Quotulatiousness

May 2, 2013

ESR on the true meaning of moral panics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Eric S. Raymond on the difference between the claimed meaning and the actual, underlying reason for various moral panic incidents:

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude — as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones — like, say, inner-city Detroit — might be a different story.)

If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

April 30, 2013

Another incident of hypersentimentality

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the latest opportunity for people to ostentatiously display their sentimentality:

I wish Scottish author Iain Banks had kept his cancer to himself. For in making it public, through a statement about being ‘Very Poorly’, he has unwittingly mobilised one of the ugliest mobs of modern times: the death-watchers, the ostentatious grievers, those who like nothing more than to read about another’s physical demise and advertise how moved they are by it.

Almost as soon as Banks announced earlier this month, through the publisher of his entertaining novels, that he was suffering from terminal gall bladder cancer, these professional proxy weepers were doing their thing. Premature mourning was rife. Twitter became a vast virtual pre-death condolences book, as everyone stopped what they were doing for 45 seconds to tweet about how torn apart they were by the news of Banks’ sickness. People seemed keen to out-lament each other. One said Banks’ cancer revelation hit her like ‘a chill blast of sorrow and grief’, which makes you wonder how she’ll cope when he dies.

Friends and fans of Banks set up a website where lovers of his novels can get updates on his condition and sign a ‘guest book’ that is really just another offensively early condolences book. Thousands of messages have been posted. It’s remarkable how many of the message writers admit they ‘don’t know what to say’ yet proceed to say it anyway, at length, clearly feeling weirdly compelled to sign up to the speedily constructed community of online mourners.

We’ve also had pre-death obituaries, articles assessing Banks’ life and work before either has come to an end: his next novel, The Quarry, will be published shortly. Even those who know nothing about Banks felt an urge to write about him, or rather about how they personally felt upon hearing he was sick. Simon Kelner at the Independent admitted ‘I haven’t read any of his books’, before producing a whole column on Banks’ cancer news. The macabre sense of anticipatory mourning is summed up in the way Banks’ wife is referred to on the tribute website: as his ‘chief widow-in-waiting’.

April 24, 2013

QotD: Welcoming the DSM-V appropriately

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

The much-awaited arrival of DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) should ensure that every human being is classed as insane. At this point we might be able to start again and consider what psychiatry is for. Genomics is keen to help in the effort by finding the loci that are associated with all sorts of mental disorders. Enter a huge population based study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health: “Our findings show that specific SNPs are associated with a range of psychiatric disorders of childhood onset or adult onset. In particular, variation in calcium-channel activity genes seems to have pleiotropic effects on psychopathology. These results provide evidence relevant to the goal of moving beyond descriptive syndromes in psychiatry, and towards a nosology informed by disease cause.” Hmm. I think that when authors have to use words like “pleiotropic” and “nosology” there is a high chance that they do not know what they are talking about. So before welcoming the marriage of genomics and psychiatry, let us remember that there is a strong history of madness on both sides.

Richard Lehman, “Richard Lehman’s journal review—22 April 2013”, BMJ Group blogs, 2013-04-22

April 23, 2013

The myth of radicalization

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

In sp!ked, Frank Furedi examines the recent phenomenon of “nice guys” turning into terrorists:

… homegrown terrorism is viewed as a problem of ‘radicalisation’, where young people are seen as having effectively been warped by some imam or ideology promoter. So within days of the Boston bombers being identified, a local mosque was blamed for radicalising Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Others have looked for alternative sources of radicalisation, such as jihadist courses on YouTube or extremist Islamist websites. The theory of radicalisation is based on the premise that the lure of jihad politicises otherwise disgruntled individuals and transforms them into hardened militants.

