"The strongest reason to keep up pandemic restrictions is that some people remain vulnerable. Those who are unvaccinated, for example...."

"What do we owe to them?... Even as we heap scorn on the unvaccinated, we make sacrifices on their behalf. The unvaccinated are subject to immense pressure and moral indignation. Governments and private institutions are doing what they can to make their everyday lives difficult. A number of people, including anonymous commentators on Reddit and columnists at the Los Angeles Times, even engage in open schadenfreude when anti-vaxxers die from COVID. This is wrong. We owe every victim of this pandemic compassion... [but it's also wrong that] the unvaccinated are, implicitly, the main justification for ongoing restrictions.... Immunocompromised people and the elderly remain in significant danger through no fault of their own.... That’s tragic. But it is not a sufficient reason to permanently change our society in ways that make it less free, sociable, and joyous. Just as we are willing to take on calculated risks in other areas of life, so we should be willing to tolerate some risk of infectious disease. When you set out to drive across the country, you know that you could get into an accident. You might get hurt, and so might another driver, or even a child crossing the road. But that does not create a moral obligation to stay put for the rest of your life. Because COVID will likely remain endemic for the foreseeable future, delaying a return to normal life until the risk it poses has been completely eliminated simply is not a realistic plan."

From "Open Everything/The time to end pandemic restrictions is now" by Yascha Mounk (The Atlantic).

"But fears of a Biden presidency leading to a woke takeover misunderstand the way public opinion moves in America."

"Because Trump’s ample failings have given the most misguided claims of the far left a superficial veneer of plausibility, Trump himself has been the far left’s biggest ally. And if the Biden administration does overreach on key cultural issues, that will likely set the stage for a course correction—a cascade back to moderation. If you want to combat illiberalism, casting a vote for Donald Trump is the worst possible thing you can do.'

Writes Yascha Mounk in "Trump Is the Best Candidate for the Illiberal Left/If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden" (The Atlantic).

"Over the course of three years, the number of Americans who say that they feel justified in using violence to achieve their political goals has gone up from 8 percent to over 33 percent."

Holy s**t.

Over the course of three years, the number of Americans who say that they feel justified in using violence to achieve their political goals has gone up from 8 percent to over 33 percent. pic.twitter.com/JBg3Y83ASK

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 1, 2020

"Dear Producers at RT, This is what happened the one and only time I will ever appear on your network...."

Dear Producers at RT,

This is what happened the one and only time I will ever appear on your network.

Are you sure you want to keep sending me those invites?

My best,

Yascha Mounkhttps://t.co/RoD6VStqfg

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) July 8, 2019

"Does watching television make people stupid? Are stupid people more likely to vote for populist parties?"

Asks Yascha Mounk in "The More You Watch, the More You Vote Populist/A new study ties consumption of entertainment television in Italy to support for Silvio Berlusconi" (The Atlantic).

In the study, three economists, Ruben Durante, Paolo Pinotti, and Andrea Tesei, were able to provide strong evidence for a shocking set of conclusions: Watching a lot of entertainment TV does seem to have an adverse impact on your intelligence. And it also makes you more likely to vote for populist parties...

Analyzing Berlusconi’s television appearances, Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei found that he consistently “adopted a much simpler communication style than other parties and leaders.” As a result, he performed much better among less educated citizens. Taken together, this suggests that “early exposure to entertainment TV influenced political preferences through an impoverishment of cognitive skills.”

(It would be tempting to think that the causation runs the other way around: Perhaps people with poor cognitive skills are more likely to watch a lot of television? Once again, the authors of the study were able to exclude this possibility by focusing on random geographic variation: Places with earlier access to Mediaset contained a greater proportion of people with poor cognitive skills.)...

Mounk ends with a clever expression of doubt: "Only someone whose brain has been turned into mush by watching too much entertainment television would immediately accept an argument that fits elite ideological priors quite as neatly as this one."

"Sanders’s Speech About Socialism Was Deeply Unserious/In the senator’s view, the threat of autocracy comes exclusively from the right."

Writes Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic:

If Sanders was coy about the details of a “socialist” economy, he was downright disdainful of the notion that a speech on socialism and authoritarianism should seriously grapple with the long history of socialist movements that have ended in dictatorship. In his view, the threat of autocracy comes exclusively from the right. Just as in the 1930s, “America and the world are once again moving towards authoritarianism.” This danger is driven by “right-wing forces of oligarchy, corporatism, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia.” The only answer that will stave off fascism is, you guessed it, “democratic socialism.”

Thus Sanders name-checked Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but remained silent about Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. And while he rightly decried the autocratic tendencies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he neglected to mention leftist autocrats such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, or North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. Indeed, the only connection between socialism and autocracy that Sanders was willing to acknowledge is the one that exists in the feverish imagination of the ignorant right: He decried the “red-baiting” in which Republicans have long engaged.

The implication was obvious. Anybody who was hoping for a clear account of the differences between Sanders’s political ambitions and those of autocratic socialist regimes is a fellow traveler of Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Donald Trump, and the Heritage Foundation....

The speech Sanders gave was not serious.

