Americans and creationism

Of course, the fact that an absurdly high number of Americans endorse full-on creationism is not exactly new information, but something about the ongoing high numbers just really struck me in this Post piece today:

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) sudden and unexpected elevation to the top job in the chamber last week meant that a lot of political observers (and more than a few politicians) were left playing catch-up. In the hours and days that followed his election as speaker, Americans learned a lot more about Johnson’s past rhetoric and advocacy, a background that sits squarely within the overlap of conservative and religious beliefs.

One particular vignette came up repeatedly. Over the past decade, Johnson has worked and advocated for a religious theme park in Kentucky, one centered around a re-creation of the ark described in the Bible. The theme park elevates the idea that the world was created in its present form by God several thousand years ago; that there was no evolution involved in the emergence of different life forms, including humans.

Polling released this week by Suffolk University for USA Today indicates that this comports with the views of nearly 4 in 10 Americans — more than say either that human evolution was steered by God or that humans evolved without any divine intervention.

As you might expect — particularly given the beginning of this article — Republicans are much more likely to say humanity was the result of divine creation than are Democrats. A majority of Republicans say divine creation created humans; just under half of Democrats say that there was no divine role.

 

Honestly, I’m willing to say, fine, whatever, on “humans evolved, but God directed” in that, in admitting evolution, is actually not at odds with all the scientific evidence.  Just like one cannot ever disprove that prayers, in addition to chemotherapy, did not cure a particular incidence of cancer.  But the no evolution whatsoever view is, just astoundingly unscientific.  Given the evidence we have, it seems roughly on a par with saying the earth is the center of the solar system (or that the earth is only 6000 years old, for that matter).  

Thinking about this made me honestly curious if anybody had ever really dug down into these views.  So much of polling response is just expressive answering and I wonder how many of the “born again” respondents just “know” this is what you’re supposed to say.  Do they think all the fossils are just entirely made up?  Some bizarre coincidence?  God testing us by planting skeletons of Homo Erectus?  I get that some of these people really do believe variations on this, but, especially for the college and higher degree holders, what’s their response to the follow up of “really?” or “what about all the fossils?”  I’m honestly curious about this. 

 

Quick hits (part II)

Better late than never…

1) Hopefully you’ve heard something of McKay Coppins new book on Romney.  So much good stuff in there.  This excerpt in the Atlantic (it’s been out for a while, but I finally got around to it) really is a must read.

2) This interesting in the Post (gift link), “The depressing relationship between your job and your odds of drug overdose”

The results are fairly startling: 1 out of every 5 people who died of an overdose in 2020 usually worked in construction or restaurants. These folks lived in a different universe from those who worked the safest jobs in the country: Education and computer work lost 6 and 9 people per 100,000, respectively. Combined, about 1 in 100 overdose victims nationwide worked those jobs. (This data set assigns jobs based on your usual occupation — meaning the one you held the longest, regardless of what you were doing at time of death.)

The substance most likely to cause a fatal overdose — no matter your occupation — is a synthetic opioid such as fentanyl. The category that includes meth usually comes next, then cocaine and heroin. The vast majority of deaths (92 percent) were deemed accidental rather than suicide or homicide.

What other factor ties them together? We guessed education. Occupations with a higher share of workers who earned only a high school diploma (or less) are more likely to rack up drug deaths, and construction has the lowest share of workers with at least a bachelor’s degree (7 percent).

3) This is good, “Why Can’t We Stop Unauthorized Immigration? Because It Works.: Our broken immigration system is still the best option for many migrants — and U.S. employers.”

That last bit about the employers is the real key.  The Republicans throw anti-immigrant hysteria to their base while making sure unauthorized immigrants can be exploited in the labor market for cheap labor to serve business.

4) Great stuff from Lee Drutman, “The U.S. House has sailed into dangerously uncharted territory. There’s no going back.”

In the pixels ahead, I’ll visually map where we are.  As we’ll see, there are some historic parallels. But not enough to feel like we’ve really been here before.

Here’s what’s distinct about this moment, based on the best metrics we have.

1. Congress is more polarized than ever.
2. The Republican Party is more far-right than ever.
3. The share of House districts that are truly competitive is tinier than ever (less than 10 percent).
4. The share of House districts splitting their tickets hit a 100-year low in 2020 (fewer than 4 percent).
5. Partisan margins in the House are uniquely narrow.
6. The dimensionality of voting in the House has collapsed into a single dimension.
7. The Republican Party is growing more internally divided.

To close observers of politics, none of these findings may be that surprising. But I hope by seeing them all together, we can appreciate how unusual this moment is — and just how far we’ve sailed away from the “normal” patterns.

My simple takeaway is: We’re not going back.

So we need to ask: where do we want to head now?

If we are deliberate, we have possibilities. If we are not deliberate, the sea of dragons may chew us into pieces.

So come aboard. We’re going on a data journey.

(The data will cover only the U.S. House of Representatives. Similar patterns hold in the Senate, but since the House is in crisis right now, and the trends are clearer in the House, that is the focus of this piece, which is already long-ish)

5) Freddie deBoer with a tough take on Israel, but he raises a lot of important points:

Israel is an ethnonationalist state and Zionism is an ethnonationalist project. This simple statement of fact is frequently met with anger, but obviously I’m not the one who set those terms. Theodore Herzl did. The British Empire did, back when there was an empire. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel did. Israel is the Jewish state, and “Jewish” denotes both an ethnic identity and a religious one. This isn’t a part of Zionism; it is Zionism. And in a political culture defined by our remarkable ability to redefine terms to our liking, this fact is one of the hardest to avoid.

Many defenders of Israel are unwilling (because unable) to deny that Israel is an ethnonationalist state. They’re just annoyed when you bring it up. Others try to quibble over what exactly that means – I’m frequently told that Israel is a Jewish state, but that designation has no material consequences. There are various examples of why this is untrue, most prominently in immigration – the very concept of Aliyah, for example, or Israel’s right to exclude immigration rights to Jews who “are or were involved in an activity that is/was directed against the Jewish people,” which amounts to a definition of political Jewishness in and of itself. There’s also the fact that very few liberal people would accept a law that named the United States as a European and Christian state, even if such a designation supposedly made no material difference. If Zionism has any meaning, then its interest in the Jewish people must be substantive. It’s hard to say what Israel could possibly be, if it’s not a Jewish state. This has consequences.

Take the settlers. While there are plenty in Israeli society who defend the settlers in the West Bank and dream of Greater Israel, officially the settlers are at least partially condemned, and certainly most American defenders of the current Israeli government regard the settlers as an illegitimate force that makes peace harder. (That the settlers are as a class ultra-religious, ultra-conservative, and ultra-nationalist makes this admission a little easier.) Condemning the settlers is often a little rhetorical move Israel’s defenders make to show that they’re reasonable, a bone to throw. Unfortunately, despite broad theoretical commitment to opposing the settlements, including from the seemingly-impotent American government, Israel refuses to really do anything of substance to stop them. The potential internal political backlash is apparently too great. But Israeli politicians need fear no such backlash when they contribute to scourging the Palestinians, as those in the territories have no votes and those who are Israeli citizens are a small portion of the electorate and subject to concerted efforts to fracture Palestinian political organizing.

This is, if you think about it dispassionately for five minutes, a good example of why Israel’s nature as a Jewish state is untenable in basic liberal democratic terms. The settlers have a political constituency that will fight for them, despite various official condemnations; the Palestinians do not. And the ethnic and religious identity of each group is directly responsible for this difference in status. Under any other scenario, this would be considered totally untenable. If the Hutus had established such systemic disempowerment of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the international community would never find itself struggling to call that an imposition on human rights. Or consider the concept of a one-state solution. I think the obvious (if incredibly difficult) solution is for Israelis and Palestinians to share the land of Canaan with an absolute commitment to peace and absolute political and legal equality. Then they can do politics under a representative parliamentary system like most democracies do. But people always say, you can’t have that. Why can’t you have that? Because the number of Palestinians in such a society would mean that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state. But if the rise in one ethnic population is threatening to a state’s identity, is that not inherently a premodern state? Does that not in and of itself suggest an incompatibility with modernity?

6) A paid post from Yglesias on the wrongness of the “slavery was actually good, economically” argument, but I love this take on the mode of argumentation:

It’s worth noting that a lot of intra-academic disputes have this kind of structure.

Going back to classic political disputes about imperialism in the west, you have liberals arguing that empire building is costly and pointless. Sure, there are individuals getting rich off the scramble for Africa or the colonization of the Philippines, but as a society, England or America or France or whomever is not actually benefitting from this and it would be better to have peaceful trading relationships. On the right, they’re saying no, that’s wrong, we desperately need to conquer and dominate foreigners in order to secure their natural resources or have captive markets.

My view is that the liberals had this right all along — as I wrote in “Why Does Switzerland Work So Well,” everyone’s favorite banking haven has been the richest country in Europe since at least the 1870s and they never built a colonial empire. Denmark and Sweden had token colonies, but they were much smaller than those amassed by much less economically successful countries like Portugal. And of course Germany rose to become the dominant economic and military power in Europe before obtaining colonies.

 

But in contemporary academia, the take that colonialism and empire-building was mostly pointless would be considered a spicy right-wing take, because leftists want to denigrate the achievements of the liberal/democratic/capitalist order by emphasizing the idea that all this modern prosperity was, in fact, built on bloodshed and brutality. To own the libs, they want to embrace the old conservative idea that this exploitative and immoral conduct of the past was also highly efficacious.

I think this is a dangerous game. Most people are somewhat selfish most of the time, and if you tell them that their prosperity hinges on the cruel exploitation of others, they are likely to say “well then, let’s do some cruelty and exploitation.”

The good news is we do not currently have rightists arguing in favor of enslavement or suggesting we need to build colonial empires. But the general idea that the path to prosperity for our community is to be bigger assholes to some other community is very much alive and well in the hearts of various strands of right-wing politics in many countries around the world. And it’s not, in general, true. We build a better world based on positive-sum interactions. Dramatically more wealth has been generated over the past couple of centuries via innovation and investment than via theft and plunder. Of course, theft and plunder are nonetheless very real aspects of world history. But any account that exaggerates the extent to which they were real generators of prosperity plays into the hands of the forces of darkness.

7) I’m sharing this post to make sure BB sees Noah Smith’s take on the need for greater state capacity.

This is a picture of Deirdre Beaubeirdre, a character from the comedy sci-fi movie Everything Everywhere All At Once — an IRS auditor who hounds the immigrant protagonists mercilessly. I loved that movie, but I also thought Deirdre’s character was emblematic of a common and unhelpful way that Americans tend to think about the civil service. Ronald Reagan famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” I think that antipathy toward government workers has filtered through to much of American society — not just to libertarians or conservatives, but to many progressives as well.

I believe that the U.S. suffers from a distinct lack of state capacity. We’ve outsourced many of our core government functions to nonprofits and consultants, resulting in cost bloat and the waste of taxpayer money. We’ve farmed out environmental regulation to the courts and to private citizens, resulting in paralysis for industry and infrastructure alike. And we’ve left ourselves critically vulnerable to threats like pandemics and — most importantly — war.

It’s time for us to bring back the bureaucrats…

But even beyond military production, the U.S. needs to do lots of preparation for the possibility of a China conflict. Private companies need to audit their supply chains to make sure they can sustain production in the event of a war. The U.S. government needs to ensure that critical minerals can be accessed without reliance on Chinese processing facilities. And the government needs to revive the defense-industrial base, so we don’t see bottlenecks of the kind we encountered when we tried to produce Covid masks, tests, and ventilators in the early days of the pandemic.

All of this requires a large, competent, well-funded bureaucracy. Yet I worry that neither progressives nor conservatives understand this need. Progressives still seem wedded to the idea of defending NEPA, while conservatives still seem wedded to the idea of slashing and burning any government agency they can. It’s a toxic equilibrium in which one side wants to drown the government in a bathtub and the other wants to outsource it to every NIMBY and nonprofit in the country.

To reestablish U.S. state capacity, we have to sail between the rocks of both of these disastrous approaches. We have to rebuild the civil service, with sufficient long-term funding guarantees, talent, and size. For all our sake, we need to bring back the bureaucrats.

8) Jamelle Bouie is not wrong, “Mike Johnson Is a Right-Wing Fever Dream Come to Life”

9) This is good, “The Great College Pricing Sham”

First, some good news: College isn’t as expensive as you think. Yes, costs at elite schools like Harvard are staggeringly high — but very few students at four-year colleges actually pay the full list price for tuition, fees, room, and board. At most private colleges and some public schools, the list price is more fiction than reality — a fiction designed to squeeze as much money as possible out of wealthy students and their parents. Think of it as a sticker price on a car lot. What the dealer is asking for isn’t what you’re likely to wind up paying. You’ll haggle for a lower price — and drive off thinking you got a deal.

That’s basically the way it works at colleges. Schools use “merit” aid to discount the sticker price for pretty much everyone except the wealthiest students. I use quotation marks, because merit aid is granted to half the students at public colleges and 84% at private colleges. In addition to merit discounts, many students from low- and middle-income households receive state and federal grants that do not need to be paid back. About a third of all undergraduates at four-year colleges get a federal Pell Grant, with two-thirds of the recipients coming from families with incomes under $30,000.

These grants create a gap between the sticker price (what the college professes to charge) and the net price (what students actually pay). Over the past 15 years, the gap has grown. At public colleges, the average list price has grown to over $23,000, but the net price has remained fairly flat, at about $14,000. At private colleges, meanwhile, the list price has ballooned to $53,000, while the net price has actually gone down, to less than $29,000.

If this seems like a bizarre way to put a price on college — setting an exorbitantly high tuition and then marking it down for almost everyone — that’s because it is. Once upon a time, some public universities, including the entire University of California system, were tuition-free. Others charged students low tuition, thanks to large state subsidies that covered much of the cost of operating a college. So how did colleges come to depend on tuition revenue to survive? Dominique Baker, a professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University, traces the tuition model back to the 1970s, with the creation of the Pell Grant. Instead of maintaining and expanding free college for the growing numbers of baby boomers who were enrolling, she says, the United States settled on a kind of trade-off, in which “institutions can price however they want, as long as they give enough aid” to students who can’t afford it. In true American fashion, the marketplace was put in charge of college costs.