Yet it is not clear what exactly constitutes the lure of jihad. Young people who are attracted to jihadist websites rarely adopt a new worldview. In fact, their perspective is very similar to numerous non-Muslim Westerners who visit nihilistic websites and become fascinated by destructive themes and image. Those who visit jihadist sites are choosing a fad rather than a coherent ideological outlook. In this regard, it is worth noting that some radicals arrested for terrorist activities in Europe are neither religious zealots nor political idealists. A study of ‘The Mujahideen Network’, a Swedish internet forum, discovered that its members’ knowledge of Islam was ‘virtually non-existent’ and their ‘fascination with jihad seems to be dictated by their rebellious nature rather than a deep ideological conviction’ (5). In other words, these people seem to have been driven by their estrangement from society rather than being pulled by a vibrant and dynamic alternative.

[. . .]

In fact, there are formidable cultural forces that denigrate the West’s historical achievements and its traditional belief in progress and enlightenment. Some commentators argue that the West, finding it difficult to believe in itself, faces a moral crisis. In such circumstances, is it any wonder that many young people feel deeply estranged from the Western way of life? Fortunately, only a handful opt for the nihilistic course of action taken by the Boston bombers. But the real problem is not to be found in the impressionable minds of youths but in the failure of society to inspire these young people with positive and forward-looking ideals.

Young people are not being seduced by mystical jihadist ideologies; they are being driven away by a society that fails to lead or enthuse or move them. There will, of course, always be a handful of confused and disturbed individuals who opt for acts of violent destruction. But as long as their community believes in itself, the damage they cause will be contained. The experience of the post-9/11 world shows that winning the arguments for an open society is the most effective answer to the threat of terror.

April 22, 2013

QotD: The long-term dangers of chronic unemployment

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

One of the most pernicious aspects of the chronic unemployment rampant during the Great Depression was that it took many people (mostly men) out of the workforce permanently. Many men simply became unsuited for making a living, and this in turn prevented them from forming families or even becoming a part of normal society. The same pattern is appearing now, and it is a cause for grave concern. Chronic unemployment isn’t just a hit to the economy; it attacks the very fabric of society.

The simplistic approach to this problem is to demand that the government create jobs ex nihilo, but this almost never works in practice. Besides being wasteful of tax dollars and of limited use in actually reducing unemployment, these types of programs also tend to cultivate a sense of cynicism in the workers themselves. FDR’s various make-work schemes were a perfect example of this. (The old joke about the WPA was that it stood for “We Piddle Around”.)

Monty, “DOOM: It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-04-22

April 17, 2013

QotD: Compromises

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

As American kids grow up, authority figures all around them — public school teachers, local and national political leaders, the broadcast and print media, ministers and priests, and other useless busybodies — are always very enthusiastic about the idea of compromise.

Compromise, these Judas goats and stable ponies always proclaim in the most glowing terms, is the one absolutely indispensable, magical key to living and working within that best of all possible political worlds, a democracy. If everybody takes a stance and won’t budge, if nobody is willing to give at least an inch (if not a mile), why, then nothing will ever get done! This, of course, overlooks the obvious fact that there are a great many circumstances — almost all of which involve government in some way — in which nothing ever should get done.

Somewhere around the fourth grade, if we have anything like half a brain left after all the indoctrination, we begin to notice certain things about this compromise bonnet-bee that make it clear that it is something less than the wonderful notion its proponents always say it is.

The first is that, since neither side can reasonably expect to get what it really wants. The best that anyone can ever hope for, from a properly engineered compromise, is that both sides will wind up equally dissatisfied. This is not, I submit, an acceptable way to run a civilization. It is a recipe to guarantee the perpetuation of bitter conflict, creating the ideal breeding ground for politicians (like puddles for mosquitoes), for whom solved problems are a threat to their livelihood.

[. . .]

The third thing that even a nine-year-old kid notices is that, having finally been badgered and brow-beaten into accepting a glorious compromise of some kind, whoever has been sucker enough to do it will be expected to do it all over again, the next time the subject comes up.

“What’s mine is mine,” goes the saying, “and what’s yours is negotiable.”

Which is exactly how we ended up in the mess we’re in now.

L. Neil Smith, “Compromise: Political Poison”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2013-04-16

April 14, 2013

Differing national philosophies on child-raising

Filed under: Europe, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:56

In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan compares the way American parents interact with their children to the rather more relaxed parenting styles of other nations:

The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.

