Month: August 2021

This is the the fabulous Victor Emmanuel II National Monument at the Piazza Venezia, built (mostly) in the first decade of the 20th century to honor the first king of unified Italy. Opinion varies about the artistic merit of the monument, ranging from "ugh" to "hideous POS."

But I say: a pox on all your houses. If you're going to build a monument in Rome to your first king, then it ought to at least match the popes and the Caesars in grandiose pretentiousness. That's tough competition!

So count me a fan. It wouldn't work in every city—though you can find stuff just as gaudy in a whole lot of them—but it works in Rome. This picture was taken at 3 in the morning on one of my late night/early morning strolls, the only time it was cool enough that I could manage to walk around outside for more than about half an hour.

The magazine article of the day—on Twitter, anyway—is Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic about "mob justice" in America. It's a worthy enough subject, but unfortunately the piece itself just isn't very good.

The proximate issue is "cancel culture," and the fact that one false move in lefty America—something you say, something dug up from your distant past, sometimes simply holding unpopular opinions—can get you fired and/or banned from polite company forever. Partly this is due to kangaroo court "investigations" and partly due to fear of Twitter mobs and all they represent.

And sure, fine enough. This is hardly the first treatment this subject has gotten, but a fresh look is always welcome. The problem is that Applebaum's look is tooth-crunchingly stale. It's basically what I think of as a Google piece: round up all the cancel culture stories of the past year or two and then devote a few thousand words to summarizing them. All the greatest hits are here: Amy Chua, Donald McNeil, Ian Buruma, Laura Kipnis, Nicholas Christakis, Howard Bauchner, and the usual cast of anonymous victims who didn't want to be quoted publicly.

And that's it. The problem here should be obvious: This represents only about a dozen cases over two years—plus the alleged thousands of others who are now afraid to speak their minds because of the toxic PC atmosphere that young people have brought to contemporary discourse.

If this were the first piece ever written on the subject, that would be fine. But it's more like the hundredth. To make it worthwhile we need to learn something new. And in this case the something new is obvious: Aside from the usual roll call, just how widespread is cancel culture? Does it pop up here and there on occasion, or are there hundreds of lower-profile cases that have genuinely created a climate of fear all across the country?

You won't learn this from Applebaum. You won't learn this from anyone. But it's the nut of the whole thing. I'm sympathetic to the argument that lefty PC has become harmful and faintly ridiculous in recent years, but I'd still like to see a broader look that's a little more convincing on that score. I understand that I'm asking for something pretty difficult to measure, but someone ought to be giving it a try. Otherwise it's just the same dozen or so cases swirling around forever with no real broader conclusion aside from the personal views of the people writing about it.

Here's my kind-of-weekly summary of COVID-19 deaths in the US and six other peer countries. To make up for my sloth in being a few days late with this, I've expanded it to include lots more great information.

First, here are death rates:

We're at more than double the rate of the second-place country and still skyrocketing. Here are case rates in the United States:

With the exception of a few outliers like Oregon and Washington, high case rates are almost exclusively found in the most conservative regions of the old South, where the politics are Trumpish and devotion to Fox News is highest.

Here are vaccination rates:

The US started to flatten out more than a month ago and is only barely above 50%. Other countries not only have higher vaccination rates than we do, but they're continuing to increase.

Finally, here's the latest Kaiser poll showing who has the highest and lowest vaccination rates:

The delta between Democrats and Republicans is now an astonishing 32 percentage points. That's double even the rural-urban divide (16 points) and half again higher than the education divide (20 points).

My old boss Monika is pissed off at this illustration from Axios:

The problem here is not labeling Fox News as "right leaning," which is sort of defensible since the thing that makes Fox unique isn't so much ideological extremism as it is its laser-focused fearmongering and appeals to racism. The problem is labeling Mother Jones as "far left."

I know this will sound like special pleading since I used to work there, but this labeling demonstrates two things. First, it's astounding how long old reputations last. When MoJo was founded, nearly 50 years ago, it was a far left magazine. But for better or worse depending on how you view these things, it hasn't been for at least the past 20 years. It's a consistently progressive magazine, but it's solidly reported and far from radical.

Worse than this, though, is that this label shows a real paucity of awareness about the left. The far left, depending on how you pigeonhole things, is either (a) loud and bomb throwing or (b) ideologically extreme. And those things do exist. We have bomb throwers like Truthdig and CounterPunch and ideological extremists like Jacobin or Current Affairs, but MoJo is neither one of those. It's not even as lefty as The Nation.

