URLs du Jour

2021-12-30

  • Mr. Ramirez has the Right Stuff. But not Wheezy Joe.

    [The Wrong Stuff]

    Jen Psaki (by the way) has claimed this "no federal solution" thing is missing context.

    You know what? I don't care. More on Covid below.


  • What, another retrospective? Sure, but it's George F. Will, who bids Farewell, 2021, year of weird speaking.

    At the end of 2021, a year of weird speaking, Americans learned from Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) that “student debt is policy violence.” Previously, Americans were lectured that “silence is violence” — that not voicing support for this or that supposedly oppressed group is violence against it. The proliferation of new forms of violence raises a question: Are old forms — say, a flash mob looting a Louis Vuitton store — still violence? Or is this just the vigorous articulation of intersectional consciousness against consumer culture’s commodification of everything, including commodities?

    Normal people, who might want to toss anvils to progressives drowning in their jargon, should modify George Orwell’s axiom that “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” Today, the enemy of clarity is the scary sincerity of progressives who are politically inflamed about everything.

    Numerous examples are provided, and it's your call whether to be disgusted or amused.


  • Ah, but is it the light at the end of the tunnel? The WSJ editorialists cheer, because The CDC Sees a Great Covid Light.

    ‘Tis the season for epiphanies, even at the White House. President Biden on Monday said there’s no “federal solution” to the pandemic, and now his Administration is acknowledging that protecting public health requires balancing social and economic considerations.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week even revised its isolation guidelines. Praise be. Airlines have cancelled thousands of flights because so many workers were having to self-isolate after testing positive or being exposed to someone who had. As the Omicron variant spreads, businesses are struggling to operate.

    Epiphany is January 6, so you still have some time to schedule yours.

    The CDC action "revising isolation guidelines" should be a wake-up call for those who have been claiming that all this involves "following the science". The "science" didn't change that much in one day. The big mainframe computers in the CDC data center didn't crunch the data yesterday and spit out "Thou shalt isolate ten days… no, wait, five days" on its stone tablets.

    They're just guessing, and they're feeling pressure from, well, the real world.


  • The Goldberg Variation. The Goldberg Dispatch variation, to be specific. Scott Lincicome confesses: 2021 (Unfortunately) Comes Full Circle—And Radicalizes Me in the Process.

    I’d originally planned to do a “clip show” version of Capitolism this week, in which I—still technically on vacation—lazily listed some of my favorite or most popular/relevant columns (and charts!) from 2021. But the last couple weeks of holiday- and Omicron-related COVID-19 news have me thinking a lot about the question I asked back in January 2021: Would free(r) markets—i.e., minimal government regulation and subsidization, market pricing, free trade, etc.—have handled vaccine production, distribution, and uptake, and thus the pandemic, better than the U.S. government? As you’ll recall, even a hardcore free marketer like me was somewhat skeptical of a “pure” market approach, even noting some of the theoretical reasons why a top-down alternative may have been preferable. However, the last 12 months of U.S. public health bureaucracy boondoggles have increasingly radicalized (ha) me; now it seems clearer that a system with far (far) less government involvement, while surely messy and chaotic at times, would’ve produced far better results than what we’re experiencing today (which is, by the way, also quite messy and chaotic!).

    Fine, but Lincicome is euphemizing. When he says "less government involvement […] would’ve produced far better results", he should have said: "would've killed far fewer people."


  • If you liked Part One… You'll swoon for How We Changed Our Minds in 2021 (Part Two), Bari Weiss's compendium of rational rethinking. Here's Jordan Peterson:

    Over the last few years, I have had a number of discussions with famous atheists, Sam Harris foremost among them. We spoke together twice on his podcast, and also in Vancouver, Dublin, and London. Although these conversations were very well-attended—nearly 10,000 people attended the Dublin and London shows—I always felt that I had not conducted myself optimally. They had an argumentative quality that I did not regard as entirely positive.

    I had already learned, years ago, that the sessions I conducted as a clinical psychologist were much more effective if I just listened and tried to clarify rather than ever attempt to lead or convince. It wasn’t up to me as a professional to decide what direction my clients should go, or not go. It was up to me to pay close attention and understand. 

    What I had been doing with Sam Harris—and in a number of other public conversations—was not what I had done as a psychologist. I was trying too hard to make my point. I was using instrumental tactics, trying to justify my own beliefs and to undermine the stance of my opponents, rather than being open to hearing them.

    I realized my mistake, and when Sam and I spoke again in October 2021 all I did was ask him questions—and real questions, too (not those that only led in a direction that I wanted to go; not those that somehow made my point). I stopped trying to demonstrate to Sam and to potential listeners that I was right. Instead, I simply tried to understand his points of departure more clearly. We had the best conversation we ever had.

    This November, on a trip to Oxford, I had a discussion with Richard Dawkins. We had stepped rather tentatively around each other in the email exchanges leading to our meeting, but they became increasingly good-humored. When we met, I tried to remember my clinical experience and my last discussion with Sam. I did my best not to be right or to win or to make my point. I asked him real questions. He did the same. Our conversation, which lasted several hours, was still too short, and left many issues unresolved, but it went very well.

    What did I learn (again) this year? Don’t treat people as instrumental means to my predetermined end. This is particularly true of people with whom I may think I disagree. It’s highly probable that I don’t understand where they are coming from, what they mean, or anything about the particulars of our disagreement. If I listen, instead of winning, I learn. And that’s better than winning.

    A New Year resolution candidate: be more like Jordan Peterson.


  • Senator Karen, Hedgehog. As Jeff Jacoby notes, she knows just one big thing. Elizabeth Warren's one-trick inflation pony.

    PRICES IN the United States are rising faster than they have in decades. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month that inflation was up 6.8 percent over the past year, the steepest annual increase in consumer prices since 1982. There is no mystery about why inflation is exploding: Prices spike when too many dollars are chasing too few goods. The federal government has massively increased spending over the past two years in the name of economic stimulus and COVID-19 relief: too many dollars. At the same time, the pandemic's upheaval has led to a global labor shortage and snarled supply chains, preventing commodities of every description from being produced or from reaching vendors: too few goods.

    The result is straight out of Economics 101: Everything is more expensive.

    But Senator Elizabeth Warren has a different theory. She insists prices are being pushed up not by anything as impersonal as supply and demand, but by greedy business executives.

    "Prices at the pump have gone up," she told an MSNBC interviewer last month. "Why? Because giant oil companies like Chevon and ExxonMobil enjoy doubling their profits. This isn't about inflation. This is about price gouging."

    She's wrong (and dangerously wrong) at the top her lungs.


Last Modified 2024-01-31 5:55 AM EDT