The View from Right Field

Mass Shootings: After We “Do Something,” Let’s Try to Do Something That Actually Works

With two more mass shootings, in El Paso and Dayton, we are told we must “do something.”  Generally, that means gun control, though it now also seems to include “red flag” laws, as well as more spending for mental health and doing something about violent video games. Okay, let’s do it, subject of course to the Constitution.  Not only the Second Amendment, but also the other ones: the First, Fourth, Fifth, etc.

But after we “do something,” let’s also try to do something that works.  Megan McArdle, at The Washington Post, has a couple of ideas on this subject (here and here).  Aggressive stop-and-frisk policing has seemed to reduce murder rates in places like New York City, but many people don’t like what they see as police harassment of minorities.  Also, given the distrust of the police by many people in places like Chicago, you wonder how it would work there.  Plus, these kinds of tactics wouldn’t stop mass shootings, though reducing day-to-day murders might save more lives than reducing mass shootings over a whole year.

Why I’m Leaving the @WashingtonPost

About two years ago, I subscribed to The Washington Post online.  I liked their international news coverage, and the online subscription seemed like a relatively inexpensive way to keep up on that stuff.  I won’t be renewing my subscription when it expires, however, because it is becoming harder to find the international news in the WaPo, and “Today’s Headlines,” the newsletter I receive, is basically just all Donald Trump all the time.  Actually, it’s not all President Trump all the time; it’s all President-Trump-is-the-worst-president-ever all the time.  It’s getting tiring – and, more importantly, I’m not learning anything from it.  I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016 (either in the primaries or the general election), and I’m not going to vote for him in 2020, but that doesn’t mean I want to read about how bad he is all the time.

Even though I didn’t vote for him, I don’t think that everything he does, or his administration does, is the worst that any president/administration has ever done.  Some kind of semi-rational analysis would be interesting, and I might learn something from it.  I am not talking about the kind of so-called balance that includes an equal number of quotes from each side.  But one anonymous source after another, followed by quotes from people who are already fully on the other side, doesn’t tell me anything new, either.  Now, it could be that these articles are accurate, in the view of The Washington Post’s editors, and that everything they say is the truth.  But even if it is, I am not learning anything from reading it again and again.  So, it’s goodbye WaPo, until your news pages give me a little more information that I don’t already know.

Jacinda Ardern Gets It Right

In the New Zealand parliament today, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern got it right with respect to how to respond to the murderer and terrorist who killed 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday.  This is from the New Zealand Herald:

“Ardern told Parliament the Australian man accused of carrying out the atrocity was seeking notoriety.

‘That is why you will never hear me mention his name.  He is a terrorist.  He is a criminal.  He is an extremist.  But he will, when I speak, be nameless. 

What’s Worse? Fake News or the Cure

I find the panic about “fake news” a little overdone.  I understand there are a lot of news stories out there that aren’t true, but it’s been that way for a long time.  The National Enquirer has been at my supermarket checkout lane for decades.  That’s pretty fake news. 

If by fake news, you mean lies, they’ve been around for a long time, too.  Hitler lied about the Jews.¹  Stalin lied about Katyn Forest.  Vladimir Putin lies all the time.  Crimea.  Ukraine.  The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17.  Anybody who believes Vladimir Putin isn’t paying attention.²

It could be, with the Internet, fake news today travels a little faster and gets a broader distribution, but so does everything else. 

Any Publicity Is Good – As Long As They Spell Your Name Right

My father-in-law used to say that, for politicians, any publicity was good publicity – as long as they spelled your name right.  It didn’t matter what the article said about you.  If they spelled your name right, it was good publicity.

While my father-in-law passed away long before Donald Trump became political, I think he may have gotten President Trump – and the media – exactly right.  Since President Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination three years ago, the media has been “All Trump, All the Time.”  The media loved then-candidate Trump – especially the TV and cable networks – during the Republican primaries.  While other candidates were pretty much ignored, Donald Trump was covered 24-7.  Because people would watch and ratings mean money.

An Idea for Less Stress About the News

Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economics, was asked what somebody should do if they woke up, turned on the TV, and found that the stock market had fallen by three percent.  Dr. Thaler’s advice was simple: “Change channels.  Turn the show off.”¹

Dr. Thaler’s investment advice is pretty simple:

“Whenever anyone asks me for investment advice, I tell them to buy a diversified portfolio heavily tilted toward stocks, especially if they are young, and then scrupulously avoid reading anything in the newspaper aside from the sports section.”²

He said crossword puzzles are also okay, but you need to stay away from the financial section.

Fact-Checking President Trump: Does It Really Make Any Difference?

The Washington Post fact-checked Donald Trump’s interview with The New York Times on Thursday and came up “24 false or misleading claims” “in a 30-minute interview.”  The Post is constantly fact-checking President Trump.  In fact, the Post does this so often, I sort of wonder what the purpose of it is anymore.

Clearly, anybody who wants to know realizes that President Trump gets a lot of things wrong.  I don’t know whether he is lying (in the sense he knows what is right and he is saying something else anyway) or he really thinks what he is saying is right (even though it isn’t).  I think I would rather that it was the former, i.e., he knows what the facts are but he says something else anyway, than that he really doesn’t know what is correct.  But I understand people can differ on that point.

Sexual Harassment in the DOJ and FBI Under Which President?

The Washington Post published a lengthy article yesterday on sexual harassment in the Department of Justice and the FBI.  According to the Post:

“The Justice Department has ‘systemic’ problems in how it handles sexual harassment complaints, with those found to have acted improperly often not receiving appropriate punishment, and the issue requires ‘high level action,’ according to the department’s inspector general.

You Call It Obstructionism. I Call It Standing for Principle.

Throughout the last six years of Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats complained about Republican “obstructionism.”  They complained that Republicans wouldn’t vote for anything President Obama proposed and that he was forced to do things on his own, via executive order, agreements as opposed to treaties with other countries, etc., because the Republicans wouldn’t work with him.

Now the situation is reversed.  A Republican (or at least somebody who isn’t a Democrat) is president, and it is the Democrats who are united in opposition to anything he (or Republicans in Congress) proposes.  But now it’s apparently not obstructionism.  Now it’s standing for principle.  Because what Donald Trump/the Republicans are proposing is really bad, and he/they won’t agree to what the Democrats consider a reasonable compromise.

The Problem With Facts: We Honestly Do Have Our Own Facts

The Economist’s “Word of the Year” for 2016 was “post-truth.”  Fact-checkers at major media outlets are doing a land office business.  Concern about “fake news” is all the rage.  The answer seems pretty simple.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”  So the solution to the whole post-truth/fake news problem is to force people to get the facts right.

Except it’s not that simple. Tim Harford, the author of The Undercover Economist and columnist for the Financial Times, wrote an article in FT Weekend last month on “The problem with facts.”  The thing I found most interesting was this section, which is not on how our allegiances, or the “tribes” to which we belong, affect our opinions, but on how our allegiances affect our facts: