Thursday Throughput: The Heavy Price Of The Great Barrington Declaration Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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39 Responses

  1. LeeEsq says:

    ThTh3: The decline of the mall and increased study pressures on teens has a lot to do with this. There don’t seem to be a lot of places where teens can just hang out with minimum adult supervision and learn to romantically interact with the gender of their choice in real life. A lot of these interactions are now online and done in the privacy of your home. There are even fewer places where they can go. Getting into college is a lot more difficult than it was for earlier sets of teens, so more time needs to be spent preparing for that if they want to go to college.Report

  2. LeeEsq says:

    ThTh1; The divisions among libertarians to COVID-19 are some of the more interesting ideological reactions. Some just held very fast to the belief that COVID-19 was not a big deal because they didn’t like the mitigation efforts, and this was something that voluntary action wasn’t going to solve, and quickly went into COVID denialism. Others realized that COVID was a big deal and acted accordingly.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    ThTh7: It was doing fine before Trump got elected.Report

  4. fillyjonk says:

    ThTh2: I remember the kid-lore that you needed “20 shots in the stomach” to prevent rabies if a rabid animal bit you, and we were (understandably) leery of any animal we didn’t know. (I remember worrying slightly when the class pet mouse bit my thumb, but the teacher assured me that it wasn’t rabid – after all, it came straight from a pet store to our class – and furthermore it didn’t break the skin).

    Still, as an adult, even if it WERE “20 shots in the stomach,” I can’t imagine dying of rabies to be preferable to that. But it’s good to hear that it’s a much more minor sequence, and that the painful part is the immunoglobulin shot. (Never have had one of those but have had corticosteroid shots which are pretty painful)Report

  5. DensityDuck says:

    [ThTh3] maybe what’s happening is that kids are less normalized to the idea that you should just talk about your sex life to random adult strangers. It’s not that they’re being less frisky, it’s that they’re being less kiss-and-tell about it.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to DensityDuck says:

      That could be another part of the equation. When pre-marital sex become more prevalent because of social change, pregnancy being easier to prevent, and STDs getting under control there was a big release in society. Not all of this was necessarily good because you had things like Jimmy Page kidnapping a 14 year old girl as a concubine and lot of other dark weirdness like the entire Brooke Shields photo shoot. After this became normalized, there was a necessary correction emphasizing things like mutual consent to get thing moving in a more ethical and healthy direction for society.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

        American Mind has a scathing article on the current backlash to “sex positivity”.

        In other words, real sex positivity—which would ostensibly account for emotion by placing taboos on manners but definitely not sex—has never been tried. According to Goldberg, the problem wasn’t her generation’s aggressive attack on all sexual mores, borders, and distinction, neatly branded “sex-positivity,” nor its failure to specify the terms of its mission (Whose sexual pleasure? Repression of what exactly?)—the problem, instead, is that these poor young people simply aren’t being nice enough to each other between sexual partners. Treating human beings like sex toys is fine, you see, you just have to say please and thank you to each machine before and after use. You’re all still essentially disposable to one another, but the brutality of that fact should be concealed by an endearing smile.

        Dang.

        (The whole thing is good.)Report

        • LeeEsq in reply to Jaybird says:

          Getting statistics on this is really difficult but I think that the mid to late boomers, people who were in their twenties and early thirties during the time between the Pill and AIDS, probably had much more frequent casual sex than people my age, which is late Gen X and early Millennial. Most of the people born in and around 1980 that I know seem to have fairy typical love/sex lives for people in our age and socio-economic level. I’m an outliner.

          So I’m kind of doubting both Goldberg’s thesis and the the American Mind’s criticism. To an extent we have more single people who never married is really complicated. It goes beyond sex but obviously includes sex. There are also economics in that it is a lot easier to live alone these days without suffering great poverty especially if you are a woman and a wider availability of potential partners than in the past. There is also increased time spent on the job and debates on how a good couple should behave towards each other. What do partners owe each other if consent is the supreme value?

          I also think that most people aren’t really that great at getting hook ups without something to lower their inhibitions. This is why alcohol tends to be a very third rail issue when it comes to consent. I bet a lot of the casual sex in the pre-AIDS days involved drugs rather than stone cold sober people. So what you have is this relatively small group of people that like casual sex and is really good at getting it, a larger group that might like casual sex but is bad at getting it, and an even larger group with some rather inchoate wants and desires when it comes to love and sex. All the things we tell each other are just so stories.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

            The stats I saw (this reflects the stuff that I thought happened) showed that the boomers didn’t have quite as much sex as was advertised. I mean, sure, you had Studio 54 and the AIDS crisis, but there were a *LOT* of people in flyover who were still seeing The Beach Boys as degenerate rock and roll. Hollywood and magazines and all that stuff got all the press, but the boomers were mostly squares.

