I had not heard of Warren Farrell, but his Top Ten Quotes over at Nature-Nurture-Nietxsche are interesting
4. “We always look at the ‘Fortune 500,’ and we say, men in power, but we don’t look at the glass cellar as opposed to the glass ceiling and say, men also are the homeless, men are also the ones that are the garbage collectors. Men are also the ones dying in construction sites that aren’t properly supervised for safety hazards.”
The 100% CI is a recommended stats and metascience site because they are over my head but look good to me, and they are funny. The article linked by Works in Progress is What's In a Correlation? by Julia Rohrer.
It’s a less helpful feature if one or even both variables have a unit that is actually interpretable. For example, researchers have calculated correlations between birth order position (first-born versus later-born) and personality traits. I personally don’t know what a standard deviation of birth order coded in such a manner means; “How many SDs is your birth order position above or below the mean?” is not a common smalltalk topic. But I can easily make sense of “On average, first borns score 0.2 SD higher on intelligence”, so a semi-standardized metric would probably be more helpful for communicative purposes. Likewise, I’ve seen people report correlations between personality variables and income, but I have no idea what to make of one SD of income.
In the essay you can also find out that there is a measure of life satisfaction related to attitudes toward sex doll ownership. You can infer from that, because I noticed, that you can be head researcher into topics like this with pretty grad students and associate professors as a career, at least if you work at Nottingham Trent University. Dr. Rohrer has fun discussing the limitations of research like this while using it to illustrate lessons about correlation.
It's not going on my sidebar, but it may make it to bsking's at Graph Paper Diaries.
From The Fantasticks. I had forgotten that it was based on an earlier play by Edmond Rostand, more famous for "Cyrano de Bergerac."
Is this my favorite song? Might be. Knowing it in the context of the play gives it extra poignancy (if such a thing is possible), and the only time I saw it, my father played Mortimer, magnificently.
Shreeda Segan at the Free Press introduces us to TBPN, a Silicon Valley insider talk show.
Guests include some of the most influential CEOs and investors in tech. People like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. “I now only respond to VC cold emails/DMs if they’ve been on @tbpn,” tweeted Cy Sack, the head of business systems at Anduril.
Not my world, but if it's yours you may want to get on it.
I would take better to the theology that "God is still speaking" if it didn't seem to always come up in the context of a single doctrine that a group had a special interest in. It seems like special pleading. When I played in a band in college, guys would come up and say "Y'know what this band really needs? A harmonica." My roommate would reply "Hey, that's interesting! You wouldn't happen to play the harmonica would you? Yeah, I thought so." He would then inquire what they guy liked to play and politely dismiss him on that account. The same thing would occur with girls who thought some of our songs would be improved with a female vocalist.
In mental health, art therapists would tell us that our patients needed more art therapy. The list goes on.
Over the last 20 years, the idea has become strongly attached to the blessing of gay ordination and gay marriage. When it broadens at all, it seems to have settled on being a late-60s, early 70's liberal. Not even an early 60's liberal. God was apparently not speaking quite clearly enough then. To be fair, they would say the Church was not listening clearly enough.
There are brands of conservative Christianity that don't use that exact phrase, but mirror the concept. These are usually around end-times prophecy, and wouldn't you just know it? Our own Reverend Elijah Blanchard and his wife Blanche are anointed preachers bringing a powerful message that is going worldwide.
This was a lot of the trouble with the various Gnostics in the early Church, that they believed in continuing revelation, as if Jesus had just missed coming to the final necessary conclusions. The Montanists had this new convert to Christianity Montanus, who may have been a priest of Apollo or Cybele (a Great-Mother goddess. That happens a lot, too.) Whatever he had been before, he claimed to be a prophet in the 100s. About the same time Marcion had new ideas about Jesus and edited the Gospel of Luke into the Gospel of...Marcion.
