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Michael Jensen claims that old article says the opposite of what it says.

There is an error in this piece that is very fundamental.

"Trump’s most toxic line about Biden is

Joe Biden’s mind is gone, and his Communist Deep State goons are driving America off a cliff.

This statement is literally incoherent.“Communism”, spelled with a capital C, refers to an era of historical evolution in the work of Marx and Engels where the state “withers away” without any system of organised repression over the people. Communism, however unrealistic it may be, precludes the possibility of “Deep State goons” with hidden machinations."

The article that Jensen is citing for the "withers away" quote says the exact opposite of what he claims that it says. It says that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were not anarchists and envisioned that there would be a state in Communist society. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2128862 So the state would not "wither away" under communism.

The article by Richard Adamiak is from 1970. So it could be outdated. But nevertheless, it is evidence against Jensen's claim that the state withers away under communism, not evidence for it.

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Kim Elsesser is wrong about sexual assault statistics.

The problem is in this paragraph:

“Although some think that restorative justice lets perpetrators off too easily, statistics suggest that the criminal justice system lets the large majority of assailants off without any repercussions at all. Statistics from RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) indicate that out of every 1000 sexual assaults a staggering 995 perpetrators go unpunished. Most of the cases don’t get reported, and only 230 out of 1,000 are reported to police, 46 of these reports lead to arrest, 9 get referred to prosecutors, 5 cases will lead to a felony conviction, and only 4.6 out of 1000 rapists will be incarcerated. By contrast, 20 in 1000 robberies result in incarceration.”

If you actually go to that wep page by RAINN that she is citing, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system  it says that 25 out of every 1000 sexual assault perpetrators goes to prison. So, the rate is higher for sexual assault than it is for robbery, not lower, like she thinks.

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A brief thought on patriarchy as a problem for men.

I can see the argument for patriarchy hurting men: Patriarchy defined as a system that privileges the masculine over the feminine. Patriarchy leads to the belief that men should be the only ones who participate in the public economy, i.e. the only ones who hold paid jobs. (Sage encyclopedia on gender: Patriarchy, 2017 edition). Men being the only ones in the work place during the industrial revolution leads to managers discouraging men from showing emotion, because they believe that it harms productivity. But not women. https://aeon.co/essays/whatever-happened-to-the-noble-art-of-the-manly-weep. So then, men being conditioned not to cry or otherwise show emotion leads to men’s mental health problems. https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-be-a-man-who-has-inner-strength-and-emotional-resilience Only that argument doesn’t entirely work. Women now outnumber men on non-farm civilian payrolls in the U.S. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/10/795293539/women-now-outnumber-men-on-u-s-payrolls So why didn’t women get discouraged from crying as they entered the work-force?

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Response to “How to Be a Man” by Andrew Reiner

My response to this piece on Psyche ended up being too long for their comment section. So I am putting it here.

On a personal level, I think that this must be aimed at men who are in a different place than me emotionally. I have a disability, delayed phase sleep syndrome, which leads to me being socially isolated from everyone except my immediate family most of the time, and we have a strained relationship due to various disagreements about the state of the world, like the 2020 election and the COVID-19 vaccine. Plus I have a long held feeling of inferiority towards women. So I can’t shake the conviction that there is no good way to be a man and that the people who think otherwise are just fooling themselves. For example, the part about helping other men just makes me think “I can’t help anyone. I can’t even help myself get a job that I like, make friends, or get a romantic or sexual partner, or lose weight.” Maybe those are things that therapy can fix. But I am in therapy now and it hasn’t fixed them yet. I can’t see me discussing whether there are any aspects of masculinity preserving or not with my male friends, or anyone else, because I am always scared that the answer will be that there is nothing worth preserving because there isn’t anything good about men, because we shouldn’t even exist, or that we should be subordinate to women. This is a tangent, but I hate the way the term “authentic” is used in this piece. That term should only ever be used in contradistinction to “counterfeit.”

As an advice piece, this article fails, because the ends aimed at are vague and mysterious. It fails to ask and answer: How will I know if the advice worked or not after I have followed it? How will I know that I have done it right?

It talks about how men need to learn to provide each other with emotional support as opposed to prescriptive advice and solutions. I think that they meant to say that its ok to give each other prescriptive advice and solutions, but that we should also be emotionally intimate with each other, because this piece is itself a man giving prescriptive advice and solutions to other men. If it is not explicit that prescriptive advice and solutions are still ok for men, then this piece comes across as hypocritical.  

