We don't have a crime problem. We have a gun problem.

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Henry Olsen at the Washington Post, on the FBI's scary murder statistics: "Murders in the United States rose by 30 percent in 2020, the largest one-year increase on record. There are likely many factors that contributed to the spike, but there’s one thing that clearly did not help: the blanket anti-police mantra adopted by many urban and national leaders after the killing of George Floyd"

It pains me to admit he might be right*. Here's The Guardian in July: 

Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 – even before pandemic-related shutdowns started in March, the analysis found. But there was also a “structural break” in the data in June, indicating “a large, statistically significant increase” in the homicide rate, around the same time as the mass protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

But also: 

A preprint study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that a spike in gun purchases during the early months of the pandemic was associated with a nearly 8% increase in gun violence from March through May, or 776 additional fatal and nonfatal shooting injuries nationwide. The researchers found that states that had lower levels of violent crime pre-Covid saw a stronger connection between additional gun purchases and more gun violence.

And indeed, here's a notable paragraph in another WaPo article on the FBI's statistics:

The FBI data also shows how much killing in America is fueled by shootings. Guns accounted for 73 percent of homicides in 2019, but that increased to 76 percent of homicides in 2020. Gun killings rose 55 percent in Houston, from 221 in 2019 to 343 in 2020. Overall, the city saw more than 400 killings last year.

It's not just that we have more homicides, but a higher proportion of homicides are committed with guns -- fueled by the presence of more guns out in society. We don't have a crime problem, or at least not just a crime problem. We have a gun problem. 

* Chicken-and-egg question: Does the murder rate spring from anti-police sentiment, or from police delegitimizing themselves through things like murdering civilians on the street? Not sure the two can be untangled.

Reading…

 …a good novel on paper, not on a screen, slows my brain down wonderfully. 

Milley's challenge: How do we stop presidents from committing nuclear genocide?

I agree with a lot in this piece by Tom Z. Collina of the Ploughshares Fund: 

Just after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Gen. Mark Milley faced an impossible choice: should he allow President Trump to retain sole authority to start nuclear war, or should he intervene to block such an order?  

Unfortunately, under existing policy the only way to safeguard the nuclear arsenal from an unstable president is not to elect one. Once in office, the president gains the absolute authority to start a nuclear war. Within minutes, the president can unleash hundreds of atomic bombs, or just one. He does not need a second opinion. The defense secretary has no say, and Congress has no role.

In retrospect, voters should never have entrusted Trump with the power to end the world. But do we really think any president should have this power? By now, it should be clear that no one person should have the unilateral power to end our civilization. Such unchecked authority is undemocratic, unnecessary and extremely dangerous.

But I'm skeptical of his proposed solution:

President Joe Biden needs to fix the system for himself and all future presidents.

First, Biden should announce he will share authority to use nuclear weapons first with a select group in Congress. The Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war, not the president. The first use of nuclear weapons is clearly an act of war.

Second, Biden should also declare that the United States will never start a nuclear war and would use the bomb only in retaliation.

Leaving aside whether the U.S. should declare a first-strike off-limits -- something that should happen, but I'm skeptical will -- Collina's fix basically involves the problem he identifies in the first place: It requires continuing to elect non-nutty presidents. That's far from guaranteed. 

Biden could announce that he'll share nuke authorities with Congress. Subsequent presidents could revoke that pledge, though -- and if they're anything like Trump, they probably will. The only real way to limit a president's power over nuclear war is for Congress to pass a law.  That hasn't happened yet, either, but perhaps Gen. Milley's experience will persuade enough members that it's time.

Rod Dreher and Robert E. Lee: The little-known third option

 Dreher offers up a semi-defense of Lee, reflecting on a 1970s-era essay by Wendell Berry: 

As Berry makes clear, the tragedy of Robert E. Lee was that no matter which choice he made, there would have been pain. For Lee to have remained loyal to the Union would not have entailed mere disagreement with his family and his people; it would have required him to make war on them.