It never stopped. In the next century Manichaeism, from the prophet Mani, went for it all and claimed to supersede Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus with an elaborate dualism that included bits of every religion in a thousand mile radius. Make that two thousand. Mohammad was the new and final prophet until Baha'ullah became the final prophet much closer to our time. In between The Albigensians had this new (not really) idea of dualism, that the material world was evil and the spiritual world was good. Rinse, repeat for other new philosophies. Ferdinand and Isabella though that they were going to usher in the Last Days by getting the last of the Muslims - and oh yes, Jews now that we are at it - out of Spain which would then rule the rest of Europe and who know? Maybe the whole world. Rinse, repeat for other secular rulers.
Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell, Joseph Smith - new revelations, and the 20th C is chock-a-block full of them. Are there any out there who believe in this ongoing revelation idea who don't have something to gain from it? As I said, I'm not opposed to the idea, but it doesn't seem to have a good track record.
Before people get into it, yes I have thought of this in terms of slavery and am not convinced that it qualified as a New Revelation in the church. I admit the defining of terms could get messy, but I think I could at least get the defense of that started, though others with more intelligence and wisdom might have to finish it.
This was my brand when I was young, but it waned in popularity over the years of my smoking. They were supposed to be very different because they were cured and thus less harsh. Well, maybe. The brands are largely the same, but we spoke about them as if they were distinguishable, in much the same way that we thought each of the American lagers was identifiable. Menthols are certainly different, but they are much like each other. (No one has ever explained to me why those are more popular with Blacks.) Nonfilters are like each other and lights are also very much like each other. The lightness comes from the holes that are punched in the filter, which caused the smoker to take in more air relative to the smoke. Without noticing it, smokers would grab the filter at the holes to intensify the draw, making it more like a regular Marlboro or Winston. Ultralights had more holes, sometimes in two rows. My Dad smoked two packs of Luckies a day, though went down to one (in secret) after his multiple bypass surgery. My mother switched from Winstons to Merits, and my mother in law smoked Mores because they went out easily when she left them in the ashtray and went to do something else.
I am not sure what the "treatment" angle was about Old Golds, but several brands were advertised as being recommended by doctors for calming the nerves.
Folk etymologies occur most often when languages first come in contact and need words for each other's objects and actions. It is something like sparrow-grass for asparagus (though that might more properly be considered an eggcorn). An unfamiliar word changes in pronunciation to match with a word in English of similar sound. People then think that the word must come from"sparrow grass," because the grass part seems obvious and there must be some old story behind the sparrow part.
Crayfish from ME crevice, small freshwater crustaceans, which is from 13C Old French. That is in turn from Frankish krebvitja, related to kreb, the Germanic ancestor of crab. But it was not a "cray-fish." It just sounded like "fish" must have something to do with it, being right there in the stream and all. The "veess" sound morphed into "fish" by association. The pronunciation "crawfish" was uncommon in England but took off in the American South, likely tied to an unknown regional preference in the British Isles.
The first reference is in 1612, " I have caught with mine angle pike, carpe, eele,..creafish, and the torope or little turtle." Alexander Whitaker, in a letter from Jamestown. Angle meant hook, so you can see how it is related to the other type of angle, meaning a bend. It was already becoming a synonym for rod and reel. The art of angling to catch a fish also involves the angle at which one casts the bait or lure in front of the fish.
If you were alert to that "torope" in the sentence you may have connected it to the modern word terrapin, meaning a sea-turtle. Tortoise is used for land versions of the shelled reptile, and turtle became a more general word for either in North America. But we are not done with the oddities. Turtle originally meant a bird, as in turtle-dove. To turtle meant to speak fondly of a sweetheart, but later took on the meaning of fishing for turtles or of being turned over, unable to flip back or get up.
I was sure there must be some version of turtling that referred to hunkering down or retreating into a protected place, but I didn't find one. My OED is a few decades old, though, and it may have started coming into play. If I were to write "After Miss Bascomb humiliated him in front of the ladies, Algernon turtled into the background for the remainder of the evening," People would know what I meant.
