If Jesse Singal is Right about Gender-Care, then the Courts will Handle it Pretty Well.
Traditionally, the best respected gender care for youth was provided under the “Dutch Protocol.” The Dutch protocol uses a diagnostic model, whereby a clinician’s job is to decide what care is appropriate. The protocol requires heavy psychological testing and psychotherapy, then perhaps puberty blockers, hormones, or surgeries, depending on what the clinician considers appropriate. For…
Journalists are Surprisingly Careless About Defamation.
Sarah Jane Comrie is a random woman who was recently caught in the vortex of a scandal. She is white, and recently found herself in a dispute with some black teens over who had the right to use a citi-bike that either she or the teens had paid for. A video of this incident went…
A Legal Analysis of the Jordan Neeley Case
The Jordan Neely case is complicated enough that it could be on a criminal law issue spotter. You should not be surprised if Daniel Penny is acquitted. But he might also be convicted of 2nd degree manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. Any of these is a plausible verdict. But Penny is probably going to get…
Hmm.
New article in the Nation about how swimming is especially transphobic. There is a particularly interesting passage: World Aquatics, the international federation that governs the sport of swimming, released a new transgender participation policy in July 2022 that essentially bans trans women from competing by creating incredibly restrictive requirements for their inclusion. (As I have written previously, there…
Wow, Dean Heather Gerken actually killed the US News Rankings.
New US News law school rankings came out and they’re a shitshow. A Duke/Harvard tie is just silly. No student has a hard decision between Harvard and Duke unless their parents are in Durham and are hospitalized. Harvard probably has the best legal faculty in the world. [NOTE: lol, no, I do not go to…
I May Have Been Right About Tests
A while ago I said that colleges faced a vicious cycle that made them all go SAT blind: Was that model right? It looks like it was. Why do I say that? Because a bunch of law deans have objected to a policy that would allow law schools to not require LSATs. If a law…
American Iconoclasm
People like tearing down confederate monuments. Seems largely sensible. Some worry there is a slippery slope. Circa 2016 the respectable position was to deny that such a slope existed: no-one would desanctify the good-but-problematic guys like George Washington. Then in 2020 people tore down some statues of George Washington in Portland. To be fair, that…
Institutions are the smartest dumbest.
One of the classic SlateStarCodex posts is about how pathetically easy it is to be smarter than institutions. Here is a great example of that. Robert Contee is chief of metropolitan police, saying that violent crime in DC has fallen in DC since 2015, and Robert Contee is obviously, obviously incorrect. If you’ve been in…
Big Eureka
Big Eureka. Unironically, Big Eureka is probably the best YIMBY idea out there. Let me explain. One bizarre thing about the NorCal/SoCal divide is that “Northern California” is actually in the middle of the state. The actual northern part of California is mostly just wilderness, except for the dying industrial centers of Chico and Redding,…
A Socially Conservative Vision for the United States
I consider myself a social conservative. By that I mean that I would endorse the following package of laws, which are aimed at the suppression of vice. Rule 1: All names for babies must be chosen from a list of ~1,000. If you wish to choose a name not on the list, you must document…
Everyone’s Understanding of Redlining is Wrong
Everyone’s talking about redlining, but most of these discussions are bad. Very few people actually know what it was, and even fewer know its effects. Redlining improved housing affordability for black Americans, especially poor ones. Neighborhoods weren’t “red lined” because they were black. Neighborhoods became black because they were red lined, and red lining improved…
Elon’s Battle Against Substack is Probably Illegal
Twitter has a new policy that any tweets with links to Substack cannot be retweeted, liked, or commented on. The reason is pretty obvious: Substack is a competitor to Twitter for attention and the take-o-sphere. In particular, Substack just announced a Notes feature, which is transparently a twitter clone. This seems like anticompetitive conduct, which would be…
Against Qualification
There is a common verbal tic in fancy liberal non-profit circles of prefacing almost everything one says with some variant on “I think.” “I think the case for that is Exxon Mobile v. Allapattah” “I believe it costs $7” “I’m pretty sure it’s over here” Invariably, the statements so qualified turn out to be correct.…
Rust Cohle from True Detective is a Very Specific Type of Highly Online Guy
