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The University of California Los Angeles has launched an inquiry into a teacher for reading aloud Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” because the civil rights document includes the n-word.
https://freebeacon.com/issues/university-to-investigate-lecturer-for-reading-mlks-letter-from-birmingham-jail/
As I said in the previous thread, you can’t really compare accidents with acts of deliberate aggression, beacause the former don’t respond to incentives while the latter do.
The reason cops aren’t killed at a higher rate is that they pose a credible threat to anyone who might want to kill them. The less threatening cops are to criminals, the more likely they are to be attacked for each interaction with criminals, making the cops more cautious and hence less effective.
You occasionally hear British people joking about stabbing cops with a butter knife. Or you see videos like this one. Very funny, except it’s not so funny when London becomes the murder capital of Europe and child grooming gangs operate unchallenged all over the UK because the cops are afraid of going after actual criminals and prefer instead to use their resources to investigate mean tweets.
The grooming gangs thing was about a fear of “inflaming community tensions” (i.e., getting called racist), rather than a fear of physical harm. Arguably the knife crime is as well, because the Met were made to stop randomly searching people for weapons a few years ago when it was noticed that knife-carriers were more likely to belong to certain demographics.
Yes, but I think the reason that the police and the Home Office don’t want to “inflame community tensions” with certain specific demographics is not so much because they are afraid of being called racist by the blue checkmarks on Twitter, but because these demographics (and specifically the neighbours where these demographics form enclaves) are more likely to attack the cops or outright riot if they aren’t left alone.
Various other European countries, notably Sweden, Belgium and France similarly have “no-go zones” where the cops are afraid to do their job, so these areas are largely lawless.
No they don’t. I can understand that why you might think so if you come from a South American (meaning, south of Canada) country with a hugely elevated level of violence relative to the rest of the civilised world, but this is simply false.
I’m from a country in Europe that shall remain unspecified, and I know that no-go zones exist.
I’ll admit that my “largely lawless” remark might have been an overstatement compared to, e.g. Brazilian favelas, and I’ll concede that maybe American hoods might be somewhere in between European no-go zones and Brazilian favelas, but my point that is that cops can definitely be intimidated in underpolicing certain areas and demographics, resulting in a breakdown of the rule of law.
British police riot gear is, as far as I can see, pretty much identical to that of every other police force, so I don’t think “They’re too lightly-armed to deal with riots” is the explanation.
@viVI_IViv
I’m not sure what kind of “no go areas” you exactly talking about, but crime statitics convice me that USamerican “Hoods” are on average a lot more dangerous as let’s say French banlieues.
Name three.
Cops don’t just go about doing their generally peaceful job except for shooting people at random intervals during the day. If a cop is pulling the trigger, it’s because he’s in the middle of a confrontation with an aggressive or actively violent suspect. In which case, I’m pretty sure the fact that both the cops-and-robbers action movies they watched when they were a kid and the aggregate statistics about law enforcement career risk are less of a factor than the guy right in front of them who gives the distinct impression of meaning them harm.
Police training disproportionately emphasizes the violent parts, which is probably an important influence. It disproportionately emphasizes the violent parts because those are the parts police trainers feel are particularly important to get right, but it probably does shift an officer’s perception of edge cases towards “this is going to be one of those violent incidents so much of our training is about”.
And there’s also the bit that, while commercial fishing etc is dangerous, it doesn’t let you get away beating people up and occasionally shooting them. So, for people who actively want to do that sort of thing, it’s cop or nothing where the legitimate job market is concerned. Cops-and-robbers action movies might play a role advertising police work in that context, but really I don’t think you’re going to be able to conceal the fact that “cop” is the job with the most latitude for beating people up and occasionally shooting them and getting away with it.
Isn’t this part of why activists have advocated for (likely useless) diversity/sensitivity trainings? Not only have the cops been incorrectly conditioned to believe that people are more deadly than they are, they’ve been conditioned that those deadly people look and express themselves a certain way. (For one thing, they perceive those hypothetical deadly people to be men rather than women.)
What are the numbers you’re looking at?
We know cops kill about 1,000 people a year. They shoot more than that. We’re assuming the cops are shooting them because they are almost all armed and dangerous people who are going to shoot/stab/kill the cop. If a sizable portion of the people cops shot instead killed the cop, would that be enough to bump the danger to cops over that of, say, fishermen and lawn care guys?
If so, the reason cop isn’t the most dangerous job is because the cops are trigger happy, and if the cops stopped being trigger happy, we would lose more cops each year per capita than we lose fishermen and lawn care guys.
It’s tough to know that counterfactual.
I’ll assume, for this thread, the assumption that nearly every time a cop kills another person that it’s justified.
But “justified” doesn’t mean the cop was in at least 50% danger of dying, which would approximately double the number of dead cops if they never fired. It just means that there was some justifiable reason.
I’m not saying that cops should never fire their weapons for self-defense, but if they didn’t I don’t think we’d see cop deaths go up by even 10%.
But the elephant in the room is that fact that cops need it to be Common Knowledge that cops are authorized to shoot you if you do something that threatens them. Losing this Common Knowledge might be worse for everyone. We may want cops to shoot a lot less than they do right now while still maintaining that Common Knowledge.
Oops, I screwed up the math here. I assumed “1000” was both the number of times someone died meeting with cops, and that “1000” was also the number of cops who died per year.
There are about 100-200 cop deaths per year, about half by accidents.
One thing that’s kind-of interesting here: a lot of police departments have adopted policies against high-speed chases. This came out of recognizing that a lot of people got killed or badly injured in these high-speed chases, and that they were usually over not-very-important stuff. In nearly all cases, the criminals could be caught another way (radioing ahead, sending a policeman to go knock on the door of the owner of the car in a couple hours, tracking them via helicopter, etc.).
To my mind, this is a model for further improvements. The police had a standard procedure that was getting a lot of people (police included) killed, and in many places, they stopped. I don’t know what other changes in procedures would make sense, but I bet there are changes they could get that would both reduce danger to cops and also to people being arrested/interacting with cops.
One example I know of: A few years ago, there was a case where a crazy person was waving a knife around in a public place. The police were called and eventually a policeman showed up to deal with the problem. Because he was alone, when the knife-wielding crazy guy started advancing on him, his only good choice was to shoot. If there’d been two or three cops, maybe one could have tried hitting him with a taser first, knowing that if it didn’t work, there was still someone with a gun who’d have a very good chance of stopping him.
Since Camden has been thrown around as an example of when “dismantle the police” worked, some folks have been linking this VICE piece on the evolution of Camden’s policing policy. This actually sort of reminds me of your explanation of no-chase policies. “Look, we’ve got the perp on camera; we’ve got his face; we’ve got his license plate; we can maybe even track him down to his home. Don’t worry about it, we’ll just catch him later. Wait for a time when he’s not suspecting it, not running with his crew, just trying to pick up a little food from a corner store or something. And the good news is that, before, you used to have 2-4 officers together to do this job… well, we doubled the size of the force, so now you can expect to have 5-7 guys, pretty much minimum. You can back off more easily and safely, and you can expect to have more folks having your back in case something can’t be avoided.”
This article (obviously biased but citing Bureau of Labor Statistics). Puts the police officer fatality rate at 14.6 deaths per 100,000 per year. It also gives the number of law enforcmenet officers in the U.S. as 813,000, although it’s not clear if that’s also from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or a different source. That works out to 119 deaths per year. An additional 1000 deaths per year would push the total to 138 per 100,000 per year, narrowly beating out logging workers for the most dangerous job in America. So by the numbers, it checks out. I did not expect this result.
It seems pretty generous to assume that every time an officer kills someone, that officer would have died if he didn’t. Also very few of the actual police fatalities are what we would normally consider violent. According to the linked article (again, biased) most of the police fatalities are vehicle accidents and suicides.
Even if just 10% of the people cops kill would have killed the cop, that’s enough to double the number of officers who die each year.
Add in Edward Scizorhands’ point about the loss of the Common Knowledge “don’t shoot at cops, they’ll kill you” and the number and severity of confrontations may well go significantly up.
In general I don’t think the “dangerous jobs” comparisons make a lot of sense, because for any job there’s a difference between the inherent danger of the situation, and the steps the worker takes to mitigate that danger. “Cop” is a more inherently dangerous job than “fisherman” because the fish aren’t shooting at you. If it turns out that fewer cops die than fishermen per capita, that doesn’t mean the fish are super dangerous, it means the cops were much better at mitigating the dangers of their job than the fishermen were.
Interesting Twitter thread estimating excess deaths from protests. Before reading, try to come up with a rough estimate of the amount of death a marginal protestor-day is responsible for, and examine how different values for that estimate would make you feel about the ethics of protesting. Personally, the estimates in that thread made me update heavily towards “excess deaths caused by protests are pretty much a non-factor”.
He’s estimating 200-1100 deaths per day of protest, and you’re saying this is a “non-factor”? I’m pretty sure that if Tom Cotton gets his wish, we call out he military, and they shoot and kill 200-1100 protesters a day, you’d think that was a pretty big factor – even though the deaths in that case were entirely among the protesters who volunteered to take the risk. Or, if the protesters gunned up and started killing policemen at 200-1100 per day, you’d consider that to be hugely important, even though they’re again all volunteers. But 200-1100 innocent bystanders dead each day is a non-factor because, they’re dying off-camera or something?
I don’t actually think the numbers can be narrowed down even within factor of five. I hadn’t done the math on this particular case before, but looking at his work, some of his assumptions are a bit pessimistic. On the other hand, he’s assuming the current Rt of ~1 is A: not even a little bit above 1.0 and B: not going to increase because of the high-visibility precedent that it’s OK to go out and have wild parties with your friends so long as it’s in a Good Cause(tm). And since the whole point of protests is to change people’s behavior, I think it’s fair to hold the protesters at least partially responsible for all the predictable behavioral changes.
So, probably and hopefully less than 200/day, but possibly far more than 1100/day.
There’s some body of people who thinks the evil of racism is worse than that many deaths per day, and the people who say Racism is a greater public health risk either believe it themselves or are afraid of upsetting the people that do.
Racism, slaveries, holocausts, however many centuries of evil you think it’s been going on.
Not your argument I know, but it’s got a killer of a buried premise in it: that letting the protests go ahead will fix racism. (I get the impression that the people who believe this overlap heavily with the people who believe that white people will never be anything but racist.)
As has been discussed ad nauseam, people treat different kinds of deaths (in particular violent ones) differently, and as per discussions of the cost of lockdown coronavirus deaths would differ significantly from protestor ones in terms of QALYs lost. At the upper end of the estimated numbers of deaths caused by protests and the lower end of generally estimated numbers for total coronavirus, that means each day of protests will be responsible for ~0.5-1%, which I think would be a relevant factor. But at the lower end it’s <0.1% which I don't think is.
If that’s true then US coronavirus deaths went from extremely important, maybe the most expensive deaths ever prevented (aside from maybe bringing a stranded astronaut down from space), to something not as important as fighting racism.
Which means we are on the right track and that the mass hysteria around coronavirus is abating.
this is the single best thing about the protests.
I’ll believe it when my church can meet again. Or at least my church small group.
As it is, it sounds more like one law for leftist protestors, and another for conservatives.
Well, that’s the question. What proportion of deaths does each degree of lockdown prevent? Since a day of lockdown involves more than two orders of magnitude more people than a day of protests (and actions avoided by lockdown are not disproportionately outdoors) it seems implausible that it would not have a massively greater impact in numbers of deaths (and remember, harm is above-linear in number of interactions).
Agree that the protests are insufficiently likely to end racism forever for their benefits in terms of lives saves to be worth considering, and that by the same logic we should be fine with anti-lockdown protests and other things with the same level of risk on this basis. In fact, anti-lockdown protests are probably more defensible (on this basis) since they are smaller (and the link between number of people and deaths caused is supra-linear).
Huh. I updated in the completely opposite way. I was thinking about deaths as a direct result of the protest, which have already exceeded the number of unarmed black people killed by cops in 2019. If his pessimistic figures are right and there’s over 1,000 per day, then each day of protests kills more people than were killed by cops in 2019 (1,004), good, bad or otherwise.
I largely think these protests are driven by innumeracy. If people could calculate percentages, they would not be in the streets.
I think these protests are driven by anti-Trump left-wing radicalism, and police brutality is just an excuse.
Maybe I’m being uncharitable, but it seems to me that the people who support these protests are largely the same people who are pro-police when it comes to gun-control, breaking up the working class anti-lockdown protest, and in general expansion of state power over citizens.
I don’t think it’s “left wing radicalism” if a majority of the country says they support the protests in the polls. Unless the country suddenly went a radical left turn in the past few weeks.
The same polls that had Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 election with 99% probability?
No polls claimed anything about anyone’s probability of winning any election. Some people may have interpreted polls in stupid ways, that makes those people wrong not the polls.
“Could” is the wrong way to think about it. There are a lot of contexts in which people may offer a consequentialist claim but have no interest in estimating actual consequences, because the claim is not the real incentive.
Consider a Republican who votes for president in California because he wants Trump to win. Estimating the probability that his vote will affect that outcome doesn’t require higher mathematics, or even arithmetic.
Depends on your assumption. One plausible set finds it’s slightly worth it.
The protests are about more than just death, though. The perception of Black Americans is that even those who aren’t directly physically brutalized by the police are under their thumb. Like, it’s not great if the police shooting rate goes down because the people are licking their boots extra hard.
We’ve seen this in action where the police have physically brutalized people who were trying to protect their own properties from looters.
I predict that none of the physical violence inflicted by the police during this time will make it into the 2020 stats. And that says nothing of societal damage inflicted by their demanding that we lick their boots all of the time. For example, people should be compensated if they get charged for resisting arrest and acquitted of all other charges.
Ten years ago retired art deal Forrest Fenn hid a chest filled with gold coins somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He wrote a poem filled with clues that would lead treasure hunters to the gold. Apparently someone has just found the treasure.
You can read the poem with clues here. The solution hasn’t been revealed yet, but might be soon.
I have always wanted to do something like this, both as the author and the treasure hunter
Radley Balko used to post about this on his old libertarian blog. It is true that police are taught in their training that any traffic stop could turn deadly and that there is definitely a War on Police. A quick google for risk perceptions among police didn’t turn up anything that useful.
I did find this:
link text:
Standby for an edit with more information:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/is-there-really-a-war-on-cops-the-data-show-that-2015-will-likely-be-one-of-the-safest-years-in-history-for-police/
One difference between the situation of a police officer and that of a lawn care worker or, for a more dangerous profession, a fisherman, is that the particular danger the officer faces is one that might depend on how quick he is on the trigger.
This is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Debater
I wanted to highlight and discuss one of Eric T’s points from a post below in a way that didn’t really seem to fit the tenor of the reply thread. This is a matter of historical curiosity that I haven’t yet seen really adequately addressed:
I think the chronology here is exactly right. There’s been a sea change in American attitudes about the present state of our racial settlement, with the most obvious inflection point being 2014, though you can maybe see earlier stirrings going back a couple years and the movement isn’t fully consolidated until Trump’s nomination in 2016. This is amply supported by polling data that I’m not linking right now, but would be happy to do if anybody wants to explore this particular part of the question.
The question for historians to ponder is, why at that particular moment? I want to be very loud and clear that I think the tectonic shift definitely precedes Trump, and Trump is more of a reaction to something already underway. So the question becomes: What changed in 2012-14?
I think the possible answers tend to fall into three genres:
1. The objective facts on the ground got worse in some way. Often vaguely implied, but not empirically evident in any way that would be obvious to me. Totally open to being persuaded otherwise, but I haven’t yet seen the claim made in a way that’s convincingly localized to that specific period.
2. Classic crisis of rising expectations. Maybe things didn’t get worse, they just got better much more slowly than was anticipated based on a preceding period of getting-rapidly-better. Or maybe the specific phenomenon of Obama’s two-term presidency generated a sense of heightened frustration based on the disparity between holding the highest de jure position while the de facto situation for ordinary black folks still sucked in roughly the same manner and degree as before.
3. The massive shift in communications media during that period — where Twitter was a fringe curiosity in 2012 and the primary theater of the presidential campaign in 2016 — was conducive, in some unanticipated, unplanned way, to raising the salience of racial injustice as an issue commanding broad public attention. But it’s not clear to me how to narrate that in a way that doesn’t sound like an obvious just-so story.
What do you think is the proper balance among these three kinds of explanatory narrative? Or is there a further alternative that I’m not thinking of at the moment?
Broad deployment of smartphones capable of filming video, maybe?
This whole issue with Floyd would never have happened if only eyewitness testimony had been available. It probably would not have happened if only scattered snapshots had been available.
3 definitely happened. Whether it was a cause or effect is harder to determine.
My money is on 3, although I admit it’s the sort of thing that’s basically impossible to prove.
That’s a great article for substantiating the chronology: there’s a real thing that happened, and it happened right then.
Still, there’s no particular causal thesis asserted, and that’s what I’m asking about: Why specifically at that moment?
Isn’t the likely answer that various necessary or contributory preconditions fell gradually into place in the preceding years – social media, phone cameras, Obama’s presidency not changing much – but that an incident was needed to actually spark the shift, and in our time Michael Brown/Ferguson was that incident? Maybe it could have been one of dozens of somewhat similar cases in the preceding or following few years, but as it happens, for essentially chance/unpredictable/chaotic reasons, it was that one.
I would point to 2010-2011 as the start, when everyone kind of realized that Barack Obama wasn’t going to end racism.
And we all scoff at this now but I remember racism in the 90’s being a hatred or dislike of black people that everyone should fight. The colorblind society thing really was the ideal, one that had been built upon and instilled into the public since the 60’s. Everyone believed that if we could all just get along, racism would be solved. And if you look at the extreme legal and open social racism of the 50’s and 60’s, it totally makes sense to focus on removing that. If we could just get white people to stop hating black people and get the laws to treat everyone equally, we would solve racism.
And then Obama got into office. This really was the culmination of the colorblind ideal, a black president. But just put on some contemporary media, like the Wire, and you see much of black America still trapped in the ghetto. I think this gets ignored now but would have been shocking, bordering on unbelievable, to LBJ or MLK or RFK. That legal and open social discrimination could basically be abolished in the US and yet we’d still have such massive inequality between black and white America is shocking.
And I think we’re still in the fallout from that. People are scrambling for answers and, more importantly, people are scrambling for a new consensus on race. Because the old thing just doesn’t work anymore, we maxed out the colorblind ideal with Obama and it didn’t solve our racial issues.
PS. when I talk about abolishing open social and legal discrimination, I’m speaking less from our modern viewpoint and more from the viewpoint of the 1960’s. I think everyone would agree that such open and blatant discrimination is 99% abolished.
Because people are different, so treating them the same does not result in the same outcome for everyone. If the different outcomes are correlated with race (and they will be), then it will be blamed on racism and even if that is incorrect, the existence of things being blamed on racism is a racial issue.
Also, “treating people the same” can be an extremely high bar. Assuming genetic differences between races are insignificant, getting broadly identical outcomes still requires e.g. treating everyone as if they had inherited $177,000 from their parents and can afford that much higher education and startup capital. It requires that the children of inner-city black parents get the same “you must study hard and take the right classes/extracurriculars to go to the best universities and we will tolerate no slacking off ever” as the children of East Asian immigrants. That level of “treating people the same” is not going to happen for generations, if ever, and trying to hamfistedly force it is going to break things. The resulting inequalities, are going to be blamed on racism and that makes it a racial issue whether it’s true or not.
Yeah, the social justice types, often act like explaining themselfs is their cryptonite.
The argument is that lingering effects of the openly racist politics of the past, still disadvantanges people.
Let me give you an example: Back when redlining was a thing, “porpotion of black inhabitants”, was an measure that lowered the value given to the neighbouhood. Which meant that a) it was harder for black people to get loans to buy houses, or to renovate those they already had. b) it incentivized ghettoization, since it was bad for white people when blacks moved into their neighbourhood. This made it harder for black people to develop personal wealth.
Since there are still people who were in “house buying age” back then, and since wealth has a tendency to be handed down through families, this still put’s black people behind. If we expect wealth to grow exponantionally over time, this will mean that the average black person will always be behind the head start the average white person has. Acting colorblind won’t solve that.
At least this is the Motte version. There are a lot of people using a more Bailey version of the argument.
@John Schilling provided a good summation of the argument and this was meant less as an argument and more as an empirical observation.
At the micro-level, a “solution” to racism that still has a significant black/general wage gap and black/general home ownership gap (decent proxy for wealth) and high racial tensions is a poorly functioning solution at best.
At the macro level, racism and racial issues have a very long and difficult history in the US and there’s a lot of emotion and energy tied up in solving it. In the US, hundreds of millions of people are have at least some investment in solving this issue and for millions, if not tens of millions, it’s a primary concern and issue. If they don’t think racial issues have been solved, it’s a huge issue for them.
I mean, I’m not going to stop you from arguing with other people about optimal policy if you want, but I intended my post as a “why did this thing happen” and not “should this thing have happened”.
If the scheme depends on the existence of poor Episcopalians to extract from, I foresee it running into trouble.
I very much agree with your larger point, but I think the answer to the question is actually a partial “yes.” People generally can’t literally tell how much wealth you have. If you wear clothes that the average purchaser of is a very rich person, people seeing you on the street will assume you to be rich. Same thing if your physical features mark you as a member of a group with high average incomes. People meeting you will default to assuming you’re at the group median, even if in fact you’re way below it. This obviously doesn’t change how much money you actually have, but it does result in getting more respect and better treatment in all kinds of social situations, in ways that might play significantly into your chances of eventually becoming less poor.
That effect — of being able to “pass” as middle-class more easily than others — also gives you an edge in intra-poor status competitions, and intra-class status anxiety is a hugely underrated driver of people’s actual feelings and behavior.
The form that existed in the 1950’s is 99% abolished, but affirmative action is open and blatant racial discrimination.
And I doubt that either LBJ or MLK would be surprised to observe that, with no open social discrimination by race, large inequalities in average income by race remained. There is no open social discrimination between the children of professors and the children of janitors, but is it surprising if the average income of the two groups is different? Whether due to discrimination or other causes, as of 1960 the ratio of professors to janitors was lower among blacks than among white. Wiping out such effects takes more than one generation.