This market-driven model works pretty well at a very small number of elite universities with big brand names and even bigger endowments. The Ivy League and other top-tier schools charge very high tuition, which enables them to enroll classes with large shares of students who can pay full freight. They then use the money from the rich students and their huge endowment to subsidize the education of those with fewer means. (By this logic, maybe Harvard should jack up tuition even higher than its current level of $54,000, so it can make college free for even more students.)

Unfortunately, there are two big problems with letting the market set prices. The first is that only the most elite schools can attract enough rich students to pay for the poor ones. Of the roughly 2,600 four-year colleges in the US, fewer than 100 promise to meet an applicant’s full financial need. And the second problem is that most elite colleges accept almost no poor or middle-class students. They provide affordability without access.

I’ll just mention here that one college mailing my son received said, “99% of our students receive merit-based scholarships.”  What a joke. How about, we all charge our full tuition price to a handful of suckers among all our students.

10) Good stuff from Tomas Pueyo, “The Hidden Patterns of Sexual Evolution”

As a rule of thumb, it makes sense for females to be as big as possible, because that allows them to have more resources to lay more eggs and support their offspring better. We shouldn’t be surprised to see animals where the female is bigger.

The big one is the female, the small one is the male. Source.

So when the males are bigger than the females, something else is going on. What environments cause that?

One of the key considerations is whether the animals live in 2D or 3D.

2D vs 3D

When an animal lives in three dimensions, like in the sea, the air, or forests, it’s very difficult for the male to control the female, because she can easily escape and hide. As a result, the female has ample choice in selecting her mate or cheat, and the male has less incentive to coerce the female over time, or to best his enemies through force. The result is much more female choice, and much less male-male competition than for animals living in two dimensions, such as on land.1

That’s why female and male fishes and birds are usually similar in size, and the males are much more colorful than the females: Because it’s hard to control the females, they are the ones to choose their mates. Males need to differentiate themselves from other males in a way that females find attractive.

…

Since males need to differentiate themselves in ways that are compelling to the female, they might evolve to invest more in the offspring. Frequently, the result is monogamy in fish and birds. Long-term partnerships form, usually for the mating season. Monogamy for life exists, but is rare. That makes sense: If you mate only with one partner, what happens if that partner is not a great match genetically? What if he is not adapted to a future threat? The more partners you have, the more genetic diversity for the offspring. These animals are monogamous2 to grow offspring together, and then diversify their partners.

This is also why there’s a fair amount of cheating, even in monogamous animals (defined as those forming long-term partnerships): It’s one thing to get a mate to help defend you and the nest and bring food, but something completely different to get his sperm, or that of a Chad. It’s also why a lot of sperm competition exists in these animals: Since males can’t control the female, and the female cheats, males need to find ways to increase the probability that they are the fathers.3

Compare this with animals who live in 2D—that is, on a surface. There, a male can control the movement of potential female partners or male rivals much more easily. This means it’s easier to protect or coerce females, and fend off rivals. Here, males have an advantage in becoming bigger: The stronger they are, the easier they can fight off other males and win.

…

The 3D spheres in water and air represent the areas open to an animal who is settled around a given point. On land, since animals can’t go up or down, they’re limited to a surface. Note that animals that live in trees might be closer to a 3D environment than a 2D one.

Because males are bigger than females in such environments, and because females can’t easily escape, males in 2D environments are in a much better position to force, harass, or intimidate females into sex.

The result is that in 2D environments (land), males tend to be bigger than females, more aggressive sexually, develop more weapons, and don’t need to look especially pretty.

11) I’ve been sleeping with “white”(actually probably brown) noise since my 21-year old son was a baby.  Loved this article on the different colors of noise.

There’s no question that noise can be a nuisance. It can distract you from what you’re doing, interfere with your sleep, put you in a bad mood, ratchet up your stress level or affect you in other disruptive ways. But not all noise is problematic. In fact, different colors of noise (yes, you read that right) could actually help you feel and function better. Which may be why YouTube videos and other social media posts about the benefits of exposure to pink, green, brown, white and other types of noise are trending. Colored noises are having a major moment.

“Different colors of noise emphasize different frequencies over others — they have energy in different parts of the sound spectrum,” explains Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, the director of the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “They all have a quality that’s boring to the brain and makes other sounds less perceptible. The main effect is to drown out unexpected or disruptive sounds that would distract you or compromise your attention.”

While there’s more research supporting the use of some noise colors than others, there’s growing interest in the entire spectrum. Whether it’s called sound therapy, auditory stimulation or auditory masking, listening to different “colored” sounds could help you feel, focus or sleep better at home.

“Using these sounds to mask or cover distracting sounds is a lot more applicable to people’s lives than soundproofing is,” says Catherine Franssen, a neuroscientist and professor of biological sciences at Longwood University in Virginia. “It’s a relatively cheap way of making a big change, and you can vary the effects a lot.”

Here’s a look at how different noise colors compare.

12) NYT Upshot, “New SAT Data Highlights the Deep Inequality at the Heart of American Education”

By the time rich children take the SAT, researchers speculate, experiences like bedtime reading, museum visits and science summer camps may contribute to their scores: “They’ve gone to better schools, they’ve read more novels, they’ve learned more math,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

If the SAT is, in a sense, a wealth test, education research suggests that is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Other parts of college applications, like essays and letters of recommendation, are also influenced by socioeconomic background. And data suggests that children with high SAT scores are more prepared for demanding college coursework, and more likely to have high earnings or prestigious jobs in adulthood.

The solution, researchers say, is addressing achievement gaps much earlier, through things like universal pre-K, increased funding for schools in low-income neighborhoods, and reduced residential segregation.

It could benefit all parents and students, even wealthier ones. Parenting in highly unequal societies is intense and competitive, driven by fear of the increasing risk that children will be worse off than their parents. Parenting in places with less income inequality and more public investment in families is more playful and relaxed, research shows. When the risk of falling is smaller, a college admissions test becomes less fraught.

13) Drum’s take:

There’s truth to all this. But out of 2,000 words, there is only one passing suggestion that there’s any other cause of this disparity in SAT scores:

Although the heritability of cognitive ability appears to play some role on an individual level….

“Some” role. Research suggests that by first grade there’s an IQ difference of 11 points between children of affluent and poor families. That’s a lot! This might very well be partially explained by home life and neighborhoods, but it’s long before private schools, world travel, and test prep classes have any impact.

There’s nothing controversial about how this happens, either. Smart people tend to make lots of money; marry other smart people (“associative mating”); and then produce smart babies who go on to get high SAT scores. Some of this is indeed due to environment, but most of it is up to heritability and genes. We’re all just afraid to say so for fear of accidentally brushing up against forbidden race-IQ topics.

In any case, the most interesting aspect of the chart isn’t the SAT differences between rich and poor. It’s the difference between the top 1% and the top 0.1%. No one thinks there’s any cognitive difference between these two groups, but then again, there’s probably not much difference in preschools and test prep either. These are both very wealthy cohorts. So what causes the difference? Further empirical research on this score might be illuminating.

14) This is really something else.  Even though it’s in Denmark, I’m surprised it’s not getting more coverage, “Denmark Aims a Wrecking Ball at ‘Non-Western’ Neighborhoods: A government program is using demolition and relocation to remake neighborhoods with immigrants, poverty or crime.”

After they fled Iran decades ago, Nasrin Bahrampour and her husband settled in a bright public housing apartment overlooking the university city of Aarhus, Denmark. They filled it with potted plants, family photographs and Persian carpets, and raised two children there.

Now they are being forced to leave their home under a government program that effectively mandates integration in certain low-income neighborhoods where many “non-Western” immigrants live.

In practice, that means thousands of apartments will be demolished, sold to private investors or replaced with new housing catering to wealthier (and often nonimmigrant) residents, to increase the social mix.

The Danish news media has called the program “the biggest social experiment of this century.” Critics say it is “social policy with a bulldozer.”

The government says the plan is meant to dismantle “parallel societies” — which officials describe as segregated enclaves where immigrants do not participate in the wider society or learn Danish, even as they benefit from the country’s generous welfare system.

Opponents say it is a blunt form of ethnic discrimination, and gratuitous in a country with low income inequality and where the level of deprivation in poor areas is much less pronounced than in many countries.

And while many other governments have experimented with solutions to fight urban deprivation and segregation, experts say that mandating a reduction in public housing largely based on the residents’ ethnic background is an unusual, heavy-handed and counterproductive solution.

In areas like Vollsmose, a suburb of Odense where more than two-thirds of residents are from non-Western — mainly Muslim — countries, the government mandate is translating into wide-ranging demolitions.

15) Happy Birthday to JPP (One of two great JP friends who read this)

Quick hits (part I)

1) It’s Halloween time, which means candy corn time.  I recognize this is among the most polarizing of candies.  As for me, I’m a lover.  Honestly, I love most candy with a chewy texture.  I’m glad they changed the name, though:

Chicken feed, as candy corn was originally called because of its appearance, was invented by the Wunderle Candy Company in the late 1880s during a candy boom in the United States, said Susan Benjamin, a food historian and president of True Treats, a research-based candy store in West Virginia.

Chicken feed and other treats like it were marketed toward working-class children. “It was the first time they could see themselves as part of the middle class because they could go out and purchase something,” Ms. Benjamin said. “That something was made for them and geared to their taste and that was candy.”

Chicken feed was initially popular year-round. It’s unclear when it became a near-exclusive Halloween sensation, but research suggests it was most likely around the middle of the 20th century.

By the 1940s, trick-or-treating was taking off in the United States in part because candy manufacturers became adept at packaging smaller snacks. “That would explain why candy corn became the natural fit for trick-or-treating, because it had everything,” Ms. Benjamin said, adding that it reminded people of harvest rituals, it was festive in appearance, and it was inexpensive.

“The triumph of candy corn is the triumph of getting past all of these thousands of candies that were made in the 1800s to be one of the few that survived today,” she said. Ever heard of Sen-Sen, spruce resin gum or banana split taffy? Probably not. But candy corn, she said, is “still around and we still use it.” She added, “You still find it in decorations and food all over the place.”

Candy corn today is widely sold across the United States. Jelly Belly Candy Company, which has manufactured candy corn since 1898, when it was called the Goelitz Confectionery Company, produced about 65 million kernels of candy corn the last fiscal year, a spokesman said. Brach’s, a competitor, produces about 30 million pounds of candy corn each year, a spokeswoman said. Brach’s claims to be the No. 1 producer of candy corn, making up 88 percent of the candy corn sold in the United States.

2) This essay is just over a year old, but new to me and it’s excellent from Timothy B. Lee, “I’m a professional dad who “leaned out” to support my wife’s career: If we want an equal society, we need to get more comfortable with unequal marriages.”

In her 2021 book Career and Family, the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin introduces a concept that’s crucial for thinking about tradeoffs between work and child care: the greedy job. A greedy job is a job where workers who work long and irregular hours earn significantly more per hour than workers with less demanding schedules.

Journalism can be a greedy profession because success begets success. Each time a reporter gets a scoop, they become better known on their beat. Sources will be more likely to give them their next scoop. This means that when reporters put in more hours, they don’t just produce more stories, they tend to produce better stories. Over time, that can raise their profile and dramatically increase their earning power.

News also has a tendency to happen at inconvenient times and places. Reporters who can cover breaking news on nights or weekends—or even hop on an airplane to visit the scene of a big story—have an edge over those whose family obligations preclude them from doing this.

Medicine is often a greedy profession too. Research has found that surgeons who perform more surgeries produce better outcomes for patients. And the practice of medicine sometimes happens at inconvenient times. As an OB/GYN physician, my wife spends about one night a week at the hospital delivering babies. Doctors who work long and irregular hours can earn a lot more than those who are limited to a nine-to-five schedule.

Similar analysis applies in elite professions like law, finance, and management. People who are willing and able to work long and irregular hours often wind up making a lot more. As a result, it sometimes makes financial sense for parents to specialize—for one parent (in our case, my wife) to focus on their career, while the other parent (me) prioritizes the needs of their children.

Goldin seems deeply skeptical of this approach. She writes that when greedy jobs lead to a substantial gap in earnings potential, “the average couple will opt for higher family income and, often to their mutual frustration and sorrow, will thereby be forced to throw gender equality and couple equity under the bus.”

I don’t feel “frustration and sorrow” about the unequal division of labor within my own household. Quite the contrary! I think that if we want to achieve gender equality at a society level, we need a lot more women to reach the top of their professions—to become CEOs, law firm partners, members of Congress, and so forth. If these ambitious women also want to have children—and most women do—they’re going to have to do what ambitious men have always done: find partners willing to do a lot more than half the child care.

3) Great news, “First malaria vaccine slashes early childhood mortality”

In a major analysis in Africa, the first vaccine approved to fight malaria cut deaths among young children by 13% over nearly 4 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week. The huge evaluation of a pilot rollout of the vaccine, called RTS,S or Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, also showed a 22% reduction in severe malaria in kids young enough to receive a three-shot series. Hundreds of thousands of children are born annually in the parts of Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi included in the analysis, for which WHO revealed the final data on 20 October at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

“The RTS,S malaria vaccine is already saving lives,” said John Tanko Bawa, director of malaria vaccine implementation at PATH, a nonprofit that develops vaccines and therapies for global health problems. He added, “What we have seen is a considerable impact of a vaccine described as having modest efficacy.” (A late-stage clinical trial delivered lackluster results on the durability of the vaccine’s protection.)

