The former Columbia University student has been a ringleader of anti-Semitic activity and pro-Hamas demonstrations.

He is believed to have committed suicide after undergoing gender-related surgery.

Altruism, as Ayn Rand has demonstrated, does not mean kindness or benevolence; it means that man is a sacrificial animal; it means that some men are to be sacrificed to others. -- Leonard Peikoff

Years ago, I was in the car line at a Starbucks and was puzzled to learn at the payment window that "the gentleman ahead of you has paid for your order."

Then ignorant of the self-congratulatory, performative ritual variously known as pay it forward or pass it on, I accidentally gave one of the only two acceptable answers.

"What a pleasant surprise!" I said, as I accepted my free order at the pick-up window and left, performative chain of unchosen obligations broken.

The other correct reply, I think you'll agree after seeing this Reddit thread on the subject, would be No thanks!

As I elaborated at some length in an earlier post about performative driving "etiquette," practitioners of such rituals suffer a form of altruism-induced myopia, as if they see only the presumed needs of those immediately next to them -- at the expense of the larger picture of how rude (or even dangerous) they are being to others around them, sometimes even including the alleged benefactor of their largess.

The driver who slams his brakes "generously" to allow for someone to proceed out of turn upsets the expectations of anyone else in the vicinity, increasing the likelihood of an accident.

The pay it forward guy is cut from the same cloth.

The obligation he is trying to foist on you, for example, can blow your budget, should you choose to accept it:

I came for the cheapest thing on the menu - popcorn is like two dollars. And there was a large family behind me. And most people were coming in big groups for alcohol. So I might have gotten free popcorn, and I appreciate the gesture, but I might then have had to shell out fifty bucks for beer for a bunch of randos.

And as for the workers in a line, there can be inordinate degree of inconvenience:

Former barista here and yes, pass it on sucks. In a drive thru, every order automatically pops up on the register. Now imagine having to manually override that every single time to account for people paying for the car after them, while you're also on a clock that automatically reports the time from order to delivery to your district manager, and everyone is technically waiting longer for their order to be delivered because they have to pull forward for the next person to take the order that's already been cashed out for minutes. Mind you, being in the red for too long on the timer can get your whole team into trouble.

Those who start these chains are being thoughtless and putting others on the spot, which is rude to begin with. On top of that, there may be consequences many of them would rather not saddle others with if they took a moment to consider them.

And, while the temptation to pass along a pleasant surprise out of good will is understandable, it is on the (would-be) recipient to decide against it if there is a sacrifice -- however small -- of self or others involved in doing so.

-- CAV

WHEN AUSTRALIA PASSES LEGISLATION, we're often not far behind.

Australia's Orwellianly titled Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act was passed last year. 

The Act's aim is to ban under 16-year olds from social media.

The social media ban was rushed through Parliament with no real inquiry into the nature of the problem it was supposed to solve or the likely effects of a ban. Evidence from mental health experts on the question of whether and how social media use is harmful is at best inconclusive, as far as I can determine.
    But the advocates of a ban haven’t worried too much about that. They’ve relied on casual correlation and on the testimony of instant experts, with no particular expertise in the mental health of young people. ... most notably Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt.

Twenge peddles bullshit based on so-called "generational analysis"— on the assumption that being a "millennial"/"Gen Z"/"Gen Y"/"Gen Jones" is any more effective than astrology. (Indeed, as one review of her latest book concludes, "for serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive.”)

Six years ago, NYU social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt co-authored 'The Coddling of the American Mind. 'In the book, he and Greg Lukianoff argued that parents are doing a real disservice to their kids by overprotecting (coddling) them, rather than giving them more freedom and allowing them to make mistakes and learn.
    This year, he’s back with a new book, 'The Anxious Generation,' arguing the exact opposite in the digital world: that social media and smartphones have made kids under-protected, rewiring brains and increasing teenage depression rates.
    Haidt tries to address this obvious contradiction in his book with the standard cop-out of the purveyor of every modern moral panic: “This time it’s different!” He provides little evidence to support that.

[A]s a quick summary: he’s wrong on the data, which undermines his entire argument. Almost every single expert in the field who does actual research on these issues says so. Candice Odgers ripped apart his misleading use of data in Nature. Andrew Przybylski, who has done multiple, detailed studies using massive amounts of data going back years, and keeps finding little to no evidence of the things Haidt claims, has talked about the problems in Haidt’s data. Ditto Jeff Hancock, at Stanford, who recently helped put together the National Academies of Sciences report on social media and adolescent health (which also did not find what Haidt found).
    Indeed, one thing that came up in looking over the “strongest” research in the book was that (contrary to some of Haidt’s claims), data outside of the US on suicide rates seem to show they’re often (not always) going down, not up. Even worse, the data on depression in the US showing an increase in depression rates among kids is almost certainly due to changes in screening practices for depression and how suicide ideation is recorded.
    As my review notes, though, the problems with the data are only the very beginning of the problems with the book. Because, in the first part of the book, Haidt misleadingly throws around all the data, but in the latter part, he focuses on his policy recommendations.

It's those very policy recommendations that Australia has just followed! 

It's not just pseudo-psychology based on bad data: "even his former co-author, Greg Lukianoff, pointed out that Haidt’s proposals clearly violate [the US's] First Amendment."

So fast and loose on both data and free speech!

The transcript reads like a master class in dismantling moral panic arguments. When Florida’s lawyers stood up in court to defend the law, they reached for what they clearly thought was their strongest argument: “Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms.”

But Judge Mark Walker, chief judge of the Northern District of Florida, wasn’t buying what Florida was selling. His response cut straight to the heart of why these kinds of claims deserve skepticism, and some of it was based on his own childhood experience on the other side of a moral panic:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Well, Your Honor, it is well known in this country that kids are addicted to these platforms. This is a mental health —

THE COURT: It was well known when I was growing up that I was going to become a Satanist because I played Dungeons & Dragons. Is that — I don’t know what really that means. You can say that there’s studies, Judge, and you can’t ignore expert reports that say X.

The D&D reference isn’t just an amusing comeback — it’s a federal judge explaining through personal experience why courts shouldn’t accept “everybody knows” arguments about harm to children. After all, lots of things have been “well known” to harm children over the years. It was “well known” that chess made kids violent. Or that the waltz would be fatal to young women, or that the phone would prevent young men from ever speaking to young women again. I could go on with more examples, because there are so many.

When Florida’s lawyer tried to argue that social media was somehow different — that this time the moral panic was justified — Judge Walker was ready with historical receipts:

MR. GOLEMBIEWSKI: Kids weren’t reading comics — millions and millions of kids weren’t reading comics eight hours a day. Millions and millions of kids weren’t listening to rap music eight hours a day. There’s something different going on here, and there’s a consensus —

THE COURT: The problem, Counsel, that’s a really bad example, the comics, because there is an entire exhibit in Glasgow where they barred comics in the entire country because somebody decided that comics were turning their youth against their parents and were causing them to engage and worship the supernatural and stuff.

So, I mean, I guess that was the point the plaintiffs were making is from the beginning of time, we’ve targeted things under some belief that it’s harming our youth, but doesn’t necessarily make it so.

But, go ahead.

That trailing “but, go ahead” is savage. I think I’d rather curl up in a ball and try to disappear in the middle of a courtroom than “go ahead” after that.