Outrage fatigue II: And your little dog too

I have a great idea for a series of posts, if not a whole website.  Titled Goalposts, it would chronicle the continuum fallacies perpetrated by people I don’t like* who insist that since a bad thing (e.g. warrantless wiretapping) isn’t immediately a much worse thing (e.g. a Stasi-like police state), the first bad thing isn’t actually bad at all.  (“If it’s not the worst thing ever, it must be okay” is the continuum fallacy in play here.)  Then, when the much worse thing they dismissively toss out as an unthinkable absurdity actually happens, I dance my little I-told-you-so jig, post an amusing image macro, and record the new location of the unthinkable-absurdity much-worse-thing goalposts.  ”Banning trans fats isn’t an infringement of liberty!  All we’re doing is regulating a chemical that’s well-known to be toxic in humans.  Quit talking about Prohibition; it’s not like we’re banning large sodas or something asinine like that!”

Unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to document the process of the world going to hell in quite such real-time obsessive detail.  I’m slowly trying to build myself a beautiful bubble, and to my pleasant surprise I’m actually making progress and feeling more optimistic less carnassial as a result.  I’m unlikely to improve the state of the world by blogging about outrages or by chronicling the mendacities and idiocies of the politicians and parties for whom I might vote (or for that matter by voting) nearly as much as I might by doing my job well, being nice(r) to people, and maybe even writing some useful software on my own time.

I doubt very much that I’ll give up ranting about stupid shit entirely (I didn’t last time, and neither has Bryan Caplan), so at some point in the future you’ll probably see more vitriolic rantage.  But until I start feeling less like a pale shadow of Kafka and more like a pale shadow of Voltaire, politiblogging can make its dick like a Klein bottle and go fuck its own pisshole.

That doesn’t mean I’ma quit blogging altogether, though.  If nothing else you’re probably going to read a bit more about my continuing quest to get jacked.  Presently I’m trying to get lean as fuck, which is boring as hell so I want to do it in a hurry, and I’d really like to do it without losing appreciable amounts of strength.  Sound unlikely?  Yeah, me too, but so far I’ve tried a couple of Lyle McDonald’s diets (targeted ketogenic and Ultimate Diet 2.0) and seen some encouraging results.  I’ll probably write about those soon.  I’m also gearing up to give Kiefer’s Carb Backloading plan a try, which looks a hell of a lot like Cheat Mode on steroids (perhaps a poor choice of metaphor, that).

I’m also likely to keep ranting about stupid nutrition tricks.  On which note, PopSci recently(ish) debunked eight ridiculous nutrition myths which, like most ridiculous nutrition myths, were largely debunked by mid-century physical culturists (who in turn were largely written off as idiotic and dangerously unbalanced meatheads until the paleo movement rediscovered them within roughly the last decade).  You could just flip through my blog archives, I think I’ve covered all of these, but PopSci has new and different citations which is always cool.  Too bad they didn’t bring up breakfast.

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* I’m an equal-opportunity misanthrope, so this includes pretty much everyone

Quis custodiet etc.

I don’t have the energy to blog about the NSA’s data-harvesting the way I might once have, but that’s okay, because Mike Masnick, Mike Riggs, and some guy on Reddit have said everything I’d have said (and more).  While the third link is presently lodging itself deep in my midbrain to nourish my sense of nameless, protean dread for the next few months, my frontal lobe would like to point out that Masnick’s post is the most immediately concerning (and Riggs’s post is why we’re fucked).  For the next few decades, at least (although the Germans were probably saying the same thing in 1931), I’m less concerned about secret-police brownshirts rounding up political dissidents* than I am about individual shitbirds using the data for their own nefarious purposes.  (Some say this is already happening.)  Those of you who might protest that the NSA is “only” storing metadata might consider the mischief caused if a true-believer with the courage of s/h/its convictions extracted a list of the phone numbers of people who’d called Planned Parenthood clinics within the past few months.  Other examples might occur to you.

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* The “police rounding up dissidents” rant is a Drug War topic, and is ably covered elsewhere

Asking economists for career advice

I enjoyed this:

• How can you follow your passion if you don’t have a passion? (Marginal Revolution)

…though reading the first few comments made me wish I’d done something more pleasant with that ten seconds of my time, like set fire to my penis.

My claim: People who tell you to follow your passion aren’t giving you advice, they’re humblebragging.  Smile widely and roll your eyes a lot; passion-followers love that.  It’s a sign of respect in their culture.

