Wesley Yang and Adam Mortara on Scotus on Harvard; Daniel Gordis on Israel's apocalypse; Peter Gray on letting children play; Sanjana Friedman and Brandon Gorrell on self-driving cars
"Yes, we needed judicial reform. Almost everyone knows that. But we needed unity more than that. And we could have had both."
"And today, any semblance of unity, or even the possibility of restoring unity, died. More precisely, Israeli society as we knew it was murdered."
Gordis, a man of the Left, is not only semi-hysterical, he fails to explain just how Israel "could have had both" reform and unity. Over time the self-perpetuating Israeli Supreme Court, in a country which lacks a written constitution, has arrogated powers to itself which properly belong to the legislature and executive. The Left, having been eclipsed politically as a result of the Oslo Accords and Gaza withdrawal disasters, and the displacement of Leftist Ashkenazim by more conservative Sephardim and Mizrahim, clings to power through its continued control of the media, the universities, and above all, the judiciary and the legal bar. They never tried to reform the judiciary when they could have. They refused to participate in good faith in reforming it, and are not going to accede to reining it in and confining it to its proper function, the interpretation (where needed) and application of the law, rather than making ex cathedra pronouncement on laws' "reasonableness" without reference to any legally established standards, only unstated Left policy preferences of the day. Even Gordis admits the situation is untenable, he evidently just wishes that a left-controlled legislature could have made cosmetic changes that wouldn't have really upset Left institutional control. He seems to be quite OK with what was the highly undemocratic status quo.
Excellent note about the unchecked power of the leftist Israeli SC - whose leftist decisions are being rejected by voters.
Demographics is destiny. Like the low-birthing pro-abortion folk in the US slowly being overtaken by people born from pro-life parents.
"Israel as we once knew it no longer exists. It may heal, it may not. …" The Israel which was majority atheistic yet tolerating Orthodox Jews, now has become minority atheistic.
They do have "unity" - the Supreme Court needs to be reformed. What they don't have is agreement on what should be done to improve it. How to check the undemocratic power of the Israeli SC? Not sure Gordis' other many clips, not written transcripts, answers that.
If Gordis doesn't want unity enough to support Netanyahu, he doesn't want unity enough; he's devaluing the word "unity". What he should be asking for is more agreement on tolerating disagreement, with majority voting/ democracy to decide what the gov't policy is. What he's really upset about is that a small majority of Israeli voters no longer agree with his favored policies.
Like most "anti-Bad Thing" protesters, many can agree, even unify, that the Bad Thing is bad, and should be changed. But there is usually NO unity on what should be done instead.
The larger problem than affirmative action in university admissions is a multi-billion dollar diversity industry pushing toxic nonsense that feeds into ESG scores and provides, through civil rights lawfare and activist mobbing, an enforcement mechanism for cartelising corporate finance. Yes, the Bakke basis for such lawfare is now closed, but the Griggs v Duke Power “disparate impact” jurisprudence is still operative.
The thing about analyses based on particular SCOTUS decisions is that they don't directly explain why other countries play the same games.
Yes, America is a cultural leader, but is that the whole story? My guess is that these SCOTUS decisions are as much symptom as cause of an ideological sickness in western society.
Other countries do not play the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity game to the same extent, except Canada. The story seems to be that it originates in the US, riffing off civil rights jurisprudence, and then, because it is well-targeted to bureaucratic pathologies and because US academe sets so much of the patterns for academe in the rest of Anglosphere, it spreads out from there.
Also, these ideas are essentially a Christian heresy that plays well into the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
I expect you are right that Canada is worse, but is the Australia or the UK let alone NZ really better the US? Or are we just differently bad? I could argue that the US is the healthiest, because it has the most robust systems for a fightback.
There's a good argument, that this is an Anglosphere pathology. But then Germans, going back to Hitler himself, are worse on the pathological environmentalism. Every culture has it's speciality.
