"Since Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, liberals have adopted far too conservative a rhetorical posture towards institutional norms. Liberals should not be in favor of preserving norms per se. The norms that we ought to care about are the ones that serve the project of advancing liberal ideals."
Let’s Wreck Some Norms and Take the Court Down a Peg
It is imperative that we end judicial supremacy in America. It may be politically difficult, it may take time, but it can be done, and should be.
liberalcurrents.com
A cancel culture post from me. Some critics of it have called for a liberal proceduralism for adopting new norms. I say that's impossible, and the goal should instead be to foster substantively liberal norms.
Speech Norms in a Rancorous But Free Society
Back to the cancel culture well
endofsafety.substack.com
Very surreal to see my dad's byline at First Things. But it is on something he knows quite a lot about: the CIA.
Bumbling Intelligence | Martin Gurri
Asecret government institution will always occupy an uncomfortable and uncertain place . . . .
firstthings.com
Samantha Hancox-Li often says that we DO allow easy access to gender affirming care, it's just that it is only available to cisgender people. I asked her to write this up. Please read to get a sense of just how unmoored from reality these debates have become.
The Actual Ubiquity of Gender Affirming Care
Gender affirming care is framed as an issue exclusive to trans people: niche, experimental, untested, demanding. This is exactly backwards: gender affirming care is universal, pervasive, well-studi…
liberalcurrents.com
Funny thing is I learned about these JUST before they suddenly became au courant, by pure happenstance.
How heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future
Innovative thinking has done away with problems that long dogged the electric devices — and both scientists and environmentalists are excited about the possibilities
knowablemagazine.org
What I appreciate the most about Virginia Postrel is her anti-puritanism.
Taking Shopping Seriously
Why do people buy things they "don't need"? And why should we care? (Be sure to read to the end.)
vpostrel.substack.com
Body cams aren't enough. We need to change the actual structure of governance of police bodies.
What do we want police body cams to do?
Taking a new look at one of the most commonly adopted police reforms in the country.
vox.com
This is extremely funny
How Rod Dreher Caused an International Scandal in Eastern Europe
Blogging and backtracking.
thebulwark.com
It's hard to get a sense of the scale of what's happened so far in the war in Ukraine, in no small part because there's a lot of uncertainty. I found this a helpful roundup.
Russia deploys more than 300,000 soldiers: Ukraine War in Data
Week 48: A rapid buildup in eastern Ukraine may be a sign of a looming Russian offensive.
grid.news
This is the best thing I have read on the intense scrutiny the media has subjected gender confirmation surgery to in the past year.
THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK:Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids?
A question to ask. At length.
popula.com
This novel is the first in an incredible series, the rest of which will be coming out in the near future (it is already completed). The author is a genuine authority on the Ancient Near East, so the historical setting is not only unique, but well researched. More than that though, it is an incredibly human, meaningful, and entertaining tale.
Amazon - The Primal Flower: Book One: Leaving Lily
The Primal Flower: Book One: Leaving Lily by John David Duke Jr
amazon.com
Global investments in clean energy were equal to investments in fossil fuels in 2022
$1 Trillion Green Investment Matches Fossil Fuels for First Time
World spent $1.1 trillion transitioning to cleanpower in 2022, same as amount spent producing oil and gas.
bloomberg.com
Tim Lee is cautiously optimistic about a soft landing
We just might tame inflation without causing a recession
Inflation is falling while the unemployment rate stays very low.
fullstackeconomics.com
One of the biggest unforced errors in business history. He had no plan going in, has no real plan now. What was the point?
With $1.5 billion bill due at month-end, Elon Musk’s options aren’t great
arstechnica.com
Matt McManus on pseudo-intellectual edgelord Curtis Yarvin
The Dark Elf
The writer Curtis Yarvin advances a monarchist politics that’s too elitist even for fascism. His only real talent is pitching reaction in a hipster vocabulary.
commonwealmagazine.org
Jacobin recently published a critique of degrowth, which was great to see, but our own Paul Crider beat them to the punch and did it from a liberal (and therefore better) perspective.
Degrowth: Neither Left Nor Right, But Backward
As we pare away the extraneous elements to get to the core of degrowth, we find an illiberal philosophy fundamentally at odds with human freedom and human welfare.
liberalcurrents.com
Josh Chafetz is an excellent scholar and this paper is great. People think that the Roberts Court is mostly unraveling the judicial activism of the past, but it is actually expanding the court system's micromanaging of the system to an unprecedented degree
The New Judicial Power Grab
The judges are out of control. While judicial institution-building is nothing new in American history, the John Roberts-helmed judiciary has engaged in a remark
papers.ssrn.com
Very exciting things happening in California housing policy this year
California's 2023 Housing Laws: What You Need to Know | Insights | Holland & Knight
California Legislature enacted a large volume of housing production laws in the 2022 session, some of which may have a significant effect on housing production in 2023.
hklaw.com
Banning noncompetes is the right idea
Banning noncompete agreements would be good for workers and the economy
fullstackeconomics.com
Good criticism of the book, good by the books "abundance agenda" stuff, very bizarre vision of the future at the end
The Dystopia We Fear Is Keeping Us From the Utopia We Deserve
We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible.