“On the journey to rethinking masculinity, there are going to be some old-school masculine traits you might feel strongly about keeping. For instance, some men are naturally less talkative, especially with regard to our emotions, while others really love competing aggressively. There’s nothing wrong with these traits – as long as we are open to rethinking and tweaking them so that they still point us down the path to greater empathy, compassion and emotional resiliency. So, if you’re more introverted, you still want to make an effort to open up about your emotions when the occasion calls for it.” In this self-same paragraph, this piece argues that being introverted isn’t intrinsically bad, but that introverts should still be less introverted. This is self-contradictory and incoherent.

As a sociological account of modern men, it is lacking because it locates the source of men’s problems in certain beliefs, norms, values, and patterns of behavior among men, as if those are the ultimate cause. To paraphrase the historian Barrington Moore Jr., cultural inertia is a fiction, norms are not self-sustaining, they are created a new with each generation, with every tool from bullying to bribery, to imprisonment, to the teaching of sociology. Moore only talks about norms that dominant groups maintain on purpose. But norms can be made to persist by social and biological realities themselves. For example, in his book “The Myth of Culture” the psychologist Nigel Barber argues that polygamy is a response to a shortage of men who have the economic resources to support a family, and the presence of parasites and other pathogens making it more important for women to mate with men who have genetic resistance to those pathogens. There isn’t any need for a villain preventing most men from being what women want in a husband for that to happen, all you need is for most women to be able to feed themselves and their children without male assistance. My point is that whether a norm or social practice is maintained on purpose by a group of people, or by the logic of the mating market, it is still caused by something else. For an example of the problem with the sort of explanation employed in this book, if boys are doing worse in school than girls because of how their fathers and other male role models treat them and act, then how did those fathers and other male role models get that way? Are they just stupid? Are they engaged in a conspiracy against future generations of men? Until these questions are answered, we do not have a working theory of this phenomenon. It mentioned the male role models in pop culture, but to use that to explain why men do worse than women in some ways, it would need to compare them to the female role models of pop culture. Otherwise, it can’t explain differences between male behavioral patterns and outcomes and female behavioral patterns and outcomes, because we don’t know how the women know to do anything different. What I am trying to say is, that who we are is the result of various causes outside of ourselves, just telling us to be different without acknowledging that, perpetuates a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans work, and amounts to victim blaming.

What is also missing from this piece, is that we have evidence of men being discriminated against. This mentions various public health problems that men have. Doctors provide men with less advice and service than they do women per-medical encounter. (Williams, David R. (May 2003). "The Health of Men: Structured Inequalities and Opportunities". Am J Public Health. 93 (5): 724–731. doi:10.2105/ajph.93.5.724. PMC 1447828. PMID 12721133.) Just telling people to take better care of themselves as individuals and explaining their health problems as problems of habit and norms without mentioning discrimination against them by health professionals, when it exists, helps to hide that discrimination, and legitimize it, and again, amounts to victim blaming.

 This piece cited this study: (Potts, M. K., Burnam, M. A., & Wells, K. B. (1991). Gender differences in depression detection: A comparison of clinician diagnosis and standardized assessment. Psychological Assessment: A Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 3(4), 609–615. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.3.4.609) As evidence that depression is underdiagnosed in men. But in the discussion section, the authors said that their definition of depression may be too stringent for medical and mental health practitioners, so disagreement between the operational definition of depression and clinician diagnosis doesn’t necessarily mean that the definition adopted by the scientists is right and the clinician’s diagnosis is wrong. So this study is not really firm evidence of diagnosis being under-diagnosed in men.

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Are all men created equal? It depends on what you mean.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the declaration of independence, he meant for the words “all men are created equal” to be read as “all groups of men have an equal right to self-government.” It was only later generations of Americans who decided that it meant that all men were equal, as individuals. https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/07/01/meaning-declaratnce-changed-time/  at the time that the declaration was published, people understood that the idea that all men were equal as individuals was patently false. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPbsVJ6fYIk&t=215s

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Yes, your genitals do in part define you.

