Category Archives: Politics

Green on Green

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Colin Browne writes,

The end result of this project includes a big win for biking in the region: a paved, grade separated trail from Bethesda to Silver Spring. But the construction phase will include unavoidable disruptions—the entire Georgetown Branch Trail from Bethesda to Stewart Avenue will be completely closed starting September 5. It will remain closed for the duration of construction.

There are a number of workable on-street routes, many low-stress and relatively direct, but things get a bit complicated here because the town of Chevy Chase has so far refused to allow the county to sign a trail detour on its roads.

At present, the official signed detour is on Jones Bridge Road, which is a busy thoroughfare with narrow sidewalks and no bike infrastructure. If you’re a confident bicyclist, it may be fine. If you’re not, it will be a stressful experience.

Note that “duration of construction” is estimated to be five years. This one affects me. A lot. I bike regularly, and about 60 percent of my rides use this route. It would be less than that, but another multi-year construction project, which closes Beach Drive/Rock Creek Parkway, had been forcing me down the now-closed trail.

As for the official detour, Mr. Browne greatly under-states its problems. As you know, I think that the term “city bike lane” is an oxymoron. But the road we are being asked to use not only has no bike lane. It has zero shoulder. No white stripey thing at all. Just the curb. Plus it has curves that are difficult for drivers to see around. And lots of cars, regularly exceeding the 35 MPH speed limit. If you want to engineer a road as a no-go zone for bikes, this is what you would design. Mr. Browne, I may not meet your definition of a confident cyclist, but I am confident of one thing: as a cyclist, I want no part of that road.

So I tried the sidewalk. Not as dilapidated as some of the sidewalks I use, but pretty uneven and quite narrow. With the usual crowd of joggers, strollers, dog-walkers, and so on, it would tempt many cyclists (not me) to try the road.

But to add insult to injury, you end up nowhere near where the bike trail picks up again! Instead, you are left with about a mile of urban traffic to navigate through to get back to the path. Yes, there is a bike lane, but I already told you what I think of those.

Anyway, I called this post “green on green” because it reminded me of what a commenter wrote recently.

I occasionally notice what I think of as “bobo wedge issues,” disputes that divide bo from bo. For example, I live near a regional airport with ambitions to expand. This has set the bourgeois faction’s desire for travel convenience against the bohemian faction’s desire for natural quiet. Which bo you are depends on whether you live in the flight path.

The bike trail is being closed because the Washington DC Metro (our subway system) is building a new line. Of course, Metro, which loses money in spite of generous subsidies and exorbitant fares, is the poster child for “green means unsustainable.” And then, to top it off, Chevy Chase is packed with smug, green progressives, so of course they would NIMBY-veto any signage that would help cyclists deal with the trail closure.

David Byrne on dehumanizing technology

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He writes,

I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction.

He goes on to list examples, such as shopping on line with no salesperson. He points out that with Uber you do not even have to talk to the driver to say where you are going. Online courses reduce interactions with teachers.

You can quibble with some of the examples, but I think he is on to something.

Jean Twenge watch

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She writes,

The result is a generation whose members are often afraid to talk to one another, especially about anything that might be upsetting or offensive. If everyone must be emotionally safe at all times, a free discussion of ideas is inherently dangerous. Opposing viewpoints can’t just be argued against; they have to be shut down, because merely hearing them can cause harm.

She adds,

Members of iGen are also taking longer to grow up. As I found in analyzing seven large national surveys of teens, today’s adolescents are less likely to drive, drink, work, date, go out and have sex than were teens just 10 years ago. Today’s 18-year-olds look like 15-year-olds used to. They don’t reach adulthood too early, but they also lack experience with independence and decision-making.

Her book is out, but I have yet to read it. The reviews have been mixed. Tyler calls it new and excellent.

Jonathan Haidt does not mention Twenge in this interview, but his observations parallel hers.

Haidt believes there is a mental-health crisis on campus: ‘I have never seen such rapid increase in indicators of anxiety and depression as we have seen in the past few years’, he says.

The interesting brief interview with Haidt includes this:

‘Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.’

The new partisanship

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Janet Hook reports in the WSJ,

People who identify with either party increasingly disagree not just on policy; they inhabit separate worlds of differing social and cultural values and even see their economic outlook through a partisan lens.

The wide gulf is visible in an array of issues and attitudes: Democrats are twice as likely to say they never go to church as are Republicans, and they are eight times as likely to favor action on climate change. One-third of Republicans say they support the National Rifle Association, while just 4% of Democrats do. More than three-quarters of Democrats, but less than one-third of Republicans, said they felt comfortable with societal changes that have made the U.S. more diverse.

And these are much larger than the gaps that existed years ago.

Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster use the term “negative partisanship.”

