News, Notes, and Notions for 14Apr24
The subtle art of being really careful who you let upset you, plus things worth watching and reading from the week that was
You “never start a piece with a quote” folks just grab onto something and bare down for a moment, we are going to quote right off the top here.
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is an age-old philosophical exercise. If you grew up in the woods of West Virginia, it was irrelevant, since a downed tree meant clean up and if you were quick enough before it rots maybe some firewood.
It was darn breezy Up Yonder for a family shindig this past weekend, and the large fireplace was popular, so Cousin Gary brought a load of firewood to keep the festivities warm. When asked if we had enough wood, he pointed to Aunt No-no who lives nearby to him and remarked “All these storms, her yard is full of firewood.” The trees definitely made a sound coming down, and the chainsaws cutting them up did as well. Let the philosophers make of that what they may.
Since I first started writing publicly in 2017, the single biggest change I’ve made to my “process” such as it is really pruning what I intake off of social media.
Twitter was the first social media account I ever had, of any kind, and I was almost 37 years old when I signed up. Now, Twitter (I refuse to call it X) has really devolved under its current leadership but it is still my primary social media. The reasons I started on Twitter, and how that led to my writing, are explained here.
As is all too common with mental health issues, and PTSD in particular, I rapidly began withdrawing and cutting myself off from the outside world, as well as those around me. Isolation is a common attempt to self-correct mental health issues of almost every kind, but it is also the gateway to the truly dark side of a troubled mind, and the awful places it can lead without intervention and treatment. Sensing this danger and desperate to avoid it, I admitted and confided to my VA mental health provider that I was struggling, frustrated, and withdrawn from the world. Along with setting a long-term plan for individual therapy, other things such as peer support groups and options for learning were made available to me. On a more practical and immediate level, she made a short list of items to challenge and work on with me, to attempt to improve my interactions with others. She encouraged me to come up with one of my own ideas to add to the list. To my own shock, and hers I imagine, I did something out of character, something that felt more like I was watching myself do than experiencing it. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
I joined Twitter.
Understand, at 37 years of age, I had never had any social media account and rather despised the concept. However, my decision was not without sound reasoning. I have always been a follower of current events and politics, and most of the media now is using the medium as a companion to their official writing, reporting, or punditry. Being a historian at heart and a person who still deeply loves his country, it seemed like the appropriate outlet to dabble and engage in areas that interested me, and in a small way participate in the public discourse. The truncated format keeps things brief, and it is a controllable environment; unlike being in a public, crowded, noisy place full of potential triggers, a phone can be put down or turned off. Even as a public platform, a certain degree of anonymity remains as I am a virtual nobody, pun intended.
Mostly, though, I wanted to see if I was still sharp enough mentally to compete in the arena of ideas.
The whole of that piece details some of my health issues and other things as well, but you get the idea.
So, therefore, why in the world should I waste my time on the griftosphere, bot farms, troll armies, and fully integrated online engagement machines? I do not begrudge anyone making money; God bless, do what you need to do to eat, don’t hurt anyone to do it. Still, it is rather astonishing to watch how little discernment folks have with social media in realizing how much monetization affects what flows into their feeds.
Not all of those accounts during a presidential primary that suddenly became all (insert candidate here) content all the time where paid to do so, but some were. Anyone with any kind of following, media presence, or - God help you - if you had a podcast or writing platform, such offers were relentless last year. The pitch from the campaign, party, or PAC goes something along the lines of “You don’t have to tweet anything you weren’t already tweeting, just when it is supporting (insert candidate here) you’ll receive compensation for it” or some such. The thing is human nature quickly takes over, and all the sudden tweeting for engagement dollars changed how you tweet. Meanwhile, followers of that account may catch on, or may just wonder why the lukewarm suddenly became a firebrand, or might just unfollow and go do something else.
Then there are the for-profit online culture wars. This past week some circles, including some major outlets, went content farming over the evolution of the “alt right” or the “idw” or other nomenclature for trending debatable cranky, controversial, and mostly wackadoo folks from a few years ago who have only gotten more debatable, more cranky, more controversial, and mostly more wackadoo in the interim. So it was I turned down a couple of media invites this past week on the subject with the honest reply of “I’m not wasting my bandwidth on this” more politely phrased that I was very busy this week (very true) and the topic isn’t one I was happy about.
The professional protesting set, the grifter right, the grifter left, the “trad” lunatics, and the constant made-for-internet skits that are passed off as something meaningful and debate-worthy is a landscape of lies, slander, and calumny. Sure, I lob some insults at them from time to time, occasionally might pay attention long enough to write something or comment on the self-serving chaos, but mostly I have culled such things out of my feeds and out of my online life. Most of the current socio-political culture-warring is the pinnacle of mistaking activity for achievement, and is far more masturbatory than meaningful.