“The U.S.’s almost obsession with cognitive development in the early years overlooks so much else,” Harkness told Slate.

For part of their research, the authors focused just on parents in the United States and the Netherlands. The differences are stark: American parents emphasized setting aside “special time” with each of their children, while Dutch parents spent a few hours each day together with their kids as an entire family.

American parents said they struggled to manage the sleep schedules of their babies and young children, explaining that they try to entertain or distract them when they wake up in the middle of the night.

April 10, 2013

ESR asks “What if it really was like that?”

Filed under: History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

An interesting jaunt along the byways of human perception and social organization:

I think the book that taught me to ask “What if it really was like that?” systematically might have been Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes observed that Bronze Age literary sources take for granted the routine presence of god-voices in peoples’ heads. Instead of dismissing this as fantasy, he developed a theory that until around 1000BC it really was like that — humans had a bicameral consciousness in which one chamber or operating subsystem, programmed by culture, manifested to the other as the voice of God or some dominant authority figure (“my ka is the ka of the king”). Jaynes’s ideas were long dismissed as brilliant but speculative and untestable; however, some of his predictions are now being borne out by neuroimaging techniques not available when he was writing.

A recent comment on this blog pointed out that many cultures — including our own until around the time of the Industrial Revolution — constructed many of their customs around the belief that women are nigh-uncontrollably lustful creatures whose sexuality has to be restrained by strict social controls and even the amputation of the clitoris (still routine in large parts of the Islamic world). Of course today our reflex is to dismiss this as pure fantasy with no other function than keeping half the human species in perpetual subjection. But some years ago I found myself asking “What if it really was like that?”

Let’s be explicit about the underlying assumptions here and their consequences. It used to be believed (and still is over much of the planet) that a woman in her fertile period left alone with any remotely presentable man not a close relative would probably (as my commenter put it) be banging him like a barn door in five minutes. Thus, as one consequence, the extremely high value traditionally placed on physical evidence of virginity at time of marriage.

Could it really have been like that? Could it still be like that in the Islamic world and elsewhere today? One reason I think this question demands some attention is that the costs of the customs required to restrain female sexuality under this model are quite high on many levels. At minimum you have to prevent sex mixing, which is not merely unpleasant for both men and women but requires everybody to invest lots of effort in the system of control (wives and daughters cannot travel or in extreme cases even go outside without male escort, homes have to be built with zenanahs). At the extreme you find yourself mutilating the genitalia of your own daughters as they scream under the knife.

April 7, 2013

1,900 first-year psychology students versus the arrayed might of Wikipedia editors

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:03

You know how great Wikipedia is? You know what’d make it even greater? Adding nearly 2,000 first-year university students as contributors and editors (because they do such a great job of writing research papers and citing their sources):

Steve Joordens urged the 1,900 students in his introductory psychology class to start adding content to relevant Wikipedia pages. The assignment was voluntary, and Joordens hoped the process would both enhance Wikipedia’s body of work on psychology while teaching students about the scientist’s responsibility to share knowledge.

But Joordens’s plan backfired when the relatively small contingent of volunteer editors that curate the website’s content began sounding alarm bells. They raised concerns about the sheer number of contributions pouring in from people who were not necessarily well-versed in the topic or adept at citing their research.

Discussions in the Wikipedia community became very heated with allegations that articles were being updated with erroneous or plagiarized information. Some community members called for widespread bans on university IP addresses and decried the professor’s assignment as a needless burden on the community.

April 3, 2013

El Neil on acting

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith recounts his brief brush with acting:

It takes a particular kind of individual to be an actor.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in high school, when one of the English teachers cast and directed the only play I’ve ever been in (although I’d already had lots of stage experience as a musician), Anastasia.