I once read a psychologist on Psychology Today argue that people are not defined by their genitals. He was talking about Toxic Masculinity. But the problem is that he was dead wrong. Your genitals do in part define you. You might point to trans-women. But transwomen are marked out as post-op, pre-op, and non-op by their genitals. Your anatomy defines you as much as your religion, your education, your ethnic heritage, or anything else about you. Your intangible qualities are real. But so are you tangible qualities. The headline to this Aeon article says that your inner voice defines you. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-inner-voice?utm_source=pocket-newtab But it also goes on to describe how people can have more than one inner voice. So if that is the case, then which one defines you? More importantly, some people have internal monologues and some don’t. So what defines the people who have no internal voice? https://www.iflscience.com/brain/people-are-weirded-out-to-discover-that-some-people-dont-have-an-internal-monologue/

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How little philosophers matter

There is this philosopher by training but marketer by proffession named Josh Bachynski, who thinks that the problems that we now have came from Nietzche's attempts to destroy democracy by teaching the young people that there is no truth and that its all just culture. There is this rapper who calls himself Rucka Rucka Ali who thinks that our problems started earlier, with David Hume separating identity from objects, which inexorably leads to the denial of truth. I say that both of these men are wrong. They are both wrong because they think that philosophical ideas are what drive human behavior. But that isn't true. Taking a page from the Marxists, material conditions dictate consciousness, which in English, means that  our world creates our philosophies, not the other way around. And taking a page from Alec Ryrie , a historian of religion, people acquire the beliefs that matter intuitively and unconsciously. The philosophers are not leading humanity towards new frontiers. They are just tagging a long behind, explaining how things inevitably turn out however they turn out. My favorite example: governments were printing money like mad long before anyone had ever heard of MMT, because they could. An earlier example, governments were trying to relieve unemployment with public works projects years before Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. He didn't publish that until 2 years into FDR's 2nd term. And if wikipedia is telling the Truth, Herbert Hoover was doing that before FDR. Another example going in the opposite direction, you might think that people are becoming more atheistic since the end of the 2nd world war because they are learning more about the world. But that cannot be true. The case against God hasn't gotten stronger since then. It has gotten weaker since then. At the end of the 2nd world war, the scientists believed that the universe was eternal and the philosophers believed that any statement that could not be verified was meaningless. Those beliefs are both inimical to theism. But neither has stood the test of time.

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Is America really a failing state?

“In 2020, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worst possible ways. No other rich country has such a poor public health infrastructure or such a tattered social safety net. America’s levels of both police violence and violent crime find their closest peers in countries like Venezuela and South Africa, not Canada and Germany. And even Cuba and Bosnia and Herzegovina beat the world’s only superpower in infant mortality and other key social indicators.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/01/us-politics-state-government-democrats-left The poor public health infrastructure part isn’t true. Rich countries like Andorra are faring worse than the U.S. is on the COVID-19 infection rate. Great Britain has a higher COVID-19 death rate than the U.S. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

The tattered social safety net is false because the U.S. spends more money in its social safety net than Switzerland, Iceland, or Ireland, even if you adjust for the size of its economy. https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm The police violence and violent crime thing is false because Venezuala is in a league of its own when it comes to people killed by state security forces. The U.S. is closer to Germany or Canada than it is to venezula in terms of police violence just because Venezuala is so far ahead of everyone else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country The same is true of Homicide for Venezuala and rape for South Africa. We don’t have rape data for Venezuela. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/violent-crime-rates-by-country

So the U.S. still manages to be closer to Germany or Canada than it is to Venezuela or South Africa, because Venezuela and South Africa are so far ahead of anyone in the developed world when it comes to police violence and violent crime. The U.S. does have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba. But it has a lower one than Boznia and Hertzogovinia. https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortality-rate/country-comparison

So, if the U.S. is a failing state, then its not failing in the way that Bhaskar Sunkara thinks that it is.

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Turns out that a satire site has a bad take on the pandemic in the U.S.A.

So I read this article from the Onion, and this quote caught my eye for some reason "said Carpenter, adding that he had the vague idea that living in a social system based on brutal competition that made all human relationships transactional and perverted the very idea of community might have something to do with it." https://local.theonion.com/something-about-the-way-society-was-exposed-as-complete-1846251067 Its wrong on two levels, Its wrong because America would be better off if its economic system was more competitive, because market power in developed countries has been rising since the year 2000, which is having deleterious effects on output "THE RISE OF CORPORATE MARKET POWER AND ITS MACROECONOMIC EFFECTS. IMF 2019." Its also wrong because if you account for private social spending, the U.S. has the 2nd highest social spending in the world (https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm). So saying that the U.S. social system is based on brutal competition, is a very hard case to make. This next quote also got my attention. " which wasn’t mishandled as some people say but in fact shown to be rationally handled by a group of insulated wealthy individuals who can pursue their greedy desires with the full knowledge that a vast percentage of Americans are economically superfluous and thus willing to fight among themselves for scraps?" The pandemic being rationally handled from the perspective of the wealthy wouldn't lead to most people being prevented from working and shopping. It would have led to exactly the opposite. The wealthy make money from both of those things, and want for them to continue. Part of me feels like I shouldn't be putting this much thought into an article from the Onion. But the part of me that likes to I.Q. flex and dunk on leftists won out.

