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Self in Society Roundup 58

Trump, Ukraine, immigration, religion, Bezos, homeschooling, transformations, and more.

Trump Updates

He Warned You: Aaron Ross Powell: "The disconnect here, between what Trump said and what many of his supporters thought he'd do, only makes sense if those supporters didn't believe him. If they thought, Sure, he keeps telling us he'll impose ruinous tariffs, but he won't actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he'll tear America out of its place of global leadership and instead make it a vassal state of his buddy Putin, but he won't actually. Sure, he keeps telling us he'll destroy the federal government and the constitutional system with it, without a clear plan to meaningfully replace any of it beyond a massive tool to carry out revenge against those he thinks wronged him, but he won't actually."

Tracinski Tracks Trump: Robert Tracinski writes his Executive Watch for UnPopulist. Here are some of the entries:
Trump Announces Shakedown Deal with Big Law Firm
Trump Asserts Illegal Wartime Powers to Deport Immigrants in Defiance of the Court
Musk Usurps the Power of the Purse from Congress but Republicans Can Apply for Relief from Funding Cuts
Trump Uses Sovereign Crypto Fund as a Payout to Political Insiders
Trump Punishes AP for Exercising Its Free Speech Rights

Palmer on the New Right: Tom Palmer: "This new right is not a conservatism focused on preserving the liberal gains of the past—the elimination of slavery, the securing of equality before the law, of limited constitutional government, and of the rights to worship, to speak, to acquire and own property, to trade on mutually agreed terms, and to live as one likes with one's own resources. Instead, it advances a radically opposed agenda that seeks to centralize absolute, arbitrary, and unaccountable power in the hands of the executive alone."

Noah Smith Worries: Here are a few recent entries from the economics writer:
It's time to start panicking about the national debt
Why America betrayed Europe
There is no utopia waiting on the other side of Trump's economy
Bananas republic
Trump takes a baseball bat to the U.S. economy

Central Planning: Let no one confuse Trump's policies with a free market: "The Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisitions involving companies that continue promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said" (Washington Post via Cowen).

Tariffs: The Wall Street Journal reported March 5 (main page), "Stocks mostly edged up amid comments about exemptions for some products." In other words, those who are politically connected, and especially those to kiss Trump's ring, will get special treatment. This is cronyism, not a free market. On March 4, economist Justin Wolfers called the original tariff policy "the largest tax hike in United States since 1993." As I commented on Bluesky, "Trump is able to disrupt the markets with his inane tariff thugism only because Congress has abnegated its authority in this area (as in many others)." Trump has been all over the place with his tariff pronouncements, creating uncertainty among affected businesses. New York Times: "Trump Doubles Metal Tariffs as He Presses Canada to Become Part of U.S."

Liar in Chief: Matthew Yglesias summarized much of Trump's speech to Congress: "He's just lying wildly." He continues, "The problem with lying is that it doesn’t actually set you up to govern."

Patrimonialism: Jonathan Rauch: "Patrimonialism [as Trump is employing] snips the government's procedural tendons, it weakens and eventually cripples the state. Over time, as it seeks to embed itself, many leaders attempt the transition to full-blown authoritarianism."

Transgender: NPR: "The Pentagon has directed that service members and recruits with gender dysphoria be separated from the U.S. military." This is just straight-up bigotry for the sake of bigotry. (This policy, like many others, remains in flux.)

Wrong Lessons: The French socialist Thomas Piketty observes, "In the counties where Trump has been getting the most votes, the big predictor is the destruction of manufacturing jobs." Unsurprisingly, the lesson that Piketty and Michael Sandel wish to draw from Trump's election, and from comparable nationalist politics in Europe, is (as they already thought) that the left should become more socialist, focusing on wealth transfers and economic controls. In other words, the current debate largely is over whether we should have more left-wing socialism or more right-wing socialism. I would here point out that (as Bryan Caplan argues) local land-use socialism is largely what is driving the inability of out-of-work people to relocate to job-creation centers. But the view, "Hey, we need less socialism and more freedom," just isn't popular right now (however much the idiot wing of the MAGA movement rails against socialism while embracing its central tenets).

An Empire if You Can Take It: Businesses "donated" half a billion dollars to Trump since his election win. Obviously in a free society this is not what people think is necessary.

Selling Out Ukraine

Republicans have gone from the party that forthrightly called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire" to appeasing the former Soviet intelligence officer Putin, a mass-murderer, autocrat, and warmonger. Pure moral depravity.

The person "gambling with World War III," precisely, is Donald Trump. Appeasing murderous aggressors such as Putin only invites more aggression in the future. Trump's shameful display betrays the United States to serve the interests of a brutal dictator. Trump is the Neville Chamberlain of our time.

After the disastrous meeting at the White House, Zelensky kissed the ring, on March 4.

