When I point out, as I sometimes do, that large shares of the public don't actually understand how modernity works, it's tempting, I'm sure, to dismiss this as elitist snark. But I think it's actually sad, in its way. People don't know how things work, but worse, they have no intuition for why things work the way they do, even once it's explained to them.

This is obvious when you see the arguments they bring to bear.

Courts and laws must seem totally insane to them, never addressing their needs, always coldly rejecting what must seem to them to be persuasive arguments about personal hardship that might have carried the day in more intimate societies.

The whole thing, the whole project of society must seem capricious and random and unfair. When they are asked to make arguments for themselves, they can produce only non sequiturs and appeals to emotion that might as well be in an alien language for how likely they are to have anything to do with the issue at hand.

It might be obvious to you in what ways the cable company is different from the police is different from a local hardware store is different from Lowe's is different from the Social Security Administration, both in their obligations to you and in the limits of thinking about them in terms of obligations at all.

I assure you, this is not true of all people equally.

And if you think, you know, well these people just need to be *educated* better, then you haven't heard what I'm saying. They don't think in contracts, in abstract moral systems, in legal structures. Their intuition is a tide pulling them out into a sea, no matter how many times you row them back in. Modernity is great. We're not going back to small tribes. And this all just is what it is. But clearly we've moved into territory that some non-trivial share of the population is always going to find themselves out of sync with.

And that's not their fault. And it's genuinely sad.

I don’t know, I’m not that vindictive and I don’t really want ordinary liberals to suffer for their views, but we do need some social norms around these things. The thing that drives me most crazy is how many people on the left have absolutely no self-awareness or self-consciousness about the fact that they might be talking to someone who is just a little bit more conservative than they are. It’s a kind of narcissism, a solipsism.

I’m not saying their lives should be ruined for this, but maybe they should be forced to sit through a yearly DEI-esque training that reminds them that other human beings exist, that they sometimes have different political views, that it’s inappropriate to make strident political claims at work, that you’re not actually better or more empathetic or kinder than your coworkers, and that it is extremely obnoxious to behave as though you are. As has been pointed out to me before, this is probably just an ordinary human foible. If conservatives controlled all the institutions, then this is probably how they would behave in the office, too.

Saying that people should wait to get married because they’ll be wiser is sort of like saying that people should wait until they’re 30 to play in the NFL, so that they don’t get involved in any stupid scandals when they’re young and stupid.

It’s of course true, in some sense, so long as you’re aware of the opportunities on which you are foreclosing. I have no trouble believing that younger marriages are higher variance. But if you wait, you will foreclose on the potential for a specific kind of marriage that many people find quite rewarding.

I really don’t think you can underestimate the impact of the mass incarceration narrative on political polarization. Imagine how different a country that busts people’s doors down and throws them in prison for decades because they’re smoking a joint is from one that doesn’t. Those are two completely different societies. There are lots of normal, otherwise well adjusted, successful people walking around you who think there are people in prison who have been there for years and years and years for smoking a joint. That’s what they think. They think that’s a thing that happens in this country. They think the nature of the criminal justice system is that you get caught with a joint, then it goes all the way to a criminal trial, after which you will be sentenced to prison for many years.

Anybody who believes this is completely fucking insane and out of touch with the actual reality of criminal justice in the United States. This isn’t a small difference. That’s an insane belief.

And it might be the modal belief.

I think there’s a way in which the phrase, “what do people even DO in suburbs and small towns” is kind of telling on yourself, as though the whole point of life is to consume restaurant food and attend street fairs (at which you consume restaurant food from a cart).

https://twitter.com/nealjclark1/status/1876987400297099470

“What do people even do in the suburbs” is it a question with a shelf life. It’s supposed to be uttered by teenagers who are in their peak socializing years during which they are supposed to be finding a mate to have children with.

You aren’t meant to still be asking that question in your 30s.

To the extent that allowing millions and millions of Ellis Islanders to come here guaranteed for at least the next century that the average American would now think of the country as defined by that immigration — that the immigration wasn’t just something that happened, but rather core to what it means to be an American — I think that’s a perfectly good argument against doing new rounds of mass immigration. Certainly you have to acknowledge and admit that this totally changed the average person’s conception of America. People literally think of the country as something else, now.