MLK was a strong advocate of wealth redistribution policies, right? He was strongly into class politics, as well.
Communism was very popular in the 1960s. We hadn’t learnt the horrible toll yet.
the toll was known before the 60s. It was knowable even before the secret speech got out (1984 was written in the 40s based on things happening in the 30s, remember), it was just still being excused in the 60s.
If *everyone* *actually* treats everyone the same, then that *does* solve the racial issues. But if 90% of ordinary people treat everyone the same, while 10% act in traditional racist ways, then having government treat everyone the same *doesn’t* solve the issues, but having government pay extra attention to the people victimized by this 10% may mitigate the problem.
Calling for the government to turn a blind eye to this actual continuing simple racism is naturally interpreted as a kind of second-order racism.
If we don’t ignore the structural problems of the existence of inheritance and the decades of property law that gave most white Americans better inheritances than most black Americans, then there are other ways in which facially neutral policies just perpetuate past injustices.
Unless the traditionally racist way involves lynching people or the like, it solves much ore than 90% of the problem. Having the number of people willing to hire blacks or rent to blacks be (say) ninety million instead of a hundred million has a very small effect, since there are still many more jobs or apartment than there are blacks.
I have tried to figure this out. It’s hard for me to believe the facts on the ground got terribly worse recently, although militarized police forces and some other things may have made cops more likely to crack down in certain ways. I assume this stuff is nothing new.
I think the cell phone video part of it is huge–just having the clips available–made people a lot more aware of it and upset about it, and it meant the authorities had to respond. Then you had the social media replays and discussion, which got people more invested in it, building sincere communities and also engaging in some signaling, even involuntarily, as people began to go after those who didn’t post about these incidents. This is just the nature of social media. Also being able to see the social media profiles of the people involved in such shootings made a difference. And the media’s changing model meant it signal boosted all of this.
I think the “culture wars” lost some of their other issues, allowing this one to take on more salience. Partisan polarization making everything a national and somewhat more existential issue.
Obama being president may have made these things feel more “out of place,” like we were supposed to be over this. And he was expected to comment on it, and sometimes did, so it got more attention.
I feel like the whole thing was already well in place by the time Trump was on the scene, when it comes to police violence. Going beyond police violence, it seems likely that the things written about race started changing. I think after 2008 or maybe a little earlier, some people’s faith in progress was really starting to waver. With certain theories having become popular in academia, they started to go mainstream in certain circles to explain why the race issue wasn’t as “settled” as we thought, because it was far more structural and systemic. This became central to the left’s discussion as it felt its progressive vision more and more under threat, especially with Trump.
When social media became big in 2012-2015, all parts of America suddenly were confronted with all the other parts. They had different ideas about race–some people thought systemic racism sounded crazy. Those who found it obviously true felt surrounded by racists. Debates ensued. And it was easy to find examples all over social media of people making statements racist or possibly racist remarks, or, in the eyes of others, finding racism where there was none. All controversial issues tend to run into this on social media, because with so many people saying things, a lot of them are idiotic, tactless, or easily misinterpreted by others.
The one thing that is still somewhat mysterious to me is the extreme shift in the views of educated white women around 2014, which has been extensively covered. I’m in this group, but haven’t (so far as I know) radically experienced a change in my racial consciousness compared to many of my peers. I don’t know what has driven this, and out of nowhere this week I’ve fallen out with one of my closest friends, with whom I’m never fought, for being insufficiently woke. (Wokeness is a very new thing for her and seemed to come out of nowhere; I do not believe my feelings on race differ much from hers at all; I just didn’t use the right words or something). I know it’s a crazy and emotional time so I’m just trying to hope she comes around…
It seems that for many of them, the online activity surrounding Ferguson was highly emotional and upsetting for them, and maybe triggered some guilt, and this got things moving. I also think young people need purpose, and the secular religion thing is true, so I get why it caught on. But I associated it with people mostly younger than me. I have no idea what suddenly changed in my friend now.
To be clear, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be reevaluating how we deal with racism in America, or that it is important, just that I don’t quite understand why this shift happened when it did.
I’d love to hear more about this.
It may ultimately not be in their economic interest in some respects, which is why I think it makes sense to think of this as more like a religious revival than something explicable in conventionally self-interested terms.
That said, I think there are a number of slightly-subtler routes by which you could get to an analysis where racial grievance and professional-class female self-interest at least partly converge. Zephalinda already explicitly pointed to one:
To make the case even clearer: a lot of the activists’ current proposals seem to revolve around “hire a lot less cops and a lot more social workers.” Which occupational group do you think includes more college-educated white women?
This is a general problem in politics called Entryism.
The solution is to have gatekeeping against Liberals – by my definition anybody who specializes in processing information is a Liberal. It is a competition where we in the working class want the information processing class to compete with machines to drive their wages to zero and they want us to compete with other humans or machines to drive our wages to zero.
I’m heartened by the sincerity of somebody like the Youtuber Leah of See Jane Drill – to pick up a hammer and build to put a roof over your head is the most direct form of power. We should have whites and blacks plotting together against the building regulators who do the dirty work of the middle class. No cheap labour for you bucko!
If Silicon Valley could assist normal people with the building regulations it would be revolutionary. The most opaque part of the market is everything to do with property – isn’t that interesting.
@Zephalinda I generally agree with your first paragraph–that plays a role. I have personally felt unable to live up to expectations placed on me regarding status, which were high. It didn’t send me in that direction, but I understand how it sends other young women that way. This disappointment is radicalizing, historically more radicalizing for people who were privileged—elite overproduction and all that. I’m a bit confused about my friend, because she’s one of the few who seems to have exceeded expectations professionally, and appears to have a good personal life as well, and was never very conformist or social-media-oriented. I’m sure few are entirely free of status-anxiety or perhaps guilt regarding privilege, but it is interesting to me how it plays out so differently.
I’m trying to figure out what personality traits lead people where–it seems related to one’s affinity for and belief in the possibility of successful top-down enforcement of views. In my experience, highly educated young women I know either radically ratchet their expectations (relative to the norms they were raised with) upward (“once we fix these few things, everyone will become like me, and we’ll live in a just society”) or downward (“I’m going to move someplace more chill, get a dog, marry a guy without a college degree, and not tell my kids they have to go to college because I’m not totally sure what the future looks like right now.”) I definitely go towards the latter.
It’s maybe relevant here that historically this was exactly the demographic most central to institutional religion in the US. And now you have a generation where churchgoing has fallen off but some of the psychological needs are presumably still there. Some progressive younger women obviously are still religious, but even for them the sense of collective affirmation tied to church is maybe less strong, and Social Justice ends up playing something like the role that liberal Presbyterianism would’ve played for their mothers. (Though obviously with a very different kind of anti-status-quo bias.)
@mtl1882 — thanks for your series of posts on this. I thought it was interesting personal reportage, and illuminated some dimensions that hadn’t occurred to me before. I’ve observed some similar dynamics in my wife’s peer group, though I haven’t ever really talked about it with her in quite those terms. Seconding Zephalinda: really sorry to hear about the situation with your friend, and I hope it’s something you’re able to work through.
@Zephalinda I agree that “conscientiousness” plays a role. One issue that has been difficult for me is that while I’m sure I’d rank above average on this relative to the entire population, I think I’m below average ranked against other educated young white women. Not because I just don’t care, but because certain related skills like organization are difficult for me, or manifest in inconsistent ways. My executive functioning is not typical, but my weaknesses are somewhat inseparable from my strengths, and I increasingly resent the amount of (sometimes purposeless) administrative and box-checking work I’m forced to do, as well as its emphasis relative to actual work. I was long able to compensate for this through higher levels of intelligence and commitment, but this has become harder as I’ve taken on more responsibilities. There is so much pressure to self-monitor and optimize that I’ve kind of burned out, especially given that I don’t have a big career to make it seem worthwhile. I am therefore sympathetic to people who have trouble with these things, especially those who have much harder lives than I do and less intelligence and education to help them cope with it.
I believe this is the real point of contention going on between me and my friend. She has become increasingly conscientious and intolerant of those who aren’t as fastidious. I have become increasingly aggravated with the demand that most people meet a standard that only a tiny percentage of society can realistically meet. The reward for exceptional conscientiousness should be success in one’s endeavors, but it should not be equated with moral decency or even reasonableness, especially because you can be scrupulous in doing immoral things. While I share most of her views, I don’t share the belief that they can or should be imposed on everyone, and I increasingly favor “decentralized” approaches. She sees this as an embrace of bad behavior, or, even worse, of the “wrong tribe.”
I like to study the Victorian era (I often try to explain my feelings about decentralization by explaining how things used to work), and I agree there is a lot of overlap in the psychology. What’s going on now is a replay of what has gone on before in history.
I consider myself pretty earnest, and I struggle to find an outlet for this now, or to express how I think it is largely missing now, though the impulse is there. I think there’s a difference between that and conscientiousness, although they can definitely overlap…the latter sometimes turns more performative than earnest, and the fastidiousness doesn’t really extend to logical consistency, just following whatever rules are handed down day-to-day. I would be happy to find a cause, but the social justice movement does not appeal to me, because I think it is mostly well-intentioned but dangerously dysfunctional. I would have fit in well with the abolitionists, I think! I find myself wishing I was actually religious and could join a church, which a lot of millennials have been doing, and which says something about the situation.
@Jacobethan Glad it was helpful and thank you.
I strongly suspect there’s an element of barely acknowledged “a good career and children probably aren’t going to happen for me” going on. Getting involved in this provides an alternative source of meaning and social support, and a distraction/justification for this. I’m certainly not saying this is the main driver or true for everyone, but I think it is way off to believe that they’re looking at it from that sort of conventional perspective. They don’t trust the system to make sense and don’t use the calculations you are using. And, Jacobethan and Zephalinda are right that it increasingly holds professional promise–at first that was true mostly in academia, but it is increasingly true of corporate HR positions. To some extent, corporations exploit these disappointments, offering superficial changes that seem to support the cause, which feels like meaningful progress.
Cross-class socializing is not actually that common. Most educated white women don’t know any poor black people, especially as they avoid those parts of time for their own safety.
Wokeness, therefore, is about gaining status within their own social circles. There is literally a trend on Facebook of people posting a picture of Woke Book Of The Week (White Fragility is popular) tastefully positioned next to their avocado toast + glass of wine + small house pet.
Hearing the latest gossip, going “how dreadful! simply ghastly. :o” and doing nothing else about it is mid-to-upper class business as usual for centuries.
Maybe this is the same as number 2, but a shift in what constitutes racism? I was trying to look for evidence of racism in US police, and while there are several articles claiming no or little evidence, I find this WaPo (paywalled, limited number of free) article. It claims “overwhelming” evidence of “systemic racism” – as far as I can see, the evidence is entirely of inequality of outcome.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/18/theres-overwhelming-evidence-that-the-criminal-justice-system-is-racist-heres-the-proof/
Also, “systemic racism” is defined thusly:
I think many (older, non-woke, or conservative) people would disagree with this as a definition of racism.
This may explain the reaction to Floyd’s death: conservatives look at this and say excessive brutality, but no evidence of actual racism (no slurs, everything is calm until Floyd resists getting in the car). Liberals look at this and see the same excessive brutality, but as yet another case affirming a phenomenon that affects blacks disproportionally, and therefore the injustice of the system.
That definition of structural racism is unfalsifiable–any gap in outcomes can be attributed to it by definition. The definition they gave assumes their conclusion.
The issue appears to be conflation of descriptive vs. prescriptive. The concept of “a disparate impact exists, despite policies that on their face are colorblind” is useful to describe the situation. However, significant sects of activism pretend that you can simply invert the situation to make prescriptive solutions. “We have to teach people to be less systemically racist” is an incoherent command.
Black people became more white. That is to say, they took on the cultural mores of the white middle class to a greater degree. This was signalled in an aspirational way by TV programmes like the Cosby Show back in 1980s; it was realised historically by the election of Barack Obama.
One effect of these cultural mores is to give a (justified) sense of ownership of public discourse and public space––not merely legally, but in the sense of a feeling in the gut that assumes ownership rather than just claiming it. On encountering a reality that was misaligned with this expectation, the result is what you see now: outrage. Before this, endemic poverty and a self-distancing fatalism (“America isn’t my country) meant that political activism always fell far short of what it could have been, given the historical injustice.
This is essentially the same narrative as occurred for women in 19th and early 20th centuries. After being denied basic political and cultural recognition for most of history (and not even having the power to object to it), the rising affluence of the west after the industrial revolution made it possible for new demands to be articulated by the wives and daughters of the wealthier classes.
(This, incidentally, also explains why the current political agitation winds up conservatives. They correctly detect that this is a status grab not actually motivated by the ostensible reasons. What they fail to see is that status is a good like any other, and being denied it leads to riots quicker than a food shortage.)
My mental model is that there’s two ways people can approach conflict resolution. One is that people who need something sufficiently hard should be given that just because of that (This is typically referred to a left-wing in modern world) and another is that if you want something that is someone else’s you should do what they ask in exchange to deserve it (Which is usually right-wing). Most people would be more “right-wing” whenever it’s time to pay the bills for them personally.
So right now there’s 2 conflicting philosophies: “The rioting will continue because you are an evil oppressor and won’t give them status” vs “They should stop rioting and go back to earn status from me, or suffer for trying to take it by force”.
I agree that these two perspectives partition commentary on the protests, but I doubt they capture the distinction between protestors and counter-protestors (so to speak). Or more precisely, I think everyone subscribes to your second view, but disagree on whether the requested exchange has been made.
The protestor never asks for stuff because they need it; instead their actions say something like “I’ve played by the rules, done what was asked of me as citizen, made my contribution, and still I don’t get my fair access to goods of society––like not being murdered by the police for no good reason. So, I’m going to withdraw my consent to be governed by you by way of protest and/or rioting.”
The counter-protestor doesn’t agree that the protestor has made payment they claim; they say “You are an opportunist who is insincerely using an unfortunate event to hold my goods and safety to ransom. You need to brought to heel by the forces of law and order or everyone becomes ungovernable.”
In both cases, they agree on the cognitive frame; where they disagree is on whether the demands of the frame have been met.
Re: #1. The civil rights movements of the 60s didn’t happen under worsening circumstances, but improving. Everything I have seen on wage disparity shows black wages gaining on white wages post WW2, and this is very significant because white wages were also rising at a good rate. From a very basic perspective those gains actually help the movements in terms of resources available but also show the promise of improvements. It is going to be a lot harder to recruit masses of people if there is a feeling of hopelessness.
If you are looking at the 2010-2014 as significant I would (wildly) speculate that several issues came together. First, while I have looked specifically at the 2008 recession, most recent recessions in the US have the recovery in minority employment lagging the majority, and the total employment bottomed in early 2010 with a slow recovery. Then the signature acts under Obama were teh ARA in 2009 and the ACA in 2010, and Republicans won back the House in the 2010 elections. I think you could construct a story where Obama comes into office and its a big government push to get america back to work and then to fix the healthcare system with tons of coverage. Then the expectation for many minorities would be ‘ok, time to fix our issues’, which sounds reasonable since the federal government has just declared that it can and should fix major issues. Disaffection starts to set in as this doesn’t materialize, and if Obama represents your hope for getting it done then Rs taking the House in 2010, holding it in ’12 and ’14 and taking the Senate in ’14 will make it feel like it isn’t ever going to get done. On a slightly more granular level Ds took 8 seats back in 2012 which raised the prospect for taking back congress and giving Obama two final years of his presidency with a friendly legislature to act from above.
I think a generation of people came of age who had never heard alternative theories of black underachievement.
In the 90s when the issues of black poverty or incarceration or the state of the inner cities came up, you could hear people on national television explain this as a problem of “black culture.” The glorification of criminality and violence in the rap songs, that sort of thing. In semi-public settings you could nod towards The Bell Curve (and before the book itself was published, the “general knowledge” of its contents). After 2000 or so, no one made these arguments anymore because if you did, you were likely to be fired from your job on TV, and generally denounced as a racist. Not because they were untrue, but because people got very angry about them.
So if you were born in the 90s and only ever exposed to post-2000 racial politics, you were brought up to believe that every group of people on the planet is basically the same as every other group of people with only superficial differences. If you believe this, then the only explanation for black underachievement is racism. And since that racism is not overt, it must be structural.
Once you instead look at the overlapping bell curves for racial IQ, though, it becomes fairly obvious. Criminals tend to be low-intelligence, but doctors and engineers tend to be high intelligence. So when the black IQ curve is centered at 85, and the Jewish IQ curve is centered at 115, I expect to see more black criminals and fewer black doctors and engineers, and more Jewish doctors and engineers and fewer Jewish street gangs. I look at reality, and that’s pretty much what I see. There is no structurally racist system shoving blacks into street gangs and Jews into med school. It is the natural assortment of different groups with different abilities.
But if I said that on TV I would be never allowed on TV again, if I said that as a politician I’d be unelectable, if I said that in school I’d be expelled, and if I said that in my workplace I’d be fired. So there is an entire generation of people who have never heard what I believe is the true reason for racial disparities in society.
One piece of evidence against that explanation is the performance of West Indian immigrants, who are on average genetically “blacker” than the African-Americans already here. By Sowell’s account in Ethnic America, they make it to the average U.S. income in one generation.
His explanation is that southern plantation slavery produced a less functional black culture than West Indian peasant slavery.
I wonder if genetic profile would reveal that southern plantation slave descendant actually contain a good amount of Borderer blood. Or would the racial mixing be largely with Cavaliers? There’s a reverse-model-minority/brain drain argument, too, where those sold as slaves had to already have been the lesser of their native African populations.
@Conrad Honcho
This theory doesn’t hold up for how consistently racial minority populations are disproportionately incarcerated by the ruling classes. One might even posit the correlation between IQ and policing choices has a different direction of causation, given that abuse is just about the only factor where nurture definitely trumps nature. Under this theory, crime rates eventually rise to match the policing discrimination, as per cycles of violence, but the latter came first. Crime rates are more about who got caught than who’s doing the crime, and so is influenced by what is prioritized to be investigated.
Differential enforcement of the laws could explain a racial disparity in marijuana arrests, but I doubt it could explain the racial disparity we see in murder statistics. From official statistics, blacks commit murder at something like 8x the rate of whites, and 90% of the time it’s a black victim. It’s hard to see how that size of a result could be from differential enforcement of the laws.
@zqed
It’s consistent in the sense the the ruling class somehow always picks a specific minority to disproportionately jail. The fact that this minority changes from nation to nation suggests that IQ differences can’t be it, or we would see the same minority population every time.
@albatross11
That “blacks commit murder 8x more than whites” only applies to America indicates an element of nurture over nature shaping the black American population that way, which puts some responsibility on those who did the shaping to help that rate change, instead of deciding that black Americans have to bootstrap their way out of their crime rate.
AG:
You said Crime rates are more about who got caught than who’s doing the crime, and so is influenced by what is prioritized to be investigated.
I offered what seems to me to be a pretty clear counterexample in the case of the US. I don’t know much about what this looks like in other countries.
Blacks in the US, right now, commit serious crimes at many times the rate of whites. In the case of murder, the disparity is *really* high; I think it’s lower (more like 2-3x) among other crimes. This is borne out in crime statistics and also in crime victimization surveys, as well as in everyday-life observation, as well as in looking at (for example) pictures of people arrested for serious crimes in the news. (Lots of US news sources have stopped reporting the race of criminals because they were worried about re-enforcing stereotypes.)
This is a really important fact if you want to understand stuff like why blacks have a much higher rate of being arrested or being imprisoned or being shot by the cops. If you want to talk about racial disparities in those things and don’t know about the difference in rate of committing crimes, you are doomed to talk nonsense.
It’s quite hard for me to see how this could be caused by any kind of direct racism/prejudice/bigotry against them by whites. Racist policemen, prosecutors, jurors, judges, prison guards, etc., are not the cause of this disparity.
Biology could in principle have a role here, but crime rates bounce around all the time way faster than genes change, so most likely, what’s going on is social. My guess is that the difference is driven by a bunch of interlocking bits of social dysfunction–poverty, lots of unwed births, honor culture, gangs, shitty schools, anti-intellectual culture, etc.
The language of “structural racism” and “white privilege” seems to me to be supremely unsuited for helping us fix any of this broken stuff. Making every white person in America suddenly non-racist won’t convince a black guy not to murder his black girlfriend, or not to abandon his pregnant black girlfriend to raise their kid alone, or a black kid not to join a gang. Whatever the solution to those problems are, I think they mostly have to come from within the black community. Blaming white racism for those problems feels better and is probably better politics, but it will never lead to any help for those specific things.
The latter quote is exactly the point of structural racism: that to improve outcomes for African Americans you need to deal with the systemic issues like poverty, shitty schools, etc., that hold them back. I think you are probably much closer to agreeing with systemic racism than you realize: if you will concede that at least some of black poverty, shitty schools, etc., can be legacies of the era when blacks were second-class citizens, you basically agree that systemic racism is some of the problem, if not all of it.
So what work is “racism” doing in that phrase, and how does it tie in with calls to check my privilege or denunciations of white fragility? What’s the relation between this and discussions of systems of white supremacy?
If your point is that there’s a lot of social dysfunction in the world that needs to be fixed, and that some of it probably can be traced back to racial hatreds and discrimination in the past, I agree. But that sure doesn’t look like the point of the surrounding rhetoric.
It’s like if I start explaining all our social problems in terms of original sin and the need for Christ’s saving grace in our lives. And then when you say “you know, I think the problems are actually due to bad incentives and poorly written laws and some social dysfunction,” and I respond that yes, of course you’re right but those things are all caused by original sin and the lack of Christ’s saving grace, and so that’s why we should spend a lot of time in revival tents and in getting everyone to read the Bible more–you’re likely to suspect that I’m mainly shilling for Christianity there, and probably not providing an approach that will address the problems you see. And this is pretty-much how I see a ton of mainstream rhetoric about race w.r.t. racial disparities in policing, education, etc.
