This Week’s Posts
Monday, February 21st - I’ll Be Against the Next “Good War” Too
It’s unlikely that we’ll go to war against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf, but enough people are rattling the saber for me to articulate why we shouldn’t, and why we need to get real about our endless military entanglements.
Tuesday, February 22nd - What is Effect Size? (subscriber only)
The next in my little stats/research methods series for subscribers.
Wednesday, February 23rd - A Future Where We Never See Each Other
I was worried for civic life and the degradation of the public through digital technologies before Covid. Now I’m even more worried.
Friday, February 25th - I’m Not Sure I Want to Run the New York City Race Much Longer (subscriber only)
I’m getting worn down by the grind.
From the Archives
As I pointed out in 2016, the “born this way” argument for gay rights was always an argument of convenience and not one which was particularly respectful towards gay people and their relationships.
Song of the Week
Substack of the Week
I have to recommend Darrell Owens’s newsletter this week. I wrote about YIMBYism again recently; the short version is that the movement is essential but often its members are not helping their own cause. Owens is most certainly helping the cause. He has a great knack for voicing basic YIMBY perspectives without the rhetorical excess and insiderism that sometimes plague that community. This post about the recent madness at UC Berkeley is a good example of expressing appropriate anger towards NIMBY madness without being a sneering, haughty dick about it. Darrell’s newsletter is well worth your time.
Book Recommendation
Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin, 2016
Let me start by saying that I don’t know if Peter Turchin is right. I’m fairly confident that he is about “elite overproduction,” the idea that our society creates too many people with aspirations to being part of an overclass (typically religious or scholarly rather than moneyed) and that this overproduction produces unhappiness and, eventually, instability. If you observe the immense anxieties of our college-educated class, it’s hard not to see what Turchin’s talking about. But the bigger picture, these big sweeping rises and falls of cultures that are almost metronomic in their regularity? I don’t have the slightest idea if he’s right. Probably not; these attempts to impose transcendent order on humankind are rarely correct. But the ideas are wonderfully alive and I find the whole thing to be a great deal of fun. This book is, I take it, the best encapsulation of his theories, and it’s a heady affair. Plus Turchin predicts another big downturn happening just about now, so we’ll see if he’s correct.
Comment of the Week
Open plan offices suck, I totally agree. I complained about it when I was stuck there. Tech offices in particular are held together by ridiculous non-perks like foosball, free Red Bull, and “unlimited PTO,” which just means never feeling good about taking a break. But you, a human being, need to interact with more people than that. It’s the way we are “wired” as primates, and our abiding love for convenience can’t change that. I say, change the nature of the office. Pod life isn’t real life. And evening socializing is different from experiencing humanity in non-customized venues. - TD
That’s it! I’m traveling this weekend so there may be delays with getting posts out next week. Hopefully not though.
Man, NOBODY likes “unlimited paid time off”. We had it for a year or two at a law firm I worked at. Out of all the complaints there are about big law firm practice, I don’t think any of them garnered as much discontent as unlimited PTO.
It used to be that old conservative political men would send young men to die in the old political men's wars.
Today it would be the man-hostile political matriarchal elite sending young men to die in political matriarchal elite's wars.
At least in the previous times the old political men were once young men and had some natural empathy for the decisions they made that led to the death of so many young men.
Not so with the modern political elite. They have telegraphed that they would very much like those young men to die. Thus those young men should simply reject the orders to do so.