People who follow the news often claim to be surprised or even shocked by current events, Bryan Caplan notes, but that’s rarely his reaction:
Sure, I can’t predict the details of the latest happenings. But the broad outlines of the news are tiresomely familiar. Heinous domestic murders. War in the Middle East. Blatant violations of the plain English reading of the Constitution. Chaotic socialist tyrannies in Latin America. Pampered First Worlders blaming their horrible plight (?) on hapless refugees. Civil wars in Africa.
And always, people screaming at each other.
He goes on to list some actual surprises:
The collapse of the Soviet bloc. I expected that all reformism would ultimately be constrained by Soviet tanks. Instead, the Soviet Union let its satellites go, then shattered into 15 separate countries two years later.
9/11. As the vehicular rammings of the mid-2010s show, any motivated midwit can carry out a major terrorist attack. Since major terrorist attacks are very rare, motivated midwits must be in short supply. QED. Yet one far craftier team of terrorists still managed to carry out this world-shaking attack. (Note: I was not surprised that nothing comparable has happened since).
After Obama won, I laughed at a colleague who predicted that complaining about racism in America was finally over. But I was still shocked a few years later when complaining about racism — and renewed “anti-racist” activism — massively multiplied.
In mid-2015, I laughed at the idea that Trump would win the Republican nomination. Once he got the nomination, though, I was only moderately surprised that he won the election.
I was shocked that transgenderism became so common that I personally know multiple people with trans children. Darwinian evolution just tells us less about human sexuality than I imagined.
In 2020, I was not surprised by the emergence of a new, moderately lethal virus. Such things happen a handful of times per century. But I was completely stunned that serious limits on in-person activity lasted more than two weeks in the United States. Indeed, my jaw dropped simply when Disneyland first shut down. I never expected a reasonable policy response, but I counted on ADHD to save us. ADHD did not save us.
I was not surprised that Trump refused to concede the 2020 election. Indeed, one premise of my 2016 election bet was that even if Trump lost, he would not admit it. I was however surprised that he managed to come back from January 6, especially at his age.
I was surprised that Putin tried a full invasion of Ukraine. I thought he would limit himself to annexing de facto independent territory in Donetsk and Luhansk.
I was amazed that AI went from mediocre to excellent so quickly. But not surprised that it’s taking so long for AI to actually replace human workers, even when it conceptually seems easiest.
Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs shocked me. I figured he would limit himself to symbolic outrages, but instead he eagerly terrified the stock market for weeks. While he mostly backed off and the stock market more than fully recovered, there’s almost nothing he could do on foreign trade that would shock me at this point.
So, he’s just numb to news, which is not shocking or different than what he complains about, because his midwittery is visible with the events he listed.
Caplan’s not wrong. News is horrifyingly banal in terms of it’s general themes, almost like a sitcom in terms of it’s pacing and story beats, and the degree of capture experienced by news outlets at the hands of federal bureaucrats has only further poisoned the well. What was once merely aimless has become actively malicious.
“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth.” – TJ
Pretty sure the Bukele-El Salvador-Prison events would qualify as surprising/unanticipated.
“Pampered First Worlders blaming their horrible plight (?) on hapless refugees.”
Okay, now I know I can safely ignore anything this buffoon ever has to say.
“I was surprised that Putin tried a full invasion of Ukraine. I thought he would limit himself to annexing de facto independent territory in Donetsk and Luhansk.”
But Russia did not do a full invasion of Ukraine, and it did limit itself to annexation of the Donbas.
Caplan is an idiot, and a typical delusional neocon.
“Pampered First Worlders blaming their horrible plight (?) on hapless refugees.”
So Caplan wants to destroy Western Civilization. Has he personally endorsed the Coudenhove-Kalergi Schedule for total destruction of the USA? Is he upset that the devastation is behind schedule?
To borrow a line from The Mousetrap, Caplan isn’t actually a red. He’s just pink all over. It goes with the territory of being a public intellectual.
So he is trying to reconcile the Official Truth with the Observable Reality. His predictions based on this salad continue to fail. So enigmatic…
It never had a good aftertaste, yet the people who think they are smart keep reinventing “Forbidden fruit and Lethe water power drink”.
https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2011-05-25
Michael van der Riet says:
Or, the purple pill.
Bryan Caplan says:
Dude, Bryan, my man, I’ve had the same thought so many times that you just wouldn’t believe it.
Women voting? Blacks bearing arms? Taxing wages as income? Land taxes? Free money for everyone—parasitic capitalist, Oriental striver, and worthless gibs recipient alike—except productive whitey, at productive whitey’s expense? Iryna Zarutska being stabbed to death on public transit by a hominid with fourteen prior arrests? Divorce “court”? Homosexualism in the streets? The military as a jobs-program-of-last-resort? Paper money? A central-banking system? Male genital mutilation? Google? Sam Altman? Somalians in Minnesota? Men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men? The extension of the U.S. Government into the States via the Commerce Clause? Factory farming? The deliberate extirpation of the American yeoman by the Money Power? Coed schools? Woman doctors? Woman soldiers?? Woman judges???
What the fuck?
Oops, I forgot one:
The FBI?
Or how about the Department of “Justice”?
Somehow the constitutional necessity of DOJ wasn’t discovered until…
…
…
1870!