On a Personal Note
Okay, it’s week 5 and we are already back to the vicious cycle where I start every newsletter with me lamenting how tired I am. But ffs, I am. In a good way. Because I just returned from Gummersbach. And that means that I will now need some days of proper decompression. Not only in a physical way (i.e. sleep, exercise, detox); but mentally. The hardest (and yet most rewarding) thing about my job is that I get so intensely exposed to new people (and they to me, to be fair) in the most compressed form. Then, when everything is over, this always leaves a sort of emptiness behind that I need to wrestle with. Of course, I have found my ways over the years to handle this; yet, considering my introverted personality, this will always remain a process that I simply need to pass through.
Luckily, I am now back to the German countryside, and this means that I can retract to the Heideggerian ideal:
The Populist Moment Never Happened
I have been tracking the rise of illiberalism since the very beginning of this newsletter, I have talked about the “Great Realignment in Politics” too many times, and I just ran a two-week intense seminar on “Liberalism vs Populism.” So, when someone writes that the populist backlash—which I deem to be the most important shift in global politics—has never happened, I (obviously!) get baited, especially when the author is such a familiar name to the readers of “Links”: Bronze Age Pervert.
As usual with BAP, this piece is painfully hard to read. Characteristically, he does not really present us with an argument; instead, we have to wade through some random, vaguely connected segments full of convoluted sentence structures, obfuscating jargon, obscure references, and the occasional hat tip to internet meme culture. You get the picture. Yet, despite all of this (and in a proper BAP manner), he also offers an interesting and contrarian (≠ correct) point of view. So, I will try to give it a charitable reading. Needless to say, that does not mean that I endorse any of his views. On the contrary, I have repeatedly shown the dangers of the worldview that he hides behind his esoteric language.
First, he (I think, rightfully) claims that Bannonite populism (see here for context) is a big nothingburger. Because it has been practiced in Argentina for many decades—and essentially wrecked the country. In other words, it isn’t an appealing model in a world of systemic rivalry. I tend to agree. BAP’s focus on Argentina seems to be spot-on and still underrated. I think the contemporary discourse around populism cannot accommodate all the contextual nuances of Milei and Argentina in the way it should. Second (and here things get properly interesting), he claims that any populist movement turns towards migration when in power. Why? Because their economic policies hurt the entrepreneurial and intellectual elite—who then leave/flee the country. This brain drain then needs to be replenished through immigration that is sugarcoated as somewhat culturally desirable or whatnot. This might sound counterintuitive but noting that populism is a phenomenon that only occurs in liberal or transitional democracies, we ought to add that many of those countries occupy some sort of “legacy status” that still attracts foreign immigration before the populists turn things sour. One needs to see the data on that; but it seems conceptually interesting. Because that would further bolster a liberal migration policy for the Open Society à la: “Hungarian Refugees Are Welcome Here!”
Obviously, that’s not what BAP thinks. For him, mass migration is the root cause of the collapse of Western civilization—due to various esoteric, eugenic, and frankly racist reasons. While most people see liberalism vs populism as a battle between open and closed societies, BAP claims that there is a “migration consensus” between the two. As a proper reactionary, he yearns for a proper white nationalism. Don’t get fooled: When BAP talks about the “cultured, highly literate intelligent population” of Argentina, he means “white European roots.” In any case, you can give it a go; but I spent some more time than usual to extract the core argument so that you don’t have to haha
The election this year in Argentina has elevated to international stardom Javier Milei. His theatrical performances and comic passion, energy on camera remind people of Trump, Bolsonaro and other anti-establishment manic-charismatic champions in recent years. These rose up mostly as a result of people’s justified desperation at the failure of modern governments to address problem of decline of life: cities dilapidated by crime, economic sclerosis, zombi mass migration. It’s not even completely right to call them “populists,” as when, because of a personal failure of nerve from individuals like Trump and Bolsonaro, many pundits jumped since 2020 and 2021 or so to proclaim “the populist moment is over, the globalist technocrats have won.” Such a frame misunderstands the fundamental modern problem, which is declining human capital, a fact of life that is being felt first of all in governance worldwide.
