and you can be sad about that

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and many seem to resist attempts to make it so

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there’s just something about that number where “if you take more than 20%, everyone bucks.”

this finds interesting consonance in modern america when one looks at federal takings and hauser’s law which shows that overall american federal tax receipts tend are remarkably constant irrespective of the top marginal tax rates and that they bounce off 20% like a bird hitting a window. people just do not pay bills bigger than that. they arrange their lives not to. (laughs in laffer curve)

the US saw massive tax hikes around ww2 and we’ve averaged about 17% of GDP since. (americans are notoriously feisty about taxes and so we treat 20% as a limit, not a standard.

but, if you pile on state and local, that’s another ~9% so the reality becomes more like 26% in total take.

but here’s the funny thing: we’re obviously getting taken for a great deal more than this.

here’s a wild chart that i pulled together from some disparate sets of source data.

back in the days of coolidge, all government spending in the US aggregated to something in the neighborhood of 12%. as of 2025, that has basically tripled. it’s quadrupled since 1900.

obviously, the federales were a meaningful part of that rising from 3% in 1929 to 9.2% pre ww2, spiking massively in the big war, but then never going back down. they drifted up to 22% by 1982, we got a little leverage on it through the 90’s but every crisis since seems to kick us up into a higher valence. the 2008 crisis got us up from the 17’s to 24% and we settled in at 20, covid kicked it to 30% and we’ve settled in at ~23%.

one way ratchet.

obviously, comparing this to federal receipts shows a nasty set of deficits which have been making a sawtoothed railroad tracks to hell pattern since the dot com crash when the fed began its 26 year (and counting) excursion into activism and money printer obsession.

yikes.

this gets talked about quite a lot so it’s probably not surprising anyone.

the feds are spending 5%+ of GDP every year that they are not paying for.

but, and this is less discussed, it looks like the states and localities are burning about another 5% of GDP that they don’t have either and that one gets interesting as most of them are supposed to have balanced budgets and not to be able to partake of such shenanigans on a durable basis.

and this one is going to end in tears because there is damn near no way out of that hole. states and towns cannot print money. they also, unlike the federales, are subject to far greater “vote with your feet” discipline so that when some clever boots governor starts talking about a “wealth tax” and an entire air force of private jets takes the billionaires to texas and the tax base is gutted and groovy gavin and the rail project of doom will be left to languish.

kathy nazgul and marxism mamdani are learning some similar lessons in new york

and seriously god help them if and when the real estate prices start to drop and the property tax revs evaporate.

there have been some shocking developments in some of the more poorly governed and managed cities where the potent brew of high tax, high cost, and deteriorating lifestyle and service level is causing wealth flight.

choices have consequences.

and the “well, it’s just a few rich people so who cares” argument rapidly turns into “everyone cares” the minute anyone tries to make up the tax take. the rich are paying for the system and when you start pushing them past the “royal fifth” and well into “leviathan’s third” or the truly deadly levels of double digit state income taxes and then piling sales and property taxes on top and you get wholesale wealth walkout.

the top 1% is paying a helluva lot of the tax bill and this is a “customer” both willing and able to take its business elsewhere. capital, businesses, and people have never been so mobile and it has never been easier to live where you want and work where you need.

the cites and states that have figured this out are booming and the ones that are squeezing harder are really flirting with disaster because this is one of these accelerating calamity curves where the money leaving blasts huge budget holes that raise taxes and drop service and just drive more flight. and once that really starts in earnest, it does not stop and there is no easy way back out of the hole because you lack the money to fix the problems and attract the money back.

count on the crisis in coming years where states and cities start threatening BK and demanding the feds to bail them out.

do that even once, and 40 more will follow rapidly and hopefully, not even the feds are that barking mad.

but somehting has to give.

we have a massive spending problem in this country and there is just no way to pay for leviathan’s 35% of GDP.

we can either get serious about it or it’s going to be the sinkhole of the coming decade and urban blight and city center sinkhole will become the outcome in many top metros.

this is not the movie you want to star in.

and being increasingly stupid about it is not helping anyone, least of all those it was intended to.

back in 2020, the university of california system decided to phase out the SAT/ACT and in 2021, a lawsuit made it permanent.

this certainly increased the “diversity” of students, but perhaps not in the manner that had been hoped. i cannot speak to whatever they were aiming at, but “massive diversity of preparedness and capability” is what they got. in these days of grade inflation, AI, and social promotion, it (entirely predictably) filled the UC system with kids who had no business being there and we, flattly, unprepared for and unable to catch up to the work.

it’s so bad the faculty are revolting because STEM students cannot manage middle school math. here’s the letter signed by 686 faculty as of this writing: LINK

it does not mince words:

bravo, folks. exactamente.

the simple fact is that the SAT is one of the best predictors of college success and when you hold high school GPA constant, the effect really pops.

all A students. twice the college completion rate (74%) at 1400+ vs 800-990.

this gets significantly more acute as you move up in the selectivity of a university.

HS GPA predicted basically nothing.

it did a little better in an internal at dartmouth, but it was basically non additive to overall predictivity, meaning it’s all cross correlate and GPA from HS adds almost nothing to the signal. you’d be FAR better off just using SAT and ignoring transcripts.

so, the story is clear, the data favors testing, and the Destruction, Incineration, and Effacement gang will, predictably demand to Do It Everywhere because that is the only note that this flute would seem to know how to play.

but this is not playtime. taken past a point it becomes deadly dangerous.

leaving aside the fact that “health equity scholar” makes “pronouns in bio” look like winning the science fair, this is a truly terrible idea.

the university of california dropped the SAT and the preparedness of STEM freshmen plummeted so precipitously that they were having to reteach middle school math.

and from this you learn "we should drop the MCAT from med school?"

this certainly seems likely to improve the diversity of poor medical outcomes...

it’s also likely to cause actual racism because, in a racially rigged system, racism becomes rational despite, ironically, not actually needing to be racial. it’s just an emergent artifact of differential preferencing.

it’s a different standard.

and that will have effects.

if would work for any bifurcation.

if my med school let in people whose names started with A who had a 24 MCAT at the same rate as people whose names started with B but had a near perfect score, it would become rational to want a doctor named barbara and not alex.

they had to pass stricter tests and have higher capacity and given that schools now graduate far too many students as it is, GPA and diploma and even board cert are just not enough to cover for this.

i’m sure there’s a knee jerk to say “they are all good by the time they graduate” but the data has a tendency to track the MCAT.

here’s data pulled from medical boards (it’s not as complete as i’d like, but the trend is still pretty obvious)

we can argue about base rates and “could you tell?” etc, but in the end, why? if you need a doctor, you want the best one you can find and if it’s clear that it’s easier for some groups to get medical degrees than others because of their ethnicity, why wouldn’t you want the asian doctor?

this is the insidious harm of DEI. it casts all achievements into doubt. maybe doctor so and so really is great and deserves everything they have and more, but if lots of people who look like them got ahead on “intrinsic characteristics” then will people take the chance and find out?

you simply cannot set of spirals like this in any insitution.

the mediocrity downspiral is inevitable.

once you hire, promote, or enroll for reasons other than merit, those without merit start seeking to shove out any who have it.

mediocrity loves company, but only company more mediocre than itself.

A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. (and you seriously do not want to meet the people C’s hire)

they will ravage every institution they touch and the high schools will rot because the colleges are contagious and the grades will inflate and the ability to distinguish will drop. hell, they’re even nerfing the SAT to wipe out its mid level discernment.

these people REALLY want to stop objective assessment.

it’s the exact behavior you’d expect from a B looking to hire C’s and push out the A’s.

any system not a deliberate objective meritocracy will devolve into an anti-meritocracy.

objective testing is a means to prevent this.

it’s why they hate it so much.

a time when one rarely gets what one asked for

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and, honestly, much of this incomprehension is mutual

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economics: people respond to incentives in predictable ways

social science: people are people, the basic nature of humans does not change much.

ignore either of these concepts, and you rapidly lose the ability to describe or predict reality.

combine them and you get a simple and fundamental understanding of why history is so prone to repetition and why

1. there is so little under the sun that is new

2. those who seek to control the present always seek to shade the past in order that we draw inapt inference therefrom. making up history is control of the future.

ground truth is this:

people don’t change and they respond to incentives in predictable ways.

literally this is all one needs to know to know that no, communism will not work this time. no, government will not resist the temptations of gato’s first law and refrain from putting themselves up for sale the minute they have control over that which you have to buy. yes, the plundercrats will gin up a bunch of faux-moral precepts and safety hobgoblins to justify it. no, this will not check itself and gato’s postulate will pertain: once you give them this power to determine that which is bought and sold, you will always and inevitably get rule by rube.

these things are obvious to anyone who is actually conversant in what was and why, in the long march through institutions and culture, those who would lead you off the path must always with such ardent vigor efface the trail behind you.

and this is why the history of history matters so much in the battle to avoid being eaten by leviathan.

consider:

all regulation works this way. it’s ossification and preferencing for incumbents masquerading as “safety” or “equity.”

in 1720, it was just the same: we cannot let you buy stock from others, just us, because, uh, safety.

bastiat (from whom i shall shortly, in the finest tradition of pablo picasso, steal shamelessly) was a masterful student and expositor of this.

and this is why they push so hard to consign his ideas to the memory hole.

imagine the gaslighting it takes to ignore this and instead teach keynes and marx and (shudder) piketty.

one cannnot understand the american healthcare (or the electoral or basically any other) system until one foregrounds a simple fact:

these systems are not horrendously dysfunctional and broken, they are captured and that is a very different thing.

they are not like this because those running them are stupid or know no better, they are like this because someone wants it this way.

once one realizes that this is the relevant lens, it’s actually easy to work back to seeing who the problem is. you just ask “cui bono?” (who benefits?)

you’ll note that it’s never the voter, the patient, the consumer and always the party, the guild, the cartel.

certificate of need (amusingly abbreviated “CON”) for hospitals, practitioners, and kinds of medical equipment is one of the most anti-consumer regulations imaginable. it literally states that “no, you cannot buy and operate an MRI machine in this area without first getting permission from the guys who currently have MRI machines in the area.”

if one did this with, say, a burger stand, and said “no, you cannot sell burgers in this town unless you get permission from the guy over there who sells gagtastic mystery meat for $27” you’d get run out of town on a rail as an anti-competitive monopolist. but somehow when a hospital does this exact same thing, everyone nods sagely and says “ah, yes, too important to be left to a free market” and prices are left to spiral.

again, this is not a bug, it’s a feature. price is a signal. high prices say “provide more of this” and a free market will do so. the entire point of the CON con is to break that adaptive mechanism and prevent new supply from entering a market and thereby reducing price. the point it to sustain monopoly pricing.

there is always a song and dance about how “if we do not do this some very bad thing will happen” to make such interference look like safety or reason, but the truth is always this:

it’s not protection, it’s plunder.

maybe it started with good intent, but this can never last. big business and big government do not like free markets, they like control and mono/oligopoly. and it’s always cheaper to buy politicians and regulators than it is to compete.

in the days of basiat, “a monopoly” was something one bought overtly from the state.

guess what? it still is.

that is why regulatory capture is always the outcome of regulatory regimes.

it is not the exception, it’s the rule.

humans, nature, predictable incentives.

hence:

gato’s third law: any sufficiently evolved regulatory regime will devolve into a system of legal plunder backed by a system of faux morality used to disguise it as safety and justice.

what does this plunder look like? it wears many masks cunningly carved to allow the crony to appear the savior. remember covid? even past the jabs, there was a comet sized piñata stuffed with dirty money candy that every politician and powerbroker in the world struck repeately with as big a stick as they could find. covid tests, masks, ventillators, you name it: if one of my pals makes it, i’m gonna make you buy it and pay top dollar for the privilege.

it never stops.

this is the always on 24/7/365 raison d’être of the intrusive state. it’s so prosaic and commonplace that we cannot even see it. from quality learing center to FEMA hustles, it’s the whole game. i’d wager that just from the US government, the GDP of taiwan gets stolen in this fashion, every year. expand the scope to “that which you are made to buy that you would not have wished to” and “the cost of features and limits you did not want” and “regulatory compliance and preferencing” and i’d wager you’re baking $5 trillion a year in to US costs. it touches absolutely everything from homes to cars to healthcare to law to baby clothes, from gasoline to green energy and ethanol to tupperware to barber shops.

it never lets up to the point where you cannot even see it in the same manner that fish forget to think about being wet.

it’s obvious with things like “you have to buy a heat pump” or “new windows must cost 5X the electricity they will ever save” or “every public space needs to have an electric defib that no one will ever use.” it gets blurrier with “every car must have this feature” or “all baby clothes need $10k/sku testing even if all the materials are known.” it’s always “safety” and some facile moral line about “what, are you anti-baby?”

yes. if the state is the one to define it, i am. because what they push is not safety, it’s robbery and crony corporatism.

law schools are not improved by needing to be certified by the american bar association, they are captured by it. it’s not safety, it’s price gouging and risk. the schools become a subsidiary of a guild and the guild seeks to benefit the guild members by limiting supply and (increasingly) to control their membership with severe political bias.

again, there is no accident nor stupidity, there is capture and imposition.

and once you see it, you realize that it’s everywhere.

like, literally, everywhere. everyhting leviathan touches is corrupt and plunderous. everything. and the more prosaic they seek to make it sound, the more tightly you need to grab ahold your wallet.

remember gavin and his diapers for newborns plan?

sounds lovely, who could be against being sure that babies have diapers?

well, me. because this is not an access program, it’s theft.

baby2baby, the nonprofit set to guzzle this largesse on a no bid/no shop contract is run by norah wienstein who sits on the board of california partners project with, wait for it, jennifer siebel newsom.

and the costs are multiples of what you’d pay on amazon or costco. it’s legal plunder to favor a crony. see below.

and they ALL do this.

you could buy these in bulk for $3.

call me "mr cynical paws" but when i read this, all i can think is:

"which one of your constituents is a bath mat company any how much did they donate?"

it’s just endless.

they prey on the “well, but isn’t this true? isn’t this safety?” idea.

no, it’s probably not and even if it were this would still not be the way to go about it.

they choose this for a scam because it’s so easy to blow by you unless you stop to think. what are you, pro old people breaking hips in showers?

