1) Yglesias (free post) on effective altruism and consequentialism. I didn’t know the term consequentialist before this, but I’m pretty sure I am one:
The most important part of all of this, the part that ties back into my more mainstream political commentary, is the importance of trying to do detached critical thinking about the consequences of our actions.
Max Weber, this blog’s namesake, talked about the “ethic of responsibility” as an important part of politics. You can’t just congratulate yourself on having taken a righteous stand — you need to take a stand that generates a righteous outcome. That means a position on abortion rights that wins elections and stops people from enacting draconian bans. It means crafting a politically sustainable approach to increasing immigration rather than just foot-dragging on enforcement. It means taking Black lives matter seriously in the 2020-present murder surge. And, yes, it means trying to drag our Covid-19 politics out of the domain of culture wars and into the world of pandemic prevention.
2) Relatedly, very much enjoyed a Sean Illing conversation with Cornell West on pragmatism. Hell yeah am I a pragmatist. Not clear, though, if I’m a consequential pragmatist or a pragmatic consequentialist
3) Noah Smith on Japanese productivity:
Even for those who manage to land a middle-class job, the lifestyle is often soul-crushing. Japan’s famous culture of overwork rewards employees who put in long hours at the office instead of those who accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently. This is mostly a result of the country’s notoriously low white-collar productivity rates —workers are working overtime to make up for broken corporate cultures. But it’s also likely that there’s a feedback loop involved; excessively long hours have been shown to make workers tired and ineffective.
4) Yglesias on conservatives in marriage. I think he’s quite right:
Children who grow up in a home with one parent rather than two fare materially worse on almost every metric, which gives rise to the question of what the government could or should do about it.
Occasionally conservatives will assert — as Brad Wilcox and Chris Bullivant did in a recent USA Today piece — that this topic “cannot be uttered in our national conversation” and is “verboten” in elite circles. I don’t agree with that; I think progressives are simply skeptical that conservatives have any real ideas for promoting stable families and feel that the right typically brings this up to prevent the adoption of proven anti-poverty policies, like a child allowance…
Discussions about the impact of family structure on life outcomes are tricky in the United States because most white kids grow up living with two biological parents and most Black kids do not.
This leaves almost everyone disinclined to discuss the issue. One camp doesn’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that any racial gap in life outcomes shows the need to fight racism. And another camp consists of racists who don’t like to talk about family structure as a source of disadvantage because they believe it detracts from the idea that Black people are inferior…
Is this a causal relationship?
There are two basic problems with attempting causal inference about family structure.
One is that since married parents in America are richer, better educated, and more likely to be white, it’s not particularly surprising that their kids are better off. You could pick any attribute that is statistically associated with rich, well-educated white people and find that people like that have kids who end up with better life outcomes.
The second and larger problem is unobserved variables. You can apply statistical controls to obvious demographic characteristics, but even if you limit yourself to white, college-educated, 41-year-old dads, it’s probably the case that there are some differences on average between the WCE41YODs who are married to their children’s mother and those who are not. And it could be that those underlying personal differences are driving the differences in outcomes…
I think this research essentially confirms what common sense would tell you, which is that a second parent usually brings a lot to the table. Some of that is money. But some of it is that parenting, while delightful, is also difficult work, and kids benefit from parents’ ability to tag-team. The second adult generally also brings connections to a whole larger universe of adults whose acquaintance with the kid can be useful. The level of involvement of the second parent exists on a spectrum, but in practice, given the actual social conditions of the United States, dads are more involved with kids when they are married to their children’s mother and that brings benefits…
What can we actually do here?
The most obvious pro-marriage move would be to remove marriage penalties in the welfare state.
A lot of programs are means-tested in an effort to maximize the alleviation of material suffering while minimizing expense. But because marriage itself alleviates material suffering, programs are often structured such that a mom with two kids who earns $20,000 per year gets less help than a mom and a dad with two kids and combined earnings of $40,000 per year. There is a certain logic to that, but it discourages people from getting married. The most straightforward solution is to consolidate and simplify these social assistance programs while also making them more generous overall. Universal benefits do not create marriage penalties.
But conservatives dislike spending money in general and specifically dislike spending money on programs that benefit people who don’t or can’t work.
5) McWhorter:
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In the late 1980s, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the term “African American” had more “cultural integrity,” and “Black” was, therefore, out of date. But I’d be hard-pressed to say that the Black community today has a greater measure of cultural integrity or is any prouder than it was then. And though a recent poll showed that a majority of Black Americans see being Black as central to their identity, the younger they are, the less central it is — suggesting less significance, as time goes on, about what we call ourselves.
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I think also of Nina Simone’s musicalization of Lorraine Hansberry’s phrase “To be young, gifted and Black.” Watch Simone perform this song in Questlove’s Oscar-winning documentary, “Summer of Soul,” with her vocal emphasis, full of conviction, on the word “Black.” Singing “African American” wouldn’t — couldn’t — ring with the same richness. Black America added meaning to and wrested pride out of a word that was supposed to have negative connotations by thinking of ourselves as beautiful and determined. I’m not sure “African American,” just as a term, has furthered that at all: “To be young, gifted and African American”?
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Remember, too, the “euphemism treadmill” described by the Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, who explained in a 1994 Times Opinion essay: “People invent new ‘polite’ words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations.” For example, the pathway from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled.” New words ultimately don’t leave freighted ideas behind; they merely take them on…
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Today’s predilection for newspeak neglects all of this. Frankly, I think it is partly because generating new labels offers instant gratification, especially with the internet handy. It’s easier to introduce new terms than to change the way different groups referred to by those terms are really perceived. In that way, never-ending calls to change the way people talk and write is less an advance than a cop-out.
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Terminology will, of course, evolve over time for various reasons. But broadly speaking, thought leaders and activists of past eras put their emphasis on what people did and said — not on ever-finer gradations of how they might have said it.
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Far better to teach people what you think they should think about something, and why, instead of classifying the way they express themselves about it as a form of disrespect or backwardness. After a while, if you teach well, they won’t be saying what you don’t want them to say. Mind you, you may not be around to see the fruits of the endeavor — a frustrating aspect of change is that it tends to happen slowly. But “Change words!” is no watchcry for a serious progressivism.
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6) Fascinating interview about the Russian military:
Does this suggest that Putin has simply blamed the intelligence agencies for the war’s problems? Or is it that he has no option now, other than to turn even more to the military?
That’s the problem. He’s actually out of options. He’s quite limited. He got himself in a big war, and right now the military is finally quite convinced that they are fighting a really big war, not just some limited conflict. So what’s he going to do? He needs to vow to keep going in Ukraine. And he understands that he’s fighting a conventional army, not some group of Nazis. And the military thinking is that in this big war, the Russian Army is on the losing end, because the Ukrainian Army is a completely mobilized army that actually claims it can call on hundreds of thousands more in reserves. The Russian Army is still largely a peacetime army.
At the same time, the Ukrainian Army is given the best weaponry that the West can provide. And this weaponry is tested against the Russians and the Russians are not in position to inflict any damage on nato. They’re suffering heavy losses from the weaponry supplied by nato countries.For many years, the Russian military believed that they had a chance to win a conflict with the West, not because they have better technology—they knew that the West always would have better technology—but because the West, and specifically the United States, would never sustain heavy casualties like the Russian Army can sustain, because, to the leadership, the cost of life is different. But in this war, in Ukraine, all the casualties are not by nato or by the American Army but by the Ukrainian Army. So even this cannot be played by the Russian Army. And that is why they think that they picked up a fight with nato in the wrong place.
So if they’d been fighting a nato country then presumably nato itself would be experiencing losses. And now nato is more willing to go along with the long war, because it’s the Ukrainians who are taking the losses?
Yes, absolutely. But the weaponry supplied by nato—
By nato countries, really.
Yes, exactly. So the Russians are taking these losses and they are taking a hit from the Ukrainian Army with the best weaponry in the world, supplied by the West. But we are not in position to inflict any damage back on nato.
7) Alex Yablon on guns and the GOP:
In the recent annals of American political rhetoric, there have been few more consequential statements of ideology than NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s post–Sandy Hook truism that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The line has gone from crisis PR spin to Republican Party dogma. But while the “good guy with a gun” mantra has the ring of tough guy common sense, the empirical evidence suggests armed cops and civilians do less than nothing to deter mass shooters.
Look no further than Texas Republicans’ responses to this week’s mass shooting in the small town of Uvalde, the deadliest at an elementary school since Sandy Hook. Speaking to Newsmax, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the top law enforcement and public safety officer in the state, said: “We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. … We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”
In the recent annals of American political rhetoric, there have been few more consequential statements of ideology than NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s post–Sandy Hook truism that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The line has gone from crisis PR spin to Republican Party dogma. But while the “good guy with a gun” mantra has the ring of tough guy common sense, the empirical evidence suggests armed cops and civilians do less than nothing to deter mass shooters.
Look no further than Texas Republicans’ responses to this week’s mass shooting in the small town of Uvalde, the deadliest at an elementary school since Sandy Hook. Speaking to Newsmax, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the top law enforcement and public safety officer in the state, said: “We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. … We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”
As Republicans like Abbott and Paxton double down on the same pro-gun proliferation response to every mass shooting, evidence accumulates that weapons are rarely effective means of deterring or stopping mass shootings.
Last year, a group of public health scholars published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association examining 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019. An armed guard was present in about a quarter of the incidents in the study. Those schools actually suffered death rates nearly three times higher than schools without armed guards. Similarly, a 2020 review of gun policy research by the RAND Corporation think tank found no evidence that the presence of more guns had any effect on gun violence. Criminologists at Texas State University found that unarmed staff or the shooters themselves are far more likely to bring a school shooting to an end than someone with a gun returning fire.
8) deBoer in the Daily Beast on mental illness and mass shootings:
It’s quite correct to place the focus on gun control, as Murphy does, but it’s not entirely accurate to say that the United States is not an outlier in mental illness—we have some of the highest rates in the world in almost any identifiable disorder. More importantly, our relative rates of mental illness can say nothing about whether any individual was so afflicted.
With luck, information will come out about Ramos’s history that will help us understand his mental state. Either way, whether he was mentally disordered or not is a question of fact, and the answer cannot be found through appeal to first principles. I’m afraid that attitude has been consistently rejected in progressive spaces, though, typically expressed with a bromide that I hear more and more often these days—“mental illness can’t do that”—in response to any bad act committed by someone whose sanity might be questioned.
But I’m afraid mental illness can do that…
If progressive mores only dictate respect for those who struggle with their mental health when they are inert and unthreatening, then that “respect” is a farce. I have watched with increasing frustration as the narrative that those who become violent must therefore not be mentally ill has spread among progressives. It’s a cartoonishly childish stance, the most facile and shallow form of moral support, a caricature of liberal regard for the voiceless. It’s the schizophrenic who cannot stop hurting themselves and others who need your support the most.
What the insistence that mass shootings can never be the product of mental illness shows me, more than anything, is the contemporary addiction to moral simplicity. If Ramos did indeed suffer from a psychiatric disorder then that would not in any sense absolve him of responsibility for what he did. But it would complicate the moral dimensions of the act, compel us to consider mitigating circumstances, suggest that he was perhaps deserving of sympathy as well as condemnation. And in 2022, in a society that’s obviously broken and seemingly impervious to positive change, all people feel they can hold on to is their judgment, their searing and perfect moral righteousness—“mental illness doesn’t do that.”\
9) OMG new totally classic Onion, “The Pros And Cons Of Letting Children Die”
America is currently wrestling with the difficult and controversial question of whether it’s worth it to make an effort to keep children alive, not to mention safe, educated, or healthy. The Onion looks at the pros and cons of just letting children die.
10) And some more great gun satire:
11) And, while I’m at it with good tweets
12) 1,000,000 time this!
13) Arthur Brooks on mindfulness:
If mindfulness is so great, then, why aren’t all of us practicing it every day? Why are we still spending our time romanticizing or regretting the past and anticipating the future? I think the answer is that mindfulness is not very natural, and actually quite hard. Many psychologists believe that as a species, humans are not evolved to enjoy the here and now. Rather, we are wired to time-travel mentally, mostly into the future, to consider new scenarios and try out new ideas. The social psychologist Martin Seligman goes so far as to call our species Homo prospectus.
