Top 5: Forgiveness, David Shor, and Ruthorford County, Tennessee

Plus: why we all like to kill spiders

The Top 5 articles for your week:

1. “David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Don’t Want to Hear” (NYT)

   Because by looking at reactions to David Shor’s work, Ezra Klein examines the major difference of approach (in large part, because of a difference in goals) of Democratic decisionmakers. Klein says:

   In this case, I think both sides are right. Democrats are often trapped in an echo chamber of their own making — a problem Twitter has made immeasurably worse — and they are too quick to dismiss evidence that their ideas and messages are alienating voters. The political system is stacked against them, and unless they are going to change it by adding states and reforming election laws, they need to campaign with the constant recognition that the pivotal voter is well to their right and skeptical of everything they say. On all of that, Shor is offering a warning Democrats should heed.

   Of course, if you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I (Michael) fall closer to David Shor’s side of the disagreement. The Senate and Electoral College isn’t a problem for any Democratic Party, but for this Democratic Party, and there are democratic implications of that fact that many on the left wish to overlook in order to advocate for their prefered version of the Democratic Party.

2. “Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge.” (ProPublica)

   Because this is a damning investigative report from ProPublica into the criminal justice policies of Rutherford County, Tennessee, and how one judge (Donna Scott Davenport) created a for-profit juvenile filter system that went unchecked for years and was based on extralegal means. (n.b. there is vulgarity in the article…also, you might swear while reading it yourself)

   But that doesn’t mean its jail is ramping down. Quite the opposite. The jail keeps adding staff. Mark Downton, one of E.J.’s attorneys, says the county has “shifted gears.” Forced to stop jailing so many of its own children, Rutherford County ramped up its pitch to other places, to jail theirs. The county has created a marketing video titled “What Can the Rutherford County Juvenile Detention Center Do For You?” Over saxophone music and b-roll of children in black-and-white striped uniforms, Davenport narrates. She touts the center’s size (43,094 square feet), employees (“great”), access to interstates (I-24, I-65, I-40) and number of cells, which she refers to as “single occupancy rooms.” “Let us be your partner for the safe custody and well-being of the detained youth of your community,” Davenport says. Thirty-nine counties now contract with Rutherford, according to a report published this year. So does the U.S. Marshals Service.

3. “Death and Forgiveness” (Comment Magazine)

   Because this is a rich and heartfelt account of exploring Western and Eastern postures towards the concept of forgiveness, and how the writer, Joseph M. Keegin, found the best explanation and defense of forgiveness in the Gospel of Luke. We especially loved this essay, and hope you’ll take the time to read it.

   After puzzling over Scripture for some time, I went back to my friend and reported that my mission had failed: I’d finally found evidence of forgiveness, but only in the Bible! What was I supposed to do with that? If the brilliant philosophers had overlooked something that only appeared later in the Gospels, troubling conclusions would follow. It would mean that our most important tool for discovering truths about the world had failed in one crucial respect—and if so, and we could not think our way to forgiveness on our own, it might have to come to us by some other route, arriving from somewhere outside of ourselves. Only after a few months of reflecting, and struggling, and fighting against the obvious like Jacob wrestling with the Angel, did I finally understand that what I had found was a little hole in the structure of things, a place where human reason—even at its greatest and most noble—had been unable to go. And it was through this tiny gap that I first caught a glimpse of God.

4. “The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left” (The Atlantic)

   Because “somehow” (“SOMEHOW!”) academics have missed (discounted/ developed theories as to why it’s impossible/harangued those who would even suggest it could be a thing, etc. etc.) authoritarianism on the left.

   In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychological makeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster. ” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion.

5. “Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers” (BBC)

   Because I (Melissa) am absolutely a spider-murderer and this excellent account of why I am possibly that way still cannot convince me to save these many-legged and many-eyed fellow occupants of Earth. Nope.