but paws (sorry) to consider:

do you seriously think that there are a meaningful number of people who:

1. need these
2. do not already have them
3. and would put them in if you sent them one

(don’t discount this one, people are people, not the rational and proactive avatars we might wish)

and that even if all 3 of those criteria were met, that medicare/medicaid, one of the least efficient and most fraudulent systems in america is the way to distribute it?

yeah.

and that is why we simply cannot tolerate these programs.

it will always be all theft, crony corporatism, and legal plunder, and they will always and inevitably gussy that up with some coat of righteous moral whitewash and harangue and vilify you for pointing out what larcenous claptrap this all is.

when you allow politicians to determine that which is bought and sold, the first things bought and sold will be politicians.

such a system, like all systems of legal plunder will devolve to story time about why the capture of the system is vital and moral.

those taken in by such justifications by faithlessness will, over time, lose control and degenerate to rule by rube who know no other way.

and that is the death of both the republic and the high trust society.

it’s really not complex - big government becomes a form of organized crime that ultimately forgets that it’s a mafia.

you cannot fix it or change it because people do not change and they will always respond to incentives in predictable ways.

so all one can do it tear it out, root and stem, until there is no point in buying politicians because they have nothing of value to sell.

and when you do this, the speed with which things get better is remarkable and obvious.

it’s why they try so hard not to let you or to let you see how it works.

did you think it was a coincidence that argentina vanished from the news without a trace amidst the massive success of ending rent control?

again, not stupid, captured.

forget that one at your peril.

remember it, and the solutions become so obvious that only an academic could miss them or a crony deny them.

and so i leave you with the words of the philosopher mileicat:

many have criticized christopher nolan for going too far with some of his casting for "the odyssey."

but what if the real problem is that he didn't go far enough?

hear me out on this:

because i have a rock opera for the ages.

the story begins with the careless whisper of a close friend

and he got it bad, so bad. he was hot for paris!

and this shot through the heart gave love a bad name

and so they return home where they talked to their daddy who showed them how to walk this way.

but not everyone was sanguine with this outcome and in the midnight hour, they cried “war, war, war!”

and his brother said, “let’s dance!”

and gathered to him great heros ready to jump for glory

heros of great cunning forever ready to enter the danger zone

hearts were dragged around

and last breaths were taken

in a story for the ages, for all of olympus loves a battle of princes!

tell me you wouldn’t go see this.

i dare you.

it is said that there is no allegory so on the nose that a determined human cannot ignore it

that it is humanity’s fate to step repeately upon the same rakes

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like they are just teasing you

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is a hammer a useful tool? yes.

which one is better?

this is a silly question, it depends upon what you need to do.

this is a set of discernments so obvious and inarguable that only an academic or a troll (increasingly, sadly, often the same thing) could find fault.

tools are designed for tasks and suited to some and not to others. it’s not about better or worse, it’s about “better suited” in any given context.

evolution works the same way. which is better, a dolphin or a wolf? well, it really depends upon where you drop them off and what you ask them to do, doesn’t it? 2 miles offshore, a wolf is in trouble. 2 miles inland, well, that’s a very different story for flipper.

these are ideas so simple that a half concusssed 5 year old will instantly grasp them.

“i am a screwdriver that identifies as a hammer and i demand that everyone acknowledge not only my right to drive nails but that i am just as good at it as any ball peen!”

this is just stupid. we’re not all the same and as the great sage tells us

but it’s a funny thing: an awful lot of people seem desperately invested in pretending that it does.

we see this in the trans movement where “boys who tuck” start dominating track and swimming meets and volleyball matches while some core of reality denialsts proclaim that “there is no biological advantage to being male” in these sports. but there obviously is. it takes an ostentatiously willful level of denialism to pretend that it does not.

what really fascinates me on this topic though is that those directly victimized by it seem more inclined to support it than those who are not.

it seems a varietal of the “suicidal empathy” we were discussing the other day.

women support “boys who tuck dunking on the girls” at roughly twice the rate that men do and while male support for this has dropped by about 1/4 since 2023 (18 to 14) among women, it’s basically the same (33 vs 32).

that’s an interesting trend especially in light of all the bad press this has garnered and problems it has caused.

but even the people who see this and say “no way” have this weird block when it comes to other male/female differences and seem to fixate upon this bizarre tabula rasa obsession with pretending that men and women are the same, want the same things, have the same capabilities, and ought to be doing all the same stuff.

it’s an oddly telling perceptive duality that the same people who say “obviously, duh” when you say that men are, on average, larger, stronger, have denser bones and muscle, and have body geometries more conducive to athletics and violence than women suddenly flip to “nuh uh” when you speak about any sort of large enduring difference in attitudinal norms, intellectual capabilities, or even the natures of trait distribution.

it’s like they somehow think that size and muscle mass come from genes but verbal or math ability are magically all some sort of “nurture.”

these variances are not cultural or sociological, they’re biological. you can see this all over the place, especially as our tools of analysis get better. it’s flat out embedded at the neurological level.

and, of interest, one of these hardwired variances may well explain the differential rates of support for “boys in girls sports” and quite a lot more as well.

consider this study on gender variance in conditional empathy.

they’re basically measuring one thing: do you perceive punishment differently if you view it as warranted?

the answer is, provocatively, “it depends” and what it depends upon appears to be your gender.

in men, yes, the two are different. men show empathy for the unfairly punished but lack it for those they view as justly punished. instead, their reward centers light up.

in women, the responses are not different. they show empathy either way. they do not experience the positive feedback of punishing a cheater.

put simply: male empathy is conditional and female empathy tends not to be.

the part of the brain that would be used to make it so is simply not engaged.

this is supported by a fairly broad body of research and linked to testosterone levels, which seem not to limit overall empathy (the high T are still empathetic) but rather to drive a delination around “do you deserve empathy or not?”

this pathway is less active in those with lower T and thus tends to express as large differences between men and women. this is a likely fundamental aspect in “female judge won’t hold the suspect” and “female victim (or her low T male friend who ran away on the subway abandoning her to the attacker) won’t press charges.”

the concern is less “who started it?” than “who is crying right now?”

this is a classic example of a set of claims that every sort of jerk with an axe to grind seizes upon to stir up a war of the sexes, so let’s just head that off right here:

this distinction almost certainly exists for a reason and if it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be here.

do you really want women, who birth and nurture babies, to be wired to ask whether the baby is justified in crying before deciding whether to help or feed it? would any of us have survived our infancy? so give it a rest guys, this is not about which sex is superior.

that’s an argument as tiresome as it is pointless.

women are better at being women and men at being men, those are not the same thing, and there are some basic imprinted realities there. and one of them is that lower testosterone people are less likely to punish others, even when they think the others deserve it.

i don’t make the rules.

it’s foundational biology.

there have been some fascinating studies on “weak” democrats (those with weak rather than intense) affiliation. to begin with, they had significantly higher T (19%) than those who identified as “strongly dem” but the interesting bit is that when dosed with additional testosterone, these people immediately had mood improvement and started to lean more red. (12% drop in strength of party affiliation (p=0.01), 45% warmer feelings towards republican candidates (p<0.001)

hormones shape your perception and cognitive function.