There have been fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic this year. There are none on the horizon. Six to ten hurricanes were predicted; there has been one. But because we are only halfway through the season, the NOAA assures us that we are still in the range of the predictions. I don't know enough about hurricane prediction to say they are wrong in that. I will say that it sounds wrong.
Weather varies.
Graph Paper Diaries has put up the Intro to its True Crime series. I think she is back enough that I have to put her back on the sidebar, no longer inactive.
I will not, generally speaking, be commenting on court procedures or rules of evidence etc. There are many other people much better placed to do that than I. What I will be covering is how I’ve covered data here in the past: how should you as a media consumer evaluate a claim you hear? If you watch a true crime documentary or listen to a podcast, what should you look for? How should you think about the different claims? One of the reasons I’m not naming the specific case I got familiar with is because I think most of this should apply to every case you hear about.
The Algorithm has become like The Matrix, including all-there-is, hasn't it?
I have bad news and good news. The algorithms steer you, but they also reveal you. You are clicking because it figured out what lures you will take. Flash of red! Nibble. Caught. It doesn't lie. You're busted, and it is likely worth some reflection what you keep clicking and then thinking "Well that was a waste of time."
Here's the good news. That's not the real you they are catching, just your automatic responses. It is largely emotion-driven. You've been hacked. It doesn't care whether you are a better person underneath. You probably aren't. You certainly aren't any worse.
I get irritated that people don't get that these are fictional characters in those videos and treat them as real. Long before social media I had complained that people treated book characters and movie characters as real and their situations as real. Philip Yancy not only took Jean Valjean as an example, but proof that a certain approach would work in interacting with others. A couple started bringing a handgun when backpacking after seeing Deliverance. It's not that those readings of reality aren't true, but that they are only true by accident of the author getting it right. If the author decides to sell you an untrue reality and you fall for it, it feels exactly the same. See also news.
Keyword: Fiction. Or more generally, Art. Do you know what it's called when an artist gets you to care about something? Empathy. Even if it's false and propaganda, it's still your empathy being targeted. The algorithms have found ways to hack into your empathy. Which makes two levels of worry, because empathy is itself a hack, a shortcut to deciding who and what to care about. It is likely an evolutionarily useful shortcut. But you've been hacked. Someone has discovered your passwords.
Core Europe: I once killed time in a meeting by trying to list all the European countries, then their capitals. I stopped at about twenty countries but suspected there were more. The next month I got up to thirty and wondered what the real number was. Malta? Azerbaijan? Really? Fifty is the approved number, but I do not approve.
How to win Rock Paper Scissors
New Theory. I still like it.
Always check what the Zero Point is
Suspicion I expand on an idea from CS Lewis's Miracles. In Mere Christianity he noted that people will say there is no foundation to morality but in the next breath get angry at you for cutting in line. Those refuting Lewis's claim that Materialism cuts off the branch it sits on do much the same. They find technical arguments that show there remain possibilities that the evolution of approximate reasoning is enough to trust it. But they don't believe it themselves.
This will be the last from 2012 for a while. I get carried away at times.
Near the close of worship today the pastor reminded us that with terrible recent events - and he listed a few - it was important that the Church be the Church and that we not give up hope. He reminded us that we need to forgive our brothers and sisters. As I had been strongly resenting my literal brother for things he posted this week, it hit home hard. The events of this world go away, but we remain. What we accomplish matters much less than how we accomplish it.
That's what I've been telling everyone else for years anyway. It seems I don't quite believe it for myself.
Well, I missed this one. It came up indirectly in class today, I made a short leap, and the sermon confirmed it. At Jesus's first miracle, another of those announcements of "Look at what God is doing here," the old wine is not as good and eventually runs out. It's not unacceptable wine. It's fine, but finite. The New wine is better and not only does not run out, but remains in abundance. After the guests leave there will still be lots of wine, same as the pieces of bread left over after the Feeding of the 5K.
