This highly thought-provoking essay by David Brooks asks some pretty tough questions about where we go from here in the wake of a precipitous decline in interpersonal (and institutional) trust.

Can we create a civic renaissance and a legislative revolution? I’m not so sure. If you think we’re going back to the America that used to be—with a single cohesive mainstream culture; with an agile, trusted central government; with a few mainstream media voices that police a coherent national conversation; with an interconnected, respected leadership class; with a set of dominant moral values based on mainline Protestantism or some other single ethic—then you’re not being realistic. I see no scenario in which we return to being the nation we were in 1965, with a cohesive national ethos, a clear national establishment, trusted central institutions, and a pop-culture landscape in which people overwhelmingly watch the same shows and talked about the same things. We’re too beaten up for that. The age of distrust has smashed the converging America and the converging globe—that great dream of the 1990s—and has left us with the reality that our only plausible future is decentralized pluralism.

A model for that can be found in, of all places, Houston, Texas, one of the most diverse cities in America. At least 145 languages are spoken in the metro area. It has no real central downtown district, but, rather, a wide diversity of scattered downtowns and scattered economic and cultural hubs. As you drive across town you feel like you’re successively in Lagos, Hanoi, Mumbai, White Plains, Beverly Hills, Des Moines, and Mexico City. In each of these cultural zones, these islands of trust, there is a sense of vibrant activity and experimentation—and across the whole city there is an atmosphere of openness, and goodwill, and the American tendency to act and organize that Hofstadter discussed in The Age of Reform.

Not every place can or would want to be Houston—its cityscape is ugly, and I’m not a fan of its too-libertarian zoning policies—but in that rambling, scattershot city I see an image of how a hyper-diverse, and more trusting, American future might work.

America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

[This is honestly a pretty scary picture, and makes me give serious consideration to early-voting in person, which I really don’t want to do.]

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

The Election That Could Break America

I’ve been terrible about blogging. I place some of the blame on the WordPress app being broken on my tablet, and some on work getting extremely busy as we gear up for election season, but neither of those is a full excuse. Partly it’s because I’ve got too much stuff stacked up to be blogged, so I’m going to dump a bunch of it in one blog post and start fresh:

If you only read one, make it this one: plastic recycling is largely a scam created for good PR by the oil and plastic companies 🙁

If you only read two, this should probably be the second one: “Lawmakers briefed on U.S. intelligence have been practically begging the Trump administration to make public information about ongoing 2020 election meddling.”

Matt Taibi: the left is now the right.

Reddit: What is the most unique piece of art you’ve ever seen? Some truly amazing stuff in here.

Who can afford to have dyslexia?

How have climate models done over the years as we’ve gathered more real-world data? tl;dr — pretty damn well.

The heartbreak of orphaned implants

NYT: durational art and its relevance during the pandemic

There are plenty of older ones I never posted, but I’ll stop here for this post. Sorry, hope to be a bit better about posting in future (but I’ve said that before) 🙂

I think we need to discuss philosophy and learn different views, not refuse to talk to each other and perpetually believe we’re right. What happens when a field of engineers gets outcast from its ideas because it’s viewed as self-serving, or a religion changes its dogma to click bait? What happens when corporate mothers refuse to allow artists to express their own distinctive values? Scott Alexander is correct: if some features occur in naturally occurring systems all the time, then they are features of all desirable systems. It’s not a coincidence that a religion, an organism, a mob of lion fish, and a stock market all look alike; it’s just that as time goes on they all get more complicated and so they look more dissimilar. There are typically relatively featureless seed entities (an exploit, a convert, a founder) and then elaborations and permutations that go on according to the users who follow the ideas and put them to use. It’s not a coincidence that the big disasters of technology in the past couple centuries have been from relatively simple systems that someone can just launch some malicious exploit at and start getting new permutations to exploit without having to get new ideas first.

GPT-3 Creative Fiction · Gwern.net

Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming. A plurality (46%) of Americans believe that cancel culture “has gone too far.” About a quarter of Americans — many of whom are perhaps blissfully offline — said they didn’t know or had no opinion on the matter. When they are removed from the results, a clear majority — across almost every demographic category — says that cancel culture has gone too far.

Twenty-seven percent of voters said cancel culture had a somewhat positive or very positive impact on society, but almost half (49%) said it had a somewhat negative or very negative impact.

While online shaming may seem like a major preoccupation for the public if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, only 40% of voters say they have participated in cancel culture and only one in 10 say they participate “often.” It appears to be more of a liberal pursuit: Half of Democrats have shared their dislike of a public figure on social media after they did something objectionable, while only a third of Republicans say they have.

Age is one of the most reliable predictors of one’s views. Members of Generation Z are the most sympathetic to punishing people or institutions over offensive views, followed closely by Millennials, while GenXers and Baby Boomers have the strongest antipathy towards it. Cancel culture is driven by younger voters. A majority (55%) of voters 18-34 say they have taken part in cancel culture, while only about a third (32%) of voters over 65 say they have joined a social media pile-on. The age gap may partially explain why Ernest Owens, a millennial journalist, responded to Obama’s criticism with a New York Times op-ed that amounted to a column-length retort of “OK, boomer.”

Americans tune in to ‘cancel culture’ — and don’t like what they see – POLITICO

This is exactly how I’ve always felt about reincarnation. What’s the point? The possible exception would be if there’s a larger self, outside the individual lifetimes, who remembers it all. But that doesn’t seem to be how reincarnation is understood in most traditions.

Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – Reincarnation

By political Calvinism I mean the tendency within the left to see the structural injustices of the world as inherent and immutable, so baked into the cake of the current context, history, the United States of America, etc., that they will always exist. The stain of injustice can never be rubbed out. This is most obvious when discussing racial dynamics. White people are inherently in possession of white privilege, as many will tell you – most insistently white liberals, in my experience. Well, yes, today all white people enjoy white privilege, though the valence of that advantage varies with other factors in their lives. But the degree and intensity and in fact existence of white privilege is mutable; if we had a real racial awakening and all people worked to end white privilege, it would end. And not only do I not think this is a crazy thing to believe, I think believing it is a necessary precondition to being an agent of positive change!

[…]

I’ve never heard a coherent answer to this: if your average uncommitted white American is told that their white privilege is immutable, that they will oppress people of color simply through existing, what is the motivation to try and change? Consider this from the standpoint of basic psychology. If you are told that you are in some sense fallen, simply by nature of your birth, then why exert yourself trying to change that fact? For someone who is not converted, the insistence that they are stained with political sin from birth simply pushes them to remain apolitical, to give up on racial politics and go back to grilling. People need to feel that their efforts have some meaningful possibility of creating positive change. The message should not be “you have white privilege and nothing you do will ever change that” but “you have white privilege but you can meaningfully contribute to ending it.” The latter is a call to action. The former is theatrics.

I believe that white privilege can be erased and that we can achieve true racial equality, that the traditional inequities of race are mutable and in fact chosen. If I didn’t, why would I bother to try?

against political Calvinism – Fredrik deBoer

Jizhou ware ceramics from Jiangxi, China. pic.twitter.com/u3JGesH0Dx

— MachinePix (@MachinePix) July 17, 2020

I’m not sure whether this is doing what it looks like it’s doing, but if so, that’s incredibly cool.

It’s time for more of us to stand up and say: yes, I am a center-left extremist. Yes, I’m an Enlightenment fanatic, a radical for liberal moderation and reason. If liberalism is the vanilla of worldviews, then I aspire to be the most intense vanilla anyone has ever tasted. I’m not a closeted fascist. I’m not a watered-down leftist. I’m something else. I consider myself ferociously anti-racist and anti-sexist and anti-homophobic and pro-downtrodden, but I don’t cede to any ideological faction the right to dictate what those terms mean. The world is too complicated, too full of ironies and surprises, for me to outsource my conscience in that way.

Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » My Enlightenment fanaticism

I recently posted a piece in which Ross Douthat argues that the social justice movement is becoming not a faction of liberalism, but an entirely distinct ideology whose values are not entirely consistent with liberalism in its typical sense. Here he comes at that question from a different angle, looking at past movements with similar values and commitments.

[The political power of the social justice movement], once claimed, could be used the way the old Mainline used its power: not to replace liberal political forms but to infuse them with a specific set of moral commitments and to establish the terms on which important cultural debates are held and settled. Who should have sex with whom, and under what conditions and constraints? Which religious ideas should be favored, and which dismissed with prejudice? What conceptions of the country’s past should be promoted? Which visions of the good life taught in schools? What titles or pronouns should respectable people use? Just as the old denominations once answered these questions for Americans, their post-Protestant heirs aspire to answer them today.

If they succeed where the religious right failed, it will be because post-Protestantism enjoys an intimate relationship with the American establishment rather than representing an insurgency of outsider groups, because centrist failures and Trumpian moral squalor removed rivals from its path, and because its moral message is better suited to what younger Americans already believe.

Opinion | The Religious Roots of a New Progressive Era