This is something I don’t think we fully consider today — that is, what it means to make war (a real shooting war) on your own family. Could you do it today, to remain loyal to the government in Washington? Even though we are far more connected and aware today, thanks to technology, than the Americans of the 1860s were, it is still a hell of a thing to ask people to take up arms against their own friends and family to be loyal to a distant abstraction.

Would you turn your abilities against your own people? Even if those people believed wrong things? Even if they believed wicked things? I could conceive of a circumstance under which I could do that, but it would be extreme. I would like to think that I would have fought against the slave state of the Confederacy, but I think it would have been so very difficult for a Southerner in 1861 to have turned his back on everything and everyone he had ever known to take up arms against them, even if he believed their cause was unjust.

There was a third option, of course: Not to make war at all.

I understand that would have been a difficult choice to make, particularly for Lee, a lifelong military man. I suspect there is no realistic counterfactual that involves him choosing neither to fight against the Union nor to make war on his own family. It's likely he would have been imprisoned or otherwise persecuted -- by one side or the other -- to put his military skills to use. Still, Lee made a choice, and one of the choices on offer was to sit this one out. Instead he lead an army in defense of slavery and for the dissolution of his country. It wasn't a great choice. 

Losing sleep over the pandemic

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 Vox:

When the pandemic hit, rates of insomnia spiked around the world, driven by everything from the stress of living during an international public health crisis to the changes in daily life wrought by lockdowns. “People had additional responsibilities, new challenges, much more uncertainty,” Lauren Hale, a professor of family, population, and preventive medicine at Stony Brook University, told Vox.

And as the delta variant continues to spread around the country, that uncertainty and its effects on sleep may not have abated. Some people have just gotten used to disrupted cycles and 3 am anxiety spirals; it’s how life is now.

I've mentioned this before, but my experience has been totally the opposite. After nearly a decade of sleep deprivation -- to the point that work was nearly impossible, depression gripped me, and I expected to die any day -- I finally started sleeping again not long into the pandemic. Some of this, I think, was due to quarantine-induced diet changes: I stopped eating fried food so much, and I stopped drinking caffeinated coffee because anxiety was producing heart palpitations. Within a few months, I was sleeping better than I had in years, with huge results: Less depression, more energy, more hope. Sleep, I've come to believe, is the most important factor in my well-being. 

Are evangelicalism and Trumpism the same thing?

 Interesting news from Pew:

Contrary to what some may have expected, a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data finds that there has been no large-scale departure from evangelicalism among White Americans. In fact, there is solid evidence that White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.

Additionally, the surveys do not clearly show that White evangelicals who opposed Trump were significantly more likely than Trump supporters to drop the evangelical label. The data also shows that Trump’s electoral performance among White evangelicals was even stronger in 2020 than in 2016, partially due to increased support among White voters who described themselves as evangelicals throughout this period.

I'm tempted to think this isn't sustainable, if only for reasons of tactics. Evangelicals tend to be a bit mission-oriented, believing that they're called to share "the good news" of Jesus Christ. Trumpism, on the other hand, is fairly insular -- more interested in cultivating the base than expanding its appeal. Trump and Christ aren't the same thing, of course, but there's a difference in mindsets -- and if evangelicalism and Trumpism become closer to being the same thing, I suspect it's evangelicalism that will lose its character.

Update:

We got our Child Tax Credit check today...

 ...but neither me nor my wife quit our jobs. 

One more thought about the Woodward book

John Adams said we have a government "of laws and not of men." But reporting on the late Trump era suggests that it's both, actually. When lawful governance was teetering under Trump's assaults, it was a few individuals -- a Mark Milley here, a Dan Quayle(!!!) there, a lone Michigan Republican  voting for the truth and not his party's inclinations  -- who provided the nudges needed to preserve the system, and perhaps even the country. Occasionally (as with Milley) they had to do it in ways that -- on the surface, at least -- seemed to contradict the rule of law, and of civilian control of the military. But what was the alternative?

The real villains of the Woodward book? Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell.

