June Miscellany
Links, the bizarre family history of Canadian political royalty, and life updates
Media I’m Consuming
Israel & Iran
1. They’re at war. I wrote about this the night it began, and I’ve been following the news pretty closely since. Casualties stand at 224 dead and thousands injured in Iran; 24 dead and hundreds injured in Israel.
2. Why the disparity? Is Israel COmMiTTiNg gEnoCIDe again? No, the more likely answer is that Israeli civil defense is good and protective of civilians whereas Iranian civil defense is bad and sucks. Israel has missile-interception systems and functional anti-aircraft batteries; Iran does not. And Israel has a bomb shelter or a safe room for every man, woman, and child; Iran does not.
has the right take (with needlessly rough language, as usual):3. Recent reports indicate that Iran is looking to negotiate a deal already, given how incredibly effective and devastating the Israeli strikes have been. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I totally called this, but also it’s unclear whether the deal will lead to any good.
writes:I somehow think it's a bad idea to give them an offramp right now. They haven't actually changed their beliefs, nor have they been destroyed.
They’ll just regroup and rebuild, but this time they'll bury the nuclear infrastructure deeper.
It’s a real possibility, and those concerned about the Iranian nuclear program should be skeptical of any deal that isn’t absolutely airtight.
4. How else does this war end? I’m not so unfriendly to the idea of pursuing regime change in Iran, but it seems like even the Iranian opposition sort of is.
Prominent figures in Iran’s movement for democracy have … come out against both the war and the regime. From his prison cell in Evin, former Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh condemned the Israeli attacks and … called for “a peaceful transition to democracy” in Iran. The Nobel peace laureates Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi were joined by five other activists (including the director Jafar Panahi, who last month won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival) in issuing a call for an immediate end to the war and condemning the attacks on civilians by both Iran and Israel. They also called for an end to Iran’s enrichment of uranium and for a democratic transition.
Are these activists hopeless idealists, with totally unrealistic expectations of having it all? I think maybe. But these are Iranian anti-regime activists—generally pretty tough, down-to-earth people. And I can see how getting bombed might not be such a rousing experience for the popular masses, so this account makes me pretty confident that regime change won’t result.
5. What about Gaza? Israel is still conducting loads of airstrikes and a brutal ground invasion in the enclave.
argues that this is Officially Probably Bad At This Point, and I’m inclined to agree.A while back, I supported Israel’s attempt to enter Rafah as the last redoubt of Hamas. But today we’re told everywhere in Gaza is now the last redoubt of Hamas, and so the end of the war has become like an Irish goodbye, or one of those symphonies that seems to end—and then doesn’t, and doesn’t, and doesn’t. There is something manic and desperate about the IDF’s actions in Gaza right now. They know they’ve lost their way but have no idea how to extricate themselves. And the thing about knowing you have killed so many children is that it will require you to suppress a sense of their humanity in order to maintain sanity and carry on. The cost of that moral coarsening is huge.
Other Political Things
6. Trump is expanding aggressive immigration crackdowns in big cities other than LA. Interestingly, a lot of the coverage I’ve seen is calling this a crackdown in “Democrat-led” cities, specifically:
It’s not really the media’s fault—Trump did (sort of) say it himself—but this is obviously silly. Cities, generally, tend to be Democrat-led! The municipalities in question are New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—in other words, the three biggest American cities. The crackdown is where the people are, not where the Democrats are.
7. Crackdowns in big cities will lead to protests in big cities, and if organizers aren’t careful, riots in big cities. I wrote that this is bad; now
offers an account of a very good and peaceful protest in Chicago:Every time people talk to them, it becomes even more obvious that the cops are just here to hang out and give people directions and make sure nothing violent happens. They all have name tags on and no face coverings, unlike some prior protest experiences I’ve had in which the police were fully covered, unidentifiable, and obviously ready to enforce the state-mandated monopoly on violence. These ones pass the vibe check. Also, they’re all on bikes, which is funny.
This is great! Chaos is as bad for local police as it is for the protesters. They have obvious incentives to act more like this, and I hope they continue to! Harjas also writes about how he dealt with a Christian pro-Trump counterprotester:
Megaphone guy is still here. People are trying to drown him out, heckling him and yelling at him. I wait for them to be done and then I ask him if I can ask him a few questions.
It sounds like he believes none of us have read the Bible. A couple of us explain that we were former Christians, which he summarily ignores. Apparently we’re being controlled by Satan. Oh, and the LA protests were the work of Satan too.
…
While I’m chatting with him, someone who was yelling at him comes up to apologize (“I’m sorry for raising my voice at you, I just really think that Jesus wouldn’t approve of what you’re doing”). The mood becomes more civil and people mostly stop heckling him while we’re talking, which is nice.
This is excellent! Good work to all involved!
8. If these protests can effect real change, then I’m all in favor of them, because cracking down on immigration is extremely bad! And it’s bad in about 12 different directions: for instance, Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution asks, “Deport Dishwashers or Solve All Murders?”
Almost half of the murders in the United States go unsolved (42.5% in 2023). So how about devoting some of the $167 billion extra in the BBB bill to say expand the COPS program and hire more police, deter more crime and to use Conor Friedersdorf’s slogan, solve all murders. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that $20 billion annually could fund roughly 150k additional officers, a ~22% increase, deterring some ~2,400 murders, ~90k violent crimes, and ~260k property crimes each year. Seems like a better deal.
9. Speaking of the Big Beautiful Bill, it really really sucks: the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that, if made permanent, the BBB will add around $6.2 trillion to the deficit all told. This is insane, this is bad, the debt is too high, look at this website until you’re convinced and/or have a seizure, then come back and agree with me that this is very bad!
10. Trump held a military parade in DC. By all accounts, it was super-duper lame; I love this guy and want him to be my friend:
11. Trump did have a bit of bad luck: the parade was overshadowed by a shooting in Minnesota earlier the same day. One lawmaker and her husband were killed; another lawmaker and his wife were hurt badly, though it looks like they’ll survive. The shooter had plans to take more lives in a broader terroristic attack: this is awful and shocking, of course, but I mostly agree with the school of thought that says it was inevitable.
The United States is a fraying society, torn apart by polarization, intense disagreement, and ratcheting extremism. Cheap weapons of mass murder are readily available. And into that tinderbox, Trump adds incendiary rhetoric. We don’t know when or where the deadly conflagration will strike next, but more flames will no doubt come.
Philosophy / Effective Altruism
12. Donating to shrimp welfare continues to be one of the very best possible uses of your money. If you’re somehow still unconvinced by such luminaries as
and , take it from Ronny Chieng of The Daily Show:I especially love that they bring on an EA critic who is expected to criticize shrimp welfare (Ronny primes her with the declaration “fuck these shrimp”) but even she is on board with the shrimp welfare project. Her reaction to the shrimp welfare project is “hey, that’s great!”
In the Bible story of Balaam and Balak, Balak King of Moab was peeved at the Israelites. So he tries to get Balaam, a prophet, to curse the Israelites. Balaam isn’t really on board, but he goes along with it. However, when he tries to curse the Israelites, he accidentally ends up blessing them on grounds that “I must do whatever the Lord says.”
This was basically what happened on the Daily Show.
They tried to curse shrimp welfare, but they actually ended up blessing it! Rumor has it that behind the scenes, Ronny Chieng declared “What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemies, but you have done nothing but bless them!” But the EA critic replied “Must I not speak what the Lord puts in my mouth?”
13.
wonders whether EAs should consider evangelism as a possibly-super-effective cause area, given the infinite stakes of salvation. I ask:Is there a sense in which this argument proves too much? Like, traditionally, evangelism doesn’t involve murder because God said that murder is bad. But if we’re going full-bore infinite-utilitarian about all this, is there a sense in which any extra time in heaven is infinitely valuable, and outweighs the nastiness of killing?
Presumably for the same reason we should prefer a 99% chance of infinite value to a 1% chance, we should prefer infinitely-awesome experience for 99 days to 1 day. I don’t know how to make that math work out, but if it does, then it seems like a truly effective missionary would find himself committed to murdering those he’s converted, no?
Interesting point! I think that will hinge on a lot of things, including not least your eschatology.