we like to feel that we’re in control and to tell stories about our full agency and choice, and i am a believer in free will, but also a believer that it has real limits. what would you like for dinner? an idea pops into your head and some preferences. you can (likely) override them, but where did they come from? what said “burger” instead of “chicken”? no one has access to that. “did that make you angry?” ditto. the machine is mostly ghost.

we like to style ourselves as creatures of pure reason, but we’re not. that’s the skin on a large, large orange and most of the juicy parts are underneath. (as anyone who has ever had their hormones disrupted can tell you)

and one cannot help but wonder: is the collapse of testosterone levels in the west directly tied to the newfound surges in suicidal empathy? it certainly stands to reason.

are we all simply shifting to a non-conditional empathy state that is easily abused by those least deserving of (or able to secure) conditional empathy?

is this why men and women have been having such an incredibly intense political bifurcation of late? is it because we’re seeing the same stimuli and high T is saying “punish that” and low T is saying “punishment is mean and i don’t like it. i feel bad for the attacker/thief/whatever.”

are male and female at biologically driven odds here?

i suspect maybe they are.

and again, this is not about better or worse. is a hammer better than a screwdriver? if you’re driving nails it is. if you’re trying to remove a screw, it’s not. can we seriously not grasp that this same pertains to a great many forms of male/female variance and that the exact same trait “being empathetic with less regard to culpability” is highly adaptive in the child rearing that every single one of us needed in order to be here (and perhaps to being a doctor, which attracts women to that profession) but perhaps becomes problematic when setting bail for violent felons?

because this seems like one of those obvious things that a civilization forgets right before it declines. the 70’s and 80’s made it vogue to pretend that all the old stereotypes lacked basis, and likely some of them did, but likely some had a point as well and all this pretense that they could not, cannot, and must not is leading to forms of reality denial and a profound “talking past one another” sort of situation where, because we are not allowed to name or define the issue properly without having words ending in “ist” hurled at us, we simply cannot make any progress toward understanding or solution.

let’s keep a few things in mind:

given the variance of humanity and its bell curve nature, nothing behavioral or cognitive like “men are this and women are that” is ever absolute. there are women at the far end of the curve who out express most men in many male traits and men (like our subway hero who ran away and left a 23 year old woman to face burke alone) who, well, act like that.

but what’s astonishing is how accurately one can infer political party just from behavior and how that party affiliation and behavior track to basic issues like “testosterone.”

i have not looked up the judge in the rhammell burke case, but i’ll stake $20 blind that we can all guess her politics. same goes for the woman and her runaway male compatriot.

these things are all of a piece. it’s a basic assortative divide.

and you cannot change it. you could not “fix” it even if it needed fixing.

but the good news is that it does not. it’s fine and has worked for millennia.

we just need to stop being ridiculous about it.

i’m going to say this as simply and directly as i can:

men and women have demonstrably different brain structures. hand a neurologist 100 brains, 50 male, 50 female, than they can, just by looking at them, sort them into male and female piles with pretty much perfect accuracy. it’s everyhting from size to white matter/gray matter ratios, connectivity patterns, and the size and proportions of specific areas. men, for example, have larger amygdalas, this leads to greater propensity and capability in emotional salience determination, threat tagging, reward relevance, and socio-emotional cues. women have larger lateral prefrontal cortexes. this leads to larger working memory, greater task switching, and multi-tasking capability.

men and women are optimized differently. this is a simple, demonstrable fact. taking brains that different and bathing them in hormones as different as men’s and women’s are and winding up with “these work exactly the same” would be the most outlandishly improbable coincidence in the entire universe. it’s just not a thing.

everyone always wants to make this into some “better or worse” debate as though somehow noticing a difference is some form of bigotry or misogyny, but this is just the screwdriver vs a hammer argument again.

has there been such a thing as sexism in human history? of course. does it still exist? certainly in some places and to some degree. but in others, it seems to have been turned inside out into a new dogma of “screwdrivers can do everything a hammer can do but backwards and in high heels” and i suspect this is not really helping anyone, women least of all.

the idea of gender roles and preferences is not oppression, it’s “noticing things.”

forcing those roles on people against their will is oppression.

but so too is indoctrinating people into social pressure enforced belief sets that conforming to any sort of biological gender role makes one some sort of gender traitor or weak.

i mean, can we seriously not just figure out how to be different and not in conflict, to work toward happiness and capability instead of politicizing gender variance into lysenko level conflict generation?

you can be pro man and not be anti-woman. you can be pro women and not be anti-man.

it seems to me that a significant part of the problem right now is this “the genders are talking past one another” issue that no one can resolve because we’re not allowed to admit that genders see things differently and that women being women and men being men are both important and desirable.

start from there and the structures you build are workable.

start from “we’re all the same and need to be the same” and you’re just opening up a new misery factory.

the deck is stacked in our favor here guys. the war of the sexes has no future. it’s always been too pleasurable to fraternize with the enemy…

i know it’s been the cute new pose of the intellectual to play semiotic games to deconstruct the term “suicidal empathy” and pretend it lacks meaning, but let’s not lose the essence of the the issue in amongst the word games of academia and twitterati:

to fail to recognize attacks against yourself and your neighbors as attacks is a profound form of disassociation and demoralization.

this, large, dangerous, and seriously mentally unstable man chased a couple through the subway physcially attacking both.

“He comes up and he kicks my friend in the back, and basically pushes him through the transition of the cars,” the woman said in a phone interview Friday night.

“My friend freaks out, runs away, and then he grabs me by the head and pushes my head down, trying to like maybe throw me on the ground or something. But I didn’t, I resisted as much as I could. I didn’t fall, and then I immediately opened up the car and then ran towards my friend.”

they fled the subway, he followed, and who knows what might have happened had police not been around.

“We get off at West 4th Street and then we turn around and we see he’s following us. That’s when I was like: ‘Oh, like, this is scary. Like, why is he following us?'” the woman recalled, calling the perp a “buff guy.”

“We started running a little bit, but then thank God the cops were right there because, I mean, we kept thinking about, imagine that there were no cops, we would have had to literally run for our lives. They immediately arrested him. It was shut down really fast by the cops and we respected that.”

so far, OK. it’s a city, it’s crappy, but stuff happens sometimes. but then, you get the problem, and like so many problems, it comes back to “the graph.” (IYKYN)

despite this mortal fear and naked, unprovoked aggression from a man they clearly felt was seriously dangerous, they made a decision:

“She said the attack left her and her friend “in shock,” but they ultimately chose not to cooperate with prosecutors… Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail.”

they are literally refusing to press charges.

and 5 days later, burke kills a man, a total stranger, for no reason other than the fact that burke obviously barking mad and deeply dangerous.

here’s just the run ins he’s had with the law since february that have made the media. (i have no access to his full record)

look at how many bites the big apple had at getting this rotten fruit out of the barrel.

and look at how they failed.

robbery, resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, weapons possession, crack, IV drugs, breaking and entering, destruction of property, it just goes on and on and this is all in 3 fricking months. amazingly, he attacks this couple on the subway, gets hauled down to court, and then, in the face of all this is released without bail.

the system refuses to hold a man who is attacking strangers on the train.

even the victim refuses to cooperate.

and it keeps getting worse.