It's easy to argue that this doesn't matter much. But for people whose lives are dedicated to politics, they really should know better. My own view is that MoJo isn't really more or less progressive than most other progressive magazines, it's just different. It spends less time on the business of Washington DC and more time telling deeply reported stories of how that business affects people in the rest of the country.

Anyway, that's that. This habit of continuing to view MoJo as some kind of quasi-communist rag has annoyed me for a long time, and this is a good time to get it off my chest. As someone who worked there and read the magazine religiously for a dozen years, I can say with some authority that it just isn't so. It's way past time for people to get this right.

The latest from China:

China on Monday issued strict new measures aimed at curbing what authorities describe as youth videogame addiction, which they blame for a host of societal ills, including distracting young people from school and family responsibilities.

The new regulation, unveiled by the National Press and Publication Administration, will ban minors, defined as those under 18 years of age, from playing online videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday. On the other three days of the week, and on public holidays, they will be only permitted to play between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.

So teenagers will be allowed to play online videogames for three hours per week, and that's it.¹

This is what I think of as "guy in a bar" leadership: No nuance, no listening to stupid sociology papers, just a lashing out at stuff that "everyone knows" is wrong with the country these days. It's what Donald Trump wished he could do, but couldn't.

Anyway, we'll see how this works out. Maybe it will save China. Maybe it will spawn a huge black market in videogames. Or maybe it will spark a rebellion among the nation's teenagers. China has an awful lot of kids who don't really have much else to do if you take their videogames away.

¹Except for the children of high-ranking officials, I assume.

From the editor-in-chief of National Review:

This is a squalid act of betrayal of our countrymen, a moral failure to top off the gross ineptitude of Biden’s withdrawal https://t.co/j1WkwRG45J

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) August 30, 2021

To the extent that this is partisan blather, I guess I can ignore it. But I assume that much of it is a sincere sentiment, despite the fact that we evacuated something close to 99% of all Americans in Afghanistan. And there's still reason to hope that the remaining 1% will make it home too.

But if it's sincere, I wonder what people expected? Putting aside the difference of opinion on whether we should have withdrawn at all, how is it that 99% evacuation can be spun as either inept or morally deficient? When do we return to reality in this country?

This is the Colorado River near Needles. That's Arizona on the far shore.

It sure looks like it has plenty of water, doesn't it? But it ain't so.

The Kabul evacuation is winding down and it looks like the final numbers will be in the neighborhood of 20,000 Americans rescued and 100,000 Afghans—all in the space of two weeks. I wonder how many people understand just how extraordinary that is in historical context? Certainly the United States has never pulled off anything close to that size, and very few other countries have either.

And you hardly have to be a Biden stan to understand that there are pretty easy answers to most of the criticisms that have been raised.

• We were suffering almost no casualties, so why didn't we just stay in Afghanistan? Because things were peaceful only due to the Taliban cease-fire. If we had stayed, the Taliban would have started fighting again and US casualties would have escalated.
• Why were weapons left behind? Because those weapons had been given to the Afghan army as part of the turnover.
• Why was Bagram air base closed? Because we only needed one airport and the military decided that Kabul was a better choice.
• Why was there so much chaos? It's easy to see how it looked that way if you were caught in the middle of it, but there wasn't, really. There were thousands of Afghans who wanted to flee the country and they all surrounded the airport hoping for evacuation. There's nothing anyone could have done about that, and for the most part the crowds were handled well and processed as efficiently as anyone could have hoped for.
• Why did it take so long to approve visas for Afghans who qualified for evacuation? It didn't. We approved visas for 100,000 Afghans in two weeks! And to the extent that this was slower than it could have been, it's because the Trump administration deliberately sabotaged the process before they left office.
• Why didn't we rescue everyone? As always, there are limits to American power. The Taliban controls Kabul, and rescuing literally everyone who wanted to get out was never remotely feasible.
• Why didn't we start evacuation earlier? Because we couldn't. As long as the Afghan government was in power, we had to support them. Starting a mass evacuation would have been an obvious signal that we thought they were doomed.
• Why didn't we know that the Taliban would take over so quickly? That's a very good question, and it was certainly a failure on our part. On the other hand, literally everyone made the same mistake. There wasn't a single analyst or reporter on the ground who thought the Taliban would take control of Kabul in less than a month.

