Flogging

Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”--Sowell

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For much of our history, we were indeed one of the freest, most democratic, most “equal” countries in the world. Where we were bad, other countries were (and are) much worse. America was never utopia; it has always been a mix of good and bad, plus and minus. It began as an experiment in letting people run their own country. Not all people, but more than were allowed to have power in England or France, or anywhere else. The experiment worked. But it also meant that law reflected, and had to reflect great waves of popular sentiment. It could never stray too far from the mean. It could express ideals, it could express “enlightened” opinion, but it could never be dramatically better or worse than the values of articulate people. That was its weakness, and also its strength.--Freidman

This is an important observation and demands, demands, the country emphasizes raising the vision and aspirations of its people.

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Reason has an article that discusses the reviews of the climate book Unsettled. It's damning. Here's the gist:

We couldn't find a single negative review of Unsettled that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately. Many of the reviewers seem to have stopped reading after the first few pages. Others were forced to concede that many of Koonin's facts were correct but objected that they were used in the service of challenging official dogma. True statements were downplayed as trivial or as things everyone knows, despite the extensive parts of Unsettled that document precisely the opposite: that the facts were widely denied in major media coverage and misrepresentations were cited as the basis for major policy initiatives.

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Flogging

In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos.
Moskos has a semi-Swiftian thesis: Prisons are so bad, it would be better if we punished convicts with flogging instead of incarceration. I say “semi-Swifitian” because he makes his case so eloquently that you struggle to believe that he’s not serious. The two main flaws: First, Moskos barely mentions one of the strongest arguments for flogging over incarceration: Criminals are impulsive and macho, so front-loaded, humiliating punishments are extra-good ways to deter them. Second flaw: Moskos tries so hard to convince readers that flogging isn’t too harsh that he barely tries to convince readers that flogging is harsh enough. Yet that’s probably the greater concern, at least according to this poll: