Links to Consider, 9/25

Rory Stewart on Success in Politics; Rob Henderson on the sexual revolution's effects on children; Matt Continetti on the New Right; John Bailey on self-driving cars

In a podcast with Yascha Mounk, Rory Stewart says,

The combination of party media and campaigning means that the system selects for somebody who is going to very naturally produce very binary options in very clear colors, who doesn't admit any form of complexity, doubt, or humility; who's perpetually confident in their vision of the world. … when they sit around the cabinet table, they have to demonstrate critical thinking, and critical thinking is the opposite of all those things. Suddenly, they have to think about complexity, they have to be humble, they have to be open to other people's ideas, they have to be able to change their minds. They have to be interested in nuance and detail. None of those things are the things which enable a Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to flourish in the first place.

Rob Henderson writes,

Another study found that while only 4% of daughters growing up with their biological father had been abused by him, 17% of  daughters growing up with a stepfather had been abused by him. Moreover, the types of abuse committed by stepfathers were more serious and more violent.

Between 1950 and 1995, the suicide rate among adolescents aged fifteen to nineteen more than quadrupled.

If the U.S. had the same level of family stability today as 1960, the country would have 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, 600,000 fewer kids receiving therapy, 70,000 fewer suicide attempts every year.

He attended the debate on whether the sexual revolution failed, and he concludes,

We sacrificed the happiness of children for the freedom of adults. And because every adult starts out as a child and carries their experiences with them, we get to live with the consequences.

He provides respectful remarks about the debate. In contrast, the mainstream media ignored it, or worse (LA Times, New York Magazine), gave the job of writing about it to snarky, bitchy columnists who mostly composed their stories prior to attending.

In the UK, Ben Sixsmith writes,

What the media has not reported is the extent to which these demonstrations are both reflecting and fostering communitarian divides. Zoom in on the signs that have been stuck to the shutters of Peckham Cosmetics and you can find messages like “PARASITIC MERCHANTS OUT OF OUR COMMUNITY” and “RACIST ASIANS GO TO HELL PATEL”. The same journalists who are always very sensitive to, say, the blowback on peaceful Muslims after terrorist events don’t think that this is worth a mention.

Pointer from Ed West. He comments,

racial narcissism is a bottomless well, and if we don’t stigmatise it in all groups - because we’re worried that people will suspect our intentions - a minority of people will become unbearable to live around.

Matt Continetti writes,

The first thing to say about the New Right is that it can get weird. Its ranks are composed almost entirely of men. They inhabit a social-media cocoon where they talk a lot about manhood, and strength, and manliness, and push-ups, and masculinity, and virility, and weight-lifting, and testosterone. “Wrestling should be mandated in middle schools,” write Arthur Milikh and Scott Yenor in the collection Up from Conservatism. “Students could learn to build and shoot guns as part of a normal course of action in schools and learn how to grow crops and prepare them for meals. Every male student could learn to skin an animal and every female to milk a cow.”

The second aspect of the New Right that deserves attention is its flirtation with anti-Semitism and racial bigotry.

We discussed this more on a Zoom event last week. I’ll let you know the link to the recording when it goes up.

John Bailey looks at studies of the safety record of self-driving cars.

More than 28 percent of conventional car crashes were front-end compared to just 7 percent of AV’s crashes. Rear-end crashes are more prevalent with AVs, but the researchers noted that they are mostly the result of a conventional car running into the back of an AV and that “the AV is rarely at fault.”

I insist that if the human-driven car were only invented after today’s state-of-the-art self-driving car, it would be the human-driven car that is banned.

substacks referenced above:

@

Sunday West 41

@

The Paradox of Liberation

@

Rory Stewart on How Not to Be a Politician