More Sweeney Boob Discourse, Deflationary Liberalism, and More

Links and commentary for September 2024

Below are the links for September. I cover topics including the relationship between civil rights and the Cold War, the Founders ending up blackpilled about America, the decline of Red Lobster, how The Apprentice made Trump president, and the role of oil in twentieth century history.

1. Can you believe the Sydney Sweeney boob discourse is still going on?

Here’s a new piece from Newsweek. This article angered me, as it lumped Hawk Tuah in as part of the same phenomenon, which I hate.

This one from Vox is better. The author groups in a lot of things on the right and argues they’re part of the same outlook. But the rightists who want to ban abortion tend not to be the ones who like the idea of hot women showing off their bodies. They’re allies of convenience for the most part, though I’m sure the author is right that there are some men who want both. In my original Sweeney piece, I agreed with the author that The Man Show was bad. Women can be attractive and people can enjoy it but they shouldn’t be publicly degraded is fine as a synthesis.

2. I enjoyed this history of neoliberalism from Sam Hammond. I don’t really agree with the conclusion that it failed in an objective sense or that the shifts he discusses caused the legitimacy crisis. I’m something of a technological determinist here, I think AM radio, getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine, the rise of Fox and finally the internet and social media caused our current unrest, not the lack of labor unions or other intermediate organizations between citizens and their elites.

Here is a followup piece on “Deflationary Liberalism,” or the idea that freedom is less a matter of the triumph of an ideology and more a process of discovering how to turn negative and zero sum games into positive sum games between groups. A fascinating way of looking at liberalism that I’m going to give a lot more thought to.

3. Cremieux on the Protestant origins of modernity, via the Turks, who fought Catholics and therefore forced them to stop suppressing Protestants for a while. A twist on the standard story of Protestantism being important here is that Crem doesn't believe Protestants were necessarily more tolerant or had a more liberal culture or anything, only that they were worse at suppressing science because they were fragmented. I've long been convinced that Protestantism was key to modernity, as I think the evidence here is strong. But I don't believe that Protestant and Catholic cultures are pretty much interchangeable except for the latter being worse at stomping out dissent. It was taken for granted in the precolonial period and throughout the first two centuries of the United States that Protestantism was more conducive to individual liberty and I doubt that this was a just-so story to explain American success. The question is why did they care about liberty so much in the first place, and use it as their standard of judgment?

4. Very interesting on government data collection, with a focus on immigration numbers. The Census says there was a net migration total of 1.1 million in 2023, soon to be adjusted to 1.4 million, compared to 3.7 million for the CBO. That’s quite the difference! And the number we use ends up determining things like the unemployment rate. I’m still unsure whether to be appreciative of the competent professionals in government who work on this data or declare it all witchcraft.