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Men, weeping, and the work-place.

I read this piece on Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/whatever-happened-to-the-noble-art-of-the-manly-weep

The relevant points are: 1. Men weeping used to be considered normal and desirable in most parts of the world. 2. Suppressing emotions is now known to be bad for your mental and physical health. 3. Men being expected not to cry only came about during the industrial revolution when men started working with strangers in large numbers for the 1st time. 4. Factory managers trained their workers to suppress emotions to boost productivity. 6. Office culture is less formal than it used to be. 7. So, men should cry at work for the sake of their well-being. 8. So, this should be encouraged through measures like “emotional Monday.”

The problem with this line of thinking, is that its treating the symptom (Crying is discouraged in office environments) and not the cause (Managers see it as detrimental to productivity). For this to work, you either need to make the case to managers that encouraging crying is in the best interest of their organization, or you need to pass laws forbidding managers from discouraging crying even when they believe it to be in the best interests of their organization, because in work environments, you can’t just choose to start doing things differently, if you are an employee, that right is reserved for Owners, CEOs, and independent contractors.

But there is another cause that is harder to address, this author pointed out that in the work-place, the typical person is surrounded by people whom they don’t know that well. People perceive the tears of people whom they don’t know that well as impositions. Plus, crying in front of people whom you don’t know might not lead to help, and crying and not being helped can actually make you worse. In other words, crying in a modern work-place is not the equivalent of crying in front of friends and loved ones, the environment where historically male crying was considered normal and positive. You can’t just pretend that emotional expressions hold the same meaning to people whom you have known your entire life that they do to people whom you met last year and only know in a work capacity.

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Joe Biden's "Buy American" plan, an assesment.

Raising federal R&D expenditure is a good idea. Public R&D expenditure positively correlates with economic growth. https://jois.eu/files/06_222_Irena%20Szarowska.pdf

But the other ideas not so much.

Even poor countries are automating their manufacturing jobs away. Bringing back manufacturing jobs in America, or anywhere else, is a pipe dream. https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/is_global_equality_the_enemy_of_national_equality.pdf

Plus, China buys more medical supplies from America than the other way around. Biden has fallen for his opponent's propaganda. https://reason.com/2020/07/11/trumps-trade-war-made-the-pandemic-worse-and-nationalism-will-slow-the-recovery/

Federal defense spending crowds out private spending. So the cost of the jobs that you create exceeds the compensation from those jobs. So directing Federal agencies to buy American, if it means anything, means that the crowding out happens on American soil rather than foreign soil. https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/december/government-spending-stimulate-economy

In other words, it would do the opposite of what Biden wants.

But most importantly, he is making the same mistake as Trump in believing that he can help the economy by directing demand towards high-cost domestic producers and away from low-cost foreign producers. We know that the way to help the economy is to allow those high-cost domestic producers to go out of business so that their assets can be employed by different organizations in more productive ends. https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/columns/a01_0286.html

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Zor mad!

Just started reading book 2 of The Immortal Hulk. It managed to piss me off right away. It was this exchange between The Hulk and this black lady about how the world indulges and rewards the anger of white college educated men like Bruce Banner, but it ignores the anger of black women is dismissed. The problem is that the entire point of the story of The Hulk is that people fear his anger, and want to kill and/or imprison him for it. When the Hulk points out that he got shot into space for his anger, the black lady's response is "Instead of just shot." But The Hulk was shot when he was first created. People try to kill him all the time. So it doesn't work in context of the story. It doesn't work in the real world either, because men get longer prison sentences than women and we execute more men than women. So when it comes to the gender angle they are pushing, the exact opposite is closer to the truth.

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Reaction to Joe Biden’s acceptance speech.

I watched Joe Biden’s acceptance speech on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmQr0WfSvo

I typed up a reply, and decided that it was good enough that it deserved a more permanent home than Youtube.