One thing is that I doubt whether you can have infinitely good experiences in a finite amount of time. … Even so, any day on earth is presumably worse than any day in heaven.
…
Another question is whether killing someone might reduce your chance of being saved drastically. If so, then it seems like you should be very sure you save roughly an expected person by doing so.
As to whether this “proves too much,” I don't think that's straightforward. A decision theory that allows this result is strange, but it's just a standard counterexample to fanaticism, and denying fanaticism also has very counterintuitive implications.
But I'm probably not gonna go out and murder people for this cause so maybe it is too much.
I thought this was a good answer. I’m also not gonna go out and murder people (or even try to convert them), but I certainly respect the people who do (convert, not murder) a lot more now.
14. On the potential follies of “denying fanaticism,” here’s
via BB:Let’s review the major premises in my reasoning. Some of them are moral premises, and some are empirical, factual premises. First, I have the moral premise that suffering is bad. Anything surprising there?
The next step in my argument is just a factual, empirical premise: that life on factory farms is extremely unpleasant. Is that surprising?
Here’s my other factual premise: the number of animals killed in two years of factory farming is greater than the total number of humans who have ever existed. Were you expecting that?
That’s where the “craziness” comes from. My moral claims aren’t surprising; it’s the empirical facts that are surprising. It’s shocking that factory farming might be the world’s worst problem, not because it’s shocking that animal suffering might matter, but because the quantity of animal suffering is shockingly large.
True Miscellany
15. In 1900, a 33-year-old woman named Letitia Ford (née Smart) passed away in Warwickshire, England; cause unknown. Her son, a nine-year-old named Ernest, went to live with his father and grandmother, but soon proved too chaotic and unpleasant to keep at home—he was moved to an institution called Middlemore Homes, a place for “children who were either truants, disorderly or orphans.” Middlemore was part of a child migration scheme called “Home Children” which relocated problematic kids from the UK to Canada, Australia, and the rest of the Commonwealth, where they would be put to work.
Ernest Ford served in the Canadian army during World War I. He received various military honors, then returned to civilian life and married in 1924. The Fords had six children, the last of whom—a son, born in 1933—was named Doug. Ernest died the year of Doug’s birth.
Doug seemingly fared better under single-parenthood than his father. By the 1960s, he was a successful businessman in the label industry, of all things. His business partner quit after Ford insisted their company expand into tags as well, and the Ford family–owned Deco Labels and Tags was born. It grew quickly into a multi-million dollar business,1 Doug became a successful politician in the Ontario Legislative Assembly, and his four children grew up comfortably.
Those four children were named: Randy, Kathy, Rob, and Doug Jr. And they somehow all ended up really fucking crazy:
Randy Ford is a probable drug-trafficker. He’s apparently been in court for assault and kidnapping charges, on repeated occasion.
Kathy Ford, in the 1980s, fell in with a rough crowd. That crowd got its start in Canada sometime in the 1920s, when an African American man fled to Ontario from the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan pursued him, and in the process started up some local chapters in the Great North—one of those chapters called themselves, naturally, the Ku Klux Klan of Kanada.
The KKKK died off during World War II, but by the 70s, they’d made something of a return in Toronto. A couple of men named McQuirter and MacFarlane were in charge, and Kathy joined them—apparently, in an effort “to piss off [her] parents,” and also in order to do lots of drugs. She succeeded in both regards, and also found love!—on three separate occasions.
Kathy’s first husband was named Ennio Stirpe. They had a common-law marriage that went bad pretty quickly.
As the marriage disintegrated, Kathy fell for a white supremacist kung-fu-master named Michael Kiklas. Stirpe got jealous and killed Kiklas with a shotgun. Amazingly, Stirpe escaped with a manslaughter charge, citing Kiklas’ martial-arts skills: he claimed he needed the shotgun as “an equalizer.” (After serving nine years of a 12-year sentence, Stirpe was released—he promptly stabbed an ex-girlfriend of his nearly to death, and is now serving 18 years for attempted murder.)
Kathy finally settled down with Scott MacIntyre, a cocaine dealer who was possibly-partially-responsible for shooting her in the face seven years earlier. MacIntyre later threatened to kill her brother Rob, who was Toronto’s mayor at the time.
