Cancel Everything

I'm Megan McArdle, and this was my week

This week, my columns ended up tied together by an unexpected thread: Hemal Jhaveri, a young editor at USA Today who reacted to the Boulder massacre by tweeting that the perpetrator of such attacks is “always an angry white man. Always.”

As you may be aware, the perpetrator turned out to be Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a Syrian immigrant. Alissa came to the United States when he was young, and according to his brother, he was bullied in school for his name and his Muslim faith. Technically, the US Census counts people of Middle Eastern heritage as “white”, as a number of commenters pointed out to me. But just as obviously, this was not the kind of white man that Jhaveri, and the many others offering similar remarks, had in mind.

As I wrote, what they were picturing was “another sort of White man — you know, white supremacist, entitled, conservative, marinated in gun culture”. Many of these tweets were deleted when Alissa’s identity became known; Jhaveri was fired while my column was still in edits.

If Alissa had turned out to be someone like Robert Aaron Long, the murderer who attacked Atlanta day spas, one suspects that many of those tweets would have stayed up. And yet, as I noted in that column, they would still have been just as wrong.

Statistically, white men aren’t more likely to commit these kinds of mass public shootings than any other groups. Statistically, they are no more likely to be apprehended alive by police than are other mass shooters. Which makes this sort of talk wrong in another sense: it propagates a false racial stereotype.

Unfortunately, this assumption is all too common in the wake of these tragedies; just this week, MSNBC erroneously reported that the man who allegedly drove a car into Capitol Police was white. The suspected perpetrator, Noah Green, is not white, and appears to have been a follower of Louis Farrakhan.

I thought that would be all I had to say on the subject. Then Jhaveri got fired, and I wanted to say something else: that shouldn’t have been a firing offense. We need less of this sort of thing, not more of it.

Yet such an argument would have to be addressed to conservatives, since they were the ones who complained—and as I discovered when I discussed it with conservatives, even moderates were getting less receptive to the idea that the best way to fight cancel culture was to model tolerance. They are becoming convinced that they only way cancel culture can be turned back is to give as good as they get.

So instead of writing another homily on mutual tolerance, I found myself explaining why I’m pretty sure mutually assured destruction won’t help conservatives fight cancel culture.

Even if canceling left-wing writers and professors somehow made their employers sufficiently afraid of embarrassment or turmoil to force those institutions toward armistice, which conservatives could promise them a cease-fire? We’ve collectively arrived at this place because neither left nor right has institutions powerful enough to constrain their side’s militants, which means deterrence is bound to fail.

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Elsewhere at the Washington Post:

Roger Lowenstein points out that a national $15 minimum wage makes no sense.

When economists talk about the minimum wage, they envision a "sweet spot," or a range, that best accommodates these trade-offs. But the sweet spot is drastically different across the country. It even varies within states. Chicago's living costs are 35 percent higher than those in Danville, in east-central Illinois, according to the Pew Research Center. Nationally, the variations are greater. The cost of living in Manhattan is three times that in Joplin, Mo. 

Radley Balko says we shouldn’t read too much into the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial:

Years from now, Chauvin’s trial itself will seem relatively inconsequential. We’ll see Floyd’s death, on the other hand, as an incident of profound consequence. Along with other high-profile cases such as those of Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake and Rayshard Brooks, Floyd’s passing sparked the largest, widest-reaching wave of civil rights protests in U.S. history, generating a tectonic shift in the public debate over race, policing and criminal justice.

Josh Rogin says we have to reckon with the possibility that covid-19 escaped from a lab:

Further challenging the official narrative, Redfield told CNN in an interview released last week that he believes the outbreak likely did originate from research in the Wuhan labs, based on how the virus acts. But though he is a trained virologist who saw the underlying intelligence, he was accused of spreading speculation and even fueling hate.

George Will also posts his annual baseball quiz. (I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how I did.)

And over at the magazine, Eric Garcia asks why Latino men like his father have shifted towards Trump:

…when a group shifts dramatically, it’s impossible not to at least guess at broad explanations. And for Democrats, there’s a lot riding on trying to get these explanations right. Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that no party is entitled to a constituency. Every campaign has to work to actively court Latino voters. Instead of expecting — as many progressives do — Latino men to automatically vote against someone who works against their “self-interest,” it might be better to ask what Latino men actually see as their best interests and how they view themselves — and then adjust accordingly.

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Substackery:

Noah Millman defends vaccine passports on the grounds that they just don’t matter that much:

The purpose of an immunity passport, then, would be to enable activities that are unsafe and also non-essential — like going to a nightclub — to open to vaccinated people only, and thereby open them more quickly and/or with larger capacity while only a fraction of the population is vaccinated. They’re also a plausible mechanism to facilitate the restart of international travel, since receiving countries could dispense with quarantine requirements for travelers with demonstrable immunity. That’s why I say the idea of immunity passports is fundamentally about the economy, not about protecting public health.