Obviously, you can prefer what came before or you can prefer what came after, but I don’t see how it’s possible to deny that there’s a difference. Again, I would just insist that you don’t get to talk about this like it’s no big deal. A thing happened that completely changed the ordinary American’s understanding of what it means to be an American. That’s a really big deal! That’s always going to be a big deal. There’s always going to be a fight about it. It’s always going to be contentious. No, it isn’t just the most obvious thing in the world that you should do it again.

This image going around purporting to explain two-lane roundabout usage nicely demonstrates why these intersections are confusing and dangerous.

The image says that the right lane is for turning right and the left lane is for turning left, but that *either* lane can go straight, suggesting that the blue car is allowed to t-bone the red car when it turns across its lane. In fact, it's much more typical that the right lane *must* turn right, as can be seen in the markings on this real-life two-lane rotary in Warwick, RI.

This obviously makes way more sense and the image is just simply confused about that which it is attempting to explain.

The messaging around hiding your vote from your husband is of a kind with arguments against home schooling, because it can conceal abuse, or arguments about having parents leave the room when kids are at the doctor, so that the doctor can find cases of abuse, and so on and so on.

In each of these cases progressives want to rudely insert themselves into an existing relationship -- a primary relationship, the kinds of relationships on which you build a society.

This is extremely rude and presumptuous and insulting and also, yes, it will catch some predators, but at the cost of inserting yourself where you don't belong millions of times for every serious case of abuse you uncover.

Liberals are of course *entirely* aware of this dynamic and *accept my point of view uncritically* when it comes to defending the rights of criminal suspects in literally every other context.

It's just marriages and parent/child relationships that they're willing to subvert in order to get tough on crime and abuse. Amongst my worst critics are a handful of cretins and liars who seem to simultaneously hold the view that it's critical to defend the rights of somebody who almost certainly committed a serious violent crime, but also that they just can't understand why anybody would be against routine intrusions into the lives of parents against whom no credible evidence of abuse even exists and that my doing so implies something nefarious about me.

The deeper point revealed by this obvious truth is that we're all individuals, not avatars for our group identities. "You can't have that job, because people who look like you have dominated in that role for the last 100 years and it's time to give somebody else a chance" is basically incoherent, because I'm just a singular individual and either I get the job or I don't. Whether people like me did or didn't get the job in the past and whether people who look like you did or didn't get the job in the past collapses into a single point where one of us gets the job and one of us doesn't. American individuality is fundamentally at odds with social justice. It's zero sum. They make opposing, incompatible claims about the world. Either you and I are individuals who should be treated as such or we're pawns in a bigger game. You can't have both.

The country literally devolved into riots and practically every institution, from your local PTA to the largest corporations and government agencies, remade itself in response to the lie that police hunt minorities for sport

https://twitter.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1844835702753619974

I’m sorry, but that happened. That all happened. It just happened. Not a long time ago. It just happened. Yes it’s also true that some people recently said some things that are untrue about FEMA. To what end? What were the consequences? What burned down? What was looted? What institution that you are part of completely remade itself in the image of this lie? How many television ads were premised on this line? How many moments of silence at sporting events asked you to reflect on this lie?

One of my most strongly-held is that beliefs are developed primarily from emotion and that if you felt the same immediate, knee-jerk, emotional responses that your opponents feel on any given issue, then you would believe as they do. You happen to feel different emotional responses, so you’ve developed commensurate beliefs.

Conservatives aren’t particularly good at this, either, but it’s particularly funny that the “veil of ignorance” understanders, who spend 75% of their time on this website talking about how empathetic they are, seem completely unable or unwilling to grant this. A good exercise to go through is to create a table with three columns labeled, “issue,” ,”my position,” “my emotional response to that issue” and see if you can come up with even one thing for which your emotions do not match up with your preferred policy.

Libertarians were wrong about this. Prohibition decreased alcohol deaths. This is obvious and straightforward and really shouldn’t be controversial. We legalized marijuana and usage went up. We made opiates more available, more people died. When alcohol was prohibited, fewer people drank it and we had fewer alcohol related deaths.

This is very simple stuff. Obviously you can still oppose prohibition for other reasons. But this is right. There’s a lot of dishonesty about some very basic aspects of drug and alcohol prohibition.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1842550795298079138

I remember once being at a bar with a good friend, a good, kind person, and telling her that I had to leave because I was conducting some technical interviews at work the next morning and wanted to be sure I was well rested. She was asking a bit about it, and as I described the process, which by tech standards wasn’t all that rigorous, but which did involve more than one technical round, you could see her face kind of scrunch up. The whole thing clearly sounded elitist and snobby distasteful to her; and after all, “you’re just my buddy who hangs at the bar where we’re all equals, who do you even think you are that you can gatekeep a job in this way?”