Griggs isn't as broad as people portray it as. The cultural force that our host describes in terms of Brown is a lot more influential. There are all kinds of ways various institutions in different capacities get around Griggs in terms of the law because of the many other decisions that effectively narrow its scope.
The other thing is that institutions are as afraid of getting into discovery (think about how damaging discovery was to Harvard's reputation in SFFA; but for many institutions the $$ cost is as significant) as they are of a trial. Even when the law is on an institution's side, a plausible claim can be enough for an institution to respond to a civil rights plaintiff's crack of the whip.
Corporations actually like the Griggs "disparate impact" standard; it means that if they observe hiring quotas, they will be free of endless specious litigation under civil rights laws. It is cheaper to hire redundant employees whose duties in some cases have to actually be carried out by other employees than to be embroiled in the courts and media. It is their defense against the gigantic racial grift that characterizes our country.
Sure, the bureaucratic and established ones do. During their growth phases, Microsoft, Google, and similar firms made hay about using IQ proxies in hiring. Then, Jesse Jackson came to town in the early 2010s (for Google at least) and intimidated them into changing their policies. Under the Griggs test as it has been applied in numerous other cases, firms like Google could demonstrate that the tests were "reasonably related" to the work involved, just as other institutions have done in a variety of professions like policing as the Court did in 1976 in Washington v. Davis, which cited Griggs.
The typical online argument is just that Griggs bans IQ tests in hiring which is not true. The actual test is that the hiring exam must be "predictive of or significantly correlated with important elements of work behavior which comprise or are relevant to the job or jobs for which candidates are being evaluated." But do YOU want a judge and jury in California to make that call given the sheer quantity of sophistry and bad press that a plaintiff can bring in today's age of shamelessness? Naturally, corporate America has decided to offshore when possible and to submit to Big Xother domestically.
Re: "the cultural tide has turned against the progressives on [affirmative action]."
An alternative scenario:
a) Disparate impact of neutral rankings will motivate elites to contrive ambiguous workarounds.
b) Admissions and HR will contrive ways to avoid damning paper trails and to prevent "discovery."
c) To the extent that affirmative action is partially thwarted, reparations will gain traction as a partial substitute.
MLK's colorblind ideal was fleeting — not an equilibrium. (Even MLK soon came to advocate affirmative action, after 1964, if I understand correctly.). The U.S. went straight from segregation to affirmative action.
Standardized metrics of many kinds for ranking candidates for admission, employment, and promotion have been eroded or abandoned.
The pandemic lockdowns struck a broad blow against standardized tests (SAT/ACT) in admissions to selective colleges.
I usually concur with Arnold's judgment and predictions. In this case, my intuition is, I'll believe when I see it.
I wish the opinion in SFA vs Harvard the best of luck. Obviously I support it. And I don't wish to be a downer, personally I take a noncommittal view towards its result. I don't feel like I can guess the outcome. I think we can just wait and see rather than guessing.
Manifold has a betting market on what % of Harvard's 2028 class will be black. I think it's way too thin a market to be a meaningful signal, but that will be a good measure in 2028 to see if this ruling matters. Currently bettors don't think it will make a difference.
Affirmative Action has been illegal in CA since the 1990s, but it's still practiced in CA in both public and private institutions with growing impact. James Damore got fired for questioning AA on a gender basis.
I think people overestimate public opinion against Affirmative Action. When you phrase it as "keep race out of decision making" it gets a lot of support. But when you ask blacks if they should get free stuff for being black, they support it. Hispanics support free stuff for Hispanics. Asians support free stuff for Asians. I don't think we should oversell what polling on AA means when its described generically.
What a lot of people can't understand is that Blacks and Hispanics really do think "using race" means "discriminating against them". Some of them know the score but not all. They think the white man is keeping them down and that's why they don't succeed. When you try to come for their specific gibs, they fight for them.
My default assumption is that as the USA becomes less white it will get more affirmative action because each group will want to maximize its share and it will construe anything less then X% of thing must match X% of our population as racism.
About autonomous vehicles: I think it probably has to do with liability in case of an accident. And in particular accidents involving injury or death. Our sense of fairness says that if person X runs over someone and then comes out of the car visibly drunk, such person will face criminal charges because that's fair.
If an AV runs over someone and then the one and only passenger comes out of the car visibly drunk... what happens? No charges? Would most people be ok with that?
What if after a fatal accident we learn that the owner of the AV didn't update the car's software? Is the manufacturer just trying to avoid blame? Was really the lack of that update the cause of the accident? Will the family of the deceased blame the owner of the AV or the manufacturer?
These numbers about AVs sound good in the abstract but the authors don't provide numbers about human drivers for a comparison. Accidents are also quite uncommon even for bad human drivers.
I haven't looked at the details myself but a friend who is somewhat skeptical of AVs says that these cars have had more accidents than an average human driver would in the restricted areas of SF where these cars are allowed to operate.
I would love these cars to work out and I probably have the opposite bias as my friend, but that article is not convincing.
I think of it as "All AVs" vs "A few AVs plus mostly humans". The reality of today is the second, not the first, but it is the first that is probably safer overall. Getting the former is going to be quite the trick, in my opinion.
If your friend is correct (and I am guessing he is), it is because the AVs don't yet understand fully how human drivers might behave, and human drivers don't understand how AVs behave- you mix the two and end up with more accidents for AVs than you would for a normal human driver. I am reminded of this fact every day at a local 4-way intersection where there are three stop signs, not two or four. You have to account for the fact that some of the drivers might not be aware that one of the oncoming cars isn't legally required to stop.https://foursquare.com/v/malfunction-junction/4c758bc43adda143f3a707af?tipsQuery=
While reading Gray's essay I was captured by his remarks about the beneficial long-term effects of play and independent activity on mental well-being. Particularly, "...people of all ages who have a strong internal locus of control...that is, a strong sense of being able to solve their own problems and take charge of their own lives, are much less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression..." And thus contributing to younger generations' perceptions that they lack agency, victimhood, society is oppressive, etc.
"... but the cultural tide has turned against the progressives on this one."
I thought the tide turned when California voters said no. Kind of like when Kansas voters said no to severe abortion restrictions. Not that it much matters. Both groups will continue, probably double down.
> Brown reflected the deeper mood of the country, which was that it was time for racial segregation to end
Revealed preferences in home buying say that the demand for segregation is strong. Parents who buy homes in 'good school districts' might feel happier if the schools there were both 'good' and racially/ethnically balanced, but when the choice is between racial/ethnic balance and taking their kids out of dangerous and disruptive environments full of bad role models, they overwhelmingly choose the latter even though it is much more expensive than the former. And it is likely that many parents paying through the nose for effective segregation today are children of deep mood havers who expressed themselves in the Brown decision.
I'm happy about the "death of AA" in elite admissions, but don't yet believe it's going to be operational in practice to the extent Mortara is hoping for. It will take a few years to see. Too bad the second part of the interview transcript is pay-walled.
This AA death, like overturning the Roe decision, was based on increasing numbers of conservative / anti-Democrat voters, partly because of Dem demographic decline. Pro-life folk have more kids than pro-abortion women.
Gordis in Israel laments the same dynamic - the "culture of death" Democrats / Leftists will lose out in a real democracy and pro-life folk, usually also pro-religion, have more kids. Gordis is terribly weak on explaining what the actual policy differences are between the new law and the prior, unwritten but decided by the Israeli SC (?), policies on judicial power.
Kids certainly need more time without adult rules to play, including arguing about what rules they play under.
The SFFA decision won't be enough- it will take losing a few hundred million dollar court cases to get their minds right in the universities. Doesn't the SFFA case now go back to the lower courts for an actual civil trial?
