Gregory Cochran is what you’d call a “hyphen man.” Formerly a physicist, now an anthropologist, with ancillary interests in various other topics, it is said that if you speak a falsehood to a mirror three times, Greg will appear in the reflection and yell at you.

I’ve collected some of his quippage.

[Innumerable uses] “You’re wrong.”

“When you think about it, falsehoods, stupid crap, make the best group identifiers, because anyone might agree with you when you’re obviously right. Signing up to clear nonsense is a better test of group loyalty. A true friend is with you when you’re wrong. Ideally, not just wrong, but barking mad, rolling around in your own vomit wrong. Movement conservatives have learned this lesson well.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/megafaunal-extinctions/

“Ron Unz explains that his model took no more than five minutes to produce. I believe him.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/

[On the origin of homosexuality] “The Emmdees say that when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. When explaining homosexuality, people think of pterodactyls and unicorns.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/homosexuality-epigenetics-and-zebras/

[On the existence of the Kinsey Scale] That would make exactly as much sense as a bell curve of food preferences ranging from steak at the left to granite at the right, in which people in the middle liked steak and rocks equally well. Is an even split between a behavior that works and one that never does what you expect from biology? Do you expect half the geese to fly north for the winter?
http://www.unz.com/pfrost/origins-of-male-homosexuality-germ/

“Homosexual men are nature’s Petri dishes”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/recantation/

[On Iraq] “There are now a number of talkative idiots saying that Bush has made a mess of Iraq…I compare this to someone who has had a bad sexual experience with a porcupine and is now trying to decide just where he went wrong. Should he have used Brylcreem on the quills? Should he have sent flowers? Did he ‘come on too strong’?”
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail309.html

“There is no threat out there that can be usefully addressed by a larger ground army. In fact, there’s not much of a short-term threat out there at all. Except the threat from within: crazy people. That one is serious, as always.”

[Later] Many of you seem to think that invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 was a reasonable response, just as we always attacked the Navaho or the Cheyenne in response to Comanche attacks. Ah, but we didn’t, because that would have been pointless and incredibly stupid. Nor did we talk as if the redskins were the coming threat to Western Civilization, even though jihadists are actually relatively weaker than Sitting Bull was. […] If accuracy or making sense mattered, I can think of a a few hundred pundits who would be cleaning septic tanks right now.”
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/08/wheres_snow_whi.html

“…if Iraq had been about 50 times cheaper, in terms of money and casualties and reputation, I could maybe see someone reasonable arguing that it wasn’t a mistake, or at least wasn’t the stupidest thing this country has ever done. But it wasn’t 50 times cheaper.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/a-god-damned-hippie/

[On the Chelyabinsk meteoroid] “If this meteor had exploded at a lower altitude, it would have smashed that city flat and killed hundreds of thousands of people. How likely that was depends on the details—most meteors are not strong enough to hold together during that kind of re-entry, although some nickel-iron meteors may be. The Tunguska explosion would have utterly destroyed any city it hit. It’s not quite as bad as a nuclear weapon: It would only kill you with fire and blast, rather than fire, blast, and radiation. You’d only die twice—Sean Connery might survive.”
http://takimag.com/article/paranoid_about_asteroids_gregory_cochran

“What’s Arcturus really like? The real Arcturus, not the touristy parts?”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/charade/

Do you like to read manga? How do you keep yourself distracted from the constant gasping, wheezing sound of the art form DYING ON ITS FEET?

This is shit, guys. I got 7 Billion Needles in 2012. Junji Ito was in one of his periodic 2-3 year “releasing fucking nothing” dry spells, and this looked vaguely similar. What I got managed to be not what I expected via the contradictory path of being EXACTLY what I expected: cliche after cliche after cliche, hammered down with the repetition of a judge’s gavel.

This is the swill that passes for horror manga? Even a novice to the form like myself could pick up on all copy-of-a-copy ideas. “Main character fuses with a symbiote and fights monsters”? Off the top of my head: Parasyte, Variante, Tokko, and Genocyber…and I read LESS THAN ZERO manga. Main character’s an alienated high school girl? Be careful, I’m not sure Western markets are capable of handling this much originality.

The story is better recapped by someone who cares more than me (ie, anybody). The character design is workmanlike and boring. The art is full of computer-assisted gradient shading and all the other parlour tricks of a bored pen monkey cranking out a generic serial to an editor’s cracking whip. The plot has a lot of…events, you could call them. Things happen. Then they stop happening. Repeat for a few hundred pages. Launch franchise.

7 Billion Needles is apparently inspired by Needle, by Hal Clement. The storytelling is not reminiscent of any era of Western science fiction, just a very standard manga formula that’s executed neither better or worse than average, and doesn’t stand out even by being a train wreck. Cripples inspire pity: bores inspire no reaction at all.

When I think of horror manga, I think of Kazuo Umezu’s doomed worlds, Shintaro Kago’s gross-outs, Suehiro Maruo’s nihilism and aesthetics, Jun Hayami’s brutality, Junji Ito’s fetishistic HR Gigerisms…even Hideshi Hino’s primitive efforts have more panache and charm than 7 Billion Needles.

The title comes from a metaphor: the difficulty of finding a particular needle amongst seven billion other needles. This also describes the experience of anyone trying to find decent manga in this day and age.

There’s a puddle of water on your floor. How did it get there? Maybe you have a hole in your roof. Unfortunately, you lack a ladder.

Is there a way to check if there’s a hole in your roof without a ladder? Affirmative. Does the puddle only appear when it rains? Does your house get cold at night? You can’t gain “ground knowledge” (or “roof knowledge”, or whatever) but clues can be used to triangulate what’s going on.

The key thing is that “my house gets cold” is a weaker form of evidence that actually seeing the hole in your roof, so it’s a good idea to let a few clues pile up before making judgement. JREF is wrong. Sometimes a plethora of weak evidence CAN equal strong evidence.

I like to do this with internet users. I can’t look into anyone’s head and determine that they’re stupid or pathological. But there are distinctive and uniform “tells” that relate to certain types of people. I’m against making snap judgement based on just one trait, but let each additional one be a hair raised on your neck.

Pink hair: likely a woman who posts frequently on twitter about how she “needs feminism”. Like many women who “need feminism”, a cauldron of insanity, vindictiveness, and narcissism. Comments will be interpreted as death and rape threats.

Anime girl avatar: strong risk factor for trolling, being a sockpuppet, or being from /r9k/.

Self-describes as an “atheist”, “rationalist”, “free-thinker”: moderate risk factor for selective skepticism, hivemindedness, or being some social cause’s automaton (substantially more so than someone who self-describes as “religious”)

Self-describes as “traditional”: very opposed to moral degeneracy. Deletes internet browser history with the frequency and compulsion of Lady Macbeth washing her hands.

Self-describes as a good person: thoughtful and conscientious. Keeps the thermostat low enough so that neighbours don’t have to smell the decomposing hooker in the basement.

South Park Avatar: guy who’s been on the forum for 10 years, and whose every post is an impenetrable mare’s nest of inside references and in-jokes. Every reply after him being some variant of “hur hur hur, that’s exactly what you’d say, South Park Avatar Guy. Hey, everyone, check it out. South Park Avatar Guy just said the kind of thing South Park Avatar Guy says.”

Avatar of himself playing guitar: male who disregards life in favour of carefully staged pictures of himself having a life. Zoom in and the guitar will probably be strung back to front and held in the wrong hand.

PGP Key in profile description: you’re not meant to USE it. You’re meant to ADMIRE it. Woah, shit, this busta has a PGP key!

I hope this has helped you in your online adventures. More will be posted at the brisk schedule of “probably never”.