In some countries it was possible to label critics of stupid government “populists,” but this wasn’t true everywhere and even in Brazil, Bolsonaro wasn’t elected on the votes of the poor and the many, but on campaigning against left-wing Red demagogues who had run the Brazilian economy and life off a cliff, and on behalf of well-to-do farmers and small businessmen. The frame that a “populist moment” that never in fact existed and never was the thing that mattered is “over” is also based on individual accidents — in particular the character, experiences, and decisions of Bolsonaro and Trump themselves. But their personal hesitations don’t mean the problems that led to the rise of these men in the first place have disappeared. Nor are these problems four-dimensional Machiavellian “chess” on the part of an actually competent shadowy “elite” that is in fact “profiting” from the disorder; there is no cynical manipulator of events… things really are that stupid, and there’s no one competent at the wheel of events. Thus there will be Trumps, Bolsonaros, and Mileis going forward every year or so, and not all will have the same personal hangups. The next few decades are likely to be exciting.
Milei becoming a star, however, has led to some uncomfortable moments as many on “antiestablishment” and “dissident” spheres, both right and left, have paid any close attention to content of his words beyond the comedy. Quickly they notice he is “libertarian” and asking for reductions in government spending, government programs and size, and calling for the elimination of government departments. This goes against the Dissident Talking Points that have emerged since 2017, which dismiss Libertarianism as a “basic bitch” ideology, identify all free market rhetoric with the old guard of the GOP that Trump destroyed in the 2015-6 primaries, and are largely based on “economic populist” or “economic nationalist” positions vaguely identified with Steve Bannon or called “Bannonite.” Like all enduring Talking Points, these have some truth, maybe even 60% of truth behind them. Libertarianism, both in the form pushed by theoretical ideologues whether from Cato or Mises Institutes, or in the lite-political form pushed by the Jack Kemp wing of the GOP exemplified by men like Paul Ryan, was largely discredited not just by Trump but by manifest failures in the years leading up to 2016. The failures were of two kinds. A full discussion of these failures of rhetoric, practice, or in the case of genuine and honest Ron Paul-style libertarianism simple inability to contest in democratic political struggle — for whatever reasons — is very interesting but should be left for another time. I want to address for a moment the “Bannonite” and “economic populist” consensus that has emerged on the dissident spheres so-called of the right for the last few years, and which is now being pushed in its major zines and publications acting as the public voice of a supposed “resistance.” It is because of the widespread acceptance of this orthodoxy — really a set of unexamined talking points — that the right increasingly sounds like a version of Chomskyite Marxoid professor in cheap tuna-stained blazer, droning on about the IMF, the WEF, Neoliberalism, the supposed problem of “hypercapitalism” and Capital, “atomization,” “destruction of native and traditional communities”; while stomping with a kind of self-important frisson for “an engagement with socialism,” “class analysis,” “postracial multiracial working class democracy,” as if these things were the newest and most revolutionary ideas and as if there was a genuine prospect of being the vanguard of millions of urban proletarians against the bourgeois “Anglo Liberal” order.
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Such people have been in power in Argentina for decades, and haven’t delivered what you would think people are yearning for a government to deliver based on the expression of mass direct concern during the time of 2015 and 2016 and before pundits and Intellectuals began their campaign of obfuscation. Argentina has had “Bannonite” or “economic populistnationalist” government for decades, on steroids. They got 100% of what Bannon-types and “conservative socialist” and “dissident right” or whatever edgy name they will call themselves — they got it all these are now demanding, everything that’s being asked for, and much more. For decades, this has been the case in Argentina. Everything in the rhetoric but also the policies, often enforced at point of gun. Peron utterly crushed the Argentine landowning upper classes, and brought in a nationalist and populist economy, freed from English interference in particular, and often invoking family values and traditionalist communitarian language. If you want conservative socialism, here is your example in action, in full — and see then its fruits after some decades…
Consider for example that the doors of Argentina have been busted wide open to mass migration. This has been done despite the economic populist and nationalist language that Bannonites invoke in America and that Peronists have used even more aggressively in Argentina. I find it fascinating that all left-populist and economic populist platform nations or regions have this same result by the way. Ireland did, so does Basque Country in Spain — ETA being the spirit of that region and along with the Kurdish PKK one of the old and dependable factions of the international “nationalist left.” But all are flooded with migrants. To look into the reasons why I will again leave for another time but I suspect that, although when out of power such parties insinuate that migrants are being let in for “cheap labor” as a conspiracy by Capital or devious capitalists who plan to build an orbital station like in Elysium movie; and so they promise — maybe genuinely — the lower middle and middle classes that they will stop this migration and improve the labor market, wages, and their economic condition. But then once in power, left-populist parties discover that the migrants were never being brought in by capitalists for Machiavellian reasons; that at most, the capitalists were being bought off, and not all the capitalists but only some industries, who were allowed to profit and who therefore complied… although it’s unclear their willingness to comply or not would have been at all relevant. That the migrants were in fact being brought in primarily as political clients and political tools for the left and by those who opposed “the rich” — a shifting definition that often comes to include much of the middle class as well. And so the logic of this is irresistible to “economic populist” parties once in power for some time, regardless of their initial rhetoric about the “pauperization of the proletariat finally coming true through the vehicle of mass migration.” If your position is “the poor and conservative many against the decadent and predatory Elite and rich,” why wouldn’t you come to see millions of foreign poor “decent family people” as your allies? Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so. In many cases they don’t in fact have specifically racial, or national or ethnic-cultural language even by the way: many rightists are dumbly misled when a leftist starts to inveigh against “globalism,” the “IMF,” “international Anglo-Liberalism,” “the transnational elites,” and many such things, into thinking that such a person must surely want to preserve the demographic and cultural characteristics of a particular country or region. But that’s almost never the case: importing millions of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians in Argentina, or migrants in Basque Country or Ireland may actually come to be seen as “yes we are importing good family people who will stand with us in native solidarity against globalism, Capital, and Neoliberal atomization.” And that is in fact what happened.
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The matter of how economic populism and leftism always betrays real nationalism is very interesting, and must be explored in detail; but its failure to deliver specifically its economic promises is the real and big reason for Milei’s rise at the moment in Argentina. Decades of “getting everything the American dissident sphere is now asking for” has left Argentina a nation competing with Venezuela when, given its natural endowments as well as its human capital, it should be competing with the United States. There’s no better example in the modern world of a case where specifically bad government and bad culture has so wrecked a country that otherwise does have both the natural resources and the biological human capital to be not only nice but truly great. Unlike East Europe or other parts of Europe, Argentina has no excuses: no Russian or other occupation, not even any wars; no natural disasters. Paradisiacal climate and isolation; temperate climate, free from disease. A cultured, highly literate intelligent population. All wrecked by bad political decisions, a terrible political culture, maybe bad elements of culture in general.
And all wrecked by “economic populism” that results in crushing taxation, regulations in the name of social justice that destroy all enterprise, and ultimately really the enslavement of the good, intelligent, and talented part of the population in the service of providing goods to the dumb, dusky stupid many so that these many may vote for petty politicians invoking selfrighteous “union” language. It’s that simple. The left is right that libertarianism in Argentina would be “de facto white supremacy.” In fact they’re right about it in the United States too, except that the “dissident right” brain trust has convinced itself that the white “working class,” who are already highly taxed at the local level, would profit not from an elimination of racial legal handicaps against them and their children, as well as a lowering of their taxes—that would be Neoliberalism! Libertarianism!—but through “conservative populist socialism,” that is, taking more taxes from them and then funneling it back in the forms of “credits” or “services” after being filtered and laundered through the hands of various government employees. Who are these employees? Well, not “altright” or altlite Bannonite or “dissident conservative socialist” brain trust people as none have gone into the government bureaucracy, but Shaniquas and Chantelles. Maybe banning porn would help! But it’s just so trite to invoke freedom. You don’t want to be thought of like Paul Ryan, do you?
The corner into which the anti-establishment factions of America and France especially have locked themselves — other parts of Europe too though — a corner from which, after a few years of trading simplified orthodoxies through a retarded telephone game, they’re unable to see plain reality at least in Argentina… and they are unable to see why someone like Milei is ascendant there not despite but because of his rhetoric and promise of freedom… this may be hard to overcome in the coming few years. It is loser rhetoric that obscures the reality of tightly controlled, highly regulated life in America and the West under absurd slogans such as “hypercapitalism” and “atomization” and that wrongly assumes European youth, or frankly any other kind of talented youth, needs government aid and protection rather than needing to have the boot taken off the neck. It is just easier to see it in another country and another world where maybe talking points haven’t so thoroughly covered up what’s in front of your eyes.
