Archive for 2023
April 29, 2023
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Axios: Part-time president — and his handlers — seek to avoid “age trap.”
“THE ENEMY OF YOUR ENEMY IS NOT YOUR FRIEND; HE’S A GUY WHO MIGHT WANT TO THROW YOU IN JAIL:” The Very Strange New Respect for Authoritarian Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.
Here he is in a September 2014 interview, for example, arguing that billionaire industrialists/philanthropists/political donors Charles Koch and his then-still-alive brother David Koch (both of whom donated to the Reason Foundation over the years) “should be in jail…enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals” and that politicians who agree with the Kochs about global warming are “contemptible human beings” of whom he “wish[ed] that there was a law that you can punish them under”:
After this lock-’em-up interview drew criticism (including from National Review‘s Charles C.W. Cooke, who described it as “a sure sign of mental imbalance, and a gold-leafed invitation to be quietly excluded from polite society”), Kennedy came out with a clarification removing from his prosecutorial crosshairs most of the individual “climate-deniers,” but stressing that “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty.”
He’s had climate apocalypticism long before AOC decided to fight what Kevin Williamson dubbed “Sandy’s War.” In 2008, RFK Jr. “wrote an article raising the alarm about global warming and the resultant lack of winter weather in Washington, D.C.”
More recently (i.e. Thursday night): ABC News cuts Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vaccine remarks out of interview.
IN THE MAIL: The Woking Dead: How Society’s Vogue Virus Destroys Our Culture. #CommissionEarned
SHUNNING: “Especially interesting is her discussion of how central social exclusion is to female behavior.”
This all suggests to me that “cancel culture” can be seen as a straightforward extension of a common relatively-female strategy, upped in part by #MeToo.
That is, many orgs are now willing to break association with anyone who enough others say they don’t like. Some sort of accusation is often required, but details or supporting concrete evidence are less often required. I guess this change is part of the overall feminization of culture, though it must also have other causes. (What?)
The above descriptions don’t give me much confidence that the excluded are typically guilty of justly-punishable offenses. Expect to see a lot more of this, unless we re-establish prior norms that discouraged it.
Indeed.
HIGHER EDUCATION HYPOCRISY: HBCUs overwhelmingly lack DEI departments, research shows. “Amid the push by prominent Democrats and many in academia for the expansion of diversity, equity and inclusion departments in colleges and universities, research shows that the vast majority of historically black colleges and universities do not have them. Of the 80 HBCUs that The College Fix researched, just 16 have an official DEI department. While many more of those HBCUs have put out statements endorsing DEI initiatives, the vast majority have not established such departments, unlike other prominent universities in their respective states.”
KAY HYMOWITZ: The Transgender Children’s Crusade.
To grasp the novelty of gender identity, compare its idea of child nature with that of child psychology. The psychological approach is predicated on an idea that seems glaringly obvious to most people today: young minds differ from those of adults. Jean Piaget, one of the field’s first theorists of cognitive development, called the first two years the sensorimotor stage, when infants and toddlers explore the outside world through sensory means. They only gradually gain control of their arms and hands as they grab at their clothes and their hair, pull at their genitals, or reach for a caretaker’s necklace or hair. Anyone who has cared for a toddler knows that toddlers’ emotions are so fleeting that they forget the banana that they just demanded in a fit of red-faced rage, once distracted by a bright shiny object.
Here are other truths about young children known to experts and parents alike. They are prone to magical thinking; they believe, as Jazz Jennings did, that a fairy will change their penis into a vagina, or that they play with invisible companions, like the castle-dwelling ninjas that my grandson used to “fight” when he was five. Their sense of time is primitive. Young children have trouble thinking about being six years old; imagining themselves as 20, as they would need to do to know their identity, is like science fiction. Their personalities change; the placid infant turns into a chatterbox five-year-old, who suddenly turns into a withdrawn ten-year-old. Dysphoria itself is often a temporary condition. Assuming that they don’t socially transition, as Jazz did, the large majority of dysphoric young children will desist as they get older; most will become gay.
