Monday, Sep 27
Denying the Crime Spike (Charles Fain Lehman, City Journal, 6 min.)
Tuesday, Sep 28
Murderapolis, Again (Rav Arora, City Journal, 8 min.)
A body of research shows that local violence causes children to sleep less, to suffer from increased anxiety and impaired impulse control, and to experience substantial temporary reductions in cognitive performance on standardized tests. Functional communities depend on public safety and order.
Concentrating on Crime (John M. MacDonald and Thomas Hogan, City Journal, 8 min.)
First, crime is heavily concentrated by place. As a general matter, 5 percent of the locations in a given city account for 50 percent of that city’s crime. This finding has been replicated so often that it is sometimes referred to as “the law of crime concentration.” As David Weisburd and Taryn Zastrow note in a recent Manhattan Institute report, “there is tremendous consistency in the degree to which crime is concentrated at hot spots across cities.” This is not just a matter of neighborhoods: between 3 percent and 5 percent of specific addresses on city blocks generate 50 percent or more of reported crimes. And if the focus is strictly on violent crime, such as shootings, then even fewer locations—perhaps a drug house or a liquor-store check-cashing operation—are magnets for an even greater percentage of violent crime.
Second, violent crime is heavily concentrated in a relatively few individuals. In general, 5 percent of the criminal offenders (not 5 percent of the general population) in a given city commit about 50 percent of that city’s violent crime. One study found that just 1 percent of offenders were responsible for over 60 percent of violent crime.
Third and finally, crime is concentrated in time. It is predictable by hours, days of the week, and season. The small percentage of chronic offenders who generate the majority of serious crime and violence aren’t actively committing crime all day, every day. Instead, the criminal activity in crime hot spots and among chronic offenders tends to occur at night, during the weekends (Thursday night through early Sunday morning), and in the summer.
New York Firing Health Care Workers as COVID-19 Heads Northeast (Matt Welch, Reason, 10 min.)
There is No Such Thing as “Punching Up” or “Punching Down” (Freddie deBoer, 20 min.)
There is no such thing as punching up or punching down. The entire notion is an absurd pretense. For it to make any sense at all, human beings would have to exist on some unitary plane of power and oppression, our relative places easily interpreted for the purpose of figuring out who we can punch. That’s obviously untrue, and thus the whole concept is childish and unworkable, an utterly immature take on a world that is breathtaking in its complexities and which defies any attempt to enforce moral simplicity. Power is distributed between different people in myriad and often conflicting ways; when two people interact, their various privileges and poverties are playing out along many axes at once.
Of course it sucks if some rich asshole mocks a homeless person for being poor. It also sucks if a merely affluent person does it, if a middle class person does it, if a working class person does it, or if another homeless person does it. That behavior sucks because it’s wrong to mock poverty regardless of the relative power of the person doing the mocking. This is how adult morality functions; coherent moral judgments are based on acts and the intent that drove them, not on tendentious designations of who’s more powerful than who.
People desperately want to believe that the world is simple, that good and bad are easily sorted, and that they are always on the right side of that ledger.
I think it’s a sacred political duty to insist to these self-aggrandizing liberals that no, the world is not simple, no, you are not the protagonist of history, no, all of your heroes do not share your boutique collegiate politics, no, you don’t get to rest easy that you’re one of the good ones. You must remind them that they live in the confusing scrum of history like all the rest of us, and all of the trite political shorthand they’ve developed for good people and bad is just bullshit Twitter signaling for the already convinced.
Thursday, Sep 30
The Culture War is Coming for Your Genes (Damien Morris, Quillette, 25 min.)
An Overlooked Contributor to the Rise in Homicides: Fewer Witnesses (Radley Balko, Washington Post, 8 min.)
Second Thoughts About That FBI Report of a 40% Spike in Anti-Black Hate Crime (John Hirschauer, RealClearInvestigations, 12 min.)
The News is America’s New Religion, and We’re in a Religious War (Matt Taibbi, 15 min.)
Well after it became clear there were no whips in the story, a parade of politicians lined up to double down, with Kamala Harris saying the pictures evoked images of “slavery,” Representative Maxine Waters saying the pictures were “worse than what we witnessed in slavery,” and even President Biden himself promising his own agents would “pay” for “strapping” refugees. An investigation was ordered and some employees were removed to administrative duties.
Even the New York Times, five days after the photograph was taken, reported that Border Agents were “in some cases using reins to strike at running migrants.” They almost immediately issued a correction, saying they’d “overstated what is known” about the Agents’ behavior. Meanwhile, the Fox/OAN wing of the press put out a string of stories about the “whips” mistake, going after everyone from Brian Stelter to CNN’s Victor Blackwell to Axios (which deleted a tweet using the word “whipping’) to Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler to a host of others.
Larger questions, like what happened to the 15,000 migrants who were removed from an encampment — some were flown back to Haiti right away, others will likely be flown back later, with the Biden administration essentially continuing Trump-era policy — faded into the coverage background. Most people following the news emerged knowing a tiny bit about the relevant border-tightening policies like Trump’s Title 42, and a lot about a single, apparently misinterpreted image that became the latest moronic proxy for a culture war debate.
News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.
Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.