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Milei is the latest in a series of last-ditch and probably doomed attempts to stop this, the logic of democracy. It’s possible at times that, under the logic of mass democracy — take from those who have and work to give to those who don’t in exchange for votes, and if you run out of these latter, just import them from somewhere under humanitarian language — it’s possible to stop it for a while. Things under this logic periodically get so bad that various coalitions sporadically form and may elect someone like Milei, or, before him, Macri. But these men soon find that to achieve their aims they would need reforms so extreme that revolution and maybe even civil war would be inevitable. So they give up, and the process then continues until the next crisis. But it doesn’t end and can’t end, until it all ends.
It’s easy to see how a country like Argentina ends, and it is likely going bust as a country. Some territory with that name will exist in maybe fifty years, but I’m not even sure it will still be called that. You can see the final outcome of everything I’ve said already: no intelligent, ambitious young person wants to be enslaved in that type of a thing forever, which is why everywhere you go in Costa Rica or Spain, or other parts of Europe, you see young Argentines who have left.
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[B]ecause of the “economic populist” idiocy, the country that has for the longest time learned most expertly to hide wealth, and so the very wealthy again have either fleed, are fleeing, or have learned through corrupt and other means to hide or offshore generational wealth. I can keep going but all these examples are the same thing: the end is the country becomes depopulated, or at least depopulated of a large percentage of its men, its capable European population, and its wealth, along with any other element eventually that gives it its being as the particular country that it is. So my guess is it will eventually, and within this century, stop existing. Someone like Milei could turn it around, but only with a complete abandonment of democracy and a militarization of the government. The United States will likely not allow that. It may allow it in El Salvador to stop gangs and violence, but probably not in Argentina to stop the local version of racial Marxism, which is its own program as well. But history has many surprises lately and some peoples are showing unexpected and hidden founts of energy and ingenuity; I hope I’m wrong, and that Milei or someone else stops this process in South America and gives an example to others… but it’s unlikely.
The likely future — and to a large extent already the present — of Argentina is interesting because the solution is and will be mass migration of its capable, its wealthy, and eventually soon in coming decades in general most of its beautiful, its talented, its non-dwarflike. But where will there be left to flee in the end?
Protest Problems
I have consistently criticized various governments for shutting down public protests against COVID-19 restrictions or (more recently) the Israel-Hamas war. For me, the vibrancy of the public town square is a litmus test for the robustness of the Open Society. That’s why I suggest starting this important intervention from Jan-Werner Müller in the very last paragraph, where he states:
“Democracy means sharing space with people whom we find annoying, and who sometimes deliberately annoy us. But like it or not, we have to have the right to get in each other’s faces.
That’s the essence of liberal democracy; yet, we have seen an erosion of those public norms, especially during the pandemic where fundamental rights have been (short-sightedly, one might say!) curtailed. That’s a dangerous path that essentially plays into the hands of illiberal democrats—because it means that we gradually adopt their playbook of institutional undoing. Moreover, I see some value in Tyler Cowen’s contrarian argument that a society of protest is less complacent and hence more dynamic. I’m not sure all this extends to the self-proclaimed climate activists (especially the so-called Klimakleber), as Müller claims; but read the whole thing nevertheless:
In If We Burn, a history of protest between 2010 and 2020, Vincent Bevins writes that the decade ‘surpassed any other in the history of human civilisation in its number of mass street demonstrations’. The responses to Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 restrictions and most recently the Israel-Hamas war suggest this decade may be just as tumultuous. Yet many governments are restricting the right of assembly. The trend is unsurprising among authoritarians who have abandoned any pretence of toleration (think of Putin after the invasion of Ukraine or Beijing’s clampdown in Hong Kong after 2019). But states that have a real claim to be democracies are also enacting new restrictions, targeting people, possessions and proclamations. In Bavaria, climate protesters were locked up for thirty days so that the Munich Motor Show could proceed undisturbed. In the UK, people can be arrested for carrying objects suitable for ‘locking on’. In Germany, it’s now illegal to hold a placard with certain words relating to Israel and Palestine. The new restrictions also concern places. Protesters aren’t allowed near politically significant locations and are instead shunted to ‘buffers’ and ‘bubbles’, or to designated ‘free speech zones’ (which make other areas speech-free zones). Both the legal and the physical space for protest is being shrunk.