It was clear then -- and clearer now -- that Trump should have been removed from office after Jan. 6. Pence could've led the 25th Amendment option. He didn't. McConnell could have sped up the impeachment process. He slow-walked it. That forced a group of people worried for their nation into apparently extra-legal maneuverings to ensure that Trump didn't destroy everything. When the responsible people aren't responsible, bad choices are the only option. 

Rod Dreher plays dummy, again.

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I've previously expressed my feelings about Rod Dreher in this space, but dammit I can't quit him. So of course I read the latest New Yorker profile of Dreher and his dalliance with Hungary's right-illiberal Orbanistas. 

He mounted his usual defense of Viktor Orban:

Quite quickly, in the course of his dinners and meetings and observational trips on Budapest’s convenient public-transit system, Dreher began to form a dissenting opinion of the political situation in Hungary. “I was there about ten days before I realized that eighty, ninety per cent of the American narrative about the country just isn’t true,” he told me recently. He had heard Hungary described as an authoritarian state, but in Budapest he saw everyone seemed free to speak their mind. Dreher noted that he had appeared at a conference with an opponent of Orbán, who was critical of the Prime Minister. What’s more, Orbán, Dreher came to think, had a keener grasp of the “crisis—political, even civilizational” facing traditionalists than nearly any American conservative. Dreher liked how openly nationalist Orbán was, picking fights with his partners in the European Union when it grew too progressive, and how he had often set aside free-market principles in order to promote conservative social values—offering state subsidies to women to stay home and have more Hungarian children.

Needless to say, however, I wasn't surprised when I got to this section: 

When I asked about Orbán’s campaigns against the Roma—his government refused to pay court-ordered compensation to Roma children who had been confined to segregated schools, and his political party blamed George Soros when pressed about it—Dreher, who does not speak Hungarian, told me he had heard that many Roma supported Orbán, but “I don’t know much, to be honest.”

If you follow Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, you'll probably notice this is a fairly frequent thing he does. Americans don't understand what Hungary's really like! It's so much better than you heard! But when pressed on specific critiques about the regime, Dreher suggests he doesn't really understand what Hungary's really like either. I don't know much, to be honest. 

My conclusion: Dreher wants a strongman to punch his enemies in the mouth, but doesn't want to think too much about what happens when people start bleeding as a result. 

Exercise and mental health

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It never ceases to amaze me: I get cranky and depressed, unable to see anything good about the day or my future. All the good things are over in my life. It's just a matter of playing out the string until I die, to be forgotten and legacyless.

And then I go to the gym and move.

I am no paragon of fitness -- overweight and broken. I will never be beautiful again. But I don't exercise to be beautiful, or really even in the hopes of extending my lifespan. I do it to feel a little better about life, right now.

Bag O' Books: 'The Constitution of Knowledge'

When I first started Jonathan Rauch's "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," I was preparing to arm myself with information and thinking to battle with Trump-style con artists and their followers, the kind of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly. I got a tiny bit of that. But I also came away with a bit more sympathy for the people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly.

It's not that I think they might be right. They're emphatically not. But as Rauch tells us in this book, there is a lot of research telling us that human beings -- not just conservatives -- have a tendency to filter knowledge through the lens of their tribes. And once a view is adopted by the tribe, it's hard to make its members accommodate contrary facts. "Once a belief becomes important to the way we think about ourselves or important to the group we identify with, changing it becomes very costly," Rauch writes, citing the psychologist Dan Kahan. "Humans are equipped with some of evolution’s finest mental circuitry to protect us from changing our minds when doing so might alienate us from our group." When people believe stupid things and keep believing stupid things because all their friends believe stupid things, that's profoundly human.

Honestly, it makes me wonder what I believe fervently because the people around me believe it too.

This isn't to say that Rauch lets the Trumpian grifters off the hook. The book exists in large part because of them. "Trump and his media echo chambers were normalizing lying in order to obliterate the distinction, in the public realm, between truth and untruth." But it also exists in large part because of Rauch's concerns about progressive "cancel culture," citing a number of incidents on college campuses. "Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?" he asks. "The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent observers; cancel culture relies on mob action."

