Anybody involved with a university in the western world knows there are serious problems. Ideological capture by a hateful, anti-social cult movement certainly looms large, but there were systemic problems predating the rise of violent leftism that still burden the system and its unfortunate student charges in 2021. Chief among these problems are administrative bloat and the resulting skyrocketing tuition costs, the accumulation of crippling levels of student debt, the lack of incentive to guide students into employable majors, an ever-decreasing level of rigor in coursework, and a systemic lack of concern for the fate of working-class students and especially those who begin their education at community colleges. The consequences of ignoring all of these problems are dire; those of us in Red State World increasingly contemplate not sending our children to university at all. Financially, the system cannot stand if half the country — the most productive half — abandons it. And that would be a tragedy, as these institutions used to be great beacons of hope for mankind’s future.
So we should fix it, but how? Personally, I’m a low-rent nobody, so my opinions wouldn’t matter even if anybody listened to them. Fortunately, others with more pull are thinking seriously about the topic. Here’s a list of solid suggestions from the James Martin Institute for Academic Renewal, worth reading for anyone living inside the academic bubble:
As those of you who follow this blog know, I don’t have a lot of social media exposure any more. That’s good for my peace of mind, but not so good when I want to get the word out about something. So let’s see if enough people read this blog to make a difference. My PhD student’s daughter has run into some pretty nasty health problems that are keeping her from being able to work, and the pandemic has made it difficult for her to get the treatment she needs. She has surgery scheduled, but there’s going to be a long recovery period, and she and her mom could really use some financial help getting through it. Most of you have been grad students at some point in your lives as well, and some of you know what it’s like juggling kids and work on the meager pay you make as a TA/RA. If you find yourself in a better place financially now than back then, please consider donating a little something to Melissa and McKenna’s GoFundMe: https://gf.me/u/zcvacz
So it’s been a year today since a howling mob of leftist scumbags tried to destroy me for holding the position that Wokianity was vastly more dangerous than any element of the modern right wing. I’m still here. In the early days it was touch-and-go, and I had a few people tell me to fuck off, either because they themselves had signed up with the cult, or because they were terrified of getting the same treatment themselves. Anonymous activists (I assume there’s more than one, though I have no idea honestly) nearly wrecked two of my funded projects by threatening my collaborators (or their bosses) and generally managed to cause havoc for me in everything I did for months. At the peak of things I had police guarding my class.
I won’t lie, it was an incredibly unpleasant experience. Possibly the most traumatic thing I’ve experienced, which is saying a lot. I drank too much, experimented briefly with SSRIs, and gained weight. What made it even worse was the degree to which the mob was able to torment my friends and colleagues, whose only “crime” was knowing me. Prior to all of this I had a low opinion of the political left, but after seeing all of this behavior first hand, I can confidently say that I despise them, that I genuinely hate them in a way I could never imagine hating anything previously. There is nothing redeeming about the Woke mob; they serve no useful purpose, they contribute nothing of value to the conversation or to society as a whole. They are like the Anopheles mosquito; horrible pests that ruin human lives with no evident positive role in the environment to offset the damage they cause. I grudgingly acknowledge their right to speak their minds; but the serial harassment and mob violence they facilitate is a pox that must be eliminated by force of law if we have any interest in preserving liberty in our society.
A year ago, many people adjacent to me were surprised by what was happening, and didn’t know how to respond. But now? It has happened to so many others that it surprises no one. Every day you see reports of another scientist “cancelled” by a mob of communist shitweasels: here’s today’s unfortunate wretch, who just yesterday was an accomplished physician and researcher but now is a pariah thought criminal for reasons. What happened to me was just foreshadowing, a taste of what was in store for most of us eventually; no academic is woke enough to survive the purity spiral forever. If we don’t figure out a way to stop these people, the entire edifice of western science will be cordycepted and lobotomized faster than you can say “Lysenko”.
Someday I will tell the whole story of the months following my “cancellation”. There are some people whose behavior was so egregious they deserve to be named and shamed unto the ends of the Earth. Others were brave and principled, including not a few who certainly do not agree with me politically, but who recognized the importance of freedom of speech and the threat posed by the Mob and were willing to take substantial professional risks in support of our American way. Yet others were simple cowards, who know they should have supported me publicly but kept their heads down when it counted. But that story will have to wait for another day. Right now, I have science to do, classes to prepare for, and crops to harvest. My closing statement to those who hoped I would be struggling to find work as a trash collector by now: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, commie.”
Yesterday, conservative columnist Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, a publication that I subscribed to back during the hideous reign of George W. Bush, noted that Google had essentially “memory holed” his work:
So, apparently it's happening to other conservative writers and websites too, this sudden blacklisting by @google. Is it a conscious choice by Google, or a hack? Whatever the truth, it's a reminder that Google has far too much control over information access.
This started a wave of right-wing commentators checking their own sites, and finding that Google — but not Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc — had buried them completely. Not just that your site wouldn’t come up on the first Google page, but that it wouldn’t come up at all even if you used very specific search terms.
The notion of the “memory hole” comes from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The main character, Winston, works for the ‘Ministry of Truth’ where he is tasked with falsifying history. Whenever the Party that rules his nightmare Britain changes its policy, agents at ‘MiniTru’ go back through all surviving historical documents and alter them to make it seems as if the current policy had always been the only policy. Any piece of information suggesting otherwise — along with the orders from above to change the records — are dropped into a chute by Winston’s workstation where they are incinerated instantly. This is the “memory hole” — where all unapproved information goes to die.
Google and other tech giants have unprecedented control over what we see and read. There banishment of conservative thought represents a real-life version of the memory hole. Perhaps more concerning is the migration of books, film, scientific publications, and government records to the Cloud, such that most people access them from a central database that leaves no hard copy behind, and such that the tech giants are solely responsible for maintaining them. The possibility to engage in tampering with history on a massive scale simply by writing a program, perhaps an AI, that goes through all of that material and scrubs certain ideas or thoughts, is terrifying. Imagine a future where the only copies of Huckleberry Finn on Earth are Kindle e-books, and an AI has purged them of the “N-word” (god I hate that weaselly evasion) and any other concepts that might trigger an SJW. Imagine in two generations nobody even realizing this is going on anymore. Horrifying.
The memory hole is bad, but there is another side of it as well that I’m not sure Orwell envisioned. In his world, thought criminals where simply rounded up by the Party and tortured into submission. In our own dystopia, thought criminals are instead shamed and ostracized by our own Party of corporate HR departments and their leftist radical online stormtroopers — using the electronic tools available to them from the tech giants. Twitter is ground zero for this effort, and one can’t escape it; even if one has the sense to stay off of it, rumors and smears about your heterodoxy easily metastasize like tumor cells through Twitter where they can ruin your reputation forever.
In one of my most-read posts, I wrote about my suspicion that Twitter’s algorithms are evolving to sow discord and misery in the human species. But I think Google may be doing something similar as well. It seems unlikely that leftist goons in Google’s dungeons manually annihilated Rod Dreher’s online presence. He’s not that big of a fish, and he’s not that offensive in the grand scheme of things. Instead, it seems more likely that an algorithm is working against conservatism and libertarianism sensu lato, somehow learning keywords or phrases that can be used to bury people in the search results. In other words, an automated memory hole let loose on the world to scrub unapproved thought; an AI-like entity whose job is to devour thoughts and reduce the achievable range of human conversation.
There’s another side to the Google story though — an anti memory hole if you will, that boosts content critical of conservative positions. If you Google my name by itself, all you find is the world’s most famous Jeff Morris, a cowboy actor from the glory days of Western films. If instead you Google “Jeff Morris UAB” (the university where I work), the first hit is my faculty page, but the next hit is to the semi-literate hit piece written about me by the journalist LARPers at our campus newspaper. (Seriously, it’s so bad that it went to print with the name of this blog misspelled…) Beneath that, in the top 10 hits, are three other links to the communist freak-out about my post arguing that Rashida Tlaib was more dangerous than any living white nationalist in the United States. Google also helpfully suggests that you might also want to do a search for “Jeff Morris White Nationalist” while you’re at it. Too bad you can’t sue an algorithm for libel.
What’s up with that? I have certainly done things with broader impact than dissing seditious congresswomen on the Internet, even if you take into consideration the thousands of people who were funneled toward that post by a few academic serial harassers on Twitter like arch-commie Kevin Bird. As of the publication of this article, my most famous scientific paper has been downloaded over 12,000 times, cited over 500 times, and has inspired research in a goodly number of other labs — but nothing about it makes the front page on Google. Nope, Google thinks more people care about me being yelled at by neckbeards on Twitter.
You might think, well, only a narrow segment of humanity cares about evolutionary theory compared to the number of wild-eyed screaming Bernie-bros out there. But if that were the cause then you would expect the same results if you search for me on other search engines, and that most definitely is not the case. On DuckDuckGo, in the top 10 hits there is only one focused on my “cancellation” — and that to a reddit post that doesn’t even show up on Google. You keep scrolling to the next 10 results and there aren’t any at all about the cancellation, but many about my research. Similarly on Bing — you get the reddit post, but nothing else even if you keep going for 50 more hits. Completely absent are the goofy speculations of our campus Barbara Walters-wannabe and the Twitter threads using me as a whipping-boy for attacks on freedom of speech. Neither Bing nor DuckDuckGo suggests that you might link me to “white nationalism” either — even though the clueless student who wrote the reddit post accused me of just that in the title of his post, meaning that both DuckDuckGo and Bing would have more justification in making such a connection than Google does.
So here, instead of the memory hole that buries pro-rightwing thought, we have a memory megaphone where Google boosts the signal of radical leftist cancel culture mobs. Again, I find it hard to believe that some pink-haired goon in a Google cubicle singled me out for abuse — this has to be automated somehow. But if Google has put in place an algorithm whose specific function is to harass people, this has got to be illegal. If it’s not, it needs to be.
For now the solution is obvious — if you aren’t a commie scumbag, use DuckDuckGo. But given the degree to which Google has its tentacles interlaced through almost every bottleneck in our tech infrastructure — not to mention its ties to the totalitarian rulers of China — it is necessary for legislators to address this kind of behavior as soon as possible.
Tl;dr — this post ran a little long. If you get bored, scroll down to the bottom to see the cool math.
It’s been over three months since we all fled to our bunkers in terror of the coronavirus. Many parts of the country have now partially re-opened, but there still appears to be a massive media push favoring re-closing everything. Or, at least, to keep the inchoate fear of the virus burning bright in as many minds as possible. Infuriatingly, it’s become a political question, with people on the left (even the center-left) generally having higher levels of risk aversion regarding the virus than those on the right. Massive streams of exaggeration and misinformation spew from the leftist legacy media, and coupled with the explosion of overtly Communist anti-American hatred coming from that same sector, one can’t help but suspect the real aim has nothing to do with protecting people from the virus, but rather to terrorize administrators into shutting down the economy again in order to exacerbate tensions and ultimately achieve a genuine revolutionary collapse of the American system.
It’s all bullshit. Nobody should still be worrying about this virus – not because it isn’t dangerous, but because the way forward is, or at least should be, clear. In March, it was still something of a mystery – we didn’t know what the actual death rate was, or how many people had it, or how it spread, etc – but now we have a much better understanding of all of these things. Here, I am going to make a case that it is time to re-open nearly all aspects of American life with minimal ongoing antivirus precautions.
1. THERE ISN’T GOING TO BE A VACCINE. One of the biggest problems with the shutdowns, and one that is causing the biggest hassle for administrators now, is that there was never a clear end-game. Originally, the argument for shutdown – which was a good argument – was that we needed to slow the transmission of the virus enough to keep from overwhelming hospitals. But we now know that was an over-reaction. In March, the possibility existed that the virus would kill as much as 4% of its victims – much higher than the real rate of ~0.5%. The huge surge of ICU victims for the most part never materialized – because the virus was not as dangerous as we thought. Unfortunately, the rampant fear-mongering in the media about the virus changed the focus of the shutdown from “slowing the spread” to “eradicating the virus”, which was an impossible goal without a vaccine. So, the implicit endgame became “the shutdown ends when a vaccine or a highly effective treatment is available”. And despite the fact that great labs are working on both, there is simply no reason to expect that either of these things will ever be available, at least not within the next few years. The fastest deployment of a vaccine I remember was the ebola vaccine, which was first announced 4 or 5 years after the first really big ebola outbreak. That was an amazing effort – but it still took 5 years… hence my second point:
2. WE CANNOT KEEP THE UNITED STATES SHUT DOWN FOR FIVE YEARS.In a previous post I analyzed the relative lethality of a massive pandemic in comparison to a massive economic depression. The latter is vastly worse, and the depression that would be caused by literally arresting the economy would be worse than any depression that has ever occurred in the free world. Indeed, it would likely resemble the conditions experienced in socialist countries – massive shortages, starvation, privation on an unimaginable scale. Indeed, with the rise of overt Marxist revolutionary politics as the de facto norm on the American left, this threat looms even larger. An economic collapse caused by prolonged shutdown would almost certainly be used to “dismantle” the system and replace it with a totalitarian nightmare “to protect us” from the virus. But another thing…
3. WE CAN’T ENFORCE A SHUT DOWN FOREVER EVEN IF WE WANTED TO. People aren’t going to allow any of these things to happen. As the situation gets more dire – either on each person’s individual plane, or on the broader societal plane – people of strong convictions will break quarantine and do what needs to be done. You have already seen this all over the country. People go back to work despite government threats of fines. “Protesters” churn out into the streets to attack the government they have been convinced is hurting them. People flock to bars and beaches to achieve the social connections we have evolved to need as prosocial animals. The only way to prevent these things is with wholesale coercion by force – but imagine that! Police rousting up twenty-somethings from bars by the hundreds, shutting down business establishments, crushing protests by force. Number one, it would encourage an even faster collapse of the social order than is already happening – but number two, it would also require EVEN MORE close contact between people, as police arrested them and as they were housed in cramped detention facilities. Force used to stop the virus would ultimately increase the virus’ spread.
4. WE’RE CLOSER TO HERD IMMUNITY THAN YOU THINK. Ultimately the only way out of this thing is to achieve herd immunity. Once most people have had the virus and therefore become at least partially immune to future infection, it will become harder for an infected person to find a vulnerable person to spread the virus to, and it will start to die off (although it will probably never die out). The proportion of the population that has to be infected to achieve this is determined by the R0 value of the virus, or the average number of people an infected person will infect before they recover if they live in a population of completely susceptible people. Early estimates for the coronavirus were R0 = 3, although this value is open for debate and was probably high based on the spotty data available early on. But let’s run with it. At an R0 of 3, 1-1/R0 or 67% of the population has to have been infected to achieve herd immunity (this is based on an equilibrium solution for the “SIR” epidemiological model, explained eloquently here). In the US, that means about 220 million people will have to have the virus before we get herd immunity. According to the current numbers, there have been about 3 million cases in the US and 130,000 deaths. 3 million is so far away from 220 million that it seems impossible we can get there! But it’s also misleading, because there are vast sums of undiagnosed cases remaining out there. A more realistic estimate of the number of cases can be reached by multiplying the death toll by 200 (assuming that the age-integrated overall death rate is 0.5%), which suggests that there have been 26,000,000 cases so far in the US – almost 12% of the way to herd immunity. Moreover, the effective R0 can be lowered dramatically by relatively small changes in behavior, such as reasonable mask-wearing and taking temperatures in high-traffic buildings, plus it’s also necessarily lower in the low-density rural communities that cover most of the landmass of the US – all of which would lower even further the threshold for herd immunity. It’s an achievable goal, in other words.
5. THE EFFECTS OF RE-OPENING ARE LESS BAD THAN YOU ARE BEING TOLD. Ever since most of the “red states” re-opened their economies, the legacy press has been ranting about how horrible it is. Look at the “spike in cases” in places like Alabama! But it’s bullshit. As I mentioned above, there is a VAST undiagnosed pool of cases throughout the US because most people who contract the coronavirus have mild to no symptoms. The “spike” in cases is almost certainly related to improved discovery of these individuals by improved testing. If it were not, then we would be seeing a concomitant spike in hospitalizations and deaths, but we are in fact seeing the opposite. In my own state of Alabama, the rate of new cases per day increased substantially in June, but the rate of new deaths per day has not changed since April. To the degree that the “spike” might be caused by new cases, it’s probably linked to mostly younger people – who are exactly the people we need to get the virus in order to reach herd immunity, because they have the lowest risk from it!
So how many people are going to die from coronavirus in the end? I believe there is good reason to think that the coronavirus will evolve to become milder as time goes by, but let’s assume that it retains the same lethality that has been measured so far. Let’s also assume that no vaccine or cure is forthcoming and that we have to reach herd immunity before the spread stops. The first thing you have to understand is that, in the absence of age-structuring of infections (see below), the same number of people will ultimately die of coronavirus regardless of whether we remain shut down or whether we re-open; they will just die somewhat more slowly in one case. (Of course, it’s likely that more locked-down people will be carried off by sequelae of economic depression and social isolation such as suicide, addiction, and violent crime…) The second thing you have to understand, though, is that the main point of policy should be to make sure that the right people get sick on the way to herd immunity – that is, the people with the lowest risk of death or other serious complications. In other words, young otherwise healthy people. The age structure of the United States and the death rate by age from the coronavirus can be used to calculate the number of people in each age bin who would die if all of them became infected:
Age
Death Rate (%)
People
Total Deaths
0-19
0.0001
83,094,000
83
20-29
0.0065
43,257,500
2,812
30-39
0.025
43,219,000
10,805
40-49
0.055
43,219,000
23,770
50-59
0.25
42,960,500
107,401
60-69
0.9
37,354,059
336,187
70-79
2.45
21,781,941
533,658
80+
11.5
15,114,000
1,738,110
Estimated Coronavirus deaths if everybody got infected. Population numbers for the age bins were interpolated based on source data to match the death rate age bins.
We can then ask, what are the consequences in terms of number of dead if we take different policies. On the one hand, we could take no action, and then a random 220,000,000 get sick. The age-integrated average death rate based on this data is about 0.8%, so after 220,000,000 get the virus we expect about 1.8 million dead. Yikes! Another possibility – which unfortunately seems to match the policy adopted in New York City and other major US population centers early during the outbreak – is that we could see the most vulnerable, older age bin disproportionately affected. If spread occurs mainly through health care facilities and community contact with health care workers and patients, which is what we might expect during a shut down, this is likely to be close to the case. In such a situation, we could look at the cumulative percentage, starting with the oldest bin and moving younger, and keep going until we reach 67%, totaling up the dead until we reach that point. In that case, we can calculate that in this worst-case scenario we would see about 2.8 million dead. Holy smokes!
But what if we enacted policies that caused the disease to spread primarily in the youngest age group? For instance, we re-open schools with no precautions of any kind, we re-open businesses possibly with mild precautions such as taking temperatures at the beginning of everybody’s shift, and then we provide extensive government assistance to people over 60 and people with pre-existing risk factors to help them stay home and stay protected for extended periods of time and also to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to maximize their safety. In that best-case scenario, going up the age ladder until we reach 67% of the population we could have gotten to herd immunity with as few as 40,000 dead! That’s just a little more than 2% as many dead as in the “do nothing” category – and with minimal disruption to the economy.
We obviously have already passed that point, and it’s largely because we have taken dysfunctional and paranoid worst-case scenario steps to control the virus, and have now become unwilling to admit that fact and change course. Importantly, these are not steps chosen by President Trump, but rather by the health care professionals (e.g. the CDC) that advise him. The idea that a real estate mogul should be an expert on epidemiology is ridiculous; he was entirely dependent on the advice he received form the supposed experts, almost all of which was half-baked. In retrospect it seems like the CDC had no concrete plans to offer him at all, and the response has been entirely ad hoc and ineffectual as a consequence.
Many universities, including mine, are nervously planning the 2020-2021 school year and are attempting to incorporate piles of pointless “security theater” that will greatly disrupt instruction and the all-important social maturation of the young people who come of age in our institutions, while doing nothing to lower the ultimate death rate in our country. I have shown here that, in fact, preventing the spread of the coronavirus amongst 20-something college students will almost certainly increase the overall death rate in the long run. It is high time that we accept this fact, completely rework our approach to dealing with the coronavirus, and get about the much more pressing business of saving our country from economic collapse and totalitarian revolution.