Friday, Oct 1
Monomania is Illiberal and Stupefying (Jonathan Haidt, Persuasion, 20 min.)
By abolishing the right to question, a monomaniacal group condemns itself to hold beliefs that are never tested, verified, or improved.
Within the category of threats from the far left, there are many reports about rapid change in specific professions. For example, we’ve read reports on The New York Times, the CDC, psychotherapy, medicine, documentary filmmaking, corporate America, Kindergarten teaching, elementary school teaching, math teaching, literature teaching, K-12 teaching, and the transformation of American universities as they have strayed from their previous telos—their ultimate purpose—of truth.
In the last few years, I have had dozens of conversations with leaders of companies and nonprofit organizations about the illiberalism that is making their work so much harder. Or rather, I should say I’ve had one conversation—the same conversation—dozens of times, because the internal dynamics are so similar across organizations. I think I can explain what is now happening in nearly all of the industries that are creative or politically progressive.
I want to be clear that monomania is not just a problem on the far left. On the far right, we have seen communities becoming illiberal and stupid by following monomaniacs obsessed with communism, homosexuality, religion, immigration, and the national debt.
Open for Business (Alberto Mingardi, City Journal, 6 min.)
Early on, the most intense debates concerned which national response was best: the Italian model, the closest thing to a Chinese lockdown that a liberal democracy could manage; or the Swedish model, an almost laissez-faire approach. Few paid attention to how cities and regional governments responded. In Spain, however, it’s at the regional level that the pandemic’s most interesting and useful lessons may be found.
Autism and Its Abusers: The Contrasting Case of James Damore and Greta Thunberg (Carlos Miguel del Callar, Areo, 15 min.)
These responses can’t be divided neatly along political lines of right vs. left or anti-woke vs. woke. Nonetheless, the double standards are painfully clear here. People with autism are only worth defending so long as they’re deemed useful to ideologues’ and journalists’ pet causes.
Monday, Oct 4
Public Health Officials Blew Up Their Credibility, and We're Paying the Price (J.D. Tuccille, Reason, 10 min.)
Last year public health officials went from condemning anti-lockdown protests to promoting protests against police brutality and racial injustice.
"Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who's Protesting What," The New York Times headlined an article on the whiplash-inducing change in messaging over the potential health risks of public gatherings.
Abandoning objectivity and substituting ideological preferences for consistent standards damages trust. It took a long time for experts and officials to build whatever standing they had with the public; too many of them seem dead-set on burning it as quickly as possible.
One end result of destroyed credibility, as we've seen, is resistance among part of the population to vaccination for COVID-19. Yes, anti-vaxxers are making bad choices, but they've been strongly nudged in that direction by self-destructive experts.
Officials are justified in complaining about vaccine hesitancy among the general population. But, when they're looking for somebody to blame about the public's resistance to medical advice, they should look in the mirror.
This is What Democracy Looks Like (Leighton Woodhouse, 20 min.)
Vaccine skeptics posting breathlessly on Facebook about nebulizing hydrogen peroxide, vaccine zealots wishing aloud that ERs would turn away the unvaccinated, MAGA weirdos dressing up as Q Shaman and taking selfies for Instagram, pasty-faced neck beards with hammer-and-sickle t-shirts calling for violent revolution, gender fluid TikTok tweens bragging about their neurodiversity, Young Republican nerds LARPing as edgelords at Turning Point USA conventions, QAnon conspiracy theorists, Russiagate conspiracy theorists, wine moms, Jesus freaks, wokelords, cat ladies, incels, gamers and furries, all under the same circus tent. Democracy is the process by which all of these tribes and a thousand more manage to co-exist. Getting a small group of people who agree with each other to pursue a common course of action might come with its challenges, but it’s hardly remarkable. Dragging millions of people who barely agree on anything kicking and screaming to a compromise they can live with — that’s extraordinary.
Instagram’s Mental Health Emergency (Claire Lehmann, Quillette, 20 min.)
Psychological stress arises from Instagram through the relentless social comparisons it induces, alongside its addictive design. Instagram, like Facebook and Twitter, doesn’t stop. Features such as “infinite scrolling” are designed to addict users to an endless newsfeed. The little red dots and circles hook us up to a drip feed of rewards—all we have to do is press or click, and our repetitive behaviour is reinforced.
The first insights into reward-seeking behaviour came from a series of classic experiments in a lab at McGill University in the 1950s. Two scientists, James Olds and Peter Milner, found that if they hooked up electrodes to certain sections of a rat’s brain, the rat would voluntarily press a lever giving itself tiny jolts to stimulate itself.
The scientists were interested in which parts of the brain the rats wanted to stimulate, and how far the rats would go in order to receive this stimulation. Disturbingly, Olds and Milner discovered that when the lateral hypothalamus was stimulated, the rats pressed the lever several thousand times per hour, for days, preferring to press the lever than to eat or drink. The rats even crossed electrified grids—scorching themselves—in order to get their hit. Observing this, Olds assumed the rats were in a state of bliss, describing his findings in Scientific American with an article titled "Pleasure Centres of the Brain." But this hypothesis was not quite right. Scientists now know that it is not the reward itself, but the anticipation of a reward that powerfully drives goal-directed behaviour. The rats were not in a state of bliss, they were in a state of desire.