Parallax is the new name of the blog/newsletter. I’m still experimenting with formats and themes. Some essays and reviews will be woven in if all goes according to plan. Suggestions are welcome. Please comment or drop me a line. Call or text if you know me. This is the 4th Saturday morning of Rounding Out, now a staple. Thanks so much for taking the time to have a look. I hope you find some value in it.
Article of the Week
How We Chose Violence (John Wood, Jr., Areo, 12 min.)
How can we blame people for turning to violence when they believe that the peaceful mechanisms of democracy are being stolen from them by the very politicians who represent them? How can we blame people for turning to violence when they believe that innocents are being gunned down in vast numbers by the very police officers whose duty it is to protect them?
Those who recognize that each of these narratives is a deception may nevertheless resist this juxtaposition. One might offend you more than the other. One might seem more excusable than the other. Yes, you might say, police killings of unarmed black men were exaggerated; but there is still a problem with systemic racism in the criminal justice system that can’t be ignored. Yes, maybe Trump lost the election, you might say; but with all of the electoral changes that took place in response to COVID-19, and after all of the lies of the mainstream media, it makes sense to call for greater scrutiny of the outcome.
If You Lean Left
Sex Offending Suspect Claims Transgender Harassment in Wi Spa Case (Andy Ngo, New York Post, 10 min.)
On Monday, charges of indecent exposure were discreetly filed against a serial sex offender for the Wi Spa incident, following an investigation by LAPD.
A warrant was issued for the arrest of 52-year-old Darren Merager based on five felony counts of indecent exposure in connection with the Wi Spa incident.
Merager also has a long criminal history in California that includes nearly a dozen felony convictions for crimes ranging from sex offenses to burglary and escape.
CDC Goes Woke, Demands Americans Use ‘Inclusive Language’ for Their ‘Health’ (Libby Emmons, The Post Millennial, 10 min.)
The CDC has as its mission to protect public health, "to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the US."
The CDC writes that "preferred terms" for "select population groups" are intended to "represent an ongoing shift toward non-stigmatizing language."
Holes in Reporting of Breakthrough Covid Cases Hamper CDC Response (Erin Banco, Politico, 12 min.)
In May the CDC decided to forego tracking all infections in vaccinated people and instead focus on only the most severe cases.
Consequently, they are using outdated and unreliable data on coronavirus breakthrough infections to help make major decisions.
Data is aggregated, inaccurate, and omits critical details for teasing out trends, like which vaccine a person received or whether they’ve even been vaccinated.
The Downsides of Masking Young Students Are Real (Vinay Prasad, The Atlantic, 12 min.)
The potential educational harms of mandatory masking policies are more firmly established than their benefits in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in schools.
The evidence supporting vaccination is indisputable, whereas the evidence to support school mask mandates for young kids is fragmentary at best.
Americans Are Losing Sight of the Pandemic Endgame (Céline R. Gounder, The Atlantic, 10 min.)
Public discussion of the pandemic has become distorted by a presumption that vaccination can and should eliminate COVID-19 entirely.
The goal isn’t to block all infections, but to eventually turn COVID-19 into something much less deadly—something more like the flu.
Stop Death Shaming (Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic, 12 min.)
A genuine persuasion effort would examine what the unvaccinated say about their hesitancy and inhabit their point of view honestly and seriously.
Lurid accounts of death or allegations that the unvaccinated themselves are guilty of killing those who end up infected are not persuasive.
The New Puritans (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, 1 hour)
Unforgiving and relentless, the internet keeps track of past deeds, ensuring that no error, mistake, misspoken sentence, or clumsy metaphor is ever lost.
In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context.
Disapproving crowds are no longer literal, as they once were in Salem, but rather online mobs.
Public apologies have become ritualized, and more often than not they will be parsed, examined for sincerity, and rejected.
Isolation, public shaming, loss of income - these are severe sanctions for adults, with long-term personal and psychological repercussions.
Tracking Attacks on Scholars’ Speech (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 15 min.)
The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to a database of these incidents by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
It’s unclear whether there are more students than ever seeking to “punish” scholars for their speech, or if there are an “emboldened” but relative few.
FIRE found that targeted incidents “come from individuals and groups to the political left of the scholar more often than the political right.”
The Social Science Monoculture Doubles Down (Keith E. Stanovich, Quillette, 40 min.)
It is doubtful that social scientists can help adjudicate polarized social disagreements while their own disciplines and institutions are ideological monocultures. Liberals outnumber conservatives in universities by a factor of almost 10-to-one in liberal arts departments and education schools and by almost five-to-one margins even in STEM disciplines.