But avoiding mindfulness can also be an effective way to distract yourself from pain. In 2009, four researchers writing in the journal Emotion showed that people’s minds are significantly more likely to wander when they’re in a negative mood than when they’re in a positive mood. Some sources of unhappiness that lead to distraction and mind-wandering are: fear, anxiety, neuroticism, and of course, boredom. Having a negative self-perception—feeling ashamed of oneself, for example—is also likely to lead to distraction from the here and now. Scholars writing in Europe’s Journal of Psychology showed in 2019 that people who suffered from a lot of shame tended to mind-wander considerably more than those who did not.
Neuroscience gives us clues as to why we escape to the future or past. A good deal of evidence shows that mind-wandering decreases activity in the brain regions that involve the processing of physical pain. Researchers have long known that social pain is processed by many of the same regions as physical pain; it stands to reason, then, that avoiding mindfulness is a self-defense strategy for those suffering mentally…
If you have struggled with mindfulness, two underlying problems might be to blame: You don’t know how to be at home in your head, or you do know and have concluded that home is no fun. If the former is what’s stopping you, then by all means, dig into the extensive and growing technology and literature on mindfulness. You might try formal meditation or simply paying attention more to your current surroundings.
But if your problem is the latter, you need to face the source head-on. Avoiding yourself won’t work in the long run; in fact, a lot of research shows that mind-wandering to avoid emotions makes things worse, not better. In a 2010 article in Science, the psychologist Matthew A. Killingsworth and my colleague Daniel T. Gilbert found that mind-wandering to positive topics didn’t improve mood, while wandering to neutral and negative topics made people unhappier.
14) Tim Miller on gun culture (from 2021 and on-point as ever):
As I understand it, there was a time when gun ownership and gun safety were paired with a pride in the craft. Maybe that was only in the movies and lost cause propaganda; I don’t know. But it is a concept I can appreciate. I recognize the sincerity of those who speak with a “do you want to have a catch” wistfulness when discussing shooting with their parents or grandparents.
But all of this is within the context of seeing guns as a right of passage, a privilege, and at times a necessary danger. That’s a frame that makes sense to me.
Another way of putting it is, to borrow a phrase, that guns should be safe, legal, and rare.
But these days American “gun culture”—or put more precisely, the kinkification of deadly hand-penises—has spiraled out of control. From kids in our cities who are getting killed pretending to be hardcore, to the “hunters” collecting hand cannons, to the lonely boys importing their first-person-shooter video games to real life, to a member of Congress using a rifle cross for her backdrop like she’s fucking American ISIS.
It’s way, way too much.
Mass shootings, suicides, urban bloodshed, police violence—they all lead back to this fundamental issue.
I’m sure that everyone reading this is familiar with the recent mass shootings at the massage parlors in Atlanta and at King Soopers in Colorado. These have shocked our consciences, again.
But did you know that since those shootings, eight people were killed at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis? A former NFL player killed four people in South Carolina? Two brothers killed four family members and themselves in Texas? A gunman killed four people—including a 9-year-old boy—at a real estate office in California? A guy killed his parents, two others, and himself at a convenience store in Maryland? A man was shot to death at a “shot house”? Another in a drive-by shooting at a strip mall? Another in a drive-by at their home? Another during a domestic argument? A 19-year-old was shot and killed trying to break up a different domestic argument; another shot and killed on the sidewalk; another shot and killed in his car?
And those last seven all happened in a single small city—Birmingham, Alabama (population 210,000)—in the last 10 days.
How is this an acceptable state of affairs?
Gun absolutism is one of the few dogmas still in place in conservatism. There are conservative politicians and pundits and voters who feel the way I do. I’ve met them. These are people who respect gun rights and individual freedoms but are deeply alarmed and horrified by the amount of carnage in our country and believe we need to rebalance the equation.
But saying that out loud is akin to self-deporting from the conservative movement.
This language is policed aggressively by the NRA, Dana Loesch, conservative politicians, and media personalities who immediately shoot down (intended) even minor restrictions or reasonable reforms that are proposed.
Every proposal to try to rationalize gun laws fails one of the (many) litmus tests that have been set up by the gun fetishists.
Want background checks at gun shows?
Well it’s ackshually only small-time unlicensed gun proprietors who don’t already do background checks.
Let’s make them have background checks, too, then?
Okay, but what about inheritances, gifts, and the temporary borrowing of guns among family and friends
Fine. Let’s limit magazine capacities then?
There are so few shootings where limiting magazine capacities would make a difference. And frankly, most of the gun deaths in this country are suicides.
