I've discussed the so-called political spectrum repeatedly. And see here, here, here and here. Today on Twitter, biologist Colin Wright offers this helpful illustration as a cautionary tale of what it means to be somewhere along the political spectrum.
Do you like slime? On this romantic day, perhaps you might enjoy learning about the extraordinary sex lives of slugs, courtesy of Sir David Attenborough. Feel free to take notes if you'd like to add this to your own repertoire.
And also consider the sex routines of snails, as recounted at Brain Pickings (video available at the website):
This is how it happens: When a snail finds a partner, the two face each other, gently touching their tentacles together to feel if they like each other. And if they do, they glide their bodies alongside one another in a slow double embrace, until their baby-making parts fit together like puzzle pieces. Then, they gently pierce each other with tiny spears called “love darts,” which contain their genes.
What happens when the Venn diagram of "news" coverage by outlets on the political Left and Right have almost no overlap? What happens when our "news" outlets become singularities, where people on the political Left rarely tune into Right-leaning "news" outlets and vice versa? What happens when consumers of the "news" become too trusting, too obedient, too subservient to the carefully crafted political narratives of their favorite news outlets? It is at that point that news consumers become dupes. Worse, they become agitated dupes who don't want to hear about their blind spots. People on both the political Left and Right insist that they are well informed merely because they get their "news" from the A, B, C outlets. In the meantime, John Stuart Mill is spinning in his grave over our collective self-induced sickness.
This is the current state of news media and its most rapacious consumers. Matt Taibbi explains the main danger: the lack of informational course-correction. It is now common that blatant errors of fact take root and live on indefinitely. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's latest article at TK, where he offers many examples (you will be pummeled with examples beginning at the 6-minute mark of Taibbi's video, below). You can find this article at Matt's Substack website. The title his article is "The Bombhole Era":
This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.
This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.
A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters.
In the above video, Taibbi explains that the "news" media now operates like a Ponzi scheme, promising yet failing to pay off. Here is a quote from the one-minute mark:
You've heard of a Ponzi scheme? You promise guaranteed returns using money from the new suckers to pay off the old ones and nobody ever finds out you are bankrupt all along. The bombshell era is a journalistic ponzi scheme you sell every scandal as the biggest ever you stoke audience expectations with words like "historic," "unprecedented," "treason," "Watergate," "concentration camp," "reichstag" and BOOM! You dismount into dramatic predictions before moving on to the next mania.
If you are looking for science at Scientific American, you'll need to look a litter harder. This is from a Scientific American article titled "It's Time to Take the Penis off Its Pedestal: A culture of phallus worship has slanted the science in crucial and sometimes unexpected ways."
Yet thanks to the assumption that anything large and powerful must be male, a phallus with more imposing qualities—like the hyena’s—gets dubbed a “pseudopenis,” "masculinized" or “malelike.” Those who spend a lot of time with human genitalia see it differently. “What I’ve come to realize is that everything a man has a woman has; everything a woman has, a man has, anatomically,” says Dr. Marci Bowers, a gender affirmation surgeon in Palo Alto who has done more than 2,000 male-to-female surgeries. “The penis is just a large clitoris. In fact, I don’t know why they don’t just call it a large clitoris.” Here’s why: because human biases shape scientific knowledge, and much of what we know about our nether regions has been shaped by lazy, antiquated stereotypes about what men and women are.
On Twitter, biologist Colin Wright is barely holding it together after spotting this article. That's probably because he specializes in writing "old-fashioned" biology article suggesting antiquated things like his claim that there are two biological sexes and that men are different than women. And see here.
In the meantime, back at Twitter, "M" responded to Wright's Tweet with this:
And then "Prominent Public Figure responded with this:
And there were dozens of other responses whose witticisms rivaled in intensity their frustrations of seeing Scientific American's loss of respectability.
Finally, I wanted to know more about Rachel E. Gross, who wrote this "science" article. To my dismay, I noticed that she also wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, though (thankfully) not recently. She has even written about the challenge of getting evangelicals to understand evolution, but that was before her apparent conversation to the religion of Wokeness.
For many years, I thought of “ADHD” and “ADD” as dysfunctional conditions with which other people struggled, not me. Discussion of these conditions brought back vivid grade school memories of several bright and energetic boys struggling to sit still in their desks for seven hours, while nuns scolded and belittled them. I was fully aware of the social stigma that came with a diagnosis of ADHD. At the same time, I have long been aware that many successful people have been diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve long been convinced that, to some degree, their ADHD traits fueled their success.
Before my divorce in 2014, my wife Anne (in our 18th year of marriage) accused me needing treatment “because of ADHD,” explaining that I was “ruining the marriage.” She had been reading a website called ADHD and Marriage. She insisted that I should see a doctor to get medication for my “problem.” She told me that I was a bad listener. She told me these things repeatedly. It didn’t help that these concerns were hurled at me, not gently broached, but I now understand her frustration better.
An ADHD diagnosis also seemed ridiculous because I had never before been told I exhibited ADHD symptoms. No other human being ever raised a concern about ADHD until Anne proclaimed her diagnosis in black and white. Nor did any instances of ADHD seem apparent in any of my close relatives.
I resented these sole-cause accusations because I saw our marriage to be much more complex than that and far more nuanced. Also, I liked who I was and saw myself as high functioning. I have always been upbeat. I enjoy many activities and I’m fairly good various things, including my legal career, writing and composing music. Also (as I reminded my wife), I was capable of sitting in front of a computer screen for twelve hours per day writing complex appellate briefs. I have received awards for my brief writing. Fellow lawyers (and opposing lawyers) have often expressed that they like working with me. On a regular basis, more than a few of my friends tell me that I am an extremely attentive listener.
After the divorce in 2014, I became increasingly intrigued about ADHD. I started reading various articles and books about ADHD. From this informal research, I became convinced that many of the qualities associated with the ADHD mind are things that describe me well. In December, 2020, Anne died suddenly causing me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things, including our marriage, including the role ADHD might have played in our struggles over the last few years of our marriage.
More icing on the cake: a counselor has gotten to know me well over the past few months. He recently blurted out: “You are ADHD from top to bottom.” Hmmm. That I am indisputably high-functioning (unlike many people who receive the diagnosis) doesn’t rule out ADHD, but it explains why I pushed back when a diagnosis was hurled at me. I’ve thought further about my ability to writing for many hours at a stretch? After the divorce learned that hyper-focusing is something that some people with ADHD diagnoses do well.
The above paragraphs are a bit awkward for me to re-read because my purpose is here is not to tout my accomplishments. It is not my purpose to drag my marital struggles into the public, post-mortem. My purpose is to show the reasons for my initial confusion and to set the stage to explain something fascinating I’ve recently learned about my way of processing the world. Perhaps my journey might help others. [More . . . ]