The 13% drop in deaths is so remarkable that “I was surprised I didn’t hear any gasps when it was stated,” joked medical epidemiologist Mary Hamel, who led the WHO pilot program. The mortality decline could translate to tens of thousands of lives saved if RTS,S, which WHO approved for widespread use in 2021, is more broadly deployed: In 2021, malaria killed an estimated 468,000 children under age 5 in sub-Saharan Africa. Seventeen countries in the region have already won approval to receive doses that will start to roll out next year.

4) Love this from Chait:

It is gratifying to see former “no enemies to the left” liberals waking up to the need to identify and criticize illiberal or reductive thinking they previously apologized for.

But there is another, much stranger reaction. The conservative Free Press is using the far left’s response to October 7 as an argument that liberals should not defend liberalism, but abandon it altogether and join the right.

“October 8 was a wake-up call for those who didn’t appreciate that the ideology of the campus has spread to our cities, supercharged by social media,” argues Konstantin Kisin. Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman giddily discern a “political reawakening” with such observable manifestations as “Liberal friends were suddenly talking about buying guns. Progressive friends were texting about topics like border security and immigration. In a whisper, one even admitted to watching Fox News.”

For more specific evidence, they quote a monologue by venture-capitalist Democrat turned Republican Chamath Palihapitiya, who now sees that the Trump administration was actually a spectacular success:

So much of the work that happened in that administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message.

Some people have difficulty tolerating ambiguity or cognitive dissonance, and when their faith in one totalistic worldview collapses, they rush toward another. These responses do not always follow a coherent logic. If your reaction to an absurd statement by a collection of student groups at Harvard is to purchase a firearm you never previously wanted or needed, you are not responding to political information. You are having a breakdown.

None of the responses here track in any logical way. You don’t need to start watching Sean Hannity to find a news anchor who will condemn Hamas in unambiguous terms. You don’t even need to start voting Republican to have a president who opposes terrorism and illegal immigration. President Biden is taking enormous heat from the left for cracking down on border security and endorsing Israel’s right to self-defense.

Palihapitiya’s rant is especially bizarre. Illegal immigration proves Trump’s border wall was a success? Biden did not take down the wall, so why do we have an immigration problem now? Trump forged a “structural peace in the Middle East”? The Middle East doesn’t seem very peaceful. Does he understand what structural means? It’s the opposite of temporary.

There are rational reasons to vote for Trump over Biden. Some of those would be: You believe abortion is murder, you make a very large income and care only about minimizing your tax liability, or you bought a membership at Mar-a-Lago with the expectation of receiving personal favors from Trump and can monetize that investment only if he wins the presidency. And so on.

None of the reasons the Free Press provides is a rational basis to vote for Trump or to watch the Republican Party’s media arm in lieu of real news sources. It is especially irrational to let opposition to the radical left turn you against a Democratic president who is also opposed by the radical left. Indeed, at a moment when the Democratic Party as a whole is facing down mass protests from progressives over its support for Israel, abandoning the party for the GOP over the same issue is downright bizarre if not actually cynical.

If you want to criticize the Democrats, go ahead — I do it regularly. But if your sympathies for Israel are driving you into the arms of Fox News and Donald Trump, you are not making a statement against terrorism or the extreme left or even antisemitism. Trump has activated right-wing antisemites whom the Republican Party has previously shunned, giving them a foothold in conservative movement activism.

5) Daily Kos on NC’s new gerrymander.  And thorough analysis from Duke mathematicians.  Gerrymandering sucks.

6) Scott Alexander talks about donating his left kidney to a stranger.  Terrific read.

7) Love this from Yglesias, “Against murder-suicide politics”

Backlash to the Dobbs decision transformed the 2022 midterms, and protecting abortion rights continues to be one of Democrats’ strongest issues for 2024 — especially if they can link it to a broader message about health care. Democrats want women to have access to contraceptives before they get pregnant, they want them to have both abortion rights and prenatal coverage if they become pregnant, and they want their children to have health care after they’re born. Republicans want none of those things.

It’s a strong, compelling message, and if Democrats could make that the most salient issue in 2024, they’d win a lot of races.

Republicans, because they are pretty smart, are disinclined to cooperate with this.

You won’t see Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, or any of the dozens of people running for Speaker of the House talking about how they would like to enact a nationwide ban on abortion. You also don’t see back-bench Republicans talking about how since there will never be 60 votes for a national abortion ban, they need to get people to promise to overturn the filibuster in order to accomplish this.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean there are no abortion stakes in 2024. Republicans will go as far as they can to restrict abortion rights, which might turn out to be pretty far when you consider things like FDA authority over mifepristone or the fact that some rogue district court judge anywhere in the country could hold that a blastocyst is a person under the meaning of the 14th Amendment. But note that while these things are unpopular, nobody in the GOP field is talking about them. And that’s not just strategic discipline on the part of the candidates. When Donald Trump was refusing to concede the election, Fox News made an initial effort to weigh-in against him, but they immediately started losing market share to Newsmax and OANN. By contrast, Fox is not pushing Republicans to talk about banning abortion, and Fox’s competitors on the right aren’t either. There is a lot of nuttiness roiling Republican Party politics, but there is ecosystem-wide cooperation with the post-2022 strategy of trying to reduce the salience of abortion in national politics, even while working to ban it any time a legislative majority to do so exists.

And a fascinating thing about all of this is that anti-abortion groups — even though they are staffed and funded by people who believe with 100 percent sincerity that legal abortion is a plague of infanticide — are perfectly happy to go along with this pragmatic strategy of trying as hard as possible to win…

But a notable aspect of current discourse is pro-Palestinian activists and their allies “warning” (but really, I think, threatening) that voters who are to Biden’s left on this topic won’t turn out in 2024 and that will throw the election to Trump.

This is important because it’s a general feature of how progressive activists have thought about politics over the past eight years and it helps explain a lot of Democrats’ conduct during this period. I’ve written several times about the mobilization delusion, the myth that a secret stash of hyper-progressive nonvoters is ready to surge to the polls if only Democrats shift to the left. But a very non-mythical thing is that if left-wing thought-leaders tell highly engaged progressives not to vote for the lesser of two evils, they can probably succeed in tanking turnout and throwing the election to Republicans.

In practice, this is what I think a lot of progressive activism has amounted to: Donors fund groups that are completely ineffective at mobilizing non-voters or persuading swing voters but can credibly threaten to actively discourage people from voting, and then they use these murder-suicide threats to extract policy concessions.

 

The first time I saw this dynamic at work in a major way was during the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. Every informed person involved in this dispute understood that the cost-benefit profile of blocking this pipeline in terms of emissions reduction was terrible, largely because the emissions impact was nearly zero. But a few months ago when I criticized Obama’s decision to cave on this, a very smart climate analyst wrote to say that even though he agreed with me on the merits about the pipeline, “the counterfactual where climate activists decide (idiotically but still) that Democrats are just as hopeless as Republicans seems potentially terrible.” So Obama did the right thing in his estimation. To me, though, the fact that you’d even be having that conversation reflects an irresponsible attitude on the part of the people who finance and lead progressive activist organizations.

8) Tomas Pueyo has been doing amazing work on providing background and context to Israel. Here’s a terrific and thorough piece on West Bank settlements.

9) Damon Linker on the new Speaker: “The MAGAfication of the GOP is Complete”

The American party that currently enjoys majority control in the lower house of the national legislature just voted unanimously to make their leader a man who insists the previous presidential election was stolen and who played a key role in efforts to overturn the results. He is also an outspoken opponent of abortion who believes the procedure should be banned nationally beginning six weeks after conception, if not sooner. He opposes same-sex marriage more than eight years after the Supreme Court embedded a right to such unions in the Constitution. He favors making sharp cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And he is a young-earth creationist who denies the reality of climate change…

That dispute points toward the true fissure within the party. On one side are those, like Gaetz and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who embrace brinksmanship, hostage-taking, and a willingness to drive the institution itself into a ditch if (they think) it will help to advance their ideological agenda. On the other side are those, like McCarthy and his allies in the party, who are comfortable deploying incendiary rhetoric and antagonizing Democrats but who nonetheless believe in adhering to normal institutional procedures, including occasional compromises with the other party, in order to keep the government running.

In this respect, the Gaetz gambit of undertaking a figurative regicide against the head of the party in the House wasn’t only successful because his side got its way, replacing McCarthy with a smiling, bespectacled, bow-tie wearing member of his own radical faction of the GOP. The gambit was a success because it was self-validating: Gaetz vividly demonstrated to his colleagues that his own extremist tactics work. 

Skin-Deep Radicalism

The Republican Party in the House is remarkably unified on policy and in what its members will say on the record to reporters and in public to constituents. It’s a party that supports Donald Trump, thinks the 2020 election was stolen, blames the former president’s legal troubles on out-of-control partisan prosecutors, opposes abortion, denies the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and increasingly expresses hostility to gay and transgender rights, and to funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It sounds, in other words, like a fully MAGA party. 

10) I was fascinated to learn that propensity to take sacks is a relatively immutable feature of a quarterback’s ability. And, obviously, one that matters a lot.

11) Great interview with political scientists on growing educational polarization, aka, the diploma divide:

Voters with college degrees are increasingly supporting Democrats, with Republicans now doing better among those without college—a big reversal in recent decades. Joshua Zingher finds that college-educated Americans are more liberal on social issues and that more educated Americans are moving furthest toward Democrats when surrounded by other educated people. White voters are flipping fastest by education but the trends are present across the electorate. Will Marble finds that white college graduates are now more liberal across economic, social, racial, and foreign policy issues. Less educated white voters have increased the importance they place on non-economic issues, polarizing the electorate on these issues.

12) I did not really know much at all about High Point University— not at all far from me in NC.  Pretty amazing story about it’s massive growth because its president is a genius at marketing himself and the university.  Mostly sounds like a luxury university for rich, but not very smart kids.

Beyond the arena was a campus that had expanded since 2005 from 91 to 520 acres, expertly landscaped into a Disney-esque mini city with fountains and heated swimming pools, a high-end steak house, and a concierge service—“literally a resort,” one enthusiastic student quipped in a recent YouTube video, “an all-inclusive vacation with a side of homework.” 

Qubein, an HPU alum, is both the architect and face of this brand. At the convocation, a video, complete with soaring music and reminders of his many books and awards, introduced him as “the leader who transformed High Point University into one of the finest and most unique in the nation.”

The school has seen more than $2 billion in investments since Qubein arrived, not just in buildings but in new academic programs, services, and expansive marketing that draws a student body mostly from out of state.

Along the way, it has become a national exemplar of enrollment success, as well as Exhibit A in the debate over how far to push a customer-service approach to higher education. 

High Point University is a nonprofit organization, but its operating margins are among the highest for private colleges, driven mostly by tuition, housing, and food-service fees. Enrollment, a record of nearly 6,000 this year, is generating enough excess cash to help fuel an audacious $400 million plan to add several graduate professional schools. The first, law and dentistry, are to open in 2024, the school’s centennial year. 

Officials from some 300 schools have visited HPU, Qubein says, keen to learn the key to its success. For both admirers and critics, including many who offer grudging respect for the university’s accomplishments, the answer begins with Qubein himself, a Jordanian immigrant who came to the United States for an education and became one of the nation’s highest-paid college presidents…

Ron Lieber, a New York Times financial columnist and author who writes often on higher education, focused heavily on HPU in a 2021 Town & Country story asking how far colleges should go in “pulling the levers of luxury.” 

Qubein seems impatient with the topic. “We don’t have lazy rivers” as some campuses do, he told The Assembly. “We don’t have climbing mountains. We don’t have boats.”

“Someone might look at fountains and flags,” he said, but the school’s daily focus is to “make the academic program here sufficiently valuable for every student who enters our hallways.”

Yet as he looks ahead to the next phase of HPU’s development, the luxury reputation is hard to shake, because it has worked. In a crowded marketplace, HPU has succeeded in enrolling the “full-pay students everyone wants,” said Robert Kelchen, a higher education researcher based at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

One of the best illustrations: High Point hasn’t had to rely as much as other private colleges on discounting—knocking off part of the sticker price—to get students to enroll. In 2021, HPU’s discount rate was 29.2 percent, according to S&P Global Ratings, compared to the 54.5 percent average found in a national survey.

13) Trying to avoid others for five days with Covid is probably sufficient for the majority of Covid cases:

In this cohort study of individuals newly diagnosed with COVID-19, 75% continued to have positive RAT results, while 35% had culturable virus on day 6. Everyone with a negative day-6 RAT result had a negative viral culture. However, only 50% of those with a positive RAT result had culturable virus. Acknowledging the caveats of a small cohort of mostly young, vaccinated, nonhospitalized individuals with a presumed Omicron variant and potential variation in self-sampling techniques and lab-based culture methods, these data suggest that a negative RAT result in individuals with residual symptoms could provide reassurance about ending isolation. However, a universal requirement of a negative RAT result may unduly extend isolation for those who are no longer infectious. Meanwhile, a recommendation to end isolation based solely on the presence of improving symptoms risks releasing culture-positive, potentially infectious individuals prematurely, underscoring the importance of proper mask wearing and avoidance of high-risk transmission venues through day 10.

14) On the seasonality of Covid:

FALL HAS ARRIVED, flu shots are rolling out in pharmacies, and pediatricians are watching for an uptick in respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. In other words, it’s virus season. Covid deaths and hospitalizations also began rising at the end of July, and wastewater surveillance that looks for the virus has been on a slow upward trend.

So do we have a “Covid season” now? It’s an important question, because knowing when cases will surge could help public health officials and health care administrators plan for vaccines, treatments, and hospital staffing—and might prompt everyone else to be a little more self-protective.

But experts on the front lines and doing data analysis say it’s too soon to declare that Covid has achieved seasonality. Looking back over the previous three years, they do see patterns: a spike at some point in the summer, such as the arrival of the Delta variant in 2021, and a spike sometime in the late fall or winter, such as the Thanksgiving surge of Omicron later that year. But those spikes haven’t occurred at the exact same time from year to year, and it’s possible they didn’t all arise for the same reasons.

