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This year, India surpasses China in population. Here’s another milestone:
2. This twitter thread presents a depressing take on Brexit. I’m glad I opposed Brexit, as I’d hate to have to rebut all of these arguments. Regarding this one, I wonder how British nationalists feel about immigration switching from (presumably white) Europeans to (presumably non-white) non-Europeans?
3. I used to think that I couldn’t be a feminist, because I believed that gender was not just a social construct. I was relieved to hear that feminists have come around to my view:
Political opportunism, with both parties loving science where it suits them and spitting it out where it does not, is nothing new to James Cantor, a sex researcher who has seen “fair-weather friends” come and go. He has acted as an expert witness for Florida’s government in several gender-care cases. He remembers how 20 years ago he was pitted against lesbians and feminists because he focused on the role of biology in explaining differences between the sexes, whereas they saw most differences as social constructs. “Well, here we are 20 years later and suddenly I’m their darling now the science, which hasn’t changed, suits their argument [that sex differences are real],” he chuckles.
4. An argument for progressive consumption taxes.
5. We live in a sick, sick, sick society:
According to the Rockland/Westchester Journal News, David McKay Wilson—a tax columnist at the Westchester, New York, newspaper—was visiting Rye Playland for a story on the park’s changing tax status. He bought a ticket to the rides and was standing in line for the locally famous dragon coaster when he struck up a conversation with the kids waiting alongside him.
One of the kids told her father about how she had just been talking with a grownup. Outraged that a man spoke to his daughter without his permission, the dad reported Wilson to a guard. That guard called the police.
6. When the number one Republican is so insecure he feels a need to insinuate that the number two Republican is a pedophile.
7. Medieval working conditions? Well, yes. Here’s the Orange County Register:
Medieval Times workers launched an unfair labor practice strike Saturday, Feb. 11, claiming management has given substantial pay hikes to employees at other castles while their wages remain low amid unsafe work conditions.
The group of about 50 performers and stable hands walked off the job and began picketing after their first performance Saturday, forcing the Buena Park dinner theater to cobble together the two remaining shows by pulling in employees from other departments.
8. Measurement before theory:
OK, now for some theories?
PS. Oddly, I visited both Prague and Budapest last fall.
9. Here’s the National Review:
We should support Ukraine because Russia is our enemy, but that support can’t be unlimited.
No, we should support Ukraine even if they had been attacked by our closest ally.
10. The FT describes Marin County:
Artists of all stripes are still trading urban life for Marin’s wide vistas and locals-only beaches. The county’s progressive liberalism has always played a role in its allure, as has the legacy of the 20th-century counterculture that proliferated across the Bay Area. . . .
Bolinas, population 1,400, has always been a self-regulating community. Though it gets its fair share of tourists, not all the locals are welcoming, and far less so to the cashed-up city denizens who’ve inflated the housing market enormously in the past decade. The road sign indicating the turn-off from Highway 1 regularly gets stolen, and if you venture into the bar at Smiley’s (established 1851), the old-time saloon on Wharf Road, the intensity of the collective appraisal can be, to borrow from the local parlance, a little gnarly.
Locals-only beaches? Stolen road signs? Super tight zoning laws? Is this actually liberalism? Sounds more like a left wing version of Trumpian tribal anti-immigration ideology.
11. Here’s Tyler Cowen:
Bacon discussed the printing press in his seminal work, The Advancement of Learning (1605), where he identified three inventions that had changed the world: gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. He acknowledged that these inventions had enabled the expansion of human power, discovery, and communication, but he also warned that they had also introduced new dangers, errors, and corruptions.
Of course the Chinese developed those three inventions, and the Europeans stole them without compensation. Later, America stole intellectual capital from the UK to jump start its industrial revolution. (A point not emphasized in US history books.). And now there’s great moral outrage that China is stealing Western intellectual capital.
12. As I’ve been predicting, Brexit did not deliver the promised independence to the UK. Here’s Bloomberg:
Hardline Brexiteers are nonetheless depressed at the seeming inevitability of the [Northern Ireland] agreement passing relatively easily. One said the promise of divergence from Brussels rules was dying and it was inevitable the UK would end up aligning more closely with the EU over the next decade, first under Sunak and then if Labour wins the next election.
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4. March 2023 at 05:52
Scott,
I often wonder who (periodically) $#!ts into America’s brains. Today we got the gender insanity on the left and the fear of universal pedophilia on the right. But before that, there were others, now forgotten, like the anti- evolution / new atheist struggle of the early 2000s, the campus rape/radical feminist stuff of the 90s and what have you. It’s just one wave of insanity after the other. Much of it before social media, Twitter is just a current enabler. The question is, why, oh why?
