Sibylla Bostoniensis

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The internet is full of people enraged by the US CDC's reduction – and all but elimination – of isolation guidelines for COVID, pointing out that the CDC's new guidelines seem to be more about what is good for "the economy" – which is to say, good for business interests – than what is good for the health of the people.

I don't think anyone's wrong to be enraged. Nothing that I am about to say is meant to make anyone feel better about the CDC's decision. I do not explain this as any kind of excuse.

There is a sense in which the CDC's decision is right. Not good, mind you, but correct: it brings their guidance back into alignment with our larger society's beliefs about the value of human life and health.

( Ours has never been a society that has particularly highly valued the health and well-being of the people of it... Read more [2,460 words] )

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This was originally posted to Mastodon here. Slight changes have been made and further commentary added.




This is a true story.

In 2014, I happened to be on site at a software development company, where I wound up being a proverbial fly on the wall during a notable conversation.

I was being shown around by the head of technical documentation, and had just been introduced to the head of engineering. Maybe he was a VP, I don't recall. Anyways, he decided that was the occasion, with me, random contractor standing in front of him, to engage the head of technical documentation in a conversation about how there might be layoffs coming, and he was of the opinion that they should probably lay off his division's tech writers, and make the software developers write their own documentation, to save money.

The head of technical documentation was, of course, flabbergasted and appalled, but substantially outranked, and she had to be diplomatic in her response, tying her hands – and her tongue. Also she was caught somewhat by surprise by this fascinating proposal.

Unbeknownst to me, while this conversation was happening and I was supposed to be being onboarded, my contract was in the process of falling through, because the disorganization of this organization was so high, the parties who had extended me the offer were unaware the organization had put a stop order on retaining new contractors.

And to this day I lament that I did not know that fact, because I was being on my best behavior, and in retrospect I really wish I hadn't been. ( Because what I was biting my tongue rather than say was...[5,020 words] )

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It all started when I decided I wanted to know the origin of the expression "male chauvinist".

I have no idea if the young among you have ever heard this expression. It was very idiomatic back in the 1970s and 1980s. It's basically means "someone who is sexist" or "male supremacist". It was strongly associated with the second wave feminist movement, which promulgated the term.

I think it might be a super useful term to revive, for reasons. Thing is, the more you think about the term "male chauvinist", the weirder it is.

( The dictionary is happy to tell you... (Read more [6,880 Words]) )

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The following are excerpts from the excellent essay "The Deep Archeology of Fox News" by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (2023 Mar 3), which is behind a paywall:

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is.

In a moment like this it’s worth stepping way, way back, not just to the beginning of Fox News in 1996 but to the beginning of the broader countermovement it was a part of and even a relatively late entry to.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s there was something historians and critics of the time called the post-war liberal consensus. It was not liberal in ways we’d recognize today. Indeed, it wasn’t liberal in many ways actual liberals of the time recognized. But it did represent an important level of elite consensus about state intervention in the economy and openness to a more restrained version of the American state created by the reformist periods of the first half of the 20th century.

Though what was then sometimes called “the race question” was “complicated” and not something that could be resolved overnight, there was also in elite opinion a general assumption that the South’s system of legalized apartheid was a source of embarrassment and something from the past that the country had to outgrow, even if not any time soon. (Just as is the case today, what is actually more properly called cosmopolitanism was sometimes misportrayed as liberalism: a general belief in pluralism, values tied to cities and urban life.)

I mention all this because, in the early 1950s and 1960s, what we now recognize as the embryonic modern conservative movement could rightly sense that there were assumptions embedded in elite culture that viewed certain of their core values and aims as backward, retrograde, archaic. When the early founders of modern “movement” conservatism looked at America’s elite consensus, they saw a set of assumptions and beliefs embedded in many elite institutions that ran counter to their aims and values. And they were not totally wrong.

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s they set about trying to build a series of counter-institutions, ones that wouldn’t, in their mind, have their sails angled permanently toward the winds of liberalism. One key moment in this story was the founding of The Heritage Foundation in 1973. Heritage was founded to be the counter to the “liberal” Brookings Institution. But Heritage was never anything like Brookings, even though in the D.C. of the ’80s and ’90s they were routinely portrayed as counterpoints — one representing liberalism and the other conservatism. Brookings was mainstream, stodgy, quasi-academic. Heritage was thoroughly ideological and partisan. In practice it was usually little more than a propaganda mill for the right. This pattern was duplicated countless times. The “liberal” Washington Post was matched by The Washington Times. Fox News, which didn’t come along for another generation, was not so much the answer to CNN as to CBS News, the iconic broadcast news organization of the first decades of the Cold War.