Glenn Loury offers us Daniel Bessner offering a defense of cancel culture I hadn’t quite seen before:

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Mexico in the 1960s where the only way to attack one party rule was to basically do what were called denunciations, which is the exact same thing as cancel culture. There’s no space, there’s no political mechanism, so the only thing you can do is basically explode in a paroxysm of anger.

And it’s not a surprise, with a lot of particularly the elite media cancel culture: two weeks, three weeks later you find out that actually everyone hated this person and they weren’t retiring or they weren’t pushed out, and so this was the weapon that people used, the powerful weapon of the moment, to basically force something for which they had no other mechanism. Right?

How many times have you heard someone who was canceled—and I agree, it’s a real thing and I agree there’s lots of excesses—but very rarely do you hear, “Oh, that guy was actually a great guy who took everyone seriously and really responded to people’s demands and they interacted in a nice way and oh, no, they made this one misstep and they were canceled.” I can’t think of one. And there’s a reason for that.

Because this is basically a circumvention of a system that has collapsed, in my opinion, a system that is no longer viewed as legitimate.

Zeynep Tukfeci wants us to build a wall of vaccines around surging variants:

The solution is obvious and doable: We should immediately match variant surges with vaccination surges that target the most vulnerable by going where they are, in the cities and states experiencing active outbreaks—an effort modeled on a public-health tool called “ring vaccination.” Ring vaccination involves vaccinating contacts and potential contacts of cases, essentially smothering the outbreak by surrounding it with immunity. We should do this, but on a surge scale, essentially ring-vaccinating whole cities and even states.

If you need a drink after all those unpleasant topics, my husband gives subscribers to his cocktail newsletter 11 Rules for Martinis:

… And yet a gin/dry vermouth Martini is the antithesis of the big, bold, fluffy flavors of whiskey, sweet vermouth, and aromatic bitters; I like to think of a Martini as a Manhattan in negative. 

The appeal of a good Martini, then, is in its dryness, its citrus-sharp crispness, its icy and judgmental demeanor. It is bracing and austere. It can even be off-putting at first. But all those qualities eventually become what you like about the drink. 

If a Manhattan is a soft and comfy sweatshirt, a Martini is a taut and form-fitting pair of designer jeans. It’s not quite as easy to slip into. Not every pair will work for everyone. But once you find the right pair for you and learn to wear them, nothing feels more right. A great Martini is a high-style experience. 

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Browsing around the web:

You should read everything that Steven Randy Waldman writes, but his observations on why rootless, cosmopolitan liberalism leaves so many people cold seem particularly essential.

Professional class Americans follow their careers around the country, relocating between liberal cities and college town with remarkable ease, paying expensively for new child care in each. Working class Americans are much more likely to rely on family to render child-rearing manageable and consistent with their jobs. Among the affluent, elderly parents can be left “on their own”, because deliveries can be paid for, rides can be hired, if necessary more intensive, personal help can be paid for. The downscale elderly rely much more upon unremunerated help from children and church, upon the goodwill of particular human beings. When people upon whom they rely leave, they simply become poorer. For the person who might choose to leave, this cost they might impose pits liberal “rights” against very visceral obligations. A person who has faced that dilemma, and chooses to stay, might understandably view the kind of people who make the opposite choice as selfish.

Everyone (in Hollywood movies) is beautiful, but no one is horny:

When a body receives fewer calories, it must prioritize essential life support systems over any function not strictly necessary for the body’s immediate survival. Sexual desire falls into the latter category, as does high-level abstract thought. A body that restricts food and increases exercise believes it is undergoing a famine, which is not an ideal time to reproduce.

Is there anything more cruelly Puritanical than enshrining a sexual ideal that leaves a person unable to enjoy sex?

Matt Levine explains the logic of 100-hour workweeks at investment banks:

The point of the 100-hour weeks is not just to haze analysts. As I said the other day, it is “to develop, through endless miserable repetition, a muscle memory for certain core skills,” mainly financial modeling and presentation formatting. One way to do that is by just doing it, alone in your childhood bedroom, 105 hours a week, but a better way to do it is by doing it in the office next to a slightly more senior analyst who can show you the shortcuts and whom you can easily bother with dumb questions. Without that in-person learning, the analysts don’t get faster, and the 105-hour weeks keep taking 105 hours.

White liberals are the only group that expresses less warmth towards their own race than others.

We still don’t know where the potato chips came from.

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Easter meditation:

As Christians spend this weekend contemplating the resurrection, it’s worth reading WH Auden on the inescapable, awful truth:

It seems to me worth while asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I’m certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in an agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all-too-familiar sight — three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, “It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?” Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.