Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 337

Some wild stories about Stanford in this one.

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

This is volume 337, a prime number. In fact, the digits are prime even when rearranged (the other permutations of these digits being 373 and 733).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I do not expect a civil war in America (and what does worry me) (Chris Blattman, blog): “Most enemies prefer to loathe one another in peace. War is really costly. It kills, destroys economies, and weakens your country to enemies. As a result, all sides have huge incentives to avoid violence. That’s why most rivals don’t fight. For every thousand ethnic groups, gangs, religious sects, political factions or nations who hate one another, maybe one in a thousand end up in prolonged violence. Because it just doesn’t make sense.”
    • The author is an economist and political scientist at U Chicago. I like this article in part because he spends time talking about the absurd “democracy ratings” political scientists have been downgrading America in over the last few years.
  2. Pandemic-related news:
    • PDF: A Literature Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID-19 Mortality (Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke, Studies in Applied Economics): “[The studies] were separated into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-placeorder (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies. An analysis of each of these three groups support the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality. More specifically, stringency index studies find that lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2% on average. SIPOs were also ineffective, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.9% on average. Specific NPI studies also find no broad-based evidence of noticeable effects on COVID-19 mortality. While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”
      • Lockdowns only achieved a .2% reduction in deaths? That’s one in five hundred. Wow. Some of the other stuff our society did was justified, but clearly lockdowns aren’t a tool we should use in the future.
    • Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dangerous (Shadi Hamid, The Atlantic): “The rationing rules in New York and elsewhere are not the product of anything resembling conventional political persuasion. No party would support—certainly not openly—the essentialization and instrumentalization of race in medicine. Few are willing to defend policies such as these on the merits, because what exactly would they say? Tellingly, these controversies have received limited coverage from mainstream outlets.” Recommended by a student.
    • COVID Affects Your Memory (Alex Gutentag, Tablet): “After spending four years checking every perceived authoritarian impulse from Donald Trump, the media suddenly called for strict enforcement of government decrees, denounced the noncompliant, punished dissenters, and advocated for Big Tech clampdowns on speech.… With the 2022 midterms in sight, the narrative is simply shifting without apology, and many of the arguments once made by ‘covidiots’ are now being backed by Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and the familiar cast of journalists and experts.”
  3. Two revealing articles about Stanford:
    • “Racist, Triggering, Disrespectful” — Stanford RA slams unmasked white students (Stanford Review): “Late Sunday night, a Stanford student RA in the EVGR dormitory emailed the building’s 2,400 residents to warn against a ‘gross inequity’ that risked students ‘being killed or maimed for a lifetime.’ The danger in question? Maskless students— especially white ones.”
    • The teachers of White Plaza (Valerie Trapp, Stanford Daily): “He tried to respond and was cut off. ‘You’re a white guy,’ Waites said. ‘I can interrupt you.’ ‘And you’re a white woman.’ ‘Well, you’re copping out of the fact I’m saying that you’re racist, and you’re not saying you’re not a racist.’ ”
    • This isn’t all of campus life, but it’s not none of campus life.
  4. Some insights into academia:
    • How the job market works at top schools (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “At least pre-Covid, most of the faculty would get together and rate the graduate students (I am not sure how it has operated for the last two years, though I suspect the same, only over Zoom). Some but not all of the students would be designated as ‘should work at a top school.’ If you were not so rated, your chance of being hired at a top school was slim. Other schools, of course, would know not to pursue the top candidates, and would shoot lower, though some foolhardy places might try to lure them anyway. But basically if you were hiring at a high level, you would call the placement officer at a top school, and they would tier the candidates, based on where you were calling from, and recommend accordingly.”
    • Intellectual Freedom in Medieval Universities (James Hankins, First Things): “One reason [medieval universities flourished] is the lack of professional administrators, a feature of universities that lasted into modern times. (Harvard University—O the bliss of it!—as late as 1850 had only a single full-time administrator, the president, helped by a janitor, a cook, and two ushers.) It is a general principle of successful institutions that the people who run them are the ones most committed to their missions and most responsible for their success. A professional administrative class, by contrast, spends much of its time evading responsibility for failure and taking credit for other people’s achievements.” The author is a history professor at Harvard.