PSA

Dear internet,

Please stop saying and writing “d-bag”.  It is trite, not benign.  You are calling someone a “douchebag”, which is inherently offensive (to them at least), and Bowdlerizing yourself isn’t going to tone it down.  All it does is make you look like a twee milquetoast pantywaisted grass-eater.  Knock it fucking off.

Love and Spydercos,
–Matt

Honest contempt, its hour come at last, slouches toward Pennsylvania to be born

By way of Andrew Sullivan we discover that the University of Pennsylvania Health System is gonna stop hiring smokers.  Ostensibly this is intended to reduce health-care costs, but as any fule no smokers tend to cost “the system” less over their lifetimes because their lifetimes tend to be rather short.  (I admit that it might be arrogant to expect a university’s health system making economic decisions to be current on health economics research, but fuck you, that’s how I roll.)

No, this escalation from nudge to shove — as with the attempted high-capacity assault soda ban in New York City — is simply an expression of contempt.  Smoking is a blue-collar working-class habit, and the clerisy in UPenn doesn’t want any of (shudder) them on its staff.  If you dig far enough down the Penn Medicine page, in fact, you’ll find this gem:

Faculty and staff who are employed by the University are not subject to this policy.

Uh huh.  A nurse smoking a Marlboro is filthy and irresponsible.  A prof smoking a Gauloise is culturally diverse.

Fear sells, but who’s buying?

Who’s the customer?

If the business is a media company, like (just for example) The New Republic (or whoever owns them this week), the customer is advertisers.  That means the product is you, dear reader, or more specifically the fifteen seconds of your attention that it takes to get a click-through.  ”North Korea’s threatening to nuke the West Coast?  My friend’s cousin’s grandmother lives in San Diego, that’s terrible!  Oooh, five foods I should never ever eat, I wonder what those are?”  And in recent “news”, TNR are at least honest enough about their “prey on your fears” strategy to write shit like this:

• Diet soda will kill us all!

That is, in fact, the real title.  I am shitting thee negative; click on through if you don’t believe me.  This is the introductory article in TNR‘s new series Threats, which they describe as an intermittent assessment of everyday risks.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention to the occasional OMGWTFBBQ washing across the bow of the internet for the past five years — or decades — you might recognize some of the article’s themes.  ”Artificial sweeteners cause cancer!  No wait, now they’re harmless!  Now they cause obesity!  Somehow!  My hovercraft is full of eels!”  Throw in a few to-be-sure debunkings of safely historical moral panics and vague semi-literate references to epidemiological studies (my favourite, as ever), and you end up with a thousand-odd words full of sound and fury, signifying only the ominously vague conclusion that “scientists” aren’t sure that aspartame and &c. aren’t bad for you.  After jacking up your cortisol and catecholamines with buzzword after terrifying buzzword — obesity!  Cancer!  Diabetes! — the author limp-dicks to an end with this flaccidity:

For now the rich and educated drink diet soda, figuring it helps more than it hurts, but artificial sweeteners may soon fall victim to another shift in sensibility. If that happens, it probably won’t be on account of new or better science. As far as we can tell right now, it doesn’t really matter whether you drink diet soda or not. The risks are insignificant—and so are the benefits.

Yup.  ”Threats”, the new assessment of shit that might maybe kill ya, ducked and weaved through an obstacle course of TERRIFYING SHIT to tell you – meh.  But I bet it got you to scroll past a banner ad!

Now, some of you are grumbling about the evils of advertising, for-profit journalism, “the capitalistic system”, and all that.  You’re about to hop down to the comment form to pollute my lovely blog with your earnest beliefs that if only we had a publicly-funded news media we’d be able to avoid all that grubbing about for filthy lucre and focus on the noble cause of delivering truth to the informed citizen.  Well, my friends, I gotcha covered.  Here’s the Public Broadcasting System delivering truth:

• Decision delayed on dangerous chemical found in drinking water

The “dangerous chemical” involved here is hexavalent chromium, which is indeed a nasty little fucker in sufficient concentration.  But, well… it turns out that PBS is only delivering truthiness, for as Ars Technica point out they’ve neglected to discover the basic toxicological axiom that the poison is in the dose:

• PBS’s follow-up to Erin Brockovich left key details out

Looks like someone has chronically elevated levels of the journalism majors, amirite?

Follow that link to the PBS website, and you’ll find plenty of banner ads… for other PBS shows.  So who’s the customer?  PBS is, of course, they’re the ones advertising at you.  In this case, though, your job isn’t to click on a banner ad or “take our short survey”, it’s to call your Congressshitbag and insist that, future generations and debt-service payments be damned, not one cent of the PBS budget should be cut!