American politics has become like a bitter sports rivalry, in which the parties hang together mainly out of sheer hatred of the other team, rather than a shared sense of purpose. Republicans might not love the president, but they absolutely loathe his Democratic adversaries. And it’s also true of Democrats, who might be consumed by their internal feuds over foreign policy and the proper role of government were it not for Trump.

What people have come to seek in political news and commentary is anger validation. That is, they want the news to be presented in such a way that it confirms and justifies their anger at political opponents. To say that the market is catering to this desire is an understatement.

Re-reading David Brooks

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Almost twenty years after it first appeared, I review Bobos in Paradise.

What Brooks might have foreseen, but did not, was how this Bobo project would play out as it gathered momentum. In the last two decades, we have witnessed the acceleration of the long-term trend toward expansion of the more abstract-oriented industries, such as finance and entertainment, and a decline of the more concrete-oriented industries, such as manufacturing and mining. As a result, the cultural influence of Bobos has soared. The Bobos became insistently cosmopolitan on issues of immigration and foreign relations, increasingly aggressive in their assault on traditional ideas about gender, and increasingly eager to stifle the speech on campus of those with whom they disagree.

Ralph Peters sounds like David Halberstam

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Peters writes,

It really comes down to that blood test: What will men die for? The answer, were we willing to open our eyes, is that more Afghans will volunteer to die for the Taliban than for our dream of a “better” Afghanistan. Nor could the Taliban have survived without support among the population. This is Mao 101.

The entire column is in that vein. It sounds very similar to Halberstam’s diagnosis of the Vietnam tragedy.

Frederick W. Kagan makes the case for staying in Afghanistan. An excerpt:

to prevent al Qaeda and ISIS from regaining the base from which al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks and from which both would plan and conduct major attacks against the US and its allies in the future. He [President Trump] also described the minimum required outcome: an Afghan state able to secure its own territory with very limited support from the US and other partners. This outcome is essential to American security and it is achievable.

My guess is that the call that the President has to make concerning Afghanistan is a close one, but I am more inclined to agree with Peters. I have no military experience or any other basis for expertise, but for what it’s worth, here are a couple of my thoughts:

1. I am leery of blaming the problems of the Afghan government on corruption. In a limited-access order (borrowing the terminology of North, Weingast, and Wallis), what we call corruption is the only way for a government to remain in power. More generally, if victory depends on our capabilities for nation-building, then I have doubts about the mission.

2. If the Taliban took over, we might be able to convince them not to allow Al Qaeda a safe haven there. If deterrence works, then that would be cheaper than war.

David Brooks on what moderates believe

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He wrote,

Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

I like the entire column, but especially this paragraph. I care more about my family and folk dancing than I do about politics. And I think that if everyone cared mostly about their relationships and their hobbies, the world would be a better place.

Note that I schedule my posts several days in advance. I think that this makes me write more moderately than I would if I were racing to give my immediate reaction to things.

David Brooks on the case for moderation

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His column concludes,

Over the next few months I’m hoping to write several columns on why modesty and moderation are superior to the spiraling purity movements we see today. It seems like a good time for assertive modesty to take a stand.

Of course, for Brooks to say this is dog-bites-man. When Paul Krugman says it, it will be news.

I remain extremely pessimistic about the political outlook.

Robert Sapolsky defines culture

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Crediting Frans de Waal, Sapolsky writes in Behave.

“culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means.

I guess that is close to my preferred definition, which is “socially communicated thought patterns and behavioral tendencies.”

I am about half way through the book. I have two nits to pick.

One nit is that he says that when behavior correlates with a gene in one setting but not another, that proves gene-environment interaction. An example would be that a gene correlates with violence in people who were abused as children, but not in people who were not abused as children. In my view, this might be gene-environment interaction. But it also could be gene-gene interaction. That is, the behavior might be influenced by a gene other than the one on which you are focused, and that gene correlates with whether the person was abused as a child.

Another nit is when he talks about gender and math ability. First, he points out that the very top percentile in math is dominated by males (the fact that Larry Summers was fired for pointing out). Then, he reports on a study showing that male-female math differences are less in egalitarian cultures. However, that is only relevant to the Larry Summers issue if that study refers to the very top percentile. As I read the study, by Guiso, Zingales, and others, it is about averages, not the very top percentile.

The way I see it, a lot of academics are dogmatically insistent that genes matter little and the environment matters a lot. Sapolsky is not one of those, but these examples suggest that he is somewhat biased in the direction of the prevailing dogma.

Jean Twenge Update

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She writes,

Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

I don’t think a crusade against cyber-bullying is the answer. I am enough of a McLuhanite to say that the medium is the message. There is something about smart phones that is damaging, and I suspect it is the sheer immediacy of them. I think that this immediacy is what makes contemporary politics so stressful. You see what somebody posts online and if you like it, great, and if you don’t it really gets your fight-or-flight hormones raging.

Also, this is something I noticed and remarked on when I was teaching high school:

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.

The book is due out in less than two weeks.