Links to Consider, 10/21
Greg Lukianoff on speech suppression; Alexander Kruel on hate speech; Emil Kirkegaard on Palestinians; Noah Smith on China, Taiwan, and the U.S.; Glenn Reynolds on civil service
Cancel Culture affects you even if you don’t believe you’ll ever be canceled or threatened with cancellation. Its most profound harm for society as a whole — besides, perhaps, how it undermines interpersonal trust and is often simply merciless and cruel — is that it undermines trust in experts.
When even a single thinker is punished for their academic opinion or for engaging in thought experimentation, it leads the public to be justifiably skeptical that any expert on that topic is being fully honest.
I want to know what people think, especially if I hate it, and even more so if their beliefs might threaten my well-being.
Many average people live in filter bubbles that shield them from the barbaric realities metastasizing at the very foundations of their societies. This is why I prefer people to publicly and widely proclaim their beliefs in order to burst as many filter bubbles as possible.
If there are Nazis, I'd rather have them wearing swastika armbands so I can easily identify them and gauge their popularity than be surprised when some social tipping point is reached and they suddenly and unexpectedly rise to power.
Banning pro-Hamas rallies only allows politicians and intellectuals to maintain the illusion that multiculturalism and diversity are positive until it is too late.
The point is that free speech encourages self-outing, which you should want. Speaking of self-outing:
how good immigrants are the Palestinians? Denmark decided to try it out in 1992 by giving 321 rejected Palestinian asylum seekers extraordinary residence permits, granted directly by parliament by a special law (Danish Wikipedia Palæstinenserloven). These people have been followed since then to see how this experiment went. Here's the data for the 2019 follow-up written about here:
Of the 321 who were given asylum 270 are still residing in Denmark, meaning the rest either left or are dead.
Of the 321, 204 (64%) have received a serious fine or jail time for crime, with 71 of them being given jail time. (Definition is fine of 1500+ DKK, traffic law excluded.)
A very large proportion of them are receiving some kind of welfare
I am very skeptical that this constitutes a representative sample, or that some of the other data he gives later in the post is representative.
Making part of your supply China-proof doesn’t just mean that you buy some products from companies that aren’t located in China. It means that those suppliers also buy some products from companies that aren’t located in China, etc. etc., all up the supply chain, all the way to the raw materials. It means that there’s an entirely intact supply chain for your intermediate goods that never touches China — or which touches China only in unimportant ways that can be easily and quickly replaced in a war situation.
He points out a number of disadvantages that the United States would have if China were to attack Taiwan.
under the spoils system, the fact that the president could replace anyone mean that everyone worked for him. And that meant both that everyone was responsible to the president, and that the president was responsible for everyone in the government, and everything the government did. This is consistent with the Constitution’s vesting clause, which provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” If the executive branch does it, it’s an executive power, and if it’s an executive power it should be controlled by the president.
Contrast this to a “professional” civil service, in which the president does neither the hiring nor the firing, except with regard to a comparatively small number of senior officials.
My first job out of graduate school was at the Fed, and I would describe that agency as a suck-up culture. You could not question the conventional wisdom or show any sign of independent thinking without derailing your career. It would not surprise me if most agencies evolve to be suck-up cultures.
If you abolish civil service protections, I could imagine a President staffing the government without regard to competence or experience. Instead, he might hire on the basis of ideology or mere personal loyalty. But he would be accountable for the results.
substacks referenced above:
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The problem with Alexander Kruel’s idea is that the Nazis (as an example) aren’t just self-identifying, they are recruiting. If they are allowed to speak openly without public shaming and shunning, their numbers will grow. I think it’s necessary for very bad ideas to be socially disallowed, especially among young people who look around them to calibrate their growing minds on what is normal and acceptable.
(Yes, I know my conservative axis is showing.)
Your reaction to Reynolds illustrates exactly why Lukianoff has it backwards. Trust in "experts" (that is, the credentialed class) is a bad idea that *should* be undermined. From Covid to environmental and war policy, our present system, both public and private, is chock full of "experts" whose advice is leading us to ruin.