My prediction is that doubling the amount of anti-racism education and public messaging in the US, training all the police carefully about bias, and getting everyone to read books on critical race theory will have very little effect on police killings of blacks. But eliminating no-knock raids for anything short of a hostage situation, ending policing for a profit, and ending qualified immunity will probably combine to substantially decrease the number of blacks who get killed by the police.
The “racism” is there on the theory that the stuff like shitty schools and poverty are legacies of things like residential and school segregation, etc. which were explicitly racist (also, in some instances the theory is that current racism plays a role as well).
The call to check your privilege is a call to recognize that, if you grew up white, you have a better chance of having avoided some of those structural issues: you were less likely to grow up in poverty, less likely to go to a shitty school, etc.
The system of white supremacy is the set of laws, customs, and attitudes that led to a world where blacks are more likely to grow up in poverty, go to shitty schools, etc.
This really is all that you need to believe to buy in to some form of structural racism. My guess is you mostly disagree on how big that “some” is (which can still be an important disagreement).
I don’t fully disagree with this: there really are a lot of people who have built stuff like “white privilege” up into this almost mystical thing; I’m reminded of a group of white people who, at one of the George Floyd protests, ritually renounced their white privilege–whereas taking the idea of white privilege seriously, this is precisely what you cannot do. So, in that sense, the comparison to original sin is apt, and I agree that there are a lot of people who use the idea really badly. Some of this probably is grifting (like Sean King, or the woman who got white women to host her for dinner parties while she cured them of white privilege or something like that), and some of this is probably genuine misunderstanding.
My primary disagreement with your analogy to original sin is that, unlike with original sin, the fact of past racism is in fact very well established, to the point of obviousness: whether you believe that past racial injustice is responsible for things like black poverty today, it is at least incontrovertible that there really was past racial injustice.
This I am the least sure about: I think the argument of the people who push white privilege and similar rhetoric is that, people who don’t examine their privilege will not be likely to care about, or at least not prioritize, those reforms. The argument is, in order to build support for ending no-knock raids and so forth, you need to convince people that this is something they should prioritize even if the beneficiaries of the policy change will be poor black people. In this view, it’s not a coincidence that a bill to end no-knock raids and limit qualified immunity only emerged in the aftermath of massive protests that included a huge number of “woke” white people–before white people checked their privilege, there was no appetite for such reforms.
I think the argument is plausible, but not completely convincing, and I think that some of the overheated rhetoric is orthogonal to, or even counterproductive to, building that support.
This David French essay helped me to understand “systemic racism” besides a buzzword.
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/american-racism-weve-got-so-very
@Eugene Dawn
Except this is nonsense. the worst schools in the country are in large urban areas which (A) often were never segregated and (B) are incredibly well funded. there is no way in the world to blame the failings of, e.g. the DC school system, on segregation and racism.
If the issue is the legacy of racism, and not actual racism, then we should be celebrating the end of racism and adopting race neutral policies, because if actual racism has been largely ended, then if you help poor blacks as much as poor whites, everyone will rise up at the same rate.
At best, that WAS the system of white supremacy, 60 years ago. It can’t be called that doay.
this is just motte and bailying racism.
It’s also incontrovertible that enormous efforts have been expanded in attempting to tear down those systems and build up minority groups. And it’s unconscionable to call the modern system by the same name as the old.
You were just talking about how overt racism was wasn’t the issue, but structural racism was. Now we’ve fallen back on “people don’t want to do these things if they help blacks”, which is overt. First, this is the motte and bailying everyone was talking about. Second, shouting about white privileged is the absolute WORST possible way to do that. if you want to make race less a salient category, you have to make it less salient! You need to argue that these things are good for people, full stop, and then if anyone grumbles “yeah black people” you can call them racists and I’ll back you to the hilt. But what you can’t do is constantly talk about race and how race is important and claim you’re not the one obsessed with race.
It’s not a coincidence because blacks are 13% of the population. any movement for any sort of change is going to require a large number of white people behind it, because white people are by far the biggest group of people. Math isn’t secretly racist.
Edward Scizorhands:
What that essay seems to be talking about isn’t structural racism in the sense being described by Eugene Dawn, but rather actual current-day racism.
The West Indian blacks had also been sold as slaves, so that couldn’t explain the difference.
Your other conjecture is an ingenious one. Presumably one could test it with suitable genetic testing.
I think that’s backwards.
I’m reminded of one of my father’s stories. It involved some major government program, possibly social security. He argued that it made sense only for poor people, so should be limited to them. The person who he was arguing with, I think someone near the top of the relevant bureaucracy, replied that a program only for the poor would be a poor program.
My father thought that was a valid point, that if a program were only for the poor the only people who would notice and object to things wrong with it would be poor people, who didn’t have much political power.
The same argument seems to apply here. If you treat no-knock raids as a problem for blacks, you will have only those people who give black problems a high priority on board. If you treat them as a problem for both blacks and white, which they are, you will have both those people and the people who don’t care about blacks but don’t want to have cops smash down their door in the middle of the night because they got the address wrong on board.
OK, so what work is “racism” doing in that sentence?
The schools suck, the suckage of the schools is causing problems for a lot of people, we should fix the schools. There’s your argument right there. Almost nobody will disagree with any part of that except the price tag.
The moment you add “…because of the legacy of X behaving badly”, you start losing support of the X-adjacent people who think you are accusing them of wrongdoing, or fear that you are using this cause to assemble a coalition against their interests.
What do you gain, to offset this loss? If the schools suck, why are you distracting yourself from “here’s how to fix this” with “here’s who to blame for this”?
OK, now you’re definitely losing all the people who think you are accusing them of wrongdoing. Which is maybe not a big loss if you’ve got the right culprits and they are irredemably lost to your cause anyway. But how sure are you that the problem is racism rather than e.g. class or cultural bias?
@cassander/David/John
Sorry for being slow to respond; in order to keep the thread from getting too messy I wanted to prioritize any response from albatross, but I think at this point it looks like albatross is done.
There seem to be three different things to consider:
1. Is it accurate that a meaningful proportion of the issues African Americans face today are the legacy of past racism?
2. If so, is that enough to fairly characterize the persistence of those issues as racism?
3. Even if so, is it divisive and unhelpful to buy into this framing, and we would do better to make race-neutral arguments?
I take David and John to mostly be making point 3, and cassander to be making all three points, but most of the comment making a mix of points 2,3 and a little bit of point 1 at the beginning.
So I’ll start by addressing point 3:
I’ll start by saying that I don’t dismiss 3 at all; I think there’s a lot of truth to it, and I think for both moral and practical reasons, even people who think that black disadvantage is caused entirely by ongoing racism should prefer solutions that help as many people as possible, all else equal.
But I don’t think that’s the end of it. First of all, there’s the matter of accuracy: while it may be politically expedient to avoid racial framing, political expedience isn’t the only value–we are not just trying to change the world, we are also trying to understand it. If it is true that past racism is partly responsible for poor outcomes for black people today, then accurately describing that is important.
This is especially so if different diagnoses of the problem suggest different solutions. In short, the concern is that, if primarily-black schools suck more than primarily white schools, “fix the schools” won’t resonate all that strongly with white voters–they will be more likely to balk at a price-tag for a good they will get less of, and that they will probably pay more of. This is especially so if a successful strategy to “fix the schools” will require paying attention to race.
The same argument applies to David’s example: it would be great if there were a way to frame no-knock raids as a problem for black and white people equally, but if white people believe that no-knock raids are more likely to be executed against minorities (as I believe is the case, though tracking down a good source is surprisingly difficult) then it’s not obvious what convincing arguments you could make to the effect that white people should treat no-knock raids as an equally serious problem for them.
And furthermore, it’s not actually clear that these arguments are political losers! Among other considerations, losing some marginal supporters of your agenda in exchange for the remaining supporters prioritizing your issues more can be a good move.
What’s more, the Civil Rights-era fight for racial inequality is one of the more popular political moments to appeal to, especially for the left: if you can convince people that you are continuing the work of MLK, that can be pretty compelling.
And finally, empirically, it seems to be working: it is in fact true that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of white people who believe in fixing structural racism, checking their privilege etc.
So, while I don’t at all dismiss the concern that some of the white privilege talk is alienating and off-putting to potential allies, I think there are at least some reasons not to retire that rhetoric completely. And, once again, FWIW I think a lot of uses of it are counterproductive, unhelpful, incoherent, mean-spirited etc. I’m just not convinced that the term has no utility in spite of that.
On point 2, is the “racism” of “structural racism” necessary? I don’t strongly care; I’m a descriptivist w.r.t. language so if people here prefer a different term, that’s fine by me. But for better or for worse, that is the term that is in common use, and I don’t think it’s too unjustifiable: if something is a consequence of an explicitly racist system, even if that system has since been dismantled, I don’t think it’s out of bounds to think that it’s fair to apply the term “racist”. At any right, if you answer “yes” to 1, whatever term you use should probably have some acknowledgment of the role of racism, even if you try not to have that acknowledgment front-and-centre.
On point 1, as I said to albatross, my guess is this where most of the disagreement lies (John I think is also making this point at the very end of his comment)–is it really the case that Jim Crow and slavery are responsible for some significant proportion of the issues black people continue to face? I think if you grant that the answer is “yes”, most of your disagreement about the term “structural racism” is about tactics. If you say “no”, then it looks like an unfair attempt to tar your political enemies as Bull Connor when they’re really just Mitt Romney.
I won’t make a full defense of 1 for obvious reasons (my guess is this comment is plenty long already), but I’ll just say that I think there are plenty of examples in human history where cultural patterns can persist for centuries after they were laid down: it’s popular on this blog to attribute some of the attitudes of SJWs to the Puritan heritage of New Englanders, a cultural transmission of 400 years. I do not think it is at all implausible that slavery and Jim Crow are responsible for some of the cultural patterns in black communities.
What’s more, residential segregation and school segregation are exactly the sorts of policies that can trap people in poverty-stricken neighbourhoods and deny them access to the institutions to get out of poverty. John asks, am I not sure that I should be blaming class? I think a partial answer is: Jim Crow was a system that forced black people into a certain class, and denied them any means to get out, even the means that were available to white people of lower class. Again, there are plenty of examples of long-term consequences of bad policy on development and institutions, so I don’t find it at all implausible that the legacy of two centuries of strangling black political and economic development persists to this day.
Finally, and a little more controversially, I think people are a little too sanguine about ending formal, legal discrimination as the end of racism and racial discrimination. It took 33 years after the Civil Rights Act before white support for interracial marriage reached even 50%; the idea that informal racial discrimination ended in 1964 strikes me as pretty implausible. Once again, there are unambiguous cases where racism and discrimination well outlasted the end of legal discrimination: the Jews of Germany were emancipated in the early 19th century, but it is pretty obvious that antisemitism was still a potent force a hundred years later.
So to this end, I am much less skeptical that past racism can still have profound effects in the present day.
@Eugene Dawn says:
For certain definitions of those terms, yes.
No, definitely not. If a genie came to earth tomorrow and magically made everyone completely non-racist, a year after that happened black people would still be, e.g., poorer on average than whites. but racism wouldn’t be the cause.
Emphatically yes.
This cuts both ways. Obsessing over ever more marginal sorts of racism drives non-racial solutions out of the discourse and focuses attention on “solutions” that won’t actually fix things.
Disagree strongly. “fix the schools” is a good slogan that everyone can get behind, and everyone has been getting behind for decades, no one thinks the schools are good enough, and funding keeps going up. “fix the schools, you racist” is a much less popular slogan.
Why would they think that, if no one is making it a racial issue? Do you really think people are going to get up and argue that it’s an issue white people shouldn’t care about because it only helps blacks and be allowed in polite society?
Successfully accusing your opponents of racism has been a winning argument for a long time. that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for society. In the long run, it only raises the salience of racial divides and makes actually getting past them harder, not easier.
It isn’t fair. If you get soaked by a sudden storm then go inside, your problem isn’t still the rain, it’s that your wet. Insisting that you’re being oppressed by a lack of umbrella access is nonsense. the past is past.
The word “some” does a lot of work in that sentence. I don’t think anyone would disagree with some. But some use some to mean “almost all and anyone who brings up alternatives is racist” and that gets tiresome.
That must be why democrats are leaping to endorse charter schools, vouchers, and local control of education! Oh, wait…
Again, I refer to the rain metaphor. If we accept that open discrimination is largely dead, then race neutral solutions will be at equally effective and less divisive than explicitly racial ones. the only reason to chose otherwise is the political power that comes from stoking racial grievances.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, but I don’t see how that answers my point. I don’t want men smashing down my door and pointing guns at me and my family. I still don’t want it even if it’s more likely to happen to someone else than to me.
4. These protests are the violent phase of the unholy alliance of the urban underclass and the elites waging their war on the working and lower-middle class. Hordes of rioters and looters, endorsed and funded by big corporations and celebrities, raiding mostly small local businesses and attacking cops, who are working class professionals primarily protecting the working and lower-middle class, as the underclass relies on gangs and the elites rely on private security.
This is a really interesting question, and one I wish I understood the answer to better. However, I have some poorly worked out thoughts, that I hope will add something to the discussion.
One feature of Twitter and social media that I think others have overlooked is that they are genuinely informative: I think a lot of the liberals who have been radicalized in recent years were probably not very well-informed or politically attentive liberals in the past. My understanding is that there’s a decent amount of evidence showing that often it’s better informed voters who are more partisan and more ideological, which makes sense when you think how deep and fundamental some of the divides between the two parties and their coalitions are–you almost have to not be paying very close attention to not really have a preference between them.
There is some evidence that “high information environments” (i.e., access to the internet) results in less ticket-splitting and a lower incumbency advantage. To me, the most natural reading of a finding like this is that as voters become better informed, the effects of charisma, and other non-ideological factors on elections diminish and people start to vote as hard-edged partisans, as they come to understand which of the two parties genuinely represents their beliefs better.
Another mechanism here is that, even if you only loosely affiliate with one party or another, a higher-information environment allows one to become better informed on the issue of “what someone in your preferred party believes”–people become more aware of the views they hold that are idiosyncratic in their coalition.
I think lots of forms of social media function to essentially lower the bar for people to be informed of, and participate in, political conversations that better inform them of what political coalitions best align with their views, and what the other views held by that coalition are. Usenet and blogs are early stages in this trend, but Twitter and Facebook lower the bar much further.
Another factor that I think is at play is the rise of the college-educated share of the electorate. For whatever reason, college education seems to correlate with cosmopolitan values; it also plausibly results in people being better informed about the makeup of political coalitions.
I think the latter trend has probably been raising the “cosmopolitanism baseline” for a while, and the former trend has raised the “informedness baseline” enough to sort along the cosmopolitanism axis, and to learn the shibboleths of the cosmopolitan faction.
I think events like Obama’s election, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc., are then tipping points where the underlying trends are accelerated, or suddenly thrown into sharp relief.
I don’t know that I fully endorse this story, but I think there’s probably something to it; I also like that it mirrors some previous similar moments in American history, like the rise of abolitionism pre-Civil War: anti-slavery voters were split between parties, or not highly committed, but over time trends like rising religiosity intersect with information like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and events like the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, to radicalize people, in some cases seemingly quite suddenly. There is a quote attributed to an abolitionist, in the aftermath of the Anthony Burns case:
I generally agreed with this article that 2014 is when the turning point felt like it was happening. Though some of my feeling about this was also due to personal events of that year. I moved from Los Angeles to medium town Texas. And as a philosophy professor, it was also quite relevant that 2014 was the year that the profession finally revolted against Brian Leiter’s blog as the central blog and moved to Daily Nous (even though there had been repeated calls over the previous several years for people to make a parallel move, that never quite stuck).
But I was thinking about this question in November/December 2019, when I was looking back on the 2010s and wondering what we will in retrospect see as the major developments of the decade. There were some idea changes, like the Overton window coming to include fake meat, self-driving cars, and universal basic income, even though none of those things actually had any significant impact yet this past decade. But most of the others were somehow naturally seen as consequences of smartphones and/or social media – Uber/Lyft, Grindr/Tinder, bikeshare/scooters, the Arab Spring, #metoo, Black Lives Matter, Trump, Brexit, possibly even the Tea Party. (Smartphones and social media themselves predate 2010, but they achieved their relevant features late enough in the 2000’s that their major consequences didn’t really take root until the 2010’s.)
I’ve seen a similar phenomenon when people would post occupation fatality statistics that included soldiers deployed to Iraq during the height of the war. Spoiler alert: it was less dangerous than being a fisherman.
In that case it was a fatal incorrect assumption regarding the “tooth to tail” ratio, the vast vast majority of GIs never left an air conditioned tent.
Could there be a similar heterogeneity issue?
The police have a logistics tail, but unlike the army, they dont count the people working the forensics lab, morgue, ect as cops, so no.
I just learned about the “N-P-K” soil fertility paradigm, and would like to make my own, simple fertilizer for my backyard. I have the following ingredients and know they contain high concentrations of each element:
N = Nitrogen = Used coffee grounds
P = Phosphorus = My urine
K = Potassium = Wood ash
To make a generic fertilizer, in which proportions should I mix those ingredients? (e.g. 1:2:2.5 by volume)
Insert “proyas is a nice guy, but he makes the worst coffee” joke here.
I don’t know much about the other two, but my understanding about coffee grounds is that they are best used as an addition directly into a compost pile, rather than distributed directly into the soil. Throwing coffee into the soil like that requires a lot of time to break down their nitrogen, and if you are just throwing it on top of the grass, it’ll smother it. Same if you leave grass clippings in a big pile, it’s not really going to do squat unless it somehow decomposes.
Also, I guess the Q is what are you fertilizing? Don’t want to be a naysayer, but if it’s your lawn, it depends on your grass type. Bluegrass can need up to 1 lb/sq ft 4 times a year per 1000 sq ft. On a typical suburban lot, and at 1.5% nitrogen in coffee, you need something like ~300 lbs of coffee grounds, 4 times a year, to adequately fertilize a lawn.
Any particular reason, just trying to be frugal and use up the good stuff you have?
@proyas:
I generally think of urine as being high in Nitrogen, rather than in Phosphorus. This article suggests that human urine has about a 10:1:4 ratio of N-P-K (it’s not nearly this high as a percentage when liquid, this is only the ratio). So it would be hard to get enough Phosphorus here without going really high on the Nitrogen.
The P-K ratio for wood ash is probably more like 1:3 and thus might be slightly better as a source of Phosphorus, although you have to be careful about pH and sodium levels when using it, and would probably end up with too much Potassium.
Coffee grounds are fairly high in Nitrogen — apparently about 2%, but are typically used in making compost rather than directly as fertilizer. The issue is that composting consumes nitrogen initially, so that if you add them as fertilizer and they compost, you might not actually be adding net Nitrogen.
So if by general purpose you mean something with 1:1:1 ratios, I think it would be impossible to achieve with the components you list. I’m not sure what a common household waste that is actually high in Phosphorus might be — maybe bones if you eat enough meat? Are you able to collect much roadkill? But as “A Definite Beta Guy” asks, perhaps the first question should be what your specific goals are.
It would depend on your soil type and climate, and what you are growing. In temperate climates much of the inorganic (available) nitrogen will be lost in the winter rains. Nitrogen is best applied in spring in time for the greatest period of growth. P and K are not lost this way in soils with high organic or clay content, but K may be lost in sandy soils.
For grazed grass on very poor soil for example, up to 80 kg/ha P and 60 kg/ha K is recommended, but this falls to 20 and 0 in reasonably fertile soils. Because N does not remain in the soil, the amount is calculated based on the predicted yield of plants grown, and can vary from 30 to 300 kg/ha.
Consider saving your fruit and vegetable waste in a compost container. It will contain NPK plus the other plant nutrients (Ca, Mg, S and micronutients), as well as organic (carbon) compounds which improve soil structure.
I don’t produce any such waste.
Curfews strike me as a horrible idea for maintaining law and order during mass protests. The idea behind them is fewer people will stay out, meaning those who are out will be easier to police leading to fewer opportunities for vandalism and looting.
The problems with this:
1) It’s possible the crowd size isn’t reduced at all. These are protests against the prevailing law and order paradigm after all.
2) Once curfew hits, everyone out is breaking the law and everyone knows it, further lowering the status of law.
3) Because everyone out is breaking the law after curfew, protesters and police are automatically, officially in conflict, no matter whether the protesters are peaceful or not. What the police will or won’t allow becomes ambiguous, making good/bad decisions by protesters a matter of guesswork. (If we walk across this bridge will it anger the cops?)
Cities without curfews (E.g., Houston) have had much less violence, although I realize this is only weak evidence, as cause and effect aren’t clear.
There are situations in which curfews likely deter looting, such as during a power outage at night, when relatively few people would be out late anyway, making it easier to police those who are. But curfews in response to large scale protests are counterproductive.
It also worth mentioning the places that have had curfews have been implementing them pretty terribly. LA and Seattle had a 6/5pm curfew, which is patently ridiculous, and NYC had a curfew where essential services (food delivery workers) were arrested for violation of it. So while i personally also think curfew is bad, the evidence against it atm is muddled by a lot of the implementations of it being just abysmal.
Years ago when I was an anarchocapitalist I argued on the internet that privatized police would be an improvement:
-most security is private already
-police don’t have incentives to provide useful protection of life and property, easier and more lucrative to prosecute victimless crimes like the drug war or people rolling through stop signs
-police often won’t even show up for reported property crimes
-insurance companies and private security could do a better job
I didn’t have any data to back that up at the time. I’m not an advocate for abolishing the police or AC in general any more, at all. Just out of curiosity though, does anyone have any data about what police actually spend their time and resources doing? How much of it is what your average liberal or libertarian would consider protecting and serving?
This is a nitpick, and maybe evidence of a bigger issue here, but the police don’t prosecute anything, or at least aren’t supposed to. They’re supposed to enforce things like the drug war and traffic laws.
Are there examples where most of all the police protection for a community is provided by private security, with (for example) a fallback to calling on the county or state police for a suffiicently serious issue?