I've been stuck in traffic this year because an autonomous vehicle stopped in the middle of an intersection. And I heard recent report of emergency responders complaining that an AV halted near the site of an emergency blocking a lane and hindering emergency response.
AVs can have of record of no accidents and still be a safety problem.
In Lasch's Culture of Narcissism there is an extended discussion/critique very much in a Marxian vein of the commodification and commercialization of sports and the decline of play with regard to youth sports. At first I found it kind of strange interlude within the entire book. But after reading Elephant in the Brain on the evolutionary origins of laughter as a spontaneous utterance as a signal for play mode it made a lot more sense, especially as it dovetails with the Goodhart's Law critique of education credentials as a pathway to elite status and the present trends with regard to educational attainment and the ratcheting away of "frivolous" portions of youth as documented by people like Haidt and Twenge.
A commonplace cultural trope used to be the "last picked for a side at recess" business. That whole thing kind of speaks to how all kids used to play sports, in a sense, sometimes at the behest of a teacher but often on their own initiative. Now youth sports so quickly "spots talent" and silos kids that I think it is less a universal experience of childhood. And that's maybe a little bit of a shame. Even if you are not that good at sports, sports can be fun; it makes later watching of sports more interesting and understandable; and it can be instructive to do something whether you are good at it or not.
I say this as someone who thinks the country is far too sports-mad, but in a stupid, indeed grotesque way.
The Left in Israel is losing the grip on its last bastion of power in the government. The Right in the US isn't quite in the same situation but might be in two years time if the Democrats win the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2024, at which point they are sure to pack the Supreme Court with at least 3 new justices.
I have no idea but it is curious to see that the American notion of "checks and balances" however distorted by the inexorable rise and typically pernicious influence of SCOTUS - a notion which in our civics is presented as fundamental to democracy - evidently forms no part of Israeli democracy. Democracy: a rather amorphous concept.
Gordis wrote:
"Yes, we needed judicial reform. Almost everyone knows that. But we needed unity more than that. And we could have had both."
"And today, any semblance of unity, or even the possibility of restoring unity, died. More precisely, Israeli society as we knew it was murdered."
Gordis, a man of the Left, is not only semi-hysterical, he fails to explain just how Israel "could have had both" reform and unity. Over time the self-perpetuating Israeli Supreme Court, in a country which lacks a written constitution, has arrogated powers to itself which properly belong to the legislature and executive. The Left, having been eclipsed politically as a result of the Oslo Accords and Gaza withdrawal disasters, and the displacement of Leftist Ashkenazim by more conservative Sephardim and Mizrahim, clings to power through its continued control of the media, the universities, and above all, the judiciary and the legal bar. They never tried to reform the judiciary when they could have. They refused to participate in good faith in reforming it, and are not going to accede to reining it in and confining it to its proper function, the interpretation (where needed) and application of the law, rather than making ex cathedra pronouncement on laws' "reasonableness" without reference to any legally established standards, only unstated Left policy preferences of the day. Even Gordis admits the situation is untenable, he evidently just wishes that a left-controlled legislature could have made cosmetic changes that wouldn't have really upset Left institutional control. He seems to be quite OK with what was the highly undemocratic status quo.
Excellent note about the unchecked power of the leftist Israeli SC - whose leftist decisions are being rejected by voters.
Demographics is destiny. Like the low-birthing pro-abortion folk in the US slowly being overtaken by people born from pro-life parents.
"Israel as we once knew it no longer exists. It may heal, it may not. …" The Israel which was majority atheistic yet tolerating Orthodox Jews, now has become minority atheistic.
They do have "unity" - the Supreme Court needs to be reformed. What they don't have is agreement on what should be done to improve it. How to check the undemocratic power of the Israeli SC? Not sure Gordis' other many clips, not written transcripts, answers that.
If Gordis doesn't want unity enough to support Netanyahu, he doesn't want unity enough; he's devaluing the word "unity". What he should be asking for is more agreement on tolerating disagreement, with majority voting/ democracy to decide what the gov't policy is. What he's really upset about is that a small majority of Israeli voters no longer agree with his favored policies.
