Ross Douthat’s columns often have some thoughtful insights but, more often than not, also incorporate some fundamental misunderstanding of human nature which void his conclusions.  Not here, No Culture for Alienated Men:

There is a lot of talk lately about a crisis of manhood, manifest in statistics showing young men falling behind young women in various indicators of education and ambition, answered from the left by therapeutic attempts to detoxify masculinity and from the right by promises of masculine revival. The root of the problem seems clear enough, even if the solutions are contested: The things that men are most adapted for (or socialized for, if you prefer that narrative, though the biological element seems inescapable) are valued less, sometimes much less, in the peacetime of a postindustrial civilization than in most of the human past.

In a phrase, when we talk about traditional modes of manhood, we’re often talking about mastery through physical strength and the capacity for violence. That kind of mastery will always have some value, but it had more value in 1370 than in 1870 and more in 1870 than it does today. And the excess, the superfluity, must therefore be repressed, tamed or somehow educated away.

Kristof shares some similarity with Douthat in that he’s prone to getting important aspects of human nature wrong.  The difference is that the nature of my disagreements with conservatives differ from the nature of my disagreements with neoliberals.  Anyhow, as with Douthat’s column noted above, I agree with what he writes here, It’s Easy to Feel Righteous in the Trump Era. Liberals, Beware.:

It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about.

Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism. When you see well-meaning people on your side who were catastrophically wrong about profound moral and political issues, humility comes more easily.

These days, however, many conservatives are so ridiculous that I fear they are robbing us liberals of that well-earned humility.

I wonder if it isn’t more difficult for younger liberals to feel appropriate self-doubt after seeing conservatives frolic decade after decade on the wrong side of history…

My guess is that we liberals will continue to do silly things from time to time and that our silliness will be directly proportional to our smugness. If conservatives won’t let us earn humility the traditional way — by periodically discovering we’re the stupidest people in the room — then we’ll have to sharpen our ears for a Greek chorus warning us of the risk of our own fallibility in a complex world.

Otherwise, the whole room gets stupider and stupider.

Greg Sargent, Trump coup plotter John Eastman is finally facing real accountability:

Elite accountability in this country is at a crossroads. Many of the coup-plotters have skated, and though Trump faces prosecution for hoarding classified documents, he might evade accountability for the insurrection… If Eastman loses his law license expressly for abusing his professional stature to destroy our constitutional democracy, it would constitute yet another step, however small, in that direction. At the very least, it will send a message: Coup-lawyering will no longer be tolerated.

Excerpting it doesn’t do Karen Attiah’s column justice.  She puts recent events in proper perspective, The Titan disaster shows the effect of human hubris in the deep sea:

There is something more complex to examine here, about the social value of certain perilous journeys… I find it interesting that sunken slave ships… have not generally become the subjects of people’s romantic fixations.

File under “schadenfreude”:  Andrew Gelman, Ted-talking data fakers who write books about lying and rule-breaking . . . what’s up with that?:

What’s going on?

I have a few theories. The first is that these cheating researchers are both cheaters and researchers. That is, they are willing and able to break the rules and misrepresent the facts for their personal benefit, and they are researchers who are genuinely interested in cheating…

Another factor is that scientific misconduct is often rewarded. Until their eventual exposure, Gino, Hauser, Wansink, Ariely, and Frey were riding high. Their research tactics had succeeded for years, so they had every reason to believe they could keep doing their thing and just brush aside any objections. Lots of people in authority don’t care, or don’t want to know. Once you’ve been doing it for awhile and nobody in power has called you on it, you might feel yourself invincible….

Ultimately it’s my impression that these people don’t understand science very well. They think their theories are true and they think the point of doing an experiment (or, in some cases, writing up an experiment that never happened) is just to add support for something they already believe. Falsifying data doesn’t feel like cheating to them, because to them the whole data thing is just a technicality. On the other hand, they know that the rules say not to falsify data. On the other hand, they think that everybody except “schoolmarms” do it…

Ending on Positive Note

I found this conversation between Kristen Ghodsee and Ezra Klein provocative in the best sense of the word.  Ghodsee said some things I agreed with, some I strongly disagreed with (I tend to regard utopian views with contempt), and others where I initially disagreed but, after listening and thinking for a few minutes, ended up at least partially agreeing.  She got me thinking critically about my views.  It’s the most engaged with an interview/conversation in recent memory.  It’s a long interview but well worth your time, What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal:

Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships.