Welcome to a Hump Day (“ден на ритамот” in Macedonian): Wednesday, December 3, 2025 and National Apple Pie Day. To be frank, apple is among my least favorite pies, even though it’s said to be quintessentially “American.” But here is a much better version, a French tarte Tatin, best served warm and lathered with creme fraiche. I hope to be in Paris within a few months, and will have this at one of my favorite restaurants.
It’s also National Green Bean Casserole Day, best served without the green beans, and the celebration of another dreadful concoction, National Peppermint Latte Day. Here’s a peppermint mocha. Is this coffee or liquid candy?
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 3 Wikipedia page.
Posting will be a bit light today as I’m somewhat under the weather, but, as always, I do my best.
Da Nooz:
*Trump, arguing that Americans pay too much for drugs because we’re subsidizing low drug prices in other countries, has bullied the UK into raising its own drug prices.
The United States and Britain announced a deal on Monday in which Britain would avoid potential tariffs on drug exports by agreeing to spend more on certain medicines covered through its national health service.
In Britain, a public body uses a complex formula to determine whether and how much the government will pay for new drugs, part of a process that results in lower drug prices there compared with the United States.
President Trump and top officials in his administration have complained that wealthy European countries like Britain pay too little for medicines, forcing the United States to pay what they believe is an unfair share of the costs of drugs. American consumers ultimately bear some of those costs when they pay health insurance premiums and taxes.
“For too long, American patients have been forced to subsidize prescription drugs and biologics in other developed countries by paying a significant premium for the same products in ours,” Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said in a news release announcing the deal.
Under the deal with the United States, Britain would pay 25 percent more for new medicines.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in Britain, known as NICE, decides whether the government should pay for new drugs based on how much benefit a drug provides versus its price. For most drugs, these thresholds have been frozen for more than two decades, despite pressures from drugmakers and some patient advocates for them to be raised. But the threat of U.S. tariffs and drugmakers retreating from Britain have spurred a change.
To set Britain’s thresholds, health economists calculate how many years of good health — so-called quality-adjusted life years — a drug can be expected to provide, factoring in side effects and symptoms. Until now, for most drugs, Britain has estimated that medicines should cost 20,000 to 30,000 pounds (about $26,500 to $40,000) for each such healthy year. The health service typically won’t pay for a drug if a pharmaceutical company won’t lower its price below that threshold.
So the Brits are raising the threshhold, which will increase the allowed price of a drug. Brits will pay more for drugs, and their loss is (supposedly) America’s gain. But I’m not sure whether drug prices will decrease much (if at all) in America, as I’m not clear about how companies in the international market do pricing. Maybe every other country will pay more for drugs. At any rate, if higher prices for Brits mean lower prices for drugs, I can understand the action, but somehow it still strikes me as unfair.
*The White House is defending WAR Secretary Pete Hegseth against accusations that he gave a verbal order to kill any survivors of boats attacked by the U.S. military under suspicion of carrying drugs.
The White House said Monday that the U.S. military conducted two strikes on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean in September, deepening questions about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s role in an operation that led to the killing of two survivors.
Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the head of Special Operations Command, was acting legally under authority to use lethal force granted by Hegseth in conducting the attacks on the boat, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
The question some in Congress and legal experts are asking is whether the orders may have contributed to the commission of a war crime.
The White House defense of Hegseth followed a report Friday in the Washington Post that he gave a spoken order to “kill them all” aboard the vessel. The first strike killed all but two of the boat’s 11 occupants before Bradley ordered a second missile strike, which killed the men, according to the Post.
A Defense Department official on Monday provided a similar account to The Wall Street Journal and said Hegseth was the “target engagement authority,” the key figure who authorized the strike.
President Trump said Sunday that Hegseth told him that he didn’t issue an order to kill all the people on board.
“Pete said he did not order the death of those two men,” Trump told reporters during a flight to Washington from Florida. “And I believe him.” But Trump later added “I wouldn’t have wanted that” in response to questions about whether he favored targeting survivors.
On Monday evening, Hegseth wrote a social-media post that said that the Sept. 2 attacks were Bradley’s decisions.
“Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support,” Hegseth wrote. “I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.”
It’s still a mystery: did Hegseth tell Bradley to wipe out everyone in the boat, including any survivors? In that case Hegseth did leave space for committing war crimes. And Bradley was actually committing a war crime if he ordered that the survivors be killed, as he’s obeying an unlawful dictate. I suppose Trump’s excuse will be that the people in the boat were not combatants but terrorists, and we’re not at war with them.
That’s a distinction without a difference. Finally, I still have seen no evidence that the boats were carrying drugs, though I suspect many of them are based on reporters’ interviews with friends and relatives of smugglers. Somebody’s heads are going to roll, and if it went down the way it’s described above, it will be Hegseth’s and Bradley’s.
*There’s some distressing results of a new poll by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) on student attitudes towards speech; the poll was taken in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University on September 10. I will quote an email I got from Katie Stalcup, who works at FIRE (they send me new stuff from time to time, though I think probably everyone interested gets these).
Today the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released results of a survey conducted on college campuses in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The survey of 2,028 college students assessed free speech on campus and asked undergraduates about their comfort level with a number of controversial topics.
Findings include:
- 91% percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence.
- Moderate and conservative students became significantly less likely to say that shouting down a speaker, blocking entry to an event, or using violence to stop a campus speech are acceptable actions. In contrast, liberal students’ support for these tactics held steady, or even increased slightly.
- Among moderate and conservative students, opposition to controversial speakers generally declined. Opposition among liberal students, on the other hand, either held steady or increased for all of the controversial speakers compared to the spring.
Here are links to the press release and report. Thanks!
Key findings include:
- Half of students surveyed say that they are less comfortable attending or hosting controversial public events on their campus.
- A notable portion of students is also less comfortable expressing their views on controversial topics in class (45%), in common campus spaces (43%), and on social media (48%), after what happened to Charlie Kirk.
- And roughly one in five students say they are now less comfortable attending class.
- These feelings were most pronounced among students at Utah Valley University, and among moderate and conservative students nationwide.
- Compared to this past spring, moderate and conservative students are less accepting of other students using aggressive or violent protest tactics. Liberal students, in contrast, did not shift their views in the same way.
- A majority of students opposed allowing all six controversial speakers on campus they were asked about.
- In contrast, a majority of students opposed firing all four professors from their campus for hypothetical social media comments made following Kirk’s assassination.
- A majority of students (53%) say that political violence is a problem among all groups, considerably more than the 35% of Americans who recently said this in FIRE’s October National Speech Index.
Note that more than nine out of ten students think that words can be violence, a figure that horrifies me, as it justifies using violence as retaliation against words—exactly what happened to Charlie Kirk. We also see from the figure below that 70% of non-UVU students think that shouting down speakers could be acceptable. And about 68% of students see violence as never acceptable to stop a speaker, though, as noted above, many more think that speech itself can be “violence.” The students mostly likely to condemn violence and allow speakers to speak are those at UVU, which experienced violence in Kirk’s assassination. On the other hand, there’s no pre-Kirk control for UVU that I know of. Kudos to those students, who tend to be moderate or conservative, who are less approving of aggression or violence. You can see the data from the main report, but, as always, many students have had their speech chilled on certain sensitive topics (Palestine/Gaza, religion, abortion, etc.) In this sense “progressive” Leftists are hardly progressive!
*RFK Jr. and his vaccine cronies are planning yet other vaccination changes, including an examination if vaccinations cause childhood allergies and autoimmune disorders. They’re also going to decide whether newborns should be faccinated for hepatitis-B.
Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and critic of coronavirus vaccination who recentlytook over as chair of the influential vaccine panel, said members meeting Thursday and Friday are broadly scrutinizing vaccines recommended for children. The wide-ranging discussions on the timing of vaccines and ingredients could signal major changes to how children in the United States are vaccinated, marking the latest flash point in an accelerating reshaping of immunization policy under Kennedy.
For decades, the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule has called for administering vaccines at set milestones. But Kennedy, the founder of an anti-vaccine group, has long linked the rise of chronic disease, autism and food allergies in the U.S. to what he calls the “exploding vaccine schedule” — claims that have been rebutted by medical associations and extensive research into the safety of shots
The members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices are preparing to make their most significant change to the childhood vaccine schedule yet since Kennedy purged the panel and replaced members with experts who have largely been critical of public health vaccination practices.
The new members plan to vote Thursday on scrapping the recommendation to give all babies a dose of hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth. Instead, the panel is weighing a delay in that first dose byan interval that is “still being finalized,” Milhoan said. Vaccine advisers pushed back a vote on hepatitis B vaccine recommendations at their September meeting following disagreement.
In my view, this is all palaver based on RFK Jr.’s status as an anti-vax zealot. That does not mean that everything he says about everything is wrong (some of the nutrition stuff is good), but the man is not a scientist and can’t think scientifically. I don’t think he grasps risk vs. benefit factors of vaccinations, and there are other things that probably correlated better than vaccinations with the rise of allergies and autoimmune disorders. How about the widespread use of antibiotics, which is more recent and surely, at least temporally, would correlate more than the “rise of allergies and autoimmune disorders.” I would not trust anything that RFK Jr. says about vaccinations–not without rigorous and objective scientific tests of the hypotheses. If you think the man is objective, I have some land in Florida I’d like to sell you.
*The NYT has named its “The ten best books of 2025.” I haven’t read a one, as I’ve been catching up on older novels. Here is the list, with five fiction books and five nonfiction books. I’ll link to the NYT’s review of each book. The first five are fiction:
Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus.
The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Stone Yard Devotionalby Charlotte Wood
And the nonfiction:
A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
Mother Emanuel by Kevin Sack
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
There is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone
Wild Thing, by Sue Prideaux
Notice that there are no science books on the nonfiction list, as usual, but perhaps no great science books came out this year. Do you know of any? At any rate, I already know which one I’ll pick from each category: the books by Kiran Desai and the one by Arundhati Roy. They are both highly touted (I’ve read reviews before), and both are about India, one of my favorite places. Desai’s book is called a “transcendent triumph” in the review, and I’ve read Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things. I loved it, and it won the Booker Prize. But there is a lot of good stuff on the list, I’m sure. If you’ve read any of them, please weigh in below.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili looks peeved!
Hili: How do we know what we know?
Andrzej: Usually from questionable sources.
In Polish:
Hili: Skąd wiemy to, co wiemy?
Ja: Na ogół z wątpliwych źródeł.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Things With Faces; happy peppers:
From The Language Nerds:
From Emma, another witty but true tweet in response to the Girl Guides’ decision that transgirls and young women can no longer join their organization as it’s a space for females.
“Girl guiding is for girls. Yay girls.”
“In April, we were surprised and saddened to learn that girls are female.”
“It’s been eight months, but we really can’t find a workaround.”
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) December 2, 2025
From Malcolm; night archery:
Check out this amazing compound bow shooting at night
[📹 jinqiang.chen.7545]pic.twitter.com/Tne91LHCmx
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
A couple from my feed. First, woman and her beloved goose. Sound up.
The way they walk away together.. 😊pic.twitter.com/eSzEbkrrn0
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 1, 2025
I love this one. Sound up, of course:
Alive alarm.
After the kiss, it changed tune. 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/526ZW1jEQm— The Figen (@TheFigen_) December 2, 2025
Yep, you’ll not see a cartoon like this these days:
They don’t make cartoons like this anymore pic.twitter.com/CP5F6W3Ex3
— Today In History (@historigins) December 2, 2025
One I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish girl was gassed to death as soon as she arrived in Auschwitz. She was ten years old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-12-03T13:16:42.061Z
Two from Dr. Cobb, back from hols. Here’s his last photo:
What a difference a day makes. Southwold beach this morning.
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-12-01T12:59:30.019Z
Don’t think things are getting better? I think a doubling of your expected chance of living is progress!
Currently dorking out over this graph about child mortality with my brother. Just mind boggling to take in.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. -Joseph Conrad, novelist (3 Dec 1857-1924)
It’s just a matter of time before Trump says he never met Pete Hegseth. I’m not sure why Congress was okay with blowing up civilians in boats without presenting any evidence there were drugs involved but suddenly is concerned about two men who survived and then were killed.
It is also hard to imagine the bold hypocrisy of killing low-level drug runners like these while pardoning the ex-President of Honduras, whom a US court had convicted of being involved in a real, gigantic drug operation.
Hypocrisy is a virtue in politics. It is not a flaw 🙂
A feature, not a bug…
It wasn’t the first drug trafficker pardon either.
Wrt to the war crimes, that is standard procedure for Seal Team Six. Something of a rogue unit, but also by design. You do not call them if you want to follow rules of war.
Above and beyond my pay grade to understand Trumps’ reasoning, but why the hell would drug companies lower their prices as a result of higher prices in Britain? They are private companies with a duty to earn profits. Period.
If market forces can be brought to bear pressing drug manufacturers to reduce prices in the United States, they will have more room to accommodate that pressure if they are getting better profits abroad. Since a pharma knows that other countries will confiscate its innovation and license generic production sooner than the U.S. will it has to make most of its profit on a new drug in the States. That’s where the money is. There must be some pressure in the America already, else drug companies would just raise their prices arbitrarily without limit whenever they felt like it, which they don’t. Even a monopolist can’t charge a price higher than the maximum the market will bear.
The insurance companies are your friend here. They are the ones baulking at paying arbitrarily high prices and can choose not to reimburse a drug that is too expensive, which will hurt Pharma sales obviously. Their ability to collude is limited by antitrust but it is not zero, as long as vigilantes don’t murder their CEOs. The problem is patients who want every exciting new drug paid for free as a human right. I’m not sure it’s worth it to me as a taxpayer to help pay £26,000 a year for a stranger’s better health. I don’t think I’d pay that much for myself. I see collapse coming soon.
Why would more profit in the UK mean operating at a loss in the US?
If faced with the choice between more money in the UK and losses in the US or just more money in the UK, shareholders would demand the latter.
Oh, they’re not going to sell at a loss in the U.S. Never. But as of 2026 under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, U.S. Medicare will be authorized to use its buying power to try to get volume discounts from the companies. The Pharmas ought to be more willing to give up a few percent of margin if Medicare knows they will be getting more money from British sales to compensate.
The socialized systems have more leverage in their own countries because they can actually say No to fantabulously expensive drugs. They can say, We can’t/won’t raise taxes to pay for this drug no matter how good it is. When you buy into socialism you accept that there are limits to what the state will provide, each according to his needs and all that. If the drug company will lower its price then we might consider putting it on our national formulary.
But with the moves by the Trump Administration, countries that he arm twists won’t be able to get prices down enough for them to afford to cover it. They will have to either pay what the company wants or tell their people to do without. The Pharmas will be strongly disincentivized against lowering prices in order to get admitted to socialized national formularies (as they have historically done) because their margins in the US will now (after 2026) be tighter. Governments in socialized countries will be under strong pressure from their citizens to cough up the euros and pounds to pay what the company needs to get to stay in Trump’s good books.
It’s all quite diabolical. I love it.
Public health care is not socialism. There is no owning the means of production going on. Painting it as socialism is a cheap rhetorical move – probably to cover up the contradictions in your comment.
You claim “When you buy into socialism you accept that there are limits to what the state will provide” – which in a sense is true though that limit is less severe than the limit of what your personal finances will provide.
Then you turn around and frame it as a problem that countries “will have to either pay what the company wants or tell their people to do without”. Which is no different than before. Why should citizens pressure their government to “to cough up the euros and pounds to pay what the company needs to get to stay in Trump’s good books.”?? It makes no sense. Citizens do not care how a foreign leader thinks of a pharmaceutical company. They are used to limits in treatment. So why on earth would they agitate for spending public money to subsidize medicine for US patients?
More likely Trump gets a kickback from pharmaceutical companies due to the increased profit they make in the UK.
I won’t to and fro here given Da Roolz, just point out that ownership of the means of production is communism, not socialism. I’m correct in saying socialism is a process where certain ideologically selected goods and services are paid from general taxation, not through individual decisions about value for money. The motivation is to make these goods available, free, to consumers who would otherwise be priced out of the market. Socialism can do this precisely and only because the state can confiscate the resources of high-income taxpayers to pay for the project, which a private market participant can’t. Because there are no price signals, demand is artificially inflated, particularly from consumers who pay no taxes, for whom the services really are free. This produces dead-weight distortions in the economy which, for gargantuan sectors like healthcare consumption, can’t be ignored even if they are desired ideologically. People consume free goods and services that they personally value less the the cost to produce them. (This is the argument against free, i.e., socialized, public transit.)
The taxes come heavily disproportionately from the upper 15% of the population who pay nearly all taxes and not at all from the bottom two-fifths who nonetheless use healthcare services disproportionately, as Marmot and others showed in the UK: the socio-economic determinants of health are largely indifferent to the consumption of medical care. This effect is what caused Margaret Thatcher to observe that the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. You will see this wherever the state is the tax-funded payer for free goods even if the goods themselves are produced by private capital and labour.
Yes, but don’t forget the temporal aspect, Leslie.
Like with consumer electronics, medications often start off “only for the rich!!!” with some .. (apparently now) shooting of CEOs in protest…. but in the real world prices drop over time.
So the wildly expensive (say hepatitis or HIV) drugs of past decades are cheaper now. Plus they’ve stood the test of time. They’re “Lindy” if you will…
I’ve seen that in my own life – blood glucose monitors which attach to/into the body which are utterly lifesaving and miraculous, were prohibitively pricey a few decades ago… now are affordable to the masses. So the calculations change with tech advancements.
Best to you my Kanuk friend,
D.A.
NYC
Thanks for that. Healthcare economics is more opaque than regular economics (which itself is pretty opaque), so an insider’s view is very welcome.
Leslie, I’d love your hard edged wisdom where direct advertising is concerned. The bulk of advertising on broadcast television in the US is for pharmaceuticals created to treat ailments most viewers have never heard of.
“. . . most viewers have never heard of.”
And in a few cases, to advertise drugs for conditions that exceedingly few people suffer from and for which virtually nobody watching will have been treated.