“You might look at that data and think, maybe this is just a biannual virus, compared to flu and RSV, which have single seasonal peaks,” says Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease physician and professor at the Duke University School of Medicine. “But that gets much harder to say when you factor in that as a society we behave very differently, seasonally. And that we’ve behaved differently in different years of the pandemic, according to how restricted we were in terms of our movements, how much mitigation we were actually performing, and how immune we were, either by vaccine or native infection.”

In other words, what looks like a season might be an artifact created by our behavior, not the virus’s. The way our bodies react to SARS-CoV-2 might also be playing a role in pushing it around the calendar.

“As we get more used to seeing this virus, our immunity builds up a little more and a little more—so the time between the winter surge and the summer surge gets longer and longer,” says David Dowdy, a physician and professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “What may eventually happen is that it gets longer and longer, until it’s every winter. It may be very interesting this year to see if we have the same winter surge of Covid, because we had such a late summer surge. There’s going to be a fair amount of immunity still in the population.”

In fact, the latest data may reflect that. Epidemic curves posted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a steady upward trend for two months have begun turning down; between September 10 and 16, hospitalizations shrank 4.3 percent (though deaths increased, by 2.7 percent). That downturn can’t have been created by the newest Covid boosters, because they were only released September 13.

But the degree to which people accept the new shots might control whether and when a winter surge arrives. “We know from this virus, year over year, people’s immune response to each vaccine or boost starts waning at that six- to eight-month time point,” says Mark Cameron, an associate professor of population and quantitative health sciences at Case Western University.

Ashish Jha, a physician who is the dean of the Brown School of Public Health and served for 14 months as the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, said at a media briefing last week, “My expectation is we’re going see a further decline for probably the next month or two, and then we’re going to see the virus starting to rise again, as we get into the holidays and beyond.”

To say that a virus is seasonal seems self-evident: at a particular point in the year, cases begin; at some further point, they subside. But “seasonality” conceals mysteries, even for the flu. Environmental changes—in ambient temperature, humidity, or the duration of UV light—might combine to create optimal conditions for the flu’s return. So might anatomical responses to those changes, such as the effect of colder or drier air on mucous membranes and the epithelium of the respiratory tract. Equally, so might behavioral shifts: crowding indoors to escape the colder weather, and sharing spaces that offer less air circulation than the summertime outdoors.

If the complex effects of all those influences aren’t well-understood for influenza, one of the most-studied viruses, imagine the knowledge gaps that exist for Covid.

15) NYT on the bloggers who took on the fraudulent researcher at Harvard. 

Israel and “decolonization”

Best thing I’ve read on Israel all week.  Lots of good stuff in here: “The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False”

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts…

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

An aside:

This was how I illustrated “concept creep” in What’s Our Problem? Applying powerful words (like “racism”) to more and more things can be a short term political weapon, but the weapon quickly loses its edge and the powerful word becomes less powerful moving forward. When a word… https://t.co/ypVWBnOqie pic.twitter.com/YHB4RCgJxa

— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) October 27, 2023

Back to the article:

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish…

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical…

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.

Okay, that’s more than enough, but the article just covers so much important ground.

And my short take on the colonizers– we are all colonizers!  Except for the cases millennia ago where humans could move into land completely uninhabited by other humans, the evidence is pretty clear that humans take land by violence.  Those Indian tribes liberals pay obeisance to with the land acknowledgements almost surely took the land from other groups of Indians before them.  Not to excuse all kinds of bad human behavior, but, the colonizers/decolonization ideology is more than a little facile and reductive.  

Palestinians are in the wrong on plenty and in the right on plenty.  Same with Israelis.  Life is complicated!  And it’s damn frustrating when people pretend otherwise.  What’s not complicated is that the mass slaughter, rape, etc., of non-combatants, especially children, in any place in any era is just wrong. 

Mike Johnson is awful and the Republican party should own it

Brian Beutler is exactly right, “Make Mike Johnson Famous: If Republicans vote for a medieval insurrectionist, and nobody knows, does it count?”

Republicans have gambled that they can apply the same method Bill Barr used to bury the Mueller report to Mike Johnson’s record of extremism and insurrection—create a first impression of innocence in the public mind that Democrats can’t easily unmake.

But Barr’s propaganda only worked because Democrats immediately declared defeat, ignoring the fact that the contents of the Mueller report were incredibly damning. (A subsequent bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report was more damning still.) It didn’t stick not because Bill Barr discovered one simple trick to neutralize all corruption scandals, but because Democrats surrendered. 

As Jim Clyburn said, “It’s a chapter that’s closed.” (The next chapter was “health care.”)

Upgrade to paid

I don’t dredge up that history because I think Democrats are necessarily poised to repeat the same mistake.

But I do hope they understand there’s more to typecasting an opposition leader than issuing a few press releases, fanning out some juicy opposition research, and declaring the damage done. Johnson’s record—forget his record, actually; his name, his face, his job title—will not take root in the public imagination on its own. And without a sustained effort to make him famous, he can make himself seem innocuous simply by being a bit more demure than his peers. 

Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on. 

House Republicans, with a helpful assist from Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), teed things up nicely for Democrats by boo-hissing and screaming at a journalist to “shut up” for asking Johnson whether he stands by his involvement in the coup, while he stood by meekly. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) shouted booyah (“damn right!” technically) on the House floor in full support of Johnson’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But memories of those episodes will fade, advertisements that exploit the footage, while useful, will lose shock value. (Don’t most people thumb through their phones during commercial breaks these days anyhow?)

What won’t fade as easily is an indelible caricature. Like Gore the exaggerator again, or Jimmy Carter as the prophet of malaise. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) became a meme when the January 6 Committee released footage of him (daintily, fearfully) fleeing the insurrection he helped inspire. Well here’s Mike Johnson, MAGA Ayatollah, running away from questions about his involvement in the failed coup and support for a national abortion ban…

More than at any point in the modern media era, this kind of crude branding exercise is the direct responsibility of political actors who might prefer to float above the fray and launder their negative politics through journalists. Republicans do this in concert with the political actors at Fox News all the time; Democrats have to carry more of the weight themselves and quite frequently decide the burden is too large. 

The exception that proves the rule is Clarence Thomas, who has become a face of public corruption not because Democrats have battled incessantly to expose him, but because investigative journalists, particularly at ProPublica, have been tenacious in their reporting and have dropped shoe after shoe in a cadence we typically associate with a congressional investigation.

(The latest revelation, that Thomas disguised an expensive gift from a wealthy friend as a loan that he never repaid, does come from a Senate investigation, but not from the Judiciary Committee, which has largely let the Thomas matter drop.)

Without that kind of ratatat the public will pick up on the din of some other concerted messaging campaign. Mike Johnson’s extremism and corruption, along with his unwillingness to defend either, have to become social knowledge, and repetition is central to that process.

Meanwhile, Greg Sargent on Mike Johnson and his ilk mainstreaming the white supremacist adjacent “great replacement theory” into the GOP. (Free link here)

It gets worse: Mike Johnson has repeatedly pushed the ugly lie that Dems have deliberately "opened" our borders to convert "illegals" into voters.

On this he's the most extreme Speaker in recent memory. I've documented many examples here. 1/

(free link)https://t.co/UlttlKaUmt

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) October 27, 2023

ChatGPT takes on college admissions

It’s college admissions season for the first time under the new world of ChatGPT.  My 12th grade son has already applied to Carolina and will be completing the Triangle triple by applying to Duke and NC State by the end of the month.  He was very proud of himself for writing his essays without ChatGPT assistance.  Of course, he did have the assistance of two parents with PhD’s.  Anyway, I especially loved this N&O article about the issue because it is specifically about applying to NC State Engineering, exactly what my son will be doing.  It shows how my iteratively improving your prompts, you can get an excellent college essay.  Meanwhile, the skeptics in the article are just deluding themselves that the world of college admissions essays has not fundamentally changed. 

With this feedback, we asked ChatGPT to improve its essay.

What the N&O asked ChatGPT: I would like to make this essay include more personal details while keeping it at 250 words. Can you do that?

What ChatGPT wrote:

We asked ChatGPT to add more personal details to the essay. This is it’s second attempt. ChatGPT

What a college admissions counselor said:

“My initial thoughts, I think it’s an excellent essay,” said Anna Zirkel, who runs The Admissions Wayfinder in Hillsborough. “It includes specific things at NC State and that’s typically one of the things that they’re going to be looking for. What about this campus is unique that’s different than the other schools? It’s well written, I think. That’s kind of one of the things that a lot of students need is help with structure.”

Zirkel noted it is rare for college admissions essays to include titles.

Like the other admissions counselors, she found the ChatGPT response left her with a few too many questions.

“I want to know what did you do in robotics club?” she said. “What was your position? Did you attend competitions? If you attended competitions, did you win anything? Did you overcome challenges?”

In addition to requiring students to explain what they want to study at NC State, the university also expects students to provide a 650-word personal essay based on prompts listed on the Common App or Coalition App.

“It can write all these beautiful things, but it can’t create experiences,” Zirkel said. “The hard part is you putting in that work.”

I’ve read lots of NC State essays and that’s just a good essay.  It can create experiences. The admissions counselors can pretend to themselves that it’s not.  I asked Claude to write an essay based on a topic my son eventually rejected (to be fair, it’s embarrassing to an extended family) and– with some semi-expert prompting– it wrote an excellent essay. Probably better than I would have, honestly. 

ChatGPT is only going to get better and it’s already making it very questionable what is the value of the essay in college admissions.

Quick hits (part II)

1) Drum on Biden’s voice (and yes, he is most definitely slurring his words):

You know what I’d like? I’d like a qualified linguist with a good ear to listen to a Joe Biden speech and report back.

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time doing this, and Biden’s problem is that his speech really does sound a little slurred at times. My amateur conclusion was that he had problems enunciating his unvoiced fricatives, which suggests not a cognitive problem but only that his vocal cords have loosened with age.

However I’m not a linguist and I very definitely don’t have a good ear. I sure wish someone who was both would provide a professional opinion about this.

2) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Kendi’s failed anti-racism center. 

3) This is a pretty fun and scientifically valid personality test.  I especially loved that they did some research to see how well Big 5 vs, Myers-Briggs actually predicts behaviors. 

4) There’s been lots of good evidence for years now about the serious health benefits of moderate-paced jogging. If you want to run a lot more because you enjoy it– good for you.  But there’s tons of health benefits from just moderate running:

Why run? I ask myself this question as I lace up my shoes, as I confront an approaching hill, as I coax one more lap out of my aching calves. The obvious answer is that we run to be healthy, to improve our cardiovascular systems and our moods, to become fitter and stronger. But sometimes it feels like the real reason that I run is to get better at running. I run so that I can run more.

That’s why it knocked me for a loop when I read about recent studies showing that you don’t have to run very much, or very fast, in order to get major health benefits. “Running, even 5 to 10 min/day and at slow speeds <6 miles/h, is associated with markedly reduced risks of death from all causes and cardiovascular disease,” one study, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, concluded.

I shouldn’t be surprised at this. In August, a study found that walking fairly short distances was associated with reduced mortality risk. We’ve been talking for a long time about six-minute workouts and 11-minute workouts and how to do the shortest workout humanly possible and still reap benefits. But running in particular seems intricately linked to questions of endurance, of grit and commitment and even moral rectitude. “Running is more than a sport or a form of exercise, a passion or a pastime. It’s about identity,” one runner declared in an essay in Runner’s World, a sentiment expressed in nearly each of the one million essays I read while mulling this topic.

I run pretty regularly, but it’s certainly not central to my identity. This isn’t, I hasten to add, for lack of trying. I started running because I wanted to reclaim the practice from my elementary school days, when the Presidential Fitness Test — and its crowning glory, the mile run — was accepted as a meaningful measure of a child’s worth. I kept running because I wanted to access the enlightenment that runners seem to achieve, to cultivate a low-tech solo activity that would improve every aspect of my being and, perhaps, entitle me to some of the smugness so many runners radiate.

I do not identify as a runner even though I do it five days a week.  I just now that it is a very time-efficient way to keep me healthy– and I like feeling healthy– so that’s it. 

5) My very own health plan is spending a ton on the new weight-loss drugs:

North Carolina State Health Plan staff recommended ending coverage of weight loss drugs Friday in order to rein in spending on a class of drugs called GLP-1s, which has put the plan’s finances “under siege.”

The recommendation comes ahead of next week’s NCSHP Board of Trustees meeting, where leaders are expected to vote on the future coverage of anti-obesity drugs like Wegovy and Saxenda.

More than 20,000 state health plan members currently take these medications for weight loss, which bear a $1,350 monthly list price.

State Treasurer Dale Folwell, who oversees the State Health Plan, said spending on these drugs has spiraled out of control. The plan spent more on Wegovy than any other medication this year, the plan’s pharmacy benefit manager told the board of trustees in August…

Those options are:

• Maintaining the current coverage of weight loss drugs, which they wrote would require the plan to increase premiums substantially for all members.
• Moving all the weight loss drugs to a lower tier. This would cause members to pay more out-of-pocket and would only slightly reduce the plan’s spending on these drugs, according to the plan’s projections.
• Creating an entirely new tier for GLP-1s. This would increase out-of-pocket costs for members and reduce the number of people using weight loss drugs. This moderately reduces costs to NCSHP.
• Ending coverage of GLP-1s for weight loss, with an exception process. This would dramatically reduce the number of people taking the medications, which substantially reduces costs for the plan. They wrote that allowing for exceptions “increases litigation risk.”
• Ending coverage of GLP-1s for weight loss drugs with no path for exceptions.

NCSHP staff recommended the last option, which they acknowledged would negatively impact more than 20,000 members but also represents the “best cost-saving scenario” that puts the plan back on a more financially sustainable path.

