Links for January, 2025
Incels, Networks, Trump EOs, Bible History, CS Lewis, Homeschooling
Welcome! If you’d like to support Bullfish Hole, you can leave a one-time tip at this Stripe link. Or become a paid subscriber with the button below.
Now, here’s my monthly roundup of items from around the interwebs.
Old Business
An archaeologist in Arizona has found a nearly 500-year-old bronze cannon, the oldest gun ever found in America. It is a relic of the 1542 Coronado Expedition, which penetrated as far North as Kansas. I can picture Young Indy shouting, “It belongs in a museum!” H/t David Hines.
The Astor Palace Riot of 1849 took place at a Manhattan opera house and left between 22 and 31 people dead. The cause? A fight over who was the better Shakespearean actor: American Edwin Forrest or Englishman William Charles MacCready. Partisanship fell along class rather than ethnic lines, with both the Irish immigrants of the Five Points and their usual enemies, the nativist Anglo-Americans of the Bowery, uniting to support Forrest as the manlier American choice. H/t Aaron Astor by way of Bradley Campbell.
On Youtube, an 18-lecture course on the historical Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman. Ehrman begins by summarizing the sources — the Gospels, apocrypha, and Josephus — and their reliability. He builds to his thesis that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish preacher who made no break from Judaism and never claimed to be divine, with all that stuff added on later as the sect grew and mutated.
Ehrman began his studies as a Christian before concluding Jesus a mere man and eventually losing all faith.
On the opposite trajectory, reporter Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ is the work of someone who started off a skeptic and became a believer. The book really should be called The Case for Jesus, though, as much of it deals with the argument that Jesus didn’t exist as a historical person. I always thought that one just fell down on sociological grounds — even if the faith be just another cult, cults have charismatic leaders! Strobel’s interviewees (all believers, if I recall) also push back against the revisionist view of Jesus as a revolutionary Zealot, and against the Ehrman view that claims of divinity are later additions.
FYI, there is also a lecture series on Youtube entitled The Case for Jesus — but this should really swap titles with Strobel’s book, as it’s focused on the argument that Jesus is divine.
Same region, different millennium: The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finklestein and Neil Asher Silberman, summarizes archaeological evidence that the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan could not have happened as described in the Bible. But in The Exodus, Richard Eliot Friedman argues that Exodus is a mostly accurate account of the history of the Levites — and only the Levites, who came out of Egypt and eventually fused with other Canaanite tribes to make up ancient Israel.
If you want an argument that will annoy both secular archaeologists and Bible believers, see my review of military historian Richard A. Gabriel’s God’s Generals. He also says Buddha had PTSD and Muhammad’s angelic visitations were induced by malaria.
New Business
A year ago, I reviewed Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke. He argues the Great Awokening is downstream of government policies, such as Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order mandating Affirmative Action. He also argues that what executive actions and court decisions can make, they can unmake.
Smash cut to President Trump’s recent executive order rescinding the Johnson EO and ordering a halt to DEI activities in government and government contractors.
West Virginia’s new governor, Patrick Morrisey, beat Trump to the punch with a statewide EO calling for an end to all DEI in any publicly funded institutions.
Many — including academics who’ve come to see DEI activities as part and parcel of their disciplines — will look to undermine the orders. My guess is that such efforts will go better in places with sympathetic state governments. Doing it when the state and president are on the same page seems unwise. But a lot of leftist academics will have trouble realizing someone else has the whip hand now, since they were unable to perceive that they had it before.
Beyond the object level, it’s weird to look at the flurry of Day 1 Executive Orders and realize that, should the opposition take the White House in four years, there will be another flurry of actions undoing them. Moving legislative functions to the so-called executive branch is going to make for interesting times.
If you want to keep up with Trump’s many EO’s, and which are facing legal challenges, check out Executive Order Tracker 2025 by Ben Shindel of The BS Detector.
Homeschooling
Mountaineer Homeschool Hub has a new six-week session of classes starting in February. If you’re a homeschooler in the area, consider finding one that suits you.
Math Academy uses custom AI instruction to help users learn math quickly. I haven’t tried it yet and am mostly linking it here as a reminder to do so. There is clearly a potential application for homeschoolers. Pointer from Tracing Woodgrains.
Ryan Burge at Graphs about Religion examines the religion and politics of homeschoolers. Caveat: His data are on college students who were homeschooled versus college students of different backgrounds, so they might not generalize to the non-college population.
As you would expect, homeschoolers skew religious — even more so than those who attended parochial schools. They also skew Protestant: “The takeaway from this graph is that Catholic kids who don’t want to go to public school go to a parochial school. For Protestants, they tend to homeschool.”
Regarding politics, homeschoolers in college lean slightly to the political right, but in partisan terms tend to identify as independent. Kids who went to public magnet schools are the most left-leaning group in his charts.
Networks and Social Ties
I recommend this piece by cognitive scientist Cody Moser on networks and innovation. His argument is that social networks can either be optimized to explore — to find new information and create new solutions — or to exploit what is already known. Online networks are increasingly optimized for the latter. A major factor is centralization — not just in the sense that more and more people are on the same online platforms, but that the network structure of the platforms is getting tighter:
In 2008, Facebook reported that the average distance between two users, as measured by the people between them, was 5.28 degrees or people; by 2011, it had decreased to 4.74; and to a meagre 3.57 people between you and any one of Facebook’s 1.59 billion users in 2016.