On March 7 Trump threatened to potentially impose new sanctions on Russia over its continued "pounding" of Ukraine, a feeble gesture in light of Trump's support for ceding parts of Ukraine to Putin.

Nataliya Melnyk: "Nor are Trump's ideas for an end to this war the building blocks for a lasting peace. Rather, they are a time bomb pretending to be a ceasefire that will go off once Russia regroups and pulls in more resources from its allies. In the meantime, Ukraine will be further weakened, since this peace arrangement will potentially end all military aid going into the country and possibly disallow it from protecting itself from any further onslaught of missiles and drones. In addition, Russia has a broad range of tools to cause further internal instability in Ukraine through election tampering and fraud, propaganda and misinformation, and bribery."

Ilya Somin: "If Trump persists in withdrawing support from Ukraine without demanding any reciprocal concessions from Russia, the consequences for both Ukraine and America are likely to be dire. The reversal may well go down in history as one of the worst American foreign policy decisions, simultaneously evil and stupid."

An Evil Immigration Policy

Ilya Somin: "The Trump Administration terminated legal 'parole' status for some 530,000 legal migrants who entered the United States [from] four Latin American countries—Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela—to live and work in the US for up to two years if they passed a background check and had a US-resident sponsor willing to provide financial support. These people will be subject to deportation, as of April 24. The termination of CHNV parole is a further expansion of Trump's cruel campaign against legal immigration."

NPR: "NPR talked to the families of four men believed to be in El Salvador. None of them had a serious criminal record in the U.S. Only one had been charged with illegal entry. . . . The administration is not sharing any evidence that supports the claims that these men are members of Tren de Aragua."

NBC: "Human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented extreme crowding, torture and other issues at the prison."

Balko: "More than half the 238 Trump sent to El Salvador received no due process at all. No court ever reviewed their cases. This is why we have due process. It's why we don't snatch people off the street and send them to a foreign gulag run by a dictator based solely on the word of an ICE agent." Balko links to an article by Adam Isacson.

Jasmine Mooney: "One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer. . . . I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me."

New York Times: "Administration Officials Believe Order Lets Immigration Agents Enter Homes Without Warrants." (So much for Constitutionalism.)

Eric Boehm: "In court and the media, the Trump administration . . . [asserted] its power to deport asylum seekers without due process—and to ignore judges who get in the way."

Rick Noack: "Thousands of Afghans who were set to be relocated to the United States before Trump halted refugee admissions are at risk of being forced out of their homes in Pakistan—and potentially sent back to Taliban-run Afghanistan." Beth Bailey (from February): "A former Afghan intelligence officer who worked alongside U.S. forces sought safety in America. Now, under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, his parole has been revoked, and he's been detained without explanation."

Steve Chapman: "The crackdown has hit the harmless as well as the dangerous, and those who lack legal status and also, most alarmingly, those who have it. . . . The deportation campaign manages to stand out: It is indiscriminate, malicious, secretive, and disdainful of the law. Its entire purpose is to rid huge numbers of foreigners living here and instilling fear in all the rest."

Bayer on Religion

Recently I watched two excellent videos featuring Ben Bayer, a philosopher with the Ayn Rand Institute.

In an interview with Yaron Brook, Bayer takes on J. D. Vance's claims about circles of concern (we love family more than strangers) and why they do not reflect the doctrines of Augustine or Aquinas. He also talks about (among other things) the schism within the atheist movement over transgender issues. (You can read Jerry Coyne's essay on the matter if you wish. My offhand take is that the participants involved insist that "woman" must have a single, universal definition, when in fact it has two distinct overlapping meanings. Critics are right to push back against the subjectivist position; gender is a real, physiological/psychological phenomenon and not just a matter of opinion. See also Hemant Mehta's take.)

In his talk posted December 9, Bayer argues, contra Tom Holland, that rights derive from secular philosophy, not Christianity. Bayer effectively argues that, in important ways, Christianity promotes, at best, a collectivist view of rights. But I do think it's fair to say that aspects of Christianity, such as the focus on individual worth, can be retooled and stripped of their broader Christian baggage to help support a rich and secular conception of rights. Bayer argues that Locke's theory of individual rights is fundamentally secular, even though Locke is Christian. In contrast to earlier thinkers, Bayer reviews, Locke held that "natural law" is knowable by reason based on perceptual evidence. The broader point that Bayer makes, and that I'd emphasize, is that just become some theory comes from a Christian, does not make that theory fundamentally Christian. Pretending otherwise is the basic trick that apologists use to claim that Christianity is behind pretty much any good thing you can imagine. Bayer says, "Locke developed his theory [of rights] in spite of his (extremely diluted) Christianity."

The Libertarian Post?

Jeff Bezos said of his Washington Post's editorial page: "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others." Offhand this seems okay, although we can wonder whether Bezos is sucking up to Trump to avoid regulatory troubles. Bezos's "decision to kill a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris" (as NPR reviews) is more troublesome.

