Author: Crowhill Report

This was a fun episode: 237: Matt Walsh, transgenderism, walruses and women

I’m writing an article for a tech website about some geeky marketing stuff, and I need to describe how Google Analytics collects demographic information. Generally speaking, it collects age and … what? Sex or gender?

It says “gender,” but it only has two: male and female. So what is that?

The gender police will tell us that there are scores of genders, so “male or female” can’t really be “gender,” can it? I mean, is Google transphobic, or … whatever?

Sex is conveniently binary. So if they’re dividing things into male and female, it really should be sex, not gender, and that’s the way I’ll write it in my article.

But I wonder what the editors will do when they see that.

How sushi took over the world

“Thinly sliced raw fish on plain white rice. How did this Japanese staple take over the world? And what has a tuna-loving, controversial Korean religious leader got to do with it? This is the story of sushi and the way of tuna.”

I eat Sushi and I’m not a Moonie, but a lot of people make those kinds of nutty associations, so ….

P&C continue their “shortcut to the classics” series, with special guest Longinus.

235: The Great Gatsby

I had a lovely conversation today with a professional colleague who also keeps bees. He has lots of local customers who buy his honey because they believe eating local honey will help them with their allergies. The evidence for that is not good, and he tells his customers that. But they don’t believe him. They persist in the belief that eating local honey helps.

He said, “now I know why people believe in QAnon,” and we chatted about conspiracy theories and such for a while.

He mentioned his surprise that otherwise educated people would believe something for which there is little or no evidence.

I’m not surprised at all. I’m a skeptic about the alleged benefits of (what passes for) education. I know lots of educated people who believe very silly things. Part of the reason for this is that education has become mostly indoctrination. They don’t teach you to think critically. They don’t expect you to consider opposing viewpoints. Rather, the reverse.

A big part of the problem with false beliefs is that we’ve lost trust in our institutions. E.g.,

Beekeeper: Studies show that local honey doesn’t help with allergies.

Honey buyer: Those studies were probably funded by Big Pharma. They don’t make any money off local honey, so they want us to buy their stuff.

Note an interesting contrast here. It would be to my friend’s benefit to encourage people to believe that local honey helps with allergies. But he doesn’t. Because he’s an honest man.

We can easily believe that a particular man is honest. We have a very hard time believing that a corporation is honest. That’s worth thinking about.

He also mentioned the negative effect of right-wing media, which is always tearing down trust in our institutions. I agree, although I don’t believe it’s confined to right-wing media, and data I’ve seen indicates that belief in conspiracies is a bi-partisan problem.

The other thing to consider is the involvement of Russia and China. The silly Democrat lie was that Russia tried to promote Trump. The truth is that Russian wants to sow distrust in our institutions. “Trump v Clinton” is not nearly as important to them as getting Americans to distrust their system.

Same with China.

They want to undermine us from within.