Elsewhere (297)

on the life and work of Thomas Sowell
For a minute I thought he’d passed away. *whew*

#HateFacts
#HateLogic
It’s quite the marshalling of unspeakable information, and does rather suggest that the default media narrative is not merely fanciful and incompetent, but wildly perverse. Something close to an inversion of reality.
In light of which, YouTube’s hair-trigger deletion and subsequent age-restriction takes on an interesting hue.

One occasionally sees “Neighborhood Watch” signs posted along residential streets, but none of them have ever had as profound an impact as a man with a rifle standing guard.
It may be controversial to say “we need more of that,” but I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say “we’re going to see a lot more of that.”

Pretty sure the badge cancels out skin color, along with one’s plumbing and whatever thoughts one has about the correctness of said plumbing and one’s preferences regarding the plumbing of others. Have you seen the way these gracious protesters have been treating the black cops standing off against them?

[…] wildly perverse.

Polymorphously so.

any Antifa shitling
Something about that pejorative struck my fancy. Then I realized the spanish translation is “cacacito” and I have a new favorite word. Thanks, David!

Then I realized the spanish translation is “cacacito” and I have a new favorite word.
A couple of years ago Mrs. Oik and I were in Seville a few days before Christmas. In the streets around the cathedral and the alcazar were many stalls selling figurines and dioramas for the creation of elaborate nativity scenes, which the Spanish love… and we also discovered that they like to include a caganer somewhere in the background, and it was possible to purchase some surprisingly accurate miniatures of inter alia His Holiness The Pope, Barack Obama, Lionel Messi, Beyoncé and Captain America, all portrayed in the act of taking a dump.
Not exactly festive perhaps, but really quite amusing.

HMD: “The biggest determinant of officer behaviour is civilian behaviour”
That.

Columbia University is introducing racial segregation in order to “facilitate the development of an antiracist lens”
Do these clowns even hear themselves?

Oh dear. A comment goes MIA.
David, your spam filter needs some mild correction.

Morning, all.
David, your spam filter needs some mild correction.
A light spanking did the trick.

Sitting and typing, and staring into space for extended periods, is now, it seems, a form of exercise.
“Clare Allan spent 10 years in a mental health institution”
https://www.timworstall.com/2020/08/seriously-guardian-seriously/

Shaming people (lowering their self-esteem) strikes me as … ineffective … Indeed, it is highly likely to have the opposite effect.

Referendum and Election results in 2016 would appear to agree.
The 2006 Clare Allan wrote this:

[F]or me: mental illness is not an identity. Nor is it something I wish to celebrate.

She wrote just before The Guardian signed her up to be their mental health columnist. It feels like there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Telling people locked in an addictive relationship with food to just eat less, is like telling someone with mental health issues to pull themselves together, or a heroin addict to just stop shooting up. It isn’t helpful.

Well, it’s somewhat on the blunt side to be sure, but it is ultimately true. Stopping shooting up is actually what you’re going to have to do to leave heroin addition behind; finding cathartic ways of managing what seems like overwhelming and unmanageable mental stress, ‘pulling oneself together’, is pretty much what’s required; and, yes, ultimately eating fewer calories while burning more of them results in weight loss over time.

practical advice, which is generally humdrum, makes the person in question feel much less special
It’s not about the nail.
https://youtu.be/-4EDhdAHrOg

Ah yes, but practical advice, which is generally humdrum, makes the person in question feel much less special…
My father once convinced an intelligent young woman who worked for him to stop dating the sort of self-centered manipulators that fit her “imprint”. Her intelligence, as is usual in such cases, made the task more challenging, not less. She could speak freely of her father, and of every male she’d had a lasting amorous relationship with, in ways that made it screamingly obvious to any objective listener that the lot of them had been manipulators who’d exerted a crippling and entrapping influence on her life. This was never obvious to her, armored as her senses were in rationalizations that came as readily as long-practiced mantras. Which is what they were.
He is the only person I have ever personally known who succeeded in such an endeavor.
He did it by tricking her into dating a young man who turned out to be perfect for her.

