HWFO Reading List, January 2024
And a treat for those who've got the funk
Once a month I like to compose a summary article of all the things we’re talking about behind the veil over on the publication’s Slack Server. This is that, but before we get into it, here’s the DJ set I did for my girlfriend’s New Years Even party:
It’s an hour and a half of curated, beat-matched, key-matched, club mixed funk music ranging from 1970 to 2023. I’m quite proud of how it turned out.
If you want invites to these things, or to participate in the discussion about this month’s reading list, subscribe to join the Slack server.
Reading List
FdB’s latest rant on The Atlantic freaking out about “Substack Nazis” may be one of the juiciest things I’ve ever read of his. It’s so good.
I can’t link it without including some quotes. It’s that good.
The Atlantic has, somehow, published yet-another anti-Subtack hit job, this time written by someone called Jacob Stern. (His LinkedIn proudly notes that he is a graduate of the $50k/year Georgetown Day School, which I would like to make fun of but reluctantly find kind of endearing.) The piece’s existence is both very difficult and very easy to understand. Difficult, because it adds nothing to what Jonathan M. Katz ’s self-regarding piece on the same topic in the same magazine did a couple weeks ago, really nothing at all; easy, because declaring people working without the blessings of big deal media to be racists is the kind of scutwork on which careers are now built. Leadership at The Atlantic see Substack as an ox to be gored, and you can earn a lot of chits in this business being that kind of bagman. I hope someday you get to write the piece of your dreams, Jacob. Try not to crawl over too many bodies on the way there, if you can.
..and..
Is the problem the existence of Nazis, Ryan? Or that you don’t want to be all jammed up with them? For one thing, I have bad news for you: you get all jammed up with people with despicable beliefs every time you stand in line at the supermarket. Broderick’s complaint is about a fundamental problem of the world, but bent by convenience to be about a particular service, run by a particular company, one associated with a particular place in our world thanks to the dogged antipathy of media people who agreed to live in New York on $50,000 a year under the theory that doing so meant they would be invited to some groovy parties, which they found to their chagrin were shut down years ago. That is the anger that powers all of this. Not antipathy to Nazis.
..and..
Broderick, and Newton, and the sublimely self-righteous Rusty Foster, and others like them are creatures of the media professional-social human centipede that I’ve criticized for so long. They are firmly ensconced in the status hierarchies and petty frenemy networks that define that space. Like most people in media, I imagine, they’re feeling a little lost over the demise of media Twitter thanks to Elon Musk’s whims, given that it was the organizing force that did so much to define the culture of the industry and which handed out the social rewards that have had to replace the financial rewards that no longer exist. These guys are feeling pretty shitty about their industry and its economics and the fact that Media High School appears to no longer be in session.
..AND..
Let’s talk about Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, Stern’s boss, and the boss of whoever decided to publish Jonathan Katz.
Goldberg is a bad person. He was an actual prison camp guard at a notoriously abusive Israeli facility. In his book, Prisoners - you see, it’s not just a literal reference to the prison camp, it’s a clever metaphor for the Israel-Palestine conflict, cut the advance check! - in that book, he repeatedly dismisses and excuses and provides cover for techniques deployed on Palestinian prisoners that were torture under any definition. Goldberg specifically details covering up physical abuse of prisoners to help a buddy. (You can read Norman Finkelstein treat Goldberg exactly as he deserves here.) Worse, along with Judith Miller of The New York Times, Goldberg was the individual media member most responsible for getting us into war in Iraq. (I say “getting us into war in Iraq” and not “lying us into war in Iraq” because I really do believe Goldberg is gullible enough to have gotten rolled by such a blatant conman.) Miller’s career was destroyed, while Goldberg only continued failing up, probably because he’s a man. But in doing so much to make readers of the tony New Yorker comfortable with an invasion that would go on to kill at least a half million Iraqis, Goldberg stands as one of the single most despicable figures in the history of media. He is, objectively, a bigger villain than someone whose work you find a little fash-y.
You see that dead baby up there? Her blood is on Goldberg’s hands, in a very direct and uncomplicated way. You think it’s in poor taste to show her picture here? That’s cool. I think it was in poor taste of Jeffrey Goldberg to help kill her.
And there’s more. Go read it.
One of the people FdB calls out in this piece is Jonathan Katz, who’s been on the “Substack are Nazis” tear for a bit, going at least back to this piece of shit article. I read it back before he made it paid content only, but I could only get as far as the part where he claims
is a Nazi, and closed the browser tab. I met Razib at the Quillette social almost exactly one year ago. He was hilarious, and could automatically intuit with almost 100% accuracy the genetic heritage of every cute girl that walked past the bar. Not only does he have game, he has the sort of game that a Nazi could not possibly have..
There has long been a sense that the media buries the race of murderers if they’re black and puts the race up-front in the article if they’re white, but is this sense real? The Free Bacon did an analysis on this very thing.
They took a sample set of around 1,100 articles from 2019 to 2021, determined whether, where, and how the articles mentioned the race of the offender, and made a bunch of graphs. Their analysis shows, among other things, that when an offender is white the journalists are over three times more likely to mention their race than when the offender is any other race.
The article is good and their graphs are good but the best graph was crowdsourced from TwitterX user “Nonlinear_Zero-Sum,” summarizing the position of the mention of the race in the article. When articles do mention race, and the race is white, they mention it almost entirely in the first third of the article. When they do mention black race, which isn’t very often at all, they do it in the final third.
The thing you’ve been thinking you’re seeing is real. It would qualify as a “subconscious individual racial prejudice applied at a population level,” which is Racism Definition 4 from HWFO, except that Racism Definition Two (prejudice plus power) excuses racism against whites. More on all that here, from 2022:
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Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote something over on LessWrong in 2007 that keeps cropping up in my circles, and you should read it if you haven’t, and reread it if you have.
For a true Bayesian, it is impossible to seek evidence that confirms a theory. There is no possible plan you can devise, no clever strategy, no cunning device, by which you can legitimately expect your confidence in a fixed proposition to be higher (on average) than before. You can only ever seek evidence to test a theory, not to confirm it.
This realization can take quite a load off your mind.
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This article also comes up a lot in my discussions recently, particularly when folks complain about liberal double standards in conversations which seem curiously similar to the conversations we used to have in the 1980s about conservative double standards. TL;DR, it’s not a double standard, they’re just showing off their power. Rules and consistency don’t matter to people who have power.
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If you ever wanted to elevate your game and quit reading crap from the HWFO Reading List and instead read good things from a really good reading list, St. John’s University has a fantastic reading list.
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Some AI folks resurrected George Carlin and made him do a necromantic comedy special. I watched it for you. It’s not good. You can skip it.
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One of HWFO’s regular readers has a Youtube Channel where he hacks together some very interesting documentaries.
There’s a lot of material on his channel, and it’s not very well trafficked yet, but I encourage you to go over there and do your own determination. His material seems very similar in many ways to Adam Curtis’s series The Century of The Self, which is also amazing and you should also watch that.
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One of the more interesting things about the Claudine Gay ousting from Harvard for variously either antisemitism, or failure to control antisemitism, or plagiarism, or whatever else, is it exposed her history of attacking other more capable black academics for their failure to bend the knee to the dominant political ideology.
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The Egregore concept that HWFO plugged on for around a year continues to gain traction:
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Scientists Talk to Humpback Whales! Not really. Seems as if they basically invented a “duck call” but for whales, got a whale to talk back for a bit, and then the whale buggered off when it figured out it was talking to a fake. But it is interesting. I wonder what wale word they kept saying over and over.
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Scott continues to raise the bar with each successive Bay Area House Party parody.
“How - how can you live in Kiev and deny there’s a Ukraine war?”
“Well,” says Irina, “I just think that belief in the war is a . . . what’s the English term . . . totalizing ideology. My neighbors believe in the war, and they leave their wives and children to go to the front and fight the Russians. I was always taught to put family first, and I think it’s wrong to become the sort of fanatic who lets your beliefs get in the way of that.”
“It’s not a belief! There are literal Russians with literal tanks!”
“Don’t get me wrong, I think soldiers are great. I just see a lot of bright promising young people whose mental health goes down the drain when they start believing in Russians.
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Scientists published a study in Nature using mobile network signals to study segregation in cities and rural areas. It had some fascinating findings. I raked some data, did some analysis looking for an interesting HWFO take on their results and in the end dropped the idea because of the holidays. Here’s a screenshot of that, just for fun.
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Scientists trained artificial neural networks to recreate brain images purely from measured brainwaves. So that’s cool and will portend interesting things in the future.
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Shellenberger, Taibbi, and Alex Guntentag exposed a treasure trove of whistleblower documents outlining the creation of the censorship industrial complex in 2018.
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Contrary to a commonly held belief among the incelsphere and manosphere, recent science has indicated that the three dark triad personality traits are not viewed as “hot” by women, only one of them is. Narcissists are perceived as attractive by the opposite sex, while Machiavellians and psychopaths are not. So if you’re a Machiavellian psychopath, make sure you include some narcissism in your dating repertoire, I suppose.
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continues to do amazing work with his data driven blog tracking the dramatic crash in violent crime and murder rates in the USA, but he did highlight the very few cities where violence is getting worse. DC, Memphis, Greensboro.
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Parkinson’s disease is one of the fastest growing mental disorders in the world, and it may be linked to nanoplastics.
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If you find anything in this list interesting and want to discuss it with other HWFO readers, subscribe and I’ll send you an invite to the Slack server.
Completely off topic, but I know how you love quantifying things.
"The problem is that Trump’s crimes are so large, his behavior so egregious, that if other candidates’ faults were viewed in proportion to Trump’s, they wouldn’t be seen at all. Imagine that faults — all of them, from goofy posture to light treason — were weight. In that case, we would measure a candidate’s faults in pounds. A regular candidate might have 100 pounds of baggage, DeSantis’ weirdness might put him at 120, and a clear crook like Rob Menendez might tip the scales at 200. In this analogy, Trump would weigh about as much as a neutron star. Trump’s faults are so immense that he requires new scales of measurement — in this analogy, solar masses would be needed to measure Trump’s weight. And, of course, DeSantis, Menendez, and every other candidate effectively weigh zero solar masses; they’re simply too small to register on that scale. If we assessed the flaws of Trump and other candidates on the same scale, we would simply ignore the other candidates."
https://open.substack.com/pub/imightbewrong/p/i-regret-having-made-fun-of-ron-desantis?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1sj3lf
Lots of funny DeSantis jokes included!