The young lady the director chose to play the lead, I regret to say, was an utter non-entity of whom none of my friends or I (outcasts ourselves in our own way) had even been aware. You might say she was an ultra-wallflower, rather like the invisible girl in that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer you may remember. And yet she was so utterly brilliant and appealing in the difficult role that she brought tears to everybody’s eyes, and she earned a long, well-deserved standing ovation.

I have no idea what happened to her afterward.

There are exceptions, but in general, actors are people so empty, so devoid of personality, they need others to fill them up, writers to put words in their mouths, directors to tell them which piece of tape to stand on, when to move and how, specialists to dress them and apply paint to their faces, and a horde of other creatures exactly like them to inform them — through a sort of neural network like the nervous system of a jellyfish — what they should think and say on their own time.

QotD: Conservatives and Progressives

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

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 1924-04-19

March 30, 2013

QotD: Stupidity

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:29

“No one would be that stu—”

Susan stopped. Of course someone would be that stupid. Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it, saying “End of the World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

March 29, 2013

Demonizing smokers hasn’t forced them to quit … let’s start sending them to psychiatric care instead

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

When the all the persuasion, “nudging”, shaming, harassment, and legal shenanigans haven’t worked, try taking a leaf out of the old Soviet Union playbook for dealing with dissidents:

Smoking may be a sign of psychiatric illness, experts say. Doctors should routinely consider referring people who smoke to mental health services, in case they need treatment, they add.

The controversial recommendation from the British Lung Foundation, a charity, comes in response to a major report, Smoking and Mental Health, published this week by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists with the Faculty of Public Health. It says that almost one in three cigarettes smoked in Britain today is smoked by someone with a mental disorder. When people with drug and alcohol problems are included the proportion is even higher.

The reason is that smoking rates have more than halved over the past 50 years, but the decline has not happened equally in all parts of society.

“Smoking is increasingly becoming the domain of the most disadvantaged: the poor, homeless, imprisoned and those with mental disorder. This is a damning indictment of UK public health policy and clinical service provision,” the report says.

March 25, 2013

Still “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”

Filed under: History, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Strategy Page on the psychological state of Russia:

Westerners are puzzled at the way Russian politicians are growing increasingly hostile to foreigners in general and the West in particular. Then there is the feud going on within the Defense Ministry over whether to import more Western weapons or rely instead on what Russian defense firms produce.

Scrounging up details from Russian media, discussions on the Internet and statements by the many members of the Duma (parliament) with access to the inner circle reveals a rather bizarre (to Westerners, and some Russians) state of affairs. Put simply, most of those currently running Russia really believe that the United States has formed an anti-Russian coalition that is surrounding Russia in preparation for an invasion. The motive behind this plot is the Western need for Russia’s many natural resources. The U.S. has been using pro-democracy and reform minded NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) within Russia to cause turmoil and weaken the government and military.

[. . .]

Creating the idea that Russia is surrounded by enemies, led by the old Cold War arch foe America is something older Russians were exposed to most of their lives. It persuades Russians to keep electing Vladimir Putin and his cronies. But a growing number of Russians are noting that there’s no sign of this conspiracy in the West, only bewilderment over what the Russians are saying. Over time, the Putin paranoia program becomes less believable to more Russians. There is growing fear that, rather than face a majority of Russians who don’t believe in the conspiracy, the current rulers will try to turn Russian into a strict police state, without the trappings of Soviet–style communism or any other ism besides the greed of the small ruling class.

March 24, 2013

Humans are very good at spotting patterns … even when they aren’t really there

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Slate, George Johnson explains why the human ability to detect patterns can sometimes work against us:

Lay a chessboard on a table. Then grab a handful of rice and let the grains fall and scatter where they may. They won’t spread out uniformly with the same number occupying each square. Instead there will be clusters. Now suppose that the chessboard is a map of the United States and the grains are cases of cancer.

Each year about 1.6 million cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States, and epidemiologists regularly hear from people worried that their town has been plagued with an unusually large visitation. Time after time, the clusters have turned out to be statistical illusions — artifacts of chance.

The Erin Brockovich incident, one of the most famous, is among the many that have been debunked. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.

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