It's a tight little symbol of the Old Covenant being superseded by the New. The OT by the NT. I mentioned this sheepishly to a young woman in the worship band, admitting I had never seen this before. A smile played at the edge of her mouth, as they say. "Old wineskins?"
Hmm, yeah, I missed it even with the hints. They teach them well at Grove City College, don't they?
One of my book groups is reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Right out of the gate in the introduction was the line "The greatest happiness is to be found in longing." (The Autobiography of Goethe) I disagreed with it, remembering CS Lewis's take on the statement "To travel hopefully is better than to arrive." If there were never any arrivals, then there would never be any hopeful travel. That seems logically very solid to me. I never much thought about it again.
But with my long Nostalgia Destruction Tour, long after the final result was inevitable, still I kept on, making sure - as with Pooh and Hunny Pot - that is was going to be a disappointment right the way down. I used words like nostalgia and reverie to describe it, but the words longing or yearning did not occur to me. This time it jumped out at me. I do enjoy longing - not to the extent that Werther or even Goethe did, but I recognised the idea. With nostalgia now discredited in my heart, I find that I long for something to long for. I like the thing itself. I have harbored an opposition to longing, suspecting that it is unhealthy. I associate it with whining. Yet the Psalms describe longing for the Lord, and Jesus tells his disciples that prophets longed to see the days they are seeing now. Even more, Jesus himself tells Jerusalem that he has longed to gather it as a hen gathers her chicks. So longing cannot be entirely unhealthy or forbidden. Longing for longing may not qualify.
When I first heard "Take Me For Longing" by Alison Krauss it irritated me. No, you silly girl, you want to be loved for your good qualities, your kindness and faithfulness. Any beagle can long for you. Don't encourage other women to think this way. Spoken like a longtime husband and a father of sons. Nor do all young people want to be yearned for. It seems to make a fair number of people nervous. But some are built for longing, and some hope to be longed for. I had forgotten that. It's dangerous stuff, but when I related it to my own longing I get it. There is a pleasure in it. A dangerous pleasure, but not necessarily a forbidden one.
If you worry that your longing is inordinate, reading The Sorrows of Young Werther may be the cure of it. He longs for nature, he longs for greatness of soul, and mostly, he longs for Lotte, a betrothed woman whose fiance he loves almost equally. I have always tried to limit my exclamation points and tried not to gush. Werther revels in it.
When I first came here and looked down into that lovely valley from the hill, the way the entire scene charmed me was a marvel. —That little wood!—Ah, if only you might walk in its shade!—That mountain-top!—Ah, to view this vast landscape from there!—And the chain of hills, and the gentle valleys!—Oh, to lose myself amongst them!—And I hastened there, and returned without having found what I was hoping for. Oh, distance is like the future: before our souls lies an entire and dusky vastness which overwhelms our feelings as it overwhelms our eyes, and ah! we long to surrender the whole of our being, and be filled with all the joy of one single, immense, magnificent emotion.—And then, ah! once we hasten onwards, and what lay ahead becomes the here and now, everything is just as it was, and there we are, as poor and confined as ever, our souls longing for the elusive balm. In the same way, the most restless of travellers ends up pining for his homeland once again, and discovers in his cottage, in the arms of his wife and amidst his children, and in the labours that are necessary to support them, that joy he sought in vain in the wide world.
Just stuff it, willya? Who asked you? You're acting like a poodle trying to hump someone's leg. I find it hard to believe he was such an inspiration to the young of Europe in the 18th. They must have been longing for Romanticism pretty badly. It was hard through much of the book to take seriously that Lotte might ever consider being in love with him, or that her boyfriend then husband admired Werther so greatly that he let him hang around. But then Lotte goes into a little speech of her own at the end and she's just the same, perhaps dialed down only 10%.
