Finally got around to this one. Wow. That was an avalanche. A lot to chew on. Could have devoted an hour to each topic, but they just kept going.
I feel like a coach at the end of a football game after the Gatorade has been dumped on me. I know it's all a show of brotherhood and respect, but now I'm wet and cold af.
The most disturbing part for me were those stats on high school academics. The most fundamental solution there is to never lessen standards for any reason. I have zero fear that these standards can be met and exceeded, even if it took another generation. More importantly, *so* many of these issues begin and end in the home, not the school.
But all of these topics carry a certain amount of nuance that's hard to get to with two interlocutors so closely aligned--like Glenn and Heather. While I appreciate his attempts to steelman arguments from the left, I think Glenn (inadvertently) conflates the most obstreperous people on the far left with relatively serious people who simply lean left, and they are not one and the same any more than Heather MacDonald and Amy Wax.
And fwiw, violent crime is a lot more complicated than it seems. For instance, most people, including most Black people, aren't experiencing violent crime on any sort of regular basis. But it's so easy to paint a picture of a living hell with statistics. I am reminded of a Thomas Sowell interview when he alluded to a rather overused talking point about murder rates in Honduras. According to him--if I recall accurately--a shockingly high percentage of those murders occur on three streets, which is a fact that would almost certainly alter the stereotypical image of Honduran crime.
Much of the world looks at America's gun laws and our mass shootings and wonders, "What the ****?"
Fair question. But how many Americans can (personally) relate to a mass shooting? It's a pretty thin slice. We're a nation of 330mm.
"How bad is X?" Very often that depends on what we're comparing X *to*. The capacity for a people to accept/condone various ill behaviors in their midst is staggering in many ways, but so is the capacity for people to ignore situations that don't directly affect them (like crime in another person's neighborhood).
I would love to hear someone like Will Saletan chime in on this video. But I would not want to hear from a progressive troll. Big difference.
Finally got around to this one. Wow. That was an avalanche. A lot to chew on. Could have devoted an hour to each topic, but they just kept going.
I feel like a coach at the end of a football game after the Gatorade has been dumped on me. I know it's all a show of brotherhood and respect, but now I'm wet and cold af.
The most disturbing part for me were those stats on high school academics. The most fundamental solution there is to never lessen standards for any reason. I have zero fear that these standards can be met and exceeded, even if it took another generation. More importantly, *so* many of these issues begin and end in the home, not the school.
But all of these topics carry a certain amount of nuance that's hard to get to with two interlocutors so closely aligned--like Glenn and Heather. While I appreciate his attempts to steelman arguments from the left, I think Glenn (inadvertently) conflates the most obstreperous people on the far left with relatively serious people who simply lean left, and they are not one and the same any more than Heather MacDonald and Amy Wax.
And fwiw, violent crime is a lot more complicated than it seems. For instance, most people, including most Black people, aren't experiencing violent crime on any sort of regular basis. But it's so easy to paint a picture of a living hell with statistics. I am reminded of a Thomas Sowell interview when he alluded to a rather overused talking point about murder rates in Honduras. According to him--if I recall accurately--a shockingly high percentage of those murders occur on three streets, which is a fact that would almost certainly alter the stereotypical image of Honduran crime.
Much of the world looks at America's gun laws and our mass shootings and wonders, "What the ****?"
Fair question. But how many Americans can (personally) relate to a mass shooting? It's a pretty thin slice. We're a nation of 330mm.
"How bad is X?" Very often that depends on what we're comparing X *to*. The capacity for a people to accept/condone various ill behaviors in their midst is staggering in many ways, but so is the capacity for people to ignore situations that don't directly affect them (like crime in another person's neighborhood).
I would love to hear someone like Will Saletan chime in on this video. But I would not want to hear from a progressive troll. Big difference.