The Quarter Inch (5/18/22)
Massacres and Civil Society, Ukraine Aid, and My Solution for the Strike Zone Problem
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Dear Friends,
Another horrific massacre unfolded recently at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. An 18-year-old man, apparently an avowed white supremacist, sought out the neighborhood because of its high concentration of blacks. He live-streamed his atrocities, as though playing his own real-life “first person shooter” game. He murdered ten people.
The depravity.
In keeping with our times, all such shootings are immediately enfolded into some overarching narrative, some kind of monocausal explanation. Usually that explanation just so happens to conform to one’s prior presuppositions. This kind of outbreak of deadly violence is “clearly” the result of Tucker Carlson, Fox News, white supremacy gaining, well, supremacy on the right, and so on.
Except that just a month ago a black man opened fire and shot ten people in a Brooklyn subway. And on Sunday, a man opened fire at an Orange County, California church. He was Chinese, and he apparently hated Taiwanese people.
Simple, monocausal explanations don’t seem to work. The other explanation, sure as clockwork, is that proliferation of guns in America is the core problem. But America has never not had a proliferation of guns, so as an explanation for an uptick in gun violence it looks like “necessary, but insufficient.” Availability of guns is a factor, but as a constant factor it cannot very well causally explain the anomalies.
We should also keep in mind that while these mass casualty events are rightly shocking and they take up all the oxygen in our national discourse, over the same weekend thirty-three people were shot in the city of Chicago.
I have my own explanation. It is probably too generic, too abstract, and too vague to be of immediate public policy use. We have a spiritual problem. We are a sick, degenerating society. Our civil society is fracturing, our social fabric tearing. Our polarization problem is obvious; our addiction to outrage is plentiful and evident. We have epidemics of loneliness, fatherlessness, drug addiction, and more. Social media algorithms suck people into dark places—watch one white supremacy YouTube video, or some shock jock talking about “replacement theory,” and voila! The computer suggests that you watch … a dozen more! And there’s a dozen more after that.
There is no law that is going to fix these problems. Remember: murder is already illegal. Can we make it more illegal? Laws can hem in the worst of the effects of cultural degeneration, in the best scenario, but it’s a defensive action—an exercise in sandbagging. The kind of deep cultural renewal we need at the roots will not be brought about by legislation. The nourishment has to be come from the ground up, from civil society itself. Churches, neighborhoods, and communities must rouse themselves to local action.
We have to stop waiting for “someone” to “do something.” The government is comprised of public servants, which implies that the greater role, the magisterial role in cultural formation and health is the public itself. The “public” in this vast Republic is organized into thousands of communities and institutions that, with leadership and resolve, could really turn the tide. But we are instead addicted to blame—self-serving blame—and helplessly standing by waiting for someone else to “do something.”
It has been a good while since I’ve commented on the war in Ukraine.
The $40 Billion worth of aid Congress wants to send Ukraine has garnered a lot of partisan criticism. A lot of sloganeering: “The government can’t supply you baby formula, but they can send billions of dollars overseas!” As if those two things are even remotely related. I find most of the criticism of the aid money to be performative outrage. Of all the things to complain about with the government spending $40 Billion, sending it to the embattled Ukrainians seems pretty low on the list. I have some news for you: the Federal government spends, on average, over $40 Billion dollars every single day. (You should check out that link; up until April, to be more precise, they spent that every single Wednesday. Monday was double that). Sending them a day’s wages—er, borrowings—doesn’t seem like something to lose sleep over. We’ve got really bad borrowing and spending habits, but we should probably aim our outrage elsewhere.
As for the war itself, Ukraine has had some setbacks—they’ve lost Mariupol—amongst some tremendous successes. Russia abandoned all hope of taking Kyiv and re-concentrated on the eastern regions. But even there they are losing, as Ukraine is now on the offensive. Kharkiv has been completely liberated. For a sense of how things are going, consider this video clip (with subtitles) from Russian TV. For the first time, some straight talk, and the host doesn’t take the bad news particularly well:
Question: who gave him permission to speak like this? Because somebody did. Is Putin realizing that he’s going to have to start coming clean with his own people? Whatever the answer, it’s a good sign.
If Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies have ever fascinated you, or if you wonder what it even is, or perhaps you’re tempted to jump on the bandwagon and invest, I recommend that you first read this interview in Current Affairs.
It’s a Ponzi-scheme that has rewarded early investors and will leave latecomers high and dry. Do with that analysis what you will.
Something lighter to finish up with.
As I was watching the late west coast game between the Twins and the Athletics the other night—oh, that reminds me to get something off my chest. The reason there are no fans at the Oakland Coliseum is not simply because their ownership traded away all their good players. It seems to me the problem is that they allow fans to bring drums and a trombone and set up a drum circle in right field where they pound away and blast hideous brass notes throughout the entire game. It was nearly unwatchable without the mute button for me, and I know for sure that if I lived in Oakland I wouldn’t pay for a ticket to listen to that ridiculous racket all night long. I digress.
I came up with a potential solution to the strike zone problem. And I think it has real merit. So hear me out.
On the one hand I was impressed with the home plate umpire. He was calling a great game, pitches on all corners. And yet. He missed three or four impactful pitches, calling strikes on balls three or four inches off the plate. That is what we are trying to fix. We want to just tighten it up so that we don’t get those outlier calls wrong.
Everyone is beating the drum—heh heh—for an electronic strike zone, which basically takes the umpire out of it altogether. I am very opposed to that. Umpires have been a critical human element in the game for 150 years and we should tear down that “Chestertonian Fence” very reluctantly. And, for what it’s worth, my theory of what we’d discover by tearing down that traditional fence is that an electronic zone will destroy pitchers. We would discover just how much advantage they have had working just outside the box. Take that away and walks will skyrocket and hitters will feast on pitches in the zone. So here’s my better solution:
Technology-Aided Umpiring.
Here’s how it works. You set up some kind of infrared hologram strike zone box. I’m no techie, but I think you could do this with tiny projectors in the ground around home plate, or the in the grass just in front of it. The “box” would be invisible to everybody—zero distraction for anyone. However, the umpire can see it. Only the umpire can see it. He would wear clear, comfortable athletic glasses that display the box to him in real-time three dimensions. Having the box visible to the umpire would, I theorize, greatly reduce the number of really bad calls. If he’s looking over the catcher’s left shoulder and a 95mph heater hits the bottom corner of the far side of the plate, he will do less guessing because he can literally see the corner. Technology-aided umpiring.
It’s completely non-intrusive. It doesn’t remove human umpires from the equation. It saves their egos, and let’s face it: these guys are generally really good at their job. This simply helps them tighten up the zone to avoid really poor calls. I’d even be okay if nobody ever “saw” the real strike zone except MLB’s back-end review of umpire performance. I think fans—and players!—would quickly learn to trust the umpires more because we would have more consistency and the flagrant calls would be vastly minimized.
I think it’s a way better solution than the all-or-nothing proposals on the table right now. Let me know what you think!
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