Many universities, including private ones, have their own police departments. They are real law enforcement officers with police powers, but refer any serious crime to the government.
The University of Chicago’s private police force is second only to the Pope’s.
Google says that in the US, private security employs 2 million people full time and is a $100 billion industry. Google says there are about 700k police in the US, with a budget of $100 billion plus $80 billion for incarceration. Unclear if the 700k includes prisons.
So 2 million private security guards full time, plus lots of private security cameras and alarm systems, to me means that most security is provided privately with a fallback to calling the police.
To your question though, I don’t know of any examples where there is no local police force to call. I’m sure there are some niche places where that happens but don’t know if there are any that you could use an example for a city.
It’s worth noting that there were no police, in our sense, in England until about 1830, although there were private thieftakers, operating for rewards, public or private. Legally speaking, any Englishman (or I think woman) could prosecute any crime, and in practice it was usually done by the victim or his agent, like tort prosecution today.
Damn, Netflix has “The Legend of Bruce Lee”, a TV series chronicling the life of Bruce Lee. The series consists of 50 (!!!) episodes. That’s a remarkably thorough treatment. Will any living celebrity inspire a comparable effort?
Depending on your definition of “celebrity”, Narcos may count as comparable effort. Pablo got two seasons all to himself.
The Crown is intended to eventually also have 50 (currently at 30).
Isn’t there a show about young Obama and Michelle?
In order to bring SSC back into karmic balance, I’ll try to balance out my last overtly negative post with a positive one.
Couple months ago a friend bought me a year subscription to Humble Choice for a bunch of games. Issue- I already own many of them. I’ve pawned as many of them as I can off on friends, so here’s some more. Post if you’d like me to give you a steam key of any of the following (posted in largely random order). You’ll have to give me a place to send you a code to.
-XCOM 2
-Jurassic World Evolution
-Gris
-Opus Magnum
-Capitalism II
-F1 2019 Anniversary Edition
-SHENZHEN I/O
-Project Warlock
-Street Fighter V
-Unrailed!
-Blasphemous
-Hollow Knight
-Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville
-Tropico 4
-SOULCALIBUR VI
-Crusader Kings II (But no DLC so functionally worthless)
-Terraria
I only have 1 of each so first come first serve I guess
I would be interested in XCOM 2, and if nobody else speaks requests it after some reasonable amount of time, Terraria. I played XCOM 1 in with French audio for learning purposes, as it is one of the relatively small collection of games with good quality non-English audio, and I suspect XCOM 2 will be the same. You can email me at the following address, after removing the three xs,
ledxetoxrisaxarti@gmail.com
Full disclosure: I registered an account just for this. I am a long time reader, but still feel dirty.
For any others interested in the offer, I would highly recommend Hollow Knight.
Sent. If nobody claims Terraria I’ll pass it to you.
I would like to take Gris, as I keep hearing how beautiful the graphic design of that game is. Please send it to jonny5000@freenet.de
Just chiming in to say that it was a delight to see everyone engaging on this topic constructively – thanks!
Hah! I meant this for the Eric T thread.
I’d love Hollow Knight.
You can send the code to phigment at pwomack.com
May I have Street Fighter V, and SOULCALIBUR VI? Send to speakmemory123@protonmail.com
Thank you for your generosity!
Wow that’s a huge giveaway. I’d really love Blasphemous if nobody claimed it yet, exquisite.fungus@gmail.com .
Man, I loved Blasphemous. That was a cool game.
Wow, man, this is awesome. I’d like F1 2019 if that’s all right.
eleethaxxzor@gmail.com (I know, I know. It was an ironic joke for programming forums but whatever)
I’ve been interested in trying CKII for some time, but just how disappointed will I be if I don’t have any DLC? Is it not worth it at all if I’ve never played it? If it’s not it would be better to give it to someone who would actually buy the DLC. Otherwise I’ll take it at thesm0cc@gmail.com.
IIRC, the base game for CKII is available for free. You can definitely play without the DLC, and if you wanted some of the features that come with them you could find the list and buy some of them separately. Also getting it on steam gets you into the modding community, and you can download a ton of what amounts to DLC for free. Some mode will require some DLC, but that should be manageable.
Good to know there’s a lookup chart if I can’t bear to play without the DLC that gives my character a random chance of non-human heir.
Yes, I think they recently released it, and announced that CK3 is on the way.
I may misremember, but I think CK2 is fairly playable without DLCs, typically you need to add DLCs if you want to play as anything but Catholic/feudal. (The other kinds of nations (merchant republics, muslim, Norse, Slavic, etc) exist, but without appropriate DLCs, they are NPC only)
I would love Opus Magnum, if that’s alright.
Thank you very much for your public-facing generosity!
EDIT: You could send the link to nobody.reading@gmail.com (I promise, I’m reading!)
If after a reasonable length of time with no one else is interested, I’d also love to pick up Shenzhen I/O
I’d like
Project Warlock andTerraria. Email me at andrewpatt7 at google’s email service. Thanks!Edit: not Project Warlock, it doesn’t like steam’s windows emulation stuff on my laptop so I can’t play it.
I’d be interested in Shenzen I/O. Email me at [my username] at gmail.com
Does anyone have any actual estimates of numbers of peaceful protestors/rioters/looters?
Been trying to find you one. Not sure about the numbers on the protestors side but I found online a (supposedly complete) repository of instances of police violence during the protests:
I will keep looking for a similar link for the protestors, but I haven’t found much of anything yet.
Minor quibble, the website says at the top “This is not a complete list”, so not exactly what you stated. I don’t know of any complete list, but this twitter(every tweet with a number emoji at the start) and this github are some more partial lists.
I can’t find solid numbers, but on a related note The Guardian has reported at least 11 people killed, including a federal officer who was shot to death outside a courthouse and a retired police captain who was killed by looters while defending a pawn shop. It’s unclear how many deaths were directly protest related or just adjacent.
These sound like much easier numbers for someone to gather.
As far as I know, no one has ever found a good way to estimate large crowd sizes. But at least buildings destroyed can easily be counted after the fact, and likely are counted by insurance companies.
@GearRatio
You are the man! I just finished following your instructions on how to shield my bass guitar and it is now perfect. Not a hint of that buzz that would only go away when I’d touch the strings. I am now slappin da bass big time. Thanks for the help!!
Neat! Did the pre-amp section end up lifting out OK? I remember I was worried it was hot-glued to the body itself.
I don’t think it was hot glued…the circuit board is very small and is attached to one of the potentiometer knobs. Basically there were four potentiometers with wires running to the circuit board atop one of them, but no way to remove any of them. The knobs didn’t pull off, and I didn’t see any set screws holding them in. I just had to carefully cut the copper tape into little strips and wrap around them.
It was, as you said, a little more complicated than yours since I had to run wires between four different compartments and solder them in place. It took about two hours. But it all worked out, the thing sounds great, and I’ve been having an awesome time with it. Thanks again!
Great! I’m glad it worked out. I am sincerely glad you also enjoy what a girl I had a crush on in high school described as “that long guitar thing”.
Does anybody work as a mortgage processor? Covid forced me into a maybe-temporary-maybe-not career change, and while I’m going to probably be with the same employer for a while I’m trying to get a sense for what the job market/career path is like so I can plan ahead for those sweet lateral moves.
Hello everybody. I have a practical proposal to reduce future violence. This is an alt account for obvious reasons but I’ve been here lurking for years. I’ll repeat this message a few times on open threads so more see it.
Issue
CW can become hot.
The riots are becoming unnerving – there is a propensity for it to spill into physical targeted attacks against X-ists / X-ism. Scapegoating is becoming habit and public complacency is ratcheting an escalation. I believe the time has come to take seriously the possibility that political violence is going to be directed at available targets through moral panics. Today it can be one scapegoat – tomorrow it will be another. There is no real way of knowing who an internet mob will turn on next.
You’ve seen the script of public opinion flip multiple times just with COVID19 – a few kilobytes of virus – to say nothing for the ever swirling legacy vortexes that are sex, class, race, political orientation. How many of you have looked back at your former selves and thought “what an idiot”. That the line between good and evil runs right through each human heart isn’t an abstraction – the people we need to protect ourselves against include ourselves. Maybe I’m being neurotic but I believe to know it can get bad you only need to be modestly introspective.
Position
By us I mean anybody who subscribes to the Slate Star Codex ideal – I describe it as very high tolerance for ideas coupled with a permanent suspicion of ideological monopolization.
Medicine
It’s about time some kind of real sanctuary is on offer to modern day witches because I think official channels will react too slowly against the internet mob. There exists the sense formal institutions are not proactive when confronted with big swells from the sea of sentiment.
I’m capable of offering food and lodging to a target for a short duration in my country and I think many of us at Slatestarcodex will see the necessity too – but it needs to be systematized and well known if it is to do good work.
My request to you is to reply with an email address. If as I fear things turn for the worse we can work out the steps as the situation develops.
I expect this to be messy. The advantage we have is that mobs have an intense but short attention span and those who provoke violence most are not so persistent.
My email is originalinternetexplorer@internet-mail.org
I can shoot down one objection – the first operation would be a recorded meeting at a police station or notary to cut the risk of a Sanctuary being exploited into an ambush – and then a series of operations to put distance between the mob and the target with fallbacks – risky to be a Witch but when any person faces narrowing options they have to perform that calculation.
Thanks
Original IE
Something lately that’s been bothering me. People, even in this OT, keep either equating or at least linking supporting the protests to supporting violence/looting/rioting. Here in NYC I can confirm that every protest I’ve been to over the last week (about 5) have been completely peaceful. Me, my friends, and my Blue Tribe circle don’t condone the rioting, though I will say I’m perhaps more sympathetic to it than the average person. But we’re all big on the protests. Some thoughts on things I keep hearing:
-Any argument about how the protesters aren’t doing enough to stop the looters:
These protests are largely impromptu, spur of the moment, and without any overall organizing body. How exactly are “we” a group of people who just happened to get together in one place to yell about something, supposed to effectively combat crime? If this is our responsibility, how is it not the police’s responsibility to hold back on the instances of brutality that are happening in response to the protest. Unlike the protestors, police are organized, structured, armed, armored, and trained. I think the standard for them should be much much higher. If you support police brutality as a means to end riots, fine at least you’ve got a cogent worldview. I disagree with it but that’s something I’ll just have to argue about with you another time. But if you oppose the riots on the grounds that you don’t support violence writ large, then you better believe I’ll have an issue if you don’t take umbrage with cops shooting at homeless people or bashing news anchors with riot shields.
-Any argument on the police brutality being “necessary”
This just seems empirically untrue. Protests have been going on in all 50 states, and internationally. The vast majority have been peaceful, and unlike some people in my tribe I’ll fully admit the police have handled it well in most cases, even when they haven’t been completely peaceful. We only really see the worst-case instances because that’s what makes news.
In instances where rioting is happening RIGHT now, then maybe some brutality is “needed” but that’s not what’s happening a solid chunk of the time, especially here in NYC. News reporters are being attacked, protesters hit, crowds fired on, because someone throws a waterbottle or points an umbrella at a cop. Nobody was even close to rioting at the 3 protests I was at that got charged by the police. And even then I’m not sure I buy that de-escalation wouldn’t be just a better solution even in somewhat cagey situations. 538 ran an article on why deescalation actually keeps cops safer. I don’t agree with all of it, but even if its only net-neutral or slightly less safe, again I think its about who should be held to a higher standard. Cops CHOOSE to be cops, and get benefits of having armor and protection, and great insurance and the like. While you could argue protestors also choose to go protest, they do so perhaps expecting the cops to not attack them if things remain peaceful. As we have seen, this is not the case. So I’d argue that even if deescalation makes cops slightly less safe (unclear if I even believe that!) it’s outweighed by the fact that I value civilian safety over police safety. There are also just more civilians too so I can probably also make that claim on sheer numbers.
-Any argument about the underlying cause being irrational or even wrong
Look, there are some great statistics that show that police encounters with black people aren’t as bad as the media makes it out to be. But if that’s your defense I think you are kind of missing the point. There has been a very strong sense of unrest and unease for I’d say at least 4-8 years about the general treatment of African Americans in this country. Some of it is unarguably legitimate — like redlining for example. We just know this happened, and a lot of states have done little to nothing to assist people who have suffered from it. It’s hard to succeed if you are born poor in a shitty neighborhood. Here in NYC there is a reason the NYPD gets a bad rap, especially among people of color. Why the funniest Chapelle skit is about the NYPD sprinkling cocaine on dead black people. There’s history here, and people want something done to at least feel their voices are being heard. But there’s been very little real change. Here’s the reality, whether or not you think it’s caused by white supremacy or by genetics — if you are black or latino you are more likely to be poor, more likely to be imprisoned, and more likely to not go to college than if you aren’t (per capita obviously). People are angry about this and they want their government to do something. I worked in one of the poorest areas of NYC as a teacher for years, and let me tell you something, I was the only white person there. That’s not a coincidence.
The death of George Floyd was little more than the match that set off years and years of kindling. Maybe it was a stupid match, but then again World War 1 wasn’t just caused by a dude shooting another dude. If you don’t think that structural argument is valid, fine! I again disagree, but I’m willing to concede that you have grounds to oppose the protests. But if your gripe is only about the most recent high-profile incidents, I think you’re missing the forest for the trees.
I’m not looking to start any fights, but I thought I’d express why this lefty feels the way he does and why I’ve been a bit frustrated over the last few days with how some people have been approaching the protests.
I’m confused by how you’re using (or attributing) the term “police brutality.” No one is in favor of police bruality, except hyperbolically; it literally means “excessive force,” and there is no sense in which something can be both excessive and necessary. When you say it, do you just mean the use of riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.?
1. While I get where you are coming from semantically, I don’t think your argument holds much practical water. Within this very thread I’ve seen someone say that police brutality is good and the police could “use more of it” and I’ve seen similar sentiments (though less openly explicit)both across the internet and by the Red Tribe friends/family/coworkers I have. Some people genuinely support excessive force in these times.
2. I’m referring to instances of violence, largely using the items you described. I’m not opposed to the use of rubber bullets/riot gear writ large. I do have an issue with the police launching tear gas into Lafayette Square despite at the time, there being no violence. Or shooting a tear gas canister at a person’s head. Or hitting a newscaster with a baton for daring to… report the news. I would classify these things as “brutality”
3. If you don’t buy that, change to word brutality with “violent force” and 95% of my argument remains unchanged.
If you reread that thread, you’ll see he admits later in it that he is using the term hyperbolically, hence my qualification.
I don’t, sorry, because fundamentally I think you’re attributing a blatant contradiction to people, which is rather a strawman. And when you’ve made that change, I’m not sure I see why tear gas and rubber bullets aren’t considered violent force. Actually, what kind of force do cops have besides violence force? Moral force? I don’t think you’re saying anything coherent here. The problem is that you can’t get away from arguing, in the specifics, about whether and when tear gas is actually appropriate (as you did with your Lafayette Square example just now). And at that point the difference between your views and those of your Red Tribe friends is one of degree, not of kind.
Ok then, let’s discuss when violent force is needed. And yes I will continue to use that term, because I do think there is a distinction between “force” say putting someone in a handcuffs, and “violent force” hitting them and then putting them in handcuffs. Perhaps this is not totally accurate to the meaning of the words, I do apologize if that’s the case..
I never said it wasn’t a dif. of degree/kind. I think though the issue is it’s a pretty massive degree. As I mentioned in my response to Scoop, I’m not sure I support cops using these methods even in situations where they are provoked, but the situation hasn’t completely devolved into rioting yet. Open to being convinced on that – see my points there.
Where I am firmly planted, is that in any instance where the protestors are engaging in their right to protest peacefully, the use of mass violence is unnecessary, and thus by your definition, brutality. There is a reason i put “brutality” in quotes in my original post, because I KNOW we all disagree about what brutality is. But my point is more about the general principal of how the cops are responding than about knuckling into the knitty-gritty. I don’t have a SUPER solid redline, but I know that wherever it is, attacking unarmed peaceful protestors is over it.
WHOOPS: It turns out I DIDN’T actually put brutality in quotes in my OP. I thought I did, that’s on me!
That would be me.
I’ve already explained what I meant down below, but to reiterate: once the protests turn into rioting, it is a duty for the police to come down with full force upon the rioters, because innocent people are getting hurt. Something that has been noticeably absent from the picture.
Given that there has been a noticeable amount of violent force being used by the rioters/protestors (the rioters will of course claim to be protesting), use of violent force by the police to stop the rioting is both necessary and justified.
If your interest is in peaceful protest, it will keep. If the peaceful protesters condemned the violence and removed themselves from the streets whilst encouraging the police to restore order so that peaceful protest may be resumed, that would be a whole different story.
I hope this clarifies my position.
Thank you for clarifying, I think understand your point. Here’s a question: in situations where “rioting” is occurring sort of nebulously ie: it’s happening but not literally right here right now (maybe it was happening an hour ago), and cops suspect or even know that rioters are now hiding among protestors, do you believe the police should respond with violent force directed to break up said protestors.
I think that might be where we disagree, as I’ve mentioned before I’m theoretically fine with the police using force to break up rioting. I’m unsure if it works but if it did, I’m fine with it morally.
If rioting isn’t happening right here and now, but has happened and is likely to happen again – and there’s good reason to believe that some of those assembled in the protest shall be participating in it – the police ought to require the protest to end (and the protesters, being opposed to rioting, should comply) and use force to disperse it if the protesters refuse.
Here’s where I’m coming from: we can’t meaningfully separate the riots from the protests. The rioters claim (and may actually believe) that they are “continuing the protest via different means”. As long as there are both rioters and peaceful protesters in the streets, it is difficult, if not impossible, for the police to both effectively prevent rioting and ensure that no peaceful protesters get hurt.
So the onus is really on the protesters. Either they can say “we have our grievances, but we don’t want violence in our communities, so we’ll get out of the way and let the police round up the trouble makers” or they can say “our desire to protest is more important than whether there is rioting or not”, which I personally consider a tacit approval for rioting. In any case, the police should do whatever is necessary to ensure public safety, because it’s their job.
Important caveat: the analysis is predicated on an assessment of probabilities. Protests in a given location should be presumed peaceful, until proven otherwise. It’s perfectly possible for a peaceful protest to be happening in one part of town, while the riot takes place elsewhere. In this case, we would not consider the protesters and rioters to be part of the same group, though the protest may still be reasonably asked to disperse, in order to free up the officers guarding the protest to deal with the riot.
Conversely, if previous protests have devolved to violence, it is not unreasonable to expect that this particular one will, too. I’d go as far as questioning the choice to participate in a protest, if rioting did result recently. Like I said, it will keep. Peaceful protesting, by definition, requires a peaceful setting. A state of civil disorder isn’t it.
@Faza, thank you for your response. I’ll try to engage meaningfully with your points.
I’m willing to accept this as a purely moral justification for ending rioting, but I think there are two issues with this line of logic in practice.
First, I think that as I mentioned in the OP there are fare less violent ways to end/deal with/disperese even a semi-violent protest.
Second, in the long run, I think these violent methods are liable to cause more violence, as rioting and violence occurs as a direct response to police brutality. I have seen people discuss bringing weapons to this weekends protests, which is why I am at home talking on SSC. That would not be in the cards were the cops not responding as harshly as they are. Escalation can, and seems likely to occur, and it wouldn’t if the cops weren’t so gung-ho about smashing face.
OK I’m not sure this if this is directed at specific groups of protestors (ie: there are rioters in brooklyn so brooklynites should stay home) or the whole nation, so I’ll address each.
If specific: 1. The protestors don’t KNOW that rioters are hiding among them a lot of the time. How could they? They don’t know each other, most haven’t met, people are swarming in from all over. 2. This is NEVER explained to us. When I or really anyone is at a protest where the cops get violent, the way we report it happening is eerily similar. It happens very suddenly, usually without much warning. There isn’t a point where the cops come out and say “hey there’s like 3 wanted people in your midst and if you let us have them you can go back to protesting peacefully”. If the reason we’re getting charged is because we’re sheltering rioters, that is NEVER explained to us. The issue then becomes that people think the cops are just being abusive assholes, feeding into the point on escalation I made above.
If you’re talking more nationally: I think this cuts into what I said about “fair burdens” in my OP. Asking millions of people to stop protesting because a comparatively small number of people are looting is a bit much, especially considering many of us on the Blue Tribe are told making similar demands of cops (ie: its ok to protest cops because theres a small number who are racist) is absurd. I think the cops are held a much higher standard here for a variety of reasons, and given how much funding, weaponry, personnel, etc. I think they should be required to “restore order” without shooting at largely peaceful crowds even if there are criminals hiding inside. Note these criminals aren’t like mega-terrorists, they’re looters. They suck, but unclear if they’re worth say… NYC essentially suspending Habeus Corpus
That’s the issue – I don’t think the police are doing this. If they are, it’s not being clearly expressed in any useful way. When protestors get attacked, they don’t understand why it’s happening to them at that specific moment.
Look, as I said in my original post, I’m not convinced that violent responses are actually materially reducing/preventing violence any more than a more peaceful response. What you call “restoring order” I am seeing more as “fanning the flames”
Would protestors accept an order of “there are rioters in your midst, we need you to disperse now?”
If not now, is it possible to build towards that level of trust?
I’d say right now? Probably no. But maybe it was possible at some point. Some protests, especially early on had cops marching with them, accepted w/ open arms. People cheered and praised them. I think the anger to the police outside of a couple places (Minneapolis, NYC, LA) wasn’t so high at the start of this all that cooperation was impossible. Then Lafayette Square, the old dude in Buffalo getting shoved, the guy getting shot in the head with a gas canister, the pregnant woman getting fired on, the foreign news crew getting attacked, the CNN anchor being arrested etc.
Like each incident adds a little bit to that simmering resentment the protestors feel. I think the cops have done a real amount of damage to their reputation among non-radical leftists because we’re all seeing this shit and frankly, I find it disgusting. Before I had a generally positive view of the NYPD. I do not now. George Floyd didn’t change that, the NYPD shooting at me did.
