On the Scott A.'s

I've been a Dilbert fan since his comic rolled out in our college newspaper; this would have been late-80s early-90s, I can't remember exactly. I read some of his books, though by no means all. I started listening to his daily podcast during the pandemic once it became clear there were no experts, and I appreciated his approach of explaining to people how they should think about it rather than what to think about it. And I quickly signed up for his Locals once Dilbert became subscription-only. But he obviously had more devoted fans than me, and I apparently never blogged about his cancellation.

With that said, here is Scott Alexander on Scott Adams: here and here.

In both posts, Alexander devotes some pixels to Adams' alleged racism, about which I am indifferent. But his final comment (in the footnotes):

Although I don’t think Adams’ cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice. 4chan’s deployment of the “It’s Okay To Be White” slogan was (maybe literally) out of Adams’ book - say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to “What? You’re upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly!” when anyone calls you on it. This manuever didn’t fool woke people at all; the people wearing “It’s Okay To Be White” t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well.

I've never been able to make much sense of 4chan, but I did follow writers who follow 4chan (is it still going?), and, um, may have had some family members who were locally involved in the whole 2015 (I think) "It's Okay to be White" campaign. Note that the Left's buildup to "ending whiteness" had already started, so contra Scott, the slogan didn't need a "secret offensive meaning" for it to draw the opposition it did. Nor was it necessary for the originators of the slogan to be racist for other reasons (about which, again, I am indifferent); insofar as it was an assertion of white identity, there was no meaning that the Woke would find acceptable.

But having remembered the 2015 history, I also remembered that the slogan was denounced by exactly 100% of the college presidents on whose campuses it appeared. So when Adams ranted about how the slogan was polling in 2023, I was surprised. "Wait, we got 83% approval from whites? And 51% of blacks? That's awesome! Woke is so DEAD ! ! !" So Alexander is on to something here: Adams, God bless him, apparently really didn't know any of this history.

In Defense of Prop 13

Scott reposts commenter Mariana:

I genuinely don’t want you to take this personally. When you or someone over on Slow Boring starts speculating about how I, a young boomer, should be forced out of my nice house that I bought with my own money, it truly makes me want to get a gun and shoot you. Scott, I’m not going to do that, so please don’t ban me. I’m explaining how murderously angry it makes me feel. So every other age group gets to have whatever goods and services are available at a market rate, but old people have to move to shitty apartments because we’re worth so much less than young people?

I will take every legal means at my disposal to prevent you from doing this. I will block you in the courts, I will vote for evil totalitarian bastards if they support my property rights, I will seriously do anything to keep you from patting me on the head and telling me to move on because I suddenly don’t have a right to my own house, because some younger person suddenly wants it.

And replies:

Several people made something like this argument, but I think it’s based on a (understandable) misunderstanding.

The policy that most people in James’ camp are proposing is to repeal California Proposition 13 (or other jurisdictions’ local variants) which lock property taxes to the value of a house when it was bought (rather than the value now). This benefits old people, who might have bought their houses 30 years ago when prices were much lower. Repealing it, and making everyone pay property taxes based on the current price of their house, would incentivize (in some cases, force) old people to move to cheaper houses.

If you treat the Proposition 13 regime as natural, then this is an attack on old people’s rights. But Proposition 13 was only passed in 1978, and plenty of states have no local equivalent. If you treat the pre-13 state of affairs as natural, then 13 is an attack on young people’s rights, and repealing it merely restores the proper fair state of the universe. This is another of those marked vs. unmarked things.

I agree that a lot of the talk around this sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent, but nobody has the right to artificially-depressed property taxes.

As he notes elsewhere, Scott is conflicted about Prop 13, so these paragraphs should be treated as an exercise in "steelmanning".

Full disclosure: I support Prop 13 without reservation, or if you prefer, I would support it were I a Californian; my jurisdiction has nothing like it. My support isn't just because I'm an older Gen-X with above-average real-estate holdings (though I am surely that, too); I liked the idea of Prop 13 when I first heard about it in the 1980s. I was in my libertarian phase back then and favorably disposed towards other pro-housing policies like upzoning.

The part of this discussion that "sounds kind of ethnic-cleansing-adjacent" is that very few among Scott's commenters are claiming that California government needs more money for essential services. The framing is that biasing taxes in favor of long-time residents is distorting the distribution of housing resources; the subtext is: you have a house I want, so I will use tax policy to take it from you.