            It was the GenXers that did all the stuff that they saw in the popular media that the boomers consumed.

            And then the millennials receded back.

            And then I look and say 16.1?!?!?!?!?!?!? ON FRIGGIN *AVERAGE*?!?!?!?

            I DON’T THINK I KNOW SIXTEEN PEOPLEReport

        • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

          Isn’t American Mind, a fascist Trump loving outfit?

          ETA: Yep it is from those January 6, 2021 insurrection supporting and culture war loving, anti-democracy fascists at the Claremont Institute.

          Reading fascist sources does not make someone open-minded.Report

          • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

            I guess they’re wrong about sex too, then.

            If you don’t want to read a fascist source talking about the backlash, here’s The New York Times.

            (Personally, I think that the fascist site has more insight into the problem than Michelle Goldberg, but, you know… there you go.)Report

            • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

              Being fascist curious and supporting should be an automatic disqualifier as a source on anything, yes. It is a categorical error.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Well, I hope you weren’t harmed by reading the excerpt from the essay.

                I apologize if you were. My bad.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Jaybird says:

                Jaybird, as always you troll with a D-minus grade point average. There is nothing brave or open-minded about being able to say “Well so what if they are fascist curious and oppose democracy, this is really interesting on an allegedly unrelated topic.”Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Saul, this is a culture thing, I think.

                I come from a cultural place that is so very different than the one that you appear to be coming from that I cannot comprehend the idea that I should not read something because the people who published it have odious ideas on other topics.

                Like, I can’t even wrap my brain around it.

                Like, to the point where I can’t believe that you believe this and that you’re only using this as a lever to be thrown away the second you want to read something that has only recently been recategorized as WrongThink.

                Like, that is how far away I am from you on this.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Jaybird says:

                Fascists were “recategorized” as Wrongthink when they lost WW2.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

                Seems like a pretty neat trick, then, to bundle recent stuff that you find odious with the Axis Powers.Report

              • InMD in reply to Saul Degraw says:

                Here is a piece that touches on these issues (and much, much more!) from a decidedly non-fascist curious source if either of you are interested.

                https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/when-we-stopped-making-sense

                Critical passage:

                The ethos of the sexual revolution is today simultaneously ultra puritanical and ultra libertine depending on the context, so that the abandonment of your wife and children is now less of a social faux pas than asking someone out on a date at work – you can only get publicly disgraced and fired for the latter. Most just trundle along confused but hoping that we can survive unscathed through correctly intuiting what elites decide the new rules will be in any individual case. This now reaches into every aspect of life and the imposition of new rules is becoming ever more strange to us, which is already manifesting in ways that Fennell alludes to, and will one day bring the experiment crashing down, he claims.

                “For the most part we experience it as senseless unreflectively, in that depth of our being where countless generations of human beings before us have trained us by heredity to assess – in a combined act of reason, feeling and intuition – any presentation purporting to be a framework for life. And that encounter with senselessness, when our minds and hearts are seeking sense, sends distress, a pain of the soul, pressing into our consciousness.” Nothing more natural, then, he says, than that we would want to stop reproducing this society altogether by becoming childless and sterile and to commit self-injury and the annihilation of consciousness through drugs, self-harm and suicide, even as we simultaneously believe this is the greatest model of life that has ever existed.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:

                Interesting! Thank you!Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

                Here is another non-fascist viewpoint.
                Bob Avakian has very interesting and thought provoking idea about religion, touching on sexuality.

                https://revcom.us/en/bob_avakian/collected-worksReport

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                He’s even got a section titled WHAT IS FASCISM!

                Yes, bourgeois dictatorship in any form is very bad for the masses of people, very oppressive and repressive of the masses of people, and needs to be overthrown. But an overt fascist dictatorship that tramples on any pretense of upholding rights for people is not something that should be put in the category of “maybe it’ll be a positive change, or maybe it’ll be a negative change.”

                Well, I’ll let y’all get back to telling people what they shouldn’t read.Report

              • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                I will definitely check it out.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to InMD says:

                Check out your local laws first.
                The website contains material that is illegal in many Republican states.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Man, you definitely wouldn’t want to be lumped together with those people!Report

  6. DensityDuck says:

    [ThTh11] Isn’t “computer-repair house calls” pretty much what Geek Squad does?

    I have thought that an “in-house computer person” would be a really good thing for senior-living facilities to have; someone who could just go to people’s places and “fix it so that it works”, who would go around and set up the Zoom call and make sure it all works, etcetera.Report

    • fillyjonk in reply to DensityDuck says:

      One of the retirement benefits that my dad got from his uni was that they’d sent one of their IT guys out (during off hours; it was understood that retiree-calls were lower priority than anything on campus) to fix stuff that got broken.

