Ezra Klein on the right of a certain form of conservatism

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-pippa-norris.html?showTranscript=1

....when I look at the time frame we’re talking about, this post 2010 period, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is the iPhone, the rise of social media, increased competitiveness in the broader media. And I think this is important because there is the question of the ways the culture and society are changing, but none of us have access to the entire society or culture, and most people aren’t sitting around reading polls about other people’s opinions about cultural issues.

So there’s this question of how do you end up feeling, like what leads somebody in a rural area of Wisconsin to feel like everything is different now. And it seems to me, in a lot of places, all around the world, at the same time, you have this rise in algorithmic media in highly engagement oriented media that is constantly confronting people with, usually, stories charged around identity, in many cases, at least, that really give, I think, often an outsized view of how quickly society is changing, but nevertheless are a very, very big part of a very rapid set of changing views, a sense of what you can and can’t say, because people are now yelling at you in the comments section of your own Facebook posts.

Something I felt was a little bit under theorized in the book is this dimension of the changes in media. 2010 is right around then with the rise of smartphones, is a signal event. And in my experience of it, it’s a signal event that tends to lead to people being confronted a lot more with whatever they fear most about the country they live in. And so the fact that would lead to a rise in these populist authoritarian figures seems pretty logical to me.

How a Sexual Assault in a School Bathroom Became a Political Weapon

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/magazine/loudoun-county-bathroom-sexual-assault.html

The particulars of Smith’s daughter’s case — an attacker in a skirt, a girls’ bathroom — posed an obvious threat to the new policy. And so, critics charged, school officials buried it, and because they buried it, more harm was done. When it all came to light months later, this theory of the case would galvanize a local conservative parents’-rights movement, help swing a governor’s race and rattle the politics of gender in America far beyond Virginia.

This was one version of the story of Loudoun County. But as prosecutors took up the matter over the next two years, a different story began to take shape — one that is told here based on court records and testimony, as well as months of interviews with participants in the events at the heart of the scandal, in some cases discussing them on the record for the first time, and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public-records requests. This evidence presents a much more complicated picture of what happened, in Loudoun County and beyond, in a period of escalating culture wars that have consumed the same communities and institutions that the combatants insist they want to save.

A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html

Witnesses said the fight, in November 2021, started when men aligned with the event’s organizers, including a group called No Cold War, attacked activists supporting the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

On the surface, No Cold War is a loose collective run mostly by American and British activists who say the West’s rhetoric against China has distracted from issues like climate change and racial injustice.

In fact, a New York Times investigation found, it is part of a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda. At the center is a charismatic American millionaire, Neville Roy Singham, who is known as a socialist benefactor of far-left causes.

Why Is Narendra Modi So Popular? Tune In to Find Out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/world/asia/india-modi-radio-mann-ki-baat.html

In his decade as prime minister, Mr. Modi has done away with traditional methods of information-sharing for the country’s top elected official. He has never held a full-fledged news conference; he dominates Parliament so thoroughly, with a large majority and a quick trigger to dismiss legislative sessions, that he speaks only when he wants.

Mr. Modi sets the agenda not just by choosing what to elevate — but equally by deciding what to keep a distance from, and what to let his lieutenants and digital army do for him.

He has stayed mostly mum, on the radio and elsewhere, as his right-wing supporters have increasingly turned to vigilante violence in enforcing their idea of Hindu supremacy, human rights organizations say. Mosques and churches have been attacked, interfaith couples have been dragged out of trains, and mobs have lynched Muslim men accused of transporting the meat of cows, which many Hindus see as holy.

The result is an environment of persistent combustibility in a nation with more than 200 million people who belong to religious minorities — many feeling alienated, humiliated or directionless.

Man, It’s a Hot One: The Oral History of Santana and Rob Thomas’ ‘Smooth’

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/santana-rob-thomas-smooth-oral-history-841189/

How Carlos Santana scored his first hit in decades with help from Matchbox Twenty's frontman — and how it almost didn't happen. The making of the unlikely 1999 smash

Care for an old wounded soldier

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/14uxaci/intensive_care/

Dad was a WW2 paratrooper with the independent 509th. His nickname in the unit was Magnet because he was always getting shot. He had 4 Purple Hearts among his other awards.

In the end, near the town of Sadzot in December of 1944 dad was grievously wounded in the chest, face, throat and arms. After some battle field surgery he was evaced to a series of hospitals with each one triaging him as unlikely to survive.