Yet pediatric gender experts have put psychology’s idea of the child out to pasture. In their view, kids, even those who have yet to pull themselves up in their cribs, are capable of insight that many adults don’t have. “Kids understand themselves better, and at a much younger age, than adults assume. This includes their gender identity,” theorists at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education maintain. Today’s prodigies intuit their gender identities before they can talk. Diane Ehrensaft, director of mental health at the University of California–San Francisco and one of the foremost exponents of youthful gender dysphoria, explained at a 2016 conference how preverbal children could communicate gender distress. A boy infant might pull at the snaps of his onesie, she answered, in order to “make a dress”; he is sending a “gender message” that he really wants to be a girl. Likewise, a toddler tugging at the barrettes in her hair is not trying to ease the pulling at her scalp; she’s demonstrating that she wants to be a boy.
In the past, when a child showed signs of gender dysphoria, clinicians took a stance of “watchful waiting,” an approach that recognized the inherent volatility and cognitive immaturity of creatures still sleeping in their Batman jammies and leaving cookies for Santa Claus. The essentialist logic of gender identity, however, requires teachers, parents, and therapists to take a “gender-affirming” approach. A boy who declares himself a girl must be validated: no questions asked, no therapeutic probing about anything else that might be troubling the child. The enlightened child has spoken. “If you listen to the children, you will discover their gender. It is not for us to tell, but for them to say,” writes Ehrensaft.
Earlier: The Return of Paganism.
To the pagans, change is the only real constant. Just consider the heathens of old: Believing, as they did, in the radical duality of body and spirit, they enjoyed watching their gods breathe the latter into a wide array of incarnations. To please himself or trick his followers, a god could become a swan or a stone, manifest himself as a river or adopt whatever shape suited his schemes. Ovid, the greatest of Pagan poets, captured this logic perfectly when he began his Metamorphoses with a simple declaration of his intentions: In nova fert animus mutates dicere formas corpora, or, “I am about to speak of forms changing into new entities.” This was not understood as fickle behavior by the gods’ cheerful followers. To the contrary. With no dogma to uphold, the sole job of deities was simply to be themselves. And the more solipsistic a deity chose to be, the better. Nothing, after all, radiates inimitable individuality more than marching to the beat of your own drum and no other.
If that’s your understanding of the gods, or whatever you’d like to call the hidden forces that arrange the known universe, how should you behave? Again, lacking a prescribed credo passed down from generation to generation, pagans began answering this question by casting off the tyranny of fixity. The gods are precarious and ever-changing? Let us follow their example! We should sanctify each sharp transformation in our behaviors and beliefs not as collective madness but as a sign of the wisdom of growth.
In February, Glenn linked to an article headlined, “Detransitioner Files First Lawsuit In Canada Against Medical Providers.” It won’t be the last.
HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Harvard chemistry professor sentenced for lying about ties to CCP.
DON SURBER: Media says voting threatens democracy.
The [Washington] Post story began, “The eight new members of the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners had run for office promising to ‘thwart tyranny’ in their lakeside Michigan community of 300,000 people.
“In this case the oppressive force they aimed to thwart was the county government they now ran. It was early January, their first day in charge. An American flag held down a spot at the front of the board’s windowless meeting room. Sea-foam green carpet covered the floor.
“The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.”
The meeting was in January. The reporters were not present. But it ran pictures of the meeting taken by Evan Cobb, a freelance photographer from South Bend, Indiana. Maybe they interviewed him.
People elected an overwhelming majority of 8 new Republican commissioners (out of 11 commissioners) that the Jeff Bezos newspaper did not like. They made changes that the newspaper did not like, and so the Jeff Bezos Post said this threatened “the building blocks of American democracy.”
One of the changes made was to the county’s motto “that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery.”
The 186-year-old county adopted that motto — Where You Belong — six years ago.
The new one is Where Freedom Rings.
Freedom must be a threat to democracy, too.
