. Sadly, many medical “experts” don’t believe the figures cited for desistance among young people and discount them as flawed due to the looser criteria for diagnosing gender dysphoria used in the past. In other words, young boys who liked to wear dresses and would have been diagnosed as transgendered in previous years would not so qualify today, but young girls who hate their bodies and want to mutilate their breasts would be eligible for such “treatments”. The reasoning goes on that a whole raft subsisted of boys who were merely “gay boys who may have been experimenting with different ways of expressing gender but who were never really transgender in the first place”.

Such conclusions defy common sense or any logic or human decency. This article cites the findings of one Thomas Steensma, a clinician and researcher at the Centre of Expertise on Gender Dysphoria at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam. He conveniently found in a study that desistance rates were lower in older, female children than in young boys.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

June 10, 2022

The common male delusion that they “age like fine wine”, unlike women who “hit the wall”

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

Ed West considers the brutal truth that while beauty may indeed be fleeting, ugliness is life-long:

George Clooney at the White House, 12 September, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.

The male psyche is filled with delusions, forming a sort of psychological protection against real life. Just as men tend to overestimate how competent they are at any given task, they are programmed to wildly overestimate their value in the mating market. The brutal truth of dating apps has shown that around 80% of men are basically unattractive and, in many societies, a significant chunk would fail to find a mate at all, forced to set out on a longship in the hope of winning glory and a girlfriend. We don’t contemplate this, because reality would be just too much to take for most of us.

Among the many delusions males have is the idea that, unlike women, they don’t become less attractive with age; in the minds of many men, female attractiveness peaks early and, while most men don’t improve with age, looks are less important for us so female preference doesn’t really change.

That explains the popularity of a certain genre of feature piece, usually in the Daily Mail, in which women in their 30s lament that there aren’t any available men left, and they can’t get a date despite being beautiful and wealthy and having their own career. Many quite embittered men take pleasure in these pieces, gleeful that the shoe is now on the other foot, and that the women who spurned them have hit “The Wall”.

The Wall is the name given to the drop in female attractiveness that comes with age, the decline beginning quite early, around 20 or 21, as judged by searches on dating sites and the number of approaches a woman receives. There are even cruder measurements, such as the average hourly earnings of strippers, lap dancers or prostitutes, and which again show a decline from the early 20s which becomes steep after 30. If you think that’s a depressing measurement, there are even bleaker ones highlighted by Louise Perry in her new book, on rape victims, which show a very similar pattern.

These are all quite horrible measurements, but then science is an empty moral void and the data only has deeper meaning if you choose to give it any. It doesn’t measure attractiveness as most of us feel it; people become more interesting as they get older, and as men mature their interests change, too. What’s strange about our species is that men’s prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain concerned with judgement — doesn’t fully mature until around 25. As women enter their peak for male attention, their male contemporaries have not even finished maturing yet, and are at the pinnacle of stupid behaviour (as measured by things like car accidents).

Some men take pleasure in female contemporaries hitting the Wall, because while those contemporaries became very desirable in their late teens, they struggled to find a date, and so convinced themselves that they were playing a long game. But it just isn’t true — men hit the Wall, too, and it’s not even that much later.

Many men seem blissfully unaware that, while the dating game may seem brutal and unfair in adolescence, it’s going to remain brutal and unfair later, just in different ways. They’re not going to mature into a debonair George Clooney-type who has the women gushing over his overgrown ear hair. They’re just going to become increasingly repulsive as they age.

June 6, 2022

QotD: Eisenhower’s D-Day speech to the troops

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[The near-perfect formulaic general’s speech before battle] has a few basic parts: I) an opening that focuses on the valor of the men rather than the impact of the speech (the common trope here is to note how “brave men require few words”) II) a description of the dangers arrayed against them, III) the profits to be gained by victory and the dire consequences of defeat IV) the basis on which the general pins his hope of success and finally V) a moving peroration; the big emotional conclusion of the speech. You can read through Catiline’s speech yourself; it’s not long and it follows the formula precisely. That order of elements is not rigid; they can be moved around and emphasis shifted. But I don’t just want to show that this trope existed in the ancient past, I want to show that it is projected through military tradition to the present. So let’s look at another very standard and somewhat more recent example, appropriate for June:

    Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

    You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

    Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

    But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-1. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

    I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

    Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

    Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 6th, 1944

I’ve highlighted an image of the signed document itself to show the various components of the ancient battle speech (following my numbering above): [https://acoupdotblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/breaking-down-the-speech.png?w=689]

Apart from a slight alteration of the order, it is not hard to assign this speech to the same genre as Sallust’s Catiline speech or even Thucydides’ speeches at Delium (Thuc. 4.92-95). As we’ll see, it is certainly not the case that there is no other way to structure a pre-battle exhortation (although, I should note that the standard text of the other famous pre-D-Day General’s speech, Patton’s speech to the Third Army, hits the same notes, but with more words – mostly profanity). But this is the standard structure of a battle speech in the Western literary canon, and speeches with this standard structure, or variations of it, appear frequently.

I think a reader might particularly be caught by the emphasis on a section stressing how formidable the enemy is and how great the danger is (“He will fight savagely”). That seems an odd thing to stress! But it is an important part of the structure of these speeches; it is almost never left out. When paired with the general’s own cause for hope, acknowledging the fearsome nature of the enemy and the general terror of battle is a way to inoculate the soldiers against the seizing fear of battle. The Greeks saw the fear of battle as two distinct elements, deimos (δεῖμος) – the creeping dread before a battle, and phobos (φόβος) – the sudden paralyzing panic in combat, the sharp fear that causes men to flee. If the encouragement of the speech (and the general’s presence) is meant to defuse deimos, openly discussing the fearfulness of the enemy (but couching it in terms of how it may be overcome) is meant to rob phobos of his sting. You do your soldiers no favors by concealing from them the terror they will experience regardless.

Now the bulk of Eisenhower’s D-Day order is dedicated to the fourth part, stating the ground for encouragement, generally framed by the reasons the general is confident despite how fearsome the enemy is. One form of encouragement is a recounting of the noble deeds of the soldiers themselves. One of the marks of good generalship for the Romans was if a general could go up and down the line, calling out individual soldiers and reminding them of great deeds they had performed (Caesar does this, for instance; note Catiline’s opponent, Marcus Petreius encourages his soldiers this way, calling out each one – his is an army of veterans – by name, 59.4). Alternately – especially for a fairly green army where no one has done any great deeds yet – the general might stress the great valor of their forefathers, or the honor of their city or state. The emotion being touched here is pretty clearly pride, tapping into a desire not to let one’s self, one’s community or one’s comrades down. That’s an effective rhetorical tactic; as we’ve discussed, the fear of shame is an effective combat motivator (where so many other motivations fail). Appealing to pride is a good way to arouse that fear of shame, as the two emotions are deeply connected. Alternately, a general may not a superiority in numbers, materiel, tactical position; he may discuss his battle-plan and how it is likely to bring victory. For forces defending on their own ground, the home-field advantage may be stressed.

You want to understand the “fearsome enemy” motif and the “grounds for encouragement” motif working best as a pair.

Consider it this way: you are about to take a very important test. If I, having already taken the test, tell you “oh, don’t worry, the test is easy,” that will help dispel your dread (deimos) before it, but when you sit down with the test paper and read the (quite difficult) questions, the seizing fear (phobos) hits you, and your overall performance is reduced. That seizing panic clouds your thoughts and costs you vital time; in a battle, it might cause you to flee or get you killed. But if I tell you “the test is hard, but (you’ve studied effectively/you can pick up points on XYZ section/etc.)” it not only diminishes the dread before the test, but serves to mentally prepare you for the shock of seeing the real thing. Indeed, I turn your fearful mind into my friend – when the real thing fails to live up to your worst nightmares, you’ll draw confidence from that. When the test turns out to be exactly like I said, the encouragement carries more weight because of the reliability of the warning. I am not dispelling your fear – because this is battle and everyone is afraid and no words can take that away – I am mentally preparing you for your fear. There’s an element of CBT in this: validate the emotion, suggest more helpful ways to think about it, and direct the mind towards behavioral solutions.

