voluntaryXchange

Speaking Truth to Power

Glenn Greenwald:

CNN and NBC and others now employ little hall monitor dweebs whose only purpose is to pressure other platforms to censor or block the voices that are most threatening to them. It's not journalism: it's quashing of dissent…

This is perfect. Hall monitors is the perfect metaphor for how I feel about many people in the legacy media, especially on CNN.

Art Carden with the Article Title of the Year: “It’s Time to Admit: Drugs Won the War On Drugs”

Love it: “It’s Time to Admit: Drugs Won the War On Drugs”.

The article is lightly recommended. If you’re like me, there’s not much new there.

Just to Be Completely Clear …

James Freeman:

Hunter Biden’s lucrative arrangements in Ukrainian natural gas, Chinese finance and Romanian real estate have been attracting attention because he had no particular expertise in Ukrainian natural gas, Chinese finance or Romanian real estate.

Me neither, but I didn’t get rich that way.

Update:

Oh, this is rich (no pun intended). I should have read the whole article before pulling that quote. Some of the money associated with this story went to a firm named Bak USA in Buffalo … which asserted in its bankruptcy statements that it, uh, misplaced 99.7% of the money loaned to it.

Finding Out the Hard Way

Cold Spring Shops on the COVID-19 experiences of colleges and their students:

Is anybody really surprised that when you peddle the residential campus experience as a social experience, and the classroom stuff might be secondary, that people might take you up on the offer?

I hadn’t thought about it that way yet. But yeah … I do notice there’s a lot less outbreaks at commuter schools and community colleges — where students take their studies briefly and then head to home or work.

Cross-posted from SUU MacroBlog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Some George Will

George Will revisits Jose Ortega y Gasset:

The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans. Someone anticipated something like this.

Today’s gruesome irony: A significant portion of the intelligentsia that is churned out by higher education does not acknowledge exacting standards of inquiry that could tug them toward tentativeness and constructive dissatisfaction with themselves. Rather, they come from campuses, cloaked in complacency. Instead of elevating, their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega y Gasset called the “mass man.”

In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” (Emphasis is Ortega’s.)

Much education now spreads the disease that education should cure, the disease of repudiating, without understanding, the national principles that could pull the nation toward its noble aspirations. The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.”

Remove the sexism, and the third paragraph describes a teenager in our family.

Read the whole thing, entitled “Much of today’s intelligentsia cannot think” in The Washington Post. Via Cafe Hayek.

3 on Fungi

Going to have to read this book. Here’s 3 on fungi from Tyler Cowen.

• We’re pikers. Fungi release about 8 times as much carbon into the atmosphere as humans do.
• I loved this quote: “The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.”
• Fungi engage in arbitrage with plants. Plants have to extend roots to get nutrients. Fungi exchange nutrients with plants, and can transport those nutrients to plants that are willing to exchange more for them.

After 20 Years Here I Still Know this Feeling

This appeared on MLTSHP this morning:

I love that caption. I’m amused.

When confronted with something like this for the umpteenth time in the past week, the vXyoungman and I just say to each other “We’ve got shit like this everywhere.” You never get over that feeling: the sky is just better out here.

If You Didn’t Notice

When The New York Times threatened to doxx Scott Alexander, he noted that

If there’s no blog, there’s no story.

At the time, the NYT explained their internal policy:

We do not comment on what we may or may not publish in the future. But when we report on newsworthy or influential figures, our goal is always to give readers all the accurate and relevant information we can.

Since the NYT has not gone forward with their article, it is safe to conclude that they no longer find Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex to be newsworthy.

Scott was right.

From this I conclude that it is the policy of the NYT to doxx people they disagree with to actively harm them.

Do note that this is not the position of the source article for the two quotes.

P.S. In their defense, I’m going to call the actions of the NYT a “negated converse”: they don’t like their platform being transparent when they write things that others don’t agree with (like any number of pie-in-the-sky policy positions advocated on the editorial page).

Buying Local Quote

Russ Roberts:

We tried buying local once; it was called the Middle Ages.

From How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.

Why Is Macro So Hard? Pernicious Interview Tactics

Oops … I misplaced this draft … better post it before it spoils.

My best example of this actually comes from an article in The Atlantic about in interviewer misinterpreting the statements of psychologist Jordan Peterson:

… What struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.

First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique.

This winter, I’ve seen this a lot with discussions of the recently passed Republican tax reform, which featured a reduction in the corporate tax rate. Many people paint this as unconscionable, even evil, and yet it was a campaign plank of Obama (and Romney) in 2012. This is something we should all be able to agree about, and yet it seems that for many people the argument begins with the axiom that it can’t be something we all agree about.