HWFO April 2022 Housekeeping

And an apology

I only pushed out two new articles in April, and for that I apologize. Part of that was “real life” getting in the way, professional and personal obligations. Also I’m finally churning on a terrifically morbid misanthropic mind-screw of an article entitled “In Defense of Proto-Fascism,” which shall assuredly lose me subscribers but needs to be published anyway, and it’s not yet ready for prime time.

I’m also a month behind on installing my pool.

Which brings me to a topic often bandied about on the HWFO Slack server. I’m going to throw a convention in the fall. I don’t know exactly when, and it will probably be nothing more than an “invite-only camp-out pool party” the first year, to gauge interest among the HWFO reader community and see if anyone actually wants to meet anyone else face to face. If that seems like something you’re interested in, consider upgrading to a paying subscription and joining the Slack channel.

Subscription

This publication is and will always remain free to read, and any money earned through Substack subscriptions or Patreon will be dutifully spent on the author’s alcohol fund. But to give something back to the readers, anyone who does contribute to said alcohol fund will gain access to a private Slack server to discuss HWFO topics with other HWFO readers (and me) outside the public eye. Around 100 people are yammering away in there right now, and some of the article topics are born from these discussions. I’ll post an updated access link in a few days, as subscriber only content. If you’re a Patreon supporter you can gain access too, just email me.

Mission

Handwaving Freakoutery (HWFO) began as a Medium publication in 2018 primarily geared toward mathematical analysis of gun violence in the USA, examining media narratives, disproving many popular ones, and offering alternatives. As we went down this journey together, we discovered that media falsehoods are driven largely not by shadowy actors attempting to manipulate the narrative, but by market forces requiring the media to adopt false narratives for profit, both inside and outside the gun space. We later began to understand that the media behavior is connected to the evolution of culture, so we developed a framework for speaking of cultures themselves, and examined how the internet is increasing the rate of cultural evolution, how the media is connected to this rate increase, how the divergent cultures themselves are fueling the culture war, and how all of this indicative of various doomsdays.

HWFO pivoted to Substack in 2021 because Substack is way cooler for various reasons. One of the things Substack is worse at, however, is having multiple tabs where I can index articles for prior reading, grouping them by topic. So we’ll do that here, and we’ll update this post once per month as I continue to migrate Medium material over to Substack, supplementing with new articles as I go.

Index by Topic

General

HWFO in Other Media – Podcasts, TV, other websites.

So Long Medium – the pivot from Medium to Substack.

Beautiful Death - thoughts on the passing of my father.

She Did Not Go Gently - thoughts on the passing of my wife. (via Quillette)

Things Jordan Peterson’s Rehab Taught Me - a comparison between how Jordan Peterson handled his wife’s cancer and how I handled mine.

The Economics of Being a Teacher, by State - some math on whether blue or red states are better for the teachers who work there.

Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth - the true nature of the student loan debt crisis and how to fix it in the most gruesome way possible.

Intuition Reigns Supreme - HWFO readers take Myers Briggs and do echo chamber graphs.

Inflation for Dummies - the lockdowns themselves are an inflation driver.

Peace in Ukraine and Universal Healthcare in One Go - where we do some math about how much healthcare we could pay for by pulling out of NATO.

The Land Development Market Crashes This Year - Bold economic predictions for 2022.

Case Study of a Chinese Pig Butchering Scam - learning common 2022 dating scams by messing with the scammers

Guns

The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper - the most famous and trafficked gun article ever released by HWFO.

The Gun Solution - where we fix the entire gun problem.

Everybody’s Lying about the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide – tearing apart “more guns = more deaths” with mathematics.

The Left is Making the Wrong Case on Gun Deaths – we dive deep on male suicide and how we might fix it.

Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural – using GIS to show that “it’s the guns” is a very poor explanation of what’s going on.

The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn’t – disproving the “epidemic of gun homicides” with math.

The Magic Gun Evaporation Fairy – a dive into the impossibility of gun buybacks or gun confiscation.

Gun Buybacks Don’t Work if you Believe in Math – how many guns you’d have to buy back to avert a homicide.

Real Talk about School Shootings – school shooting numbers are a terrible thing around which to craft policy.

Visualizing the State of US Gun Law - we graph laws that work and laws that don’t by state.

Doctors are Wrong about Firearm Effectiveness in Mass Shootings – magically replacing all rifles with pistols would probably get more people killed.

The “Sabika Sheikh Firearms Licensing and Registration Act” Fails Third Grade Math – low effort mathematical dunking on a house rep.

The Gun Lane We Need Doctors In, and Government Out - how doctors need to focus on gun suicide, and gun culture needs to do the same.

Analyzing the Ryan Thomas Balch Account of Kenosha - laying out the likely details of future anarchist insurgencies based on accounts from the ground at Kenosha.

Culture / Culture War

Memespace Egregores and Nuclear War - a distributed agenda by an egregore could get us all nuked.

Memespace Egregores and Maajid Nawaz - how a distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda by a cabal to a conspiracy theorist.

Memespace Egregores and Google Maps - tying together all HWFO concepts into a collected Culture War analysis tool for the virtual century.

Graphing the Gender Wage Gap - how much of the gender wage gap is due to “choices” and how little could be due to discrimination.

We Are All Apes Behaving Like Ants - putting humanity in it’s place, game theoretically speaking.

The Human Tool - all cultures war, and you are a tool of something larger.

The Many Flavors of Wokeness - how mental cognitive filters create information silos and barriers to communication.

Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America - a 20 Year Introspective - breaking down OBL’s manifesto line by line.

We Gave Them Everything They Needed to Defend Their Country Except a Country - why Afghanistan failed.