As I said in the original thread, my view on protests and response thereto is coloured by my place of birth and upbringing. The way it works in Poland is that the moment that there is violence, the protest is over. More broadly, as soon as even just a small group in your midst starts hurling stuff at the police, your peaceful protest is no longer peaceful.
Over here, the police announce via loudspeaker that the protest is disbanded because of *incident* and it is the responsibility of the protesters to peacefully disperse (and pass the information down the line). It usually works. Where it doesn’t work, it’s because the protesters weren’t interested in being peaceful in the first place and even then, they tend to direct their aggression against the police (and possibly the media), rather than innocent people.
Worth repeating: as soon as there is any violence coming from the protesters. So let’s examine the official statement from the United States Park Police acting chief, regarding the events of 1st June.
The moment the throwing started, the protest was no longer peaceful, regardless of whether any individual protester was engaged in it or not.
Per my expectation, the police called for the protestors to disperse and this should have been complied with immediately.
If an individual protestor chooses to remain in the area after violence has broken out and the order to disperse has been given, I take it as confirmation that a confrontation with the police is desired.
This is how I expect a situation where a peaceful protest turns violent to go. If I participate in a protest (and I have on numerous occasions), upon hearing an announcement that the protest is disbanded because of violence, I vacate the area and inform fellow protestors of reasons to do the same.
So, that’s the official version, which I have no reason to disbelieve. The popular narrative is “Trump ordered police to violently clear out the protestors for a photo opportunity”. I’m sorry, but I find it much less plausible than the official explanation for a number of reasons:
a. even if you were there, you might not have been aware of the violent turn if you weren’t close to where the violence was taking place,
b. violence occurring in connection with these protests is not so uncommon as to render the official version prima facie implausible,
c. “the police are the enemy” is a, if not the, major theme of the protest, so it is totally unsurprising that some of the protestors decided to take the confrontation to the next level,
d. Orange Man Bad.
Given that the officers responsible for Floyd’s death are already facing criminal charges, my support for the protests – in light of how they’ve turned out – is exactly nil.
@Faza (TCM)
Really? Come on, one of a thousand incidents of police violence got addressed and now the protests should be over? I think you really misunderstand the goal of these protests. If you believe they’re violent, i strongly urge you to come out a go to one in person, see how that experience matches up with what the government is saying about them. I know you can’t do that since you live outside the US, so please take this as a case where you fundamentally cannot understand what is happening, and what you are reading is colored by the exact group of people the protests (myself included) are against.
The goal/my goal of the protests is short term(few years) enactment of the proposals described by campaign zero, and the long term(few generations) enactment of the ideals advocated by the Police Abolition movement (described here and here).
You’re welcome to believe worse, but please trust me that you don’t have the full picture, since you’re not here.
This is, I believe, the same statement which denied using tear gas. The Park Police have since admitted that that wasn’t really true, that they did use gas which had the effects associated with tear gas, just not the particular gas most usually used for the purpose.
Which makes me at least somewhat skeptical of the other claims. Has anyone from either side provided videos showing violence by the demonstrators? I don’t think one should assume that the fact that someone makes a claim, whether from law enforcement or demonstrators, is strong evidence that it is true.
On the issue of what the protestors can do to avoid violence. One possibility, at least in some places, is to do the demonstration somewhere with nothing to loot, the middle of a park rather than the middle of downtown. That doesn’t prevent people throwing things at the police, but it eliminates the incentive for those looters whose real objective is getting loot.
Here’s footage of a Seattle protest from far above, and here’s extended footage from the ground.
1. PD have positioned themselves poorly to deal with any looting, so they’re kind of setting the protest up for failure, as the protesters likely can’t even see any of the looting happening Over There.
2. It’s pretty clear who did the disproportionate escalation here. Seattle PD will later lie that the inciting incident was thrown rocks/bottles/fireworks.
When the use of force goes beyond securing the suspect’s compliance and into making him suffer, e.g. because the cop feels he deserves it.
Lot of tacit support for this, sadly. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” Nobody’s spending political capital on a child molester’s bruises.
Here is my good-faith attempt to engage with your points:
That is exactly what some critics of the protests are getting at. Without an organization, protesters have no ability to effectively bargain with the police and discipline their own. If, for example, protest leadership were able to coordinate with the police, a deal could be struck to require less of a police presence at the protests and free up resources to contain the looters. Since the protesters aren’t presenting a united front, they have no ability to propose a set of demands that, once met by the municipal government/police department, will satisfy them and stand them down. So protesters can continue to protest ad infinitum because the authorities have no way to mollify them. And, the longer the protests go, the more incidents of police using overly coercive tactics (“brutality”) against protesters will be captured on cell phones, sparking more protests, which then… You see where I’m going.
The fact that the protests have been going on internationally shows that this isn’t just about police brutality, no matter how much those protesters want to claim that they are marching “in solidarity” with the Americans. The thing that captured the attention of the Eye of Sauron before the protests was COVID. And millions of people worldwide have been forced to stay at home to prevent the spread of the disease, causing massive economic damage. People are out of work and lonely. Young people – who make up most of the protesters – are disproportionately affected by the economic impact. These protests are their one chance at communal gathering in several months that won’t get them shamed for killing grandma by the mass media. I think it is you who are missing the forest for the trees.
Yes, and as I’m sure you’ll remember from the media’s breathless coverage of it last month, the real major crisis of the day, COVID, disproportionately impacts black Americans. I’ll concede that the major factor there is their lower SES relative to other groups, which makes them more likely to work “essential” jobs on top of several other factors which make them more likely to contract COVID and more likely to die from it. BUT, if the protests are disproportionately populated by black people, then there are likely to be superspreader events in black communities in the next couple of weeks. These superspreader events will certainly kill more black Americans than police brutality has.
No amount of public health “experts” calling police brutality a “public health issue” on par with COVID will stop the virus. It doesn’t care. It only wants targets.
First, thank you for legitimately engaging with my points. I found most of your responses reasonable, and very well thought out. Except this one. I got some real issues with this one. I think it is HIGHLY disingenuous, needlessly cynical, and a little rude, to say that the reason people are out protesting, is that they are bored/lonely.
I’ve been to these protests. These people are ANGRY. They’re not angry about being quarantined. They’re not angry about being lonely. Many of them have had very happy lives during quarantine, myself included. Your description of what is motivating people to come out into what are quickly becoming dangerous situations that could lead to violence or arrest I don’t think passes a sniff test, let alone what people are seeing/reporting on the ground.
Similarly this explanation wouldn’t account for massive upswings in donations (not helping loneliness), or other “armchair activist” activities. I think you have to accept that at least a solid chunk of people are out here for more than just being lonely.
If this were true basically every unorganized protests would end in massive violence. They don’t. Most protests just… lose steam. I think had the cops not responded to a protest on police brutality with… ya know… police brutality, they’d be ramping down not up, but that’s little more than a theory. I do agree with you the protesters should organize, but that will take time, and in the meantime I still think its unfair to blame the collective for rioters if you aren’t doing the same to say… the NYPD and its collection of bad apples.
First of all, my apologies. And congrats on your fantastic LSAT result.
Motivation is a tricky thing to suss out. And I will concede that your on-the-ground experience is way more salient than my armchair theorizing.
Allow me to reframe – can we agree that the scale of the protests has been affected by the lockdown? I will concede that I know people firsthand (my wife, for instance) that have enjoyed the quarantine, because it’s given them more time to devote to their hobbies, even when they are still working full-time. So I don’t take it as a given that everyone is hurting from the quarantine.
But it is true that millions of people are. And if you don’t have a full-time job to go to, or no way of making money, and you are already somewhat ideologically aligned to the cause – why not protest?
I don’t have a good mental model for why most protests end by losing steam. Any thoughts on why it happens? My naive sense is that protesting is a costly activity – it’s energy- and time-consuming, you have a non-trivial chance of getting seriously hurt by police – and authorities believe (correctly) that they can just wait out the protesters without making any concessions and they’ll go away on their own. See Occupy Wall Street, for example, which was an order of magnitude more organized than these protests.
So, if we want to believe that “this time, it’s different”, what do you think is the endgame here for the protesters to win concessions before they lose the will to continue? What do you make of the calls to defund the police and municipal organizations cutting ties with police departments?
Thank you 🙂
100% these protests would not be this big if not for the lockdown. But I think that just feeds into the “kindling” issue I brought up in my original point. As you said, POCs are more impacted by CV because they tend to be of lower SE class. I think understanding it from that angle doesn’t make it a knock against the protestors – its simply them responding to yet another example (in their eyes) of their government failing them.
That’s my understanding too. Protesting is hard man. It can be scary, and its difficult to stay mad. Outrage fatigue is 100% real, and I genuinely think that if the cops had just waited this out it’d be going away.
I mean it’s working. LA slashed the budget and I can tell ya that here in NYC similar proposals are in the works. I don’t know if that’s as bad as some people here are saying, for example the $150 million slash in LA is NOTHING compared to the $700 million increase in the LAPD budget over the last few years.
Just as a datapoint, my family and I would likely have gone to some protests by now if not for C19, and we’ve been talking with a couple other families in the same boat. So not all the C19 impact on the protests is sending more people out to them.
according to that article, a 670 million dollar increase is getting reduced to a 570 million dollar increase. reductions to projected increases still aren’t actually cuts, even when it’s democrats playing the game instead of republicans.
1. You are treating it as if protests have only one cause (“the reason is”). Most things are multicausal. The claim is that the effects of Covid make people more willing to come out and demonstrate than they would otherwise be.
2. If that isn’t true, what is your explanation for the fact that these demonstrations are much larger than previous demonstrations against police killing? The Floyd case is the symbolic reason, but everyone protesting seems to agree that the real issue is a pattern of behavior by police that has existed for a long time.
This particular killing is far less objectionable than the shooting of two black panthers in Chicago some fifty years ago — that was first degree murder of two sleeping men, never prosecuted, this was something that would probably have been prosecuted as manslaughter, possibly third degree murder, if it had happened in a fight between two men neither of whom was a police officer — and it is being prosecuted as murder. There have been other cases since.
If it isn’t the pandemic, what’s your explanation?
I can propose an explanation – it’s an election year and most people who are generally inclined to protest are dissatisfied with the Trump administration. This is an opportunity for them to generate more negative sentiment around his re-election campaign. For the people who also believe Trump handled COVID poorly, the protests function as a continuation and exacerbation of the perceived chaos that followed from that.
The “create more negative sentiment” idea appears to be working well, with prominent conservative-leaning and Republican people distancing themselves from the President and going on the record early with their criticisms, expecting a Trump defeat.
It may also help that it’s currently summer in the USA and pleasant weather for being outside.
If that was the case, they would have joined the protests two weeks ago that were specifically about the shutdowns and economic impact. Those protests had equally mixed support in the popular media, and were actually about the topic the people were angry about (you claim).
those protests were getting socially shamed. the current ones are getting celebrated. That makes a huge difference.
I’ve seen both sets of protests shamed and both sets of protests celebrated. The media were very big fans of the anti-lockdown protests, and intentionally amplified them, to the point where Robin Hanson thought it was clear that the protesters were in the majority and the opponents were an elite minority.
Are you saying that the media treated them positively, or that they gave lots of attention to them most of it critical? My impression was the latter, but my contact with media is pretty much limited to GNews.
AFAICT, most of the prestige media supported the anti-lockdown protests in the same way they supported Trump’s election–they were overwhelmingly critical and opposed to both, but both made for good visually interesting stories with a clear narrative, so they got a ton of coverage.
Sometimes, the heel is a bigger draw than the face. The promotion is just as happy either way, as long as people are buying tickets.
How would they even have known those protests existed? Being locked down, they are unlikely to have actually seen them.
Almost certainly they saw them covered on TV, or in their social media of choice. But that coverage, fairly or otherwise, broadly and effectively portrayed the anti-lockdown protests as A: a bunch of selfish conservative white dudes, maybe one step removed from actual white supremacists, and B: comically inept losers to be mocked.
It is easy to see why a young black man chafing under the lockdown, wouldn’t rush out to join those protests even if the lockdown was the biggest challenge he was facing that month. So I don’t think you can read very much into that.
Yeah, I disagree. When those protests were happening, I personally was waiting for “Non-crazy people” ones to happen. The medium is the message – armed white people with trucks will always code as republicans that nobody in my state needs to take seriously.
Not even the cops take them seriously.
And one of those is the right response – although maybe if the protesters are in the streets it would help to have some traffic dispersion somewhere else
in case there are some NYPD officers visiting CAso nobody hits anyone with a car .I don’t want to argue about what people in this thread are saying besides a couple quotes, as I just realized that might break the site rules a little, so I’ll focus on something else for now:
First please see my response above – some people are genuinely calling for excessive force I think we shouldn’t give them a pass.
But fair. Let’s talk three tactics in particular.
1. Any kind of violent crowd control tactic employed when the crowd itself isn’t violent. Pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, batons. Lafayette Square is the go-to example, the protest was completely nonviolent. Teargassed anyway – I’d argue that’s brutality. Some might not.
2. Violent response to provocation. This I think is where I’m going to hit disagreement with most people, but if you throw something at an armed and armored cop, I don’t think that means they get to immediately respond with violence. Two reasons for this: First, the cop isn’t in any real danger unless the thing being thrown at them is like… a brick. It’s usually not a brick. They’re wearing riot armor and have riot shields, they’re fine. Second, the police know full well the second they respond it’ll be pandemonium. By nature of their training cops will always be more disciplined/able to maintain order than protestors. So if protestors get a little rowdy, cops can remain in control. If cops get rowdy, all hell breaks loose, people get hurt.
3. Herding. Look I was on the brooklyn bridge when cops blocked the exit. It was fucking terrifying. It was like being in a mosh pit and someone yells all the exits have been barred. You’re just waiting for a stampede. I don’t think this should be allowed in any situation baring ongoing rioting, as it risks stampede.
Who are these “some”? I mean, even our most conspicuous Trump supporter here has repeatedly and explicitly called that a stupid move on Trump’s part.
If that’s your go-to example, then problem solved. Approximately 100%, maybe exactly 100%, of SSC considers that to be brutality, and unnecessary, and does not support it. Possibly it took a day or so to get all the facts and come to that consensus.
1. I think (and maybe I’m projecting) the average SSC reader is a bit smarter than the public. I’ve seen people support what happened in Lafayette Square.
2. I threw that one out there for thoroughness of my thoughts, as I said in my post, I’m anticipating most of the disagreement, if not all, to be on my second and third points.
I mean, even our most conspicuous Trump supporter here has repeatedly and explicitly called that a stupid move on Trump’s part.
I’m beginning to wonder about that. Yes, it certainly wasn’t the way to handle a peaceful protest, but on the other hand – let’s say Trump wants to visit the church across from the White House, a church which has had graffiti sprayed on the walls and windows smashed (I’m assuming the smashed windows from all the boarding up, I don’t see the necessity to board up a building if all that is going on is a peaceful, non-violent protest).
Oh but you can’t, Mr. President, because there are a group of protesters sitting on the ground in the square, and they won’t move even when we asked them politely.
What next?
(1) The President stays inside the White House like a good little boy and protesters have the victory, they are able to force The Leader of the Free World/the Most Powerful Man in America (pick your hyberbole) to curtail his movements just by showing up and standing around. They’re the ones in charge, or that’s how it appears.
(2) If they won’t move, they’ll get moved (like other protests in other cities in other countries). The President is the one who issues the orders and the protesters have no ability to dictate any terms to him.
Which looks stronger, if you’re starting to get worried about arson and looting and cities burning? Who looks like the one in control? Before anyone gets any ideas, I’m not saying this is the right solution, I’m saying ‘how does this look’ and with an election coming up, image is everything.
For some people, Biden kneeling is going to look Presidential. For others, it looks like weakness and pandering.
For some people, Trump having the area in the vicinity of the White House cleared looks Presidential. For others it looks like over-reaction, unforced error, and tyranny.
@Deiseach
Is it though? My understanding was nobody even knew he wanted to go to that specific church until he said he did like… during his speech a couple minutes before going. Presumably he could have done literally anything else, then gone later? Or just… gone to another church? Or anything?
As have I, but not here – and I distinctly read your earlier posts as calling this out as a problem even here.
If you just want to put this on the list of things we elite rationalists have to be disgusted with the foolish mundanes about, sure, it belongs on that list – but there’s nothing we can really do about that and I think it’s generally a good policy to limit our indulgence of “damn fool mundanes” gripes. Not eliminate outright, of course – sometimes people just need to vent.
Yeah fair. I put the point in MAINLY because A. wasn’t sure whether it was the case that people were 100% on board with that, and B. I just like laying out everything I think. Even when I did debate I usually started with “the thing we can all agree on” and worked from there. As I said in my first response and above, I’m really more interested in the other supposed justifications of force that aren’t so agreed on, such as when rioting is occurring orthogonality to the protests, if cops are provoked, etc.
The only thing that “appears”, is that St. John’s Church is one of approximately ten zillion places Donald Trump didn’t go that day. Trump conspicuously fails to go to ten zillion places every day; it’s never made him look weak before. Only if he whines about how he wanted to go to St. John’s and they wouldn’t let him, does he look weak.
ETA: Ninja’d by Eric T
@Deiseach
The problem is the extremely short time between “decision to go to church” and “forcible removal of people from church.” He should have either not done it, or done it slowly.
Not sure that’s true. There appear to be Faza (TCM) upthread and Deiseach downthread expressing contrary opinions. How many people have actualy expressed the opposite opinion? I count three or so in the comments to Eric T’s post, making the balance pretty even.
Not going to name anyone, but I talked to someone in this OT that didn’t consider teargas or getting whacked with a police baton/shield to be harming anyone (because there was no lasting injury inflicted).
Did they support what you believe happened or what the park police said happened?
If they thought people would support the use of tear gas against non-violent protestors, why would they make a point of claiming that the protestors were violent and that they didn’t use tear gas?
https://forward.com/opinion/446541/are-americans-as-stupid-as-we-seem-on-twitter/
He goes into outgroup homogeneity. I don’t know if the author is a reader here but he’d like it.
In the red tribe, the modal opinion is “protestors are not directly causing violence, at most unwillingly enabling it.” There are people trying to conflate the protestors with the rioters, but it’s a minority. In the blue tribe, the modal opinion is “looting is not okay,” but there is a fringe that says it’s good and right (and done by white nationalists).
If this is true, then the disagreement “we”‘re having with many people in the Red Tribe is whether or not people who are only unwillingly enabling it are deserving of a violent police response. I say no, for reasons above.
I suppose it’s worth the mention that people who are linking the protests to rioting aren’t just the people against one or the other. There are plenty of people defending the rioting on the grounds that it is a necessary aspect of protest. That is, people who are in favor of the protests are linking the protests to the riots.
If you take the objective of the protests sufficiently seriously, there is an argument for rioting. The idea is to put pressure on the political authorities to change things, the political authorities don’t like having buildings burned down and stores looted, so if those things are a result of their not changing things, that would be a reason to do so.
There are obviously tactical arguments on the other side, but it’s not an absurd position and I would be surprised if there were not some people who held it.
In the 1863 NYC draft riots, rioters did a lot of horrific things, like attacking an orphanage for black children, but one of them was burning down the houses of prominent Republican politicians. It seems there was less random mayhem and more carefully chosen targets, like terrorists. This, like taking hostages, makes strategic sense if you have the power to get away with it and intimidate people into taking the action you want. At the time, NYC was pretty helpless against them, so it had an effect. Today, if people started going after the leaders or taking hostages, they’d get taken out fast by the authorities. Going after commercial property produces pressure without so much backlash, but idk how effective it is.
Can you offer citations to this? Not to challenge it, i just would like to read where you got that from.
While that’s a pessimistic view, but a real one, i don’t think it’s born out by what people are actually advocating for. https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision, ending qualified immunity, and ending police unions seems to be completely non-race targeted, and i’d be interested if you saw them as terrible reform ideas. Not cherrypicking here, these ideas are the most common ones i have encountered in my time with the protests.
Pre-BLM, but I lived in Cincinnati during the 2001 riots, and I definitely recall a similar effect.
That is, the riots were in April 2001 in response to the shooting of an unarmed black teenager. After the dust of the riots settled, the cops (intentionally?) backed off from normal policing in high crime areas in Cincinnati. Then (violent?) crime spiked. Especially in the summer of 2001.
I don’t have a great citation other than Wikipedia, but it’s light on details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_riots_of_2001#Aftermath
From the perspective of someone who lived about a mile from the center of the riots, the story didn’t receive the national media coverage it deserved. But from what little attention the national media paid to the riot’s aftermath in the summer of 2001–between the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy thing and all those shark attacks–I remember commentators on the left saying how shameful the police were acting and the commentators on the right saying, “told ya so/this is what happens when you want less policing/be careful what you wish for,” etc. But my memory may not be perfect on this topic.
Interestingly, but positively, I’ve had some experiences that contradicts that! For example, today i was at a BLM protest and flyers that was being passed out stated (in part), “Do you want to defund the SAPD? Do you want a Citizen Oversight Committee? Do you want to refocus police training on de-escalation instead of purchasing military equipment? Then you need to let them know”. And many of my friends had been discussing similar goals they want from these protests. So i think these reforms may be more widespread then you have seen, or i’m in an unusually well educated bubble.
That said, very good points about the BLM part of this movement. I feel you’re correct, but i’m quite happy to go along with them regardless as long as i believe their goals are targeted at this specific kind of police reform. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that.
I see a lot of “End QI” talk on my Facebook, though half from the conservatives (Never Trumpers) and half from wonky center-left.
The vast majority is just vague “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “end systemic racism.” And now it’s increasingly sub-types of black, so black trans, black autistic, black HIV, black this, black that.
The MAGA and the libertarians are just buying up guns, guns, guns, guns. Honestly I don’t think they would care if Trump declares himself God-Emperor tomorrow, they think this nation is one step away from war and they are ready to pretty much gun down everyone. The Slavic community in particular is just jonesing for it, and they don’t particularly care if the American Army has tanks, because they were all members of Polish Trade Unions and were prepared to fight Soviet tanks. They really, really, really, really, really, really aren’t intimidated.
