HWFO June 2022 Housekeeping
And continuing thoughts about Kenosha
The housekeeping post is four days late because I was camping with family in north Tennessee. In one inebriated late night conversation, my brother and I discussed how cops selectively stopped enforcing laws in certain areas of the country in 2020, which led to higher crime, which led me to tell the full-stack story of Kenosha to my children. If you’re an HWFO reader, you already know more truth about the Rittenhouse affair than 95% of the public, but if you’re not fresh on it you can go back and read these two:
Rittenhouse as a Litmus for Adult Disagreement
Analyzing the Ryan Thomas Balch Account of Kenosha
The interesting thing about the camping trip was my brother’s wife repeatedly telling me to lower the volume of my voice when recounting the true nature of those events, out of fear that nearby campers might hear me. It reminded me that I live in a curiously tiny cultural bubble of truth, that the fear of backlash to truth still looms very large over this country, and that even a camp site in the woods in rural Appalachian bear country is not safe from this cloud of fear.
Happy Independence Day.
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Mission
Handwaving Freakoutery (HWFO) began as a Medium publication in 2018 primarily geared toward mathematical analysis of gun violence in the USA, and pivoted to Substack in 2021. Unfortunately Substack doesn’t have multiple tabs where I can build an article index, so I do those in the monthly housekeeping post.
This was originally a blog about gun statistics, but when we tried to formulate an understanding of why the media gets gun statistics so incredibly wrong, we began to analyze the business incentives for clickbait outrage porn, which in turn led to analyzing the cultural divide itself, going so far as to develop analysis tools to describe what cultures even are.
Index by Topic
General
Things Jordan Peterson’s Rehab Taught Me
The Economics of Being a Teacher, by State
Burn the Universities and Salt the Earth
Peace in Ukraine and Universal Healthcare in One Go
The Land Development Market Crashes This Year
Case Study of a Chinese Pig Butchering Scam
Guns
The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper
Explaining the USA Pro Gun Position to a Foreigner
Everybody’s Lying about the Link Between Gun Ownership and Homicide
The Left is Making the Wrong Case on Gun Deaths
Geographic Evidence that Gun Deaths are Cultural
The Gun Homicide Epidemic Isn’t
The Magic Gun Evaporation Fairy
Gun Buybacks Don’t Work if you Believe in Math
Real Talk about School Shootings
Visualizing the State of US Gun Law
Doctors are Wrong about Firearm Effectiveness in Mass Shootings
The “Sabika Sheikh Firearms Licensing and Registration Act” Fails Third Grade Math
The Gun Lane We Need Doctors In, and Government Out
Analyzing the Ryan Thomas Balch Account of Kenosha
Justice Breyer’s Dissent on Bruen is a Mathematical Shitshow
Weighing US Homicide Rates vs European Genocide Rates
Egregores
Memespace Egregores and Nuclear War
Memespace Egregores and Maajid Nawaz
Memespace Egregores and Google Maps
Memespace Egregores and the Covid-19 Sensemaking Crisis
Memespace Egregores are Not Controlled
Culture
A New Unit of Measure for Civil Unrest
We Are All Apes Behaving Like Ants
Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America - a 20 Year Introspective
We Gave Them Everything They Needed to Defend Their Country Except a Country
Playbook to Fight Woke School Board Takeovers
A Detailed Look at Woke Update Mechanics
Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion
Game Theory on the Second Civil War
Science Says Sam Harris is Alt-Right
The Two Confusing Definitions of Racism
The Five Confusing Definitions of Racism
Explaining the Social Justice “Woke Anti-Semitism” Paradox
Modeling the Socioeconomic Future with Dungeons and Dragons
Conversations with Black Folks about Cops
Deplatforming, Sargon, MAGA Hat Kids, and the Kulturkampf
The Purge Will End in Violence
Visualizing the Costs of Government in Border Walls
Abolish the Federal Government and Realign the Nation Based on Football
An Outside Look at Election Fraud
No Uterus No Opinion? No Opinion No Obligation
Explaining Systemic Racism to the Right, with Guns
The HWFO / Jordan Hall Game B Dialogue
US - Europe Abortion Law Comparisons, Revised
Yumi Nu and the Sports Illustrated Cover
Media
I Offer You Joe Rogan’s Head on a Pike
Aural Hypertext and the Memory of Man
A Case Study of Memetic Compression Rates
I Just Made $100 off Some Dead Kids, and That’s the Problem
Can Fortnite Rescue Humanity from the Attention Economy War?
Rittenhouse as a Litmus for Adult Disagreement
Covid
The Trailing End of the Ivermectin War
The Covid-19 Sensemaking User Guide
Everyone is Wrong About Covid-19 For a Reason
Data From the Texas Prison Delta Outbreak Fits the Vax Narrative
The Covid-19 Red Ink Blue Ink Problem
The Vaccine Might Kill You and That’s Fine
HWFO Covid-19 After Action Report
Want a Vaccine? Elect a Nationalist
Does the USA have the Worst Covid-19 Response? Not at All
Covid-19 Stands to be Done by the Summer
I’m new to this Substack. Thanks for posting this...I’ve burned the last couple hours browsing through many of your old articles. You should do a podcast. Just an audio version of what you’re already doing.
Anyway, you seem like an intelligent person and I look forward to more content.