A canary flew oʃ the mirror and perched on her shoulder.—‘A new friend,’ she said, coaxing it onto her hand, ‘which I got for the children. Isn’t he a dear? Look at him! If I give him some bread he flutters his wings and pecks oh-so-daintily. He kisses me too: watch!’
She held the little creature to her mouth and lovingly pressed it to her sweet lips, as if it were capable of feeling the bliss it was enjoying.
‘He shall kiss you too,’ she said, and held the bird towards me.—Its little beak moved from her mouth to mine, and when it touched me with a peck it was like a breath of love, a promise of pleasure to come.
‘His kiss,’ I said, ‘is not wholly free of a desire; he wants food, and these empty endearments leave him dissatisfied.’
‘He will eat out of my mouth, too,’ she said.—She offered it a few crumbs on her lips, and smiled with all the joyful happiness of innocent and loving fellow-feeling.
It just seems it would be hard to wake up to a wife like that every morning.
She does make a wise observation near the end, as Werther grows madder and rushes toward suicide.
I fear, I very much fear that what makes the desire to possess me so attractive is its very impossibility.’
Exactly.
Over the last few letters Werther becomes completely unraveled, unable to contain his emotions. His last missive is a fevered, overwrought riffing on the poet Ossian. It wasn't the real Ossian (Oisin) of course, but a Scottish poet claiming to translate/channel/interpret the Celtic bard. It is long minutes of listening to our hero clutch and breast, wail and bury his face in his hands. It reminded me of an angrier explosion of emotion in Chap 9 of The Great Divorce.
...come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the "haves," what they thought of them
Werther believes he has a great soul but has only a shallow one, crabbed and deprived of air. There is no room for anything but longing. A very good cautionary tale for the nostalgic to keep in mind.
Ethan Strauss and Pablo Torre were discussing the True Crime interest, which is primarily female versus the Sports universe, which is predominantly male. Strauss suggested that sports is about renting war, and True Crime is about renting death. That didn't ring true to me, and I sought a better description. I think both are about identification with others. Sports is used to physically identify with someone, while True crimes is about identifying with a victim or the unjustly accused.
Play with it and see if you can improve on that.
Women interested in sports other than what their children are playing often use it as a social identification with their town, state, or region. Men do this as well, but are more likely to be fans of both teams and of select players whoever they play for.
I saw a clip of someone accusing Charlie Kirk of being a Christian Nationalist. He separated the two terms, saying that he was a Christian and a nationalist, but didn't really know what a Christian Nationalist was. That is another sliding definition when people want to accuse you, throwing any additional things they have heard about Christian Nationalists into their basket of accusations.
I wonder if they would believe the same thing about National Socialism, that if you were both of those words (As a Swede or a Greek would be) you must be a Nazi, or an International Socialist - that if you are both an internationalist and a socialist you must therefore be a communist. But I jest. They would deny that it works that way. Only in one direction, when they want to find a stick to beat you with.
Noah Carl at Aporia shows that all the common theories, left and right, are inadequate explanations. He offers some additional ones but believes it is ultimately going to prove multi-variate.
Update: Grim, check the comments
Update: It occurs to me that because I only vaguely knew who Charlie Kirk was, it is possible that the people of the left my age may not have heard of him before this week. Now that I think of their comments, there was usually reference to one of the 3-4 out-of-context quotes that made the headlines in the last few days. I used the word disquieting below. This is one step worse, but the best word is not occurring to me. But now really...really...why say anything?
Update 2: The Free Press gets it. Even without being a subscriber you can see the first part. Signalling our tribe is more important than basic human decency.
************
People who felt positively about Charlie Kirk want to say something positive, or inspiring, or constructive about him. That makes sense. That's what we do when people die, not just famous people.
I understand that people who make their livings giving political opinions think they are obligated to tell everyone what they think about Charlie Kirk even if it's negative. They aren't obligated, but I can see why inertia would make them reflexively just say something. I am growing tired of the repeated "I don't support what happened to Charlie Kirk, but he did spread hate..." But. Content providers. They think they hae to say something.