Dana Milbank writes for the Post: "If we . . . are to defend his twin pillars [personal liberties and free markets], then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to 'personal liberties and free markets' in the United States today: President Donald Trump."

Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Institute have a basically positive reaction to Bezos's announcment. The pair also point out that Elon Musk quoted Ayn Rand selectively, omitting a bit critical of arbitrary government power.

Here is the main part of what Bezos announced to the staff at the Post:

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America's success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical—it minimizes coercion—and practical—it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. . . .

I'm confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I'm excited for us together to fill that void.

Homeschool Update

Recently I posted the following update to one of the homeschool Facebook groups:

"What materials do you use?" There seem to be lots of new homeschoolers in this group, so I figured now might be a good time to post about what's currently working for us. Others are encouraged to add their own notes in the comments.

Math: I continue to love Dimensions Math (Singapore); we started with the preschool materials and now are in the 5th Grade books. I love how the materials plant seeds for future development. For example, in the 5th grade books (and even starting in 4th grade), my kid has started to work basic algebra problems (some quite challenging). We have friends who absolutely love Beast Academy, but right now Dimensions works great for us. We spend about a half-hour to an hour a day on this.

Language: We're now on the "Robin Hood" book of Fix It Grammar. My kid is getting pretty good at recognizing parts of speech and applying basic rules of writing. I like these books a lot. Also, as a family we're reading the Core Classics version of Iliad and Odyssey, and then I expect to graduate to the Emily Wilson translations. Favorite books for the past year include Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Wings of Fire. We watch Lingua Garden videos for some introductory Spanish.

Science: We're going through lessons based on Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding. These are not super user-friendly, but the contents generally are good. Also we recently picked up a used set of Happy Atoms, and with the app it's a very helpful set. My kid has watched most of the Science Kids (and History Kids) DVDs available through JeffCo libraries, and those are excellent. Also we continue to bring out the Turing Tumble sometimes; basically it's a marble-driven simple computer. Oh, and my kid is fascinated by Kurzgesagt videos.

Other: My wife continues to read from the Hirsch What Your X Grader Needs to Know books and from textbooks called Imagine It. Those cover a lot of history and literature. We watch documentaries pretty often; recently we watched the Burns/PBS film on Benjamin Franklin, which is excellent. I think that offers a pretty good idea of how we approach things.

* * *

Other people recommended Spanish Academy (out of Guatemala), Torchlight (for literature), a debate and public speaking class from Outschool, and the Wings Over the Rockies aerospace program for kids (among other things).

Paul on Transformation

I started reading a New Yorker piece on L. A. Paul's views on self-transformation. Paul's book is called Transformative Experience, based on a 392-page (!) working paper.

I don't have time to read that right now, so I asked ChatGPT to summarize it for me. See the results. Here is part of ChatGPT's summary:

Traditional decision theory relies on the ability to assess potential outcomes based on current preferences and knowledge. However, transformative experiences challenge this framework:

Unpredictable Preferences: Since transformative experiences can fundamentally change one's preferences, it's challenging to predict how one will value the outcome after the experience. For example, deciding to become a parent involves entering a state where one's future preferences and values may differ significantly from current ones.

Inaccessible Knowledge: Without having undergone the experience, individuals lack firsthand knowledge of what it entails, making it difficult to evaluate potential outcomes accurately.

Following is part of what I wrote in exchange with the LLM:

Based on that summary, I'm pretty skeptical of Paul's thesis. Sure, deciding whether, say, to become a parent brings a lot of unknowns. But it also brings a lot of knowns! People know, for example, that becoming a parent will involve lots of diaper changing and sleepless nights (at least at first), a lot of time spent educating and counseling, and so on. All of us, before we become parents (if we do), in fact know many other parents (usually including our own), and generally we have many conversations with others about parenting. It seems to me that Paul's thesis boils down to claiming "the future is hard to predict." . . .

I am a person who, in fact, chose to become a parent. (Actually, my wife and I chose to become parents, then thought we wouldn't be able to conceive a child, then ended up having a child after all. But having a child was consistent with our previous plans.) So I can attest that my life as a parent is pretty close to what I envisioned. True, becoming a parent has changed me in some minor ways I did not anticipate; for example, I now know a lot more about paleontology due to my child's interest in the topic. But becoming a parent did not, in fact, fundamentally change who I am as a person. It did not cause me to think about life and philosophy in any fundamentally different way. I feel like basically the same person, only with a child. So if Paul's paradigm example of a "transformative experience" didn't actually feel all that transformative to me, why should I believe that any of Paul's "transformative experiences" are as transformative as Paul thinks?