Cognitive elites like to insist that only they can be trusted to define good thinking. For instance, on questionnaires sometimes referred to as science trust or “faith in science” scales, respondents are asked whether they trust universities, or the media, or the results of scientific research on pressing social issues. But if they answer that they do not trust university research, they are marked down on the assessment of their epistemic abilities and are categorized as science deniers.
Imagine that you are forced to take a series of tests on your values, morals, and beliefs. Imagine then that you are deemed to have failed the tests. When you protest that people like you had no role in constructing the tests, you are told that there will be another test in which you are asked to indicate whether or not you trust the test makers. When you answer that of course you don’t trust them, you are told you have failed again because trusting the test makers is part of the test. That’s how about half the population feels right now.
If You Lean Right
Police Say Demoralized Officers Are Quitting In Droves. Labor Data Says No. (Weihua Li and Ilica Mahajan, The Marshall Project, 15 min.)
Last year, as the overall U.S. economy shed 6% of workers, local police departments lost just under 1% of employees after a decade of steady expansion, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Many latched onto recent data from a non-scientific survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum think tank showing a 45% increase in the law enforcement retirement rate and other “dramatic” losses.
The survey of 194 departments compares 2020 with the previous year, but 2019 came at the end of a long period of steady police job growth. Police employment in 2020 was roughly the same as in 2018.
The rise and fall of violent crime rates are complicated to unpack, and it’s unclear if there’s a connection between police staffing levels and the rise in violent crime.
Other factors could have caused this rise: Social safety nets like after-school programs disappeared, gun sales skyrocketed, and people lost their jobs.
Should Christians Claim Religious Exemption from Mask Mandates? (Paul D. Miller and Andrew T. Walker, Public Discourse, 25 min.)
Religious freedom is not a get-out-of-jail-free card that lets us evade whatever laws we dislike.
Nowhere does the Bible hint that we have the individual authority to examine all laws, and select, à la carte, which are binding and which are not.
Claiming religious freedom insincerely cheapens and trivializes a vital Biblical doctrine and constitutional right and invites believers to casually bear false witness.
Abusing religious freedom this way could backfire, undermine support for it, and motivate policymakers to redefine and constrict religious freedom in the future.
Making the (Conservative) Case for Vaccine Passports (Quillette, 20 min.)
National policies forcing vaccination are a violation of personal bodily autonomy, but it’s important to note that a strong commitment to mass vaccination isn’t inconsistent with traditional conservative principles.
The pandemic has generated a massive increase in government spending in all advanced economies, as well as a thicket of public-health rules that restrict freedoms in almost every area of life.
The quickest way to roll back this unprecedented expansion of peacetime governmental power is to take private steps that help eliminate its pathogen-borne raison-d’être.
McConnell Invokes Own Polio Fight While Urging Americans to Get Vaccinated (The Hill, 3 min.)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) notes his childhood fight against polio in a new PSA aimed at promoting the coronavirus vaccine.
He used his own money from the reelection campaign because it’s "awfully important that we continue to push to get more Americans vaccinated."
Georgia Anti-vaxxers Shut Down Mobile Vaccine Event (The Hill, 3 min.)
Public health staff at vaccination drives have been harassed, yelled at, threatened, and demeaned by the very people they were trying to help.
With shades of Antifa, Anti-vaccine and anti-mask protestors have publicly harassed and berated health care workers.
On Afghanistan, G.O.P. Assails the Pullout It Had Supported Under Trump (Reid J. Epstein and Catie Edmondson, The New York Times, 20 min.)
“You can’t be going out there and saying, ‘This war was worthless and we need to bring the troops home’ in May, and now hitting Biden for doing just that,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a Republican. “There’s no shame anymore.”
Dozens of prominent Republicans have sharply reversed themselves, assailing Biden even as he kept a promise that Trump had made, and carried out a policy to which they had given their full-throated support.
Those who assailed Biden’s withdrawal have volunteered few substantive suggestions for what Trump would have done differently.
Biden Deserves Credit, Not Blame, For Afghanistan (David Rothkopf, The Atlantic, 10 min.)
What we’re seeing is the culmination of 20 years of bad decisions by U.S. political and military leaders.
Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, Biden had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement.
Trump made a plan to end the war, but he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term with conditions that created a more precarious situation.
By August 31, the total number of Americans and Afghan allies extricated from the country may exceed 120,000.
Bright Sides
The Collapse of Climate-Related Deaths (Gale Pooley, 4 min.)
Bjorn Lomborg has reported that climate-related deaths averaged 485,000 a year in the 1920s.
In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,362 dead per year. In 2020 it had dropped to 14,893. Based on what has been reported so far in 2021, the estimate is 5,569.
Adjusted for population, we went from 255.3 deaths per million in 1920 to 1.9 per million in 2020, a 99.25 percent decrease.