    • Going South: Life at the World’s Most Progressive University (David Benatar, Quillette): “Many universities have a problem—on this point there seems to be widespread agreement. The nature of that problem, however, remains bitterly contested. Liberals and conservatives worry that higher education has succumbed to regressive radicalism on matters related to race and gender. Those who self-identify as progressives and social justice activists, on the other hand, complain that universities are still governed by embedded structures of oppression, and that liberals and conservatives have succumbed to a moral panic in response to reasonable calls for reform.” The author is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town.
  5. Men in the church:
    • Part one: Is Christianity doing more harm than good to American men? (Anthony Bradley, Acton): “It’s often thought that control of women, and especially women’s bodies, has been the obsession of Christian clergy down through the ages, but actually it has been the control of men and their bodies that has just as often characterized Christianity’s orientation. However, because that control has historically been mismanaged, ranging from feminization, to priests using the confessional to control husbands, to clergy falling prey to marrying church and politics, to clergy sex-abuse scandals, to recent stories of evangelical pastors abusing their power, men have become increasingly alienated from the very institution created to form them to be of benefit to others.” The author is a professor of Religious Studies at The King’s College in NYC. 
    • Part two: Saving men requires the leadership of laymen (Anthony Bradley, The Acton Institute): “American boys are often taught that marriage or work will be a cure for their loneliness and alienation, but many men find out the hard way that one can be married, gainfully employed, and still incredibly lonely. Men need local, lay-led confraternities that resonate with their deepest longings and their desire for communion with their fellows, formed by local common interests.”
  6. How Houses of Worship Became Hotbeds of Graft (Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, The New Republic): “In extreme cases, financial opacity in houses of worship can even become a security risk: It was that exact lack of transparency that may have cost human life at Goldstein’s synagogue in Poway. Though the synagogue had received $150,000 from the government because it “believed that it was at risk of an anti-Semitic attack on its congregants,” according to one of the congregants’ subsequent suits—court documents show that on the day of the attack, the building’s doors were unlocked and no guards, gates, or other security measures were in place. Instead of providing a necessary guard at the front of the synagogue, funds had allegedly been diverted elsewhere; the plaintiffs argue that this mistake may have cost the life of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who was killed in the shooting.”
  7. Concerning Francis Collins:
    • How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread COVID Propaganda To Churches (Megan Basham, The Daily Wire): “Other than his proclamations that he is, himself, a believer, the NIH director espouses nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme Left-wing bureaucrat. He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.”
    • Evangelicals: Who Are The Good & The Bad? (Rod Dreher, The American Conservative): “What sticks in my craw is the seemingly unexamined assumption that if you don’t land where educated middle class elites do on any or all of these questions, that you must in some sense be a threat to the integrity of the Church. Perhaps educated middle class elite opinion is the real threat, you know?” A long article summarizing and interacting with two other articles.
    • I’m going to regret writing this (Erick Erikson, Substack): “..the NIH executive tells me it is important to understand that Collins does not approve and sanction all research and funding and of the funding Collins has directly overseen and approved, only a little would be controversial. The NIH is complex and while Collins guides the whole, he does not oversee or approve the entirety of the budget.“A sane take (and one I privately expressed earlier today without having seen this article).
    • Disclaimer: I loosely know Francis Collins and respect him. I do wish he had done a few things differently, but I am sure that if I had his job he would wish I had done a LOT of things differently and he would be right.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have An MIT Professor Meets the Author of All Knowledge (Rosalind Picard, Christianity Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arrogant fool who snubbed the greatest Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all science, mathematics, art, and everything else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, having received the most undeserved grace. I walk with joy, alongside the most amazing Companion anyone could ask for, filled with desire to keep learning and exploring.” First shared in volume 194.

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Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a partisan organization. To paraphrase another minister: we are not about the donkey’s agenda and we are not about the elephant’s agenda — we are about the Lamb’s agenda. Having said that, I read widely (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ideological Turing test and in part because I do not believe I can fairly say “I agree” or “I disagree” until I can say “I understand”) and may at times share articles that have a strong partisan bias simply because I find the article stimulating. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with everything an author says in an article I mention, much less things the author has said in other articles (although if I strongly disagree with something in the article I’ll usually mention it). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. Also, remember that I’m not reporting news — I’m giving you a selection of things I found interesting. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not making an appearance here because I haven’t found stimulating articles written about it. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

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