It's a very weird position for a Progressive. To the extent that new residents can afford the inflated house prices to begin with, they will on average be more wealthy. To the extent that they are working age, they have higher incomes on average than those past working age. So Prop 13 is net-effect shifting taxes to more wealthy residents away from less wealthy residents.

Generally, my preferred was of dealing with high housing prices is to lower demand by 50M immigrants. Get back to me after we've tried that.

On Spanking the Generals

My first thought on SECDEF Hegseth's "the era of woke is over" speech to the flag officers assembled for this purpose: kewl.

Subsequent thoughts:

• This is all a light show for "the base", with no further import.

• On the other hand, Donald Trump is president, and I'm not. Presumably, he knows a few things about how to use and maintain power. Things that involve bases and light-shows. Things that Dr. why-can't-we-just-have-good-policy Phi will never know.

• But generals are not going to care about any of this. Generals care about exactly two things: 1) getting promoted; 2) not getting fired. They are, in this sense, pristine sociopaths. It's how they came to occupy the positions they have. SECDEF can remonstrate till the cows come home; meanwhile, the generals will always follow the incentives.

• But the rest of the military -- those who believe, as I once did, that the point of the enterprise is to win a war now and again -- is also an audience. Hegseth's speech, given publicly, does create among them certain expectations of intermediate leadership. This ought to make it difficult for the generals, and the colonels under them, to go back to blathering about how Diversity Is Our Strength. Difficult in the sense that, were they to try, the troops will notice the incongruity, and speak up about it in ways that make the people in charge of the promotions and firings take notice. Perhaps the correct incentives will be put in place after all.

Personally, I'd have had the lot of them shot for Afghanistan. But Donald Trump is president, and I'm not. So we'll try it his way.

The Rehabilitation of Charlie Kirk

I am going to make a prediction. But first some background.

Some years ago, perhaps on the occasion of Gerald Ford's passing, I made this observation:

There is none so beloved of Democrats than a dead Republican.

I am reasonably certain that, were I to dig through their archives, I could find expressed in MSM sources some variants of the following:

• Trump (or Bush '43), you're no Ronald Reagan!

• Reagan, you're no Barry Goldwater!

• Goldwater, you're no Robert Taft!

• Etc.

It's easy to see why. Once safely dead, older Republicans can serve as those against whom younger Republicans can be compared unfavorably. My prediction is that within the next three years, the NYT will be putting the recently late Charlie Kirk to exactly this end, probably against JD Vance.

I regard this as a non-trivial prediction under the present circumstances. As we have seen (cite: the growing database of anti-social reactions, publicly and under their own names, of prominent if not 1st tier Democrat-aligned personalities and even Democrat office-holders), Kirk's assassination has been an occasion for unrestrained glee throughout the Cathedral. As of this writing, this approach is in the process of backfiring hard, not just on the people getting fired, but on the Left brand generally. When an organization as gay and retarded as the NFL finds it expedient to conduct pre-game Charlie Kirk tributes, Dems, you're not winning the culture war.

A fact not lost on tier-one Democrats. I predict that in three years time they will have reasserted control of the narrative and memory-holed the current ugliness. They will instead be trying a new tack: Charlie Kirk was ever so much better than whichever figure on the right most threatens them then.

First of all, it's hard to keep hating a dead guy.

Second, Charlie will have given them much to work with. He was exemplary in his personal grace and magnanimity, an expression of his Christianity. Further, he throughout his career was never more than a few steps away from normie Republican. I hasten to add that "normie Republican" has evolved over the last decade, and Charlie evolved with it. But when I first became aware of Turning Point back then, it struck me as yet more of the Bush-era "conservatism" that no longer interested me; it was only after his passing that I caught up to how important he had become. My point is that when the time comes, the NYT will produce Kirk-isms to use against the 2028 Republican presidential candidate.

Only Thugs Need Apply

My social media feed has been replete with this meme:

Probably not.

One of the ironies of the (I hope) now-winding-down BLM era is that the two egregiously racist mass murders of blacks didn't provoke much in the way of a lawless reaction. Unless I completely missed it (and correct me in the comments if I did), there wasn't any rioting in the wake of either the Charleston church shooting or the Buffalo supermarket shooting. Even in the specific category of deaths at the hands of law enforcement, again the most egregious case of John Crawford III got a small, quiet demonstration from, IIRC, white middle-aged members of Buckeye Firearms, and exactly nothing from his fellow blacks.