may 7: he’s taken in for “acting erratically” in front of a police station. what that really meant was “he pulled a stick from a garbage can and approached officers threateningly with it.” they take him to bellevue for psych eval.

they release him in one hour.

and a couple hours later, 76 year old ross falzone is dead, murdered by burke for no reason whatsoever apart from “burke is crazy” and “the system is pathetically broken.”

seriously, if your pattern recognition is this poor, what on earth are you doing in a justice system? what are you doing as a mental health professional?

i’m just dying to hear how this fact pattern resulted in “no bail.”

prosecutors reportedly sought $3,000 cash / $9,000 bond, but judge marva brown released him on supervised release.

let’s be very clear: “supervised release” is a joke. there is no supervision, just release. it’s basically “off you go crazy person who will never comply with this! check in with an officer if you remember! if not, no biggie, the system is so overloaded that no one will notice or come looking for you.”

and so a few days later, burke is back on the streets waving sticks at cops in front of a police station. burke is a big guy, a dangerous guy. i used to be a fighter (muay thai) and i know the build.

so the cops scoop him up, take him to the psych ward, and they plop him back on the street in an hour? did they even assess him?

just what is going on here?

it’s suicidal empathy: the consistent and overt identification with people who are attacking you and the desperate inversion of making them out to be “the victim here” while somehow casting your own victimization as “privilege.”

it’s a whole set of nested hallucinations and dogma that have been oft discussed, but i think all these things reside inside a profound perceptive disconnect that people are missing and that’s one of the basic idea of punishment and justice.

this is entirely avoidable. “the system is so jammed we cannot handle the load!” yeah, that’s because instead of taking the small number of people who committ nearly ALL crimes off the street, you keep releasing them

how many court days did this fine fellow clog up?

the data is so stark that one must be willful to ignore it

i wrote a whole piece on 3 strikes and you need to be out HERE.

want some really provocative data? if you want to protect black men, elect a republican prosecutor. 6.6% drop in all cause mortality, mostly from lower gun deaths. (source)

that’s a staggering number, an outlandish reduction in human carnage.

but tell me again about your empathy.

this whole “we need to let people rob and rape and plunder because ‘demoralized by structural ism’” thing we have going on is desperately harmful to literally everyone. we all get dragged down by it and even the alleged empathy beneficiaries wind up dying in droves.

this whole set of beliefs and the policy emergent therefrom is as ghastly as it is deluded.

and it needs to end.

suicidal empathy is exactly what it sounds like.

stop pretending it isn’t.

for that which is lost may be found

Read more

Read more

why?

because it dignifies this nonsense with more engagement than it deserves and my suspicion is this blows over pretty quickly.

hantavirus is generally not that dangerous in any sort of scalable sense. once you handle the rodents, it spreads poorly, the mortality rates look significantly inflated because the kinds of places it occurs tend to be poor and lacking in many forms of modern medicine.

this is just groundhog day played as public health farce.

i know history is supposed to rhyme and all, but this just looks like plagiarism.

you seriously cannot make this stuff up.

from the looks of things, this is just the same unserious people pushing the same unserious ideas because it’s good politics in the CDC power struggle, because the WHO is out of money, and because moderna has been working on another fake vaccine for a problem no one has and maybe some insiders are gunning for marty at FDA.

they do this in hopes that we forgot about their made up ideas on distancing and supermarket floor stickers and decide to fund them again and let them terrorize us into another mr toad’s wild ride with our lives and livelihoods.

hantavirus is not novel. this disease has 10’s of thousands of cases a year worldwide, it’s not some wildly new new thing.

they just want a hobgoblin.

it’s just more of this:

so that people like this:

can try restore the funding they used to do so much harm back in 2020.

it’s fun watching tedros try to use hanta as a reason the US needs to rejoin the corrupt health circus DBA “the WHO” but the reality is that it’s a stark reminder of why we left.

either he has no idea that this disease lacks pandemic potential and is therefore incompetent or he does know and does not care because he assumes you don’t in which case he’s deceptive and manipulative.

which one makes you want to plunk down some membership money and surrender your sovereignty?

they’d love a super-spreader, but this is not a good candidate. there’s just not enough contagion. hantavirus does not transmit human to human, it’s zoonotic. you get it from rodents. (well, mostly rodent excrement)

the one exception is the ANDV (andes) strain which is what broke out on the MV hondius and everyone is getting the vapors over this, but even that strain has an R0 under 1, so it rapidly sputters out. in the entire history of andes hantavirus, there have been roughly 3,000 total cases and fewer than 300 confirmed instances of human-to-human transmission. the window for person-to-person transmission appears to be extremely short and you need significant direct contact. comparing that to an aerosol pathogen is ridiculous, not that it stops the harangues of health hobbits.

primary spread vector for ANDV is the long tailed pygmy rice rat (oligoryzomys longicaudatus). to stop outbreaks, you generally need an exterminator, not an epidemiologist.

it’s doubtful that what happened on the ship was predominantly human to human transmission (or perhaps human to human at all i don’t know that it’s been documented yet) and to the extent that it was, it’s an outlier and i’d be very interested to see the “sexual contact” data.

this is the most likely explanation:

so before we get carried away here and start acting rashly

let’s let cooler heads (like longtime gatopal™ jay) prevail.

"my message to the american people is please don't worry."

we’ve come a long way and far too many have seen where roads like this can lead:

and we’ve learned how to deal with those who try to take us down them

there has not been a dangerous global pandemic that was not made so by human over and misreaction in the last 150 years.

it’s just not a thing in modern civilization.

just keep calm and carry on.

we don’t need a vaccine for hantavirus, we need one for manipulative public health agents.

it’s like watching the pigs from "animal farm” get cast as newscasters for the hunger games.

go ahead, tell me that i’m wrong.

colbert tells us about how his kids think he is not far left enough.

BO wants a “loyal opposition” that “believes in the rule of law and judicial independence.”

this is rich fare from the guy whose movement broke DC and turned it into the rancorous gang war of partisan horror it has become. before obama, this is literally how DC worked. donkeys and elephants, both far from perfect, at least talked. they played politics and argued on the hill then their staffers all went to the same bars and got drunk. the cross dated by party. a tip o’neilian could pal around with a reaganite. no one was calling one another evil. this was true under bush, clinton, and shrub. the staffers and parties had bonds, back channels, saw one another as humans. they could hash out “what do you really need here?” and get stuff done in collegial and collaborative fashion.

obambi literally destroyed that. the whole place went “crips and bloods” because his people would not speak to republicans. they burned the bridges and now demand that the other side rebuild them. it’s projection and provocation hidden in a slick package of pretend professorialism to hide just how radical he is and always was.

the pattern is familiar:

they play at lawfare then accuse you of not supporting the system they subvert to attack you.

the hijacking of science is declared “the science™” and settled and gets called normal and opposing it called “assault.”

it all boils down to “any opinion but ours makes you evil and a danger to democracy” and the fix for it is always more collectivist authoritarianism, gay race communism, and the ceding of control and privilege to us so we can rule you for your own good (and steal ourselves rich).

note that he never seems to mention “democrats as loyal opposition.” that strikes me as telling: they cannot imagine a world in which they are not in power. if they win, you need to play the loyal oppo, but if you win, watch how disloyal they get to the system and how “disobedience” becomes a virtue. there is a name for that, but “respecting the republic” ain’t it.