Weird Ideas About Afghanistan - the sportsmanship of war, and trashing the idea of spreading feminism at gunpoint.

Playbook to Fight Woke School Board Takeovers - where we, yeah umm.

A Detailed Look at Woke Update Mechanics - using the Dolezal Affair and the cancellation of Richard Dawkins to explain the most unique element of the Woke program.

Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion - explaining the Woke engine to nonwokes.

Game Theory on the Second Civil War - towards a way to avoid violent conflict using math and stuff.

Real Talk About Meritocracy - we break down the ways in which the USA is, and isn’t meritocratic, while also differentiating between “meritocratic” and “fair.”

Science Says Sam Harris is Alt-Right – a deep dive into how all prior political axes are being collapsed into a purely woke/antiwoke band.

The Two Confusing Definitions of Racism – explaining how difficult conversations about racism are literally impossible to have.

The Five Confusing Definitions of Racism - an update.

Explaining the Social Justice “Woke Anti-Semitism” Paradox – we show how woke shibboleths combine to create anti-Semitic results.

Spot the True Believer – using Eric Hoffer’s “mass movement” framework to explain MAGA and Woke.

Modeling the Socioeconomic Future with Dungeons and Dragons – using DND to explain bell curves, Charles Murray, and silicon valley’s obsession with UBI.

Conversations with Black Folks about Cops – examining the police brutality problem from the perspective of someone on the street.

Stop Calling it a “Coup” – the “capital insurrection” was nothing more than a continuation of 2020 behavior.

Deplatforming, Sargon, MAGA Hat Kids, and the Kulturkampf – comparing our modern culture war to prior culture wars and discovering this is new dog old tricks.

Rape Math – back-calculating the “not all men” discussion.

Don’t Read This – mid 2020 election prognostications which turned out to be on point.

The Purge Will End in Violence – the early 2021 tech purge and what it portends in the long game.

Visualizing the Costs of Government in Border Walls - a new unit of measure.

Abolish the Federal Government and Realign the Nation Based on Football - using Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations Theory to map our “national divorce.”

An Outside Look at Election Fraud - the math says “the steal” couldn’t have possibly been enough to swing the election results.

No Uterus No Opinion? No Opinion No Obligation - contra-narrative abortion takes conclude that the current framework is mostly right.

Explaining Systemic Racism to the Right, with Guns - where we make the general HWFO readership uncomfortable and lose a few subscriptions in the process.

Latinx is Done - a bold prediction about the winds of wokeness for 2022.

The HWFO / Jordan Hall Game B Dialogue - a transcription of a very long discussion about cultural development with Jordan.

Media

I Offer You Joe Rogan’s Head on a Pike - media who wants to cancel someone for disinformation is throwing bricks in glass houses.

Aural Hypertext and the Memory of Man - thoughts on the “referentiality” of new media.

A Case Study of Memetic Compression Rates - where we explain how much data fits in a meme and what that means.

Facebook is Shiri’s Scissor - how human social media is analogous to artificial neural networks, how someone evil might develop such a network in order to destabilize the world, and how we’ve basically already done that by accident.

The Social Media Catastrophe - how the media is trapped in a tragedy of the commons situation which forces them to drive smartphone users insane for clicks.

The Media Engine of Chaos – using HWFO gun article traffic numbers from Medium to explain the root cause of all these shitty gun articles in the media, and by extension, all the other shitty articles too.

I Just Made $100 off Some Dead Kids, and That’s the Problem – how the media incentives for mass shooting coverage literally increase the odds of more mass shootings.

The Long Problem – the Atlanta Spa Shooter as a case study of how flawed media incentives lead to incorrect narratives.

Can Fortnite Rescue Humanity from the Attention Economy War? - a look at ways to undermine the current media race to the bottom by picking a different activity entirely.

Rittenhouse as a Litmus for Adult Disagreement - where we show not only who’s at fault for half the country being completely wrong about Kenosha, but why they’re at fault.

Covid

Omicron Anecdotes - experiences with the increasingly less dreaded Omicron variant.

Memespace Egregores and the Covid-19 Sensemaking Crisis - using applied HWFO cultural theory to explain why your doctor won’t proscribe you monoclonal antibodies even though you ask for them.

The Covid-19 Sensemaking User Guide - where we show how to use HWFO media and culture analysis to make sense of the things in the Covid space that sure do seem like conspiracies.

Everyone is Wrong About Covid-19 For a Reason - applying “sensemaking apocalypse” mechanics to explain why nobody can seem to agree about anything going on with Covid-19.

Data From the Texas Prison Delta Outbreak Fits the Vax Narrative - the prison system shows the “vax doesn’t stop Covid but keeps cases mild” narrative checks out.

The Covid-19 Red Ink Blue Ink Problem - how Covid opinions are now just tribal signifiers, how short term vaccines and mutations are going to make herd immunity impossible, begging everyone to lose weight.

The Vaccine Might Kill You and That’s Fine - VAERS undercounting, a statistical pro-vax case including that undercount, and why the government wants to hide it.

HWFO Covid-19 After Action Report - where we dunk on everyone because of how right we were.

Want a Vaccine? Elect a Nationalist -  how “me first” nationalism beats globalist cooperation within the game theory of international relations.

Does the USA have the Worst Covid-19 Response? Not at All – we compare the USA to other similar countries and discover we’re sort of middle of the road.

Covid-19 Stands to be Done by the Summer – using infection rates from prisons which achieved herd immunity the hard way to predict when we’ll be done with this stuff.

Environmentalism

An Illustrated Guide to Plastic Straws - we explain why not to recycle plastic.

Bezos is the Greenest Man Alive - we show how Amazon is “mass transit for boxes.”