Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I found this inmendham guy on youtube and he's my new favorite batshit theorist.

 

[Dak]

@Ein: Another correlation with that IQ/college problem stat of ~50% of students potentially not smart enough. Over 50% of post secondary respondents on a mental health related survey reported significant issues (stress, anxiety, etc iirc). Can't pull it up atm to see the details, but I'm not surprised.

Not sure if this is the basis for the blurb I read, but I found this:

http://ccmh.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3058/2015/02/2014-CCMH-Annual-Report.pdf

Holy shit a lot of people self harm. I've never even considered self harming, ever. I don't even understand the inclination (like, I know the reason as per textbooks but you know).

Page 20 has most of the relevant charts. Ongoing ~50% reporting attendence for mental health counseling. ~30% medicated (holy fuck). Recent spike to 10% hospitalized. Growing trend of self harm, 21-23%. Hospitalizations trending close to suicide attempts, and spike to ~30% (parallel medication) for considered suicide.

I contend that this issue is significantly traceable to "expanding the franchise" of higher education, which unfortunately has already been significantly dumbed down even over the recent decades to try and "meet them in the middle".

 

[Dak]

Ok, now that I've gone back into the pub sober and more awake, some important qualifications to that data:

This 2015 Annual Report summarizes data contributed to CCMH during the 2014-2015 academic year, closing on June 30, 2015. De-identied data were contributed by 139 college and university counseling centers, describing 100,736 unique college students seeking mental health treatment, 2,770 clinicians, and over 770,000 appointments. e following are critical to understand when reading this report: 1) is report describes college students receiving mental health services, NOT the general college student population. 2) is report is not a survey. e data summarized herein is gathered during routine clinical practice at participating counseling centers, is de-identied, and then contributed to CCMH.

Tried doing some quick searches for data on total student bodies or total counseling and such data is hard to come by, and what I am finding is slightly dated. I did find this:

http://www.collegecounseling.org/wp-content/uploads/NCCCS2014_v2.pdf

Nothing about total numbers of the population, but pretty much everything is trending in the wrong direction.

Edit: Found this, is supposed to be surveying the broad student body

http://healthybodiesstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/HMS_national.pdf

On page 7, reporting only 51*% have "Positive Mental Health". Page 4 has "Key findings". Pretty large sample size, an average of 29% of the total student bodies at participating institutions. Validated measures were used as well, not just new constructs for the survey.

 

[Einherjar86]

This and your previous post are pretty incredible.

Are you correlating poor mental health with poor(er) intelligence? Or are the stats themselves doing that...? I only perused them, honestly. Too many numbers.

 

[Dak]

This and your previous post are pretty incredible.

Are you correlating poor mental health with poor(er) intelligence? Or are the stats themselves doing that...? I only perused them, honestly. Too many numbers.

I'm saying the high levels of anxiety and depression are (probably) partially coming from people being overwhelmed with even the watered down rigour of modern academia, concomitant with the various tugging and challenges of modern cultural expectations of young or excuse me "emerging" adults. It's not a perfect correlation, and some people are a little more "hardy" than others, but I believe there appears to be enough there to go on for someone to start researching in that direction.

Unfortunately it would completely go against the ideology of education and attainment in America: "You can do/be anything!", "Everyone benefits from a college education", etc., and so would have extreme difficulty getting any funding to say the least. At this point anyway.

BTW, with all the recent social media uproar over the Brock Turner thing, and the 1 in 5 number etc getting trotted out as per usual, I found some other data for that. Campus sexual assaults/rapes are one thing generally trending in the correct direction:

http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm saying the high levels of depression of anxiety and depression are (probably) partially coming from people being overwhelmed with even the watered down rigour of modern academia, concomitant with the various tugging and challenges of modern cultural expectations of young or excuse me "emerging" adults. It's not a perfect correlation, and some people are a little more "hardy" than others, but I believe there appears to be enough there to go on for someone to start researching in that direction.

Got it. That might be the case, at least in part.

 

[Dak]

Land linked a thing about the "City State Redux" as I like to think of it.

http://www.xenosystems.net/free-cities/

I'm less excited about this than I used to be, but I'm pretty resigned to it as future-as-the-past.

 

[Einherjar86]

Sounds like a practical example of Deleuzian "line of flight," which he and Guattari go over in A Thousand Plateaus. The more I read Land, the more I think his work is basically a heavily conservative rendering of Deleuzian philosophy.

 

[Dak]

Conservative = "demarxified"?

 

[Einherjar86]

Haha, yeah sure.

Actually, I think Land has a bit of the old conservatism about him, pre-Marxian conservatism. Then again, he's also managed to merge it somehow with a post-Marxist antihumanist bent, so I really have no idea what to think about him.

I also am beginning to reconsider exactly how "Marxist" Deleuze really was. Anti-Oedipus is definitely quasi-Marxist, but his later work - especially A Thousand Plateaus - strikes me as far less so.

 

[Dak]

Well Carlyle is a popular source for Yarvin and I don't see anything from Land where he rejects the Carlylian? aspects of Yarvin's writings. Carlyle barely predates Marx.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

This isn't related to anything going on in here but did you guys ever read the Sam Harris / Noam Chomsky emails?
it's hilarious. Chomsky makes that smug dope look so bad. Harris published his beating

https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse

 

[Dak]

Neither intellectual has said much I find intellectually stimulating.

 

[CiG]

I would tip the scale slightly in favour of Sam Harris, simply because he's willing to say things that piss people off. I like that.

 

[Einherjar86]

Ha, that's funny, I tend to lean the other way.

Overall, it's a pointless exchange. Chomsky is a stubborn old mule at this point, and Harris comes off as a tool for trying to start a substantive debate via email (in this case, both scholars are distinctive enough to secure easy publication - they could have simply had it out in/on more vetted media platforms). To be entirely honest, I almost feel as though Harris looked at the Chomsky/Foucault debate and thought "I should have one of these."

It's also funny to me, personally, because accusations of "misreading" happen all the time - in fact, they're necessary for substantive debate to occur (for a really good example of a substantive exchange over misreading, see Foucault and Derrida's debate over Foucault's work on madness - beginning with the mammoth History of Madness, then Derrida's "Cogito and the History of Madness," and finally Foucault's response, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire"). When an intelligent person like Chomsky purportedly "misreads" someone else's work (which I think he's done more than once), that misreading is culturally important. Unfortunately, this sorry excuse for a debate gets hung up entirely on the positivistic egos of two intellectual superstars. It was doomed from the get-go.

If I have to choose though, I prefer Chomsky. I admit to being mostly unfamiliar with Harris's work, but what I have read (or read about) looks more like rationalization than critical thinking.

 

[Dak]

http://qz.com/709541/amazon-is-just...-and-theyre-already-making-a-huge-difference/

I almost put this in the Mort thread. All those complaints about Amazon's poor employee (contract/temp) treatment are beginning to be responded to. Soon no human will need to worry about mistreatment in an Amazon warehouse. The question is: Who will be buying, and with what?

 

[Dak]

I'm so sick of the opposing echo chambers on gun control. The gun control side is just simply either fundamentally flawed in their presuppositions, or ignorant of the existing situation, at every turn. OTOH we have "gun-nuts" acting like everyone is in constant imminent danger without a 1000 firearms and a billion rounds inside their heavily fortified house with underground bunker. And I have to see the leftoid ignorance and fearmongering and rightist fearmongering every time one of these majorly politicized/media-hyped incidents happens.

 

[Einherjar86]

I used to shoot guns in my younger life. My father and brother owned guns. I've fired handguns, rifles, and shotguns. I owned my own semi-automatic rifle (a Ruger) as well as a bolt-action. I used to read magazines and books on firearms.

At this point in my life, I see absolutely no need for semi-automatic weapons beyond some fantasy scenario in which we're invaded, or in which our big evil government turns on us (ridiculous, I maintain). Bolt- and pump-action weapons, and handguns, are perfectly adequate for home protection. That's my opinion.

As far as all the rhetorical backwash about liberals not knowing the proper terminology for guns (an assault rifle is fully automatic, not semi-auto. etc. etc.), I completely agree - the left propagandizes the firearm debate. But I don't think it changes much, since I'd probably agree even if they called it semi-automatic.

Gun control is a relentlessly politicized debate, so much so that I really can't stand to argue about it. I find issues like this to be far more concerning and scientific:

http://gizmodo.com/coral-reefs-in-florida-are-starting-to-permanently-diss-1774427441

For years, biologists have accumulated evidence of marine calcifiers losing their shells during bouts of undersaturation. But a new study is the first to show that acidification is already leading to widespread reef dissolution, indicating a more permanent and devastating problem.

Writing this week in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Langon and his co-authors describe the results of a two-year field campaign that surveyed a 124-mile stretch of the Florida Reef Tract north of Biscayne National Park to the Looe Key National Marine Sanctuary. Their conclusion? The reefs, which support a $7.6 billion fishing industry, are wasting away.

 

[Dak]

Since you said handguns I assume you meant no need for semiautomatic rifles*. Unless you only meant revolvers. I don't see "needing" them to even be a relevant factor. If things were restricted based on need almost nothing would be legal.

Yeah I think the whole temperature focus distracts from more easily provable and proven issues. Thank you Al Gore Hockeystick Charts. I've long said that carbon emissions aren't nearly as concerning as pollution broadly defined, and plastics. Unfortunately, energy is an absolute requirement for anything remotely close to our current standard of living. Unless some radical breakthrough materializes, we will have to embrace nuclear power if we wish to move away from carbon based fuel sources. Even doing so, this does little to combat broad pollution.

 

[Einherjar86]

Yeah, I only meant semi-automatic rifles. There are significant ballistic differences between rifles and handguns, and the effects they have on tissue.

As far as global warming goes, a lot of people will begin to care a hell of a lot more when the fishing industry collapses.