He eventually got out of hospital in 1948 with 100% disability, married a Navy nurse and built a modest life and a large family.

It was in the 60's that dad's war wounds began to complicate his life and he was scheduled to go to Pittsburgh to a general hospital for major surgery which we were told he would likely not survive.

Dad's case came to the attention of Dr P, ( a Greek name which is unspellable and unpronounceable) the Chief of Surgery at the hospital and Dr P decided to perform the operation himself. It turned out that Dr P had been a battalion surgeon in WW2 with the 29th Infantry Division from D Day to Germany.

As my mom and my sister were both nurses, we got first rate information from the staff.

The story told was that as Dr P approached the table to begin the operation, the Chief Resident, who was assisting, tried to lighten the mood. He looked down at Dad on the table, noting the mass of scar tissue and wound marks on him and said; "This guy looks like he's already had an autopsy. I think we have the wrong patient."

Dr. P stopped moving, looked up and said; "The men who did this surgery were being shot at while they operated on him.... You're fired. Get out of my hospital"

Dr P performed the surgery and gave dad another 22 years. When he came out of the theatre he came straight to mom and said "He's fine. He will stay with us for as long as he needs to. There will be no fees, charges or bills. Here is my home number, call me any time if you have the slightest issue."

As a young teenager, I was in awe. There was perspiration on Dr. P's face and perhaps a hint of mist in his eyes. I think he may have lost enough soldiers in his career and wasn't losing any more.

After he departed, one of the senior nurses spoke to mum, "We've never seen him like this. He said that if any of the patient's vital signs change, he wants to be notified immediately." Consequently,, dad received excellent care as the staff were terrified that something would go wrong on their shift.

In 1975, dad pinned his Airborne wings on me at Fryer Drop Zone. I still have them.

Noah Rothman on the indictment

The @NRO editors’ view is that Jack Smith’s latest Trump indictment is an overreach that seeks to “criminalize protected political speech” and undermine the rule of law.

I dissent from our editorial.

"January 6 Was a Crime" https://t.co/aKQE6BmYQ5

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) August 2, 2023

/u/flyingkumot on love

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/14ydf8f/whose_abuelita_is_this/

Met an elderly hispanic lady at a bus stop in Albuquerque. We went back and forth in Spanish for a bit (I’m a white guy so she was pleasantly surprised) and she told me about her travel plans to go to her son’s wedding–a real cute story involving him and his high school sweetheart finding each other after a long time being broken up.

I had recently been dumped, and said something a bit mopey like “I wish I could find love like that someday.”

She smiled, shook her head and said “Chico, love like that isn’t just found. It’s built. How many perfect, decorated temples do you think my ancestors stumbled across in Tikal or Tenochtitlan? No. They found a good, level spot, maybe some water nearby, and said ‘Here. We can build something here.’ Look for a clearing in the forest, young man. Not a hidden city.”

That one will stick with me for years.

How to Blow Up a Timeline

https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline

One of his key insights is what I think of as his theory of group inertia. Groups are hard to form in the first place. Think of how many random Discord communities you were invited into the past few years and how many are still active. “Organization for collective action takes a good deal of time to emerge” observes Olson.

However, inertia works both before and after product-market fit. Once a group has formed, it tends to persist even after the collective good it came together to provide is no longer needed.

The same is true of social networks. As anyone who has tried to start one knows, it’s not easy to jump-start a social graph. But if you manage by some miracle to conjure one from the void, and if you provide that group with a reasonable set of ways for everyone to hang out, network effects can keep the party going long after last call. The group inertia that is your enemy before you’ve coalesced a community is your friend after it’s formed. Anyone who’s ever hosted a party and provided booze knows it’s often hard to get the last stragglers to leave. We are a social species.