LOL. That.
Well, it does resemble an elaborately rationalised attempt at denial and procrastination. Sort of, “Yes, but is there a method of losing weight that doesn’t involve effort and which won’t inconvenience me in any way? What if we try socialism?” And if someone’s a bit chunky and they want to boost their self-esteem, the obvious way to do that is to shed a few pounds, thereby looking better, feeling better, and having a sense of accomplishment.
On the other hand, you could displace all that resentment at being fat onto a much grander project – say, “undoing Western civilisation.”

Pfart.

The late Florence King was wont to refer to the puerile as ‘phartlings’.

WTP: That’s a fascinating theory and I would like to subscribe … nah, it’s just a fascinating theory. I’d love to know, too, if it has a name.
I have a theory, too, and it is mine. Supposedly, research has shown that poor people are generally unhappy, and they get happier as they earn more money. Up to a certain level. Supposedly, in the U.S., it’s about $70,000 a year. This is enough to live comfortably, eat decent food, afford internet and cable and even set something aside in savings.
Above that income level, and happiness plateaus. Higher than that, and it declines somewhat, probably due to the person being in a higher stress job (CEO, fashion model, Instagram influencer) that requires more effort to stay on top.
Transfer that pattern to the whole of society. During the ’50s and early ’60s, when the U.S. middle class had expanded dramatically (thanks to the rest of the industrial world destroying itself, see 1939-1945), it seems that was the era of greatest contentment (disregarding worries over the atom bomb, Russia, Red Scare, etc.). There were subsequent bubbles of happiness that followed, thanks probably to inventions spurring economic improvements, particular the computer revolution.
Now, we seem to have a huge cohort of people (formerly called elites, since renamed “the comfy class”), who have enough parental money to spend on government-financed art projects, living in expensive cities, writing poetry no one wants to read and agitating for “change.” Even though they don’t work for their income, they have plenty of money and luxuries and hence are feeling the same kind of anxieties as people who work intensely for a living.
Hence, societal breakdown.

Working hard and achieving a goal gives one a sense of accomplishment. It could be a physical goal like building a piece of furniture or a retaining wall, or something more cerebral like finishing a novel or a software application. Maybe it’s the culmination of a years-long effort, like seeing your kid make Eagle Scout.
But when your ‘accomplishment’ is a Master’s thesis consisting of meaningless word salad, or a sixth-place medal in the regional semifinals of the pronoun identification Olympics, or posting a page from your adult coloring book on your Instagram, you don’t get the same feeling. (Nor should you!)
So what do you do if you lack skills, talent, and work ethic, but still have a healthy sense of ambition and a hungry ego? I suspect that you’re going to cast about for something else that makes you feel a sense of accomplishment, preferably without having to do any hard work or suffer much inconvenience. Why not a loud demonstration asserting that all your well-adjusted and successful peers are actually monsters, while you are a holy warrior in a righteous cause?

Some times a worm is just a worm, other times it’s wormegedon
So there was this post on FB recently showing a line of ducks crossing the road holding up several cars in traffic during a snow storm. Having seen a similar story months earlier, I (shamefully) reused the joke I made back then, something to wit, “Ducks are a**holes. Like they couldn’t fly across the street”. Well. Three angry faces and a comment response telling me that I was the asshole…which itself got several “likes”.

Right you are.
Just wow! How does Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez deal with the mechanics of daily life? Can she check, for instance, a restaurant bill?
Given that the concept of mathematics is originally Babylonian it may be stretching a point (or two)to claim it is white western colonisation. Still, as the Babylonians were neither Black, Latinx nor Hispanical they must, in woke eyes, be white.
A minor point, Dr G can’t get woke maths right. The example of two factories with 2 and a half machines/lines each combining to make 2+2=5 is actually 1+1=5

Amazing that while looking up those statistics that he didn’t see any about who was committing crimes.
Well, in Mr Byrne’s review, there’s an air of condescension and a kind of pissy indignation – which would fit with Sowell’s argument that leftists generally have an ego-stake in their beliefs, to which social status is attached. They are personally elevated, at least among their peers, by believing that, for instance, the criminal justice system is obviously, fundamentally and irretrievably racist, and are therefore disinclined to search out explanations that might undermine their statusful conceit. Instead, we get a quip about prisoners and slavery. And the aforementioned dismissal of Sowell as being too white to know how things really are.
The third item here seems somewhat relevant.