So here it is: 1:45 Its an election year. Its the most partisan moment of them all. 5:00 actually there are 8 countries who handled the virus worse than the U.S. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ 8:30 In percentage terms, China buys more medical supplies from the U.S. than the other way around. The story about America's overdependence on China for medical supplies is a fantasy. Its a fantasy that the Trump administration is spreading. https://reason.com/2020/07/11/trumps-trade-war-made-the-pandemic-worse-and-nationalism-will-slow-the-recovery/ Even poor countries are automating their factories. The age of manufacturing jobs is over. https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/is_global_equality_the_enemy_of_national_equality.pdf 13:21 There are students getting crushed by debt after they leave school. But its generally not the ones who graduate. https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/IB-ME-0616.pdf I hope that he has a plan for the people who didn't graduate. That would be nice. 14:00 The U.S. levies an average effective corporate tax rate of 24%. The average rate is 20% (calcualted in excell from OECD data). Higher corporate tax rates generally hurt economic growth. The U.S. tax code is one of the most progressive in the world. Progressive income taxes generally hurt economic growth. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/11/23/american-taxes-are-unusually-progressive-government-spending-is-not https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CTS_ETR (average calculated in excel). https://www.oecd.org/mena/competitiveness/41997578.pdf. However, the U.S. tax code is not that redistributive, because it just doesn't raise that much revenue. https://econofact.org/are-taxes-and-also-spending-progressive Inequality itself hurts economic growth. https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/inequality-hurts-economic-growth.htm. So making the tax code work for everyone is less about making the rich and corporations pay their fair share than it is just raising taxes generally to pay for more spending to make wealth distribution more equal. The country's seniors have not paid for social security, because no one has, not in full. We are missing 1% of GDP. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/2018/VI_F_infinite.html School shootings do happen. But they have been declining since the 1990s. The vast majority of gun violence that minors experience happens outside of school. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/gun-violence-children-actually-experience/582964/

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Correcting my review of ultra-office.

I wrote a review of Ultra Office for the Microsoft Store. Then I realized that what I wrote was completely wrong. It was the exact opposite of the truth.

I can’t find that review. So I cannot correct it.

So this post is me trying to redeem myself.

The interface is crisp and familiar. But that is mostly because of how similar it is to Microsoft Word. The problem is that it cannot cut and paste text from the web in the word processor application. I thought that it could and the problem was my mouse. But I tried cutting from the web and pasting into Notepad with that same mouse, and it worked fine. So, Ultra Office really is the problem. If you like to cut and paste things from the web, or need to because of your job, like me, then stay away from Ultra Office. If you don’t want to pay for Microsoft word, then just use Notepad. Windows comes with Notepad, and it allows you to cut and paste from the web into the text editor. The interface is bare bones and you need to manually end lines in your document by pressing enter. But that is way less work than manually typing everything from the web.

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Being in reality isn’t enough

I read somewhere that “Its not about winning. Its about being in reality.” Being in reality is necessary. But its not sufficient. You also need to take steps to move closer towards the reality that you desire and that you need. If you are not going to try to fulfill your wants and needs, then being in reality serves no purpose. Getting what you want and need is one of the things that we mean by “winning.”

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Do people really control their social and political identities?

I read a quote somewhere that “masculinity isn’t something that just happens to you. Its a social and political identity that you have total control over.” I don’t agree with that, because your political and social identity is to a certain extent always controlled by the people around you. That is why no one gets to identify as the King of France anymore. But it also just doesn’t mesh with my personal experience. I didn’t choose to be a man. I just am, just like I didn’t choose to be bisexual.

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gender differences in IPV victimization and self-report.

Its true that lifetime victimization reports show women being more likely to be victims of IPV. But past year reports generally show men having higher victimization rates. (Esteban Eugenio Esquivel-Santoveña.  Partner Abuse Worldwide DOI: 10.1891/1946-6560.4.1.e14). Past year reports are generally more reliable than life-time reports. (Hoff, B.H. (2012), "US National Survey: more men than women victims of intimate partner violence", Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 155-163. https://doi.org/10.1108/17596591211244166 Download as .RIS     ) Granted, there is evidence that women under-report their own victimization on surveys (Chan, KL. Gender Symmetry in the Self-Reporting of Intimate Partner Violence. Journal Of Interpersonal Violence, 2012, v. 27 n. 2, p. 263-286 http://hdl.handle.net/10722/134462) But there is also evidence that men under-report their own victimization on surveys. (Hines, Denise A. Douglass, Emily M. Women's use of Intimate Partner Violence against men. Prevelance, implications, and consequences Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 18:572–586, 2009  DOI: 10.1080/10926770903103099). So, its hard to argue that women are more likely to be victims of IPV than men if you just go by self-report.