Why the Champions of Affirmative Action Had to Leave Asian Americans Behind

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-champions-of-affirmative-action-had-to-leave-asian-americans-behind

Affirmative action, in my view, was doomed from that moment forward because it had been stripped of its moral force. It is one thing to argue that slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and centuries of theft demand an educational system that factors in the effects of those atrocities. If that principle were to express itself in, say, a Black student who was descended from slaves and had grown up in poverty in an American inner city receiving a bump on his application when compared with a rich private-school kid from the suburbs, so be it. But that is not, in fact, how affirmative action usually plays out at élite schools. Most reporting on the subject—including my own, as well as a story in the Harvard Crimson—shows that descendants of slaves are relatively underrepresented among Black students at Harvard, compared with students from upwardly mobile Black immigrant families. It is easy and perhaps virtuous to defend the reparative version of affirmative action; it is harder to defend the system as it has actually been used

I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/opinion/college-admissions-affirmative-action.html

Many prestigious institutions have themselves racially gamified the admissions process, finding ways to maximize diversity without making dents in their endowments. For example, some colleges and universities boost diversity statistics on the cheap by accepting minority students who can pay full freight. And even purportedly need-blind institutions seem to have a remarkable track record of recruiting minority students who don’t need financial aid. (By some estimates, over 70 percent of Harvard’s Black, Latino and Native American students have college-educated parents with incomes above the national median.)

ROBERT A. CARO ON THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/caro/desktopnew.html

Every time a youth from a poor family gets to go to college because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, and thus to escape from a life in the ghetto, and every time a black man or woman is able to walk into a voting booth and cast a vote because of one of Lyndon Johnson's Voting Rights Acts, that is a more significant example of political power. And so, unfortunately, is the fact of a young man dying a needless death in a useless war in Vietnam. In order to demonstrate and illuminate political power through a biography of a single individual, the biography has to be of the right individual. I selected Robert Moses because in The Power Broker what I was aiming at was to show how urban political power worked in America in the middle of the twentieth century--how power worked not just in New York, but in all our great cities; to show what was the true essence of urban political power, not the trappings but the heart, the raw, naked essence of such power. I selected Moses because he was never elected to anything. But for forty-four years he exercised more power in New York City and New York State than any official who was elected--more than any mayor, more than any governor. Therefore, I felt, if I could show what Moses' power consisted of, and how he got it and how he wielded it, I would be showing the true essence of urban political power. Since no one else ever wielded such power, Moses was the ideal subject.

It’s Not Possible to ‘Win’ an Argument With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/opinion/rfk-jr-joe-rogan.html

But now I see where I went wrong. Not on the merits; there’s still no case that Kerry actually won in 2004. My mistake was attempting to debate and debunk Kennedy in the first place. At best, the effort was a waste of time and energy; at worst, a big bow-wrapped gift of the thing a conspiracy theorist desires most — recognition that his arguments are important enough to merit serious debate.

After getting in the mud with Kennedy all those years ago, I realized something important that we’d do well to remember now, as Kennedy mounts a long-shot run against Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination: You can come armed with all the facts in the world, but when you’re dealing with a conspiracist, there’s no real way to “win” an argument. For people whose views aren’t anchored to facts, winning is simply getting attention — and when you publicly argue with someone like Kennedy, you’ve already lost.

u/ubercorey on western meditation culture

https://www.reddit.com/r/HubermanLab/comments/14cizcn/you_dont_suck_at_meditating/

It's so important I'm going repeat it. You cultivate what the mind is best at, instead of against it. WE DO NOT FORCE IT TO BE QUIET, we encourage it to roar, but very channeled. Like you were saying, into laser focus. The defuse power becomes a beam, focused on a specific goal. You use its natural tendency to be extremely active and constantly create. Instead of fighting it, you use that to create what you want. That is what the meditation masters discovered. That mind has a superpower and we can harness it. This is what NBA coaches know, that we can improve free throw shots just as much using visualization as on the court practice.

The way pop culture teaches meditation now, without the foundational practices first, would be like taking a wild horse who's kicking and smashing his stall and just the keeping the wild horse in his stall all day today to force him to calm down, he would start to go stir crazy in his muscles would waste. So messed up... This is how we treat children in schools who have a lot of energy. And what happens, it breaks their spirit.

In contrast, the foundational practices are like like taking the horse out and running on a certain path that horse gets better and better on that path

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known

https://kk.org/thetechnium/103-bits-of-advice-i-wish-i-had-known/

Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write up more bits of wisdom on my following two birthdays. On my 70th birthday I wrote up 103 bits of advice I wish I had known earlier, which were also widely shared. The first six bits are here:

• About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.

• No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.

• Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.

• Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.

• Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.

• If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.

The Procedure Fetish

 https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-procedure-fetish/

If America has a procedure problem, it may be because it has a lawyer problem. Among lawyers, anxiety about agency legitimacy is reflexively invoked to defend the legally imposed procedures that structure agency decision-making. Here’s Richard Stewart, a titan in the field: “The traditional conception of administrative law . . . bespeaks a common social value in legitimating, through controlling rules and procedures, the exercise of power over private interests by officials not otherwise formally accountable.” Similar statements abound in the literature. Every procedure under the sun has been defended, at one time or another, as a guarantor of the fragile legitimacy of the administrative state.

But it pays to be precise. It is reasonable to believe that procedural regularity is an important facet of government legitimacy. But legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow. Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair. Mandatory procedures may sometimes advance those values. They can focus agencies on priorities they may have ignored, orient bureaucracies to broader public goals, and improve the quality of agency deliberations. But procedures can also burn agency resources on senseless paperwork, empower lawyers at the expense of experts, and frustrate agencies’ ability to act. When procedures impair an agency’s ability to do its job, they can drain an agency of legitimacy. 

In Defense of The West Wing

https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-the-west-wing

I find the way “The West Wing” came up in the 2016 primary interesting because one of the main themes of the show actually illustrates the way that entire dynamic ran off the rails. I think it’s easy to understand why Sanders liked a show about a cantankerous politician from northern New England who took on the Democratic Party establishment in an underdog primary campaign and captured the White House. But it’s also easy to see why Whitford felt that Sanders’ “political revolution” concept was entirely contrary to the ethic of the show.

And that’s because “The West Wing” correctly illustrates that traditionally, the voters have appreciated outsiders in presidential politics but not radicals. If you look at Bartlet and Matt Santos, they don’t have much in common biographically. But they are both alternatives to the establishment insiders (Hoynes and Russell) and both inspired idealistic people on their staff and in the electorate. They are fresh, interesting characters who promise a break from the grubbiness and opportunism that people see as endemic to the political system. But in terms of public policy, neither of them is anything particularly special. They are both pretty banal liberal incrementalists. In ideological terms, Bartlet breaks with his base a bit on free trade and Santos with the teachers unions on tenure. But their outsider-ness is meant to convey honesty, integrity, and realness, not policy radicalism.

This is a template that we’ve seen over and over again from John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, and it’s exactly what makes the 2016 and 2020 races a little bit odd.

People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/people-can-be-convinced-they-committed-a-crime-they-dont-remember.html

Of the 30 participants who were told they had committed a crime as a teenager, 21 (71%) were classified as having developed a false memory of the crime; of the 20 who were told about an assault of some kind (with or without a weapon), 11 reported elaborate false memory details of their exact dealings with the police.

A similar proportion of students (76.67%) formed false memories of the emotional event they were told about.

Intriguingly, the criminal false events seemed to be just as believable as the emotional ones. Students tended to provide the same number of details, and reported similar levels of confidence, vividness, and sensory detail for the two types of event.

Shaw and Porter speculate that incorporating true details, such as the name of an actual friend, into an account that was supposedly corroborated by the student’s caregiver likely endowed the false event with just enough familiarity that it came to seem plausible.

I’m an ER doctor. Here’s how I’m already using ChatGPT to help treat patients.

https://inflecthealth.medium.com/im-an-er-doctor-here-s-how-i-m-already-using-chatgpt-to-help-treat-patients-a023615c65b6

In doing so, I’ve come to realize that dealing with ChatGPT is like working with an incredibly brilliant, hard-working — and occasionally hungover — intern. That’s become my mental model for considering the usefulness of ChatGPT.

Now, for any potential application, I think, “Would a dedicated but occasionally hungover intern working on this make things easier for me and my staff — or would the work required managing them end up being more effort than just doing it without their involvement?”

Seen from that perspective, ChatGPT or a hungover intern can still, for instance:

• Take down my patient’s history
• Create long-form written communication for patients and staff
• Explain highly technical information to patients simply with empathy and compassion

Super-rich abandoning Norway at record rate as wealth tax rises slightly

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/10/super-rich-abandoning-norway-at-record-rate-as-wealth-tax-rises-slightly

A record number of super-rich Norwegians are abandoning Norway for low-tax countries after the centre-left government increased wealth taxes to 1.1%.

More than 30 Norwegian billionaires and multimillionaires left Norway in 2022, according to research by the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv. This was more than the total number of super-rich people who left the country during the previous 13 years, it added. Even more super-rich individuals are expected to leave this year because of the increase in wealth tax in November, costing the government tens of millions in lost tax receipts.

Many have moved to Switzerland, where taxes are much lower.