The right to assemble was explicitly codified in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, though it’s now often conflated with free speech (the Supreme Court hasn’t heard a case on free assembly in four decades). The French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen left it out altogether, perhaps reflecting a suspicion, inspired by Rousseau, that different people demonstrating for different causes amounts to factionalism and therefore undermines the republic. There is no mention of freedom of assembly in the constitution of the Fifth Republic either. As for the UK, ‘it can hardly be said that our constitution knows of such a thing as any specific right of public meetings,’ the British jurist A.V. Dicey wrote in 1885. The Tumultuous Petitioning Act of 1661 was only repealed in 1986.
Even where the right to freedom of assembly has been officially recognised, it has been shadowed by anti-democratic prejudices about mass politics. Many states require permission to be sought in advance and all have the power to restrict or ban assemblies in the name of public order. Protesters can also be prohibited from using certain kinds of place. Up until the late 1930s, US jurists held that the government was, among other things, a property owner; hence, like all property owners, it could prevent people from trespassing. A new doctrine emerged according to which streets, squares and parks constituted a ‘public forum’. This relied on tradition: places that had been used for demonstrations in the past would remain open to the people. But such traditionalism leaves little room for innovation. Shopping malls and airports are off limits; after all, the Founding Fathers never used them.
Not all jurisdictions are hostile to the idea of protesters getting in the faces of shoppers or tourists. In a landmark decision in 2011, the German constitutional court allowed leaflets (directed against deportations) to be handed out in the publicly accessible areas of Frankfurt airport. The judges said that ‘the wish to create a “feel-good atmosphere” in a sphere which is strictly reserved for consumer purposes and which remains free from political discussions and social conflicts cannot be used as the basis for prohibiting the distribution of leaflets.’ Even more acerbically, they added that ‘the state may not restrict fundamental rights in order to ensure that the carefree mood of citizens is not disturbed by the misery of the world.’
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The provision of space for protest tells us how comfortable a democracy is with street politics. In the mid-1960s, the British architect Cedric Price produced a design for a Pop-Up Parliament, which would have replaced the Palace of Westminster. It had a ‘rally area’, with underfloor heating and nylon coverings protecting protesters from the rain. In contrast to the many zoning laws or ‘authorised assembly areas’ (a term used in Canberra), which suggest that the public is seen as a threat, Price’s design made clear to demonstrators that they were welcome.
Getting close to government buildings can be a crucial factor in ensuring the success of a protest. Considering the period since the end of the Cold War, the social scientist Mark Beissinger noted that ‘urban revolutionary episodes that have engaged in rallies, protests or processions in public space have had a significantly higher rate of success than those which engage in other tactics but do not use demonstrations – irrespective of the level of mass participation involved.’ More important still, he found that proximity to political authorities is a significant factor for the outcome of these ‘episodes’: ‘A majority of successful urban civic revolts occurred within seven hundred metres of the seat of power. By contrast, a majority of failed urban civic episodes occurred at least 2.9 kilometres from the seat of power.’
Demonstrations in halfway functioning democracies are not the same as protests that call for the overthrow of autocrats. But the logic is similar. Proximity to power-holders makes protesters more visible and disruption more effective; yet by making themselves visible – and making a nuisance – they also invite repression. Of course, democracies reject repression, at least on paper, and most of them do recognise the ‘sight and sound’ rights of assemblies: it’s legitimate to demand that politicians or other power-holders should see and hear demonstrators. The US is a glaring exception. In the land of the free, protest can be tidied away in ‘demonstration zones’.