I'd like to push against Paul's thesis from a different direction. . . . A "transformative experience" seems to involve, and in part arise from, ignorance about the future. But then why should we think that one sort of experience is inherently more "transformative" than another? Maybe deciding not to have a child is, at least potentially, precisely as "transformative" as a decision to have a child. Someone who decides not to have a child might gain a largely different group of friends, and perhaps one or more of these friends will radically impact the person's actions and attitudes. The point is, it seems to me, any decision we possibly could make could turn out to be "transformative," precisely because, as Paul argues, we are largely ignorant about the future. But if we can't well-predict which decisions will be "transformative," we might as well just subject each decision to basic cost-benefit analysis, and hope for the best. . . .

Obviously . . . some potential decisions have a greater chance of being more transformative than others. But I think that often people are able to predict when a decision is likely to be transformative. For example, I thought long and hard about having a child and long adapted my life toward that potentiality, so I reasonably expected that having a child would not be radically "transformative," and it wasn't. I think moving to a difference city (one far away) probably would be more transformative for me, because that would involve losing a lot of friends and (hopefully) gaining some new ones, switching jobs, and so on. True, ordinarily tasting a new food [an example ChatGPT brought up] will not be transformative, but perhaps it could be if it propelled a person to, say, become a chef, become a "foodie," or travel the world to experience new cuisine. So I think this boils down to me thinking that a) Paul makes some interesting points about some experiences being more transformative than others, but b) Paul overstates the distinction between supposedly non-transformative decisions and transformative ones.

Of course I reserve the right to change my views based on a possible future careful reading of Paul. Perhaps, if I decide to do that, it will become a transformative experience!

Quick Takes

Lab Leak: Alex Tabarrok argues that the possibility of "lab leak" of dangerous viruses justifies the creation of a new regulatory agency to monitor labs and tighter protocols generally.

Social Security: Musk's idea to cut fraud from Social Security is going nowhere. But no one is proposing the sorts of changes to Social Security that would make sense, starting with means-testing. In what universe is it fair to tax relatively poor working-class families to subsidize wealthy retirees?

Egg Police: CTV: "U.S. border officials have caught more people with eggs than fentanyl this year. . . . CBP intercepted egg products on 3,254 occasions this January and February." See also the Guardian (via Cowen).

Drug War Insanity: Jacob Sullum: "Prohibition makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and potency are highly variable and unpredictable. Ramped-up enforcement of prohibition magnifies that problem. . . . [A] new study . . . found drug seizures in San Francisco were associated with a substantial increase in overdose risk."

Safe Streets: Goldwater is promoting legislation in Texas that, as in Arizona, "allows property owners to file a claim for compensation from local governments if their property value is diminished or they incur reasonable mitigation costs due to a locality’s deliberate failure to enforce laws related to the homelessness crisis." I'm not sure what I think about this, but local governments definitely have a responsibility to establish neighborhood safety.

Torturing Babies: Alex Tabarrok: "Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don't feel pain wasn't just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia."

Cosmology: NPR: Perhaps the universe will collapse in on itself (eventually) after all. See also Joel Achenbach (via Cowen). Space (via Cowen): Maybe "the universe was born rotating," or maybe "the entire universe is the interior of a black hole."

Making Progress: Jason Crawford reviews advances in agriculture, transportation, and fighting disease (talk).

Armed Resistance: Rachel Maddow (of all people) promoted a story about armed self-defense against Neo-Nazis in Lincoln Heights, Ohio.

Wexler on Reading: Natalie Wexler has a new book coming out called Beyond the Science of Reading. She writes, "Knowledge is hugely important to reading comprehension; it's not a matter of applying an abstract skill. . . . So if we want to equip children to understand the texts they'll be expected to read in years to come, we need to systematically build their knowledge—including knowledge of social studies and science, subjects that have been marginalized to make more time for reading comprehension instruction—and familiarize them with the complex syntax of written language."

U.S. Christianity: Liam Adams reviews Pew's Religious Landscape Study. The upshot: Although Christianity continues its decline, the decline seems to have slowed, and 62% still identify as Christian, versus 29% as "religiously unaffiliated."

Ayn Rand in Berlin: The Ayn Rand Institute held a conference in Berlin in March. A YouTuber who goes by TIKHistory attended and was impressed. (I can't speak to the quality of the history videos.)

Anti-DEI Stupidity: If, for parts of the left, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) is an excuse for reverse-racism, for parts of the right fighting DEI is an excuse for old-fashioned racism. As Chris Hayes reports, a school in Idaho demanded that a teacher remove a classroom sign that says "Everyone is welcome here," specifically because the sign shows hands of different skin tones. The teacher protested. In related insanity, the Forest Service cancelled "a nationwide tree-planting program," as NPR reports. I doubt the federal government should be funding a program like this, but the reason is not that it is somehow part of a DEI plot.

Criminalizing Abortion: Stat: "Texas arrests an abortion provider."

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