Rob Ford was the greatest mayor in the history of the world.2 He smoked crack with some gangsters, who then showed a video of the event to Gawker’s CEO and the Toronto Star. Rob denied the initial reports, but then the police chief came out and said, “Yeah, nope, this definitely happened, and also we have another videotape of it happening again,” and Rob said, “Oh, silly me, I must’ve just been drunk out of my mind.” Rob was also notorious for getting wasted at restaurants, sporting events, and his office, then hurling vulgar insults at everyone and maybe partying with prostitutes.
But in my mind, one incident stands above all the rest: Accused of harassing an aide by offering her oral sex, Rob Ford went before the nation’s media, vehemently denied the allegations, and said in his defense: “I’m a happily married man. I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.”
Doug Jr. is so normal compared to all these people, but even he can’t really do anything right. After Rob left the mayoral office in 2014, Doug Jr. ran and lost to a man named John Tory.3 So instead he became the Premier of Ontario, awarded a half-billion dollar contract to a spa company that was pretending to be a different spa company, and just generally has been very corrupt.
And that’s all not to mention Doug Jr.’s lunatic daughter, Krista, who:
Was a semi-professional athlete in the, I’m not kidding this is a real thing, Lingerie Football League;
Quit the team in protest over a coach’s firing, while quoting Malcolm X on Facebook;
Advised women fearful of sexual assault to “carry mace” and not “dress like a whore;”
Became an anti-vaccine lunatic during the pandemic.
Apparently, the Fords think of themselves as “Canadian Kennedys.” I can’t help but agree—though I might tweak the spelling a bit: the “Kanadian Kennedys.”
But Ari!, you protest, Surely if anyone were the Kanadian Kennedys, it would be the Trudeaus! Well, I’d be inclined to agree with you, only the Trudeau bloodline died off the second Fidel Castro impregnated Margaret during the family’s Caribbean vacation in the Spring of 1971.4 So, no, it’s the lunatic Fords, sorry.5
16. William Langewiesche died recently. I wasn’t super familiar with his work before, but I read two of his essays and thought they were excellent:
What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane. (Hint: the culprit was the man you’d most suspect.)
An Extraordinarily Expensive Way to Fight ISIS. I’ve always hated the way the B-2 bomber looks, so it’s good to have some real justification for disliking it.
gross.
17. I miss
. Where’d he go?18. A software engineer did a semantic analysis of her texting history with her ex using AI.
This is super cool, and I would totally try to do it too (if I wasn’t so lazy).
19. A friend of mine isn’t so lazy, and he’s been doing something similarly autistically awesome: he took 100 of the 120 graduating seniors in our class, and made us into a Senate. The electoral map alone is pretty funny:
And he also had ChatGPT run some scenarios to develop our backstories. Here’s a taste of mine:
Honestly, I’ve never felt so seen.
What I’m Up To
I’m officially a high school graduate! I don’t know how it happened, and I assume the guilty parties will eventually be found and held responsible.
In any case, since then, I’ve been mostly doing a fat load of nothing. Except for…
Graduation Parties
I’ve been invited and going to about two grad parties a week. I thought this was a pretty heavy load, and then I talked to some people who are cooler and more popular than me, and they said they’re attending four or five or even more each weekend, which seems crazy!
The grad party itself is a strange event: the host invites anywhere from a dozen to 50ish of their friends, and also a dozen to 50ish of their family members.6 They cater, they entertain, and you’re expected to bring a cash gift. Sometimes they rent a venue; sometimes it’s just in their backyard.
At one party, the host’s friends went up and gave nice speeches about her—I thought it was sweet, if a little on-the-nose-ly narcissistic.
The most puzzling thing about the grad parties, though, is where they came from. I talked to my mom, and she told me there was really nothing like this when she was growing up—at most, you’d have three or four friends over for dinner, or something.
But now they’re ubiquitous! Where does a meme like this get its start?
Right now, my working theory is that the grad party is a goyish bar mitzvah. They saw how much fun us Jews were having with our little coming-of-age, please-give-me-money parties, and thought, “Oh, we must have this!”