It's enough (and it's better) to say "not serious." The headline writer came up with "deeply unserious," and you may know I have a thing about the word "deeply" (click the tag). The headline writer must have felt pressure to bump it up to "deeply unserious," which seems snazzy and contemporary and (ironically) less serious. "Deeply" especially annoys when it modifies something that lacks depth — unless humor is intended, but this isn't a subject for humor. We're talking about the oppression and murder of millions. To deploy humor would be... deeply shallow. See what I mean?

The NYT is very gentle with Naomi Wolf — the "prominent author" who was humiliated in an on-air interview.

I'm reading "After an On-Air Correction, Naomi Wolf Addresses Errors in Her New Book" in the NYT. During a BBC interview, Wolf got the humiliating news that the term "death recorded" did not mean what she assumed, that a death penalty was carried out, but the complete opposite, that the judge determined that the person should not be executed.

I see that a spokeswoman for the U.S. publisher of the book — “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love" — is saying there was an "unfortunate error" but "we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds."

How can the publisher say "the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds"? Or, to be precise, they still "believe" it holds? The only way I can make sense of that is to perceive Houghton Mifflin Harcourt not a publisher of works of history, but in the business of ideology and propaganda, where the believing is all that really matters. Of course, the "overall thesis" survives. In ideology and propaganda, your overall thesis is the foundation and you're going to continue to build upon it, no matter how many efforts collapse. Just throw out those bad materials and go get some different materials and rebuild on the same foundation. Could something be wrong with the foundation? The question isn't even comprehensible in the business of propaganda.

Though readers want to rely on the publisher's imprint, the publisher's spokeswoman says — in so many words — don't rely on us. She says it "employs professional editors, copyeditors and proofreaders for each book project," but "we rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking."

But enough about the publisher's mealy mouthpiece. The NYT headline says Naomi Wolf responded. During the interview, Wolf said “Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” But the headline says after the interview. I see that Wolf wouldn't respond to the NYT's request for comment. So what is the Times talking about?

On Twitter, however, she said she is correcting parts of her book as a result of the discussion. And she and Mr. Sweet inadvertently offered a lesson on how to gracefully handle these sorts of situations on social media. Mr. Sweet explained the errors in Ms. Wolf’s book in a lengthy Twitter thread, while Ms. Wolf thanked him for calling her attention to the misunderstanding.

The NYT is being as kind to her as possible, I think. Here's how it describes her:

A prominent author who has written several works of feminist and cultural criticism, Ms. Wolf is known for books such as “The Beauty Myth” and “Vagina: A New Biography.”

She's "prominent." She gets on the talk shows. But why? Were any of the books that made her "prominent" based on good scholarship? Where are the serious scholars — the principled, devoted historians and philosophers — who didn't get on the shows because Naomi Wolf made books that had an attention-getting, stimulating "overall thesis"? It's an unresearched thesis of mine that such people exist. And now, I'm seeing...

A lot of people gleefully trashing Naomi Wolf, and her latest book does seem based on a big misunderstanding.

But, really, Wolf is just the Id of much modern historical scholarship: It too tells just-so stories to bolster the political orthodoxies of a small group of academics. https://t.co/D8yPOfsj7B

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) May 24, 2019

Here's how Wolf presents herself on Twitter:

Dr? What is her doctorate? I looked it up on Wikipedia:

I'm hearing about the "exhausted majority." Is that something different from the old "silent majority"?

A lot of people — including me, here, yesterday — are linking to the Atlantic article, "Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture" by Yascha Mounk.

I usually give the subtitle along with the title, but this article has a distractingly incomprehensible subtitle: "Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either." I mean, I can comprehend it now that I've read the article, but unlike most subtitles, it doesn't help you see what you're going to get by reading it. The use of the word "proxy" is, if not entirely wrong, entirely confusing. The idea is supposed to be that you're wrong if you assume that the older and whiter a person is there more likely they are to think "political correctness" is a problem. It turns out that all groups — except "progressive activists" — say they think "political correctness" is a problem. And the majorities are overwhelming.

The article draws from a new report, "Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” which sorts Americans into various political "tribes." This depiction is a good quick summary:



Look at how many people are collected under the label "exhausted"! Obviously, we're a huge majority, and it's nice to see all the detail within the majority, but why are we all labeled "exhausted"? And why are "traditional liberals" said to be exhausted when "traditional conservatives" are not? The Atlantic article says that the views of the "traditional" and the "devoted" conservatives "are far outside the American mainstream." I guess the "traditional liberals," unlike the "traditional conservatives," don't belong in the "wings," and therefore get grouped with the "majority." But why is that entire diverse group, the majority, deemed "exhausted"?

To go to the underlying report:

In talking to everyday Americans, we have found a large segment of the population whose voices are rarely heard above the shouts of the partisan tribes. These are people who believe that Americans have more in common than that which divides them. While they differ on important issues, they feel exhausted by the division in the United States. They believe that compromise is necessary in politics, as in other parts of life, and want to see the country come together and solve its problems.

Is this group really tired or just hard to hear "above the shouts of the partisan tribes"? I suspect that the authors are using the term "exhausted majority" because they don't want to say "silent majority."

Here's the Wikipedia article for "Silent Majority":