Ad dollars don’t simply seek customers. Ad dollars seek to control coverage by the outlets that rely on ad dollars. There is a reason that many in the media have become pharma cheerleaders–and shy away from biting the hand that feeds it.
Obscure ailments, yes indeed. Part of this is to get the consumer to think for the first time maybe he has recalcitrant plebny (thanks Don Martin, MAD Magazine) and so he “asks his doctor if this drug is right for him.” He probably doesn’t have recalcitrant plebny but just visiting the doctor usually results in a prescription — that’s how we let the patient know that the visit is over when we read for the Rx pad — for something else the Pharma makes. It probably leads to over-servicing, generating unnecessary doctor visits, but remember, your cost is my income, so (as an imaginary American doctor) I’m not complaining. I’ve got a practice to run and kids to educate.
And part of it is to reach everyone in the country who does have recalcitrant plebny, however few they are, and just doesn’t think their existing drugs are doing it for them anymore and want to open up the relationship to start seeing other drugs. Nowadays it would be more efficient (and therefore far more lucrative for the ad bundler) to put ads for that drug on pop-ups for people who did Google searches for recalcitrant plebny or who visit the website of the recalcitrant plebny advocacy organization. But to reach people who still watch broadcast TV, you have to broadcast to everyone.
Canada doesn’t want people to be visiting doctors just to ask if they should be taking something they saw on TV so we don’t do direct-to-consumer ads here. Here, the doctor’s income and the Pharma’s sales are everyone else’s tax cost, so cool it, says the tax collector.
Direct-to-consumer advertising in the U.S. is covered under the First Amendment as long as it makes truthful claims. Like all advertising it is presumed to be effective in increasing sales enough to justify its cost or they wouldn’t use it. Does it increase prices as critics claim? Not necessarily. If the increase in sales (and therefore profit after expenses including the ads) is greater than the ad cost, profits would rise but price wouldn’t have to. It’s not what it costs, it’s what it makes. It’s easy to say that if they didn’t run ads, they could put more money into R&D or reduce prices or pay their workers more, but that’s not how the economics works. If stopping advertising causes a loss of sales, you don’t have any money freed up to do anything with. After all, if you could stop ads without sales falling off, the company would just keep the extra money as profit. Why share it with anyone?
Why not just legally require pharma companies to charge Americans exactly the same prices they charge any other country. That way if American pharma companies want a global market, they have to lower prices in America.
Then the Pharma investors will stop making drugs and invest in some other business where they can make a profit. That’s what always happens with price controls. Capital is mobile.
I’m not talking about controlling what they charge, just requiring them to charge everyone the same.
I think it is more a question of bargaining power. Nations with public health care have simply a strong position as the bargain for the entire nation while US consumers are not as well represented.
And lobbying is fierce. ISTM that many legislative and regulatory attempts have been made to have US publicly-funded health schemes bulk-buy and negotiate prices downwards, which the pharma lobbyists fought against and won.
Thank you for the Tom & Jerry and the Child Mortality graph. Steven Pinker has a similarly striking chart in chapter five of Enlightenment Now (in that case, the percentage of children dying before the age of five, 1751-2013 – a global plunge). A reminder, that while not everything is rosy, it is at least getting Pinker.
This comment brought a genuine smile this morning. Thanks.
Ditto!
Speech is not violence. Speech can incite violence, but it is not violence itself. It’s shocking that supposedly intelligent people can fail to make such an obvious distinction. “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.” Students on the left have not come to blur this razor sharp distinction on their own. Something is addling their minds, such that words being violence has become part of the zeitgeist.
Much mischief can be traced to the colleges of education.
There’s also supposedly an accrediting body that accredits the accrediting bodies – I can’t recall the name – Peter Boghossian noted this once but I couldn’t find it again…
Of course he was saying it too was “captured”.
There’s also the argument that our society is more “feminized” – and thus safety-ism, “harm” minimization… is prioritized. There are a lot of arguments about this currently.
That said, Doug, Colleges of “Education” – always the easiest for a new student to attend, grades wise – have been pretty much Marxist/Khmer Rouge level left since I was a lad in short pants. (late 80s).
best,
D.A.
NYC
Yes, and a key element of Stoic philosophy is that one only chooses to be harmed. Anyone who considers himself to be the “victim” of “violence”, no matter how it was intended, has thereby agreed to terms offered by the perpetrator.
STOICISM! Wow – currently somehow my priority for reading more, and I happened upon it here!
