The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues, lawmaking is dominated by the question of which party controls which chambers and by how slim their majorities are. Under these circumstances, polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock, and when solutions pass, they pass on a near party line.

Highly salient successes tend to be the most famous legislative achievements of a president’s term (the ACA for Obama, the TCJA for Trump, the ARP for Biden).

Highly salient failures tend to be what people point to when they call Congress gridlocked: the 2013 Manchin-Toomey background checks bill, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the American Health Care Act, the Dream Act, etc.

But while these highly salient issues are the subject of heated debate in Regular Congress, Secret Congress keeps plugging away in obscurity.

The key is that public attention creates incredibly perverse incentives. Members of the minority (rightly) think that any popular, well-known bill that passes on a bipartisan basis is going to help the standing of the president. David Mayhew’s book “Divided We Govern” studies the 1946-2002 period and finds that periods in which the president and Congress are on opposite sides generate just as much legislation as periods of unified government. Another classic Mayhew book, “Congress: The Electoral Connection,” is about how members of Congress like to win elections. Getting bills passed helps members win re-election by giving them things to take credit for. But in an era where congressional voting is so highly correlated with presidential approval, and primary electorates say they’d rather have members that fight the other party than help their own state, it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret

After a lengthy experiment with tantalizing implications for origin-of-life studies, a research group in Japan has reported creating a test tube world of molecules that spontaneously evolved both complexity and, surprisingly, cooperation. Over hundreds of hours of replication, a single type of RNA evolved into five different molecular “species” or lineages of hosts and parasites that coexisted in harmony and cooperated to survive, like the beginning of a “molecular version of an ecosystem,” said Ryo Mizuuchi, the lead author of the study and a project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo.

Their experiment, which confirmed previous theoretical findings, showed that molecules with the means to replicate could spontaneously develop complexity through Darwinian evolution, “a critical step for the emergence of life,” the researchers wrote.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-test-tubes-rna-molecules-evolve-into-a-tiny-ecosystem-20220505/

Hiroo Onoda (Japanese: 小野田 寛郎, Hepburn: Onoda Hiroo, 19 March 1922 – 16 January 2014) was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who fought in World War II and was a Japanese holdout who did not surrender at the war’s end in August 1945. After the war ended Onoda spent 29 years hiding in the Philippines until his former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Shōwa in 1974.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda

I would much prefer for the author to be wrong. But they present some evidence that seems fairly solid on first read, and I think I would have to see some counterevidence to disbelieve them.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-primitive-communism-is-as-seductive-as-it-is-wrong

The First Amendment hasn’t kept public officials from calling upon Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other tech platforms to restrict false or misleading claims about vaccination and other COVID-related issues. The White House has urged tech companies to censor individuals engaged in protected speech. Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced legislation in hopes of pressuring social-media companies to do more “to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.” And the government can apply pressure on private speech in other ways: The Department of Homeland Security, for example, is characterizing misinformation as a terrorism threat. All of these efforts reflect a judgment that, at least on pandemic matters, the liberal approach to dissent has greater costs than benefits.

But that judgment is mistaken. During past crises, even wars, the case for liberal speech norms remained so strong that Americans look back on departures from them with regret. Likewise, I can think of at least four reasons why neither government officials nor corporate bosses should try to protect the public by newly restricting the expression of ideas, even during a pandemic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/tolerating-covid-misinformation-better-alternative/626564/

I keep trying to get a chance to reread this before posting it, but I don’t know when that’s going to happen. As usual Haidt is a strong and distinctive writer and thinker.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

An interesting conversation between two extremely smart economists with very, very different points of view.

Piketty:

We are very far, to say the least, from equality of opportunity. This is the least you can say, which is interesting because equality of opportunity is a theoretical concept that people very often say they are in favor of. But if you try to move in a concrete manner to have more equality of opportunity, for instance, by distributing inheritance, people get completely crazy and say, “Oh, how could you do that?”

I’m making a proposal about this in my recent book, saying, okay, maybe everybody at age 25 should receive a minimum inheritance. Let’s say it could be 60 percent of average wealth. In France today, that would be €120,000 if the average wealth is €200,000 euros per adult, so everybody, say, would receive €120,000 euros at age 25. People who today receive zero would receive €120,000 at age 25. People who today receive €1 million will still receive €600,000 after the progressive taxation of inheritance and wealth that’s paying for that, so we would still be very, very far from equality of opportunity.

If you want my opinion, I think we could and we should go beyond that. But just doing that would increase the share of the bottom 50 percent children in total inheritance, which today is between 2 percent in the US and 4 percent in France. It would be 20 percent to 25 percent, which is still much less than 50 percent because after all, they are the poorest 50 percent children. But I think it will make a big difference in terms of real opportunity to start a business. But also, more generally, wealth has a big impact on your bargaining power in life.

When you don’t own anything, when you just own zero or when you only have debt, you have to accept everything. You have to accept any working condition, any wage, any job because you need to pay your bills. You need to pay your rent. If you have a family, you need to do something, so you have to accept this. For people with millions or billions, maybe 100 is like zero. They don’t make the difference. But for people who are at zero, having 100, 200 puts you in a position in terms of bargaining power vis-à-vis the rest of society. It is very different.

I think it’s very complementary to control capital and human capital because €100,000, €200,000 — okay, that’s not going to make you buy an apartment in Paris. That’s not enough. But there are many other cities which, for many people, are more enjoyable, where you can actually buy an apartment or house. You can start a business. It makes a real difference for the bottom 50 percent people.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/thomas-piketty/

This is one of the most cogent critiques (from the left) of liberalism (in the sense of basing society on Enlightenment values like pluralist tolerance, the primacy of the individual, etc) that I’ve read. The author genuinely addresses a non-strawman version of liberalism, unlike a lot of the critique from the left which just dismisses it as (in Bright’s words) ‘a loser thing boring normies do‘).

Bright also links at the end to some response pieces, of which I found this one especially good.

When it comes to partisan fact-checking about complex issues—which describes much of the fact-checking that takes place in the context of political news—the truth as stated is often the subjective opinion of people with shared political views.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-psychology-of-fact-checking1/

https://warrenellis.ltd/jot/found-via-8ball-newsletter-i-think/