This and That (11)
All hail Lord Bubuza! Also: Ginger Rogers and the Culture Wars
1.
My last This and That was a little while ago. Since then, I’ve done three podcasts with Robert Wright—videos below. You’ll see from the titles that there’s a certain obsession with Elon Musk and Donald Trump. (In our defense, there is much to say about these interesting men.) Another theme is free speech and its enemies, and Bob and I have some productive arguments over events involving Ta-Nehisi Coates and Amy Wax. I might return to some of these issues in a future Substack post.
As always, paid subscribers to Small Potatoes can access the paywalled hour at the end (which is much less inhibited.)
2.
My friend Mickey Inzlicht has a new Substack. Mickey has a distinctive voice—not everyone introduces himself with “Who the fuck are you, man?”—and his posts are funny, belligerent, and original. And they always include Big Lebowski references. Very highly recommended.
3.
A couple of weeks ago, I published a post titled Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings. It discussed biases in journal publishing and how these influence which research you can trust.
I used the following metaphor when describing particularly trustworthy findings.
It’s like what someone once said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Ginger Rogers is doing them backward and in high heels. A published finding that clashes with the political prejudices of reviewers and editors is a Ginger Rogers Finding. It had to be twice as good.
Now, I don’t know anything about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and I have never seen any of their movies. I just remembered the quote. Before putting up my post, I went on the web to ensure I got it right. It's a good thing I checked because I attributed the backward-and-high-heels line to Rogers herself. This was a mistake—in her autobiography, she credits the cartoonist Bob Thaves in this 1982 cartoon.
My metaphor turned out to be controversial. Commenters told me Astaire was a much better dancer than Rogers, and I was falling for feminist propaganda. They also said that the duo did much of their dancing facing forward, so they weren’t going forward and backward.
Maybe. On the other hand, when my post came out, a friend sent me this video. It seems that at least some of the time, Rogers is doing just what Astaire does—backward and in high heels.
4.
More about comments: Back in January, I wrote a post in defense of buying lottery tickets. A few days ago, the following comment popped up.
Was this AI? A hard-working spammer? Once the comment was posted, “Jerold C” disappeared from the system.
I would love to win a few million dollars, but I’m not up to contacting Lord Bubuza. (You are welcome to try; let me know if you are successful.) But, in his honor, I asked Midjourney to draw “Lord Bubuza, genius god of lottery numbers”; this drawing is at the top of this post.
5.
The Ginger Rogers post—Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings—was a hit. It got many likes, comments, and new subscribers. As soon as it was published, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked if they could reprint a slightly edited version. I agreed—it’s here.
I’m not fooling myself. It was popular because it was a Culture War post. It was critical of a certain “woke” movement in science. People love this sort of thing.
I have mixed feelings about such posts. It’s nice to get attention. And I find many issues here interesting, such as academic freedom, trigger warnings, and the complicated relationship between science and politics. (I’m usually on the anti-woke side, but not always—my post Why I use trigger warnings was pretty woke, or at least anti-anti-woke.)1
But so many people are writing about these issues that it’s hard to say something original. And the topics tend to make people tribal and less intelligent. The reaction I want from my pieces is, “Huh, interesting, never thought of it that way!”, and I sometimes get this when I write about tantrums or loopholes or envy. But when I talk about issues such as racial bias or trigger warnings, the reaction is too often either dismissive and insulting or it’s approving in a way that makes me uncomfortable—”You really showed those bastards!”.
There are people I know who manage to write about such issues in a way that’s original, intelligent, and humane. But these topics tend to make the rest of us dumb and mean. If you have 30 seconds to spare, here’s a joke that makes the point.
I will write more about these issues in the future—but not too often.
One of Mickey Inzlicht’s first posts is on the merits of an anti-anti-approach.
Thanks for the love, Paul!
I'm generally opposed to the über-woke initiatives. But, like you, I've changed my mind about trigger warnings. A specific incident caused me to reverse my opinion.
I was reading a non-fiction book where unexpectedly, the author wrote a couple of paragraphs that described (in graphic detail) a few incidents of animal abuse. I found his description to be quite horrifying and couldn't stop thinking about it for some time. Even now, it's upsetting for me to recall the incident, though it happened a couple of years ago. I now wish that the author had written something like, "If animal abuse upsets you, then you might want to skip to the start of the next chapter".