Imagine million-dollar programs to develop Stoic thought across society, from types like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, Deepak Chopra …
Makes me wonder…
It’s amazing to me the similarities between Stoicism and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
🎯
Way back in 1987 the Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse put out a public service announcement called “Words Hurt” featuring close ups of adults saying “words that were as hard as a fist” to a crying little girl (“you’re worthless,” “why don’t you find some other place to live,” etc.) This was part of an exemplary push against verbal and mental abuse. The lesson was they could be just as bad as physical or sexual abuse.
Later I remember encountering the belief that verbal and mental abuse could even be worse, with lifelong consequences. This idea merged with (or helped create) the Self Esteem movement. That movement, like many movements, began reasonably and then went overboard. It also crept out into a wider culture which was becoming increasingly preoccupied with therapy and healing from increasing definitions of what constituted “trauma.”
Past few years it seems to have gotten worse. Words aren’t just like sticks and stones, they are sticks and stones. This is usually said by people who haven’t had actual sticks and stones hurled at them, I suspect.
Telling a child they are worthless is unforgivable, it can cause psychological damage, it is wrong, and cruel, but not the same thing as physical violence.
What really bugs me is that there is a group of people who claim that speaking the truth is ‘literal violence’. Hearing a fact that you don’t want to hear is neither violence nor comparable with sticks and stones. Girl Guiding in the UK has, reluctantly and grudgingly, just announced that it will stop allowing boys to join, and the Women’s Institute will no longer allow men to join. That sentence gets me accused of ‘literal violence’ by correctly sexing the people no longer allowed in female spaces, but the truth is that they are being excluded because they are male, not because they have some magical genderfeelz.
If you think that facts are literal violence, then the problem is with you, and not the rest of society.
+1, Joolz.
respect.
D.A.
NYC
Yes indeed. But, the rest of society does have a serious problem when there are too many of those yous.
Yes. The problem these people have impacts on all of us, especially when those people are powerful enough to influence others. Much of the media is referring to ‘trans girls’ being banned from GG even though they are being banned for being male. I’m sure that many people who aren’t up to date on the topic have been misled by that and won’t realise that GG policy was allowing 17yo males to share sleeping accommodation with very young girls.
Then there are those who have had actual sticks and stones hurled at them (or been sexually abused in their family of origin) and had it minimized or outright denied by those who witnessed it, had the power to stop it, but did nothing. The latter offense, in such cases, can be harder to overcome than the “sticks and stones” themselves.
Definitely. Bruises often heal faster than mental scars, which can last a lifetime. I wasn’t saying that one is worse than the other, just that they are different. The effect depends on the severity of the abuse and an individual’s capacity to survive.It.
I’m torn on this. I know a woman very close to me whose husband verbally abuses her. I’ve never heard him shout or threaten, just demean and degrade. It’s violence in the form of torture by a thousand cuts.
I would call it “demeaning and degrading verbal abuse, so as not to dilute the meaning of “violence.” I’ve given my reason, which is that it’s a very slippery slope which could lead to violence in the way that Charlie Kirk experienced it. For the construals of what is “violent words” will of course change from person to person.
Can she shoot him in self-defence against his “violence”, then? If not, what point is served by calling his mental abuse “violence”, and not just calling it mental cruelty? An important distinction would be that the state should arrest him and punish him for inflicting violence on her. Is that what you want to see happen to this husband?
Not everything we want to see less of has to be called violence in order to get there.
Yup. None dare call it stupidity.
Yes, and harder to resist, because physical violence, for me at least, would mark the end of the relationship. Verbal abuse in more insidious.
Yes, Leslie, PCC(E) and Reece. An actual proper definition of “violence” is important and the commonly used definition – and the problem – is that the definition has changed utterly in the last decade (or two).
Another “euphemism treadmill” case, hat off to Pinker.
D.A.
NYC
Good luck with that. We don’t even have a proper and accepted definition of “woman”.
Evidence for “illicit contraband” on vessels originating in Venezuela, headed towards the United States was obtained by the U. S. Coast Guard (excerpt):
“From September 1, 2024, to October 7, 2025, […] Three of the 14 vessels interdicted near Venezuela had no illicit contraband on board when interdicted, but one of the three violated other U.S. federal criminal statutes.”
-K. E. Lunday
Admiral, U. S. Coast Guard
(Dated “31 OCT 2025”)
Full letter here :
https://x.com/randpaul/status/1995968928418337058?s=46
So what? If Trump is so concerned about drugs why does he keep pardoning drug traffickers? Including a big one yesterday:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-honduras-hernandez-pardon-9.7000112
“So what?”
Because material evidence of vessels traveling from Venezuela to the United States with “illicit contraband” is important for discernment of what is true in this case.
Dialectical flattening is alchemy that obscures discernment.
