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Balloon Riots
Ever heard of the Great Balloon Riot of 1864? (h/t Bradley Campbell). A crowd had gathered in Leicester, England to watch an aviation pioneer fly his balloon. According to the balloonist, a disgraceful rabblerouser “by his gestures and foul language…excited the mob and induced the belief that there existed on my part a disinclination to ascend.” As the crowd jostled him, he decided he was actually going to call it off and deflated the balloon. Then the crowd really went nuts, tore his balloon to shreds, and tried to beat him up.
The weirdest thing is that this was not the only balloon riot on record. Ben Franklin’s daughter observed one in Paris:
“The balloon took fire and the experiment did not succeed… The people were furious and threw themselves upon the Balloon, and tore it in pieces each one carrying off a sample; some large enough to make a mattress and I believe the author would have been subjected to the same fate if they had not been escorted by a detachment of French Guards.”
And in 1858 a crowd in Melbourne attacked a balloon that set down in their working-class neighborhood: “[The] distinguished guests were forced to escape by jettisoning champagne bottles, picnic hampers, several bags of sand ballast, and finally throwing off a few hardy objectors still clinging to the sides of the basket.”
AI Mimicry
Sometimes criminals use deceptive mimicry. They might dress as deliverymen or police officers when they come to the door or send messages posing as a family member asking for money. Technology is opening up new possibilities on this front, as in the case of AI voice cloning scams:
I pick up the phone and I hear my daughter’s voice, and it says, ‘Mom!’ and she’s sobbing,” DeStefano recalled. “I said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘Mom, I messed up,’ and she’s sobbing and crying.”
This man gets on the phone and he’s like, ‘Listen here. I’ve got your daughter. This is how it’s going to go down.
The man on the phone then demanded money, first asking for $1 million, then lowering his demand to $50,000 when DeStefano said she did not have the funds.
It turns out her daughter was fine, and the call was from scammers using a computer program to fake her voice. The result was good enough to fool her own mother:
“It was completely her voice. It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried,” she said. “I never doubted for one second it was her. That’s the freaky part that really got me to my core.”
The future possibilities for such fakery are disturbing. Imagine what other things people might do with the ability to quickly create realistic images or sound and video recordings of you and your family.
African Witch Camps
Stone Age Herbalist writes about the concentration camps for witches in Ghana.
I often tell my students that while they probably think of witch-killing as something hundreds of years in the past, witches are still lynched in Africa, India, New Guinea, and elsewhere today. For instance, between 2005 and 2011 about 3,000 accused witches were killed in Tanzania alone. Herbalist wryly observes that the Marxist-Leninist government of Benin, doctrinal atheists pushing a modernization project, still took traditional supernatural beliefs seriously and employed priests and diviners to help purge witches from the country.
Witchcraft beliefs are also strong in Ghana:
A meningitis outbreak in 1997 killed nearly 550 people across northern Ghana and led to vigilante attacks on older women. Several were lynched and others beaten and stoned to death. Outraged NGOs and journalists began investigating the conditions for women, particularly in northern Ghana, and discovered a shocking reality. Not only were women being killed as witches in higher numbers than expected, but many thousands of women were fleeing to makeshift camps - witch’s camps.
As of today Ghana has around six functioning witch camps, although others have opened and closed…. The exact number of residents is unclear, several thousand is a rough estimate.
Honor Killing
My frequent coauthor Bradley Campbell writes a brief review of sociologist Mark Coony’s book Execution by Family: A Theory of Honor Violence. From the review:
Family Honor Violence, as Cooney defines it, is violence by a family against a family member who has undermined the family’s moral status. In its pure form, family honor violence is collaborative, preplanned, justified using the language of honor, and approved of by the surrounding community. It occurs mainly in countries that are part of what can be called the honor belt, which ranges “from north Africa, through the Middle East and Turkey, across to southeast Asia” (p. 77).
…if we are going to better understand violence, our first task is to describe it as clearly as possible. Many scholars have instead let their social justice concerns distort their understanding of family honor violence. It is common, for example, to deny that family honor violence is a distinct form of violence at all…
...A concept cannot be right or wrong, but in can be useful or less useful, and what we want from a concept first of all is usefulness in describing the world. We want a concept that helps us clarify things. Lumping family honor violence in with domestic violence does not do this.
…Explanations of family honor violence have also been distorted by social justice concerns, just as the concept has. For example, Cooney shows that an explanation of family honor violence that he calls “patriarchy theory” cannot explain very much about the violence.
Inflation Prediction
Arnold Kling argues that 2% inflation is history; we’ll be lucky to get 5% a year for the foreseeable future:
The politicians won’t solve the problem by cutting deficits. And they won’t explicitly default on the debt. The only choice left is to inflate away the debt. That is why I say that the 2 percent inflation target is toast. I think it is much more likely that over the next five to ten years inflation will be at least 5 percent than that it will fall back to the vicinity of 2 percent.
But inflation won’t solve the government’s debt problem if interest rates keep going up. If inflation is 5 percent, then the interest rate on government debt will have to be less than that in order to keep the government debt from exploding. In other words, we have to live with negative real interest rates.
…Households and corporate treasurers with funds to put to work want a positive real interest rate. We want to earn a return that at least keeps up with inflation.