Like most "anti-Bad Thing" protesters, many can agree, even unify, that the Bad Thing is bad, and should be changed. But there is usually NO unity on what should be done instead.
The larger problem than affirmative action in university admissions is a multi-billion dollar diversity industry pushing toxic nonsense that feeds into ESG scores and provides, through civil rights lawfare and activist mobbing, an enforcement mechanism for cartelising corporate finance. Yes, the Bakke basis for such lawfare is now closed, but the Griggs v Duke Power “disparate impact” jurisprudence is still operative.
Excellent point - it is the grift infrastructure that drives the ideological warfare that drags along the naive.
The thing about analyses based on particular SCOTUS decisions is that they don't directly explain why other countries play the same games.
Yes, America is a cultural leader, but is that the whole story? My guess is that these SCOTUS decisions are as much symptom as cause of an ideological sickness in western society.
Other countries do not play the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity game to the same extent, except Canada. The story seems to be that it originates in the US, riffing off civil rights jurisprudence, and then, because it is well-targeted to bureaucratic pathologies and because US academe sets so much of the patterns for academe in the rest of Anglosphere, it spreads out from there.
Also, these ideas are essentially a Christian heresy that plays well into the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.
I expect you are right that Canada is worse, but is the Australia or the UK let alone NZ really better the US? Or are we just differently bad? I could argue that the US is the healthiest, because it has the most robust systems for a fightback.
There's a good argument, that this is an Anglosphere pathology. But then Germans, going back to Hitler himself, are worse on the pathological environmentalism. Every culture has it's speciality.
Griggs isn't as broad as people portray it as. The cultural force that our host describes in terms of Brown is a lot more influential. There are all kinds of ways various institutions in different capacities get around Griggs in terms of the law because of the many other decisions that effectively narrow its scope.
The other thing is that institutions are as afraid of getting into discovery (think about how damaging discovery was to Harvard's reputation in SFFA; but for many institutions the $$ cost is as significant) as they are of a trial. Even when the law is on an institution's side, a plausible claim can be enough for an institution to respond to a civil rights plaintiff's crack of the whip.
Corporations actually like the Griggs "disparate impact" standard; it means that if they observe hiring quotas, they will be free of endless specious litigation under civil rights laws. It is cheaper to hire redundant employees whose duties in some cases have to actually be carried out by other employees than to be embroiled in the courts and media. It is their defense against the gigantic racial grift that characterizes our country.
Sure, the bureaucratic and established ones do. During their growth phases, Microsoft, Google, and similar firms made hay about using IQ proxies in hiring. Then, Jesse Jackson came to town in the early 2010s (for Google at least) and intimidated them into changing their policies. Under the Griggs test as it has been applied in numerous other cases, firms like Google could demonstrate that the tests were "reasonably related" to the work involved, just as other institutions have done in a variety of professions like policing as the Court did in 1976 in Washington v. Davis, which cited Griggs.
The typical online argument is just that Griggs bans IQ tests in hiring which is not true. The actual test is that the hiring exam must be "predictive of or significantly correlated with important elements of work behavior which comprise or are relevant to the job or jobs for which candidates are being evaluated." But do YOU want a judge and jury in California to make that call given the sheer quantity of sophistry and bad press that a plaintiff can bring in today's age of shamelessness? Naturally, corporate America has decided to offshore when possible and to submit to Big Xother domestically.
Re: "the cultural tide has turned against the progressives on [affirmative action]."
An alternative scenario:
a) Disparate impact of neutral rankings will motivate elites to contrive ambiguous workarounds.
b) Admissions and HR will contrive ways to avoid damning paper trails and to prevent "discovery."
c) To the extent that affirmative action is partially thwarted, reparations will gain traction as a partial substitute.