nytimes.com
Tim Lee on why banning noncompetes is a good idea
Banning noncompete agreements would be good for workers and the economy
The FTC's proposal is a good idea on the merits but might not stand up in court.
fullstackeconomics.com
I don't often watch videos of politicians but I can see why AOC has such appeal; she's quite good at this. This video in particular had some good discussions of the details of what's going on in the Speaker vote that a lot of casual observers might not be aware of.
aoc on Instagram
A post shared by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc)
instagram.com
If you haven't read John Duke work, I highly recommend going through the Ordinary Times archive. He is one of the best writers of our day, and certainly the most underappreciated. Here is his most recent.
Home for Christmas: A Portrait
The very notion of “home for the holidays” betrays the transience of it. It loops around on itself, as to say, there is a home and there is not home
ordinary-times.com
Going to do something a little different and point to a work of art. I use my Instagram account entirely to follow artists that post their stuff online. This one really stood out to me today. I love the contrast between her well defined face and hand, and the more impressionistic surroundings.
westerberg on Instagram
A post shared by Aaron Westerberg (@westerberg)
instagram.com
This is basically my blueprint for how to reform American institutions, under the assumption that amending the Constitution or ratifying a whole new one is off the table (at the federal level).
Liberal Democracy and the Federal System
Major reform of liberal democracy in America is possible, even in the absence of a Constitutional amendment. We should learn from our peer nations with federal systems.
liberalcurrents.com
More of this please
Oregon Supreme Court Rejects Hundreds of Convictions by Nonunanimous Juries
The Oregon Supreme Court ruled today that all prisoners convicted by nonunanimous juries must have their cases reconsidered, following in the footsteps of a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Ramos v. Louisiana, declaring the practice unconstitutional.
wweek.com
In America we overestimate the importance of written law over the character of legal institutions in practice.
Lawful and Unconstitutional: Rule of Law in America Today
In a constitutional democracy, constitutionality is one component of lawfulness. But Americans focus on it to the exclusion of other, much more important elements.
liberalcurrents.com
Sadly the pizza box thing was too funny to be true
Andrew Tate, brother charged in Romania with human trafficking
Romanian prosecutors are seeking to hold Tate, a self-described misogynist, and brother Tristan for up to 30 days. One alleged victim was American.
washingtonpost.com
Very good news on the real earnings front
Inflation-Adjusted Wages Have Been Rising Since June 2022
Back in May 2022, I wrote about the very bad picture for inflation-adjusted wages in the US. While they were still slightly above pre-pandemic levels, wages had been falling consistently since the …
economistwritingeveryday.com
Loving the attention Mastodon is getting, really hope that more and more companies invest in building out infrastructure in the Fediverse in general.
Mastodon—and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers
Standards-based interoperability makes a comeback, sort of.
arstechnica.com
Linking to a post of links! This is a highlight of my writing in 2022.
Some Things I Wrote in 2022
Annual review
endofsafety.substack.com
Very interested in how this will shake out. I'm by no means an expert and have heard strong arguments either way in terms of eventual viability.
Essay | Synthetic Meat Will Change the Ethics of Eating
Consumers will soon be able to dine on chicken and other animal proteins grown in a factory, upending the way we think about nature and technology.
wsj.com
Inspiring
The story of VaccinateCA - Works in Progress
Nobody had a plan to get vaccines out of freezers and into Americans’ arms–except VaccinateCA. Its CEO tells the story of how a small team brought order to a chaotic rollout.
worksinprogress.co
An excellent takedown of a terrible book that rests on a pernicious literature
Review of The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to A Lot Like the Ones They Left by Garett Jones, Part II
The Second Installment
anowrasteh.substack.com
The cancel culture debate seems to ping-pong between people who argue that facing any social sanctions for your speech is censorship, and people pretending to believe in some kind of absolute freedom of association. This essay is my attempt to create a useful framework for thinking about the impact of association and disassociation on speech. Chiefly inspired by the work of Jacob Levy.
Rationalism, Pluralism, and Fear in the Speech Debate
There is no coherent formulation of rights which renders “cancel culture” illiberal. But there are coherent characterizations of the social system as a whole which can.
liberalcurrents.com
In this essay I develop a position I've held for some time but never quite laid out: representative democracy is not about expressing some sort of will of the people or anything so abstract as that. It's about giving the many interests in society an institutional outlet for their demands, and far from being purely more moral than non-democracies, it is also much more practical.
A Realist Defense of Legislative Supremacy
Representative democracy is not merely more moral than alternatives, it is a far more practical way to deal with the realities of the modern world.
liberalcurrents.com
Going to start with three things I'm proud of have written this year. I typically focus on aspects of liberal democracy, how it works, why it is superior to alternatives. In this essay, I focus on the case in the negative: arguing against the alternatives.
The Case Against Dictatorship
No practical case for dictatorship exists except for in the delusions of liberal democracy’s critics.
liberalcurrents.com
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