With everyone more closely connected, truly isolated fringes became rare, and conversations homogenize.
My argument would be that although it is true that people are engaging in discourse more than ever online, the diversity of things over which they are disagreeing is decreasing rapidly, meaning that fewer and fewer critical or innovative discussions are happening.
As fringe information is lost, so too are specialized, non-mainstream topics: you find more and more pundits, scientists, and commentators becoming COVID experts, Afghan policy strategists, and general information podcasters simply because this is where the information demand has led them. In other words, our information is stagnating as we are guided to talk about information which is considered appealing to the average internet user.
The rise of content curated by algorithms contributes to a network optimized for exploitation rather than exploration:
The speed at which popular memes originating from obscure online forums are exploited and passed around, passing as they do so through a seemingly infinite number of iterations, is staggering. This is the highly connected network exploiting what little novelty it has been provided with. That is no accident—a highly efficient network should and indeed must circulate information with such alacrity that any surprising joke or meme we find funny will repeat itself so fast and so frequently that we become bored within mere minutes of first seeing it.
The whole thing is worth reading.
While networks of weak ties are increasingly efficient, strong ties and face-to-face contacts continue to wane. Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic of “The Anti-Social Century.” For non-subscribers, he goes over highlights in a thread on X. Some excerpts:
2. The typical American is now alone more than in any period where we have decent data, going back to at least 1965
4. America's social depression is far-reaching. The share of adults having dinner or drinks with friends on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50%.
Both lack of personal contact and algorithmic efficiency likely contribute to the weird blackpilling of young men on women and marriage.
At The Normie Restoration, Natalia Antonova discusses “the recurring trend of incel and manosphere accounts taking unflattering or simply unglamorous photos of famous women without makeup and claiming that they’re ‘catfishing.’”
I noticed one of these making the rounds last week, claiming that a candid photo of Sydney Sweeney sunbathing revealed her as some sort of fraud who wasn’t actually physically attractive. Antonova’s title, “If You’ve Never Woken Up Next to a Woman,” gives away her thesis: A lot of this is rooted in men lacking experience with real women. She writes: “in an age where less young men are approaching women, we should probably take note of the weirdos who expect us to be perfectly airbrushed at all times”
I reckon there’s two mechanisms here. One, as the author suggests, is that men who are inexperienced with real women or real sex tend to have their standards heavily shaped by fantasy women and fantasy sex. If you’ve conditioned yourself to get turned on by fantasy, reality might be a turnoff, and it takes some experience with the real thing to recondition yourself. And with dating and face to face interactions in general on the decline….
The other mechanism is older than feudalism: 2,500 years ago, the Greeks had a fable about it. When the fox couldn’t reach the grapes, he declared that they must be sour.
Richard Dawkins observed that belief in Hell and belief in Salvation are a great memetic package, one that combines the problem with its solution. It seems to me blackpill influencers like Pearl Davis are selling a more miserable meme package: Convince young men they have no chance of reaching the grapes (sex, love, marriage), then offer the solace of sourness (women are all ugly, lying, unfaithful, etc.). Call it misery farming.
I don’t know if anyone much younger than me reads Bullfish Hole, but kids: People selling you blackpills are not your friends. The correct response to the Wormtongues is “Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth!”
Having slipped in a Tolkien reference, let’s move on to Lewis.
That Hideous Strength
My commuting audiobook this past month has been That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. I’d never read Lewis before, as I’d never had much interest in the Narnia series of fantasy books. That Hideous Strength is quite good, though. It combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. In this it can be almost Lovecraftian, with gradual revelations about eldritch forces from the stars and the bizarre cults they spawn on earth.
There’s also a lot of cutting observations about human foibles, particularly those of the young, modern, and ambitious. It reminds me of Ayn Rand’s scathing descriptions of social climbers and bureaucrats. I would even describe one of Lewis’s main characters as Peter Keating from The Fountainhead with the banality of evil twist that he’s schmoozing his way into the company of monsters.
But the Randian and Lovecraftian elements are tempered by Lewis’s Christian belief that the universe is meaningful, salvation is possible, and good can win. I don’t want to spoil it, but rest assured it’s not a downer ending.
I read Grant Morrison’s comic series The Invisibles long before I read this, and now I think that Morrison’s work owes a lot to it. Only Morrison’s story is full of gnostic elements, so it’s like That Hideous Strength and the Nag Hamadi had a baby.
On The Theology Pugcast, the host makes the argument that Strength should be classed as one of the great dystopian novels, like 1984 or Brave New World. I was intrigued by the notion that which of these is “the dystopia we’re heading for” changes from decade to decade. The host argues Strength is now the most likely and accurate of the bunch.
And, of course, the aggressive Youtube algorithm referred me to another dozen videos with similar claims that the book was prophetic and describes the modern dystopia. I guess this is what Moser was talking about with networks geared for exploitation rather than discovery.
So long and come again! If you’d like to support Bullfish Hole, you can leave a one-time tip at this Stripe link. Or become a paid subscriber with the button below.
Substacks cited above:
(The Normie Restoration); (Graphs about Religion);