4. March 2023 at 06:18
mbka, Perhaps it all goes back to the Puritans?
4. March 2023 at 07:24
Scott,
going out on a limb I would say BINGO.
[note I feel bad writing this as a non US person, I really shouldn’t. feel free to bash Europeans and Asians and Latin-Americans later]
It’s based on puritanism, but more than that, it’s the founding myth of sin, redemption, and salvation. It’s the righteousness of the enlightened. It’s right there in “Amazing Grace”:
Amazing grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now I’m found
Was blind but now I see
And so enlightened, one must now save someone else, an oppressed group, quick, no, perhaps the world. [yes I know, it was written by a former slave trader in repudiation of slavery and in itself is quite moving. I am talking about the messianic pattern]
And I notice another pattern, also based on puritanism: salvation comes through means that are harder and harder to perform – really, self-flagellation. See HL Mencken’s “Puritanism: the nagging fear that someone, somewhere, may be having fun”. Life is apparently too easy so one must make it as hard as possible. It’s not fitness if it doesn’t include ironmans and ritual ice baths. It’s not health if it doesn’t include ritual exclusion of entire food groups. It’s not inclusive if it doesn’t encourage surgical gender alteration for the masses. It’s not good enough to use well known traditional drugs like alcohol and nicotine or even smoking good ol’ pot. One must replace them with ultrapure THC and psychedelics. Every good idea must be driven to its most absurd conclusion.
Sorry for the rant, what I am reading all over lately is leaving me slightly exasperated. There is not one shred of common sense in all of this.
4. March 2023 at 17:47
mbka, No need to hold back, I feel the same way. On the other hand, all countries have their pros and cons.
4. March 2023 at 22:25
We do live in a sick society, where your preferred presidential choice tells people he “may be white but he aint stupid” and “if you’re black and dont vote for him, then you ain’t really black.”
We live in a society where children are being taken to drag shows where they watch a woke trans man dance around a poll, with signs that say “it’s not going to suck itself”.
In that type of degenerate society, which the left invetiably produces, then of course I’m calling the police. Dont you dare talk to my daughter, especially if you are a left winger, because we know the left thinks morality is “subjective” and the patriarchy needs to be dismantled, apparently, even if it means fucking kids.
Interesting that the entire pedo island flight records were all democrat. Not one conservative. Not cruz, not rubio, not even the globalist romney or McConnell, but the left wing a-listers went multiple times.
Just saying…
Birds of a feather, flock together.
5. March 2023 at 03:04
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/a-timeline-of-donald-trumps-creepiness-while-he-owned-miss-universe-191860/
7. March 2023 at 03:26
I will note that Tyler Cowen’s post was made with ChatGPT, and is a droll meta commentary — the quotes do not exist.
7. March 2023 at 05:22
Nicholas, All the more reason to trust it. 🙂
7. March 2023 at 10:53
“Life expectancy at birth, China vs US”
The chart shows the impact of Covid deaths in the US but not in China. I’d say ‘wait until all this year’s post-lockdowns deaths in China are reported’, but as the Chinese government basically isn’t admitting any such deaths …
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“Political opportunism, with both parties loving science where it suits them and spitting it out where it does not…”
Reminds one of how civil rights activists used “states rights” as a slur for so many years — then converted it to a rallying cry when fighting to uphold state laws legalizing gay marriage against the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In politics, winning trumps intellectual integrity each and every time.
BTW, is Krugman still calling the Democrats “the reality based party”?
~~~
“Pornstars per million inhabitants”
Aw, that was a tease. The USA is #3. Who’s number #1? I had to look it up, and am still not sure. Apparently Hungary and the Czechs dwarf the rest of the Europe combined (I mean, the way Babe Ruth hit more home runs than entire teams – what’s up with them?). And maybe top the USA too. This purported 2023 data puts the USA at #4 behind them and Latvia (!?)…
https://pornstars-per-capita.com/
Maybe we should get the WTO or OECD to straighten out these numbers.
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“the Chinese developed those three inventions, and the Europeans stole them without compensation. Later, America stole intellectual capital from the UK to jump start its industrial revolution. (A point not emphasized in US history books.). And now there’s great moral outrage that China is stealing Western intellectual capital.”
The Romans stole Gaul, and then the entire Mediterranean basin (killing everyone who tried to stop them) … Genghis Khan and the Mongols stole the largest empire in the history of the world (killing 10% of world population!) … the Americans stole the bulk of North America (killing as many as necessary) … and now there is great moral outrage that Russia is stealing a minority portion of Ukraine.