The boats aren’t traveling from Venezuela to the United States, or if they are, there is no evidence of that. The vast majority of drug boats from Venezuela travel to Africa with the drugs ending up in the European market.
The part of letter from the U.S. Coast Guard in the “[…]” of the quote I posted states :
“[ one ] From September 1, 2024, to October 7, 2025, Coast Guard surface assets, operating under Coast Guard law enforcement authority, interdicted 212 suspected drug-smuggling vessels at sea headed toward the United States. Of the 212 interdictions, 41 vessels had no illicit contraband on board when interdicted; 24 of those 41 vessels without contraband did not appear to commit any federal criminal offense.
[ two ] Of the 212 total vessels interdicted during this period, 69 vessels were interdicted in the Caribbean Sea by Coast Guard surface assets, operating under Coast Guard law enforcement authority. Of these 69 interdictions, 14 had no illicit contraband on board when interdicted; 11 of those 14 vessels without contraband did not appear to commit any federal criminal offense. Of the 69 Caribbean interdictions, 14 vessels were interdicted off the coast of Venezuela. Three of the 14 vessels interdicted near Venezuela had no illicit contraband on board when interdicted, but one of the three violated other U.S. federal criminal statutes.”
The entire letter is at the link below the concise excerpt of the letter I posted. There could be typos above so the original letter should be sought.
I was speaking of the recent boats that have been destroyed in the Caribbean. Not the interdicted boats the letter is pertaining to, my mistake.
Trump doesn’t care about drugs. Do you want a list of all the drug crooks he’s pardoned?
Yes F.K. – it isn’t about drugs at all. It is SO absurd given Venezuela is only a transit, seemingly a minor one at that, point for Columbian cocaine, the “problem” (of imported fent) comes from China via Mexico.
I wish we’d be more honest and say: Maduro is a bastard and must be gotten rid of (I’ll sign up to that) rather than the distraction of “druuugs!”
“The drugs!” does a lot of heavy lifting in our foreign policy mistakes for… well since Noriega in the 80s.
Pardoning this Honduran gangster is the worst, IMHO.
D.A.
NYC
As I see this letter, it is proof that many innocent boats have been interdicted. It is proof that suspected boats and their crews should not be obliterated but rather need to be physically caught and searched. It is not justification for the attacks, but rather a strong data-driven argument against them.
.
Dialectical inversion here transforms the count 41 out of 212 (19%), or the 3 out of 14 figure (21%), – into “many”, and “proof (of innocence)” ; negation of “illicit contraband”, and the interdictions by the Coast Guard, producing Aufheben der Illicit Contraband.
“41” IS “many”. Your phrasing the problem as one of proportion minimizes the degree of injustice involved. And the letter does prove that many suspected boats were not doing anything chargeable, much less deserving capital punishment without due process.
I hate graphs showing that the negative is decreasing, but other than that, interesting to see Slovenia included in Nordic countries. After a visit there for a meeting – either 2008 or 2010, I came away thinking that the place was as civilized as Sweden.
Assuming that the archers were avid and competent, while it was visually very cool to see the arrows arcing toward the target at night, it was also painfully evident that bow hunting should never take place at that distance – only one arrow hit the target in the heart. And I assure you that spot was where they were all aiming.
Re Trump’s anti-drug tactics wrt Venezuela, nobody has brought this up, so I am going to be the Devil’s Advocate:
Is brutality inherently wrong?
We in the Western world react to this quickly and confidently, assuring ourselves that ethics demands less brutality, that unnecessary brutality demeans us as a society, that minimizing brutality – even against criminals – in all situations is an ethical good.
But I would remind us that the Train Switch Problem takes place in Ethics class. That the brutal decision to sacrifice a smaller number of innocent bystanders to save the lives of a larger number of innocents is indeed easily recognizable as an ethical decision. Surely, a decision to sacrifice criminal bystanders would be an easier decision.
What if the efficacy of brutality depended on the culture and mindset of the societies and individuals involved? The Western mind is not the same as the Eastern mind. The Christian mind is different than the Muslim mind. That the Arab/Muslim mind is very different from the Western mind, for instance, is key to understanding why Western policy has been a disaster in the Middle East for over 100 years.
Is it possible that the brutality abhorrent to the Western mind might be more efficacious, result in fewer innocent deaths, and therefore be a more ethical choice in certain situations or cultures? For example, Singapore, the UAE, and Qatar are known to have both incredibly low crime rates and brutal criminal policies.
I am not saying this necessarily applies to Venezuelan drug smugglers.
It’s important to keep in mind that Trump doesn’t care about illegal drugs.
He pardoned a huge drug trafficker yesterday (not the first, either). The guy had trafficked 600 tons of cocaine. Even the conservative WSJ editorialized about it.