But maybe we could at least curb some of the big mass shootings. Wouldn’t that in itself be good?
Most of these shooters aren’t following the law when they acquire their weapon anyway, and making them reload one more time isn’t going to make a material difference on the lives lost.
Well let’s go back to the assault rifle ban then?
Can you even define an assault rifle? It’s a meaningless term. Do you know the difference between a suppressor and a silencer? I bet you don’t know AR stands for ARMALITE, dingus.
Mass shooters do seem to like AR-15s though, no?
Millions of law-abiding varmint hunters use them too. And you never know when the gangs might hunt me down in my manse and I’ll need it for safety.
In other words: Any proposed reform is useless unless it solves every problem. Any proposed reform that solves every problem can’t work. Any proposed reform that can work is an abridgment of God-given liberty. And anyone who can’t field strip a pistol with their eyes closed like Gene isn’t allowed to have an opinion.
And here’s the thing: It’s true that any one individual reform isn’t going to make a big dent in the problem—because the problem is:
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We have way too many fucking guns in this country and too many people treat them like they’re cool toys.
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Humans are fallible creatures who when given easy access to cool deadly weapons at scale will use them to kill themselves and others.
That’s the problem.
But saying this out loud on the right is verboten and politically toxic.
15) Pandemic learning loss:
I am part of a team from the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College, Harvard, and the educational-assessment nonprofit NWEA that has been investigating the impact of remote and hybrid instruction on student learning during the 2020–21 academic year. We have assembled testing results from 2.1 million elementary- and middle-school students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and Washington, D.C., and combined those with data on the number of weeks schools were in-person, remote, or hybrid during 2020–21. Our team compared student-achievement growth in the period before the pandemic, from fall 2017 to fall 2019, with the period from fall 2019 to fall 2021. For years, districts have regularly been using NWEA tests to measure how students’ performance in reading and math changes during a school year; in a typical week of in-person instruction before the pandemic, the average student improved 0.3 points in math (on the NWEA’s scale) and 0.2 points in reading.
During the spring semester of 2020, though, nearly all schools went remote. Distractions, technical glitches, and the many other pitfalls of online education made it far less effective than in-person school.
One-fifth of American students, by our calculations, were enrolled in districts that remained remote for the majority of the 2020–21 school year. For these students, the effects were severe. Growth in student achievement slowed to the point that, even in low-poverty schools, students in fall 2021 had fallen well behind what pre-pandemic patterns would have predicted; in effect, students at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps widened too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.
By our calculations, about 50 percent of students nationally returned in person in the fall and spent less than a month remote during the 2020–21 school year. In these districts where classrooms reopened relatively quickly, student-achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status widened a bit in reading but, fortunately, not in math. And overall student achievement fell only modestly. The average student in the quicker-to-reopen districts lost the equivalent of about seven to 10 weeks of in-person instruction. (That losing just a quarter of a typical school year’s academic progress is a relatively good outcome only underscores the dimension of the overall problem.)
What happened in spring 2020 was like flipping off a switch on a vital piece of our social infrastructure. Where schools stayed closed longer, gaps widened; where schools reopened sooner, they didn’t. Schools truly are, as Horace Mann famously argued, the “balance wheel of the social machinery.”
16) Evolution in action… cockroach style, “Cockroach Reproduction Has Taken a Strange Turn: In response to pesticides, many cockroach females have lost their taste for sweet stuff, which changes how they make the next generation of insects.”
When a male cockroach wants to mate with a female cockroach very much, he will scoot his butt toward her, open his wings and offer her a homemade meal — sugars and fats squished out of his tergal gland. As the lovely lady nibbles, the male locks onto her with one penis while another penis delivers a sperm package.
If everything goes smoothly, a roach’s romp can last around 90 minutes. But increasingly, cockroach coitus is going really, weirdly wrong, and is contributing to roach populations in some places that are more difficult to vanquish with conventional pesticides.
Back in 1993, scientists working at North Carolina State University discovered a trait in the German cockroach, a species that inhabits every continent except Antarctica. Specifically, these new cockroaches seemed to have no affection for a form of sugar called glucose, which was strange because — as anyone who has ever battled against a cockroach infestation knows — cockroaches normally cannot get enough of the sweet stuff.
So, where did these new, health-conscious cockroaches come from?