6) I think too many people will read this and just think, “those sexist college professors” but it’s really a lot more complicated than that. Interesting stuff:

1/ New paper! “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty” w/ @laberge_nick @hneutr @_szhang @alliecmorgan M Galesic @baileyfosdick @danlarremore @aaronclauset: https://t.co/u0zYHs4Sh2
A systematic study of gendered rates & reasons for faculty attrition in US academia 🧵 pic.twitter.com/aI8ZHhTpsL

— Katie Spoon (@thekatiespoon) October 20, 2023

7) This is good from Yascha Mounk, “The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas”

Meanwhile, academics from leading universities were busy defending these terrorist attacks as a form of anti-colonial struggle. “Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop,” a professor in the school of social work at McMaster University, in Canada, wrote on X. “Settlers are not civilians,” a Yale professor who has written for mainstream outlets including The Washington Post and The New York Times, maintained.

All of this raises a simple question: How could such a notable portion of the left side with terrorists who openly announce their genocidal intentions? Why have key institutions proven so reluctant to denounceone of the worst terrorist attacks in living memory? What, to them, renders the victims of these attacks so much less worthy of solidarity than those of the many other atrocities they have full-throatedly condemned? …

This novel ideology, which I call the “identity synthesis,” insists that we must see the whole world through the prism of identity categories like race. It maintains that the key to understanding any political conflict is to conceive of it in terms of the power relations between different identity groups. It analyzes the nature of those power relations through a simplistic schema that, based on the North American experience, pits so-called whites against so-called “people of color.” Finally, it imposes that schema—in a fashion that might, in the academic jargon of the day, ironically be called “neo-colonial”—on complex conflicts in faraway lands.

8) People love sports.  I admit to being a little surprised by this from Pew, “Most Americans don’t closely follow professional or college sports”

9) Michelle Goldberg on Israel and Gaza:

It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow those universal ideas about human rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted. Their views are the mirror image of those who claim that, given what Israel has endured, the scale of its retaliation cannot be questioned.

“At the strategic level, it would be much more helpful if there was a large group of American leftists who had the moral credibility to say, ‘We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not commit atrocities in Gaza,’” said Leifer.

There are, of course, leaders making exactly that argument. “Right now, the international community must focus on reducing humanitarian suffering and protecting innocent people on both sides of this conflict,” read a statement by Bernie Sanders. “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” That message is undermined when a loud part of the left insists that when it comes to Israelis, there is no such thing as civilians.

10) You won’t hear a lot about this, instead people will keep fearmongering about transgender teens and suicide, but, the evidence base just isn’t there like people pretend. Benjamin Ryan, “Youth Gender-Transition Treatment Not Tied to Lower Suicide Deaths in Finland: Such treatment for adolescents with gender dysphoria was also not linked to lower psychiatric treatment needs, according to preliminary findings from an analysis of Finnish health data.”

The SEGM conference also heard a presentation from Dr. Alison Clayton, a consultant psychiatrist and specialist psychotherapist and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s School of History and Philosophy of Science, on the scientific knowledge base regarding suicide risk among gender dysphoric youth and the question of whether puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones reduce this risk.

As Emily Bazelon reported in The New York Times Magazine in 2022, parents of gender dysphoric children have reported that they often hear the mantra, “It’s better to have a live son than a dead daughter.” This suggests that the likelihood of death by suicide among gender dysphoric youths is substantial and can be substantially mitigated through gender-transition treatment

Dr. Clayton characterized this mantra as coercive for families weighing the risks vs. benefits of gender-transition treatment for children. After hearing such a statement, she said, “What parent is going to be able to look at the evidence and be in a position to evaluate that evidence?”

Her analysis of the relevant scientific literature complemented the Finnish findings. Dr. Clayton said that there is no reliable evidence that gender-transition treatment decreases suicidality or mortality. She pointed to the United Kingdom’s systematic review of such treatment, which found that all the relevant studies examining the suicidality question were of poor quality and provided low-certainty evidence. She criticized studies that have suggested such treatment prevents suicidality, saying they “trumpet findings, but hide the limitations behind the paywall.”

11) Claudia Goldin received a very well-deserved Economics Nobel for her work on gender and the labor market.  This Vox cartoon guide to her research is terrific and I’ve been assigning it for years.  

12) Big new PS study suggests that popularism doesn’t work better than other approaches in advertising campaigns. But it doesn’t work worse, either:

A large-scale new study of political advertising will challenge some popular Democratic Party theories about how to win elections, and argue that advertising for everything from presidential candidates to English muffins should be based more in experimentation than in theory.

The peer-reviewed study, set to be released soon in the American Political Science Review, examined 146 experiments on 617 advertisements Democratic campaigns produced in 2018 and 2020. The ads were tested with 500,000 survey respondents on a research platform called Swayable. The study’s authors then asked independent political scientists to tag the advertisements by elements of their style and substance in what appears to be the largest randomly-controlled test of American political ads ever conducted.

The puzzling finding: Some ads were markedly more successful than others, but there was “no persistent pattern to what worked best,” according to a presentation on the data by Swayable co-founder and CEO James Slezak, who is one of the study’s authors.

In particular, the study offers challenges to the various corners of a Democratic Party stuck in a long-running argument between populists and popularists, identity politicians and class warriors – all of them seeking to direct the vast torrents of money that flow through various committees.

A couple of the surprising non-findings:

— “Popularism” – the obvious-seeming notion that campaigns should focus on positions that poll well and avoid ones that poll badly – didn’t clearly win out in the data. “Issue choice was not a reliable predictor of what ads persuade voters,” the study found according to Slezak’s presentation, which said spots focused on racism didn’t turn off viewers as some had predicted.

— Catering to identity politics didn’t consistently work, either. The “identity of narrators didn’t generally impact persuasion much.” The study also found that “voters of all backgrounds were comparably persuadable” and responded similarly to the same messages.

The paper’s findings are unlikely to settle the question of how much politicians should shape their campaigns around the results of public opinion surveys. But at the very least, it suggests that keeping an eye on polling isn’t always a reliable shortcut to producing a compelling ad.

“This is a much more rigorous spotlight on the questions that get debated” in campaign advertising, said Michael Podhorzer, a central figure in Democratic politics who has seen the paper’s results. “I’ve spent a gazillion dollars on politics and made this kind of decision,” said Podhorzer, who recently retired as political director of the AFL-CEO, a longtime major political advertiser. “The truth is that nothing gets a big reaction in any predictable way.”

13) This is fascinating. A must-read for my fellow dog lovers, “Some vets think golden retrievers are dying younger than they used to. The answer could change how we think about dogs for good.”

Today, there is a consensus among veterinarians that golden retrievers have some of the highest rates of cancer of any dog breed. Perhaps, according to data spanning from the ’80s into the 2000s, the highest. But Lappin’s other observation—that golden retrievers’ lifespans have collectively and perhaps dramatically dipped—remains more contentious, years after he first started voicing his belief on a bigger stage. Across the country, veterinarians and researchers are puzzling over the question of how long these dogs live and why they die the way they do. Multiple long-term and retrospective research studies are now devoted to finding answers, including one led by the owner of a golden retriever who lived into her late teens. Lappin, now known to many as “the golden retriever guy,” has entered his own goldens into one study that has invested millions into the cause.

At stake in understanding if—and why—these dogs are dying younger is more than the health of just one beloved breed. It turns out researching the lifespan of golden retrievers can tell us a lot about our complicated relationship with dogs in general. What’s really happening may unlock a different future in how we think about our canine partners and their lives.

13) Both the Atlantic and NYT Magazine had big stories on Kamala Harris last week.  They’re both worth a read. I did not actually come away particularly more sympathetic to her.  Honestly, I think she’s be fine as president, but I do think there are many prominent Democrats who would be way better.

14) This is not a simple solution– influenza is a damn tough virus– but there’s always reasons for (bio)tech optimism, “Scientists Use CRISPR to Make Chickens More Resistant to Bird Flu”

15) This was quite interesting, “Why some people don’t feel the buzz of caffeine“

It turns out, the coffee experience is not the same for everyone. How we respond to coffee, whether we like the taste and even how it influences our risk for heart attack or hypertension are all largely determined by our genes.

And it’s one gene in particular — CYP1A2 — that appears to strongly influence our body’s sensitivity to caffeine. CYP1A2, the gene, controls an enzyme, also called CYP1A2, that is responsible for breaking down caffeine and clearing it from the body. What variant of this you have can change how quickly you metabolize caffeine.

About half of all people have two copies of the CYP1A2 “fast” variant, making them ‘fast’ caffeine metabolizers. Another 40 percent have just one copy and are ‘slow’ metabolizers, and the remaining 10 percent with no copies are ‘ultraslow,’ says Ahmed El-Sohemy, a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto. El-Sohemy is founder of Nutrigenomix, which partners with health-care providers to conduct genetics-based nutrition testing.

Caffeine has an estimated half life of two to eight hours. That means, depending on your metabolism, it might take your body as little as two hours or as long as eight hours to remove half the caffeine in your system…

Caffeine works by binding to adenosine receptors in the brain (which affect a person’s need for sleep),and blocking them from being activated, says Manuel Díaz-Ríos, director of the neuroscience program at Bowdoin College.

The number of these receptors in your brain is determined by both genetics and how much caffeine you routinely consume. For example, if you consistently drink a lot of coffee, and those channels are consistently blocked, the body compensates by creating more adenosine receptors. More caffeine is then needed to get the same effect, thereby increasing your caffeine tolerance.

But some people, Díaz-Ríos says, naturally start out with higher levels of certain neuroreceptors than others. And “if you’re a person who genetically just happens to produce a lot of those receptors, then you are likely to be less sensitive to caffeine” than others. These people have so many adenosine receptors that normal or even excess amounts of coffee won’t block them all.

“If you have genetic variants that allow you to metabolize caffeine more quickly, you’re more likely to consume more caffeine and possibly just tolerate a higher level,” says Marilyn Cornelis, an associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

16) You know I sure as hell agree with Yglesias on this, “Democrats should talk more about healthcare”

Thanks to these fiscal savings, the IRA also has the following provisions:

• The catastrophic coverage of the original Medicare prescription drug benefit is enhanced, capping out-of-pocket spending at $2,000 per year.

• Out-of-pocket spending on insulin is capped at $35/month for senior citizens.

• Medicare and Medicaid recipients can now get the full suite of adult vaccines for free, which in practice mostly means shingles (flu and Covid vaccines were already free) but which will apply to newly invented vaccines in the future.

• Reduced cost-sharing for low-income seniors.

This is all good stuff. I grant that it’s not earth-shattering transformation of the health care system. But again, I would compare the minimal volume of attention it’s gotten to the widespread discussion of Biden’s student loan activities, which isn’t earth-shattering transformation of the higher education system. What’s happening on Medicare is fully paid-for — indeed, more than fully paid-for since the life of the trust funds is being extended — and permanent in a way that the student loan stuff isn’t. The difference is in messaging.

Health care for the future

It’s important to talk about this stuff because rather than just pleasing the base, it unifies the Democratic coalition.

Bernie Sanders has been championing price negotiation for Medicare my entire life, but it’s something that Joe Manchin is also happy to talk about. And while the far-left wing of the party wants to go further on health care than the moderates, everyone wants to go in the same direction. And if you look at the Biden administration’s budget proposal, most of what they want to do is raise taxes on the rich, but they’ve also pencilled in $205 billion in reduced spending from expanding Medicare price negotiation…

And I think it would be worth trying to change that over the next year. Healthcare is an issue where Democrats are trusted. It’s an issue where the stakes in the 2024 election are, in fact, quite high. And it’s an issue where there is a suite of moderate, popular ideas that progressives support — or an issue where a suite of progressive ideas are also very popular, depending on how you choose to look at it. When it comes to healthcare, Biden has deficit-reducing ideas, supply-side ideas, and ideas that reflect the reality that the electorate is (on average) old and working class and not very urban.

It’s true that this issue profile doesn’t seem optimized for social media virality, but we know that health care has been a major locus of public interest and media debate in the past. It’s not a question of this being an inherently uninteresting issue or even really of there being a big strategic argument over whether it’s a good thing to talk about. Unfortunately, outside advocacy groups that work on health issues have been a bit starved of resources, the White House political operation doesn’t have a good working relationship with the Department of Health and Human Services, and nobody is really focused on driving a message here.

But whether we’re talking about the governors’ races in Kentucky or Mississippi or the senate races in Montana and Ohio or Biden’s reelection, the best identity for Democrats is that they are the party that wants to make sure sick people can get the care they need and healthy people can get the preventative medicine that helps them stay that way. This also, I think, contextualizes the abortion rights message that Democrats are pushing — it’s the party that wants abortion to be safe and accessible. It’s also the party that wants birth control to be safe and accessible. And it’s also also the party that supports Medicaid, which covers over 40 percent of births in the United States. These topics deserve to be at the forefront of public debate, and I think they could be with a little more effort.

17) I was mildly annoyed by a Post article about an argument that we should move beyond racial categories completely.  Drum was annoyed, too:

The Washington Post writes today about Carlos Hoyt:

The 63-year-old educational consultant and psychotherapist is part of a small but increasingly vocal group of people who favor phasing out racial categories.

….Hoyt read aloud the Census Bureau’s caveats, that “the racial categories included in the Census Questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country, and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”

“To recognize that race … is a false concept but to keep doing it anyway, there’s something intellectually problematic about it.”

I’m sure Hoyt and others like him are arguing in good faith, but they’re deeply misguided for three reasons:

1. “Race” may or may not be the the most useful word here, but humans are divided into population groups that can be identified genetically. A recent study identified nine groups, and for our purposes the key finding is that two of the groups are Northern European and East and West African. In other words, what we colloquially call white and black.
2. The Post article starts out by noting that humans share 99.9% of their DNA. This finding of the Human Genome Project, it says, “gave waste to the notion of ‘race’ among the vast majority of scientists.” But humans share about 99% of their DNA with bonobos and chimpanzees, which obviously produces a gigantic difference. That 0.1% difference among humans amounts to about 5,000 SNPs (a measure of genetic variation). That’s not trivial
3. Everyone agrees that “race is a social construct,” so to say that race doesn’t exist is to imply that social constructs are somehow less real than biological constructs. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Social constructs are tremendously powerful and dominate all of human existence. So even if it were true that race has no biological basis, it would still be very real indeed.