MLK's colorblind ideal was fleeting — not an equilibrium. (Even MLK soon came to advocate affirmative action, after 1964, if I understand correctly.). The U.S. went straight from segregation to affirmative action.
Standardized metrics of many kinds for ranking candidates for admission, employment, and promotion have been eroded or abandoned.
The pandemic lockdowns struck a broad blow against standardized tests (SAT/ACT) in admissions to selective colleges.
I usually concur with Arnold's judgment and predictions. In this case, my intuition is, I'll believe when I see it.
I wish the opinion in SFA vs Harvard the best of luck. Obviously I support it. And I don't wish to be a downer, personally I take a noncommittal view towards its result. I don't feel like I can guess the outcome. I think we can just wait and see rather than guessing.
https://manifold.markets/inevitable/what-fraction-of-the-harvard-class
Manifold has a betting market on what % of Harvard's 2028 class will be black. I think it's way too thin a market to be a meaningful signal, but that will be a good measure in 2028 to see if this ruling matters. Currently bettors don't think it will make a difference.
Affirmative Action has been illegal in CA since the 1990s, but it's still practiced in CA in both public and private institutions with growing impact. James Damore got fired for questioning AA on a gender basis.
I think people overestimate public opinion against Affirmative Action. When you phrase it as "keep race out of decision making" it gets a lot of support. But when you ask blacks if they should get free stuff for being black, they support it. Hispanics support free stuff for Hispanics. Asians support free stuff for Asians. I don't think we should oversell what polling on AA means when its described generically.
What a lot of people can't understand is that Blacks and Hispanics really do think "using race" means "discriminating against them". Some of them know the score but not all. They think the white man is keeping them down and that's why they don't succeed. When you try to come for their specific gibs, they fight for them.
My default assumption is that as the USA becomes less white it will get more affirmative action because each group will want to maximize its share and it will construe anything less then X% of thing must match X% of our population as racism.
Would that they would stop at the proportional X%!
About autonomous vehicles: I think it probably has to do with liability in case of an accident. And in particular accidents involving injury or death. Our sense of fairness says that if person X runs over someone and then comes out of the car visibly drunk, such person will face criminal charges because that's fair.
If an AV runs over someone and then the one and only passenger comes out of the car visibly drunk... what happens? No charges? Would most people be ok with that?
What if after a fatal accident we learn that the owner of the AV didn't update the car's software? Is the manufacturer just trying to avoid blame? Was really the lack of that update the cause of the accident? Will the family of the deceased blame the owner of the AV or the manufacturer?
These numbers about AVs sound good in the abstract but the authors don't provide numbers about human drivers for a comparison. Accidents are also quite uncommon even for bad human drivers.
I haven't looked at the details myself but a friend who is somewhat skeptical of AVs says that these cars have had more accidents than an average human driver would in the restricted areas of SF where these cars are allowed to operate.
I would love these cars to work out and I probably have the opposite bias as my friend, but that article is not convincing.
I think of it as "All AVs" vs "A few AVs plus mostly humans". The reality of today is the second, not the first, but it is the first that is probably safer overall. Getting the former is going to be quite the trick, in my opinion.
If your friend is correct (and I am guessing he is), it is because the AVs don't yet understand fully how human drivers might behave, and human drivers don't understand how AVs behave- you mix the two and end up with more accidents for AVs than you would for a normal human driver. I am reminded of this fact every day at a local 4-way intersection where there are three stop signs, not two or four. You have to account for the fact that some of the drivers might not be aware that one of the oncoming cars isn't legally required to stop.https://foursquare.com/v/malfunction-junction/4c758bc43adda143f3a707af?tipsQuery=
While reading Gray's essay I was captured by his remarks about the beneficial long-term effects of play and independent activity on mental well-being. Particularly, "...people of all ages who have a strong internal locus of control...that is, a strong sense of being able to solve their own problems and take charge of their own lives, are much less likely to suffer from anxiety and depression..." And thus contributing to younger generations' perceptions that they lack agency, victimhood, society is oppressive, etc.