From Steve Sailer’s summary of the article

She gives me the impression of being a 110 IQ person who has, over grinding years of delivering boring workshops on diversity, learned how to manipulate the emotions of 100 IQ women.

A tad catty, perhaps, but the general idea isn’t too implausible.

For those who care about such things, tomorrow’s Ephemera has been compiled and should materialise just after midnight, UK time.
[ Wipes sweat from brow. ]

‘Gallup: More than 80% of black Americans want same or more police presence in neighborhood… Just 19% said they would like to see police spend less time in their community’
https://disrn.com/news/gallup-over-80-of-black-americans-want-same-or-more-police-presence-in-neighborhood

How many of that 19% are criminals?
Well if 1/3 of black men have felony convictions…?
https://www.sentencingproject.org/news/5593/

http://www.sentencingproject.org/news/5593/
Very carefully avoiding any mention of crime statistics by race

How does Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez deal with the mechanics of daily life?

By not applying her ludicrous ideas to her own affairs – it’s a given she doesn’t apply her arithmetic theories to, say, her pay packet.

Firebombing a police car is apparently an accidental “moment of madness”
But hush, we mustn’t judge. Who here among us hasn’t chosen to join a racist rioting mob, bent on terrorising entire neighbourhoods, while, quite coincidentally, carrying a Molotov cocktail, and with more Molotov cocktails stashed in your car?

Very carefully avoiding any mention of crime statistics by race.
Never mind that the statistics don’t support much of anything, beyond the government’s tendency to make *everything* a felony. From the article:
The researchers found that the percentage of black men with a felony conviction increased from 13% in 1980 to 33% in 2010 (compared to 5% and 13% for all adult men during these periods, respectively).
So black men had a felony rate 158% higher than the baseline in 1980, but racist policing since then meant that by 2010, black men had a felony rate 153% higher than the baseline.
That’s a hell of a trend they’ve stumbled on!

How many of that 19% are criminals?
Allow me to change my question to “are criminals or are related to criminals or have friends who are criminals?” 🙂

I mean…just look around THIS place…
Er, I’ll have you know this is a respectable establishment, all shipshape and above board.
[ From the cellar, sounds of exertion, as if something heavy were being dragged across the floor. A muffled scream. ]

I jump in and out of the word “engineer” as appropriate
Around here whether you’re allowed to call yourself a software engineer depends entirely on whether the Professional Engineering licensing body feels like being pissy that day.
I have a theory, too, and it is mine.
Does it involve a brontosaurus?
Supposedly, research has shown that poor people are generally unhappy, and they get happier as they earn more money. Up to a certain level.
Oh, yes, this is quite well known. A friend of mine does organizational psych. When it comes to employee motivating factors, there are two kinds: motivating factors (the more X you have, the more motivated) and hygiene factors (a lack of X is demotivating, but once enough X is present, more X doesn’t make a difference).
It turns out that for most people salary is a hygiene factor. Underpaying someone will demotivate them, but once they feel they’re being paid “enough”, paying them more won’t increasingly motivate them.

On exercise and appetite: yes,it’s been studied.

Around here whether you’re allowed to call yourself a software engineer depends entirely on whether the Professional Engineering licensing body feels like being pissy that day.
Not that I blame them entirely, but it is more than a bit pissy, true. Mostly because the ones making the biggest stink are likely crappy engineers who never actually developed anything, just stood around complaining how this or that “isn’t right”. But I digress…My thing is…so my father was a civil engineer from just after the war until the late 1960’s. Even when he went into real estate he did it always with the mind of an engineer (along with the mind of a combat infantry veteran). After he retired and I was in the thick of my SW career we would discuss how the two disciplines differed yet were the same. Until the day he died, I never considered myself an engineer. That only came after I went to work for a “major government defense contractor” where everyone used the term. When I thought of “software engineering” I mostly did so in the context of systems engineering. I used to say software is never truly “engineered”, it is developed over cycles. This was also a good bit before Agile became a thing. In fact, I advocated for Agile style development for years before I ever heard of it. I used to call it “circular” or “Spirograph” (if your familiar with the childhood…mmm…toy?) process. Sigh…but did anyone listen? Nooooo…..C’est la vie as the Frenchies say.