But I don't understand why everyday people feel like they need to go on Facebook or TikTok and say anything negative about him, however much they disagreed with him. Why say anything at all, or at least - save it for later. I say this because I have seen people who I know personally, who would think of themselves not only as nice people but much nicer than average (though they likely wouldn't say that). Being nice has been part of what they have shown to the world for 40, 50, 60 years. Years ago I would have agreed with them that they were much nicer than I was* - and I would have agreed with them on that until recently.
It is dangerous to assume that the terrible examples that the left and the right take to show the world how terrible Those Others are represent the general reality. Out of 350,000,000 people there are going to be some terrible ones of all kinds. But these are not cherry-picked worst case examples. These are people I know. In one case it is a person I will worship with tomorrow morning. And of course my brother and cousins are prominent among them.
It is just disquieting to read people immediately saying "I'm sorry about what happened to him but!...but!...but!...oh, and it is terrible about his wife and children." I went looking at my usual sites and I do not see the same about the deaths of people they disagreed with. In one case a writer had something very critical of Jimmy Carter just before his death, but said as good as he could after.
Say it later. You are just showing how quietly consumed by hate** you are, unable to contain yourself. I don't worry that you will cheer if it somehow came to be my turn, but I am pretty sure now that you will shrug.
*Okay, maybe only half of them.
**Given the update above, maybe it's more virtue signalling
Magical Systems Thinking This is a thing we all know but have a hard time generalising to a new problem.
Le Chatelier’s Principle provided an answer: systems should not be thought of as benign entities that will faithfully carry out their creators’ intentions. Rather, over time, they come to oppose their own proper functioning. Gall elaborated on this idea in his 1975 book Systemantics, named for the universal tendency of systems to display antics. A brief, weird, funny book, Systemantics (The Systems Bible in later editions) is arguably the best field guide to contemporary systems dysfunction. It consists of a series of pithy aphorisms, which the reader is invited to apply to explain the system failures (‘horrible examples’) they witness every day.
I already posted How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Irrational by Gurwinder in my Friday links, but rereading it in order to extract a quote to send to someone, I am convinced it needs more emphasis.
The main use of empathy is to help people form personal connections with others. It’s a social guide, not a moral or judicial guide. And yet people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, and in this capacity it becomes dangerously delusional.
A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathize with people, only with the people we think they are. We take the bare bones of what we know about them, and flesh the rest out with assumptions. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for them, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealize them.
Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them.
When I see that something happened in 1955 I automatically think "Oh, I was two years old then." For 1958 "Kindergarten with Miss Ashley" and even have some pictures in my head. For 1951 I think more vaguely "Was that the year my parents got married?" I am not in that picture. For any year before I was born I can build a picture from other things I know, but in none of them am I there, anywhere on the globe. Solely in the Mind of God, and He seems content to not give me any pre-AVI information I haven't earned. My parents were born in 1927 and 1930, and I sometimes piece together family history from them into my launching point. Childhood pictures of my grandparents are only hazily connected to the people I knew later.
Older people are aghast what young people don't know about recent history, but I recall my knowledge of the 1910s was nearly as good as my uncle's. Before that, he knew much less than I did, and he was an intelligent man. I suspect at least part of the "kids these days think that life in the 80s..." comes from this pinning ourselves on the bulletin board of eras we know but playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey before that until we learn hard information.
I don't think this is absolute. My granddaughter plays a mean game of Chronology because one of her anchors is Disney history. Steamboat Willie has a visual representation in her mind. Photos or buildings or various arts that we know send shafts of light back into an era. But even then, realities like poverty, lack of medical care, outhouses, poor roads, and repetitive food are not what was usually portrayed, so we miss the feel of eras before our own.
There is data about threats of violence to members of Congress in the last decade. It starts off very low in 2016, rises through 2020, declines in 2021 and starts rising again. It is very high already in 2025, way above any previous year.