Rather, blacks reserve their propensity for riot and mayhem for career criminals who get their comeuppance. Michael Brown and Jacob Blake violently resisted arrest and were deservedly shot. Eric Garner and George Floyd passively resisted arrest and died by accident. Granted Freddy Gray should have been better secured in the back of his paddy wagon, but he certainly deserved to be there. All these guys got riots.

My theory for this -- only a hypothesis, really, since I don't have any direct evidence -- is that these riots are stoked by Antifa operatives under circumstances such as will be maximally polarizing. But my point is that a white lowlife murdering a pretty black girl on the train, were it to ever actually happen, would probably not set off a riot.

Social vs. Physical Danger

Some of the abundant commentary on the murder of Iryna Zarutska has focused on her apparent lack of situational awareness. Steve Crowder, for instance, discussed it at length yesterday. This is surely correct, but it occurred to me that while Iryna's behavior was poorly suited to protecting her from physical hazards, it did seem optimized for protecting her from social hazards.

Watching the video of her last moments, I was reminded of the scene from the movie Anora (free on Kanopy) where the title character is riding the subway home from her job at the strip club. (Apologies in advance if my vocabulary for this sort of thing hasn't been updated since the '80s.) The film leans hard into the contrast: on the clock, Anora the prostitute is warm and charming as customers stuff money in her g-string; off it, she wears baggy clothes, clamps her ears with over-the-ear headphones, clamps her face with a thousand yard stare. All calculated to convey the message: do not even thing about talking to me.

Likewise, Iryna. Whatever she might have been looking for in her personal life, she quite reasonably believed she wasn't finding it late at night on the subway. So she tucked her face under a ballcap (a style choice that I noticed had become common among young women at the gym a few years ago) and absorbed herself in her phone: don't even think about talking to me.

Religiosity vs. Time

In reference to a Pew study on intergenerational religiosity, Scott writes:

Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations.

Okay, but those generations add up.

Here is the Pew data as a matrix. I have reversed the row order such that both row and column indicies increase with religiosity. I have also subtracted 1% from element (4,4) such that the table sums to 1.0.

PEW =

0.0600	0.0100	0.0100	0
0.0400	0.0800	0.0300	0.0100
0.0300	0.0900	0.1600	0.0300
0.0200	0.0500	0.1400	0.2400

Note these are joint probabilities. To find the religious probabilities of the parent generation, we must sum all columns in each row (all code is MATLAB):

P_parent = sum(PEW,2);

P_parent'

ans =

0.0800 0.1600 0.3100 0.4500

To find the religiosity of each subsequent generation, we need the conditional probabilities, which we can derive from Bayes' Theorem:

P_child_given_parent = PEW./repmat(P_parent,1,4) 

P_child_given_parent =

0.7500	0.1250	0.1250	0
0.2500	0.5000	0.1875	0.0625
0.0968	0.2903	0.5161	0.0968
0.0444	0.1111	0.3111	0.5333

Finally, we construct a table showing the generational change over time:

for gen = 1:10

    R_gen(gen,:) = P_parent' * P_child_given_parent^(gen-1);

end

R_gen =

0.0800	0.1600	0.3100	0.4500
0.1500	0.2300	0.3400	0.2800
0.2153	0.2636	0.3245	0.1966
0.2675	0.2748	0.3050	0.1527
0.3056	0.2763	0.2899	0.1281
0.3321	0.2748	0.2795	0.1137
0.3498	0.2727	0.2726	0.1048
0.3616	0.2709	0.2682	0.0993
0.3693	0.2695	0.2653	0.0959
0.3743	0.2686	0.2635	0.0937

Which we can plot:

So, clearly, the Very Religious are the long-term demographic losers. My first thought was that we could make this up in volume, but then I realized that the initial table confounds our greater on-average fertility with the starting percentages; this is a poll of the children, so the children of very religious families were already more numerous among the respondents, assuming the poll was representative. My calculation of the conditional probability assumes fertility is equal, but I'm pretty sure I would need additional fertility data and a way to map it on to these categories in order to correct this.

My second thought is that these statistics might be biased with respect to "family" religiosity: it is plausible that children's characterization of their family's religiosity may be colored by their own. For instance, a child from a "somewhat" religious family who is personally "not at all" religious, might exaggerate family religiosity to "very". OTOH, I'm not sure this matters for predicting the trend.