Kevin Drum

The New York Times ran an editorial on Friday about "America's free speech problem," and naturally this has Twitter all atwitter. I myself find the whole "cancel culture" controversy exhausting, mainly because of the absolutism on both sides. My side denies the problem exists at all, while the Fox News set insists it's rampant.

For what it's worth—which is nothing much, unfortunately—here are some things I believe:

1. Cultural mores have changed over the years and everyone needs to acknowledge this in practice, not only in theory. That means adjusting how you talk about people (and groups of people) even if you privately roll your eyes at some of it.
2. If you're mad because you can't be racist in public anymore—not even a little bit—then you just need to get over it.
3. Young lefties have had a history of "callout culture" for years. At first, this meant that if someone said something offensive you should call it out instead of staying silent and providing tacit acceptance. This steadily got more and more aggressive and eventually morphed into what's called cancel culture these days.
4. "Cancel culture" is a terrible name, but it's what we're stuck with. Very few people who say something offensive actually get canceled—i.e., get fired or seriously disciplined, lose their ability to speak in public, or pay some other meaningful price—though it does happen.
5. Most of the damage is far smaller: being ostracized, shamed, or getting a lecture from HR for an offense that possibly—possibly—isn't worth it. This shouldn't be minimized, since it can cause genuine anguish and create lifelong enemies, but it also isn't the end of the world.
6. Don't confuse cancel culture with ordinary political fights. Disagreements—big, loud, vicious disagreements—are normal parts of human society. The side that eventually loses hasn't been canceled, they've just lost a cultural battle in the most ordinary sort of way.
7. It's really important to distinguish between at least two types of cancel culture. One type is entirely an intra-left issue, where lefties name and shame other lefties who have said something that's verboten. This is by far the more restrictive version of cancel culture, where people can be taken down for even tiny infractions.
8. The other type is left vs. right. I don't have much to say about this because it's just the modern version of lefties and righties yelling at each other. There's really nothing new about it and lefties simply have no power to cancel conservatives. The only example I can think of is university students who heckle conservative speakers and drive them off campus. This has happened only a few times and has very limited impact. On the other hand, the heckling business is stupid, and activists should be ashamed of themselves for doing it. Charles Murray is not Hitler.
9. The left-on-left version of cancel culture is really, really hard to get a handle on. There is literally no real data on how widespread it is and there probably never will be. This is because much of it takes the form of people just shutting up; another large portion never gets reported; survey data is all but useless; and there's no good definition of cancel culture in the first place. We have anecdotes and that's all.
10. That said, there are anecdotes. Lots of them. In addition to the ones that make news, I've heard personally from very normal, reasonable people who think cancel culture has become too stifling. They really do feel like they can't talk about sensitive topics for fear of being ostracized unless they toe the absolute latest and wokest line, and they often express a genuine fear of being shunned or worse if they make even a small mistake. This is real, and pretending it doesn't exist is just putting your head in the sand. Not only does it do a lot of damage to people who are shy or not especially verbal, but it's politically suicidal as well since it makes no friends. Any movement that's in thrall to its most extreme elements is doomed to implode at some point.
11. When issues come up within newsrooms or other companies, they are usually driven by young staffers. That's fine, but it shouldn't be a foregone conclusion that the young staffers are automatically right. Unfortunately, managers are often afraid to argue with them even if they think things have gone too far. But they should. This kind of guidance is what experienced managers are expected to provide to younger workers.
12. Note to managers: Don't take this as permission to dismiss those younger workers. They probably know more about this stuff than you do. Just because something doesn't exist in your social circle doesn't mean it's all a bunch of made-up snowflake-ness.
13. It should be possible to have normal, good faith conversations about what's acceptable and what isn't without the wokest or most oppressed voice automatically being assumed right.
14. Intentions absolutely have to be taken into account. There's a big difference between someone being willfully offensive and someone who just makes a casual mistake or who has an opinion that's not quite full-bore extreme lefty. For the latter, it's fine to disagree with them but they should otherwise be left alone.
15. One of the victims of cancel culture is the ability to speak plainly. Not everyone knows the approved academese ("conventionally coded as feminine" as opposed to "like a girl") for addressing touchy subjects, but that's OK: there's lots of value in feeling that it's safe to express ideas in simple, intelligible ways as long as they're offered in good faith. Even if this leads to poorly considered phrases on occasion, it's still better than feeling like you have to defensively lard up every sensitive opinion with the kind of endless nuance and caveating that buries your main point. Just let the occasional glitch go unless it happens all the time or there's real reason to think it's intentional.
16. Too much of the opposition to cancel culture comes from conventional liberals who simply don't want to change the way they talk because they figure that the way they talked in the '70s was fine and no one got hurt. That ain't so. People did get hurt but mostly kept it to themselves. Liberals who don't understand this need to, um, wake up.
17. Twitter sucks, and Twitter mobs make this whole problem infinitely worse. Unfortunately I can't say that this means you should ignore Twitter. That may be good advice for most of us, but there are times when Twitter mobs affect real-world decisions and need to be sharply fought. If they aren't, people will reasonably assume that the Twitter mob's opinion represents the whole world. If you disagree, say so!