What we see today in Fox News is most of the story: a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. [...]

Here we get to the nub of the issue. Because this is not the entirety of the story. One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against [...] None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

So how do we get from this elemental misunderstanding to the raw and casual lying of the Fox of today? Well, that’s the thing: we don’t. Both were there from the very start. It’s all but impossible to disentangle the culture clash, the inability and refusal to really grasp what these institutions were, and the more open culture of propaganda, lying and mendacity. They’re fused together so tightly that getting your head around the relationship between them is more a matter of meditative absorption than anything that can be processed or explained discursively.

[...]

If you want to read the whole thing, you can pay to access it; alternatively, @jayrosen_nyu@mastodon.social has posted about it graciously including a guest link. If you go to his Mastodon post here, https://mastodon.social/@jayrosen_nyu/109966217307755528, you should be able to click through to the article (it's the second link) and read the whole thing.

I have many thoughts about this, both quibbles and amplifications.

One of those thoughts is that it can be explained discursively: I just, coincidentally, did. The "conservative" project – meaning this thing that Marshall here identifies as starting in the 1950s – has always been to shape social truths by arguing them into existence, including by lying.

I have had a huge post brewing in the back of my head for longer than I've had a Patreon account on the topic of cosmopolitanism and its enemies, and another (or maybe another dozen) about the conservative movement that arose in the US in the 1950s (and arguably earlier) that Marshall here alludes to.

Frances Fitzgerald wrote a thing that blew my mind when I read it, about which I've been meaning to write since forever, which is about exactly the same rise of the religious right in the 1950s in the US. It was the final chapter of her Cities on a Hill, which was published in 1987. I'll not unpack it now, and just say that's a book absolutely worth reading. I found it an emotionally challenging read in the best way.

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The following is a series of "toots" (tweets) I made on Mastodon, lightly edited, in general response to the trending topic of punching Nazis, which had emerged again in the more general topic of reports that a neo-Nazi group in the US has called for a national day of violence against Jewish targets tomorrow, Sat Feb 25.

Note! It turns out this report has been exaggerated by the grapevine: apparently the neo-Nazis are calling for a day of vandalism against buildings, not violence against people. That said, this sort of boundary pushing is often a prelude to violence against people, both in general, and very specifically among antisemites. Discussion as to why for another day.

I feel a need to apologize that it's a bit shouty. This is not the style I usually employ here on DW. Mastodon doesn't support rich text, so one needs to employ a style there that does not rest upon bold face and italic. When all one has is capital letters, perforce one must engage in capitalism.*

---

Alright everybody, it's time I share my feelings about punching Nazis.

I'm against it.

Punching people can kill them. Dumb schmucks wind up doing hard time for murder because they thought it was "just a bar fight" and someone winds up dead. You should never punch somebody unless you are ready to kill them.

And if you mean to kill Nazis, jesus fucking christ, don't pummel them with your meat clubs like some sort of ape. Be a motherfucking grownup and SHOOT THEM WITH A GUN.

Now, I can hear some of you thinking, ( "But, Siderea, what about stabbing Nazis with knives?" [1,150 Words] )

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0.

I wrote a series, The Great Age of Plagues, setting out the case for expecting a dramatic increase in the rate of infectious disease outbreaks. I was asked what advice I had for dealing with what is coming.

I thought a lot about this, and I wrote a lot about it, and I eventually came to realize that what I really had to say about it is this.

( I would propose that the most important asset for surviving in the world as it is becoming rests between your ears. (Read more [5,380 words]) )

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Hey, I'm working on a post for which it would be useful, maybe, to have this information, and I was wondering if anybody happened to have it to hand or know where to find it or want to go off on a research goose chase into the anthropology of music.

It's a question about part singing. That is, singing in "four part harmony" – or any number of parts greater than one – in the Western musical tradition.