The Wikidepia entry for “graduation party” is a whopping two sentences long, so I think my version of the history is just canon now.
Learning to Drive Stick
I have a very cool friend, and his very cool dad owns a very cool 2005 Honda S2000. It’s blue, it’s loud, it’s smelly, the top doesn’t come up, and it’s awesome.
It’s got a manual transmission, and my friend’s driven me around in it a few times now, but yesterday he spent 40 minutes teaching me! I’m really not great—I can start pretty consistently, although I always stall out once or twice if I’m on a hill. I can upshift well and I downshift… fine.
Eventually I’ll probably get better, but just the little taste of it’s already given me lots of perspective, lots of opinions, and lots of questions about cars and traffic laws. A sampling:
Road rage is vestigial: Getting cut off really sucks when stopping suddenly is a pain in the ass. When you have to press in the clutch and downshift and hit the brakes and brace yourself all at the same time. It makes sense to flip someone off in such a scenario! But in an automatic, you just hit the brakes! It doesn’t matter! It’s so easy! Chill out!
Similarly—why are “student driver” bumper stickers still a thing? When a student driver was stalling at every other stop sign, ok, makes sense—but nowadays, the students have little reason not to be about as good as everyone else!
Also, why on earth do you have to come to a complete stop at a stop sign? Who came up with that? I thought it was a pain and a waste driving an automatic—but the law was invented when you had a decent shot at totally stalling out every time you stopped all the way! What the hell?! I know pedestrian safety sort of matters or something, but come on!
Parallel parking must’ve been so hard in the old days. I tend to suck at it now, even when I have a backup camera—there’s no way I ever would’ve passed the test in an old manual.
How does automatic transmission even work? Driving my usual car felt so smooth in comparison to even my friend’s more experienced stick-driving—how’d they do that?
Even more puzzling: how does a hybrid work? I mean, I get that there’s a battery and there’s an engine and they work together, or something, but how exactly? What’s connected to which? Who gets power when? I don’t get it!
Maybe a dumb question, but: do electric cars even have gears?
(Googled it, answer is: yes, but just one.)
Anyway, I think I did a non-awful enough job that my friend’ll let me drive again sometime, and I’ll hopefully become better and less confused.
The Yale Effective Altruism Summer Fellowship
Which is starting in less than a week!
(Applications are still open until tomorrow, Wednesday, June 18, for anyone headed to Yale this fall.)
I don’t really know what this’ll look like at all, but I’m excited: all the active Yale EAs and also future Yale EAs I’ve met so far seem like very good and interesting people!
That’s in Canadian dollars, though, so, what, like a multi-hundred real-dollar business?
The only one who even comes close is Buddy Cianci of Providence, Rhode Island.
Tory was, in fact, a member of the Canadian Tory Party. This is so funny to me: it’s like losing an election to a guy named “John Republican.”
I want to be completely clear that I’m being serious here: Justin Trudeau (6’2” and handsome) is Fidel Castro’s (6’3” and handsome) son, not Pierre Trudeau’s (5’10” and ugly). The Trudeaus were notorious swingers; both Pierre and Margaret respected, even adored Castro: it actually just makes the most sense! The timeline works out, the motive is there—it’s a real true thing.
Also sorry if you read through all that craziness: please know, it’s entirely
’s fault.(Also a little bit Wikipedia’s. Point is, I’m not responsible.)
I know of some seniors who are actually having two grad parties: one mostly for friends, and one mostly for family & family friends.
Agreed, substack is so drab when Glenn isn't posting
“The United States is a fraying society, torn apart by polarization, intense disagreement, and ratcheting extremism.” Is a wild quote when you spend like 5 minutes reading about American history. America averaged about a bombing a week in the 70s, most of the major cities looked like Dresden after being bombed by the allies in the 80s, and crime got so bad in 90s that NYC was averaging almost *3,000 murders a year*. That’s almost the amount the US lost in Iraq - each year.
Nothing about our current moment reaches that insanity at all, and I often think such writers have a wistful, almost idealized, idea of what America should be. The reality is, America has always been bat shit insane