i feel sort of stupid. for ages i’ve been puzzling with something and trying to figure it out: from soros to BO to biden to hil-dog and the WEF, the UN, IPCC, WHO, from groovy gavin to horrible hochul, these people seem like wreckers. they are bent on undermining and destroying systems that work from the electorate to elections to the economy, property rights, taxes, energy, public health, public services, the social contract, and the public purse.

you can see the flight from their cities and states, the damage done, and the virtue claimed for it. they stand proudly in front of 17 time felons who just killed again and tell you it’s simply unjust to keep them in prison. they swear no illegal gets welfare and medicaid, then pay to teach border jumpers to steal it. it’s so obviously, ostentatiously, dystopia wept wrong. and these people are not stupid. they must understand, must be able to think in second and third order systems. so what gives?

and i finally think i get it and it’s so fricking simple and so large and nose on your face obvious that i’ve been staring right at it and not quite seeing it:

they are deliberately wrecking things. the wreckage is not a bug, it’s the feature. they want to destroy the high function systems of the west because they want to rule the west in authoritarian fashion. that’s the only goal. and successful systems cannot be so ruled. they resist. they do not want or need such rulers. things are good. people want good things to continue. they are optimistic and replete.

so you need to create a problem for which the only answer is dictatorship and then get people to give such power to you out of desperation.

you need them poor, hungry, hurting, angry, unsafe, threatened, and envious of anyone better off.

you need to break their belief in a better future because people who believe in better futures do not accede republics to dictators.

so you must not only create problems that make life unpleasant, you must undermine belief that individuals can solve these problems for themselves. if you can do that, then all you need is an external enemy to unify them against and voila, you’ve got control and people will thank you for it.

(at least for a minute until they glean your true nature by which time it’s too late.)

this is a task tailor made for marxism and even that augustly awful institution can be further bespoked to suit the times. this is the specific and explicit goal of “gay race communism” the divisive DEI doggerel that BO brought to prominence back when it could still be masked behind exclamations of “stunning and brave.”

you tell people: you are downtrodden, held down by an upperclass. they do this not just because they are an upper class (this one was tried and failed) but because they hate you and discriminate against you because of your race or creed or sexual identity. you are the victim of “structual ism” and your failures are not your fault. this was done to you.

the flipside of “done to you” is the embedded perception that the game is not fair and that you cannot succeed in such a rigged contest. you need the state to put things right. you are dependent. that’s the back edge of the grievance blade and it’s bonecutter sharp.

then you just keep making the world get worse, less fair, more oppressive, less safe, stifle opportunity, and promote pessimism regarding the idea that people can, through merit and labor, elevate themselves.

you cannot lift yourself, we must lift you. see how it gets worse? they did this to you. “let’s get them!”

it makes violence and thievery look like self defense. it makes building a business that people like to buy products from because they offer low prices for high quality look like oppression. “damn that bezos, how dare he have cat food delivered to your home for less than you would pay at the store! oppressor!”

those who seek to lead this parade are always rich and connected, the henchpeople and children of vast privilege and prerogative.

marx and engels were children of success. marx’s father was a lawyer back when such careers were rare. marx never amounted to much. classic over educated failure to launch. engels was the son of literal industrialists who ran textile mills. he was retired at 49 with enough of a nest egg to support itinerant communists.

it’s always like this.

if you think about it, it’s no surprise that the metastatic form of limousine liberalism is always marxism and that as such, this is predominantly a disease of the upper classes and not the workers.

it’s simple psychology:

marxism is the modal outcome of the super privileged who hate their dad.

to subscribe requires both the wealth to hold outlandishly expensive luxury beliefs and a simmering resentment against the fact that your useless life depends upon the largesse of your parents.

and this cartier communism group has both in spades.

you produce little and demand much. what other system provides a justification to lay claim to that as justice?

you crave the station into which you were born, but lack the talent and application to earn it for yourself so you go for “next best thing” which is “demanding to be given power and privilege for your ideology instead of your accomplishments.”

marxism is the opiate of the shiftlessly entitled.

it’s just the rich children of VC’s who cribbed a bad business plan demanding to be rewarded as though they had built a thriving business.

how seductive that must be for those who seek to have the kind of success and authority of their parents but know that, in a free market, they never could. it collects those who cannot do but badly want.

and they all go political.

and this is where the current, increasingly overt, marxist/communist/collectivist movement comes from.

at the top you have the power hungry. they need a song and dance to make the taking of power look justified and laudable.

under them, you have the connected and the flailure scions of wealth and privilege brined in years of midwit over-education in academia and simmering in daddy hate because they know they cannot measure up. (people will say “oh yeah, how is that not projection?” but let me ask you: how many of these marxists have you met who are actually good at anything other than politics? where are their businesses, their careers? what did they build? ill wait…)

and under them, you have the populace that they need for support, the victims of the wrecker games played against them who mistake the hand of the abuser for the hand of the helper. they are the ones who get lied to and who wind up getting their faces eaten by the leopards eating people’s faces party who swore to them “but not your face, comrade! solidarity!”

and the path to infection is breaking everything so that certain someones can be kings, queens, and non-gendered suzerains of the ashes.

the praxis is to make circumstances so intolerable that dictatorship becomes the only path out of it.

this is why every sufficiently advanced communist insurrection/long march eventually comes to a violent fork:

you get a violent communist/collectivist takeover or you get a violent populist fascist movement that rises to put the communists down and clean up the mess they made. you get lenin or bukele, mao or pinochet.

and until you do, they just keep making it worse until they can bring it to a head.

that’s where we are right now.

this is the wrestling match for the controls to try to regain altitude and societal trust and function from the folks who want to crash the plane and become rulers of the crash site.

people ask “how can you stay optimistic in the face of all this?”

it’s a good question.

i’ll offer a sort of pascat’s wager in response:

“consider the alternative.”

you blackpill and say “it’s so over.” you succumb to pessimism.

you have basically admitted that we’re going to keep getting worse until one form of authoritarian or another has to take over.

how is that not conceding the game?

your only choices are frying pan or fire.

unless you’re ready to step up and say “it’s time for our king to grab the crown and kill the followers of the pretender” to concede such is cowardice and fakery. it’s just an excuse to do nothing while things get worse and the self-fulfillment of the “things are going to get worse” prophecy.

where are the odds and where is the future in that?

if you want better, believe better.

embrace the audacity and promise of optimism.

remember who you are and what you are capable of.