Similarly, AP is not happy with this development in North Carolina: N. Carolina justices sweep away district, voter ID rulings.
In massive victories for Republicans, North Carolina’s state Supreme Court on Friday threw out previous rulings that had declared illegal both redistricting maps for excessive partisanship and a photo voter identification law for being infected with racial bias.
The new edition of the court, which became a Republican majority this year following the election of two GOP justices, ruled after taking the unusual step of revisiting opinions made in December by the court’s previous iteration, when Democrats held a 4-3 seat advantage. The court held rehearings in March.
The 5-2 decisions likely to mean that a photo ID mandate approved by the GOP-controlled legislature in late 2018 will be enforced for the 2024 elections. Legislators also should have greater latitude in drawing legislative seat boundaries for the next decade that will reinforce their General Assembly majorities and assist them in winning more seats within the state’s congressional delegation.
Gerrymandering is apparently only bad when Republicans do it.
GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Ezra Klein and State Sen. Scott Wiener on crime in San Francisco.
When Wiener says the property crime rate in San Francisco is fairly high I think he’s minimizing. The property crime rate in San Francisco is the worst in the country among the 25 largest cities.
In any case, it’s interesting to hear Wiener talk this way because when I was writing about the street prostitution problem, which included violence against the women involved and also fear among the residents living in the area, Sen. Wiener didn’t seem concerned at all. In fact he flatly denied that the problem had anything to do with his bill legalizing loitering.
So I can’t help but wonder if this concern for the feelings of crime victims isn’t just something progressives have learned to say in the wake of the recall of DA Chesa Boudin. Boudin, like Wiener, was very far left and also never accepted any blame for any of the city’s crime problems. But it became clear to everyone after his recall that even in San Francisco voters didn’t like being told things were fine when they weren’t.
To his credit, Klein didn’t let it drop there but pushed a little harder on what might be called the city’s permissive attitude toward crime.
This clip of Weiner from the podcast sums up his attitude regarding San Francisco quite well:
EH, PROBABLY THE CHINESE: Hunter Biden’s Ex-Mistress Wants to Know Who’s Paying His ‘Stable of American Super Lawyers.’
LIGHTNING DEAL: Fishing Tackle Backpack with Rod Holders. #CommissionEarned
DESANTIS INSIDERS SAY HE’LL FORM EXPLORATORY COMMITTEE IN MID-MAY; TRUMP SAYS HE SHOULD DROP OUT TO SHOW HIS “LOYALTY.” As Ace of Spades writes, “And I know this upsets people to hear, but Ron DeSantis did give Trump an open lane for reelection… in 2020. This is DeSantis’ year. DeSantis isn’t intruding in Trump’s year; Trump is intruding in DeSantis’. I know people keep saying ‘DeSantis should wait.’ Wait? You mean wait until he no longer has a high-profile job as governor? Wait until people begin forgetting him, like Christie did when he refused to run in 2012 and then discovered no one wanted to hear about him in 2016?”
BECAUSE EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Why did scientific journals help China censor the truth about COVID-19?
MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: Third Major American Bank Collapses, Regulators Will Soon Take Company Over: Report.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, also known as the FDIC, will imminently place First Republic Bank under receivership, marking the third collapse of a medium-sized American bank in less than two months.
First Republic Bank, headquartered in San Francisco, California, caters mainly to wealthy clients with account balances above the $250,000 deposit threshold backed by the FDIC. The company witnessed many customers withdraw their funds in recent weeks as the recent implosions of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank rattled trust in the financial system. FDIC officials had moved to secure both insured and uninsured deposits at the two failed companies to decrease the risk of bank runs at other financial institutions.
Regulators determined that the unstable position of First Republic Bank necessitates the imminent takeover of the company by the FDIC, one unnamed source told Reuters on Friday, adding that no time remains for executives to pursue a bailout through a private deal.
Shares for First Republic Bank plummeted more than 43% on Friday, reaching a low of $3.51 before markets closed. The company’s stock was priced at $121.54 at the beginning of the year, marking a 97% loss for investors over the past four months.
