I forewent a provocative headline and lead paragraph.

You’re welcome.

Culture

Peter Coy brings the receipts

I haven’t harped about this because I didn’t have facts and figures. But the New York Times’ Peter Coy has now provided them (and it’s important enough that I’m giving you a link that pierces the paywall):

• The amount of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, graphite and other lithium-ion battery materials needed for one long-range electric vehicle would be enough for either six plug-in hybrids or 90 of the type of hybrid that recharges from deceleration and braking.
• The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle.
• The production of electric vehicles produces more greenhouse gases than the production of cars with combustion engines. So E.V.s have to travel between 28,000 and 68,000 miles before they have an emissions advantage over similarly sized and equipped internal-combustion mobiles.

All-electric vehicles are presently a gigantic flim-flam, and considering that third point, they’re going to remain a flim-flam for quite a long time. (Does an EV even get 68,000+ miles before those big honkin’ batteries need replaced?)

The plug-in hybrids have appealed to me, but I’ve got to get over that and to stop feeling like a criminal for (currently) not even driving a conventional hybrid, but a full-blown internal-combustion vehicle. (I’d have bought my second hybrid if they offered one on this model.)

EVs are a kind of social contagion, heavily subsidized by the federal government, which really needs to cut it out.

This is one reason I have almost as little respect for Elon Musk as I do for He Who Shall Not Be Named (another guy who got more-or-less rich dishonorably).

From the July 15 Economist

Pangloss makes the case for AI

Mark Andreesen, giving the Panglossian version of AI, lost me early on at the patently bullshitty “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.” He reminds me of George Burns: “Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Because all those AI virtues are fakes.

I was hoping for something better, because I think there’s a better case available. In fact, I know there’s a better case to be made because I heard it made on a podcast Tuesday on the Ezra Klein show.

Freedom

Aunt Concetta told me that she didn’t like life in America because we had no freedom. That comment baffled me because, like everyone else my age, I believed that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. But she pulled me up short. “Your grandmother,” she said, “is afraid to walk down the main street at night.”

…

… That little conversation, more than anything I have read about political life, has put an indelible mark on my thinking about freedom. I have long rejected any view that reduces liberty to the results of a constitutional mechanism, or that identifies liberty with suffrage, or that defines liberty as a negative, as what the government may not tell you that you may not do.

… I think I can venture a suggestion as to gauging the degree of real freedom that a nation, or perhaps your town or your street, enjoys. It is the degree and the character of spontaneous, unencumbered, and undirected action on the street.

Anthony Esolen

I kinda sorta feel for Tommy Tuberville

Terms like “white nationalist” mean something: White nationalism is a form of white supremacy that advocates white dominance and white control. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can look it up. (On Tuesday, Tuberville admitted that white nationalists are racists.)

I don’t normally read Charles Blow, but this time, I read a little bit, including the block-quote, because The Morning Dispatch had called out Tuberville teasingly the day before:

It took him about two months and several botched attempts, but a hearty congratulations to GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama for finally saying these words in this order: “White nationalists are racists.”

I remember in law school insisting that I was a creationist. I said that because I believed that this stuff all around us, out to the furthest reaches of our telescopes, were the result of a divine creation, not an accident or the outworking of eternally-existent matter and energy. Someone pointed out that what I meant, though, was not what creationism had come to mean as a term of art. Creationism had come to mean divine creation roughly 6000 to 10,000 years ago, fixed species, etc.

“White Nationalist” has never been a term I’d apply to myself; first, because race is truly (if not exclusively, in our vexed history) a pigment of the imagination; second, because nationalism holds little to no appeal for me. But it appeared to me to mean “nationalism professed by a pale person,” and its journalistic use to be more epithet than description.

Maybe Tommy Tuberville thought as I did, and that’s why he pushed back so. But Blow cites Merriam-Webster for a term-of-art meaning that implies racist white supremacy.

I still stand by the epithet point, and believe that the term is not yet univocally racist. But sensible people, aware of its equivocal meaning, will steer clear of it.

Paris

Many people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again.

Adam Gopnik, [The Table Comes First(https://www.amazon.com/Table-Comes-First-Family-Meaning-ebook/dp/B004KPM1EY/ref=sr_1_1)

I find that very plausible.

Legalia

FINALLY someone else says it (and better than I)

The nature of expressive, creative work is also such that consumers would not ordinarily wish to risk the quality of the product or service by conscripting a reluctant vendor to create messages that contradict the vendor’s sincere personal beliefs.