You can read that as conservative wackos feeling emboldened by Trump, or as liberal wackos being angrier under Trump. Or both.
Be careful out there.
This may be the last one. Perhaps the discipline of daily links is good for me, but I am avoiding self-improvement more and more these days.
West Shawnee Amusement Park Closed in 1966, the rusting rides are still there. Because there were deaths there, an incident from the area before the park was built was plucked out as the explanation for the curse which reportedly overshadows the place. A forensic psychologist discusses why we attach such stories to places.
From Fergus Mason's Substack Singer Ellie Goulding says protests against migrant hotels make her “ashamed to be British”.It’s all very well for her to say that, but Ellie Goulding lives in a six-bedroom country house surrounded by a big brick wall, and further surrounded by an area of the Cotswolds that’s at least 96% white.It’s easy and cost-free for Goulding to say we all have to tolerate migrant hotels - because her kids will never have to walk past one on the way to school.
A conversation
Bill Maher: I know you think liberals want to destroy the family.
David Mamet: No, no. I don't think they want to destroy the family. I think they have destroyed the family.
Bill Maher: But they didn't really do it on purpose.
David Mamet: Wait a second. What you're saying is I didn't know it was loaded, right?
Bill Maher: Yes. Okay. But liberals actually think they're doing good. I know a lot of times it's really just about making them feel good, which is what's so obnoxious. But they're not actually trying to destroy...
David Mamet: We understand as dramatists is that nobody ever did something for a bad reason.
Remember the 12 y/o Scottish girl who was charged after trying to defend herself and her friend against a man who tried to attack her and then taunted her? The video was shared by "right-wing" accounts on X who accused the man instead. Those accounts also identified him as a Bulgarian Roma immigrant. The Scottish police warned the public about "misinformation" being spread about the incident. Well, The man in question, Fatos Ali Dumana and his wife have now been charged. and yes he is a Bulgarian Roma immigrant.
Denmark has banned the burqa in schools as well as in public, stating it will promote adaptation to Danish culture. I get it, but I worry that it may have an opposite effect of keeping women farther out of view and girls away from school.
People are detecting so many fascists not because there are more, but because there are rewards for detecting them but not punishment for being wrong. The same thing happened with sexism and racism. "You can detect sexism in Emily Bronte? Hold my beer. I can detect sexism in Betty Friedan. " It is the Princess and the Pea again, with only a True Princess able to detect the fascism under so many mattresses. Being correct has nothing to do with it. It is not even fully an exercise in criticising one's opponents. It is a performance for one's friends, showing that you can execute a triple salchow and land it.
Taylor Swift has become the girl she used to resent. My granddaughters adore her. I don't mind her, really. As for the rattcheting up of sexiness, it happens to most of them. That can't be Katy Perry. That can't be Miley Cyrus. That can't be Taylor Tomlinson. It was that way when I was young, too. That can't be Hayley Mills. That can't be Julie Andrews. It's a world with different pressures.
I've had my day talking about modern dating, when I was fascinated by the topics of intrasexual competition, dating apps, and burgeoning polygamies back in 2022. I still have some interest, especially with Kyle still searching. But I don't think I have much to add to the conversation. Works in Progress interviewed social scientist Alice Evans (transcript available), who substack talks about these issues a lot, in a way that doesn't make me crazy, at least when I graze a bit.
How Empathy Makes Us Cruel and Crazy. Freeing the Menendez brothers. Fits also with my post about Kind People Loving to Hate. Or maybe the one about pets. I don't know. It all looks familiar somehow.
Why Romania Excels in the International Olympiads. Jordan Lasker over at The Palladium thinks it is extreme stratification. The few at the expense of the many. I am going to reread this and perhaps come back to it, as two of my sons Transylvanian Elementary and Middle schools.