How odd! CNBC’s Jim Cramer was touting FRC as recently as March 10th: First Republic stock crashed 90% since Jim Cramer called it a ‘very good bank.’
IF THAT HURTS YOU, GOOD. STUPIDITY SHOULD BE PAINFUL. The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit: Ideology now dominates research in the U.S. more pervasively than it did at the Soviet Union’s height.
Until a few months ago, we’d never heard of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a peer-reviewed publication whose aim is to promote “free inquiry on controversial topics.” Our research typically didn’t fit that description. We finally learned of the journal’s existence, however, when we tried to publish a commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit. Apparently, what was once anodyne and unobjectionable is now contentious and outré, even in the hard sciences.
Merit isn’t much in vogue anywhere these days. We’ve seen this in the trend among scientists to judge scientific research by its adherence to dominant progressive orthodoxies and in the growing reluctance of our institutions to hire and fund scientists based on their ability to propose and conduct exciting projects. Our intent was to defend established and effective practices of judging science based on its merit alone.
Yet as we shopped our work to various scientific publications, we found no takers—except one. Evidently our ideas were politically unpalatable. It turns out the only place you can publish once-standard conclusions these days is in a journal committed to heterodoxy.
The crux of our argument is simple: Science that doesn’t prioritize merit doesn’t work, and substituting ideological dogma for quality is a shortcut to disaster. A prime example is Lysenkoism—the incursion of Marxist ideology into Soviet and Chinese agriculture in the mid-20th century. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S.S.R. started to enforce the untenable theories of Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan Russian agronomist who rejected, among other things, the existence of standard genetic inheritance. As scientists dissented—rejecting Lysenko’s claims for lack of evidence—they were fired or sent to the gulag. Implementation of his theories in Soviet and, later, Chinese agriculture led to famines and the starvation of millions. Russian biology still hasn’t recovered.
Yet a wholesale and unhealthy incursion of ideology into science is occurring again—this time in the West. We see it in progressives’ claim that scientific truths are malleable and subjective, similar to Lysenko’s insistence that genetics was Western “pseudoscience” with no place in progressive Soviet agriculture. We see it when scientific truths—say, the binary nature of sex—are either denied or distorted because they’re politically repugnant.
We see it as well in activists’ calls to “decolonize” scientific fields, to reduce the influence of what’s called “Western science” and adopt indigenous “ways of knowing.” No doubt different cultures have different ways of interpreting natural processes—sometimes invoking myth and legend—and this variation should be valued as an important aspect of sociology and anthropology. But these “ways of knowing” aren’t coequal to modern science, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise.
In some ways this new species of Lysenkoism is more pernicious than the old, because it affects all science—chemistry, physics, life sciences, medicine and math—not merely biology and agriculture. The government isn’t the only entity pushing it, either. “Progressive” scientists promote it, too, along with professional societies, funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Energy Department, scientific journals and university administrators. When applying for openings as a university scientist today, job candidates may well be evaluated more by their record of supporting “social justice” than by their scientific achievements.
Every institution has been corrupted.
April 28, 2023
HMM:
BREAKING: Pfizer silently funded groups advocating for vaccine mandates and passports during the COVID pandemic.
— Leading Report (@LeadingReport) April 27, 2023
OPEN THREAD: Have a nice weekend.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China to establish organization to coordinate international moon base. “Wu noted that CNSA has signed cooperation agreements or letters of intent with a number of countries and international bodies, including Russia, Argentina, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil since unveiling the first ILRS road map 2021, South China Morning Post reported.”
PARASITE OR SYMBIOTE? A Weird Thing Happens to Wolves Infected by Infamous Mind-Altering Parasite. “A study of 26 years’ worth of wolf behavioral data, and an analysis of the blood of 229 wolves, shows that infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii makes wolves 46 times more likely to become a pack leader.”
Effects in humans seem less positive.