Abram Pafford, “You Couldn’t Pay Me to Say That”: 303 Creative and Compelled Commercial Speech.

303 Creative was a well-warranted pre-enforcement challenge based on the proposition that Colorado’s public accommodations law was unconstitutional as applied to plaintiff’s refusal of website design for same-sex weddings. Colorado never challenged the owner’s standing, and even stipulated the facts that eventually blew a little hole in the hull of its law (which remains resolutely afloat).

Even today, pre-enforcement challenges are pending to, notably, some of the new restrictive abortion laws some states have passed, and to state bans on transgender care for minors. The Left is happy as can be with decades of pre-enforcement challenges like these — of which the Left has been the primary beneficiary. I don’t recall Right-leaning pre-enforcement challenges, other than against college speech codes, until the Obama years.

Not until after Colorado had lost did its Attorney General start joining the ignorant “fake case” chorus.

But in a sense, 303 Creative was a “fake case” — or at least an “engineered case”: the sense that in the real world, untainted by polarization and the insatiable desire of LGBTetc folks for universal affirmation, as if their sexuality were constitutional high trump, such cases would not be brought because — well, see the block quote. That’s why I put it there.

What should happen now is clear enough to me: states should disavow application of their public accommodation laws to creative professionals’ rare refusals to aid in expressing an objectionable message — with the creative professional being the sole judge of “objectionable.”

And I’ll reiterate that the key here is the right of the service provider to be free of compulsion to express sentiments they in fact disapprove. It would apply as much to, say, a Jewish graphic designer declining to work on BDS advocacy as to conservative Christians (and others) declining work on same-sex weddings. I sincerely doubt that Colorado would punish that Jewish graphic designer; this is about forcing Christians to bend the knee to the new sexual orthodoxies.

(It’s surprising how easy it is to mis-state what’s at stake here. This little item took far more time than I expected. I probably should cut some slack to those who make a living minting hot takes on complex topics for siloed readerships and who get sloppy in the process.)

Non-partisan politics

Smoke-filled rooms

I miss smoke-filled rooms.

Not the literal ones, but the ones that brought forth sane and competitive candidates back in the day.

Today, primary voters — often the most extreme members of a party — deliver us unpalatable candidates, with the only gesture toward electability being “will he be perceived as less bad than the other party’s guy?”

Yes, I’m thinking specifically of the likely nomination of Donald Trump by the GOP. But I’m not thinking exclusively of that. Hillary in 2016 is also an example.

Our Unaccountable TechLords

At almost every gathering artificial intelligence came up. I’d say people are approaching AI with a free floating dread leavened by a pragmatic commitment to make the best of it, see what it can do to make life better. It can’t be stopped any more than you can stop the tide. There’s a sense of, “It may break cancer’s deepest codes,” combined with, “It may turn on us and get us nuked.”

My offered thought: AI’s founders, funders and promoters made a big recent show of asking Congress to help them fashion moral guardrails, but to my mind there was little comfort in it. I think they had three motives. First, to be seen as humble and morally serious—aware of the complexities of this awesome new power and asking for help in thinking them through. Second, they are certain government is too incompetent and stupid to slow them down or impede them in any meaningful way, so why not. Third, when something goes wrong they can say, “But we pleaded for your help!”

That unfriendly read is based on 30 years of observing our tech leaders. They have a sense of responsibility to their vision and to their own genius, but not to people at large or the American people in particular. They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.

Peggy Noonan

My skewed perspective

There are too many sensible people writing critically and even bitterly about the government’s Covid pandemic (or is “epidemic” sufficient?) response for me to assume it just partisan politics. But I confess that something about having retired before Covidtide seems to make me largely insensible to the outrage many feel about the government response.

I even joked that “I’m an introvert; social distancing is almost my default.”

So pardon me for not joining the chorus. If I’m consistent, though, I won’t join government’s defenders, either.

But I will make this observation: during the putative lockdowns, our lowest-paid, lowest-status workers had to go ahead and work in “meatspace,” risking infection. They are our truly indispensable workers, and many of them should be paid far better than they are.

Gaming the fat-cat system

The Republican National Committee has set a threshold of 40,000 individual donors, including 200 each in 20 states or territories, to qualify for primary debates. This is supposed to assure broad support and (they say) block candidates with mostly fat-cat donors.

So, how long did it take for candidates to game that system?

So how about using fat-cat donations to buy $20 gift cards for anyone who gives $1? You can buy a lot of $1 gifts if you’re offering an instant 1900% ROI.

(David A. Graham, We’re Entering a New Era of Shady Campaign Finance)

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We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.