Our government needs for us to fail. [his emphasis]
Misery Loves Company
Old but good: Bryan Caplan writes about the silent suffering of people who aren’t neurotic in a world shaped by neurotics’ constant negativity:
Having a Neurotic personality is not fun, and Neurotics rarely let us forget it. This doesn’t imply, however, that they’re victims. By acting on their sadness, anger, and fear, Neurotics routinely make the people around them sadder, angrier, and more fearful. Parallel claims hold for non-Neurotics. They rarely complain, but that doesn’t imply they’re not victims.
How exactly does society victimize the non-Neurotic? Look at the news – or, in an election year, politics. It’s a parade of stories crafted to make every onlooker feel sadness, anger, and fear. It’s a pan-ideological problem: Left and right disagree on many things, but both tribes of activists want you to get upset about something every day. Take a look at the stories your friends shared on Facebook today. How many aren’t a thinly-veiled demand for negative affect?
Given the evidence that negative and moralistic content is more likely to succeed as news and go viral on social media, it seems like modern communications are a real force multiplier for the neurotics, increasing their influence over the culture.
Arctic Hysteria
Not that premodern cultures are a picnic, either. Scott Alexander discusses psychiatrist Edward Foulks’s work on culture-bound disorders traditionally found among the Eskimos of the high arctic. A particular focus is on something called piblokto, or Arctic Hysteria. Alexander describes:
A sufferer suddenly snaps, engaging in bizarre, dangerous, and violent behavior. She may tear off her clothing, run out naked into the tundra, and jump into the icy water. Or she may try to kill herself or others, sometimes even her own children. Other behavior is simply bizarre: trying to walk on igloo ceilings, or gathering random rocks as if they are great treasures. When the hysteric’s friends and family notice the attack, they restrain the victim - usually it takes more than one person; an Arctic hysteric has the strength of several men. After a few minutes, the victim returns to her normal self. She remembers nothing.
This bears a resemblance to the Malaysian practice of running amok, in which a person suddenly goes on a killing rampage with a knife, stabbing whoever they might reach. They’re often killed in the process, but if restrained alive will claim not to remember anything.
Attempts to ground Arctic hysteria in biological causes (like vitamin deficiency) ran aground, and it seemed clear that the disorder occurred most in the most traditional communities and was going extinct as people acculturated to the outside world (replaced by modern disorders like alcoholism and depression). It was culture-bound.
Foulks’s explanation was that Eskimo society is so different from Western society that Eskimos end up with a different psychic structure, one that handles stress in different ways.
Alexander describes some ways that traditional Eskimo life is very different from the life of the typical Westerner:
There is no privacy - after all, igloos have no walls. Nobody ever gets a moment alone, except on hunting trips. Everyone is watching each other and talking to each other all the time. In all this watching and talking, nobody ever compliments or praises anyone else, or expresses happiness or gratitude (the closest Foulks comes to admitting an exception to this rule is that a wife may sometimes smile when her husband arrives home from a weeks-long hunt). But they mock each other’s failures all the time, forever….Any Eskimo who makes a mistake or just fails to conform will be the butt of everyone’s barbs until they die - often of suicide
I’ve written before that the intense intimacy of forager bands and tribal villages is hard for atomized moderns to even comprehend. That seems typical, but the constant mockery might be less so. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm writes about how small-scale societies often use mockery as a levelling mechanism, cutting down the tall poppies before they can swell with pride. But this description of the Eskimo makes it sound like mockery is near constant for doing too poorly as well as doing too well.
Snake Bites and Missing Data
Saloni Dattani discusses missing data in global health research. A lot of people in India would be surprised to learn that, by the age of 70, 1 in 270 Indians will die from a snakebite. It’s surprising because this cause of death is concentrated in poor, rural, isolated regions. It’s not a salient problem to the urbanite, let alone the educated globalist urbanite. And the same factors that make someone vulnerable to this cause of death – living in a poor, isolated area – make it relatively unlikely to get recorded in official statistics. Thus the problem of missing data:
We take it for granted in much of the world that we know how many people are dying each year, and what they are dying from. But that’s not the case worldwide.
In many countries, there isn’t a functioning civil registry, where births and deaths are regularly recorded. This means many deaths aren’t registered officially with a death certificate. But even among the deaths that are registered, many lack a ‘cause of death’ on the certificate.
In 2015, when it was estimated that around 56 million deaths occurred worldwide, only around half were registered with a cause of death.
Only around a fifth of all deaths worldwide in 2015 were reported to the WHO with a meaningful cause of death – which excludes ambiguous causes like ‘sudden death’, ‘chest pain’, ‘event of undetermined intent’ and others. [Her emphasis]
We only know of India’s snakebite deaths because of a particular study of death in India called the Million Death Study, designed explicitly to find this sort of missing information.
Collective Violence
Next fall I teach an Honors course on Collective Violence in American History here at WVU. The College asked me to come up with a video trailer, which is now on Youtube. Maybe it’s a little too dramatic, but I wanted to get students interested in it. I look forward to teaching the course and imagine it will have spinoff content on both Substack and Youtube.
Links to Links Posts
If you like this sort of post, check out: Links for February, Links for March, Links for May.
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