Sailer on The Imitation Game:
Amusingly, the movie portrays estrogen as suddenly making the tech genius unable to program a computer. As two defenders of the conventional wisdom that Turing was hounded to kill himself put it, “And if you take the testosterone away, then the brain will become muddled.” But this bit of unintentional crimethink has evaded most reviewers.
Walter Russell Mead picks up on a highly-significant political pattern:
What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.
Modern American liberalism does its best to suppress dissent and critique (except from the left) at the institutions and milieus that it controls. Dissent is not only misguided; it is morally wrong. Bad thoughts create bad actions, and so the heretics must be silenced or expelled. “Hurtful” speech is not allowed, and so the eccentricities of conventional liberal piety pile up into ever more improbable, ever more unsustainable forms.
This one earns its ‘moron’ status strictly at the point of consumption. At the point of delivery it is by no means unintelligent, and is in fact strategically adept (if crude). Its cynicism approaches the sublime. (By “they” is meant the “us” of NRx.)
@DurrutiOvercloc @YakovPettersson Yeah, they seem to have been the most successful at rebranding fascism for libertarians.
— William Gillies (@williamrgillies) December 31, 2014
The only way this doesn’t consolidate massively in 2015 is for NRx to fall off a cliff.
From a fascinating dining companion, rather than a literary source. The Gothic potential is self-evident.
“There are many ways to stress a rat — but the easiest way is to inject it with stress hormones.”
Bonus data-burst from the same expert: According to all the rigorous cognitive tests neuroscientists are currently able to apply, crows are as intelligent as chimpanzees. (Yes, it seems preposterous, which is what makes it worth mentioning. No, I haven’t done any back-up online research yet.)
Fred Reed, on the media Balkanization tide:
Though I have spent a lifetime in journalism, I do not read a newspaper, not the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal. Nor do I have television service.
Why? Because, having worked in that restaurant, I know better than to eat there. The foregoing media are quasi-governmental organs, predictably predictable and predictably dishonest. The truth is not in them.
Within the news racket, this isn’t news. More interesting is that a large part of the intelligent population agrees. We now have a press of two tiers, the establishment media and the net, with sharply differing narratives. The internet is now primary. The bright get their news from around the web and then read the New York Times to see how the paper of record will prevaricate. People increasingly judge the media by the web, not the web by the media.
He gets it. Now how to speed it up? http://t.co/MqSiovevV0
— NIO (@NIOReaction) December 8, 2014
ADDED: Another dimension of media agony. This also relevant.
ADDED: Mass media is over.
Richard Fernandez asks a question that has been nagging at a number of people: How did this stop being a story?
The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak on record has reached nearly 7,000 in West Africa, according to the World Health Organisation. […] The toll of 6,928 dead showed a leap of just over 1,200 since the WHO released its previous report on Wednesday, according to a Reuters news agency report. […] The UN health agency did not provide any explanation for the abrupt increase, but the figures, published on its website, appeared to include previously unreported deaths. […] … Just over 16,000 people have been diagnosed with Ebola since the outbreak was confirmed in the forests of remote southeastern Guinea in March, according to the WHO data that covered the three hardest-hit countries. …
Is it because the epidemic has remained geographically concentrated, that’s expected to hold, and Sierra Leone (where cases are “soaring” with the “country … reporting around 400 to 500 new cases each week for several weeks”) has been written off? Or is the world media scared it had begun to bore people?
Time for another of these. The rule, remember, is that the instance picked upon has to exemplify a laughably mindless meme. Like this:
@JayMan471 @matthewherper @David_Dobbs @jason_pontin @charlesmurray The Bell Curve has been well refuted. I am dismayed that you cite it.
— Karen James (@kejames) December 2, 2014
Politically incorrect research, however solidly established, is especially singled out for this treatment. Some approved (i.e. Leftist) authority somewhere has provided the excuse to dismiss awkward findings, so that the painful stimulus can be suppressed, and — just to be safe — even the pretext for suppressing it is best forgotten, leaving only the permission to be undisturbed in public circulation. All crime-think has been ‘well refuted’ (sociologically a priori) as far as these people are concerned. “It’s been well refuted” means exactly “wouldn’t it be nice if this didn’t exist?” (or “nice people have told us we don’t need to worry about that”).
Refuted where?
@DocCLAR @JayMan471 @pseudoerasmus This is ridiculous. You can google just as well as I can.
— Karen James (@kejames) December 2, 2014
Amused yet?
ADDED: A banquet of ‘well refuted’ science at Slate.
A bunch of charts breaking down occupations by ideology are flying across the Internet at the moment. Perhaps Robin Hanson started it? (Linked by Cowan here.) Hanson includes a link to this NYT article, which focuses upon the Left-orientation of tertiary education, but that’s a huge, perennial topic in itself.
Hanson has his own theory on the subject, based upon differences in risk orientation, but my favorite analysis was provided by commenter adrianratnapala:
Most of the data on those plots can be explained by a rule that says “People who who tell other people what to think for a living lean left. Nearly everyone else leans (nominally) right.”
Bonus (indirectly related) chart dug up from the web:
(The site it’s taken from looks like a gold-mine for this kind of stuff, if rather popcorn-heavy.)
(Open thread, links)
Burning in the brains of the reactosphere this week: Complexities of caste, media hysteria, where reaction begins, ambiguities of narrativization, Google on the slide, the American era comes apart. The language of recovery. The meaning of property (previously linked). Rituals of disintegration. The masters of meta. The Mitrailleuse secession round-up is always worth catching.
Some comet thing happened, but far more importantly: Did you see that guy‘s shirt?
The Internet’s SJW cannibal holocaust continues. Meanwhile, in the UK (Brendan O’Neill has been doing Miltonic work). Some additional notable commentary. Oh, and Obama wants to reclassify the Internet as a ‘utility’ (always comforting rhetoric from a communist). It’s a global trend.
No idea how I missed this extraordinary gem the first time around:
Last fall I met up with an old friend in the security consulting business. We met for breakfast at an upscale hotel in the DC area. As he was having a second cup of coffee he leaned forward and said, “I’m going to say something crazy, but I can be frank with you.” He paused and added, “what we need is a new East India company.”
“Go on,” I said, mildly surprised. And he continued in a lowered tone, but not without looking first to the left and right.
He went on to say that one of the problems in the US response to terror has been in the conduct of stabilization operations — the critical task of building up a country after the kinetic battles have been largely won. These operations have been costly, prolonged and have largely failed. Billions of dollars spent on traditional aid approaches in Iraq and Afghanistan; and in countries changed by the ‘Arab Spring’ have yielded but little result. Often they have ended in abject disaster.
