URLs du Jour

2021-12-10

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  • Sadly, Trump Derangement Syndrome claims another victim. I'm kind of a Steven Pinker fanboy, so I bought and read his latest book, Rationality. And it was pretty good, especially if you're at the Harvard undergrad level. (It's based on a course he taught there.) My report is here, over in the bookblog area.

    But…

    Right at the beginning of Chapter 10 ("What's Wrong With People?") his target of choice is Donald J. Trump. Let me snip out a couple sentences:

    Trump himself […] raised further doubts throughout his presidency on our collective capacity for reason. He predicted in February 2020 that Covid-19 would disappear "like a miracle," and endorsed quack cures like malaria drugs, bleach injections, and light probes.

    Trump did say that miracle thing, apparently numerous times. Wrong.

    And he pushed the malaria drug (hydroxychloroquine), even apparently taking it himself. Also wrong.

    But, sorry Steve, everything else you say here is wrong.

    Bleach? Even the left-leaning Politifact rated then-candidate Biden's claim that Trump advocated bleach-taking as "Mostly False". Which, given Politifact's bias, basically means "Hot Garbage".

    And (apparently) the "light probe" thing is far from the "quack cure" Pinker claims. Megan Fox at PJMedia asks: Was Trump Right? UV Light Therapy Shows Promise in COVID Patients.

    You’re not going to believe this, but you now have more ammunition against the idiots running around saying Trump told people to inject themselves with bleach. He never did that. What he did do was inartfully try to describe a new technology that relies on UV light to be injected through a catheter into parts of the body (like the lungs) where the light can act as a “disinfectant” and kill viruses.

    More info at the link, of course. But it's not a "quack cure" if medical people are really trying it successfully.

    Pinker's criticism of Trump's uneasy relationship with reality is warranted, as long as he sticks to what Trump actually said. Which, truly, is often bad enough.

    Unfortunately, when you start relying on what others claim Trump said, you're in very murky water, and setting yourself up for a Confirmation Bias award. Which I award to Steven Pinker this week.


  • Longest article ever? Dan McLaughlin writes about What David Brooks Is Most Wrong About. Specifically, this paragraph from Brooks's recent Atlantic article, "What Happened to American Conservatism?":

    I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. If its progressive wing sometimes seems to have learned nothing from the failures of government and to promote cultural stances that divide Americans, at least the party as a whole knows what year it is.

    Dan's takedown:

    I understand why, if you get all your news about American conservatives from watching cable news, perusing Twitter, and reading The Atlantic and the New York Times, you might be ready to despair at how little influence remains for fusionism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, and Reaganism within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Certainly the illiberal and even brutish strands of the Right have grown in prominence and influence in the past six years. Examples of them are not hard to find, and if you choose to place them at the center of your daily news diet, they can seem overwhelming. But any reasonable and informed observer of the American political scene must see that the “moderate wing of the Democratic Party” has by far less influence within that party than the remaining Reaganites have within the GOP. It is only because Democrats have such tiny margins in Congress that the small number of surviving moderates are able to exercise any restraint upon the party. The progressives have been driving the media and cultural narratives, and the party’s behavior, on a vast number of fronts for some time now. If Brooks can’t or won’t see that, the problem is not with conservatism, but with its obituarist.

    I am pretty sure Dan's right about Democatic Party "moderates": they are meekly going along with the crazies.

    I hope he's right about the Republicans.


  • State-capacity libertarianism has got some work to do. The NYPost reports: A dozen US cities set annual murder records with three weeks left in 2021.

    At least 12 major US cities have already set historical murder records in 2021, even as three weeks remain in the year.

    Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth largest city, recorded 523 murders as of Dec. 7, surpassing its formal grim milestone of 500 murders, which was set in 1990, police data showed.

    And (get this) Chicago is not on that list of 12. Because it's "only" had 756 homicides this year, and that's (so far) below the total of 796 in 1996.


  • Well, at least we're not Turkey. Yet. Pierre Lemieux writes at Econlib on Erdogan and Countervailing Institutions.

    The inflationary policies of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirm two standard economic predictions. First, increasing the money supply, other things being equal, causes inflation. Second, the weakening of independent countervailing institutions by a dictator or would-be dictator will lead to policies entirely focused on the latter’s self-interest.

    Erdogan’s central bank has been buying assets with newly created money in order to push interest rates down. (Other policy instruments may also have been used.) Erdogan wants low interests because, like Trump, he believes that they boost the economy and, thus, his popularity with voters. He apparently also wants to signal his Islamic colors by following this religion’s prohibition of usury. Not surprisingly, annual inflation runs at between 21% and, according to Professor Steve Hanke of John Hopkins University, 83% per year (see Steve Hanke, “A Way for Turkey’s Erdogan to Have His Cake and Eat It Too,” National Review, December 1, 2021—I don’t like the title much as it obscures the fact that Erdogan is eating the people’s cake).

    And (of course) Trump was a fan.


  • Sick Transit, Inglorious Monday. (That was an actual headline once. Using it even though it's Friday.) Randal O’Toole at Cato is hoping it's terminal (get it?): Dying Transit Industry Grasps for Solutions.

    Your industry gets government subsidies equal to two‐​thirds of its operating costs and all of its capital costs, and still most people refuse to use your services. Do you:

    1. Increase operating subsidies so you can give away your services for free?
    2. Spend more on capital improvements that haven’t attracted more customers in the past?
    3. Penalize American who aren’t using your services?
    4. Redefine your mission so that you appear relevant even if almost no one uses your service?

    How about e. All of the above? That appears to be the transit industry’s solution to the fact that, except in New York City, almost no one rides transit anymore. Data released by the Department of Transportation early this week, for example, reveals that October transit ridership was barely more than half of pre‐pandemic levels even as driving has returned to nearly 100 percent, flying is 80 percent, and Amtrak is 72 percent. Even in New York, transit ridership remained less than 57 percent of pre‐pandemic levels.

    It's time to pull the plug, folks.


Last Modified 2024-01-19 5:47 PM EDT