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In Germany, the weeks after the 7 October terror attacks saw the banning of many pro-Palestine demonstrations, even in cases where there seemed to be no evidence of an imminent danger to public safety or of expressions of antisemitism. The bans appear to continue a troubling trend of limiting commemoration of the Nakba in Berlin. After the interior ministry made all activities relating to Hamas illegal in early November, lawyers were left puzzled as to whether the words ‘From the river to the sea’ constituted a criminal offence in all circumstances. The ministry, in a sloppily written announcement, appeared to suggest that the phrase was uniquely tied to Hamas; the Berlin police agree with this reading, as do public prosecutors in other federal states. At certain rallies, the number of Palestinian flags has been restricted; chanting has only been allowed if initiated from a stage; and protesters have reported being detained simply for wearing the keffiyeh. One state minister suggested that only German citizens should have the right to organise protests (the constitution specifies Germans, but the relevant federal law refers to ‘everybody’); another minister wondered if speaking German could be made mandatory at demonstrations. Suella Braverman’s attempt to have the police treat all pro-Palestinian marches in the UK as ‘hate marches’ could become a reality in Germany.
Contrary to what internet enthusiasts may argue, assembly in physical space remains fundamental for democracy. That’s partly because existing inequalities are often compounded online. Those rich in resources can also use the web more effectively; the sociologist Jen Schradie has even suggested that the internet is a medium best suited to conservatives. As the US Supreme Court recognised in the 1940s, assembly is crucial for ‘the poorly financed causes of little people’. The greater the turnout at a gathering, the more force an issue has. Leaders in the American civil rights movement often invoked ‘the sheer significance of our numbers’, a point proved by the inflated figures given for Trump’s inauguration. The success of assemblies is determined by what Charles Tilly called ‘WUNC’: worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. Citizens are willing to shoulder costs or even hardships to get to a particular place, and by appearing in public they also make themselves vulnerable. Numbers in squares don’t invalidate numbers in ballot boxes – but, as the German jurist Christoph Möllers has written, while demonstrations don’t have democratic form, they do have democratic meaning.
In the US, tolerance for protests has diminished over time. There was much greater willingness to put up with rowdy demonstrations in the 19th century – not to speak of the aftermath of the revolution, when even relatively conservative figures were willing to call mobs ‘constitutional’ and Jefferson advised Madison that ‘a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.’ A sanitised version of the civil rights movement has made us forget the extent to which civil rights leaders relied on disruption.
Protest is, of course, not the same as civil disobedience – that is, open and deliberate law breaking. And it is disobedience, driven by the climate emergency, that has provoked most of the backlash against protest in democracies. In Germany, Klimakleber from the Last Generation movement glue themselves to roads, enraging commuters. Members of the group are being investigated by state authorities on suspicion of forming or supporting a ‘criminal organisation’; if they are found guilty, the penalties for future disruption will be much more severe. Unlike making noise or accosting people in malls, such protests involve coercion. (It’s anyway debatable whether angering people who are trying to get to work is the best strategy for defeating the fossil fuel industry; the climate theorist and activist Andreas Malm doesn’t think it is.)
In the 1960s, mainstream liberal philosophers such as John Rawls recognised the legitimacy of breaking the law in a spectacular fashion to sway majorities; in the early 1980s, Jürgen Habermas defended resorting to illegal means to stop the stationing of new nuclear weapons. These lessons appear to have been forgotten in an age when the far right, centre-right and a centre-left desperate to prove that it’s ‘responsible’ have united around law and order rhetoric. It is because of this illiberal consensus that a fundamental civic principle must be reiterated. Democracy means sharing space with people whom we find annoying, and who sometimes deliberately annoy us. But like it or not, we have to have the right to get in each other’s faces.
Intelligence and Group Differences in Preference for Breasts over Buttocks
So, aehm, yeah. Looks like the question of “boobs or ass” seems to be more correlated with IQ than anything else. Obviously, I won’t reveal my preference but go figure :P
Abstract
Permanent adipose breasts are unique to humans among primates. We propose that permanent breasts, and a preference for them, are an adaptation for pair bonding and a slow life history strategy. This theory predicts that races with a slower life history strategy will prefer breasts to buttocks. To test our hypothesis, we predict preferences for breasts over buttocks from racial admixture and both national and regional average IQ, which we use as an indicator of differences in life history. Measures of Breast-Buttock preference are constructed for nations and subnational regions using the relative frequencies of internet searches on Google, Pornhub and YouPorn for terms related to breasts versus those related to buttocks. Average IQ correlates with Breast-Buttock preference at the national level (r = .76, p < .001), within regions of American countries (r = .85, p < .001), US States (r = .54, p < .001) and US Metro areas (r = .57, p < .001). Controlling for racial ancestry substantially moderated the effect size of intelligence. We consistently found African ancestry to negatively predict breast preference: across countries (r = −.80, p < .001), within US states (r = −.91, p < .001), and US Metro areas (r = −.91, p < .001). These results replicated when using Spanish language search terms within Spanish-speaking countries, suggesting our findings are not peculiar to the English language. Only for US Metro areas did we find a significant effect size for socioeconomic controls.