Just generally, I believe that cancel culture is plainly a real thing that presents us with real dilemmas. However, its main problem isn't the idea itself, which is generally admirable. The problem is that in its current form it utterly lacks even a trace of empathy. It is too often a weapon of brute power and ideology, used to crush people into subservience. This is wrong on just about every possible level. It is hateful. It makes enemies. It doesn't work.

So first of all, we should hold on to the best ideas behind cancel culture: namely that cultural mores change; not everyone (especially us olds) is up to speed on them; and we should all press ourselves and others to do better. But second of all, we should commit to doing this with grace, not scorn and contempt. That's good advice for just about everything, and it's especially good advice for this.

Here is Hilbert as the setting sun shines through our front window, lighting up his eyes magnificently. Is he aware that Charlie is photobombing him? His alert expression suggests "maybe."

After yesterday's post about the types of vehicles that are most involved in crashing into pedestrians, a regular readers suggests it would be interesting to see the total level of pedestrian crashes as context. Here it is:

Nothing much to see here. Overall crashes involving pedestrians have been rock steady over the past 15 years. But the story is different for fatalities:

Fatal pedestrian crashes went down steadily from 1980-2010, but since then they've gone up 50%. Ditto for bicyclists, though it's hard to see in the chart.

A few days ago I tried to buy something with my main credit card and was turned down. I paid with another credit card, and the next day the main card was fine, so I forgot the whole thing.

But then it happened again. And once again, the next day the card was fine. Then I bought something on Amazon, and it failed. I went to the "Change Payment Type" screen, chose the same card, and it went through. Then, a couple of days later, it failed again.

WTF? I went to the Chase site (another adventure in itself) and looked around. Nothing seemed to be amiss. What was going on?

Finally I noticed something. I had used the credit card to pay for my eye surgery, and that put us near our credit limit. Every time I tried to charge something that put me over, it failed. When I charged something that left me just under, it went through. In the case of the Amazon purchase, my remaining credit was about $14 and the item cost $16. I would have gone $2 over my credit limit. That's why it failed.

This is especially ironic since I'm endlessly being asked if I want a higher credit limit. Since I never come close to exceeding it, I never bother. But this time I did. And of course when my purchases failed I was never told why.

Anyway, that's been my week. Eye surgery, credit card mysteries, and I even picked up a nasty cold. Blah. At least I'm not in danger of my house being bombed into rubble by a deranged Russian dictator.

A couple of researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have released a study of pedestrian crashes by type of vehicle. They've done this both nationally and for North Carolina. I don't know why North Carolina rates a separate study, and they didn't explain it, but let's take a look anyway:

Big vehicles are more dangerous than cars on left turns but about the same on right turns. When pedestrians dart into an intersection, minivans are more dangerous than cars but not pickups or SUVs.

This is peculiar. On a left turn you have plenty of visibility regardless of what you're driving. Conversely, on a right turn pedestrians can be close up and easy to miss if you're driving a pickup with a big hood. Ditto for darting pedestrians, but yet again pickups do fine even if they do have big hoods.

Now look at the two categories on the right. Once again, darting pedestrians don't cause many problems even though it seems like they should. But all big vehicles, and pickups in particular, seem to mow down lots of pedestrians who are just walking along. That's not a visibility thing.

With all that in mind, let's take a look at the national figures, which are quite different

The first thing you'll notice is that the numbers are way higher for left and right turns but about the same for everything else. Why?

I don't really understand any of this, and the paper doesn't address any of it. However, I have a guess that these results may be related less to the cars themselves than to the kind of people who buy them. Unfortunately, this theory fails since minivans, pickups, and SUVs attract very different kinds of buyers.

So I'm stumped.

As I'm sure you all know by now, Texas is under fire for rejecting a large number of mail-in ballots in its primary election a few weeks ago:

According to an Associated Press analysis, the news isn’t great. For the March 1 primary, the state rejected almost 23,000 mail-in ballots, or close to 13 percent of all mail-in ballots returned — far higher than the 2 percent rate that would usually raise the concern of election experts, per the AP.