The feeling was unmistakable, like that feeling you get when you’re on a date and you know you’re not impressing.

This is the emotion on a broader scale that is underlying a lot of liberal thinking about immigration. When you start talking about vetting, about standards, about earning potential, even about criminality, their faces start to crunch up like, “who do you think you are, anyway? Who are you to judge other human beings? To put a measure on their worth?”

They feel this way about job interviews, about college admissions, about immigration policy. This is why you get into these weird debates where they try to beat you on a technicality with the language of legality. None of that is real, or at least it’s not primary. What’s primary is that feeling they get when you start talking like this. They are extremely emotional about it and the policy follows from the emotion. It’s primary, immediate, reflexive. It’s all in the way their face scrunches up when you mention it. The idea that they’ve arrived at that position because they understand the contours of the debate better than you, because they know the law, because they have looked at all the data, because they’re just simply moron, gosh darn it, couldn’t be more absurd. Their face scrunches up when you start talking aboutstandards in admissions. It’s involuntary, reflexive. Every single piece of data they’ve ever learned about immigration is marshaled in defense of that initial lowering of the eyes and raising of the corners of their mouth.

What's going on here is that we used to have two categories that our discourse is anchored to:

1. Illegal (crossed the border illegally)
2. Legal (came through as part of an orderly, planned process)

And now we have a third category: the migrant. They often *come* illegally (or quasi-legally, given that all asylum claims, no matter how spurious, have to be taken seriously) and then are granted temporary legal status once here.

This is breaking the distinction we're accustomed to assuming in our discourse. I would submit that this isn't all that difficult to understand, but there are obvious incentives to obscure it.

I would encourage the group that’s thinking about forming in response to these most recent attacks to consider carefully what is being suggested here

https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1839703868277453136

I don’t know why the fact that Islamic fundamentalists are far too stupid to understand when they’ve lost is supposed to be relevant. I mean, it’s like who are you talking to here? Why is this directed at the west? Why wouldn’t this statement be directed at the successor to Hezbollah as a warning to them that they will be obliterated just like Hezbollah just was?

It tells you everything you need to know that these people think this statement is something the west is supposed to take seriously and not plainly warning to our enemies.

People have just kind of gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s actually insane that it’s possible to get 15 convictions. Like that literally shouldn’t even be possible.

https://twitter.com/tedfrank/status/1838917777299476540

You really cannot overstate how completely our national conversation about crime has disconnected from reality. In no country that actually mass incarcerated its citizens would it be possible for someone to have 15 convictions and still be free on the street. Therefore, the United States quite plainly does not have a mass incarceration problem. You can’t have a reasonable conversation about this with normal people, because they all take for granted that we do. So basically everybody except me and like five other people on the Internet are wrong about the most basic facts of the case. It is my burden in life to know this thing nobody else knows and to be completely incapable therefore of having normal conversations with my neighbors.

The primary cause of homelessness is not a lack of money, it’s a lack of functioning relationships. You become homeless when you’ve burned through everybody in a position to have once cared about you.

https://twitter.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1838634148518342991

Like a lot of poor people, when I was deep in poverty I survived because I had a mother I could move in with for a while, a friend with an air mattress who let me stay with them when I had overstayed my mom’s welcome. When my drug addicted uncle was on the verge of homelessness, he came and stayed with us. When my mother later was kicked out of her boyfriend’s house, she stayed with me for a couple of days, and then with a friend for a while until I could help her get set up with a place.

There are like five or six different charts that keep popping up in my feed over the last few days some of which purport to show that mass shooters are disproportionately white and some that show they are disproportionately black. Since I have no idea which of these charts are based on real data and which aren’t, I just want to make a higher level point about this data, more generally, and how it’s used to tell various stories.

Basically, there are two kinds of mass shootings and similarly two kinds of school shootings. The first kind is the more sensational kind that shows up on the news and in our nightmares, where a gunman walks into a public place and starts executing people indiscriminately. These kinds of shootings are relatively rare, if sensational, and the majority of the perpetrators are white.

The other kind of mass shooting is where a shooter is targeting an individual or a group, maybe at school, maybe somewhere else. Maybe it’s a group of people standing on the street corner or at a party. He may only intend to shoot one or two people, but he’s not exactly an expert marksman and he doesn’t care that much if he hits bystanders, so often many people are shot, and it qualifies in the data as a mass shooting. These kinds of shootings are much more common, they make up a much larger share of all homicides in any given year, and the shooters are disproportionately black.