In summary: (a) there are population groups that correspond fairly closely to ordinary notions of race, (b) there are genetic differences between these groups, and (c) even if this weren’t the case, race would still be socially very real. We’re stuck with race or something very like it, I’m afraid.

18) This really annoyed me because I love self-checkout. “Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment.”   Sure, it would be nice if there were always a cashier ready to check me out with no waiting.  But there’s always waiting! Meanwhile, most of the grocery stores I shop at have enough self check that I never have to wait.  And it works just fine. Stop whining! Amanda Mull just needs to step up her self checkout game.

You know how this process actually goes by now: You still have to wait in line. The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot—wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly you’ve scanned it two or three times. Then you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk’s touch screen from pure muscle memory. If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction—not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine—well, maybe don’t do that.

19) I love when Jesse Singal does deep dives on social science research and especially how people mis-communicate social science research for ideological ends.  This piece definitely ain’t for everybody, but it’s really good, “Is There “An Extensive Body Of Rigorous Research” Undermining The Case For Color Blindness, As Adam Grant Claimed?”

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the controversy at TED over Coleman Hughes’s case for color blindness. You can read the post if you want the full details, but in it I noted that the superstar psychologist Adam Grant claimed to Chris Anderson, the head of TED, that high-quality research undermines Hughes’s argument. Anderson subsequently passed that criticism on to Hughes, who wrote in The Free Pressthat he did not find it compelling. 

I’ve had some time to look more thoroughly into this, and I’ve also emailed with Grant a bit after he initially reached out to me following the publication of my first post. I’m going to go pretty deeply into what I found — probably deeper than will seem reasonable to some readers — because I think this is a subtly important controversy. 

For the last decade or so, I’ve been interested in the frequently wide gap between what scientific research says, if you examine it closely and critically, and what some people claim that it says. All too frequently, those who communicate science — and this includes scientists, activists, and journalists — make big, bold claims that sand off a great deal of complexity and uncertainty. These claims lead to widespread misunderstanding, and, when they are translated into policy decisions, to wasted time and money. (My book focused mostly on psychology, and social psychology appears to be a particularly troubled subfield of it.) 

I think a version of that is going on here. It’s an unusual case, because Grant leveled his criticism privately. But he did level it, and it is a significant overstatement of the available evidence.

20) Back to health care. How sad/nuts that someone would need to regularly travel from America to Portugal for needed medical care.

21) I’m making my second trip through “The Office,” watching an episode with my oldest son every night. So I particularly enjoyed this, “What ‘The Office’ reboot should look like, according to office workers: Dwight is now monitoring your keystrokes, Stanley and Kevin are always black tiles on Zoom, and there’s a new Gen Z office influencer filming everything”

22) Brian Klaas on leaded gas and the rise in crime.

23) This was cool, “Another Person Just Got a Pig Heart. Scientists Have a Plan to Make It Last”

Researchers have turned to pigs as potential donors because their organs are similar to humans’ in size. But the procedure has many uncertainties. Pig organs aren’t naturally compatible with human bodies and are likely to trigger a fatal immune response. To make their organs more suitable for people, scientists have been tinkering with donor pigs’ genes. The pig used for Faucette’s transplant had a total of 10 genetic edits. Three of the genes responsible for immune rejection were knocked out, while a fourth was deleted to reduce the risk of innate viruses that pigs carry. Six human genes responsible for immune acceptance were added…

The Maryland doctors are taking different steps to prevent Faucette’s new heart from being rejected. For one, they told WIRED in December that they had developed a new, more sensitive test to detect very small amounts of pig virus DNA. Before the latest transplant, they tested the donor pig regularly for CMV and other porcine viruses, as well as bacteria and parasites. “At the present time, we have no reason to believe this donor pig is infected with porcine PCMV, which is the virus that was identified in our first xenotransplant recipient,” a university spokesperson told WIRED in an email.

Doctors are treating Faucette with traditional immunosuppressive drugs, along with an investigational antibody therapy called tegoprubart, developed by California biotech company Eledon Pharmaceuticals. The drug works by blocking CD154, a protein involved in immune rejection, and is given via IV every three weeks. As with other immunosuppressive drugs, Faucette must receive it for the rest of his life to prevent his new heart from being rejected. “When you block this receptor, it’s very, very effective to prevent transplant rejection,” says Steve Perrin, Eledon’s president and chief scientific officer.

 

Quick hits (part I)

1) In talking about politics these days, I use the phrase “uncharted territory” all the time.  (Actually, I prefer terra incognita, but I want the non-Latin scholars to understand me, too).  Lee Drutman with a great piece on Congress, “The U.S. House has sailed into dangerously uncharted territory. There’s no going back.”

Here’s what’s distinct about this moment, based on the best metrics we have.

1. Congress is more polarized than ever.

2. The Republican Party is more far-right than ever.

3. The share of House districts that are truly competitive is tinier than ever (less than 10 percent).

4. The share of House districts splitting their tickets hit a 100-year low in 2020 (fewer than 4 percent).

5. Partisan margins in the House are uniquely narrow.

6. The dimensionality of voting in the House has collapsed into a single dimension.

7. The Republican Party is growing more internally divided.

To close observers of politics, none of these findings may be that surprising. But I hope by seeing them all together, we can appreciate how unusual this moment is — and just how far we’ve sailed away from the “normal” patterns.

My simple takeaway is: We’re not going back.

So we need to ask: where do we want to head now?

If we are deliberate, we have possibilities. If we are not deliberate, the sea of dragons may chew us into pieces.

So come aboard. We’re going on a data journey…

If we are truly in uncharted territory, the map of the past offers little advice.

It’s normal to fear the uncharted. This is our natural conservative instinct  —  however imperfect the status quo might be, it at least reflects the accumulated wisdom and traditions of years; most alternatives are likely worse.

 But in this uncharted territory, we are beyond the accumulation of traditions. We are in the unknown, whether we like it or not. And all the signals suggest big change ahead. There is only one option: start thinking creatively about how we might govern ourselves in the years to come. The future, after all, belongs to those who show up with a plan.

Here, of course, is where I cue my song and dance about the need for electoral system reform to Break the Two-Party Doom Loop: Fusion voting and proportional representation, people. We’re in uncharted territory. It’s time to take alternatives seriously while we still have time to consider them.

2) Interesting stuff from Pew, “What does friendship look like in America? “

I just have no idea how I would define “close.”  I have some friends I love dearly who I hardly talk to (and I think some of you are reading this) as well as friends I enjoy and talk to all the time that I’m not sure I’d call “close.”  This is also fun.  I’m totally with women on talking about families.

3) This is honestly pretty fantastic from David Brooks.  Trust me and use the gift link. “The Essential Skills for Being Human”

4) Yascha Mounk writes about the latest research on the college gap. Some of these charts:

5) This is a pretty cool report, “The New Conservative Voter”

Executive Summary

In August 2023, American Compass partnered with YouGov to survey 1,000 Republican voters. We found:

• GOP voters have abandoned the traditional Republican Party focus on tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade.
  • Most GOP voters emphasize a newer set of cultural challenges like transgender activism, woke corporations, and race-related indoctrination; most also select illegal immigration as a top challenge.
  • On economic issues where significant disagreement exists on the Right, the center of gravity has shifted quickly: Fewer than 30% of voters still emphasize Old Right issues while more than 40% give preference instead to New Right issues like globalization, financialization, and worker power.
• GOP voters overwhelmingly prefer the New Right’s worker-first framing of key economic challenges to the Old Right’s business-friendly approach.
  • 90% reject the idea that “America keeps getting richer and the government keeps providing more generous support, so it is easier than ever for a family to achieve middle-class security,” and say instead that “middle-class life has gotten more expensive and wages have not kept up, so it has gotten harder.”
  • 85% see employer complaints of labor shortages as “a good thing, because it will force employers to offer better jobs and pay higher wages, spreading more prosperity to workers.”
• On many key issues, GOP voters have swung to positions that directly oppose the market fundamentalism still common in major conservative institutions.
  • 77% support tariffs to boost manufacturing and 78% say “the government should provide support to ensure that America is a leader in advanced technologies like semiconductors.”
  • 57% choose the view that “Wall Street investors are getting rich doing things that weaken our economy” over one that “Wall Street investors play an important role in strengthening our economy.”
  • 41% believe that “unions are a positive force that help workers and reduce corporate power,” not yet a majority but a remarkable share for a party that has been staunchly anti-union for decades.
• On fiscal issues, GOP voters retain their traditional skepticism of any policy that might raise taxes and of new spending, even targeted toward working families.

Just give us tax cuts for rich people and culture war!

6) Another great post from Brian Klaas, “How to Understand Our World in 10 Charts”

5. The World’s Biggest Economies May Surprise You

 

Now, how well does it match? Here are the Top 10 largest economies, by nominal GDP, according to the IMF’s 2023 forecast:

 

Russia is in 11th place, followed by Mexico, South Korea, Australia, and Spain.

But take a look at the numbers: they tell an important story. The US has a nominal GDP that’s still $9 trillion larger than China’s, a gap that’s more than the size of the world’s third and fourth largest economies combined.

And, consider this: after China, the drop from 2nd to 3rd place goes from $17.7 trillion to $4.4 trillion. These are huge gulfs. The world’s economic power is dominated to an extreme degree by just two countries.

7) Coleman Hughes interviews Yascha Mounk on his new book, The Identity Trap. Good stuff. 

8) This was good, “What Many Progressives Misunderstand About Fighting Climate Change: Wishful thinking hampers the clean-energy revolution.”

Since the 1960s, fighting for the environment has frequently meant fighting against corporations. To curb pollution, activists have worked to thwart new oil drilling, coal-fired power plants, fracking for natural gas, and fuel pipelines. But today, Americans face a climate challenge that can’t be solved by just saying no again and again.

Decarbonizing the economy will require an unprecedented amount of new energy investment. Fossil-fuel infrastructure built over centuries needs to be replaced within the next few decades by clean-energy alternatives. The United States will need to build hundreds of thousands of square miles of wind and solar farms; deploy enough battery storage to keep power flowing through the grid even on calm, cloudy days; and at least double the country’s transmission-line capacity. And the same laws that environmental groups leveraged in the past to block or delay fossil-fuel projects are now being exploited by NIMBYs in ways that, however well intended, will slow the country’s transition to clean energy. Windmills off Cape Cod, a geothermal facility in Nevada, and what could have been the largest solar farm in America have all been blocked by an endless series of environmental reviews and lawsuits.

The good news is that, with reasonable reforms, the energy transition is fully within reach. Private investment in clean-energy technology is skyrocketing, and even Big Oil is starting to realize there is no future in fossil fuels.

Conor Friedersdorf: The environmental laws hindering clean energy

But this may not be enough for some environmentalists. Jamie Henn, an environmental activist and the director of Fossil Free Media, recently told Rolling Stone, “Look, I want to get carbon out of the atmosphere, but this is such an opportunity to remake our society. But if we just perpetuate the same harms in a clean-energy economy, and it’s just a world of Exxons and Elon Musks—oh, man, what a nightmare.” Many progressive commentators similarly believe that countering climate change requires a fundamental reordering of the West’s political and economic systems. “The level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below ‘absolutely catastrophic’ is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo,” the writer Phil McDuff has argued. The climate crisis, the Green New Deal advocate Naomi Klein has insisted, “could be the best argument progressives have ever had” to roll back corporate influence, tear up free-trade deals, and reinvest in public services and infrastructure.

Such comments raise a question: What is the real goal here—stopping climate change or abolishing capitalism? Taking climate change seriously as a global emergency requires an all-hands-on-deck attitude and a recognition that technological solutions (yes, often built and deployed by private firms) can deliver real progress on decarbonization before the proletariat has seized the means of production. A massive infusion of private investment, made not for charity but in the anticipation of future profits, is precisely what’s needed to accelerate the clean-energy transition—which, like all revolutions, will yield unpredictable results.

9) Will Saletan, “The Pro-Life Case for Choice”

Why does Haley believe that states, rather than the federal government, should decide the issue? Because they’re closer to the people. In a Fox interview on Aug. 24, she explained: “I would much rather have laws decided by the people, you know, on the ground than by D.C.”

But if decisions are better made by people “on the ground,” that raises the next question: Who’s closer to the facts of each case than the pregnant woman herself? Who knows her circumstances better than she does?

Haley recognizes that every pregnancy is different. “Just like I have my story, I respect everyone who has their story,” she said in her speech in April. “I don’t judge someone who is pro-choice any more than I want them to judge me for being pro-life.” Instead of “judging each other,” she proposed, we should “treat [abortion] as the important and deeply personal issue it is.”

All of this wisdom points toward a policy of deference. Morally, to varying degrees, abortion troubles nearly all of us. But since every woman has her own story and her own circumstances, she’s the person best positioned to make the decision.

---

SO WHY DOESN’T HALEY embrace that policy?

There’s an obvious political answer: A candidate for the Republican presidential nomination isn’t likely to buck the party on its opposition to abortion rights.

But let’s posit that Haley is sincerely pro-life. She views abortion, in most cases, as morally wrong. And she believes that this moral view is incompatible with a pro-choice policy.

This assumption of incompatibility is pervasive among pro-lifers, and it’s mistaken.

If you think abortion is strictly equivalent to murdering a child, then yes, you should support banning it. But in that case, you should also punish it the way we punish murder. And if you’re not willing to punish it that way—by jailing the woman who hired the murderer—then maybe, on reflection, you don’t think it’s literally murder. Maybe you just think that it’s morally grave and ought to be avoided.

In that case, consider this option: You can be anti-abortion and pro-choice. Most people, to some extent, are both…

LIKE MOST PRO-LIFERS, Haley opposes criminal punishment for women who choose abortion. In fact, she told Benson that “no state law should say any woman who’s had an abortion is going to go to jail.”

