Links for October 2025
Spookiness, Feminization, Dutch Disease, Heists and Cons, Biology
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Spooky Stuff
Given my proclivity for folk tales, a friend brings my attention to the Ogua, a twenty-foot long, two-headed alligator snapping turtle said to haunt the rivers of West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania:
The Ogua was first reported in 1745 in Hoult, West Virginia. According to legend, a 12 year old boy was allegedly pulled under water by the Ogua while fishing with his family. The boy was never seen again.
The creature must be long-lived, since it was reported again in 2003 by some fishermen in Pittsburg. But it remains lesser known than other regional cryptids, like the Flatwoods Monster, and perhaps equally obscure as the Sheepsquatch.
The weirdest ghost story I’ve seen in a long time comes from a book I’ve yet to read: My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain. The relevant excerpt was screencapped on X by Westerns and the Old West, and is reproduced at Y’allogy as “The Ghost of Zacatecas Pass.”
Chamberlain’s account is from 1847, when he was serving in the military in Texas:
I was on the outpost one afternoon, the sun a good hour high, the air clear and calm….
I was thinking of nothing in particular when I caught sight of an object moving on the plain about two miles off. It was moving at right angles to the road, and seem’d to be moving at a slow walk….
On it came, until I could make out a figure of a man, or what resembled a well-got-up scarecrow broke loose from some Yankee cornfield and taking a promenade out in Mexico for the fun of the thing. Its method of locomotion was peculiarly its own; it revolved like a top in a most unaccountable and mysterious manner.
My steed showed symptoms of affright, pawing and snorting, and tried to bolt with me. I slung my Carbine and waited, my predominating feeling being that of curiosity. It appeared to be a man dressed in the stereotype stage costume of an English clodhopper, a slate-colored smock frock, knee breeches, hob-nail shoes, and a slouch felt hat. Its hair was long and tow colored, and the face! No tongue can describe the awful ghastliness of the features, and the terrible despair that glared from its stoney eyes. It was horrible, unearthly!
Chamberlain goes on to describe how several fellow soldiers arrived and witnessed the apparition. One of them panicked and fled because it looked like the ghost of a person he’d known back in Ireland. The rest attempted to shoot the thing, to no effect, and their lassos slipped through like it wasn’t there. But when one man got close trying to engage with a saber, the whirling entity threw him to the ground — despite its twirling never stirring dust from the parched earth. It continued on across the desert until it was out of sight over a ridge.
Sharing the story on X, David Hines comments: “To me, this reads uncannily like a description of a ragdoll glitch in a video game. Oldest argument for a simulation?”
Other spooky entertainment: The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets is a band with many H.P. Lovecraft themed songs, such as “Yog-Sothoth,” “Nyarlathotep” (sung in Middle Egyptian), and my personal favorite, “The Innsmouth Look.”
I find it weird when people my age lament how much better kids shows used to be, as if you can’t still find that stuff and show it to your own kids. Along those lines, here’s The Real Ghostbusters episode “When Halloween was Forever.” My son absolutely loved this. If that’s too spooky for yours, see also “The Berenstain Bears: The Spookiest Pumpkin.”
Woman’s Work
The argument, in short, is that 1) once an institution has a sufficiently high percentage of women, it hits a tipping point where men are increasingly repelled from the feminine culture, 2) a lot of institutions have hit or will soon hit this point, 3), they’ve hit it as the result of a generation of government effort, 4) some of our institutions depend on male-typical culture and won’t function as well if they’re completely feminized. For instance, academic science shifts from a focus open debate toward a focus on consensus and harmony, which doesn’t bode well for truth-seeking. She concludes:
I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.
Responses range from shouts of hallelujah! to measured skepticism to almost willful misunderstandings of what she actually argued.
Arnold Kling has his own collection of links to reactions. Laura Kennedy argues:
Having spent time in academic departments before and during the most insane era of what Andrews calls ‘feminisation’, I’ve never found academic environments to be as focused on ‘unfettered truth’ as they are on status signalling, collegial competition and resentment, funding and political expediency.
All this says is that there was never a Garden of Eden in academia. But trigger warnings and micro-aggressions and other manifestations of victimhood culture were much scarcer in male-dominated spaces.
He elaborates in a post “Feminization and Victimhood Culture” that cites Campell and I’s work. He thinks feminization is to blame for academia’s shift from dignity culture to victimhood culture.