The “Ferguson effect” was widely debated during 2016. But in some quick searching since then the only thing I’ve found more recent than 2016 or early 2017 is a 2020 study showing that there was no noticeable change in police officer morale. I’ve had trouble even finding charts of crime rates in major cities extending to 2018 (I expect 2019 data wouldn’t be fully compiled yet), so I’ve mainly seen suggestive stuff about Baltimore and St. Louis increasing by 2016, but no information about whether it’s continued in those cities, and whether other cities have had parallel increases or instead have continued the decreases most of them have had for two decades.
It might help then to calibrate on the strength of the opposition to the protests/riots/looting.
My opinions are:
1) The BLM narrative is not an accurate representation of reality. The people protesting are innumerate.
2) The protestors do not seem to have an actionable list of demands. At all, much less one that will solve their ill-perceived problem.
3) While many or most protests are legitimately peaceful, the term “peaceful protest” is no longer descriptive, because it is frequently used to refer to non-violent protestors who act as human shields for violent rioters, or to describe the time during which those planning to violently riot peaceably assemble before they have enough numbers to begin their planned violent riot.
4) The peaceful protestors and violent rioters knowingly provide a distraction for police so they cannot protect businesses from looters.
However, what should calm your frustration is not my opinions, but the fact that I don’t actually care what you do in your cities. I think you guys are wrong, and are crashing your own civilization for absolutely no good reason. But it has nothing to do with me and I don’t care. After I’m done with this post I’m going to go play some banjo and bass guitar and then some video games and relax around the house.
Nobody in my town is rioting. My black townsfolk are every bit as friendly today as they were last week and last year and we’re all getting along fine. Our cops are protecting and serving and not murdering anyone.
I look at what’s going on in your city and think “that seems like a bad choice.” But there’s no reason for you to be frustrated by my opinion because my weakly expressed opinion is irrelevant to what you want to do in your city. So long as you don’t bring it to my city, we’re all good. So, hopefully you can let go of your frustration and participate in your protests or riots, whatever the case my be, without concerning yourself with the opinions of people like me.
By this, do you mean “I am fine with out local social and political structures” or “I think that if my black neighbours were not all fine with our local social and political structures then I would know about it, and I don’t, so they are”?
If the latter, may I ask what region you live in, please?
Latter, southern U.S. suburb.
@Conrad:
Shouldn’t you worry that what is happening in the cities might result in the election of a president and Congress who support laws that hurt you and your neighbors?
I think it’s crass to bring in political considerations. Like, if there are people protesting for what they think is racial equality, and I’m all “send in the troops, this might hurt my guy’s chances,” that seems awful. If there are rioters and I’m thinking “gee, these riots might help my guy, let’s not send in the troops,” that also seems monstrous.
From everything I’ve seen, the denizens of the cities with the protests/riots largely support the protests/riots. If they want help from the Feds, they should get it. If they don’t want help from the Feds, it shouldn’t be forced on them. It seems like they’re happy with what’s going on, so it’s none of my business.
Again, I think they’re making a terrible mistake for their cities. But there’s not much for me to do about it, and they wouldn’t want my help anyway.
As a counterpoint, it’s worth remembering that the people who live in areas where protests and/or riots are occurring are not monolithic in their views.
I live in a major US city. Stores within a short walk of me have been broken into and thoroughly looted. I’d gladly support much more drastic steps to quash riots/looting, but my view is in the minority in my local area.
To a degree, I get it. I’m the one who decided to move into a major US city to have a short commute to my white collar job. Maybe putting up with riots because the local politicians want to compete with each other about who supports BLM the most is just the price for not sitting in traffic for an hour every day (back when going into the office was still a thing). But I think it’s worth remembering that even in areas where a majority of people support what’s happening / oppose more drastic measures to restore order, not everyone shares that viewpoint.
This is actually my experience in a very blue suburb in Maryland–there are protests of various kinds, no riots, and I’ve not noticed any particular hostility or tension. Most of the country is like this. It’s a big country, and some places, there are riots, looting, cops bashing heads, protesters chucking bricks at cops, etc., but most places things are just fine.
> like redlining for example
At what point has sufficient penance been paid such that it’s a resolved issue? There’s a solid argument to be made that the 2008 financial crisis was due in-part to regulations which were created to redress those issues. Is crashing the US economy not sufficient?
> It’s hard to succeed if you are born poor in a shitty neighborhood.
What level of responsibility should the parents have for having children in a “shitty neighborhood”? How should this be compared to other types (such as social) responsibility?
> Here in NYC there is a reason the NYPD gets a bad rap
Sure. Why haven’t the voters don’t anything about it for the past decades? Why hasn’t the city council done anything about it over the past decades?
There is? I’m genuinely interested in reading this, please let me know what you are sourcing because this is something I am interested in and would love to know more about.
That’s kinda the question innit? That’s what the redlining debate is really about. If the reason today’s generation of POC is so poor is because 30+ years ago their parents were pushed into poor neighborhoods by the federal and local government, then presumably at least some blame lands on the federal and local government. Maybe some lands on the parents for having kids. You know who the blame doesn’t land on? The people born there. Can’t really choose where you’re born.
Oh boy welcome to the weird wacky history of the fucking NYPD. I’ll have to source this later since I’m at a supermarket right now, but in either the 90s or the 80s (It’s been a while since I read about this – blame college) the NYPD had literally stopped policing districts of the city as well if they were run/represented by politicians who opposed them in order to ensure they’d lose. Pretty effective strategy. 9/11 basically ensured the NYPD was untouchable for a while, and police unions are still a very powerful lobbying force.
Some changes have been made. We got rid of stop-and-frisk for example, but the NYPD is still the same ol NYPD its been for a while.
Why were subprime loans so common before the crisis? There’s a myth that they were common because they’re high interest products so they’re more profitable but there’s two issues with that theory. First off, the average subprime mortgage rate was below many other investments (being slightly higher than a prime mortgage). Secondly, if they were being used as risky investments they wouldn’t have been bundled as derisked bonds. No one does that with personal loans, for example, because they’re risky.
Why did Wall Street think they weren’t risky? Because they were partly government backed. Why were they government backed? Because of President Clinton’s push to encourage homeownership among poor and minority Americans which encouraged banks to loosen lending rules and encouraged government regulation and financial entities to incentivize banks to grant such loans.
So yes, this one isn’t on the bankers entirely. It’s partly on DC, though to be fair to DC they also encouraged the mortgage market to exist and I’d argue that’s been a net positive in a lot of ways.
I’ve heard this, but I’ve also heard that Clinton didn’t do this for racial reasons, but instead because he thought homeownership was good for the economy. Considering this is the same Clinton that brought us the war on drugs, methinks being “woke” wasn’t his prime motivator.
Also on a more serious note – not sure if just encouraging more poor people to get a house is a good way to deal with the aftereffects of redlining.
I’m not accusing him of doing it for “woke” reasons. There was explicit mention of how it would help minorities but it certainly wasn’t billed as a corrective to redlining or some nebulous racial justice case. I suppose I’m emphasizing “the government caused this” part and not “wokeness caused this”.
Not so much interesting in having that debate, because I’m not sure I agree with the other guy on this part.
The 2008 crisis was created by the collapse of a housing price bubble. that bubble began forming in the late 90s, shortly after the Clinton administration made several regulatory changes to the Community re-investment act to strengthen enforcement and broaden its applicability to improve minority home ownership rates. For the record, I am NOT claiming that these regulatory changes alone made the bubble. They most certainly didn’t. And these changes were definitely not the only effort at increasing minority home ownership.
the bush administration was also a huge fan of programs like that.
The bubble was created by the entire edifice of housing subsidies in the US pushing up the rate of the increase in housing prices to the point where banks would no longer lose money on non-performing loans. That said, efforts encouraging banks to lowering standards for minorities certainly contributed to the overall process, and by getting backs used to the idea of lower standards, probably contributed disproportionately.
That argument ignores the fact that there are plenty of minorities that labored under similar restrictions that aren’t poor, like chinese in california.
Gee, it’s almost like giving large, unaccountable bureaucracies protected by endless civil service protections massive amounts of power is a bad idea? remind me again, which party is against that sort of thing on principle?
You mean the practice that resulted in the arrest of a lot of criminals, protecting the communities that they most preyed upon? That’s a victory for minority communities?
Look, it’s one thing if you want to argue that there are too many things that are illegal. I agree with you 100%. The villains in the Eric Garner situation weren’t the cops, it was the mayor and city council who agreed to make selling loosies a crime in what is supposed to be a free society. But these protests immediately descend into left wing fantasies about racism and policy suggestions that if implemented, would almost certainly make things worse. The rich can hire private security, it’s the poor that really need cops, and the poor that will suffer the most without them.
Thank you for the information on the housing crisis. I still really don’t know if I consider this a fault of “attempts to fix redlining” – see my post above about Clinton for that.
This is a pretty classic fallacy. That some people were able to overcome adversity for X, Y, or Z reason doesn’t mean adversity didn’t exist. Maybe Chinese Americans in California would be even better off if not for redlining. Also the issues they faced were quite different from the issues African Americans faced, and they suffered from completely different historical contexts, stereotypes, and political landscapes.
I don’t know… these days the Republicans seem to be pretty on board with giant police budgets and massive police autonomy. I don’t know enough about other departments or professions to comment, but my suspicion is the ones with guns can do more direct harm than like… teacher’s unions.
Ok look – Stop and Frisk wasn’t that great. Actually it was bad. Very bad. Yes crime dropped precipitously in that era. It also dropped like that… basically in every city that didn’t do it. And you know what? When we stopped it… crime kept dropping! I genuinely think the police protect poor/black/minority people and policing is genuinely good, as mentioned before I used to have a positive opinion of the NYPD. But Stop-And-Frisk, if it helped minorities at ALL, did far more to inflame and aggrevate them. The NYPD has continued to maintain a strong presence without it, and with it minorities were targeted, even Bloomberg admits they targeted minorities way too much. This made them feel less than, which contributes to that creeping pool of anger I’ve been talking about.
that something is an attempt at fixing something doesn’t mean that it’s actually fixing that thing, or that it’s a good idea. Good results come from good incentives, not good intentions.
I’m not claiming it doesn’t exist. I’m claiming that using it as a mono-causal explanation for everything as you’re doing is clearly inaccurate.
The lives of a lot more non-criminal black people have been damaged by shitty teachers than the guns of shitty cops.
Again, it’s almost like mono-causal explanations are bad! Stop and Frisk was part of pattern of policing that changed new york from one of the least safe cities in the country to one of the safest in a decade or so. It was a huge improvement to the lives of non-criminal new yorkers.
Now, if you want to debate whether or not stop and frisk was helpful, necessary, or justifiable, by all means let’s have that debate. But that conversation can’t start with “first, accept that S&F is horribly racist and only bad people support it” or “it’s problematic when the police arrest people who are guilty” which is what usually happens.
Citing facts not in evidence.
I’ll meet you half way here: I think the conversation should start with “the implementation of S&F was horrible racist, it is very likely that any repeat attempt at it would be too, and only people who believe both that it resulted in a large reduction in crime (which is a questionable but not indefensible factual judgement) and that that justifies the large-scale harrassement of innocent minorities it unquestionably entailed (which is a questionable but not indefensible moral/value judgement), or who are in complete denial of the obvious 50% of the relevant facts, support it.
@Tatterdemalion says:
Please explain what you mean by horribly racist. I’m not being snarky, I genuinely want to understand, because there is a very wide range of behavior that gets lumped under the umbrella of racist, and “stopping members of groups that commit crimes at higher rates than others” shouldn’t be one of them.
The cost of stop and frisk was that it involved the harassment of a large number of PEOPLE. It would not have been a better policy if it harassed twice as many whites and half as many blacks (or whatever numbers you need to make the math work out) for the same same conviction rate. To claim otherwise is a pretty literal argument that some are more equal than others.
As to what that rate was, 87% of people stopped were not fined or convicted for anything. that is not a very high rate, though it is considerably higher than anything the TSA has ever achieved. Any effort at evaluating the tactics’ efficacy would seem to depend extremely heavily on how much of a hassle the average stop entailed, and I have no actual data on that question. 10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours? those are very different things indeed.
No, really, really not. Stop and frisk would have been a much better policy if it had stopped and frisked twice as many whites and half as many blacks (ditto disclaimer about needed numbers…).
A society in which everyone gets stopped and frisked one day in n is much, much better than one in which one person in m is stopped and frisked m days in n and no-one else is stopped at all.
When the 1/m of the population who are targetted are also an identifiably minority who are discriminated against in lots of other ways too, that makes it even worse.
Also, moving up a level of meta from “what are the ideal parameters” to “what is the ideal method of setting the parameters”, if white people are being subjected to the same level of harassment as black people, the abuse of policy will be much less tolerated. Tradeoffs between liberty and security are thorny at the best of times, but when group A are asked to choose a tradeoff between their own security and group B’s liberty, you’re particularly likely to get bad ones.
What if that one person is the one committing all the crimes?
I’m sure that women were stopped vastly less often than men, was that equally problematic?
the continued existence of the TSA seems to prove otherwise.
You act as if this were a conscious choice of racist policy, not the result of fair treatment in an environment where groups behave differently.
By “racist” I mean, at a bare minimum, “treating black people worse than you would treat white people acting identically”.
I explicitly do not think that it is non-racist for police to make precise Bayesian calculations and stop the people most likely to be criminals, because if you exclude “It is OK to treat black people worse than white people acting identically, because black people are worse than white people” – which is what that boils down to – as non-racist, then you have pretty much defined racism out of existence.
Slightly more broadly and controversially, I also mean “treating black people worse than you would treat white people whose behaviour only differs along irrelevant axes”. “I didn’t stop him because he was black, I only stopped him because he was wearing clothes/listening to music/etc that correlate strongly with race” is clearly just using other properties as a proxy for race.
Now, obviously, this is much more thorny than the narrower part of what I’m describing as racist – what things is it legitimate to discriminate based on, and which are just proxies for race? One obvious rule of thumb is that any behaviour that has no predictive power if you control for race is not legit.
One case that I think is worth singling out is that I think that acting differently in high-crime vs low-crime neighbourhoods is notracist. On the other hand, it’s something that will obviously have a disparate negative impact on black people, and that it’s really important to take that into account and a) ensure that policing high-crime neighbourhoods is about protecting people in them, not just protecting people from them, and b) make sure that when you check, you find that actually which neighbourhoods have been treated as high-crime vs low-crime is actually about crime rate, and not just being used as an excuse.
I don’t agree with the people who include “has disparate impact” in their definition of racism, but I do think that it very much belongs in the same conversation.
My claim, for what it’s worth, is that S&F pretty clearly violated even the narrower part of my definition of racism.
If you’re sure about that, you should arrest him and haul him in front of a court so you can put him in jail.
If you’re not sure about that, maybe the cumulative police man-hours that went into the stop-and-frisk might be better tasked with an investigation on that point. Otherwise, it looks an awful lot like you’re punishing a presumably innocent man by way of a campaign of petty harassment where each harassing incident is calculated to be just below the level where the courts will insist on due process.
@John Schilling says:
I agree completely. That’s why any assessment of stop and frisk needs to start with asking how much time did and pain in the ass did it involve relative to other methods, not what color were the faces of the people getting harassed.
@Tatterdemalion
So, do you consider it misandrist that men are arrested (and I would assume, stopped and frisked) at 10x the rate of women?
Why do you assume they are proxies for race and not proxies for criminality?
it’s bad for black criminals. it’s not clear it’s bad for black non-criminals.
It’s difficult for that not to be the case, since people who don’t live and work in bad neighborhoods tend to avoid them.
again, you assume ill motives right out of the gate. Everyone has com-stat these days.
I think that it fits the technical definition of sexism (I’d like to avoid the word “misandrist” because I’m not sure about the connotations), but that doesn’t bother me, for a variety of reasons.
Out of curiosity, what are your own answers to these questions? Does stopping and frisking a black person walking down a street, purely on grounds of generic suspicion rather than because you have any specific intelligence, when you wouldn’t stop and frisk a white person walking down the same street, fit your definition of racism? If not, what (if anything) does?
Since “how much do you value not being stopped and frisked vs how much do you value the questionable reduction in risk of being a victim of crime that it allegedly provides?” is mostly a subjective value judgement, I think that the right metric to use here is mostly “do black non-criminals think it is?”; even if black non-criminals severely underestimate the amount they gain in safety (although, FWIW, I rather doubt they do), I think it should be their call.
And the answer to that is absolutely unambiguous and overwhelmingly strong.
I deny that. Checking for discrimination is not something you only do when you know that people are acting badly, it’s something you do when you don’t know people aren’t acting badly.
I think it’s really important to distinguish between beliefs and actions.
Of course a higher fraction of black Americans than white Americans are criminals. If your only goal is to maximise the proportion of stops that are of a criminal, discriminating against black people will definitely help you achieve that goal.
What I am arguing is that the police should deliberately exclude that piece of information from their judgement, and that slightly less-efficient crime fighting and/or more innocent white people being challenged is a price worth paying for being able to say to black people “you are not being treated unfairly”.
The deontological difference between race and sex here is that men are not also treated massively unfairly in other ways by society as a whole, so being able to say that to them on this one issue matters far less. There’s also an obvious really strong utilitarian difference.
@Tatterdemalion
“The deontological difference between race and sex here is that men are not also treated massively unfairly in other ways by society as a whole, so being able to say that to them on this one issue matters far less. There’s also an obvious really strong utilitarian difference.”
Here you are just wrong.
@Tatterdemalion says:
that seems worthy of examination to me.
it’s more that my baseline for what constitutes behavior worthy of examination isn’t blacks getting stopped at 1/6th the rate of of whites, but something closer to their crime rate. And when you factor in other determiners (young, male, dressing/acting certain ways) the results get more skewed. the vast majority of crime is committed by a small share of the population.
Since when do we let subsets of the population vote on general policies? this is a standard of justification tolerated no where else in society.
After a decade of propagandizing about how racist and ineffective S&F is, shockingly it has low approval ratings. that’s how the racial grievance engine works.
this is not possible without simply ignoring huge amounts of black criminality. and if you do do that, the people who suffer most will be non-criminal blacks. and it’s also remarkably ostrich like, “the campaign against noticing things” indeed.
A lot of the evidence offered for racism is that blacks do worse by outcome measures than whites. The difference in life expectancy between U.S. men and U.S. women is larger than the difference between U.S. blacks and U.S. whites.
And it’s hard to think of an outcome measure that’s obviously more important than how long you live.
@Tatterdemalion
It is fairly common for boys to not be protected from violence, but to be expected to defend themselves. Imagine the cops refusing to investigate ongoing abuse of women, as happens in certain countries, would you consider that a human rights violation?
Men quite often lose all access to their child if the mothers wants that to happen, in the case of divorce.
Men are usually not allowed to exhibit a full range of emotions.
So is it fair to men to allowing physical abuse to happen to them, letting their children be taken from their life and greatly restricting the emotions they are allowed to exhibit?
My understanding of redlining is that lenders chose not to provide mortgage loans in areas where they thought such loans were risky, which tended to be areas occupied by poor people, especially blacks. The federal government was involved through its failure to insure mortgage loans in such places. What is the sense in which that represents people being pushed into poor neighborhoods by the federal and local governments?
My impression is that the poor areas were mostly areas with inexpensive rundown housing already there, and the poor people mostly rented. Being unable to get mortgage loans made it harder for poor people on their way up to improve their circumstances, but it didn’t push people into living in those areas.
When there is no longer a strong correlation between low income housing and race?
Ah yes, this argument has never been used to justify eugenics before. I’m sure it won’t get captured by such people again. And ironically, most conservatives find anti-natalist sentiment to be abhorrent.
There are a few threads in this OT and 154.75 explaining how the police union subverts the will of the voters.
If tomorrow genie came to earth and abolished every racist thought from every mind in the country, the day after tomorrow there would still be a correlation be between low income housing and and race, and it would likely persist for some time. Do you have any way of telling if that genie has come?
Is anyone here arguing for eugenics? if not, why bring it up?
And yet the democratic party remains in favor of government employee unions and condemns the republicans when they try to do anything about this. yet they’re on the side of the protesters. Odd, that, don’t you think?
No, not really.
Strong unions transfer value from parts of society that interact with their members to those members. In the case of most professions, that value comes primarily from employers (who have to pay better wages and provide better working conditions) and to a lesser extent from consumers (who have to pay slightly higher prices). Democrats think – rightly, in my view – that transfer of value from well-off people to badly-off people is generally a good thing, so transfer of value from employers to employees is a clear positive, and transfer of value from consumers to producers is roughly neutral, possibly shading to positive slightly more often than to negative because rich people buy more stuff and unionised workers are more likely to be poor, and virtually never shading enough to negative to outweigh the positive of the transfer from employers.
In the case of an police unions, though, there’s an additional strong transfer of value, from minorities in particular and other non-police to a much lesser extent, in the form of being able to treat them appallingly and get away with it without being punished. And that’s a very bad thing indeed.
(Something similar but much weaker is claimed – correctly or not I’m not 100% sure, and don’t want to get sidetracked into speculating over – to happen with teaching unions, in the form of transfer of value from schoolchildren who are forced to put up with inferior teachers. Most Democrats support teaching unions, but – unlike most other unions – there are a non-trivial number of high profile exceptions, like Rahm Emmanuel and Jonathan Chait).
Government services aren’t paid for by employers but by tax payers. And the people who suffer most when those services are performed badly are precisely the people democrats claim to want to help. As you touch on later, the rich and middle class can escape shitty schools, it’s the poor who can’t
How on earth is it a benefit to non-police?
I agree. What I don’t understand is why you (and most of the democratic party) don’t think it’s a bad thing when unionized social workers, teachers, or nurses do it.
OK, hang on. Unions do (more than, but lets pretend not) two things: they negotiate better pay for their members, and when their members do their jobs badly they sometimes, but not always, stop them getting punished.
I am in favour of the first function, in the public as well as the private sector – most tax is paid by rich people. In most professions I think the effect of the second function is pretty small, and I haven’t really thought about what the sign of the tradeoff between benefit to employees and cost to citizens is, because I think the magnitude is fairly small compared to the wage boost effect.