North Korea probably has the lowest crime rate in the world. Sounds like paradise!
True. Not the right optimum. I guess the trick is to live in a highly non-egalitarian country where you can become wealthy enough to live where the crime and hardened criminals aren’t. Then you don’t need a repressive police state. You just need high fences, terrible public transit (to impede criminal mobility especially for the getaway phase), and armed guards who work for you, not for the Supreme Dear Leader or themselves. This assumes that crime is intractable and related only to opportunity, which it is, both.
Lots of things would be more efficacious but would have grossly unacceptable second-order consequences. Capital punishment for all felonies, for example. Or trial by accusation.
Also, brutality is valued very differently by the -isers and the -ised.
I read that one reason Americans may pay too much for drugs is because you allow profiteering by pharmaceutical companies. It’s still stuns me that they are allowed to advertise medicine on TV over there and customers go in and tell doctors what medication they want, instead of getting what the doctor thinks is best. The advertisements alone must cost an absolute fortune, money that could be spent research or lowering prices.
Medicine IS expensive to develop and test, but it doesn’t always have to be that way every time. Lives in my extended family were saved by a small hospital research project, for which the whole family were guinea pigs. Effective treatment turned out to be a medicine that was already available.
There was a scandal here over the price of insulin a few years ago and I learned that Americans can pay ten times as much as we do because there are only 3 companies in the USA that make it. I’ve read about people dying because they couldn’t afford insulin in the USA, that’s horrifying. I don’t know how common it is, but I’ve read about many cases.
I know many Americans balk at the idea of nationalised healthcare, but it can keep the costs down. Yes, my taxes go to help pay for medication needed by other people, but I’m fine with that because getting people back into work helps me, by making them financially productive members of society. It also means that when I had appendicitis I had no worries about paying for the operation and could just focus on getting better.
I liked the cartoon!
Comment by Greg Mayer
It’s interesting that the child mortality graph refers explicitly to “around the year 0”. There is of course, no “year 0” in our calendrical system. If there was, the second millennium would have begun in the year 2000. I suppose they meant “around 1 BC/1 AD.”
GCM
🙂
[Meant as a comment on comment #8] Correction: as civilized as Sweden used to be. I don’t believe that Ljubljana is plagued by gang wars involving hand grenades. Years ago, I spent a good deal of
time in Malmo, before it experienced the recent explosive growth of, uhhh, explosions,.
Given what I knew (not a lot) about Sweden… the grenade fights were quite a surprise to me. And their advancement from being as peaceable, tranquil as Japan a few decades ago to…. leading Europe in rapes and violence, is very alarming. Like Japan… Sweden is one of the countries we can (could?) hold up as a very well run place. (atheist too, I note happily)
There’s a ….. um.. demographic issue at the heart of this though, some of which is interestingly debated on twitter. That’s all I’ll say.
Nice to see you here again messaging, Jon.
D.A.
NYC
Best regards, David. A tongue-in-cheek account of Malmo as it was 25 years ago, and the Øresund Fixed Link between Copenhagen and Malmö, can be found at:
https://www.krabarchive.com/ralphmag/EW/oresund.html
Haha. Thx Jon. It seems from all the evidence (and this)… Maalmo is a… changed city.
It is hard to get a grip on these things from abroad and not speaking any Swedish, but the changes in that country are something that all westerners should take note of.
best,
D.A.
NYC
The momentous 20th century reduction in child mortality is one of those data which is well known but widely overlooked. Every poseur who pretends to vilify modern science/technology/civilization should have this timeline somehow etched irreversibly onto their consciousness, if they have one.
I think of this quite a bit. Even as a(n intentionally, happy) childless man, the fact that like… one third of little babies don’t just… die on us for reasons we can’t understand – like what happened to ALL our ancestors…. isn’t that something we should be immensely happy for?
And credit science rather than ….god or magic for?
D.A.
NYC
I guess probably not technically a science book, but most certainly a technology book, I once again recommend, as highly as possible, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares which details potential threats posed to humanity by artificial superintelligence.
As a counterweight I recommend Drew McDermott’s paper, Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity.
(FWIW, sorry for the egregious over-posting. I hope this is an instance of forgiveness being easier to obtain than permission.)
I think maybe those who come along later, as you often do, should be given a bit of amnesty. Most everyone has had their say. Who cares? (And the host has gone to bed 🥴)
No worries from this quarter (subject to being over-ruled.) You comment in a manner that suggests you are sending a trans-Pacific cable at five dollars a word.
🙂. I’ll take that as being in the same spirit as Polonius’ speech in Hamlet.ii.2 (not the mental-health part).