Yet Campbell himself argues on X that feminization can’t explain all the current cultural shifts, pointing out, for example, that the all-female teaching staff of his own school years were fine with hierarchy, corporal punishment, religious traditionalism, and dignity norms:
Kids got paddled at the principal’s office, we lined up & prayed every day before lunch (yes, public school), we said the pledge, we were told not to whine, fair play was emphasized. Don’t think they exactly said “facts don’t care about your feelings” but things like that.
“Sticks & stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” “Can’t never could do anything.” They were anti-woke aphorism generators. Why didn’t this feminized profession look like what Andrews describes? Things must at least be more complicated.
For my part: Ever since Campbell and I wrote our book, I’ve wondered about the reciprocal effects of victimhood culture and sex composition. Our book focuses on how social structure shapes culture. But I think the aggregation of individual personalities can shape it as well. Moreover, structures, and the cultures they produce, tend to attract certain personalities, and the selection effect then makes the culture even more extreme.
So, for example, an extensive bureaucracy for managing conflict encourages victimhood culture, and also tends to repel certain personalities (including ones found disproportionately among men) while attracting others (including ones found disproportionately among women). The selection effect then amplifies the original effect.
To give an example with a different moral culture: The typical woman couldn’t thrive in a 19th century mining outpost or turpentine camp, and without female civilizing influence the violent masculine honor culture of those places was all the more unhinged.
Sex composition likely has something to do with declining tolerance for dissent in academia. Just a day before the Andrews piece dropped, Chapin Lenthal-Cleary at The Eternally Radical Idea published research by FIRE showing that:
Amazingly, it turns out that men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side….
Men are, on average, significantly more tolerant and less censorious than women. By contrast, while political affiliation makes people more biased towards speakers on their side, it affects their overall willingness to let speakers speak, regardless of ideology, very little. However, regardless of party or ideology, men are significantly more tolerant than women, so much so that the gender difference dominates the ideology difference. This effect is even more acute in the extremes: men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be “perfectly tolerant” of opposing views — meaning they would definitely allow any campus speakers, including those they disagree with.
Psychologist Cory Clark is atypical of her sex modern academics in general, in that she doesn’t shy away from controversial topics. Thus her new piece “From Worriers to Warriors: The Cultural Rise of Women” in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. From the abstract:
I review research showing that sex differences in self-reported academic priorities correspond to recent institutional changes, including (1) preference for equity (e.g., DEI initiatives, grade inflation), (2) prioritization of harm-avoidance (e.g., trigger warnings, safe spaces), and (3) increased ostracism (e.g., cancel culture).
The timing of Andrews’ piece is interesting, coming a day after Lenthal-Cleary’s piece and a few weeks before the full text of Clark’s paper.
But similar ideas have been floated before. About a year ago, John Carter wrote of “Academia is Women’s Work.” His focus is less on fitting-in with sex-typical culture and more on the evolutionary psychology of status competition, claiming that men are drawn to competing in male hierarchies, thus any activity sufficiently female-coded tends to repel men.
For all his focus on sex differences, he does have a nod to structural factors that is consistent with my approach:
Outside of information technology, we’ve been in the doldrums of intellectual progress for a long time. This stalling out of scientific advancement has a lot to do with the bureaucratization of science as anything else – the decline started long before women entered the academy in large numbers, more or less at the time that large national funding agencies took over, enforcing peer review and turning academic research into an endless quest to please the grant commitee – but the growing presence of women has almost certainly been a contributing factor.
Another idea he advances is that since both men and women are more attuned to male status hierarchies (males have selection pressures not to be losers, females have pressure not to marry losers), women’s work is doomed to lower prestige among everyone. Witness how efforts to raise the stature of women focus on getting women in STEM rather than praising already female-led occupations.
If that’s true, it’s a shame, since a lot of female roles ought to command more respect than they do. I was recently at a gathering of homeschool parents where I was the only dad and the moms were all telling their birth stories. I felt like a civilian among combat vets. It made me think that those who’ve been through the difficult, painful, and (historically at least) dangerous process of creating human life ought to get at least as much admiration as earning a Purple Heart.
FYI, with any evolutionary psychology claim, you might want to first run it by anthropologist Will Buckner, who has read a ton of ethnography and can immediately tell you of some societies where things work differently.
Smooth Criminals
You may have heard that someone recently stole valuable crown jewels from the Louvre Museum in Paris. The thieves were disguised as construction workers.
Bradley Campbell pointed me toward a crazier heist: The 1303 theft of treasure from Westminster Abbey in England. From an article at Voyager of History:
In his confession, Pudlicote revealed how he had managed to do the robbery. It took him 98 days (roughly 3 months), between Christmas and just after Easter, to dig a tunnel under the abbey grounds.