So, I demur.
If a culture war happens online and you don’t get sucked into the algorithmic vortex of it, did it make a sound? Who cares, I have better things to do. If the content stokers want to gather all the tinder off the ground as firewood for their engagement furnaces have at it. Hope those fires keep them warm enough in the cold, meaningless world they are constructing around themselves.
Here’s to another productive week in the light, folks. Courage now.
Worth Reading:
A topic I’ve followed, wrote about, and talked about on programming for a while and Richard Wexler unleashes a must-read piece on the abomination that is the CPS system in West Virginia:
In 2022, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, West Virginia took away proportionately more children than any other state — even when rates of child poverty are factored in. West Virginia’s rate of sundering families was more than quadruple the national average.
Looked at another way: In 2022, 185,600 were taken from their homes and 366,400 were stuck in foster care on any given day. Had every state been like West Virginia, 930,000 children would have been torn from their parents in 2022 alone.
So it’s no surprise that West Virginia uses what is, by far, the worst form of placement, group homes and institutions, at a rate more than 50% above the national average.
In West Virginia almost every Black child is born with a target on his back. Nearly one-third will be placed in foster care at some point before they turn 18. (It will happen to 17% of white children) and 14% of Black children will have the right to live with their own parents taken from them forever.
All this is not because West Virginia is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than anywhere else. In fact, 85% of children in foster care were placed there in cases that did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. Fifty-five percent did not even involve an allegation of substance abuse. Vastly more common are allegations of neglect, inadequate housing or a child’s behavior problem — conditions which often mean simply that a family is poor.
The oppression of impoverished families by child protective services in West Virginia is so extreme that Human Rights Watch, a group probably best known for condemning the human rights records of foreign dictators, singled out West Virginia’s child welfare system for condemnation.
The justification for all this is the Big Lie of American child welfare — that tearing apart huge numbers of families is necessary to protect children. So, does anyone think West Virginia has the safest children in America? On the contrary, West Virginia’s take-the-child-and-run mentality makes all children less safe.
Because typical cases are nothing like the horror stories, study after study finds that children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. And yes, that’s even true when the issue is substance use.
The harm occurs even when the foster home is a good one. The majority are. But multiple studies have found abuse in one-quarter to one-third of foster homes. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.
Required reading from the great Walter Olson on the constant diatribe of “illegals voting”:
A common way of monitoring the integrity of elections is to apply statistical tests, looking for instances in which electoral results differ inexplicably from otherwise logical patterns. In this case, given common knowledge that certain localities have a high share of noncitizen residents, we can ask whether the number of votes cast relates reasonably to the known number of legally eligible voting-age citizens, applying plausible turnout expectations, or whether it comes in unaccountably higher than that, which might suggest seepage from the pool of ineligible persons. Tests of this sort “show nothing like widespread noncitizen voting,” Brian Quinn, a specialist in the evaluation of public sector statistics based in Wisconsin, told me. California is an example: It is a state where certain counties are universally assumed to be home to far more than their share of immigrants, including urban Los Angeles County as well as counties in the agricultural Central and Imperial valleys. “If a material number of those noncitizens were voting, total voters as a share of known eligible voters would be high.” It's actually quite low as a share of legally eligible voters, probably due largely to low median age.
The 22nd California congressional district, for example, represented by Republican David Valadao, consists in substantial part of agricultural areas in the Central Valley with a very high share of noncitizens. It cast only about 100,000 votes in the closely contested 2022 midterms, an election in which many other districts around the state recorded 200,000 or even 300,000 votes. The same pattern, Quinn says, in which participation rates fail to come in suspiciously high when compared with the pool of lawful voters, “is consistent in every state. You can see it in Texas, Arizona, Florida, New York, and so forth.”
The claim that illegal voting is swaying American elections is nothing if not sensational. Those who levy sensational charges should bear the burden of proving them. But they haven’t. It’s just assertion after assertion, with no refutation of the considerable evidence to the contrary.
Over the past four years, through a long succession of court cases, audits, and studies, the props have been kicked out from under #StopTheSteal contention one after another: that voting machine tabulations are being hacked, that hordes of dead or nonexistent persons or ineligible felons vote, and on and on. Now we’re on to a claim of massive noncitizen voting that cleverly dovetails with public anxiety over immigration generally.
Bogus claims of widespread voter fraud, even when they do not stoke hatred and fear of the foreign-born, are grossly irresponsible. They exacerbate polarization and malign honest election administrators. Most of all, they undermine public confidence in our election system.
