Zero members of Gen Z have read my draft, which does contain "insensitive or inflammatory language." That's how my friends and I spoke in the years spanning the late 90s to the mid 00s. That was how most poor kids talked, and how many still do. Not gonna censor it https://t.co/ssNju4krAS

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) October 28, 2021

If I ever wrote a novel about 1980s North Florida, how we talked and the things we said would have the wokesters shitting their pants. If I did write it and were interested in selling it (I’m not), it simply couldn’t be sold.

So much art is de facto banned now, and only the most sterilized and anodyne allowed to be produced. It’s another sign of a culture in steep decline.

Crackpot theory: SARS-Cov-2 was actually engineered by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, et al. because growth was falling off and they urgently needed something to keep the shareholders happy.

Thus, they engineered the virus and seeded it in Wuhan, so China would take the hit and it would harm their tech industry while simultaneously driving everyone inside and forcing them to depend on the internet companies. The plan worked even better than expected. Their stock prices soared and profits went way, way up.

(Note that I don’t believe this at all. But it’s fun to think about.)

All y’all need to learn about Absolute Risk Reduction and Relative Risk Reduction, what efficacy means in the context of vaccines, and so much more.

Get started reading. Sound like less of a dumbass. It’s worth it.

I’ll wait.

I think one of the main ways I differ from most men is that I just don’t really have any animosity towards women at all and it doesn’t change my opinion of a woman in any way if she’s in skimpy clothes, nude, or has had sex with 500 dudes. I just fundamentally don’t think that way and I can’t even imagine how to think that way.

Perhaps this is just due to my completely un-prudish nature, which is largely just the way I’ve always been. I don’t know.

A friend of mine who modeled nude for me a long time ago (she volunteered, I did not ask her), when I still took pictures of people rather than bugs, said the reason she was comfortable modeling for me is because she I knew I wouldn’t treat her any differently afterwards. And she was right, of course. Because why would I?

Anyway, I understand men not at all. Women are supposed to be mysterious or whatever, but to me, men are more of a conundrum.

I don’t really understand how people who were young in the 80s act so confused about different gender identities and expressions when the celebrities of their time looked like this pic.twitter.com/o7yqH61eOg

— sarah (@thesarahkelly) October 27, 2021

The crucial difference is that we were having a lot more fun then, I think. Everything wasn’t so authoritarian. Yes, it was a lot worse for LGBTQ people then, especially if you were in a rural area, but at the same time there was often in many cases less judgment.

No one was trying to convince you that biology isn’t real, no one was attempting to make you believe that biological males should compete in women’s sports, etc. Ideology on all sides wasn’t so farcical.

I think overall things are better now, but pretending nothing was lost is just wrong. We lost a lot, perhaps gained more. But people want to posture like it’s harmful to talk about what was lost and I don’t see any reason to humor them at all.

Economist: There are no shortages if you exclude food, microchips, cars, houses, and energy.

Normal person: So anything I need to live is excluded. What sense does that make?

Economist: You don’t have a PhD so you obviously don’t know what you need to live, peon.

(We need better experts. Really really need them.)

The first ten on today’s playlist:

One thing that a proper foundational training in science gave me was a deep appreciation of the following fact:

Just because you find something ethically or politically distasteful, doesn’t mean it isn’t still true.

— Nils Gilman (@nils_gilman) October 30, 2021

Indeed. There are certainly tons of things the right disbelieves that science shows very conclusively (such as the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines of late), but there are also many things that the left refuses to believe that are also true or quite likely are substantially true.

A friend of mine refers to this as “dangerous knowledge,” at least some of the items on that latter list, because if they were true it’s probably worse for the world than if they were false.

Sometimes, depending on my mood, I agree with her and sometimes I don’t. But Nils is right: there are truths in science that ethically, politically, and humanistically suck.