Hard writing means easy reading

The easier something is to read the harder it was to write. This is counterintuitive. We assume easy reading means easy writing, but the opposite is the case. Authors need to get in this mindset of doing the work of cutting the clutter, making clear, and rendering intelligible their sentences so that their readers don’t have to. From a utilitarian point of view, this is ethically preferable since sentences are generally read more times than they are written.

Smoking and Socialism

The arguments for socialism are like arguments for smoking—they depend on anecdotes. There’s the person who just started smoking who is nonetheless healthy, leading many to proclaim the virtues of smoking until the moment the person falls deathly ill (like Venezuelan socialism). There’s the person who smoked heavily, got really sick, and so cut back to a pack a month and now is seen as the model of a healthy smoker (like Swedish socialism). And then, of course, there are all the people who just smoked and died (like Soviet socialism), to which we can always say, “They just weren’t smoking the right way.” As with socialism, the best way to know the effect of smoking is to run a regression analysis. When we do, we find that—controlling for other variables—the more smoking the less healthy the body, and the more socialism the less healthy the economy. Until we can find a correlation between socialism and positive economic outcomes, I’ll be considering smoking and socialism in the same light.

The New Orthodoxy summarized in two slogans

“Latest is greatest,” and “Might makes wrong.”

The Boy Who Wolf Cried

We are all aware of the “crying wolf” phenomenon: past lies destroy credibility when real threats arise. But isn’t there a related and opposite phenomenon that past truths can create credibility for false threats? Just because there was no wolf twice in the past, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a wolf the third time; but just because there were wolves twice in the past, that doesn’t mean there is a wolf this time. People cried racism in the past and there was racism, but the “Boy Who Wolf Cried” principle means that, because of past racism, we are far more likely to have a lower threshold of evidence when people cry racism in the present (even accusing those who ask for evidence of themselves being “Racist”). The Boy Cried Wolf when it came to Covid suppression (don’t wear masks! Masks can end the pandemic! Lockdown for two weeks! Lockdown indefinitely to reach zero COVID) and now people don’t believe public health officials when they are telling the truth about vaccination. Similarly, The Boy Wolf Cried when there was slavery and Jim Crow, but that shouldn’t lead us to throw out standards of evidence about racism in the present and often times claims of “systemic racism” simply use the word “systemic” as a stand-in for “invisible” (i.e., lack of evidence). Take claims of racism seriously but demand regular standards of evidence lest we become like the Boy Who Wolf Cried.

How's this for a grand sounding claim?

The great conflict of our time is between truth and fashion, and fashion is currently winning.

Film Review: A Hidden Life (2019)

Terrence Malick’s latest film, A Hidden Life, confirms his status as among the most original directors of our time. The story—which centers around an Austrian man in the early 1940s refusing to swear loyalty to the Reich because of his Christian convictions—is less interesting than Malick’s signature cinematographic approach. Most directors tend to hold shots stationary during conversational scenes and introduce movement during action sequences, thereby putting us on a level with the characters and identifying with their state of mind. With Malick, on the other hand, it’s as if he’s putting us in the perspective of a disembodied observer that floats, bobs, and hovers around and through the characters and the breathtaking vistas of the Austrian Alps. The observer is neither situated as a character nor as an omniscient watcher, but rather as a curious spirit who’s not quite sure what is going on, so the spirit probes, turns, and retreats inquisitively and whimsically, oblivious to the tragedy unfolding around it. The effect is captivating rather than disorienting or vertigo-inducing. The constant sweeps and pulls of the camera inevitably pulls the viewer into the world that powerfully integrates character, viewer, and scenery. It can become hypnotic. Malick’s movies are not for everyone—they unfold slowly, and with sudden temporal jump cuts within scenes that leave our disembodied observer constrained by sequence, but not time—and yet this is all part of the experience. The film rewards the patient, curious viewer with an experience of how radical film techniques can be used to tell a highly traditional story about the power of old-fashioned decency and family bonds to overcome in even the most challenging times.

Power and Free Speech

A popular idea circulating among the woke is that free speech is a tool of the powerful and therefore a weapon of oppression. Not only does history say otherwise, but so does logic. Notice that suppression of free speech, by definition, requires power to censor, therefore it is always, without exception, carried out by the powerful (usually governments—generally the most powerful entity in a given society). There are logically coherent (although bad) arguments for censorship—such as Willmoore Kendall’s idea that the best society is marked by majority rule and censorship is a tool the majority should use to protect itself from subversive minorities—but those making such arguments never delude themselves that somehow it’s the weak, powerless, oppressed doing the censoring. The most powerful and oppressive institution in nearly every society is the body with a monopoly on force—the government. When governments censor, it is therefore the strong and powerful shutting down someone weaker, ergo the claim that free speech is a tool of the powerful is quite misguided.