So, basically, what you can do is shift around your definition of, “mass shooting“ depending on what kind of story you want to tell. Progressives do this in order to have it both ways. When they want to tell a story about how common mass shootings are, they use the more inclusive definition to increase the numbers. But when they want to make a racialized point about the whiteness of mass shooters, they use the more narrow definition. What I’m just describing here is the broad direction of the data. The more kind of sensational, rarer mass shooting, the kind we all picture in our head when we hear the phrase, “mass shooting” — those shooters are indeed disproportionately white.

If you want to include all of the more normal, routine, everyday mass shootings — five people shot at a party, four shot while waiting for the bus, some kids caught in the crossfire on a porch — then those shooters are disproportionately black.

You can obviously chop the data up however you want, but if you lump them all together when you’re trying to make a point about the prevalence of mass shootings, but then separate them when you’re trying to make a racialized point about the unique evils of white people, Then that’s quite plainly dishonest.

This chart is a black pill that demonstrates that most people cannot read and interpret the presentation of data. For example, 99% of people who read this chart come away thinking that the departure happened in 2010. But that’s ridiculous. 2008 and 2009 were particularly low years for pedestrian fatalities (probably because of the great recession), but the chart clearly shows that 2011, 2012, 2013, and even 2014 were well within the recent historical range. 2010 to 2014 is on this graph very obviously a continuation of the trend evident from 2000 through 2008. If you drop out the two low numbers from 2008 and 2009, it’s basically a flat line from 2000 through 2014.

The departure, again quite obviously, occurs around 2015.

This is extremely important. If you want to understand what’s going on here, then you need to understand that the departure occurred in 2015, not in 2010.

Why does this matter? What happened in 2015? We dramatically changed policing after Ferguson and the publication of the Ferguson report.

This explanation fits with the timeline and it proposes a direct causal mechanism that is unique to the United States. All other causal mechanisms — the cars got bigger, people are looking at their cell phones, etc — are just as true in Europe and everywhere else, yet the numbers only went up dramatically here.

What was different here is that starting around 2015 we stopped giving out tickets for reckless driving and everything else.

Again, this is the only explanation that is both concordant with the timeline and that explains a unique rise in fatalities in the United States. It’s a sign of just how mushy most people’s brains are that they will look you right in the face and say, “the problem is that cars got bigger!”

Only in the United States? And starting suddenly in 2015? The cars have been getting bigger all over the world and, even just focusing on the United States, complaints about the sizes of SUVs have been around since the 1990s. The cars have been getting bigger for 35 years. The number is fatalities Rose dramatically starting in 2015.

Like so many things in our current discourse, I feel similarly about liberals. Like, what I think is that I know what they think they mean by, “having been born somebody else,” but they don’t understand what I think I mean by, “having been born somebody else,” which means I actually have more information than them and I understand this problem space better than they do. In fact, I understand their own position better than they do, because they literally cannot even conceive of the opposite position. The biggest clue here that I’m right is that of course literally everybody can, “imagine what it would be like to be somebody else.”

Short of brain damage or mental retardation or something, this is a universal human capability. Literally everybody can do it.

What we’re being asked to do, though, is something much more extreme, which is to accept the claim that you actually could have been born somebody else, that your soul was floating around in the ether and then randomly assigned to a uterus at conception.

This insane metaphysics is far beyond imagining yourself as somebody else.

I think one reason I’m not bitter about the wealthy the way a lot of leftists are is that I bit this bullet very early on. My parents had lots of opportunities to save money. They did not. My parents had lots of opportunities to prefer investment over consumption. They did not. My parents could have stayed together and worked it out instead of cashing out the 401(k) and blowing the money within a year. They did not. My parents could have paid attention to the real estate market and upgraded to a home in a more desirable area that would have appreciated in value. They did not. My parents could have afforded to create a college fund for me. They did not.

There is nothing about my parents’ position in life that was not the result of their own choices. I learned from their mistakes, made very different choices, and surprise surprise I have more money than they did at the same age. It seemed to me as a teenager that the inputs were related quite directly to the outputs. I tested that theory and it’s obviously true.

And that’s great news! We definitely wouldn’t want the world to be some other way! So we’re very lucky that this is how it is.