Finally, I think it is worth noting what is not generally here. While the speaker is likely to reflect on glorious deeds of the soldiers, or other soldiers like them, or their ancestors, there is generally not a focus on how fearsome or scary or strong they are because no one feels scary or strong when they are terrified. “You’ve done this before” is a good line (so is “our people have always beaten their people”) but “Remember, we are lions” is not. No one feels like a lion when they are receiving indirect fire and cannot fire back; no one feels like a lion when their buddy just went down next to them and there’s nothing they can do about it. Remember: the purpose of the speech isn’t to pump someone up before the charge, it is to emotionally prepare them for the moment when the emotional momentum of the charge is spent and the fear of death comes crashing in to replace it.

Likewise, while “the cause” often figures into such speeches, it does so as a subordinate element; some kind of group membership – the nation, the polis, the legion, comrades-in-arms – is often more prominent (note how Eisenhower’s speech crafts concentric circles of groups that the listener belongs to, watching and depending on the listener; “liberty-loving people everywhere” -> “the United Nations” and “our Allies” -> “our homefront” -> finally “us” and “we”). While it took until the late 1940s for group-cohesion-theory to really emerge on its own, these sorts of speeches show an awareness of what seems to be a timeless truth: the cause may get you to the battle, but only comrades will hold you in it when the dying starts (on this, note especially J. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VII: Hanging by a Thread”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-12.

May 28, 2022

Scott Alexander on the “Hearing Voices Movement”

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

I’d never heard of the Hearing Voices Movement, but I don’t read the [spit] New York Times [spit]. Scott Alexander almost certainly also avoids reading the NYT, but he responds to a recent article there on the phenomenon that some of his psychiatric patients have reported:

The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement — ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses:

I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts:

2:

Plenty of people hear voices. Some of these people are your typical homeless schizophrenic, but many aren’t. One of my patients was a successful computer programmer who had near-daily auditory hallucinations. He realized they weren’t real, did his best to ignore them, and got on with his successful life — just like he had been doing for the past twenty years. He was seeing me for unrelated depression.

This guy kept his condition secret from his friends and co-workers. I don’t blame him for this choice at all. But when everybody who can hide it does, we only hear about the people who can’t keep it hidden, who are usually worst-case scenarios. Also (as a bunch of 1980s gay people can tell you) keeping a basic fact about yourself hidden from everyone you know sucks.

I recommended Hearing Voices Movement to this guy. I can’t remember whether he took me up on it or not. But I thought it would be helpful for him to have people he could talk to about his situation who wouldn’t think he was crazy, or try to get him locked up.

3:

People hate admitting that some cases are mild, and others are severe. Especially the kind of people who work at the New York Times

I talked about this a while back in the context of the autism rights movement. Many autistic people live great lives, enjoy the beneficial parts of their condition, and find it annoying or oppressive when psychiatrists keep trying to medicate them. Many other autistic people can’t live outside of institutions and constantly try to chew off their own body parts. A reasonable conclusion might be “the first group seem mild and should be left alone, the second group seem severe and probably need intensive treatment”, but it’s surprisingly hard to convince people of this.

Calling some cases “mild” sounds trivializing. Calling other cases “severe” sounds stigmatizing. Whatever your criteria for a mild case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria, but says the condition ruined their life and you are dismissing their pain. Whatever your criteria for a severe case are, there will be someone who fits those criteria but is thriving and living their best life and accuses you of wanting to imprison them in a hospital 24-7.

And that’s just the activists! We psychiatrists have the same problem from a different direction: we have seen some crazy @#!$. No matter how mild your case is, we’ve seen some case that looked like that at first glance, then slowly descended into a horror movie premise. Our instinct is naturally to round off the person who uses Xanax once a month to the lifetime drug abuser, the mildly depressed housewife to the gory suicide victim, and the occasional voice-hearer to the guy who needs to be in a straitjacket.

Still, some cases are mild and others are severe. People with mild psychosis — like my patient the programmer — probably don’t need to be on really strong medications with severe side effects. They probably just need support. In a perfect world, expert psychiatrists would have a major role in providing that support. In the real world, a lot of these patients expect their psychiatrist to freak out, overmedicate them, and maybe even commit them to a hospital. This being the real world, many of those patients are right. So they look elsewhere.

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