That’s not a states’ rights position. It’s certainly not an abortion-is-murder position. You can argue, by invoking nuance, that it’s still pro-life. But if you really believe that no state should jail a woman for having an abortion, the simpler policy to advocate is choice.

A pro-choice policy won’t give you the satisfaction of decreeing an end to abortion. It will challenge you to find other ways to prevent abortions, by working with women, not against them. But it will honor the principles Haley articulates. It will respect the personal nature of this issue. And it will leave the decision to the people who are closest to it.

10) This is pretty cool from Rolling Stone, “The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”

11) God Yemen is just a miserable place right now. Truly sad. 

Hodeida shows how climate change and hunger are converging in devastating ways. Doctors here say extreme heat is threatening underfed babies and children with ravaged bodies and weakened immune systems. Their experience aligns with emerging research on the direct link between hotter temperatures and worsening malnutrition in some of the world’s poorest countries. The findings are alarming for this part of Yemen, already wracked by war, widespread poverty and suffocating summers.

By 2030, the city will have 152 days per year, nearly five full months, when conditions are so dangerous that spending a short amount of time outside — even in the shade — could threaten a person’s health, according to projections by The Washington Post and CarbonPlan, a nonprofit climate research group.

Hodeida will be the worst affected by extreme heat of any global city with a population of 500,000 or more, the analysis shows.

12) I’ve never been one for nasal spray decongestants, but Drum, correctly, pointed out that the phenylephrine that is useless in OTC pills, is actually effective when sprayed into the nose.  Then, in the comments, I actually learned that oxymetazoline is actually effective, too.  How did I not know this?!  Vicks Sinex next time I get a cold. 

13) Enjoyed this in Yglesias‘ mailbag yesterday, as I agree with both points 1 and 2 below:

David: I saw you tweet something to the effect that those who have previously deplored cancel culture are hypocritical for now advocating cancellation on behalf of Israel. I disagree. The views on Israel are more extreme and abhorrent than the relatively banal views which have been grounds for cancellation in recent years. Moreover, those advocating cancellation on behalf of Israel may simply want consistency and fair treatment from institutions who have cancelled people for other views. Now, I’m not saying that cancel culture in the Hamas-Israel case is necessarily right. What I am saying though is that advocating cancel culture in the Hamas-Israel case is defensible and not necessarily hypocritical the way you seem to suggest. What do you think?

I just want to be really clear that, as a rule, if you think I am advancing a hypocrisy argument, you are wrong. Calling people hypocrites is, in my view, a dumb waste of time.

I was saying with an extra layer of detachment) exactly what you are saying: What a lot of opponents of “cancel culture” who turned around and decided to do Israel-related cancellations really meant was “the conduct these people are getting cancelled for is just, in fact, not that objectionable, and if someone does say something that I find highly objectionable, then I will try to do cancellations over it.” Which is a totally reasonable thing to believe. But by the same token, that is the exact same thing that the original left-cancellers were saying — that everyone agrees some forms of speech are beyond the pale, and this particular act of speech for which this particular cancel-target is being targeted was egregious.

So that’s fine. People disagree about which things are really awful to say and therefore about which people deserve to be cancelled.

My point, though, is that there are two distinct ideas:

1. People on campus these days are too left-wing for my taste: They are too quick to treat right-of-center ideas as beyond the pale and far too-indulgent of leftist ideas that I think are beyond the pale.

2. People on campus these days are too intolerant: With all their talk of trigger warnings and “words can be violence,” they are too averse to challenging themselves intellectually and don’t respect the values of free speech.

I think a lot of people who pretty clearly meant (1) all along have spent a lot of time saying (2) in a way that creates confusion.

A final thought. Recently, my eight year-old was expressing to me his admiration for German speech laws that ban the display of Nazi emblems and similar hate speech. That’s an eccentric opinion in America, but obviously it’s pretty mainstream in Europe and certainly something you could have a polite conversation about in the USA. But he followed up by saying that another example of something he thinks is mean and you shouldn’t be allowed to say is telling people that they will go to hell if they don’t follow the right religion (he’d recently spotted a fundamentalist billboard saying something to that effect). Nobody in the US agrees with that. But logically, if it’s bad to say that Israeli civilians deserve to be killed by Hamas, it’s surely even worse to say all Jewish people deserve to burn in hell for eternity unless we find salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

So how come one is an insane, beyond the pale political opinion while the other is just normal Protestantism? Well, because something we figured out in the 17th and 18th centuries is that for society to function, we need to let people have different religious views and try not to get too mad about it. We have not only constitutional freedom of speech, but a strong social norm that we not run around yelling at each other over our different religious views.

14) The Army, Navy, and Air Force are struggling to get recruits, but not the Marines.

Military leaders say there are so few Americans who are willing and able to serve, and so many civilian employers competing for them, that getting enough people into uniform is nearly impossible.

Tell that to the Marines.

The Marine Corps ended the recruiting year on Sept. 30 having met 100 percent of its goal, with hundreds of contracts already signed for the next year.

The corps did it while keeping enlistment standards tight and offering next to no perks. When asked earlier this year about whether the Marines would offer extra money to attract recruits, the commandant of the Marine Corps replied: “Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine. That’s your bonus.” 

In a nutshell, that is the Marine Corps’ marketing strategy: Dismiss financial incentives as chump change compared with the honor of joining the Corps. Brush off the idea of military service as a steppingstone to civilian career opportunities. Instead, dangle the promise of the chance to be part of something intangible, timeless and elite.

It’s more than a little mystifying to the other service branches, because the Marine Corps — a quick-reaction force made up of light, highly mobile infantry, armor and supporting attack aircraft — is not so different from the rest of the military. Except in its rabid insistence that it is. But mystifying or not, the message is working.

15) This was cool, “Cats Are Perfect. An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why”

Tell me more about how they’re similar. I’m thinking of all the breeds of domestic cat, and even within just that species, there seems to be a lot of variation.

They have different coat colors, sure. But they all have the same baby heads. They’re round, and they don’t elongate as the animal matures, which is the standard developmental pattern for mammals. Dogs have short, round faces as puppies but long, snouty faces as adults. An adult cat looks pretty much like a baby cat but bigger. With dogs, breeders play off of that developmental variation to create breeds with different face shapes. But because cats don’t have that developmental variation, there isn’t much to play around with other than coat color.

This all goes back to the fact that cats are extremely specialized. Every member of the order of mammals known as the carnivorans, including cats and dogs, has an upper fourth premolar and a lower first molar that form what we call the slicing pair, which slices meat. A lot of carnivorans retain molars behind the slicing pair that can grind up stuff such as vegetation. But cats have lost pretty much everything behind their slicing teeth. They might have a little nub, a peg tooth, but it can’t process stuff. This is why foxes are perfectly happy going through garbage, whereas leopards will kill livestock instead.

It doesn’t matter if they’re a tiny Bengal cat or a gigantic lion or tiger. They’re still gonna basically look the same. If you handed me a lion or tiger skull, I could not—as a person who’s a pretty solid expert in carnivorans in general—tell you which one it was. Most people would be hard-pressed to tell you. They look nearly identical. That’s how similar cats are. There’s a teeny amount of allometry [disproportionate change in one body part relative to the whole as a consequence of size] if they get really big: a small elongation of the face and an increase in muscle mass. But the variation is nothing compared with what you see in other groups, such as dogs. Ultimately big cats are really similar to small cats, far more so than you would predict.

 

What does this have to do with being perfect?

Cats have nailed this one thing so well that they all do it and just come up with slightly different sizes. That’s why they’re perfect, evolutionarily. They don’t need variation. They might get bigger or smaller, but they don’t change anything else because they’re doing it just right otherwise. They’re not jacks-of-all-trades; they’re masters of one.

Bears are the anticats. There are only a few species of bear, and they do different things. You’ve got your superspecialized, weird herbivore, the panda [which basically only eats bamboo]. And then you’ve got spectacled bears [which favor fruits and bromeliads]. You’ve got polar bears, which are hypercarnivorous marine mammals, and the omnivorous black bears and grizzlies. And then there are sloth bears, which mostly eat social insects. So almost every single species of bear does something totally different. And they’re just okay at all of it [laughs]. I really do like bears a lot because of that opposite side of things. They’re interesting because they’re so ecologically diverse.

16) Eric Topol on encouraging developments in Covid nasal vaccines. 

17) I have no plans at all to see the new Taylor Swift movie, and yet this was a really, really interesting read, “The Secret Art of Turning a Concert Into a Film (Taylor’s Version)
Movies like “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” rely on savvy tricks and sophisticated techniques to capture a semblance of the live experience.”

18) Noah Smith makes the case for a 3 state solution to Israel and the Palestinians. 

The two-state solution has been dead for a while. But the alternative that these people probably have in mind is a one-state solution, encompassing Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Some commentators actually want a one-state solution, and are not simply using the rhetoric to push Israel toward a two-state solution. Some dream of a plurinational state in which Israelis and Palestinians live together as members of one nation. Others dream of ethnic cleansing, in which either the Israelis or the Palestinians are driven out of their current lands to live elsewhere. Both of those dreams are completely unrealistic, for reasons I’ll explain below.

So what is realistic, other than the eternal persistence of the current unhappy equilibrium? The only answer I can think of is a three-state solution. By this I don’t mean giving the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt, which is an old idea that people used to call “the three-state solution” and which unfortunately still occupies the Wikipedia page for that term. Jordan and Egypt have no desire to re-annex Palestinian lands, and the Palestinians have no desire to be annexed by them. Instead, what I mean by a “three-state solution” is three internationally recognized nation-states — the state of Israel within its currently recognized borders, and two independent Palestinian states, one in Gaza and the other in the West Bank.

I arrive at this conclusion by looking at the current situation and applying three basic principles:

1. Large-scale ethnic cleansing will be minimized.

2. Israelis and Palestinians will not want to share a state.

3. Non-contiguous states aren’t viable.

Those principles lead me to think that a formalization of the current situation on the ground, with only minor modifications to territorial control and population location, is the only solution that’s going to stick. Though as I’ll explain, by “stick” I don’t mean that hostilities will end or that irredentist claims will be abandoned.

Why a one-state solution is unworkable

There are basically two visions of a “one-state solution”. These are:

1. A Palestinian state where Israelis have been expelled

2. A Greater Israel from which Palestinians have been expelled

3. A plurinational Israeli-Palestinian state where Israelis and Palestinians live in the same country and consider themselves part of one people

The complexity of Israel and the Palestinians

In general, I’m very much not a fan of knee-jerk/tribal opinions on politics.  But that’s especially so on issues surround Israel and the Palestinians because it is, honestly, so damn complex.  I gave a little rant about this the other day to my class and very much appreciated Frank Bruni’s latest take which hit many of the same points:

I wish I lived in a universe as politically reductive and morally stark as some other Americans do. How clarifying that must be. And I wince at the way in which the deadly tribalism of the Middle East has been met with the dreary tribalism of American politics — with lazy and self-serving responses to harrowing circumstances that are ill served and grossly demeaned by them.

“Pure, unadulterated evil” — that’s what President Biden rightly called the Hamas assailants’ massacre of hundreds upon hundreds of people in Israel that bloody weekend and such gaudy tortures as the parading of a half-naked female hostage though the streets of Gaza, where she was spat on. Oct. 7 was the greatest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, and was so profoundly outrageous, so distinctly awful, that it should have been off limits for appropriation by politicians and activists intent on pressing their own agendas, amplifying their own grievances.

Instead, it was an opportunity. We watched the marketing of a massacre.

Much has been written and spoken about some progressive groups and many progressive students (and faculty members) at American colleges, who reacted to the hunting, the shooting, the slashing, the burning of all those people in Israel by blaming … Israel. They were referring, obviously, to a conflict larger and more complicated than Hamas terrorists’ treatment of that music festival as a shooting gallery, the torching of Israeli villages and the kidnapping of 200 people, an overwhelming majority of them civilians. They were looking at a longer history.

Still, their inability to distinguish the hours of Oct. 7 from the decades that preceded it — and to look squarely and with proper condemnation at a given sequence of events — was unsettling. As Ezekiel J. Emanuel wrote in Times Opinion just days ago: “It is possible to condemn the barbarism of Hamas and condemn the endless Israeli occupation of the West Bank. So, too, is it possible to condemn the treatment of women and the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Arab lands and the attempt by right-wing Israeli politicians to neuter Israel’s Supreme Court.”

But it is impossible to do that if you navigate all events, all disputes, with a prefabricated compass, a preformulated message that you graft onto everything, no matter how awkward the fit. It is impossible to do that if you are taking your cues from a political or ideological tribe and making sure that you utter the lines it seems to want you to say.

That’s what many of those students did after Oct. 7. It was a version of virtue signaling. I know that from my own conversations with young men and women at Duke, where I teach, who conceded that they felt a vague pressure to make some kind of statement, take some sort of stand. Many looked to see what their friends were doing. Then they brought themselves into conformity with it.

Why should they be any different from the so-called adults in this country? A few of the grown-ups with chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America or Black Lives Matter hastened to stress that the Palestinians’ plight in Gaza and in the West Bank was their plight in the United States. They were all joined in a universal struggle.

Meanwhile, I was first introduced to Tomas Pueyo through his writings on Covid.  And then amazing twitter threads on how geography shapes human society.  Lately he’s been doing a killer job on the deep history of this conflict. This take on the lack of genuine support for Palestine from Arab states is really good. 

Jordan has more Palestinian refugees than Gaza and the West Bank together. All these countries force them to keep their refugee status because they want them to pick up their things and leave. Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan don’t want Palestinians on the land they control, just as Israel doesn’t want them in Israel.

 Really, they all agree: Palestinians are great, just Not In My BackYard…

A lot has happened since 1948, when Israel became a country. 