Alex Little is writing in NR with an explainer of Indian PM Modi’s economic record as he is posed to win a third term in power:
For several decades, India was plagued by socialist economic policies. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, saw socialism as a way to modernize India and pushed heavy government involvement in the economy. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became prime minister in 1967, continued India’s socialist trends by nationalizing several industries — banks, coal, copper, and general insurance.
But India pivoted in the 1990s and 2000s, as globalization led to an unprecedented rise in trade, financial, and digital integration. Economic liberalization has allowed New Delhi to become a formidable force in information technology.
Since the BJP came to power in 2014, however, India has started diluting or reversing some aspects of globalization by adopting a Hindu-nationalist approach to governance. Modi has made some free-market moves, such as privatizing Air India, liberalizing some aspects of employment law, and opening up more industries for foreign direct investment. But overall, his economic record has fallen short of what it could accomplish.
Modi’s “Make in India” 2014 electoral pledge to boost manufacturing to 25 percent of Indian GDP has fallen flat, as manufacturing’s share in India’s GDP has slightly declined to 13 percent, according to the latest figures. Despite the prime minister’s promise to add 100 million manufacturing jobs, India lost 24 million between 2017 and 2021.
Protectionist measures imposed under Modi return the government’s meddling in the economy. In 2023, the Indian government introduced Production Linked Incentive (PLI) Schemes for 14 key sectors, including pharmaceuticals, steel, and textile products. Such incentives allow the government to pick winners and losers, continuing the proliferation of already rampant crony capitalism.
Modi’s centralized approach has failed to adequately address the country’s most significant domestic issues, including pollution, unemployment, and education. In 2019, the Modi government launched a program to improve air quality in 131 cities across 24 states and union territories. However, only 69 of the 131 cities in the program had real-time air quality monitoring. Despite 14 cities recording a 10 percent or more reduction in particulate matter between 2019 and 2021, 16 cities saw an increase. Other measures, including subsidizing solar pumps to almost 100,000 farmers, are emptying already-stressed water reserves.
Our friend and film critic Luis Mendez watched the new Civil War movie and found it wanting:
It takes a lot of balls to release a film about a hypothetical civil war in the midst of what looks to be another stressful election year with a close result that will leave the country deeply divided regardless who wins. Cancel your subscription if you must, but I take the fact that we’re currently in a political world where a second Trump presidency is currently probable very serious. As in I’m very concerned. Not because we can get another four years of disagreements from me on certain tax policy or judge appointments, but because we live in scary times where one party outright rejects democratic results and spends their time in governance targeting and punishing minority groups, taking delight in taking rights away when given the chance. Disagree with the left on policy all you want (hell as a non-partisan who embraces capitalism and plenty smaller government policy I certainly disagree with that group on various fronts) but they’re not worshiping at the feet of an accused rapist who openly dreams about being a dictator and unleashing violence on those who protest him.
My point being is that if you’re going to tackle this idea that we’re facing this potential scary future where our politics drive us to the ultimate divorce, you better have the courage as well to get political with it. This is no time to pull punches. No time to “both sides” such a subject where only one side of the political spectrum in this country is fantasizing about such a future whenever they lose elections. Perhaps its just hitting too close to home with its release timing, but Alex Garland better have something more to say than “We need to hug it out and get along more because war is bad, and journalists are heroes for covering it.”
So did we get that? Did Alex Garland for all his comments about how this movie needs to start conversations show me that he was willing to go there? Not only did he pull his punches and show me he was not willing to go there, he also created characters that were so passive and detached from the horrors in front of them that I found myself feeling nothing for them.
Worth Watching:
Our space expert friend Michael Siegel was a bit unlucky with the ecplise, so he tells the story of the most unlucky astronomer ever here:
I give a report on my experience of the 2024 eclipse with, as always, a side journey into a conversation about the unluckiest astronomer ever: Guillaume Le Gentil. Plus, an announcement! For reals this time!
From our friend Peter Pischke and his excellent CultureScape show:
Why is Disney Star Wars So Awful? Learn the answer in this interview with @ThatStarWarsGirl In this riveting interview, That Star Wars Girl pulls back the curtain on the Star Wars saga, sharing her unique insights on how this beloved franchise has lost its charm. From the thrilling highs of the original trilogy to the disappointing lows of the recent releases, she leaves no stone unturned. 🎬🚀 But that’s not all! That Star Wars Girl also opens up about her journey as a content creator, her love for nerd culture, and her passion for the X-Men. She discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by AI in the influencer and creator spaces, and why she’s committed to pushing back against cliques and division in the online geek YouTube space. 🎥💻