It seems we created them by accident, after decades of trying to kill their ancestors with sweet powders and liquids laced with poison. The cockroaches that craved sweets ate the poison and died, while cockroaches less keen on glucose avoided the death traps and survived long enough to breed, thus passing that trait down to the next cockroach generation.
“When we think of evolution, we usually imagine wild animals, but actually, it’s also happening with small animals living in our kitchens,” said Ayako Wada-Katsumata, an entomologist at North Carolina State University.
17) Krugman, “The G.O.P. War on Civil Virtue”
But if you ask me, the worst and also most chilling response came from Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas. What we need to do, declared Patrick, is “harden these targets so no one can get in, ever, except maybe through one entrance.”
That restriction would have interesting consequences in the event of a fire. But in any case, think about Patrick’s language: In a nation that’s supposedly at peace, we should treat schools as “targets” that need to be “hardened.” What would that do to public education, which has for many generations been one of the defining experiences of growing up in America? Don’t worry, says a writer for The Federalist: Families can keep their kids safe by resorting to home-schooling.
Actually, if you take the proposals by Cruz, Patrick and others literally, they amount to a call for turning the land of the free into a giant armed camp. There are around 130,000 K-12 schools in America; there are close to 40,000 supermarkets; there are many other venues that might offer prey for mass killers. So protecting all these public spaces Republican-style would require creating a heavily armed, effectively military domestic defense force — heavily armed because it would face attackers with body armor and semiautomatic weapons — that would be at least as big as the Marine Corps.
Why would such a thing be necessary? Mass shootings are very rare outside the United States. Why are they so common here? Not, according to the U.S. right, because we’re a nation where a disturbed 18-year-old can easily buy military-grade weapons and body armor. No, says Patrick, it’s because “We’re a coarse society.”
I know it’s a hopeless effort to say this, but imagine the reaction if a prominent liberal politician were to declare that the reason the United States has a severe social problem that doesn’t exist elsewhere is that Americans are bad people. We’d never hear the end of it. But when a Republican says it, it barely makes a ripple.
And I guess I should say for the record that I personally don’t believe that Americans, as individuals, are worse than anyone else. If anything, what has always struck me when returning from trips abroad is that Americans are (or were) on average exceptionally nice and pleasant to interact with.
What distinguishes us is that it’s so easy for people who aren’t nice to arm themselves to the teeth.
18) Loved Jeff Maurer’s take on stick figures and ideology. Seriously, give this one a full read:
Now
Now we’re in the era addressed by the original cartoon. And I agree: Something happened. Much has been written about this, including on the left. This panel is my attempt to capture the fact that I think what happened was a bit more complex than simply “the left moved left”.
A new ideology has invaded the left. Nobody quite knows what to call it; a lot of people say “woke”, Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, I say “religious left” because it reminds me of the religious conservativism I grew up with. In this drawing, I’ve depicted it as a zombie to convey that I think this is something coming from outside; this isn’t “what was there before, only moreso”. This is something foreign — more on that in a bit.
Why did things change when they did? I think it probably starts where the conservative story started: with geographic sorting. Blue parts of the country are bluer than they used to be, and economic stratification has overlapped with economic polarization. Depending on what circles you run in, you can go a long time without encountering someone who thinks differently than you. The world I was recently in — late night political comedy — was far enough left to make your typical Vermont art collective look like a Proud Boys meeting. And, of course, ideologically homogeneous environments lead to groupthink; they’re basically human growth hormone for bad ideas.
I also think the liberal media landscape now more closely resembles what conservatives built. Mainstream outlets have changed due to the exodus of their conservative audience and by the rise of engagement-based business models. MSNBC is neither as popular nor as terrible as Fox News (it would probably be more popular if it was more terrible), but it sucks a lot and is part of the landscape. To my eternal regret, I think that late night political comedy shows played a role in the change. And, of course, there’s Twitter; Twitter is much younger and farther left than the population, and it includes every journalist in America (it’s part of their job now!). Therefore, journalists are far more likely than other people to think that Twitter is real life. We’ve created a clique-y, performative environment that’s ten times worse than the viper pit of high school, and then required the country’s most influential people to spend large amounts of time there.
