The Limits of Majority Rule > Publications > National Affairs

[George F. Will being surprisingly reasonable. -egg]

The second fallacy behind a passive judiciary deferring to majoritarian institutions is more fundamental. It is rooted in the fact that we know, because he said so, clearly and often, that Lincoln took his political bearings from the Declaration of Independence. We know that Lincoln believed, because the Declaration says so, that governments are instituted to secure our natural rights. These rights therefore pre-exist government. And they include the unenumerated ones affirmed in the Constitution’s Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

…

For many years and for several reasons, many of my fellow conservatives have unreflectively and imprudently celebrated “judicial restraint.” For many years, I, too, was guilty of this. The reasons for that celebration of restraint include an understandable disapproval of some of the more freewheeling constitutional improvisations of the Warren Court, and the reasonable belief that the law schools that train future judges, and the law reviews that influence current judges, are, on balance, not balanced — that they give short shrift to conservatism. It is, however, high time for conservatives to rethink what they should believe about the role of courts in the American regime.

Another reason many conservatives favor judicial deference and restraint is what can be called the conservative populist temptation. Conservatives are hardly immune to the temptation to pander — to preach that majorities are presumptively virtuous and that the things legislatures do are necessarily right because they reflect the will of the majority.

But the essential drama of democracy derives from the inherent tension between the natural rights of the individual and the constructed right of the community to make such laws as the majority deems necessary and proper.

Source: The Limits of Majority Rule > Publications > National Affairs

Medical benefits of dental floss unproven

[Well, this is interesting. -egg]

Associated Press: It’s one of the most universal recommendations in all of public health: Floss daily to prevent gum disease and cavities.Except there’s little proof that flossing works.

Still, the federal government, dental organizations and manufacturers of floss have pushed the practice for decades. Dentists provide samples to their patients; the American Dental Association insists on its website that, “Flossing is an essential part of taking care of your teeth and gums.”

The federal government has recommended flossing since 1979, first in a surgeon general’s report and later in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued every five years. The guidelines must be based on scientific evidence, under the law.

Last year, the Associated Press asked the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture for their evidence, and followed up with written requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

When the federal government issued its latest dietary guidelines this year, the flossing recommendation had been removed, without notice. In a letter to the AP, the government acknowledged the effectiveness of flossing had never been researched, as required.

Source: Medical benefits of dental floss unproven

New fossil evidence supports theory that first mass extinction engineered by early animals

New fossil evidence supports theory that first mass extinction engineered by early animals
The disc-like fossils shown here are the preserved remains of holdfast structures used by the Ediacaran species Aspidella that went extinct about a million years after these individuals died and were preserved. Credit: Simon Darroch, Vanderbilt University

Newly discovered fossil evidence from Namibia strengthens the proposition that the world’s first mass extinction was caused by “ecosystem engineers” – newly evolved biological organisms that altered the environment so radically it drove older species to extinction.

The event, known as the end-Ediacaran extinction, took place 540 million years ago. The earliest life on Earth consisted of microbes – various types of single-celled organisms. These held sway for more than 3 billion years, when the first multicellular organisms evolved. The most successful of these were the Ediacarans, which spread around the globe about 600 million years ago. They were a largely immobile form of marine life shaped like discs and tubes, fronds and quilted mattresses.

After 60 million years, evolution gave birth to another major innovation: metazoans, the first animals. Metazoans could move spontaneously and independently at least during some point in their life cycle and sustain themselves by eating other organisms or what other organisms produce. Animals burst onto the scene in a frenzy of diversification that paleontologists have labeled the Cambrian explosion, a 25 million-year period when most of the modern animal families – vertebrates, mollusks, arthropods, annelids, sponges and jellyfish – came into being.