"... but the cultural tide has turned against the progressives on this one."
I thought the tide turned when California voters said no. Kind of like when Kansas voters said no to severe abortion restrictions. Not that it much matters. Both groups will continue, probably double down.
> Brown reflected the deeper mood of the country, which was that it was time for racial segregation to end
Revealed preferences in home buying say that the demand for segregation is strong. Parents who buy homes in 'good school districts' might feel happier if the schools there were both 'good' and racially/ethnically balanced, but when the choice is between racial/ethnic balance and taking their kids out of dangerous and disruptive environments full of bad role models, they overwhelmingly choose the latter even though it is much more expensive than the former. And it is likely that many parents paying through the nose for effective segregation today are children of deep mood havers who expressed themselves in the Brown decision.
I'm happy about the "death of AA" in elite admissions, but don't yet believe it's going to be operational in practice to the extent Mortara is hoping for. It will take a few years to see. Too bad the second part of the interview transcript is pay-walled.
This AA death, like overturning the Roe decision, was based on increasing numbers of conservative / anti-Democrat voters, partly because of Dem demographic decline. Pro-life folk have more kids than pro-abortion women.
Gordis in Israel laments the same dynamic - the "culture of death" Democrats / Leftists will lose out in a real democracy and pro-life folk, usually also pro-religion, have more kids. Gordis is terribly weak on explaining what the actual policy differences are between the new law and the prior, unwritten but decided by the Israeli SC (?), policies on judicial power.
Kids certainly need more time without adult rules to play, including arguing about what rules they play under.
translated Gordis : judicial reform was needed but it is/was more important not to upset the powerful people objecting to reform
because very well funded and state pensioned adults with the emotional maturity of 12 year old girls throwing a public tantrum is THE END
The SFFA decision won't be enough- it will take losing a few hundred million dollar court cases to get their minds right in the universities. Doesn't the SFFA case now go back to the lower courts for an actual civil trial?
I've been stuck in traffic this year because an autonomous vehicle stopped in the middle of an intersection. And I heard recent report of emergency responders complaining that an AV halted near the site of an emergency blocking a lane and hindering emergency response.
AVs can have of record of no accidents and still be a safety problem.
On Play.
In Lasch's Culture of Narcissism there is an extended discussion/critique very much in a Marxian vein of the commodification and commercialization of sports and the decline of play with regard to youth sports. At first I found it kind of strange interlude within the entire book. But after reading Elephant in the Brain on the evolutionary origins of laughter as a spontaneous utterance as a signal for play mode it made a lot more sense, especially as it dovetails with the Goodhart's Law critique of education credentials as a pathway to elite status and the present trends with regard to educational attainment and the ratcheting away of "frivolous" portions of youth as documented by people like Haidt and Twenge.
A commonplace cultural trope used to be the "last picked for a side at recess" business. That whole thing kind of speaks to how all kids used to play sports, in a sense, sometimes at the behest of a teacher but often on their own initiative. Now youth sports so quickly "spots talent" and silos kids that I think it is less a universal experience of childhood. And that's maybe a little bit of a shame. Even if you are not that good at sports, sports can be fun; it makes later watching of sports more interesting and understandable; and it can be instructive to do something whether you are good at it or not.
I say this as someone who thinks the country is far too sports-mad, but in a stupid, indeed grotesque way.
I feel like I've asked this before, but what is being proposed that is so terrible in Israel?
The Left in Israel is losing the grip on its last bastion of power in the government. The Right in the US isn't quite in the same situation but might be in two years time if the Democrats win the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2024, at which point they are sure to pack the Supreme Court with at least 3 new justices.
I have no idea but it is curious to see that the American notion of "checks and balances" however distorted by the inexorable rise and typically pernicious influence of SCOTUS - a notion which in our civics is presented as fundamental to democracy - evidently forms no part of Israeli democracy. Democracy: a rather amorphous concept.