This is the environment in which a simplistic worldview that sees all things as a zero-sum conflict between oppressor and oppressed has bubbled up. I’m not sure if this view is actually more common than before or just more prominent; it might be that it exists in similar levels as it did in the past, but it gets more attention now. It’s certainly true that Twitter puts you in touch with colossal morons who used to be unable to reach you (what a fantastic service!). At any rate, this view is definitely more influential than it used to be; ideas that used to mostly exist in teach-ins at Antioch College and stage banter from all-female punk bands have gone mainstream.
I think the movement’s focus on race, gender, and other identity issues has made many on the left not quite know how to respond. Ending discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation is so central to liberals’ identity that we’ve become easy marks. Saying “this is anti-racist” to a liberal is like saying “this is anti-fire” to Frankenstein; we’re very likely to buy whatever you’re selling. The appeal to deeply-held values combined with the social penalty for appearing to betray those values has made us slow to call bullshit on spurious charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. And so, the zombie virus has spread.
Panel 4:
I think the left is very much in turmoil. 2020 seemed to be the high-water mark of the craziness, but things are still dicey. I’m far from ready to say that sanity has won out; after all, there was a moment in 2013 when it looked like Republicans were going to tack towards the center, and we all know how that went.
The main thing I want to communicate with this panel — the things I’ve been feeling most strongly recently — is that this ideology is NOT LIBERAL. Nor is it “progressive” or “left”, according to most definitions. I think that a closer look at this way of thinking reveals it to be completely antithetical to the American liberal/left tradition.
19) Katelyn Jetelina with strategies for reducing gun violence.
20) Meanwhile, the conservative attempts to ignore the gun aspect are just absurdly pathetic, e.g., “We must confront the cultural mess that gave us Uvalde”
21) Turns out, Scott Alexander wrote against the “autism is all good” crowd back in 2015. It’s very good.
Dylan Matthews says that autism “is not a disease”, joining writers from TIME, The Guardian, The Irish Examiner, various blogs, et cetera. I would hate to contradict such an array of eminent voices.
So let’s taboo whether something is a “disease” or not. Let’s talk about suffering.
Autistic people suffer. They suffer because of their sensory sensitivities. They suffer because of self-injury. They suffer because they’re in institutions that restrain them or abuse them or just don’t let them have mp3 players. Even if none of those things happened at all, they would still suffer because of epilepsy and cerebral palsy and tuberous sclerosis. A worryingly high percent of the autistic people I encounter tend to be screaming, beating their heads against things, attacking nurses, or chewing off their own body parts. Once you’re trying to chew off your own body parts, I feel like the question “But is it really a disease or not?” sort of loses its oomph.
My moral philosophy doesn’t contain a term for “is this a disease or not?”, but it definitely contains a term for suffering. If you’re a good person, you try to alleviate or prevent suffering. Accomodating and supporting autistic people alleviates some amount of the suffering associated with autism. Curing it alleviates all of that suffering.
And remember – society is fixed but biology is mutable. Which do you think is more likely? That soon biologists will discover a molecular cure for autism? Or that soon politicians will discover a cure for the systemic issues that cause poor people who can’t stand up for themselves to be maltreated and abused? The biologists seem to have about a ten million times better track record for this sort of thing. And if you don’t expect the politicians to create a brave new world where no disability ever remains unaccomodated, then stopping the biologists just means that the status quo will go on forever.
Faced with the choice of seeing the flood of human misery that I have to deal with every day continue mostly unabated, or having a pill that provides a quick fix to said flood, I wish with all my heart for the latter. Sure, this should not be pursued at the cost of supplying what accomodations to existing autistic people we can, any more than blue sky cure-for-cancer research should be pursued at the cost of treating current cancer patients, but it’s right and proper to want it, to think it would immensely improve thousands of people’s lives.
22) This is cool, “Surfing a record 86-foot wave took guts. Measuring it took 18 months.”
Sebastian Steudtner, a 37-year-old surfer from Germany, rode a giant wave in October 2020 in Nazaré, Portugal. After 18 months of detailed analysis, he learned the wave measured 86 feet, making it the largest ever surfed. (Jorge Leal/World Surf League)
23) Well, if you count a mouth as a limb. Still cool, “”Scientists Found an Animal That Walks on Three Limbs. It’s a Parrot.”
24) Happy 28(!!) years of marriage to my wife and me.
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