The reason I think the police are a special case is that I think that there are more police officers who behave in ways that ought to result in them being punished or fired than there are in other professions, and that the nature of their job makes that matter more.
I think you may have misread “from” as “to”?
I hope I’ve answered this above at least well enough that you can understand my position, even if you don’t agree with it?
Those other things matter a lot. In the context of government unions the two that matter most are they negotiate work rules and fund raise for political campaigns. The former provides nearly endless opportunities to feather their own nests at the expense of everyone else. The latter give them immense political power, and is a big part of the reason they are so unaccountable. They are the single largest source of fundraising for the modern democratic party.
It definitely is not small and the effects are very large if you’re one of the kids stuck in the crap school or riding on the metro system that catches fire and can’t fire the guy who lied about repairing it.
The first seems implausible. Police have no worse incentives than any other unionized profession. they will have a stronger workplace culture, but that cuts both ways.
As for the second, I would agree that people allowed to use lethal force at their own discretion need more watching than people who aren’t. that said, the average person is going to have far more interactions with teachers or nurses than cops over the course of their life, so I would not be so quick to downplay the costs of them being lousy.
Why would you expect the main effect of an increase in the cost of in input to be a reduction in the income to capital or managerial labor instead of an increase in the price of the output? That’s what your “slightly higher prices” implies.
I would expect the opposite, with the cost being born mostly by consumers.
Unions are generally more effective for skilled labor, with the old craft unions the obvious example and the American Medical Association a less obvious one. Increasing the cost of unionized labor results in less of it being employed, which increases the supply of less skilled labor and pushes down its wages. So the net effect is probably a transfer from lower paid workers to higher paid workers — the precise opposite of what you are claiming.
Also, while Democrats at the moment are pro-immigration, if only because Republicans are anti, they have a long history of maintaining restrictions on immigration, mostly on the grounds that that the immigrants would compete with much higher income American workers. So if your claim about support for transfers from higher to lower is true, it should be limited to transfers among current Americans.
I worry about this one, in various forms, a lot. I’m sure you’ve seen the satirical article on Neutonian morality.
I cannot find a coherent justification why I as an individual should value the well-being of people literally or figuratively close to me more than that of people far away. But my instinct is, very strongly, that not worrying to much about people on the far side of the world is Normal, whereas if I let my neighbour die horribly when £2000 would save their life then I would be a Monster, and ditto for other people. And pretty much everyone else clearly feels the same, so that’s one hell of a Chesterton’s fence.
Similarly, you are 100% right that “we should make the first world a much worse place to live in order to benefit people in the third world, probably including open borders policies but possibly just using taxation and aid on a huge scale” is totally something I am logically constrained to believe by my own values; the reason I am not sure whether I believe it or not is because I don’t altogether trust myself and worry that I may be making a mistake.
And the reason I don’t support policies that would do so is straightforward selfishness. I am a fundamentally immoral and selfish person (my friends never admit to believing this when I tell them, amusingly, and I think they probably genuinely don’t, but it’s totally true); if I didn’t live in the first world myself and wasn’t one of the people whose life would be massively harmed by it then I would probably bite the bullet and gamble on supporting one of those policies, but as it is I just salve my conscience by giving money personally and being open about the fact that I’m not doing the right thing, while not actually supporting the ruining of the society I live in, even in a far-more-than-sufficiently good cause.
Do you think the reason that correlation exists is past redlining? Wouldn’t you expect a strong correlation between low income housing and low income?
Is your argument that the reason blacks are, on average, poorer than non-blacks is past redlining? That doesn’t seem very likely.
What were the rates for black home-ownership and wealth levels before redlining?
My understanding of this argument is basically that redlining happened at a time of incredible and unparalleled economic growth during the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s, where white people were able to convert that prosperity into generational wealth through buying property, black people were unable to similarly convert the temporary glut into long term gains and as such the ramification are long felt.
“Poor people shouldn’t have children” has been used time and again to advocate for sterilizing the poor and racial minorities, and many of the sterilized are still alive today.
@AG
Yes and criticism of bad living conditions of the poor can be used to argue that the poor cannot be trusted with good housing because they will trash it. Yet leftists of the past decided against keeping quiet on this topic, resulting in far improved living conditions of the poor. We have far fewer slums than you found in the past and still find in third world nations.
Are you sure that the common leftist silence on this severe quality of life issue and threat to the well-being of poor children isn’t a rationalized-to-fit-within-leftist-ideology lack of concern, rather than an actual lesser of two evils?
I don’t follow your argument. Progressive activism on housing was all about forcing regulations on housing construction to conform to higher standards. In fact, their policies have been the opposite of things like sterilization, trying to make it harder for landlords to evict disruptive people.
And this carries over to their policies on poor children, trying to expand access to welfare and educational opportunities.
They don’t generally advocate for “maybe poor people shouldn’t do X because they are poor,” unless you refer to pro-choice activism.
AG:
There was also pressure on lenders to be more willing to lend money to minorities and for houses in minority neighborhoods. I think Steve Sailer made the argument that this had an impact on the housing crisis–I haven’t tried to look into this in depth, but I strongly suspect that this was a useful piece of rhetoric to justify sketchy lending that some mortgage companies were doing because it was profitable, but probably didn’t have a huge impact on the inflation of the bubble or the propagation of mortgages that were obviously never going to be repaid.
The voters damn well tried – In New York specifically, the current mayor got elected on a platform of police reform, then completely failed to actually accomplish anything, because the cops fought him on it tooth and nail, and he folded like castle made of wet cardboard.
Just with slogans and unspecific promises?
Or with a set of specific promises and ready-to-be deployed order/local laws etc?
A fair few specific proposals.
But he was the police reform candidate, and nothing actually happened, and this was because the New York police department was blatantly defiant of civil authority. Seriously, that is not Law and Order, once you tell the mayor to go pound sand for years on end, you are just a gang with snazzy uniforms.
@Thomas Jorgensen
Did he actually *enact* these proposals? Like by taking them to the city council and getting them passed, and adjusting the police budgets accordingly? Give instructions regarding the negotiating position of the city during the next police contract negotiation?
Or did he *talk* about those specific proposals? And then do nothing, because it turns out that a majority of voters don’t actually *want* these proposals, and would have made their displeasure known at the ballot box?
There are an awful lot of politicians in the US that do shit like this (A prior rant by me, and @Deiseach says it’s common in Ireland as well.)
Or at least sending formal proposal to a city council and getting it rejected.
Far too often politicians campaign to do Foobar and then fail to do anything real.
I am perfectly fine with member of parliament, mayor even president promising to do something, actually doing something (making a formal order, submitting an amendment). I may be unhappy if that is rejected, ruled unconstitutional, ignored, sabotaged by other players etc.
But not even trying? Then you are a dirty liar.
Yes, there is still a space for pretending to try (making clearly lame proposals, laws with deliberate loopholes etc) but even that is better than “I tried nothing and gave up” mode.
To be fair to @Thomas Jorgensen, maybe de Blasio did do some of that. I actually don’t know.
I would depart from you at saying that it can be considered a totally serious attempt for somebody like a Mayor (or governor, or President, or somebody like the Senate Majority Leader) by just submitting a bill and if it doesn’t pass, saying “Welp, I tried.” I can forgive that for a rank-and-file legislator like a junior member of the city council. Not for a major player.
When President Obama passed Obamacare, he spent plenty of time twisting arms to get it passed. He even had House Democrats protesting that voting for it would cost them their seats. And you know what? He said, “That’s fine!” And some of them lost their seats in the next election!
You can’t make major changes without making people mad. That’s why it’s hard–there are people who get their oxen gored by *actually* making changes.
I don’t know how many people remember, but this was the origin of the Tea Party. A lot of members of the Republican base were saying, “We keep electing people with an (R) after their name to go to Washington and actually reduce the size of the government, but we keep getting ‘cuts’ in budgets that are really ‘we only increased the budget by 1% instead of the planned 5%, so that’s a cut.'” The Tea Party was a revolt by that base to say, “No, motherfuckers, we want to see the numbers in the budgets get smaller, not slightly less bigger.”
Part of the frustration that they couldn’t do that even after the rise of the Tea Party caused many of them to flee to Trump as opposed to the Republican mainstream. I don’t agree with that decision, but there was real frustration that electoral victories never actually turned into actual policy changes. Because if the mainstream Republicans had *actually* cut budgets, the backlash would have caused them to lose their seats, since while the Tea Party was powerful in their own limited circle, they weren’t an actual electoral majority.
I think big-city police departments and big-city educational systems both tend to be powerful enough to resist a lot of attempts at changing or reforming them.
This strikes me as a classic motte-and-bailey. And a fairly representative one, in the sense that my conversations with Blue Tribers have tended to flow along much the same argumentative lines.
My strong sense is that, whatever broader themes the protestors may also be raising, the specific issue of police violence against blacks — a discrete problem addressable in principle by concrete government actions — is quite explicitly being put forward as the justification for the protests’ overriding urgency. The elevated public health risks associated with making the protests an extraordinary exception to the general social-distancing rules have been rationalized by the claim that blacks face an imminent threat of harm of a highly specific kind, which the protests are capable of preventing to some meaningful extent. That’s the bailey.
It’s only when it’s pointed out that the factual basis for that narrow claim is rather more tenuous than widely assumed that we get the pivot to the motte: “What about all this other stuff that has much sounder empirical support, like the downstream effects of redlining?” The problem is that those other things tend to lack much of a nexus to the claim for the overriding need to be protesting right now. They look much less tractable to immediate targeted interventions; their ill effects are generally of a diffuse, accumulative kind that’s likely to be ameliorable, if at all, only in the very long term. There is (to me at least) no plausible case that a protest about residential segregation needs to happen immediately in order to forestall some imminent harm, when the same issue could easily be protested at some time when the risk to public health is not so great.
My disagreements notwithstanding, I do really appreciate your doing that; I thought the post did a nice job of laying out your thinking in a way that was emphatic without being inflammatory.
ETA: initially transposed motte and bailey above; should be fixed now.
Quick pedantic note: You used “motte” and “bailey” backwards. Motte is the smaller, more well fortified area and used to represent the narrower and more well-supported claim, Bailey is the larger and less well defended area outside the Motte, and corresponds to the broader, less-well supported claim.
My pet peeve is that a lot of people do this, but to be fair to them (and you) I think it’s because unless you’re into military history or certain flavors of fantasy these are weird foreign words that aren’t in your day-to-day vocabulary any more than the technical definition of bastion or the difference between a murder hole and a machicolation. Unfortunately when people do it, it makes a hash of the analogy.
Otherwise, carry on. 🙂
Yep, that was definitely my bad — caught it shortly after posting, but SSC is ever-vigilant in these matters!
I’m pretty sure for me there’s actually a specific reason I regularly mess that one up. The phrase puts me semi-consciously in mind of the Old Bailey (a judicial structure in London), which I think of as a building, though obviously it originally took its name metonymically from the surrounding area. So I gravitate toward remembering the bailey as the building-like-thing, which of course is wrong.
I don’t think its a motte-and-bailey, but I get why you think it is. I think the way I’d like you to look at is this, all those other underlining issues, the ones you say don’t need to be protested right now, have been there for a while. Building, accumulating. Each time POC protest they’re met with staunch resistance, and occasionally they get some change, but the world remains largely the same. They’re still poor, more likely to be targeted by violence, more likely to be born in a shit neighborhood, more likely to go to jail, to get a longer prison sentence etc. etc.
George Floyd was the match, and maybe it wasn’t the best. Maybe we can all sit here smug in our knowledge that the protesters are, as Conrad calls them “innumerate.” But again, I think that’s missing the real point here. These protests will KEEP HAPPENING until something changes in a big way. Of course they will. And you can say over and over again that X or Y incident isn’t a big deal. Each incident has a chance of reignited the flames as long as the underlining kindling is still there. And each time a protest is met with violence, or with indifference, it just builds. There are actually good outcomes that we can get out of these protests. The LAPD and NYPD budgets are massively inflated. Qualified Immunity should probably end, and has been a rallying cry of the protests I’ve attended. Hell the protests probably if nothing else, will ensure the officers who killed Floyd face justice.
But if you just look at each protest as a surface level, ignoring the decades of anger and pain that brought us here, you’re not likely going to ever find something that makes sense to you. That’s what I meant with the Archduke Ferdinand joke – this isn’t about police brutality, not really. That’s just the latest in a long line of grievances. And each instance of police brutality in response only added to the line.
What world are these protests met with “staunch resistance”? when BLM got started, it was supported by the sitting president and most of his party. James Webb got booed on stage at a debate for saying all lives matter, and was the only democrat to do so. In Baltimore after freddie grey, the POC got what they asked for, the cops left their neighborhoods, and crime soared. Today the support is even more broader. The idea that these protesters are some embattled minority is ludicrous, they’re supported by all right thinking people everywhere.
And this has nothing to do with their behavior?
They will keep happening as long as they are encouraged. And they will be encouraged as long as people can make political hay by stoking racial grievances, regardless of the underlying conditions.
Racial Equality protests have been going on for a long time. From the CIA infiltrating and discrediting the black panthers, to everything Trump has done, I think its disingenuous to say there hasn’t been sizable resistance. Maybe staunch was the wrong word. But yes, it was supported by most democrats. It was also opposed by most republicans. If half the country opposes what you think, I’d call that resistance.
Yikes! I uhh just don’t know what to do with this one. I mean… no obviously not every black person is arrested because of racism. That’s… kind of not the point though? The argument is they are in a shitty situation because of a history of racism. Maybe they do lash out due to that, but maybe you can understand it. The idea that black people are poor “because of their behavior” isn’t one I’m going to condone or argue about any more though.
Encouraging protests is a bad way to get protests. People only protest shit when they are angry. It’s really hard to make people get angry overnight. My argument was simply that this anger has been building for a long time, and until that pool of anger is dealt with in a meaningful way, then “stoking racial grievances” will be a very easy thing to do.
I think you mean FBI, but they also infiltrated the Klan, the birchers, and various other groups. What of it? That’s what law enforcement does.
please be more specific.
I note that your only example is from almost 60 years ago. That seems like it matters.
Well most republicans don’t live in the big cities that were the epicenter of that sort of thing. But let’s put that aside for now. Would you say that there was staunch resistance to trump? to the affordable care act? to anything else that polls between 40-60%? I mean, I suppose you could but that renders the phrase pretty meaningless
yes, it is. Blacks are in prison at something like 8x the rate of whites. they also commit crimes at roughly 8x the rate of whites. And men are in prison at about 10x the rate of women, and commit crimes at 10x their rate. No one claims that we have a misandry problem leading to too many male arrests, why is saying the same thing about racial disparities grounds for dismissal from polite society?
since the “lashing out” in the form of crime is overwhelmingly directed at other minorities, no, I can’t.
When you refuse to accept that minorities are in any way responsible for their own behavior, you’re rendering solving their problems impossible. Because at that point, you’re not treating them like actual people, but objects to lavish your pity on. and since they are actual people, they won’t behave the way your model predicts.
the anger hasn’t been building, it has been built. Deliberately, by politicians who seek to use racial division to gain power.
@cassander
I don’t disagree with you on the rates, but for some activists, the fact that blacks have such a high rate of committing crime is a consequence of cycles of violence pushing them into it. Are black people around 8x more likely to live in poverty, as well? Certainly, white collar criminals and CEOs who crash the economy don’t seem to follow the same racial splits.
There did seem to be a time period in which black Americans were a group with increasing outcomes. The activist narrative is that this time period was cut off at the knees, and black Americans cannot recover because society won’t reinstate those conditions when they were thriving. (There may even be a metaphor to be made here with American meddling overseas.)
@AG says:
the people most hurt by black criminality are other blacks. So even if we accept that the only reason that the black crime rate so high is racism and oppression, committing crimes against people who had nothing to do with their oppression is still unacceptable.
It’s ~2-3 times the white rate.
As I recall, the black white collar crime rate is higher than the white. But let’s take for sake of argument that it isn’t. If there are lots of white people getting away with white collar crimes, the solution is more policing of white people, not less policing of black people.
Well, outcomes for blacks are improving, as have outcomes for everyone. the worst that can be claimed is that they’re not improving faster enough to close the various gaps.
That said, without knowing what period you think that is I can’t really respond to that directly. What I can say is that’s not an argument I see made much. The argument I see made is not a call to return to the past, but the claim that everything in the past was wicked and that ever more “progress” must be made, despite the abject failure of previous efforts in the same vein. Indeed, failure only seems to prove that previous efforts were insufficient and it’s racist to say otherwise.
Are we talking about the ground truth rates of crimes committed, or of some observed rate? Who’s doing the observation?
@itowel
I’m going by the murder rate, because bodies are hard to hide. And my understanding is that victim reports of the race of the perpetrators (for non-murder crimes) line up well with police reports of the same, for fairly obvious reasons.
See, between 1969 and 2016, I think there was at least half a century in which “resistance” to black people protesting over their mistreatment was exceedingly mild and ineffectual and the dominant sentiment among the left, center, and center-right of polite society was “I hope they don’t get too violent about this, but otherwise support their campaign”. And for that matter, “everything Trump has done” in this matter has been rather like everything Trump has done in most every other matter – a lot of hot air.
Picking two high-profile events and asserting they bookend a long period of more of the same, gets you to “From the Quasi-War to the Battle of Casablanca, I think it is disingenuous to say that there hasn’t been a great deal of hostility between the United States and France”.
This sounds an awful lot like moving the goalposts.
What you wrote was:
Have you now modified that to “sometimes they’re met with resistance and sometimes they are not”?
Or is what you mean by “met with resistance” that the problem didn’t vanish?
@cassander
I’ll concede the truth of the crime rates.
@Conrad Honcho
If police target investigating a particular group, and charge people with resisting arrest even if they’re innocent of anything else, those people still have a stain on their records that follows their every background check. We live in a very felon-hostile society, so if more of a certain group gets arrested and charged in the first place, recidivism ensures that it carries over and the sub-population can rarely bounce back in crime rates. This is relevant to the stop-and-frisk conversation above, as well as when police choose to search cars during traffic stops, the way the drug war has definitely impacted certain races harder, which in turn skews the crime rates, since they’re for who’s getting caught/reported.
I disagree with activists that reparations is the solution to this kind of thing, but that’s what they’re getting at with the concept.
In regards to protests: in my country protests happen a lot. There are usually specific reasons for each protest.
I’m pretty sure that protests happen more when they are “encouraged”. The general type of protest is also affect by what is “encouraged”.
This includes both the general societal tolerance for protests and groups pushing for protests.
Also: I think most people aren’t particularly opposed to protesting in general or in regards to racial (in favor of blacks at least) issues. NOT GOING AWAY isn’t a threat, just a reminder.
Riots and looting on the other hand…
And I’m going to keep ignoring them in a big way, because it simply is not possible to make everyone perfect.
It’s the Summer of the Shark and you’re telling me people are going to keep running around with their hair on fire unless something is done about these shark attacks. But there’s nothing you can do because they’re so damn rare. They only look common because (extremely low chance) * (very large population) and then the 24/7 spotlight of the media.
Imagine if we’d just had another Islamic extremist terrorist attack, and conservatives were up in arms about these damn terrorist muslims killing people, and I said, “well, our anger is going to KEEP HAPPENING until something changes about these muslims in a big way!” What would you say? Probably, “well, I guess you’re going to keep getting angry then.” It’s a super rare event in a big population, which means it’s going to happen somewhere at low levels with regularity, but you can’t do anything about it that isn’t horrible. So, yeah, life kind of sucks and everybody has to deal with it.
There’s one level at which I basically agree with all of what you’re saying here. (Bracketing the point about “staunch resistance,” where I’d echo the pushback you’ve already gotten.) That is, it very much fits my mental model of a protest like this that it’d involve a rich mix of different kinds of grievance operating on wildly different timescales and levels of particularization and redressability, all needing to be compressed somehow into a messaging and iconography that can work across widely varying levels of education/commitment/skin in the game/etc., in a way that will often end up optimizing for something other than abstract intellectual consistency.
So far as it goes, I’m fine with all of that. And I do entirely take the point about the distinction between the immediate triggers of the protest and the deeper frustration for which those events serve as a vehicle. I’m not necessarily saying, “This protest, qua protest, is a particularly bad one as protests go.”
But I do think that analysts and decision-makers further removed from the tip of the spear have a responsibility to take advantage of the luxury of reflective distance to assess the protests’ particularized aims, assertions, and probability of success from a standpoint that doesn’t simply replicate the protestors’ own Inside View of what they’re up to.
In particular, I’m thinking of government officials and scientists who make the claim, “Because racism represents an even greater threat to population-level health and welfare than coronavirus, these protests should go forward.” To make such a judgment rationally requires much more than for there to be a generalized fit between the protestors’ intentions and some objectively real source of harm. It requires disaggregating the protestors’ various stated aims and making some rough, necessarily speculative calculations about the plausible near-term gains to social utility from whatever concrete actions might be taken in response.
That in turn requires laying out protestors’ manifold grievances on a spectrum, from those most obviously open to redress (e.g., Qualified Immunity) to those most strongly resembling as-yet-incorrigible knots in the grain of our social nature, as worthy of continuing to shout about as it is worthy to keep staging King Lear — only nobody says we should keep doing Lear in a pandemic simply because ending casual cruelty and ingratitude would be the greatest public health gain of all.
I’m not seeing any of that work being done in the mainstream public discourse. At all. Instead there seems in many quarters to be a fanciful insistence on treating the protests exactly as if their actual average expected outcome were literally ending racism in America. In saying this I emphatically don’t mean you. But I do want to be clear that that’s the primary source of my frustration here, not so much with anything being done by the protestors themselves.
I can understand your position but the position is well understood – I saw it in every Reddit discussion.
The right – I am one – has no interest in more communication because it’s not our native domain and it feels there exists no winning condition. There’s a loss of good faith on all sides. While you see rightist leaders giving lip service to resolution the affect of these events is each time they happen the right ratchets up into exit – communication is inseparable from condemnation.