….Amazingly, the crime wasn’t discovered until early June as on the 6th, Edward I ordered an investigation into the robbery. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been discovered for a lot longer if it hadn’t had been for the pawnshops and brothels the treasures ended up in.
The tunneling project was audacious, but ultimately this guy was less impressive than Hungarian conman Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln:
Among his adventures, he posed as a Protestant missionary, Anglican priest, British Member of Parliament for Darlington, German right-wing politician and spy, Nazi collaborator, Buddhist abbot in China, and self-proclaimed Dalai Lama.
Pointer from Tim Hamilton, who compares him Josiah Harland, an American adventurer who may have briefly been King of Afghanistan, or at least Prince of Ghor. Bouncing around the service of the region’s warlords, Harland at one point crossed the Hindu Kush with an army that included a war elephant as a nod to Alexander the Great. He was back in America during the Civil War, at age 62, to raise a private regiment and declare himself a Union general despite no former experience in the US Army.
Political Economy
One topic Martin Skold addressed in his recent appearance on my podcast was the Triffin Dilemma, related to the concept of Dutch Disease, in which financial power leads to deindustrialization and eventually loss of real power. Wars are won by tanks and ships, or maybe nowadays by drones and hypersonic missiles. Theoretically one could use money to buy those things, but what if your main adversary is the only one with the infrastructure to make them?
Relevant to that problem is this Palladium article on “How GDP Hides Industrial Decline.”
Total Health Optimization quickly responded with a detailed rebuttal of the Palladium piece, pointing out various basic (and, the author claims, embarrassing) errors.
Aaron M. Ren then added a partial rebuttal of the rebuttal, arguing it points out real problems with the Palladium piece, but:
essentially grants the Palladium piece’s most important argument, namely that in critical areas our reported manufacturing value added has gone up at the same time the number of units being produced has declined - and that the public doesn’t necessarily understand this when it reads an article about our all-time high manufacturing levels or some such. He just claims it doesn’t matter. But it does matter.
Relatedly, scholar of Chinese politics and political economy Hongshen Zhu says:
I taught Dutch Disease in my political economy class. My Classical Chinese colleague heard about it and instantly recognised that’s ancient China philosopher Guan Zhong’s (700-645 BC) strategy to trick the neighbour state to abandon agriculture by stimulating non-agricultural demand in trade with them.
His impression is that this strategy has gone largely unrecognized in Western tradition. This is consequential, since “if you lose essential industries (agriculture for 650 BC, manufacturing for 2020 AD), your survival is at stake.”
Don’t Know Much Biology
Maybe you remember the crazy claims a few years back that someone had found soft, unfossilized tissue inside a T. rex bone? Well, a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A claims to confirm that it is in fact dinosaur tissue that somehow survived for many millions of years without turning to stone. It seems to me this story ought to be a bigger deal! [Cue John Williams music.]
An article at Aporia asks if parasites can alter how the human brain works. In short: Yes. Consider toxoplasma gondii:
Like other animal hosts, infected humans undergo mental and behavioral changes, with men becoming more jealous and women more easy-going. Infected individuals of both sexes respond more slowly to threats, as shown by a higher risk of traffic accidents and longer reaction time. The last finding reveals the direction of causality: the longer you have been infected, the slower you react.
Weird and creepy to think about, perhaps. But given that nature is rife with parasites that manipulate their hosts in ways both subtle and dramatic, it would weirder if some microbe or another wasn’t messing with our brains.
Speaking of brains: Terminal lucidity is a term for when people who have been incoherent or unable to communicate — say, from advanced dementia — suddenly become clear-headed in the days or hours before death. In his recent book on religion, Charles Murray considers it evidence that consciousness is not purely material. Ralph Stefan Weir at Psychology Today responds by arguing that neuroscience can indeed explain the phenomenon — at least in principle. The exact mechanism is still a mystery.
Time for Whale Talk: Have you ever heard of the 52-hertz whale?
The whale itself has never been sighted: it has only been heard via hydrophones, but its call has been detected since the late 1980s in a pattern that matches the migration of the blue whale and the fin whale. Those species call at 10 to 39 Hz and 20 Hz respectively. Described as the “world’s loneliest whale”, it appeared to be the only individual emitting a whale call at this frequency.
Pointer from Fenton Wood. One ought to cook up a crazy theory connecting this whale to those UFOs recorded by the US Navy. All it takes is a little inspiration from The Abyss and Star Trek IV.
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