LFG.

you never know quite what to expect from an atlantic headline like this one. have they finally figured it out? will this be some new absurdist take?

well…

so here we go. i must confess, i found myself nodding along to the first paragraph.

this is actually good stuff with which i find ready agreement.

rules are not for following just because they are rules. that’s the ethos of the slave and the simp. the ability to be ungovernable and to manifest ungovernability is the essence of the free human and the sort of society where people yell at you for jaywalking across an empty street is indeed a stupid and a flabby place.

and this sort of flabbiness carries massive risks. i would never have believed that the world would go so quietly into lockdown sacrificing businesses and economic function, breaking education and society, leaving loved ones to die alone of despair. but it happened. and that’s some very dangerous failure.

we need to do better.

but the direction in which the hosted guests rapidly took this struck me as absurd and meaningfully bereft of the morality of actual ungovernability standing rather as its antithesis.

this is not civil disobedience, it’s self-centered rights violations - i have concocted grievances about you and as such i get to take your things.

worse, it conflates voluntary association with tyranny (if you don’t like whole foods, don’t shop there, don’t work there) but do you seriously want to live in a world where property rights are all qualified by “unless someone doesn’t like you?”

i wonder how piker would respond to his own car being stolen because “it seems fine to steal from people who approve of and steal from others, they have explicitly placed themselves outside the social contract.” that actually seems a coherent and defensible view: the thief has failed to be bound by the contract and therefore has forfeit its protection and stands outlaw. the state of nature pertains.

but folks like this are never like that. they’re the first to howl if someone snakes their oatmilk matcha latte off the barista bar and absconds squawking “mine! robber!”

to his credit (and my amusement, he writes well) graeme wood, the atlantic author, is having none of this and lampoons the ralph lauren radicals and their entitlement to organic avocado toast heists.

he lands in a useful place:

“Fretting over trivia such as using a plastic cup, then treating weighty matters such as murder with the same gravity, may be a source of the moral vertigo.”

and this is something i’d like to expand upon as both a sign of the creeping and unpleasant totalitarian practice of “politicizing everything” that has become so stiflingly pervasive in recent decades and of the utter collapse of the sense of proportion and scale that has accompanied it, both carried and catalyzed by the dogmatic doctrines of post modern conversion into “woke” by the addition to the philosophe’s deconstrutionist parlor game the idea of the non-interrogable salient, that which may not be questioned.

this made everything political, and the core beliefs that underpinned the politics into sacrosanct sentiments that you got canceled for doubting. it ran riot in the self refuting fields of moral relativism where the absurdity of “all moral systems are subjective and therefore equal” not only ignored the obvious refutation of “well, my moral system says they are not equal, is that not equal to yours?” but allowed the kinds of people who posit a right to purloin avo-toast because “we think whole foods is bad” to generate what wood fetchingly calls “moral vertigo” by conflating all manner of false equivalences.

if you are the sort of person whose identity is rooted in political belief instead of some core self (a person who is their ideas rather than a person who has ideas) this is heady stuff. you get to wield your identity like a mace and no one is allowed to strike you back.

and i think, if we’re going to look back through the last 20 years and ask: where did all this newfound taste for political violence and rights violation rise? i think we will find it precisely there.

it started the moment people were told that their politics were their identities and that the core tenets of those politics were not open to debate and that any who try are bad people, immoral, unenlightened, stupid, and increasingly, evil.

that last one, evil, is the kicker because it grants license to suspend empathy and morality. as soon as you say “literally worse than hitler” you are putting them outside a moral contract and making them look like the aggressor.

it’s hatred cast as self-defense.

and if you are willing to append that epithet to pretty much anyone who disagrees with you, you’re basically at war with anyone not within your own utterly homogenous echo chamber and think that you are the good guy for doing so. quite the ironic outcome for the puprortedly peaceful pluralist…

this goes bad and violent because those whose identity is rooted in their politics experience political disagreement as personal attack because the self and the political are not separated.

this allows a really simple hop to the most dangerous of false equivalences:

speech is violence; violence is speech.

specifically, your speech against me is violence, but my violence toward you is speech.

it’s the perfect way to frame “disagreeing with me is violence” and it renders the free speech of others apparent tyranny to those who succumb to this frame.

quite literally, every time you say something that i find disagreeable, i feel “threatened” and demand “safe spaces” from your “violence.” you are evil and immoral and i percieve your very existence and expression as assault and grievance. simply denying me constitutes attack.

there is no way to share a social contract with such a person. they demand a right not to be offended that cannot exist with a speech right, so your speech right must be curtailed. and if you don’t, then they feel entitled to use physical violence against you and claim “self defense” because your words and their fists are seen as the same and “you fricking started it.”

and if that is not authoritarian and totalitarian, then i don’t know what is.

it’s the deliberate and cultivated place where talking stops and violence starts.

it’s a trap where speech of others is seen as violence if it runs counter to your views and where the people who believe this mantra are inculcated into views so bizarre that most people are going to disagree with them.

an unsustainable and externally validated identity is convinced that anyone who tries to stabilize it is attacking it.

that’s actual murderbot insanity.

at that point, you’ve basically socked the monster to life and sent it tottering down to destroy the village.

none of this is complicated, but the insidiousness of the trap is noteworthy. these people are losing their minds because they feel beset by enemies because anyone not just like them is (obviously) an enemy.

and if you try to tell them, it just proves them right.

it’s like an insane asylum inside of a kafka trap.

getting through the last of this deprogramming is going to be some interesting times…

larry summers, one of the most connected and powerful democratic operators in the US and globally was hounded from his post as president of harvard over a “scandal” that was, in fact, not even a peccadillo. he simply spoke a simple, direct scientific truth at a symposium at which he was asked to do so and a bunch of the attendees got the vapors and went off on diatribes about misogyny because they had mistaken being scandalized for scandal and their own personal emotions for facts.

adding to the fun, my understanding is that he had, quite literally, been asked to “pick a provocative topic.”

i mean, i have no love for this guy and i disagree with him about an awful lot of things, but fair play to larry: he was in the right here and despite the little frisson of joy one gets from watching arsonists get set ablaze by their peers, it’s difficult not to feel bad for the guy. the whole thing was really quite instructive from a “leopards eating people’s faces party” sort of standpoint.

they really hung him out to dry.

when one looks closely and considers for a moment, the whole affair is actually one of the more ironic self indictments of the idea of science imaginable. no debate, no data, no refutation, just cancellation, censorship, and calumny. these are not the acts of galileo, they are the actions of a clerisy, exactly what science is not supposed to be. they really set some credibility on fire here. if one sought to set back the reputation of women in STEM, this would be difficult to improve upon.

helen expounds:

the real crime committed by summers was not “being wrong,” or even being biased. he wasn’t. it was betrayal which is why they turned on him with the special rancor that cults save only for the apostate.

perhaps another way to frame this “crime” is as grand theft narrative because the facts he presented did not lead to the answer the doctrine required and thus could not be allowed to be said. those in power do no censor you for being wrong, they censor you for being dangerous to their position.

one may not speak science to “the science™.”

first off, what did larry say? he said something very simple: men have greater variability in the expression of traits than women do. this is, in rather on the nose fashion, is referred to as the GMVH (greater male variability hypothesis) and it’s nothing even remotely controversial. you see it in height, weight (including birth weight), time preference, risk taking, running speed, aggression, and yes, intelligence.

there is nothing magic about this, it’s just math.

men are heterogametic, they have an X and a Y chromosome. women are monogametic (2 X’s). this means that men express all their X chromosomes fully and women randomly turn one off in each cell (mosaicism) and therefore on a systemic basis get an average expression of both X’s so, to the extent a trait is affected by X chromosomal material (and many are, the Y is kind of skimpy), men are rolling one die and women are rolling two and averaging. as a result, their traits converge more to the middle. again, it’s just math. probabilistic phenotypic expression does not care about feelings or doctrine.