Because if it weren’t for the media, who would scare you?  You might actually have to go watch a Rob Zombie movie, like a peasant.

How’s that diamond working out for you?

Ezra Klein, it would seem, is properly contrite for having led the country to a fucking useless war:

• Mistakes, excuses, and painful lessons from the Iraq War (Bloomberg)

So is Jonathan Chait, who carefully intellectualizes the errors in reasoning which led him to, well, you know the rest:

• Iraq: What I got wrong, and what I still believe (NY Mag)

What these people will tell you, if you will listen, is that they got a few details wrong for entirely understandable reasons and were misled by tragically ambiguous information.  So it goes, you know, they were just seeking the best for the country and for the international community, but – O alas! — they were led astray by the courage of their convictions!

Bitch, please.

It is precisely this technocratic impulse — that talking heads like Klein and Chait ought to be able to judge, with aloof sophistication, whether any aggressor is morally justified in bringing remote-controlled violence upon a distant country that happens to be governed by an unpleasant fellow who might have sponsored what Chait delicately evades into “an unconventional weapons program” — that fucked my generation squarely in the ass.  You delicate handkerchief-waving weepy cunts.  You sophisticated bicoastal elites send MY GODDAMN FRIENDS off to kill and die for no particular reason beyond “it is determined that something ought to be done about that Saddam fellow”.  Oh, and now TEN YEARS LATER you’ve decided that it’s FASHIONABLE to express contrition.  Bully the fuck for you.

But a year from now you won’t give a shit, because nobody except widows and orphans marks the eleventh anniversary of a war.  You cunts.  Do what’s right.  Here, let me help:

Get the hint?

See also: Heroes in Error (Jacob Bacharach), which is more eloquent and vastly more forgiving than I.

Update: And while we’re on the subject of “people who contributed to the murder of my friends whom I’d love to beat to death with a crowbar, but wouldn’t, even if I was Gordon Freeman and they were reincarnated as headcrabs… well, okay, maybe then” — the purportedly-undersized Bill Keller and the smirking fuck David Frum.  Laugh it off, you cancerous chuckleheads, it was a good cause wasn’t it.

Update 2: Let’s just look at what the emotionally brittle Mr. Frum wrote:

Like many Washingtonians, my wife and I had prepared an emergency kit in the basement: canned goods, bottled water, flashlights, batteries. We had an evacuation plan, a rendezvous point two hours outside the city, and a stipulated wait time after which she was to presume I was a casualty.

I live in Vancouver, you emo little fuck, that’s called “maybe we’re going to have an earthquake this decade”.

These anxieties may sound luridly overdramatic today, but they suffused the mental atmosphere of the government of the United States as President Bush made the fateful decision to launch the Iraq War.

OH NO IT MIGHT BE TEH EARTHQUAKEZ, BETTER MURDER SOME BROWN PEOPLE NAO!

Good thing you little bitches held your water during Hurricane Sandy, else the whole fuckin’ Middle East might be a glowing glass parking lot right now, amirite?

Oh wait, I ought to have waited for the very next paragraph!

Yet it was not only fear that drove the administration’s thinking about Iraq. It was also passionate enthusiasm for a new Middle East.

Well, that’s a relief.

Olympic regression complexes

As usual my queue of “someone was wrong on the internet” rant fodder is overflowing, but I continue to suffer from elevated levels of dilligaf secondary to chronic outrage fatigue.  Look, the TSA are being sadistic assholes again.  I guess that means only libertarians and (checks federal balance of power) some Republicans will raise a stink, while neocons and (checks federal balance of power) Democrats will snidely dismiss the complaint as “whining”.  So it goes in this best of all possible worlds.

I’m also suffering from fatigue fatigue subsequent to today being deadlift day.  With that in mind, I’ve gotta link to Wil Fleming’s outstanding post on T-Nation today:

• Olympic lift variations to get big

That title is, um, less than encouraging.  It brings to mind absurdities like “Do 3×12 split-stance Zercher kettlebell half cleans with a slow, five-count eccentric to get hyooge!  Look, I said “clean”, it’s Olympic lifting and stuff!”  But Fleming is smart and his article is blindingly clear.  Regression complexes will make you more awesome.  (And somehow, until I watched his videos, I’d never realized that high pulls are a great way to practice scooping the bar.)  I’d give it two thumbs up but, well, hook grip.

On the off-chance that you’re bored by both my minimal political content and by that link, have some metal (you might, er, want headphones if you’re at work):