New fossil evidence supports theory that first mass extinction engineered by early animals
Conichnus burrows are trace fossils: the surface bumps represent vertical tubes that were originally occupied by anemone-like animals that may have fed on Ediacaran larvae. Credit: Simon Darrroch, Vanderbilt University

“These new species were ‘ecological engineers’ who changed the environment in ways that made it more and more difficult for the Ediacarans to survive,” said Simon Darroch, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University, who directed the new study described in the paper titled “A mixed Ediacaran-metazoan assemblage from the Zaris Sub-basin, Namibia,” published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

New fossil evidence supports theory that first mass extinction engineered by early animals

Why Is Populism Taking Over the Republican Party? – The Atlantic

[I thought this essay had some pretty great insights into the current moment of populism and what it means, and how it led to Trump. -egg]

 

If your political tendencies disinclined you to favor the U.S. presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, you might be tempted to think that for all its initial implausibility, it’s in retrospect not that tough to explain: Trump’s doubters simply underestimated a contempt for reality and depth of bigotry among Republican Party voters. It’s an inversion of Trump’s apparent view of himself, really: His haters couldn’t comprehend how much true-believing Americans would love him for his authenticity, decisiveness, and straight-shooting demolition of nonsense.

Speaking on Thursday at the Aspen Ideas festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, however, Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute argued for separating out the broad, complex forces behind the current rise of populism in the U.S. and the narrow, contingent reasons for Trump’s success in picking off the GOP nomination. “There are are a couple of black-swan events that happened here,” Brooks said.

[…]

According to New America’s Anne Marie Slaughter, for all the Trump campaign has used xenophobia and other modes of bigotry to draw out support from radical elements of the Republican base, they are not the real catalysts of populist revolt on the American right today. The real catalysts are a set of deep disruptions in the American economy—a constellation of forces that also accounts for much of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, as far as it’s gone.

“What we are seeing is anger at a disruption of our economy and, really, our social order—of the magnitude we saw when the agricultural age gave way to the industrial age,” Slaughter says:

When the industrial age completely upended the way people lived and worked, from small cottage-industry, farming villages to going to factories, in another place from your family, to work—which is the same kind of profound upheaval we’re seeing now, we got Marxism. We got Marxism, and then we got World War I, and then we got World War II—that upheaval … was a direct outgrowth of the changes wrought by the industrial revolution.

That is what we are seeing the beginnings of today. The digital revolution … is completely upending how we work, what the sources of value are, how people can support their families, if they can at all, and creates tremendous fear and rage in the sense that you are at the mercy of forces you cannot control.

[…]

If this is the right analytical framework, then, distinguishing between the prominence of anger and the dominance of populism, what’s the right comparative or historical framework for putting the current populist moment in context? There is, after all, a lot of freaking out about the idea of a Hitler in America these days.

Brooks cites a study out this year in the European Economic Review (“Going to Extremes: Politics After Financial Crises, 1870-2014,” by Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch) that looks at 20 advanced European economies across 154 years and more than 800 elections—and concludes that after a financial crisis (not a regular recession, but a full-blown financial crisis), the mean political impact has been a significant increase in support for right-wing populism: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners,” the authors write. “On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30% after a financial crisis.”

But as Brooks points out, populism has a distinctive and long history in America, where it’s “not necessarily just a right-wing phenomenon; it can be a left-wing phenomenon as well.” Following a pair of financial crises in the 1890s, for example (one when the railroads went bust on account of overbuilding and unsound financing, the other after a silver panic), and the deep recessionary effects that accompanied them, William Jennings Bryan became the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in 1896—thundering, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”—and for two further cycles. Brooks quotes H.L. Mencken’s obituary of Bryan: “Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

Why Is Populism Taking Over the Republican Party? – The Atlantic

The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb. — Medium

There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can range from “I think James Bond movies are overrated” to “I think Donald Trump would make a excellent president.”

Usually, someone responds to an opinion with, “Oh my god! I had no idea you were one of those people!” Which is really another way of saying “I thought you were on my team!”

The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb. — Medium