This book works best as a primer on liberalism and its achievements. (One caveat: Rauch repeatedly refers to the informal structures of knowledge creation and debate as "the Constitution of Knowledge" -- hey, that's thename of the book! -- a punchy but ultimately tiresome rebranding that becomes an overused tic.) Rauch celebrates the virtues of truth-seeking, fierce debate, free speech, thick skins and keeping an open mind to the possibility that you might be wrong about stuff -- and that somebody else might be right. And yes, it would be nice if we could return to the days of "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it."

But Rauch's weakness comes when offering ideas about what to about the present crisis of disinformation and epistemic closure. The bulk of his "what now" chapter focuses on countering cancel culture and sticking up for your right to explore controversial ideas on campus. There's nothing wrong with that, but from where I'm sitting the more urgent threat to liberalism comes from the Trumpist right. "There are state and local local laws in Republican-led states and communities on the books and being passed RIGHT NOW that are restricting what can be taught and what ideas can be discussed in schools," Nikole Hannah-Jones observed on Twitter recently. Those laws aren't being passed by woke undergrads. Readers probably come to Rauch's book already convinced -- more or less -- of the merits of truth and liberalism. They'll leave even more convinced those ideas and institutions are worth saving from the forces that most endanger it. I'm just not sure they'll have much of an idea how.

Mom

My mother would have turned 70 years old today. Spending the evening listening to one of her old albums.

Why I'm in favor of anti-vax stigma

AP has a piece today questioning the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" storyline that has emerged amidst the Delta-fueled COVID surge. Some hospitalized people are vaccinated, after all, but the broader concern seems to be that some medical observers worry about stigmatizing the unvaxxed.

“It is true that the unvaccinated are the biggest driver, but we mustn’t forget that the vaccinated are part of it as well, in part because of the delta variant,” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. “The pandemic clearly involves all people, not just the unvaccinated.”

Branding it “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” could have the unintended consequence of stigmatizing the unvaccinated, he added. “We should not partition them as the exclusive problem,” Topol said.

Instead officials should call out vaccine disinformation, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A sketchy stream of dubious arguments continues to undermine public confidence.

“We can say that the virus has reemerged in the southern United States, primarily among unvaccinated people, but it doesn’t mean we have to blame the unvaccinated,” Hotez said. “The people we have to target are the purveyors of disinformation, and we have to recognize that the unvaccinated themselves are victims of disinformation.”

Well, yes and no.

I'm all for calling out the purveyors of disinformation, but it's probably important to recognize there's an audience out there for the disinformation. People make choices not just based on correct information, but how they feel about things, and one of the factors that shapes those feelings is whether something is broadly understood -- by the culture, by community, by neighbors and friends -- to be good or bad. 

What's more, the medical community understands this and has used it to further public health goals in this country. Have you seen an anti-smoking ad in the last few years? They can be gruesome beyond belief. 

There is information being conveyed here, yes. But some of the information is designed to make smoking seem, frankly, unnattractive. You don't just see this ad and want to protect your health. You want to make sure you don't end up looking or sounding like this poor woman. The point here is to create visceral disgust -- to create a stigma against the act of smoking.

And these efforts, along with increasingly stringent regulation over decades, has worked.

Adult smoking rates dropped from 42% in 1965 to 14% in 2019, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has not released last year's data but the Quitline report cited U.S. Treasury Department data showing cigarette sales increased 1% in 2020 after dropping 4 to 5% each year since 2015.

"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" is admittedly a broad description, but it also seems to capture the heart of the problem facing the United States: 

By late July, a total of about 26 adults per 100,000 vaccinated people had been hospitalized for COVID-19. That’s compared with about 431 hospitalized people for every 100,000 unvaccinated individuals — a rate roughly 17 times as high as for those who were vaccinated. The data come from 13 states, including California, Georgia and Utah.

So I'm fine with continuing to use the label, despite AP's objections. I don't love "stigma" generally. But sometimes it has its uses. 

The New York Times, theology and the death penalty

This NYT podcast featuring David French and Elizabeth Bruenig debating the death penalty is more loaded with theological arguments than just about any supposedly secular thing I've heard in a long time.