this same pattern shows up in pretty much all mammals (leaving aside corner cases like monotremes).

what this means is that you get a graph like this.

and most studies show a variance of 1.1-1.25 in standard deviation of IQ/G.

in the middle of the curve range, there are a lot more women. the cutover is somewhere between 107-114 and 86-93 depending on who you ask, but somewhere in there, the frequency numbers are equivalent and outside them there are more men than women. this increases the further out the tails one travels.

hedges & nowell studied this in great detail and found that in the upper 5%, men outnumbered women 2.5:1. in the top 0.1%, it’s over 6:1 and in the very top of male slanted skills like math it’s over 7:1. and those are the kinds of folks that wind up teaching science at harvard so seeing s 6-7:1 slant in faculty gender would likely be a sign of true gender blindness. it could be even higher if the effects of ability are further magnified by variation in interest/preference. (i have not looked at that data and so have no real view on how large an effect it might or might not be)

of course, this issue has another tail: men are also vastly over-represented in the ranks of the deeply stupid by about the same rates (i think it may be a little lower just because having iq beneath certain levels is not always survivable, but am not sure) but it certainly manifests itself in prison populations. men outnumber women there about 14:1 far exceeding the 5:1 ratio by which men outnumber women in physics faculty positions.

being a guy is just more of a crapshoot in just about every way. we’re more likely to be millionaires, to be destitute, to be tall, short, to teach physics, to go to prison. we’re also less likely to have children but those who do tend to have more than women do. it’s just always been like that and each of these things is just a fact, backed by large amounts of observation and well understood and plausible functional pathways.

there are still very smart women who are good at math and physics, they are just less common and male and female intelligences manifest differently. women tend to score higher on verbal than men and men do better on math. everybody always wants to make this about “better” or “worse” but it’s not, it’s just different and different is good. men and women faced different evolutionary pressures and men evolved to be good at being men and women to be good at being women and we need both.

we are not the same and likely never will be and that’s not only fine, it’s vital.

and up until about 5 minutes ago, this was one of the least controversial ideas around.

so why aren’t we allowed to say this out loud?

we’re not allowed to say it because it’s true but that truth is inconvenient to a dogma that has become systematically important:

that there are no differences in traits or capability between genders or races and that it’s all one equal tabula rasa waiting for the correct nurture and socialization to put us on one identical level.

the level of special pleading that gets baked into this idea pushes well over the line into magical thinking. no one would accept this line of reasoning in other traits. sure, you can train to run, but you will never be usain bolt: you lack the genes, the femur length, the height, the fast twitch muscle density, the hip geometry. nothing can make you sprint 100 meters like he does. practice may help, but if you were not born with the goods, training alone cannot cut it. we know this about every other trait and then act like intelligence and disposition are somehow the exception. but they aren’t. ask a breeder of dogs or horses.

but the falsity “it’s all socialization and nurture” is the underpinning to regimes of seized privilege. it’s used to invert the interpretation of systemic outcomes by presuming that the wrong variables in the equations are fixed. this is used to support the great false premise of DEI and affirmative action:

if we’re all born with equal potential, then any variance in outcome is proof of discrimination.

and why are we so determined to believe this? because that belief allows us to intervene and claim justification for demanding preferencing and for accusing others of privilege and prejudice. because it means that if we don’t win, it’s your fault.

that’s it. it’s really that simple.

it’s been wielded like a mace through social science, hard science, systems, and institutions. IQ tests must be racist because some groups score low. no. the tests were great, it’s just the group variance is real. but they still get effectively all but banned as job assessments. SAT? same. they get nerfed and broken so that now they have a massive leveling bias in the center.

nothing about this is real or objective, it’s literally whole sets of “scientists” warping the lenses of their telescopes so they can pretend that the sun revolves around the earth. doesn’t align with the model? your data measurement must be broken.

it has nothing to do with fairness or accuracy and never did. it’s all about “give me stuff” and “i want to win.”

it cannot sustain consistency because it never made any sense.

the exact same people who say “there are not enough women in orchestras, auditions need to be blind” then call blind auditions racist when they do not like the outcome.

this went on for so long because this orthodoxy got its hooks into the universities, the journals, the science bodies, corporations, all of it. there was a deep need for this to be so and the more people who got jobs and power and prestige as a result, the more entrenched and institutionalized that need became.

even the supreme court weighed in.

they all but banned using IQ tests for hiring not because the tests were not good indicators of ability or likelihood of success but because they were and this led to less hiring of certain subgroups. sure some companies were likely racist, perhaps duke power was, i don’t know, but they made the idea general: they called the tests themselves racist and biased.

but they weren’t, they were accurately measuring a fact that team tabula rase did not like: that there are large and durable divergences in intelligence and aptitude between groups. if the core tenet of your belief set is that “this cannot be so” or that “if it is so, it’s because they were not afforded equal opportunity and are owed redress and will rise to the level of others given the chance” then all you can do is blame the test (or the society) and then use either one to demand preferencing.

the griggs v duke power case quite literally made it illegal ot use aptitude/intelligence tests as the controlling screen for employment if they had a “disparate impact” on “protected groups.” it was a classic travesty of the burger court, fully embracing and institutionalizing the idea that you could not use intelligence tests if :

• they disproportionately exclude a protected group, and

• the employer cannot show that the tests are meaningfully related to specific job performance

that second standard is basically impossible. you’d need to do it for each job and have no control group from which to draw comparison (as you did not hire the failures). this was structured to make compliance impossible.

duke power may well have been acting in discriminatory fashion, but the tests applied were the wonderlic personnel test (used by the NFL until 2022 as part of the combine) and the bennet mechanical comprehension test. neither was controversial until the court made them so.

(not that the army still uses whole batteries of similar tests to exclude and sort candidates. they know full well it works and is vital and carved out an exception for the ASVAB as “vital to a well fucntioning military.” huh.)

the point was to move a standard from “disparate treatment” to “disparate outcome” because treating everyone the same was not getting the outcome that the social planners desired.

“not getting what i want” became proof of “you have acted badly. blind auditions are not to be allowed.

there has been a lot of rollback.

the democratization of science in places like X and substack in the great breaking free of the 2020-2 period is difficult to overstate. the once rag tag mobs of dissident academics and anthropomorphic animals of questionable goodness actually fricking won. “trust the experts” is over. change is coming. even peak clownworld yale is walking it back.

but it’s going to take some doing and there will be great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments along the way.

this road will be bumpy for a very simple reason:

these groups that have grown accustomed to preference and privilege will revert to what they know: that if they do not get everything they want it must be discrimination.

they will outright champion it without a trace of irony.

they will project their prejudices onto you.

they will sort and assort people not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin and the nature of their gametes.

and they are going to lose on this one. the science, the evidence and the society is simply not on their side. people have had enough, and the femtosecond it became OK to speak these things the idea that disparate impact = discrimination started to fall apart. goodness what terrible discriminators those kenyans must be in the NYC marathon…

this arguemnt was never defensible, they won it not by marshalling evidence but by proscribing and canceling dissent.

they did not debate, they shouted down.

but the bully pulpit has been deconstructed.

summers could 100% give his talk today.

and that my friends is progreess.

things are getting better.

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because in this world, you need to step up

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