In a first phase, which lasted from 1948 to the end of the millennium, Arab countries were shocked and angered about the recent statehood of Israel. They wanted it to disappear, and if not, at least to create a Palestinian state to take on the Palestinian refugees. They believed that the plight of the refugees was a crucial card for any negotiations about land with Israel. Palestinian refugees mattered less than a Palestinian state which included Jerusalem.

Since then, things have changed. The US has been very present in the Middle East, whether directly in Iraq or indirectly, with money and arms deals. Arab states have slowly gravitated towards the US—and its ally, Israel. 

At the same time, pan-Arabism doesn’t exist much anymore, as the feelings of nations have emerged in each of these countries to replace the idea of one Arab nation. In parallel, most Arab country governments have been moving towards secularism as they gradually enter the international community, finding a balance with Islamism. 

As Arab countries evolve into more modern nation-states focused more on prosperity and less in pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism, the stability of the Middle East and a positive relationship with Israel and the US matter more than the Palestinian struggle. 

For example, today, 25% of Israel’s defense exports are to Arab countries.

[Pueyo’s latest on “The Gaza Trap is terrific, too]

And Yglesias with a great post on the nettlesome issue of “the right of Palestinian return”

The answer, in pro-Palestinian circles, is clear. Those who left and their descendants should return to the towns, cities, and villages where they lived before the Nakba. Here I’ll quote from Amnesty International:

“More than 70 years after the conflict that followed Israel’s creation, the Palestinian refugees who were forced out of their homes and dispossessed of their land as a result continue to face the devastating consequences,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa. 

“This weekend almost 200 million people will tune in to watch the Eurovision song contest in Israel, but, behind the glitz and glamour, few will be thinking of Israel’s role in fuelling seven decades of misery for Palestinian refugees. 

“There can be no lasting solution to the Palestinian refugee crisis until Israel respects Palestinian refugees’ right to return. In the meantime, Lebanese and Jordanian authorities must do everything in their power to minimize the suffering of Palestinian refugees by repealing discriminatory laws and removing obstacles blocking refugees’ access to employment and essential services.”

There are currently more than 5.2 million registered Palestinian refugees. The vast majority live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Israel has failed to recognize their right under international law to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT. At the same, they have never received compensation for the loss of their land and property.

Israel as a whole has a population of about 9.7 million people, of whom approximately 7.1 million are Jewish. An influx of 5.2 million Palestinian refugees would completely upend the demographic balance of the country.

The normal response in Zionist circles is that this proposal would mean the destruction of Israel, or its destruction as a Jewish state. You’re supposed to say that Palestinian insistence on this right shows that the whole idea of a Two-State Solution is based on a misunderstanding. Western liberals see the proposal as the idea of one state for Israelis and a second state for Palestinians, but the Palestinians see themselves as proposing one state for Palestinians and a second binational state.

Conversely, if you read Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ profile of Peter Beinart, you see that as Beinart’s views have shifted from standard Zionist to progressive critic to post-Zionist, a key difference is that he is now a supporter of a right of return. Because if you are going to insist on the return of potentially millions of Palestinians to Israel, that means you have faith in the possibility of peaceful coexistence in a binational state. And if you believe in peaceful coexistence in a binational state, then simply creating one binational state for the entire area solves a bunch of other logistical problems. You suddenly don’t need to talk about uprooting Israeli settlements, about how to connect the West Bank and Gaza, or about who has access to Jerusalem and other holy sites.

But if you forget everything you know about the conflict in the Middle East and just think about immigration politics here in the United States (or wherever you live), you can see that this is a big pill for the electorate to swallow. Forgetting the ideological structure of Zionism or the particular ethnic and religious animosities at issue here, people everywhere tend to be extremely skeptical of refugee inflows on that scale.

For the past 10 years, I have been attempting to achieve a more zen-like open-mindedness on questions of how things should be arranged in distant places that I have no personal connection to. But I do think that if you’re going to write articles about the central role of Palestinian rights in Arab politics, you need to be very clear what rights you’re talking about, because the question of how heavy a lift it is to get Palestinian rights respected hinges in part on what rights are being claimed…

Zeroing-in on the refugee question is particularly important if we’re concerned about the state of Arab public opinion.

Guyer writes that “Palestine is so central to the Arab Middle East that even US military leaders historically understood the peril of ignoring the Palestinian cause.” And I think it’s important to understand what that turn of phrase means.

You might think it means Arab public opinion is extremely sympathetic to Palestinians and eager to see Arab governments help Palestinians have better lives. Were that true, you might expect to see Egypt opening its doors to refugees fleeing the carnage in Gaza. Of course that would be a logistical and economic burden on Egypt. But countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates are right there and could help out with money. You can, of course, understand from general immigration politics why Egypt might not want to do this and why the richer Arab states might not want to help out with money. Generally speaking, “you should do stuff to help foreigners” is a hard sell in politics.

What’s peculiar about the Palestinian issue, though, is that this normal level of indifference to the welfare of foreigners coexists with what we’re told is a profound level of preoccupation with their fate.

The key is that their concern is the success of the Palestinian Cause (the reversal of the Nakba) rather than the welfare of the Palestinian people.

Note that Amnesty sort of glossed over the fact that Palestinian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon lack full access to employment rights and social services. And in this context, “Palestinian refugees” does not necessarily mean someone who fled from settler violence six weeks ago. If your great-grandparents were kicked out of their village near Acre when they were kids and fled to a refugee camp in Lebanon, and then had children in the 1950s, who had kids in the 1980s, who had you in the 2010s, then you are not a citizen of Lebanon. You are a stateless Palestinian refugee. And the Palestinian cause means fighting for your right to return to that village near Acre, not fighting for your right to enjoy citizenship in the country where you and your parents and your grandparents were born.

To be clear, this is a population of a few hundred thousand people out of millions of refugees, but the fact that pro-Palestinian advocacy generally does not mean advocating for the right of people born in Lebanon or Jordan to become citizens of those countries is relevant to understanding broader dynamics.

In short, there’s not a lot of good actors in this, plenty of bad actors and no remotely easy solutions.  There’s not even moderately hard solutions.  All the choices are hard, difficult, and bad.  Hopefully, we can find our way to least bad.  Meanwhile, this is a fantastic twitter thread from a former undergrad of mine (he went on to get a PhD and move to Israel) on Palestinian public opinion and the constraints that places on all of this.

After last week and Hamas’ horrific acts of barbarism there's been a lot of discussion around the views of Palestinians. I've spent years reading & writing polls, & begged people to pay attention to polls of Palestinians before this month. So it seems like a good time to dig in🧵

— Will Cubbison וויל קביסון (@wccubbison) October 15, 2023

So, my advice to people is to read up at least some on how difficult the situation is and forget the simple feel-good binaries of “colonizers” “oppressors'” “evil/violent anti-Semites” or whatever.  People who purposely kill innocent civilians are bad. Full stop.  But beyond that, it very quickly gets much more complicated. 

 

What Democrats should be doing about Jim Jordan

Love this from Brian Beutler.  I know it seems like Democrats are always complaining that Democrats aren’t as good at politics as Republicans and Republicans are complaining that their own party is somehow worse.  But Beutler pretty regularly points out some dramatic failures of Democratic messaging where they could surely do better.  The latest case in point, Jim Jordan’s speakership bid:

But even if his plan works, the Republicans who caved have to know that Jordan would be an enormous liability for them. He’s a man best known for his decision to cover up a sex-abuse scandal at Ohio State University, then, many years later, to help organize (and then also cover up) the January 6 insurrection. Placing an insurrectionist with molestation baggage, handpicked by Donald Trump to obstruct justice, in charge of the House, second in line to the presidency, would represent a crisis in and of itself. It could also be perilous for the GOP. 

That’s why I’ve encouraged House Democrats to invite the abuse victims Jordan abandoned (and then lied about) to the visitors’ gallery during the speaker vote—they can sit next to the police officers who were injured on January 6, 2021—to accentuate the fact that the overwhelming majority of Republicans will be knowingly voting for a bad guy. Jordan won’t be a liability to his party automatically; Democrats, using opposition tactics that fix media attention onto the controversy, have to make him one, or the press will get bored and move on.  

A big Democratic push to frame Jordan’s nomination like that would, if he wins anyhow, set the right tone for the beginning of his speakership—aswirl in questions about his corruption, his phony morals, his abuses of power. It would also offset the temptation within the political press to reward Jordan with what we in the industry call “beat sweeteners.” 

Jim Jordan is absolutely awful on every level.  But the basic impulse of the media is to simply focus on “the game” of whether Jordan gets his 218 votes.  It’s up to Democrats to do whatever it takes (within reason) to remind journalists that this is not just a game, but that Republicans seem on the verge of installing a terrible person as speaker. 

Why has Democratic opinion on Israel changes so much?

And it has changed a lot.  Some pretty amazing Gallup date here:

Whoa– that’s a pretty amazing shift in just the past 10 years. 

Very interestingly, though, actual Democratic attitudes towards Israel haven’t changed all that much– and stayed reasonably positive.  And they are still much more positive than attitudes towards Palestinians.  Actually, check that, the second chart is “the Palestinian Authority”– presumably a less sympathetic target than “Palestinians.”

 

As for that overall net sympathy, younger Americans (whom we know lean strongly Democratic) would appear to be driving the shift– check out the Millennials!

So, what exactly has driven this change.  Many would suggest it is a rational response to the bad policy of the Israeli government.  EJ Dionne’s column for example:

The sharp turn to the right in Israel that Netanyahu engineered has undercut support for the country among younger Americans in the United States. Most of these increasingly vocal critics have resisted supporting Hamas, but the gut liberal sympathy for Israel has largely disappeared among those born after Biden’s generation and mine. If Hamas’s shameful attack has mostly restored consensus in the Democratic Party around the need to defend Israel against mass terrorism, the underlying opposition to Israel’s settlement policies and its refusal to engage with Palestinian demands for self-determination remains.

Of course, your average American surely has no clue whatsoever who Netanyahu is or how Israel’s policies towards Palestinians have changed in the past decade.  This would seem to be a really classic case of elite opinion leadership whereby many elites on the left have shifted considerably and that has filtered down to rank-and-file Democrats.  Is this, then, just Democratic elites responding in a rational way to bad policy in Israel?  I don’t know at all, but I’d certainly like to read more about this shift and what’s been going on with the American left regarding Israel as it is an interesting and important development. 

Liberals vs. the illiberal left

I was going to put this in quick hits, but I’ve been bad at quick hits, so, a simple cut and paste.  Chait:

For many progressive American Jews, the horror and shock of a massacre of Israeli civilians has been compounded by the response by vocal segments of the far left to either withhold condemnation or cheer the murders outright.

Writers like Michelle Goldberg, Julia Ioffe, and my colleague Eric Levitz, all of whom rank among the writers I most admire, have written anguished columns about the alienation of Jewish progressives from the far left. I think all their points are totally correct. But I find the frame of their response too narrow. They are treating apologias for Hamas as a factually or logically flawed application of left-wing ideals. I believe, to the contrary, that Hamas defenders are applying their own principles correctly. The problem is the principles themselves.

It was around 2014 that this kind of illiberal thinking began exploding in various progressive spaces. In 2015, I wrote a story for this magazine about the rise of the illiberal left within the progressive movement. Progressive critics of my argument, while often willing to mock cancellations, firings, or other discrete manifestations of this new ideology, were skeptical that it was an ideological phenomenon. The most common response was that the shift was just college kids going through a phase.

That blithe dismissal, most commonly expressed in shorthand with references to “college teens” or “Oberlin sophomores,” has aged badly. Illiberal left-wing norms quickly spread to the media, political activism, publishing, and other cultural high ground where progressives have (or had) enough critical mass to impose them.

When I say illiberalism, I am not referring broadly to all ideas that lie to the left of liberalism. There are some proposals that I believe would make the world a better place (Medicare for All) and others that I think would make it worse (abolishing the police), but none of these are illiberal. I’m describing a way of thinking about political means, not ends.

Obviously almost any scheme of ideological categorization has gray areas where one tendency evolves into another without a clear delineation. That said, there is a fairly simple way to understand differences in the political model used by liberals and their critics on the left.

Liberals believe political rights are universal. Basic principles like democracy, free speech, and human rights apply equally to all people, without regard to the content of their political values. (This of course very much includes Palestinians, who deserve the same rights as Jews or any other people, and whose humanity is habitually ignored by Israeli conservatives and their American allies.) A liberal would abhor the use of political violence or repression, however evil the targets.

A variety of left-wing alternatives respond that liberalism ignores power differentials by class, race, or gender. The illiberal left believes treating everybody equally, when the power is so unequal, merely serves to maintain existing structures of power. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed. Is it okay for, say, a mob of protesters to shout down a lecture? Liberals would say no. Illiberal leftists would need to know who was the speaker and who was the mob before they could answer.

“Decolonization” is one of those strands of illiberal leftism. It has a model of the world in which conflicts are analyzed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans, who are evil, against native/indigenous/BIPOC people. Like other illiberal leftist theories, the decolonization model does not leave room to judge the morality of any methods.

The liberal response to these alternative ideas is not to deny that power differentials exist, but that discarding liberalism in the name of social justice invites repression. To permit any political faction to use tactics they would never accept if used against them is to grant them a license for tyranny that will never be revoked.

To many progressives, this whole debate has seemed abstract, trivial, and counterproductive. Even progressives who are not supporters of the illiberal left have been reluctant to criticize it. They see the left’s foibles as a distraction from the larger fight with the radical right — a fight that, to be sure, I also see (and have always seen) as the paramount struggle in American politics.

It is easy to understand why a progressive could arrive at this conclusion in good faith. The illiberal left has little ability to use state power — it is a miniscule faction within the Democratic Party, and the United States government is bound by robust First Amendment protections. (For this reason, state censorship is still mostly carried out by the Republican Party, whose illiberal wing is vastly larger). The stakes of this ideology have therefore been confined to the private sphere. Left-wing illiberalism can get dissenters fired from a job, but not sent to a Gulag.