Maggie's Farm

That "teen girls" link doesn't say what it pretends to. It reports one anecdote of a teenage cheerleader who is upset and ties that to covid shutdown. Then it switches, with no real connecting piece to a pediatrician talking about how suicide rates, anxiety, and depression have gone up, with the implication that that is lockdown as well. Well, maybe, but it's not clear and its limited. Those pathologies increased alarmingly until 2014, especially among boys, and have not gone down. This tracks closely with reliance on social media and devices for interaction, as Haidt and Lukianoff discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind. There may be an increase in ER visits around suicide attempts under covid, but only among girls. And ER visits is a bit soft as a measure of how much problem there is.

It does make a certain intuitive sense, that girls who have less live contact with others are even more reliant on devices and that artificial world. But "intuitive sense" has an uneven track record in psychology. We can point to a definite correlation with social media use. Stick with that first in trying to understand what is going on.

"New World Order" has a different meaning behind the old Iron Curtain than it does here. We think of it as a globalised, transnational network that infringes on the independence of states for the benefit of a few string-pullers. Out east they use it to mean "Western Democratic Norms." To Russians, it is anything that interferes with them assuming their role as the center of the Old World Order. Like, since the fall of Constantinople.

I had thought the criticisms of Orban were exaggerated and biased, but over the last two years I have liked what he says and does less and less. Maybe he got worse, maybe I got smarter, I don't know. But he has somehow become Putin's right-hand man.