Emily Nussbaum is very smart and a good critic, and in particular she is right that the women on True Detective are paper thin. But she is genuinely wrong about Rust Cohle! He is not “a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti.” He is instead a taut, precise rendering of…
A Quick Note on Displacement and Morality
America has a lot of internal migration. She also has limits on housing supply. The upshot is that sometimes, high-wage internal migrants displace the locals. Lefties have gotten very upset about this in recent years, decrying “gentrification”. But that leaves us with a bit of a puzzle: if gentrification is so bad for natives, why…
The Laws of Law
Over the the last four to five hundred years, something very special has happened: Law won. In America, we tend to see the law as the dowdy chaperone of the frontiersman. We see her sensible office shoes following in the spurred footsteps of the cowboy, pushing the roughnecks and cavaliers further and further across the…
No, the Logic in Dobbs does not Reverse Obergefell
[Note: the post below is a legal argument for why the logic in the Dobbs opinion does not overturn Obergefell or Griswold and the other cases defended by “privacy rights”, despite some cheeky rhetoric in the opinion. I wrote it because I saw smart people, including Erwin Chemerinsky, who said that it would. This seemed…
How to Succeed in Social-Norm-Enforcement Without Really Trying
How do you enforce a rule? This is a common problem. Life is full of disputes and full of collective action problems, so many norms have to be enforced. We also have random bad pointless norms but let’s ignore those for today. In these United States, we have two tricks. First, we have a state.…
The Post that was Promised
In my last post I said that real wages for a given class of income have fallen in hyperdense cities since 2000 due to rising rents, and that professional class real incomes there are much lower than in other cities. If you haven’t read that one, read it first because here I’m just going to…
A Tale of Two (Maybe Eight) Cities
American life has gotten worse for the young professional classes since 1995-2000. Here is how we know. In a simple model of rational agents maximizing consumption, the direct implication is that life elsewhere has also declined. This simple model is basically correct. Let me explain: People have to choose between living in a hyper-dense city…
Ranked List of All Books I Read Since 2020
Ding-dong, booklist! Like last year, this is a purely objective ranking of the books I read in Anno Domini 2021. The original languages are (English) Greek, French, Russian, Italian, Latin, and Pirate. The forms include the novel, the play, history, philosophical essays, and self-help. The chronological range is slightly more than two thousand years. Naturally,…
Amtrak Sucks; Publics are Terrible at Choice.
The other day, I spent $312 dollars on a short distance train ticket. This is because the congress of the United States is a scoundrel and a thief. Let me explain. Every year, Amtrak makes a loss and has to be subsidized by the federal government. However, one part of AmTrak lessens the blow: the…
Giving Thanks
This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful that America exists. America was created in quite a bloody way, like all countries (except Belgium) and like all the great American states that predated it, but today we’re a rich happy country that’s nice to live in. People have been down on America recently, and are even feeling bad about…
Oh the Humanities!
There’s an old quote, I think from Megan McArdle, that media criticism dominates blogging, and the reason is because it’s easy. I am about to indulge in some media criticism. Forgive me; my only defense is that the medium being criticized is almost philosophy, and criticism of philosophy is almost philosophy itself, so this is…
How Far can Bentham Carry us?
What is the good life? From that, what is the right way to live? One might propose that both of those questions have more or less the same answer. That is: the good life is having something we are going to call “happiness” and the right way to live is to cause the most happiness…
How the Woke were Awoken
[Edit: Looking back on this, I think I undersell the role of the internet in fostering distrustful and anti-institutional politics. It has such a tendency to pull back hoods, and outrage is the handmaiden of virality. So, take the below as a hypothesis for why one distrustful politic emerged where it did, not a general…
I Come to Bury Tests, not to Praise Them
The University of California just announced it will be going test blind. That means, even if you submit ACT or SAT scores; they’re going right in the shredder. Some people are very upset. Obviously, the first order effect of the change is that they will have an easier time discriminating against Asians without running afoul…
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I write this blog for my own pleasure. I don’t see why you would want to read it, but if you do, make sure not to get upset.
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Indefensible Expectations 