Appendix:
There is a longer blog post that does a deeper dive into the data…in case you can handle the obnoxious nature of such “research”. Here are some interesting titbits (no, no pun intended!)
Human females are the only primates with permanent adipose breasts. In other primates, the breasts only develop during pregnancy for the purpose of breastfeeding. There have been many theories for the evolution of perennial breasts in humans including thermoregulation, as a fat source akin to a camel’s hump, and as an adaptation to bipedalism (Pawłowski & Żelaźniewicz, 2021). Currently, however, there is no agreed upon explanation for why humans evolved this trait. For a comprehensive review of the literature see Pawłowski and Żelaźniewicz Pawłowski & Żelaźniewicz (2021). Although the origins of human breasts are uncertain, it is clear that they currently play the role of a secondary sexual characteristic, developing through puberty and being arousing to the male members of the species.
A particular challenge for any sexual explanation of the evolution of breasts is that the cues created by enlarged breasts may have been unattractive to our ancestors. In other primates, enlarged breasts signal being pregnant, or breast feeding infants and possibly having a male partner. During pregnancy it is near impossible to have another conception (Roellig et al., 2011) and females also face temporary infertility during breast feeding, a phenomenon known as “lactational amenorrhea”. A primate attracted to large breasts not only faces the risk of hostility from another male, but also receives few benefits from any resulting copulation. That breasts have evolved as a secondary sexual characteristic, despite possibly signalling sexually unattractive qualities in our ancestors, is a problem we term the “breast paradox”. Pawłowski & Żelaźniewicz (2021, p. 7) refer to this issue as “the key problem” to sexual explanations of the origins of permanent breasts.
Scientists Have Discovered a Way to Actually Make Coffee Taste Better
As my insta has been flooded with those pretentious espresso-making videos, I have always wondered whether these hobby baristas are just spraying water on their coffee beans for the likes or whether there is actually something to it. Turns out, that’s just the right thing to do—at least if you prefer darker roasts (which you obviously shouldn’t). Will test and get back to you on this:
Stop with the salt: adding a dash of water to coffee beans before grinding them could be the secret to a better-tasting cup of caffeinated goodness, new research suggests.
The trick boils down to reducing the amount of static electricity generated by grinding whole coffee beans, which otherwise causes them to clump together and clog up the grinder, creating a whole lot of mess and waste.
Coffee buffs have long been spritzing their beans to moisten them before grinding. Now scientists have confirmed what makes sparks fly in ground coffee beans – and shown how budding baristas can reduce that static electricity to consistently produce a more intense cup of espresso, if that's your thing.
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Grinding whole coffee beans into fine particles creates a lot of friction as particles rub against each other and fracture. This generates static electricity – a separation of charged particles – much the same as dust particles in volcanic plumes rub together and discharge to produce lightning.
By twice-grinding coffee beans, the researchers showed that most of the static electricity in ground coffee arises from fracturing beans, and less so the friction between them.
As for the types of beans that tend to clump together when ground, drier, darker roasts used in the team's experiments produced more electrostatic charges than lighter roasts, with a charge-to-mass ratio similar to particles in volcanic plumes and thunderclouds. The researchers suspect this may be because darker roasts are more brittle than lightly roasted beans that retain their moisture.
By comparing beans ground with and without a spritz of extra water, Harper and colleagues also showed that adding water before grinding resulted in a longer espresso extraction time and a consistently stronger brew. The water permeated through moistened coffee grounds and pulled more flavor from the less clumpy beans.
Speaking to New Scientist, Hendon recommends adding around 20 microliters of water per gram of coffee, or about half a milliliter for a typical espresso shot, to improve its consistency and flavor.
Peace,
SG