Note that sometimes this is called "choral singing", but there's part singing that is not choral, there are part singers not members of any chorus or other vocal ensemble, the term "chorus" encodes some limiting assumptions about the social context of part singing (choruses), and there's, technically, choral singing that's not part singing. I'm actually curious about part singing in particular, but "choral singing" can be a reasonable proxy for it.

I have an abundance of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence suggesting very different statuses of this practice in three English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. The evidence I have, such as it is, suggests that on a per capital basis, part singers are considerably more common in the UK population than the US population, and way, way more common in South Africa.

How much more common? Famously, there was a documentary about the anti-Aparteid movement in SA titled, "Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony." Videos of mass protest marches show entire marches singing in harmony as they marched. The national anthem of South Africa has an official arrangement (harmonization), and I've seen videos of sports games in South Africa where during the national anthem, it seemed the audience sang along in parts.

(As a side note, doing this research, Google was like, "Oh, hey, uh, would you be interested in a paper titled 'South African Music in History of Epidemics' (Okigbo 2017)?" ...yes. Yes I suppose I am. I haven't read it yet.)

I've found all sorts of things which allude to the remarkable prevalence of part singing traditions in SA – here's an article about an American college chorus that went to SA because of its choral activity: "'In South Africa,' explains Wells, 'communal singing happens with a frequency and an energy that is remarkable. There is a vigor and value of singing in daily life there that is very different from singing here in the United States.'" – but what I haven't got is anything that actually establishes the difference as an objective fact, ideally with some sort of measurement. I'll take anything, even proxy measures – choruses per capita, average size of choruses – but actual population surveys of part singing experience/expertise would be ideal.

So can anybody help me with some source(s) that actually establishes whether substantially more people, per capita, can/do sing in part harmony in SA than the UK and/or US?

Sources that compare the UK to US also useful.

I suppose if you have exactly this information about other nations, sure, I'd like that too.

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[Special content warning: discussion of existential threats to humanity. Highly depressogenic content. This might not be the best thing to read if you're given to despair or if despair is unsafe for you. Maybe give this post a pass if you are not in a place, emotionally, to handle it.]


Previous: Part 1. Population




6.

So the more of us humans there are, the more vulnerable we are to outbreaks of infectious disease; indeed the more evolutionarily adapted we, as a species, are to survival strategies of forming large groups and enjoying their economies of scale and network effects and so on, the more interdependent we become, the more densely connected our social graphs, and the harder it is for us to socially isolate, and thus the more vulnerable we are to contagion.

Enter Covid-19.

Covid-19 is not just terrible because it kills people and is tremendously contagious and it got a year's head start on our species before we had a vaccine.

Covid-19 may be exceptionally terrible because it may be a disease that leads to increased vulnerability to other diseases.

( It wouldn't be the first one.... Read more [5,470 Words] )

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There's a thing you probably have encountered and maybe haven't really registered as it went by. It usually plays out like this. Somebody else takes a noun phrase – usually there's an adjective or two involved, sometimes multiple nouns – that seems perfectly ordinary and makes sense on the face of it, and which refers to something in the real world, and the speaker makes some bold assertion about it that strikes you as really weird, and possibly highly prejudicial. What they've said leaves you thinking, "wait, how could that possibly be true?"

That's all you get. That's all the sign of what's happening. That's the glitch in the matrix.

There's a lot of reasons that people make ridiculous claims about all sorts of things, and you will always be tempted to write it off as just ridiculous people saying ridiculous things and thinking no more about it.

But if you can catch yourself in that moment, and not reflexively dismiss it as silliness, you could, instead, ask yourself: "Hey, is that noun phrase maybe a technical term of art which means something much more specific and possibly quite different from what the individual words literally mean?"

Doing this? Is a super power. Lots of people can recognize specific technical terms that they are acquainted with. Few people cultivate the more general ability to recognize – or just suspect – that a noun phrase is a technical term they aren't familiar with.

( Read more.... [3,770 Words] )

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0.

Someone recently asked me, in regards to my pestilence tag, whether I also had tags for war, famine, and death as well.

To which I replied, May 27, 2022, "Soon."

1.

A whole lot of people in the US are now talking about the likelihood of civil war. Now, I haven't seen anyone explain why they think (or feel) that is likely, but I can explain why I think it's likely, or at least much more plausible.

( For those who haven't heard in all the general tumult... Read more [2,060 of my words + extensive quotes = 4,240 words] )

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