HWFO Reading List, March 2024
And another RECOIL publication
A friend sent me this in texts a few days ago from an airport:
HWFO readers will recognize this article, but if you want it in print grab it quickly at your local news stand because it’s about to be gone. I’d honestly forgotten I even sent this over to RECOIL for review. That makes three. One day maybe they’ll send me one of those cool T Shirts they all wear on the floor at SHOT Show. If you instead want to buy an HWFO shirt, we still have some at our merch store, which is woefully lacking any new material. I think the last thing I added on there was the Zelda knockoff.
Reading List
THEY’RE FINALLY MAKING NEUROMANCER. The tragic thing is that this adaptation is so late that too many things have already transpired within William Gibson’s dystopia that portions of his world are going to look mundane to us. But I looked into the production company and the producers and directors, and this could be a quality operation.
Geoff Shullenberger put together a very well written and very comprehensive look at modern El Salvador politics that’s worth the read if you find that sort of thing interesting.
A recent study in BMJ showed that exercise works far better at treating depression than SSRIs. Missing from most media coverage of that study is this curious fact - dancing beats all the other forms of exercise.
Some folks and I were discussing who, in the early days of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, was able to best guess what would actually happen. This video from two years ago pinged highly.
This is a great substack article on “misinformation laundering,” which chronicles when a prominent “expert on misinformation” got spanked by Nate Silver of 538.
This is a fascinating article about how women of the KKK were a pivotal group advocating for women’s suffrage and other progressive women’s causes, so that white women could act as a counterweight to black men receiving the right to vote.
Rozado Returns with an updated wokeness rating chart for all the top AIs.
This interesting study in PLoS One analyzes interactions within the gamer community for misogynic language, and discovers that the dudes who are really good at games are quite nice to the girls, while the dudes who suck at games are the ones who treat them the worst.
I’m personally neither here nor there on the topic of Social Emotional Learning. I’ve heard very intelligent people claim it’s just a technique, can be used for good or bad, and such, but there’s a growing community of anti-wokes who have added it to the list of things which must be fought on that culture war battlefront, including most notably Abigail Shrier. This post contains an excerpt from her new book on the subject.
I’ll be honest I didn’t really like this piece about Zoomer Girl Derangement. It makes broad contentions about the psychology of modern young women without any real support or statistics to back up its claims, and seems to have been written to reinforce biases among a certain echo chamber, in my opinion. But, well, the echo chamber which gravitates towards HWFO Slack seems to be that echo chamber, so it was well received among my readers, which means if you’re reading this you might like it. And if you want to talk to other people who also like it, subscribe and join the Slack server.
The tale of Feral Aryan Femininity. A very long post about warrior women archetypes in modern culture and how they relate to ancient stories.
I like CATO Institute because CATO institute has repeatedly referenced me. (I think Trevor Burris might be a reader) They put together an analysis of green card acceptance rates over time that’s very pertinent to the modern immigration debate.
It’s almost official, 2023 was the largest year on year drop in homicide rate in US history, as documented by the very detailed Jeff Asher. Jeff’s been on this for a while. For what it’s worth, this is the graph I’ve been sharing on TwitterX, based on Asher’s preliminary estimates:
If you’re into the TERF wars and the Transgender Kid Surgeries War, The WPATH Files are something you’ll want to look into.
That’s it for this month. Share if you like. If you want someplace to talk about these topics privately so you don’t get your account banned on Facebook, subscribe for a paid plan to HWFO and I’ll send you an invite to the Slack server.
The KKK article is fascinating less for what it reveals about the history of the KKK (I'm always surprised in how American progressives consistently see female sex or gender as a sorta-guarantee of more progressive/left leaning views, I guess nobody told them about Thatcher. And Le Pen. And Meloni. And Szydlo. And and and and.) and more for the closing line. Because the conclusion to a tale of women fighting for women's rights WHILE being racist stating it's a "patriarchy in a wig" refuses to engage with reality on a very fundamental level.
Sure, it's possible that the Klan women were brainwashed victims of patriarchy and exercised their internalised misogyny by demanding suffrage and pay for domestic labour. But it's also possible that the phenomena bundled in the current American progressive "enemy cluster" (racism, anti-feminism/sexism, homophobia) are only tangentially related and it's actually perfectly possible to be a fevrently racist white supremacist person (also: fevrently racist white supremacist gay person) who believes in the equality of men and women (within each race, or maybe JUST for the whites). I genuinely can't see why not, in principle (and gay right wingers are common where religion isn't a factor in politics).
Neuromancer movie? I'll believe it when I see it. The rights to the novel have been tied up for decades. But maybe Apple can pull it off and then I'll have to subscribe. 😮