Nothing is perfect. Obviously there were security breakdowns on Monday the 16th. The suicide bombing on the 26th was an enormous tragedy. The future of Afghanistan under the Taliban is likely to be a violent and miserable one for a lot of people. There's no need for defenders of the evacuation to pretend that literally no mistakes were made.

That said, if you can look past partisanship; and neocon defensiveness; and individual stories of grief and hardship; and huge crowds on the ground that inevitably gave the impression of chaos—if you can look past all that to the bare facts on the ground, the evacuation of Kabul should go down as one of the shining moments of the US military. That hardly compensates for 20 years of bungling, but taken on its own it was a magnificent effort. No other country was as dedicated as we were to rescuing our Afghan allies, and probably no country in history has ever done anything similar under pressure like this. The final reckoning will be about 120,000 civilians rescued in two weeks with very few casualties. Anyone who refuses to see this as anything but an enormous accomplishment is just refusing to look.

As for Biden himself, there's no need to paint him as some kind of hero. However, I'm grateful that he kept his head while so many around him were panicking. Biden stuck to his guns and is finally getting us out of Afghanistan. Regardless of anything else, he has my thanks for that.

Assuming I did my sums correctly, here are the death rates for all 50 states plus DC from January 1 to the present:

It's small and hard to read. Sorry. But you can right-click to enlarge it if you need to.

NOTE: I decided to rent the Nikon combo for a week and give it a try. This is kind of pricey, but it seemed worth it. I might as well find out for sure how good it is.

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I mentioned yesterday that my beloved Sony RX10 is kaput. There are no local repair options, and the authorized repair center has quoted a minimum price of about $400.

So should I get it repaired? Or should I consider a different camera? It's been three years since I bought the Sony, after all, and there's new stuff on the market. Let's see what the hive mind thinks.

But first, an absolute requirement: Whatever camera I get, it will come with a superzoom lens. I know that lots of people think these are toys, but I don't care. The fact is that lots of superzooms are pretty sharp these days, and I've just flatly given up on carrying around a bag with a bunch of separate lenses. The slight difference in quality is more than made up for by the fact that a superzoom allows me to catch lots of pictures that I wouldn't if I had to change lenses all the time.

Anyway, don't bother trying to talk me out of this. The question I'm pondering boils down to these three options:

• Get the Sony repaired.
• Use my old Lumix for a while until Sony releases the next version of the RX10, supposedly scheduled for later this year—with an accent on "supposedly."
• Buy an entirely new APS-C camera and a separate superzoom lens.

The third option is the one I'm currently fixated on. But which one? Given my price range, I'm currently looking at the Nikon Z50 along with the Nikon 18-300mm lens. Here are the pros and cons:

Pros

Much, much better ergonomics. Sony cameras have legendarily crappy controls, and even after three years I still get frustrated with the controls on the RX10. It's inexplicable, really.

The Z50 uses an APS-C sensor, which is much larger than the 1-inch sensor in the Sony. This provides better low-light performance, shallower depth of field when I want it, and better resolution if I create big enlargements (which I do).

The lens is interchangeable. I know I said I didn't want this on a routine basis, but I wouldn't mind having an ultra wide-angle prime for occasional use. Nikon makes a decent 10-20mm lens at a surprisingly low price.

It's a little smaller and lighter than the Sony. Oddly enough, I'm not actually sure if I prefer this. I'm just enough of a snob to like the idea of hauling around a camera that looks and feels like an old-school SLR.

Cons

I'm not an absolute stickler for lens quality, but neither do I want a piece of junk. Unfortunately, I've not been able to get a firm idea of just how good the Nikon 18-300mm is.

Fixed lens cameras allow you to zoom using a small knob around the shutter button. This is handy! Bigger cameras don't support this, so you have to zoom manually using the zoom ring on the lens. It's been a long time since I've had to do this, but I suppose I'd get used to it again pretty quickly, wouldn't I?

The zoom range of the Nikon lens is smaller than the zoom range on the Sony. In 35mm terms, it's 27-450 vs 24-600. This isn't a huge deal, but still, more is better.

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That's about it. The retail price of the Nikon + lens is about the same as the Sony, but then again, I can get the Sony repaired for about a quarter the price. Beyond that, there are specific features here and there that favor one camera over the other. Most of them favor the Nikon, but not all, and none of them are deal breakers.

So . . . what to do? What to do?