      I think it would be an excellent thing for senior centers to offer, or really, any community center. (Here there are people who will do anyone’s uncomplicated tax return for free or a donation; I am not sure why they wouldn’t have walk-in clinics to fix simple laptop problems)Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to fillyjonk says:

        I would do that for the Emeritus faculty when I worked for Civil Engineering. No house calls, but if they brought in the computer itself, I’d hook it up and get it running in my spare time.Report

  7. Oscar Gordon says:

    ThTh12: Not just Sodom and Gomorrah, but also the walls of Jericho. Still, myth and legend often have some basis in fact

    ThTh11: That’s how I started out in IT. Got out of the Navy and spent a year teaching myself about the nuts and guts of PCs and Windows 3.11 / 95 / NT 3.51, until I got hired as a student Admin support and learned about the Linux / Unix side. No formal training at all, ever, Just a lot of reading and digging around in the system.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      the walls of Jericho

      “The walls fell” could easily mean “the invaders took the walls”.

      Just like a man “falling” in battle doesn’t mean he fell down. If he takes a spear and it nails him to a wall, he has still “fallen”.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

        From the article:

        About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.

        Report

      • Brent F in reply to Dark Matter says:

        What is literal and what is a metaphor comes up a lot when trying to figure out historical warfare.

        Famously, the debate whether Othismos was a literal push of shields like a football scrum or a metaphorical push forward by the phalanx. Or whether two-handed swordsmen could break pikes literally by chopping pike shafts (physically unlikely) or break pike formations by disrupting the organization they rely on.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Brent F says:

          When you get old enough, close to nothing is literal.

          No literacy, no books, no science. It’s oral history at best with no effort to make it exact.

          The previous “candidates” for natural disasters inspiring these stories were at about 2000BC. This event was about 3600BC, so something like 1500 years before the others. My expectation is that nothing survives usefully in oral history that long.Report

        • Mike Schilling in reply to Brent F says:

          Take, for instance “the sun stood still in the sky” from the book of Joshua. Taken literally, it was enough for the Church to consider heliocentrism heresy and put Galileo under house arrest, when it’s clearly a metaphor for “that was one heckova long day”.Report

  8. Saul Degraw says:

    ThTH3: I think things like this can be attributed to way too many subjective and personal factors and the answer always ends up being a hodge podge while people love to use it to prove their priors. I have read that some young people are concerned about bringing kids into the world considering climate change. Opportunities for women beyond the home are also part of the issue.Report

  9. Chip Daniels says:

    ThTh3:
    It’s weird to live long enough to see the sexual revolution, counter-revolution, and counter-counter-revolution.

    Weird because a lot of the claims are based assumptions about the past which were never true but in fact reflect our own anxieties.

    When I was an adolescent in the 70s, the conventional wisdom among both conservatives and liberals was that the previous generation had very little sex, and if they did, they certainly didn’t enjoy it, but did it missionary style in the dark under the covers.

    But of course, that was nonsense. It is the sort of thing that parents like to tell their kids, and that kids themselves prefer to believe about their parents because it soothes the anxieties of both.

    Another anxiety is the idea that everyone else is having great lusty sex, and we are somehow being left out. But the fact is that most people sex lives are pretty sedate and modest, even when given complete unfettered freedom.

    I have no way of knowing if These Kids Today are having more or less sex than we did. I know that there were plenty of us in the 70s who were late bloomers and every bit as anxiety-ridden as anyone of any age.

    But judging from all of human literature and culture from the beginning of time I kind of doubt that there was ever a time of uncomplicated anxiety-free and healthy sexual behavior.Report

  10. [ThTh12] I expect no one remembers Velikovsky, and that’s a good thing, but he was at one time quite famous for explaining lots of Biblical miracle as a result of some very unlikely astronomy (more or less God using Venus to do trick pool shots.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_CollisionReport

  11. [ThTh1] They must be smoking Great Barrington Reefer.Report

  12. Jesse says:

    Young people are turning into “puritans” to the extent that a lot of the ways that young women were objectified in the past is being pushed against, and that many women don’t want to deal with being approached by men everywhere they go, etc. So, to a certain strain of Gen X men who still want to have sex w/ 20-something women and Gen X women who have weird politics that slapping a guy who gropes your ass is more ‘feminist’ than pushing for a society where the guy doesn’t do it in the first place because he’s wary of the societal backlash against him think that’s puritanism.

    Another thing is frankly, a lot of mediocre sex is no longer happening from both ends – instead of going out to get hit on and ending up in bed with a dude who won’t perform, and will continue to bother them, women can watch a 6 hour marathon of Real Housewives than use a vibrator with some good erotica on their Kindle, and guys now don’t wast $50 on drinks to hook up with a girl they’re not that attracted too, and instead, can spend 6 hours in Skyrim, and then watch some amateur porn shot as well as anything professional via Onlyfans.

    So, if that’s some of the “connectiion” that’s not happening anymore, is that a bad thing?Report