The votes were rejected thanks to a new Texas law that requires a form of identification on each ballot. You have to either write in your driver license number or the last four digits of your Social Security Number. A lot of people were confused by this and failed to follow the rules.

This was completely unnecessary. The ID requirement is allegedly in place to fight fraud, but fraud doesn't really exist.

On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be aimed at suppressing the Black vote either. It's true that the rejection rate was higher in blue counties than in red counties, but only by a bit. And there's no reason to think that Black voters are any less capable of writing in their Social Security Number than anyone else. What's more, Texas allows only those over age 65 to vote by mail, and that's Republican territory. Why suppress that vote?

And one more thing: Although the number of rejected ballots was higher than normal, it still amounted to only 0.6% of the total vote. That's not earth shattering.

Here's my take: Texas Republicans drank their own Kool-Aid and ended up passing a provision that probably hurts them as much or more than Democrats. The actual number of votes it affected was small. And since it was piloted during a primary election, it didn't have any big partisan effect.

As usual with these things, it produced a huge backlash that in turn produced a huge PR campaign about how to vote properly. In November, I'll bet the rate of rejected ballots will be very low.

In other words, this provision should never have been passed, but in the end it probably won't have much effect. That's how most of these voter ID laws seem to go.

UPDATE: I missed something here. It turns out the real problem is that you don't get a choice of which ID to use. You have to use the same one you used to register, which might have been decades ago. Lots of people just didn't remember and used the wrong one.

This means that the ID requirement is even more phenomenally stupid than I thought. At the same time, it's also easier to fix. If the issue isn't general confusion, but merely knowing which ID to use, that's not so hard to figure out. In fact, if Texas Republicans want to show a little good faith, all they have to do is agree to a mass mailing to all registered voters telling them which ID they need to use.

AND ONE MORE THING: At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason these Republican voter ID measures don't work very well is because Democrats fight back against them. So I'm not saying Texas Democrats should calm down about all this. They should fight like hell.

In the end, after the fighting is over, Republicans don't end up changing the electorate much with these bills. However, they do waste the Democrats' time for a couple of election cycles. That may be the real benefit for the GOP.

This is a very typical view of a Louisiana marsh: swamp daisies on the floor and Spanish moss hanging all over the trees.

This is an oak tree silhouetted against a stormy sky a couple of weeks ago. As it happens, the stormy sky produced a few drizzles here and there but nothing more. We could use the water, so it was a missed chance.

A few years ago a friend of mine got cataract surgery. He had worn glasses since childhood, but after the surgery he had perfect 20/20 vision and great reading vision. That sounded awesome, and naturally I wanted this surgery too even though I didn't have cataracts. I grumbled a bit about that and then forgot about it.

Until a couple of months ago, that is, when I checked into it and discovered that you could indeed get cataract surgery even if you didn't have cataracts. It's called Refractive Lens Exchange or Clear Lens Replacement and the big drawback is that you have to pay for it yourself since insurance won't cover it if you don't actually have cataracts.

So that's what I've been doing for the past couple of days. On Monday they did my right eye and today they did my left eye. After a day my right eye already has about 20/30 vision and it will get better over the next few weeks.

My reading vision, however, is totally shot. But this is where the latest and greatest high-tech lenses come in. I chose to buy RxLAL lenses from a company called RxSight here in Southern California. Their claim to fame is that unlike other lenses, you can adjust these after they've been implanted and the eye has healed completely. The first adjustment happens in 2-3 weeks, and that's when the lenses will be tweaked to provide sharp near vision. After a few more adjustments it's all done and the lenses are locked in place.

The only real downside to all this is that the adjustments are done using UV light. This means that for the next few weeks I have to wear UV glasses at all times so I don't wreck the implanted lenses. After they're locked in place, I don't need them anymore.

In the meantime, I have to wear the UV glasses everywhere I go and reading glasses whenever I want to read or use the computer. This is a pain in the ass, but it should be worth it. There are other multifocal lenses on the market, but the RxLAL lenses are a bit clearer and don't produce halos around bright light. That's the promise, anyway. A month from now I'll know for sure.

I'm not sure why I've held onto this picture. It was taken in the town square in Tecate, Mexico, and this pigeon looks so awkward on takeoff that it tickles me. Do all birds look like this at the moment they're trying to get their first bit of lift? I don't think so. Just pigeons, probably.