Sex Differences Don't Go Away Just Because You Want Them To
This is not a topic I know a great deal about. Because of working in mental health I have had more contact with refugees than most people, but I'm not sure that generalises. I have immigrants in the family and know plenty of legal ones. I did just hear today that 98% of asylum requests are bogus. Even if that is an exaggeration, it does change the picture for me. I had always pictured that some large minority of asylum requests were real and an equivalent group was marginal but not entirely ineligible, while another 25%? 33%? 50%? were gaming the system. I had never imagined numbers as high as 98%. But it was Razhib, who likely knows more than I do. As a Bayesian calculation, my current estimate for fraud moved higher, but not that high.
The quantitative change in illegal immigration became so large that it has created a qualitative change. Birthright citizenship and "anchor babies" was something you used to hear people mutter about, but nothing ever got done and no one was taking to the streets for it. Not all countries have birthright citizenship. It tends to be mostly in the West. But as over 7 million came in under Biden, that's a lot of possible anchor babies.
As it is not possible to have hearings for 15 million people here without permission, the current strategies are designed to discourage people from coming here or not risk staying any longer. If they don't stay away or go home on their own there isn't going to be much we can do. I suspect that is behind the drama of ICE raids and choosing people who would have thought themselves beyond being worried about anymore. They want self-deportation.
Small businesses, especially in service trades like restaurants or hotels, complain that they can't stay in business without hiring illegals. They can't compete. If we emphasise that second sentence instead of the first one it makes sense. Of course those industries could continue if they didn't have illegal immigrants. They just can't compete with each other. E-verification is apparently not that difficult, but it is opposed by small businesses - often Republican - as too difficult.
The legislature has largely abdicated its responsibility to be a co-equal branch of government and work on difficult problems. It has receded to working out the details and marginal cases that the other two branches of government decide. This may account for the growth of legislatively-induced civil service, as it focuses on smaller and smaller details and need to feel important. Mission creep is unrelenting. It certainly doesn't help.
The other two branches step in to fill the void and compete with each other. Whichever party isn't getting its way in a particular branch complains that the Executive/Judiciary is too powerful. They stop saying that in the next election. The executive needs to rein in the judiciary! The judiciary needs to rein in the executive! No one seems to talk much about reining in the congress anymore. It has confined itself to trench warfare on the front lines, with predictable costs of all sorts and lack of movement.
Just a thought. In the discussions about tech and innovation competition with China, it is often mentioned that their population is three times that of the US, and now that they are ramping up, more and more of them are going to be educated as well or even better than we are. But is this 3x really true in terms of talent, or even potential talent? China is getting some researchers in select fields from outside their country, including some Europeans and even Americans. But in general they don't import talent. The Anglosphere has a shared talent base with the US getting first pick in most cases, and Continental Europe, India, and even Japan are more likely to come here than go to China. That may change, and according to Razhib Khan already is changing, but isn't the 3x a little misleading?
As recently as a year ago when I wrote about the movie The Quiet Man dowries puzzled me. If a husband (and husband's family) is getting this free labor, shouldn't they be paying money to her family? Bride-price is exactly that, and is the custom in many cultures.
Isn't dowry just a woman getting her inheritance before her parents die then, as she moves off to be part of another family?
Americans have less and less sex. What a relief. I thought it was just me.
Deepnewz appears to be gone.
State and County Level Data Can Be Plausibility Checks For Your Pet Hypothesis. I'm sure that under Bethany's gentle guidance, people will now stop just saying whatever dumb idea occurs to them on the internet. Bsking keeps talking about posting on some intriguing subject, but choosing another intriguing subject instead.
Explosions, Shootings, and Stabbings did not used to be so common in Sweden. Primarily in the cities. Still less than here. You are not supposed to mention that these events are concentrated among immigrants. Names are seldom included for that reason.
We have found this GF site useful. Find Me Gluten Free.
Did I mention that my granddaughter attended the same summer studies program at St. Paul's School that I did 55 years ago and adapted a Go Baby Go! car in her engineering program? These projects are usually given to colleges, but ASP does it after 11th grade.
