Substack Notes, Vol. 6.6
Mar 25th-29th
On New York’s disastrous recreational marijuana legislation implementations:
[T]he equity program is itself an act of hubris, distorting the market by prioritizing progressive goals instead of awarding licenses to anyone with the wherewithal to run a successful marijuana business.
The THC tax is one of those ideas that appeal to progressive technocrats who give little thought to unintended consequences. The rationale was that it would help maintain revenue in the face of falling retail prices while deterring overconsumption by forcing consumers to pay more for products of higher potency. Legislators somehow did not take into account the existence of a black market in which the tax rate is zero. Given that reality, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between using taxes to raise revenue or paternalistically prod consumers and getting those consumers to patronize the businesses that actually collect the taxes.
The facts that over-regulation; arbitrary rules and enforcements; racial, sexual, legal and other discrimination; and the “number one advocate for equity” possibly using his position to seek retribution and illegally harm business owners are all on display here just provide a kind of bestiary of simple reasons why government mucks everything up and wastes such absurd sums of money, with almost no utility provided.
My reply to a piece about/featuring Renee DiResta (whose author immediately blocked me):
"Promote positive dialogue"? If you think that questioning the idea that 'whiteness' is a toxic social construct which should be explored in the public education system, or that questioning the mask mandates and closures of the COVID-era, or that questioning the idea that the huge increases in teen girls with gender dysphoria should be affirmed in their confusion and often prescribed pharmaceuticals are "positive dialogue" then you would have to allow that the dialogue has gotten much more positive in recent years online. You would have to grant that attempted government influence of social media activities and the opacity of Twitter and Facebook and the efforts of much of the (self-appointed) anti-'disinformation' researchers were markedly harmful for positive dialogue.
The problem (one problem, anyway) is that there is a small minority of privileged and influential journalists and academics and executives who do NOT believe these conversations are positive dialogue and are determined to not have them. I include anyone who reflexively labels anti-CRT legislation 'racist' (despite it being supported by dozens of outstanding black thinkers) as part of this group.
I would love to hear/read a feature in which Renee (who I've been following for 6-7 years now) admits the harm her and her colleagues have done to our national conversations (surely there are some, even in her own mind) and areas in which her recommendations and policy ideas did not work. You know... intellectual honesty.
I guess ‘promoting positive dialogue’ doesn’t include responding to earnest (and critical) comments on your own essays. Who knew?
One thing you may not know about [Claudine] Gay is that she is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. And not just any Haitian immigrants. Her father is vice president of Haiti’s sole ready-mix concrete supplier, GDG Béton. (Her uncle happens to be president.) This may explain how she was able to attend the exclusive Phillips Exeter Academy – a $67,000 a year boarding school that boasts Lincolns and Rockefellers among its alumni.
Born overseas to an elite Haitian family, Gay exemplifies one of the most pressing social trends affecting the poor island country: brain drain. -Noah Carl
I don’t think brain drain is actually such an issue when it comes to Gay, actually… but wealth drain certainly is, as well as shocking hypocrisy. She made her career writing about anti-colonialism and social justice while living on millions sucked out of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere? In her defense, it’s possible she didn’t actually read any of the papers she published before copying and pasting from other writers (who themselves were probably all privileged, I bet).
We build our identity within the context of stories. Some of these stories we invent all by ourselves; others are told to us by people we know — or increasingly, by mere images of people we encounter via our screens; and of those stories we receive from others, some we hear so often that we begin repeating them ourselves. Sometimes when we have repeated the same story often enough, and over a long enough period of time, we can forget that the story originated outside of ourselves; we instead fool ourselves into believing that the story is our own, and we begin to identify with it.
Of all the stories we use to construct our identity, this last type — i.e., the stories that someone else told us but that we’ve repeated so often, and for so long, that we begin to identify with the story as if it was our own — is by far the most dangerous, especially if we began identifying with it when we were young and naïve, or during an emotionally tumultuous time in our lives, when our psychological defenses were temporarily down, or before these defenses were fully formed.
Consider New York Magazine's 10 most recent cover stories and tell me if any sound worth reading.
-Huberman dates girls and is very busy and this is bad
-We should let toddlers get trans surgery
-Spring fashion is here
-Sleeping around is good, actually
-The Biden campaign is very smart
-New York is good
-Let's both-sides the Israel-Hamas War
-Look at this fancy L.A. supermarket
-These 49 people have a little power in NYC
-All the Republicans who won’t be nominated
Slave-Raiding, Solidarity and Status in Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from low agricultural productivity. Land was undifferentiated and abundant, the tsetse fly killed cattle, while labour was scarce. Prosperity depended on wealth in people. Foreign and internal slave trades amplified demand, resulting in centuries of slave-raiding and militarisation.
Polygny appears to have been encouraged by the trans-Atlantic slave-trade and jihad states. This inhibits gender equality (through early marriage, high fertility, lineage, intimate partner violence, and inter-group conflict). Women are quadruply disadvantaged.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade and relentless slave-raiding may have bolstered co-ethnic solidarity and male status. This could explain why cabinets are male-dominated in African countries where ethnicity is heavily politicised.
Orwell's Latest Doublethink
A snapshot report from 2022 revealed that one-third of those asking for a transfer to an all-women’s prison were registered sex offenders.
Thanks for the mention!