I don’t expect this to go some place positive and so I’m advocating this action – that there exist a network of hiding places for Slate Star Codex readers who might become targets. There is a comment coming to explain that I’ve asked Scott to eject from the spam filter.
As I see it – sex, race or class – these are not personal choices. I don’t know why we have discussions where it is implied political orientation is a choice. All the time I feel we’re blaming the Pangolins for carrying Covid.
I’m genuinely sorry you feel that way, and I hope that here on SSC we can continue to discuss openly. I’ve held very polite conversation above with several people who strongly disagree with me, and I am sad you feel like you cannot be a part of the same.
That said:
This… seems extreme? SSC has plenty of right-wing or at least grey/lowercase c conservatives. Like I read/took the survey and know full well that I’m in the majority here as a leftist, but even in that last discussion there were far more people disagreeing with me than agreeing. And I think “targets” is a little much. This isn’t leftist twitter, nobody’s here to cancel you.
I have adapted my political views and even orientation in direct response to things I have read and observed both in life and at this blog. I understand where you are coming from, but I disagree that things like your political belief are as immutable as your race. I think there’s probably a scale from most immutable to least that goes something like this:
Race/Sex
Class/Status
Religion/Political Orientation
Individual Beliefs
Everything Else
Eric I’m delighted to converse with thoughtful Leftists and Liberals or lurk their writing on SSC – I have learned a lot here. My RSS feeds contain podcasts and news from every faction. I have a faction folder for just Robin Hanson. My policy is less political economy and more political ecology – I like all the animals – I don’t feel unhappy each occupies a niche. I would not have been distraught for Bernie Sanders to win – because discussions of class untangled from the more promoted dimensions of gender/sex or race are long overdue in the US.
On extremity – this is not abstract – it’s people being killed. I was not thinking SSC is about to direct a wave of terror. Outside of this digital bar there exist a variety pack of muggers who feel positive emotions if they could harm X-ists or X-ism – few of them are activated but lots exist.
There is not a big gap between identifying a scapegoat and persecution of them when sentiment is running hot. Think Rwanda, centuries of European religious war – it looks normal that a new communication medium and factionalism causes violence. Why not have a plan for it. I cannot think of a conflict that was not accompanied by media legitimating it.
On the scale – seems like this is a scientific question. There exists numbers for who transitions sex, class, political belief. The confounder for an investigation is that – just as a man or woman matures with different growth stages – that somebody can be at core left but we might be giving different names to the same animal because it has so many different presentations or we might observe a animal with convergent adaptions that came out of something different.
Alright I gotta go – this has been fun and there are still some comments I desperately want to respond to, but I can’t spend all day on SSC. I would like to try allay your concerns before I leave though.
I’m very very into the leftist community. I know plenty of radicals. This isn’t going to happen, not any time soon. The slim SLIM minority that call for violence are as anathema to us as those weirdos on Alt-right webforums who think its okay to rape women who refuse to have sex with them are as anathema to you. People are upset, angry even, and some will resort to violence. But you are not in danger from some witch hunt. Trust me, the situation in say Rwanda, was fomented by some incredibly different circumstances, brought on by a seriously oppressed majority for decades, mixed with a weak police system and weak economy. That isn’t you. You’ll be fine, I promise. And if you ever aren’t you are free to crash at my place, I’ll give the secret liberal handshake and the leftists will leave you alone.
The readership skews left, the commentariat skews right.
we could measure this. Count the comments. Pick out the top X commentators such that you have a reasonable share of the total comments and have people self identify, then look at the results.
It has been measured, several times. I think it was Dan L who did it last? The frequent commenters skew right, but the readership skews left.
And the skew seems biggest on fractional threads, imo
Here are a few thoughts.
1 Large numbers of unorganized unplanned protests are inherently stressful on police resources. They particularly stress police crowd control resources. That these include an anti police component only makes bad outcomes more likely and more stress police resources. Given the first wave of these resulted in considerable amount of arson, police have to treat sympathy protests with greater suspicion than protests that do not seem to be linked to any protests that ended up in arson etc. If an organization has to deal with something outside what it is prepared for, it will respond incompetently, this applies to police forces. By some of the choices that have been made about how these protests will be organized in some places or perhaps more accurately the lack of organization, getting protest permits etc, bad outcomes are more likely. This varies hugely from place to place and my local BLM protest was incredibly well organized got permits, maintained cordial relationships with the police and had zero problems and made me proud of my local area. It is hardly the fault of protestors, but if you hold a protest that will require police resources in a time and area when police resources are stretched to the point where civil order is not maintained, you end up helping bad actors. I think that a breakdown in civil order is really bad, so when and where a decision not to delay protests until they can be better organized and police resources are less strained is made, or made by action, I am quite suspicious.
Secondly, one important issue is that deescalation might be safer in the moment, but it sets up issues with precedent. If one form of deescalation becomes frequently done, it ceases to be a meaningful concession and just gets taken for granted. I imagine in the short term, almost any concession, let us use for the example ordering pizza for the protestors would do more for ensuring calm feelings and good outcomes than the same amount of money on more police presence. But if this becomes only get pizza for a crowd that looks dangerous, then this creates perverse incentives and is unjust. If it becomes get pizza for protests that are within the overton window, then it is really offensive and escalatory when pizza is not brought. If it is get pizza for all protests, then it becomes, an overwhelmingly poor city getting pizza for the wight supremacist protestors(They believe the undead are better than the living).
We need to be ok with any form of deescalation that gets adopted as policy being done to all protests. There are some forms of deescalation that that is fine for, like we will not fine-jail a protestor for unsafe pedestrian activity as long as it is not truly egregious and the protestor does not seem to be engaged in more serious criminal activity. But this are hard questions, but any examination of deescalation strategies that only look at the short term are likely to find it a much better strategy than a long term approach.
I am in NO way qualified to speak on a black secession state other than to say I know exactly one person in favor of that. So ways to go before that becomes a real option I think.
Yeah I think this right here is what I’m getting at. Leftists like me legitimately believe there is a long, long history of abuse and shitty things that got us here. From the CIA pumping cocaine into urban centers to stop-and-frisk, there is a history here that has left people not just hurt, but MAD. And I think an issue us Leftists have is sometimes it feels like people don’t want to even acknowledge the possibility that these things are still impacting the day-to-day.
Look, the whole genetic component isn’t something I feel qualified to speak on. I’m not a scientist, and the literature has been confusing to me. But I am a historian (/history teacher – depends on the year). And I know the history of the community I live in. I think the rational part of my brain says “both probably contribute” but by how much? I don’t know. But its pretty undeniable that the historical aspect is there and when it gets ignored, people get mad.
I worry that each time these protests happen and no meaningful change is made, the country “muddles along” as you say, we just set ourselves up for an even bigger disaster next time.
Got me there! This is what I get for trying to come up with examples OTTOMH – swap that one out for something with a bit more weight behind it. COINTELPRO comes to mind.
But what if the meaningful change that needs to happen to prevent the bigger disaster is “the protestors needs to understand their worldview is wrong and their concerns unfounded?” It seems like you’re taking it for granted that the protestors are correct.
This.
What the protesters could do to earn my trust:
1) Denounce looting. This would reassure that their grievances don’t include the existence of private property. They’ve done a poor job of making it clear that they are not orthodox Marxists or some sort of black socialists who support confiscating people’s property on the basis of race.
2) Support churches and other/minority religious services (like those Jewish funerals the Mayor of NYC uses the government monopoly on force to stop) being wide open despite COVID, like their own protests. This would be another way of showing non-support for Marxist or even harder to parse black socialist ideology and signal support for all First Amendment rights – which again, signals patriotism rather than Marxism or an adjacent ideology.
3) Extirpate postmodernism from the Black Lives Matter organization in favor of a commitment to logic.
@Le Maistre Chat
For your first point, it’s hard to say why i believe it and you have the opposite impression, but for what it’s worth all the experience I’ve had with the protesters in real life and in direct communications with (NOT twitter or other internet echo chambers), they has been universally against the looting. And, uh, as a protester myself i’m also against it, for whatever that’s worth.
@metalcrow: +1, thanks for the data.
FWIW, I get the sense protestors are considerably less likely to support rioting or looting than celebs and journalists on Twitter, on account of actually being there, and being members of these communities, and knowing better. I have in mind those people tweeting “Burn it down!” or journos claiming violence is sometimes okay, that looting and property damage aren’t violence, etc.
There are two questions that should be distinguished. One is whether a group was mistreated. The other was whether that mistreatment explains their present condition. The latter carries with it the question of whether that condition can be changed if the mistreatment stops.
The first is easy, since being sold into slavery is pretty clearly mistreatment, even aside from later events. The second is not so clear. There are, after all, other groups, most notably Chinese, Japanese, and Jews, who were also mistreated, even if not as severely, and managed just fine.
Furthermore, there are groups of blacks — West Indian immigrants and, more recently, African immigrants — who seem to do fine. At least according to Sowell’s Ethnic America, West Indian immigrants make it up to the average American income in one generation. That doesn’t prove that past mistreatment isn’t responsible, but it’s pretty strong evidence that current mistreatment isn’t.
Incidentally, as Sowell points out, it is also evidence against a genetic explanation, since West Indians are blacker genetically as well as in appearance than most African-American.
This is in now way evidence against a genetic explanation. Unless you think that “the essence of blackness” that defines African Americans in some way is even more pronounced in West Indians.
What does “black genetically as well as in appearance” even mean?!
This sounds terribly confused.
What you (or Sowell) maybe meant was that it is not due to [people treating black people bad] because these Indians are even blacker than most African-Americans.
It means that more of their ancestry is from the parts of sub-Saharan Africa that slaves originated in, I gather mostly West Africa.
Sowell’s point was that neither explanation for racial income differences, discrimination based on appearance or genetic differences based on ancestry, was consistent with the evidence.
The only sense I can make of your comment is that you are confusing West Indians with people from southern India, who are dark skinned but not closely related to people from sub-Saharan Africa.
West Indians are the descendants of people captured in Africa and brought to the West Indies as slaves.
To be fair, confusing the West Indies with India has a rather robust historical pedigree.
Sorry for the CW post. I wouldn’t do it, but it seems that’s it’s being tacitly tolerated here, and I do feel to be in some distress, and could use people’s advice/opinions.
A while back I made a resolution to think about politics less. I had always been in the grey-tribe outgroup of my extremely blue-tribe bubble. During this time I’ve lived happily, and realized that most of this conflict for me WAS internal – by focusing less on all the ways I disagreed with people, I could be much happier, and only occasionally feel bad, and like I was crazy and living in a totally different world.
Then the protests this week started.
Soooo many people I know are condoning violence, accepting the narrative that we live in a totally racist society with structures of white-supremacy power, calling for an end to the police, and some very vocally saying “you must voice agreement with BLM, or else you’re a bad person, I hate you, you’re bad for the world, and I’ll cut you out of my life.” These include people who were formerly silent on the issue, or who I had really really respected as centered, well-balanced individuals. All the VPs in my company have come out in support of the protests, teammates have brought it up, and so many of the institutions I wouldn’t have expected are voicing support for this. Government officials are agreeing and saying that they will restructure the world to suit this worldview. This singular SSC open-thread is the only place I’ve gone where I’ve seen anything else, anyone talking about that maybe the statistics don’t support the BLM narrative, or anything remotely close.
I’m worried that the situation is coming to a head, and I’ll no longer be able to just avoid it until it goes away like I had done before. Furthermore, I’m worried that basically there will be no place for someone who doesn’t agree with the narrative in our future society. Will I be asked eventually at work (probably not in an official way) to voice support for blue-tribe causes, renounce other worldviews? If the time comes, will I just lie about my opinions? Will I be quick enough on the uptake to do that? Am I irrational for thinking this will happen? I feel like I must be crazy or maybe just dumb and lacking some type of mental capacity for not agreeing with everyone else, not seeing what everyone else sees. There are so many people I respect voicing opinions on the other side.
Feeling confused and scared, not sure what to do, if anything.
My country had a lot of practice with this kind of thing during communism. Some things never change, it seems.
The proper approach is to voice your enthusiasm to whatever extent is minimally acceptable so you don’t stand out, and laugh at the absurdity of the situation in private. Sending sarcastic signals of enthusiasm readable to intelligent people but not the stupid ones is sometimes acceptable, as it is overwhelmingly the stupid ones who form the thought police. If you risk a one-way trip to the gulag I’d abstain from it, if you risk just social ostracism and maybe losing your job it’s sometimes a good way of preserving your dignity.
Openly opposing an overwhelming social force will make your life harder for no reason, unless you have enough hidden support to inspire people instead of making them go “phew, good thing they went after @haroldedmurray and not me”.
Then again, in the current situation in the US it seems like a lot of the normally reasonable people have lost their minds, in which case I guess the only thing to do is to wait it out. They’ll forget about it in a month anyway.
+1 to waiting it out.
It’s so important to remember how much and how many people live in Internet Standard Time, where everything is now now now, every week is a year long, and you’re told to keep tuning in for more on that hot story, repeating it to yourself like the latest pop album.
One of the best lessons to learn from rationalism might turn out to be the value of keeping your head together. For the rest, it’s remembering how the mass media business cycle works, and how it runs into failure modes.
Another +1.
Do your best to limit your interactions with people who you anticipate will be zealous on this topic. Spend more time on your hobbies. Vent as needed to maintain your sanity, but only to a confidant (spouse, for example) who won’t sabotage you.
Also, if you look around here, you’ll notice there are many people who share your concerns. There are probably like-minded people at your workplace. But we don’t pick fights with the mob.
This stuff is (really intrusive) noise, and it’ll pass soon.
It’s worth noting that even a few reliably liberal journalists from eg Vox and Mother Jones have voiced concerns about groupthink and progressive “excess” in the past few days. Given the extreme social pressure in the media at the moment, there are almost certainly many others keeping their misgivings to themselves.
What I’m saying is that I suspect what currently looks like some kind of ideological coup might be less stable than it appears. This is an extremely volatile time and journalists/pundits/public health experts are just people, many of whom simply don’t know what to say or do. Over time, I think some people will find their voices, find the right words, and effectively counter some of the progressive dogma on social media and in these newspapers.
Seconding what a real dog said, for much the same reason (growing up in a communist country).
There are some perennial guidelines that can help you get through this. Silence is golden. Avoid talking politics. Act dumb (as in: “I’m sure that smarter people than me are going to figure it out. Aren’t there a lot of people in the media and politics saying they’re gonna fix it?”) Keep away from the politruks. Always be busy and keep your head down.
There are two ways to approach this. Some of those people are probably good, just suffering from a bout of temporary insanity (this is the year of temporary insanity, after all). If you’d like to maintain whatever relationship you have with them after this blows over, the best approach would probably be to avoid them for the time being. Be busy. Times are difficult, what with the pandemic and all.
However, it’s also worth considering whether it’s worth knowing folks who’ll brand you an enemy just because you don’t enthusiastically subscribe to the political cause du jour. Some relationships are not worth maintaining.
Maybe. Try to avoid the subject, if possible. If impossible, do the minimum amount necessary to keep your job until you’re ready to jump ship. You really don’t want to be working anywhere where specific political views are a condition of employment.
Fundamentally, police shouldn’t be killing people unless absolutely necessary and should only be using the minimum amount of force to secure compliance. That much is sane and sensible. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing now is people starting with a sensible premise and shooting straight off into collective madness. I blame the internet: the way that media production has changed when it moved mostly online (see Scott’s post on paywalls) and the known toxic effects of social media. I would further not be surprised if someone were vigorously stirring the pot (i.e. state-backed trolls working to destabilize a rival superpower). If you aren’t reaching the same conclusions on examination of the evidence, don’t rush to follow the herd. Chances are, those people have no better clue than “everybody else is doing it”.
From what I read about US, this is already not practical in some contexts. For example being openly Republican in academia. It’s definitely possible, but not a great idea. Tech might be close.
Much agree with the rest.
I think the “openly” is very much the key word here.
There’s a difference between “don’t voice this opinion, if you want to work here” and “you must voice this opinion, if you want to work here”. Both may be disagreeable (and best avoided, if possible), but the latter is much more demanding.
In general, “don’t discuss politics, religion or football” are words to live by.
Probably true in some parts of Academia, but not in general. I’m an extreme libertarian, with views some of which ought to be more objectionable to the left than those of a Republican, but have never had any serious problem.
Also, of course, Academia has tenure, and a tenured professor has to go a good deal further than just being a Republican before those who object to his views can do him much harm.
Tech is widely variable, I think. Here at Very Big Tech Company in Seattle, there aren’t any problems with my being conservative. I sometimes get political all-employees emails from management, but they never ask us to agree with them. I sometimes hear my coworkers griping about the government, and I sometimes agree with them (especially when it’s our immigration system) but sometimes object, and that’s never caused problems. The most prominent thing, I think, is the occasional anti-bias training – but even that has so far been squarely focused on actual practical work-related examples. I was rather nervous when last time they went so far as to have us all show up in person and discuss the anti-bias training in small groups, but as things turned out they were talking about how employees should be given equal opportunities for success and rewarded based on performance – and of course I had no problem with that and actually learned a couple good things from their examples.
Maybe the difference at issue is the Bay Area versus everywhere else?
I’m in the same boat, except I suspect I have less resolve than you, since this has been an occasional struggle for me for more than a decade. It has been common for me to follow tech thought leaders who have contemptible political or social views, such that following them turns out to be a net negative. I have a very diverse (both demographically and ideologically) set of facebook friends, though, and notice that there are a lot of people who are subtly or overtly resisting the narrative over the last week. So, I don’t think it’s going to completely take over.
That said, I also worry about my political views (grey tribe) making me unemployable, and have for more than a decade limited what I say “in public”, on facebook, twitter, and so on, and even what I “like”, since that’s typically public information as well. When I have an irresistible urge to post a reply to something, I look for a way to do so that only involves agreeably-neutral facts. I don’t use sarcasm outright for the most part, because unlike @a real dog, I notice a lot of intelligent, competent people doing thought policing and fomenting hate.
In the last week, I have only really replied to those on the right, because I can correct things they say (neutral fact posts) without starting a fight. It seems that (in my bubble, at least!) righties have learned to be more tolerant of disagreement, which perhaps is another consequence of the situation you and I find ourselves in.
All that said, I created a new name to post this, to avoid it being tied directly to my usual account, which is less pseudonymous.
With folks writing in about their experience under communism, it seems appropriate to link “Live Not by Lies”: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php
FWIW my post is more distilled wisdom of the elders, as I’m too late to the party to experience the joys of communism first hand.
As a counterpoint to Solzhenitsyn, I have some colleagues who love to pick fights with authority and die on pointless hills. This has inflicted a lot of harm on them and no harm on the authority in question.
If the enemy wants to oppress dissidents, giving them clear targets to oppress and make example of doesn’t help your cause. You start open resistance at the point when you have a chance to win, with less and less subtle hints in the meantime. See: art in declining totalitarian regimes, where getting thoughtcrime past the censors is pretty much the national sport.
I made a previous post with a similar feeling. I agree with how you’re reading things, (in particular the “you must voice agreement with BLM, or else you’re a bad person, I hate you, you’re bad for the world, and I’ll cut you out of my life” bit.) Though I personally don’t feel insecure for not agreeing with the herd in my local blue bubble: people are clearly acting ridiculous, but large herds tend to be stupid and emotional, and well-meaning people will get caught up in them. It will pass Since I have a long record of remaining silent in all public spheres beyond personal conversations (which barely happen anymore) I suspect I’ll slide under the radar safely enough.
people are clearly acting ridiculous, but large herds tend to be stupid and emotional, and well-meaning people will get caught up in them. It will pass
I really hope so; I know I always go on about Tumblr but honestly, I do think it’s a way of finding out what a sub-section of young(ish) college-educated (or thereabouts) progressive-leaning people think and more importanly can get whipped up into frenzies over, because there are any amount of activist/support group whatever blogs online.
And one of them had a laundry list of causes people should be supporting/getting stirred up over, “sign the petition for…” The usual list of “black people killed by police” cases that you’ve seen going around, but a few included which had me going “What the ever-loving hell???”
(1) Item: Sign the petition for justice for Shukri Abdi
I had to look this up, it’s a case from early last year, the family were quick off the mark to accuse the police of institutional racism as they felt that they had not been treated sensitively and the cops weren’t taking them seriously. But this petition is out of date – the inquest has now been held, and it seems to be another tragic mess but jumping to “institutional racism” is not the answer.
(2) Item – sign the petition for justice for Amiya Braxton
This is another sad story but kids get killed getting off school buses, it’s happened in Ireland, and once again jumping to “institutional racism” is victimhood mongering. I get that the family are upset. But this is not a police brutality or police reform case!
(3) Item – sign the petition for justice for Alejandro Vargas Martinez
Again, this is outdated. In 2019 two suspects were named, one is dead and one is in jail, and it looks like small time teenager criminals going the inevitable path – they robbed and killed the kid, and if I believe this newspaper account the family are actually grateful to the cops for continuing to work the case.
So out of this list, which I did not investigate in full, three of the links are dubious – one is in an entirely different country two of the three are since updated and irrelevant, and one is a traffic accident – the entire list seems to come from Change.org and the person finger-wagging to guilt everyone into signing these petitions seems not to have checked them out, merely copied’n’pasted before starting the lecturing:
Please note the irony that they seem to have been made aware that Change.org is not an entirely impeccable source but they’re still using that list without any seeming question:
Now, two things I am taking away from this – (1) that Change.org sounds like it is emulating the SPLC in that it circulates scare campaigns in order to shake loose funding and that chasing the dollar is its real goal (2) a lot of people are jumping on bandwagons and using this moment to demand, frankly, impossibilities.
Whatever you may feel able to do or not do about American police reform when you’re an American living in America, what the hell do you think you can do about the Greater Manchester Police Force?
How is any government, administration, or president expected to accommodate all the demands of all the various groups pushing and shoving their way into the limelight? Do you think Joe Biden, if elected into the White House, can promise any meaningful action on “we’ll force states to prosecute traffic fatalities and overseas police forces to be free of racism”?
(And frankly all the “I’m not black, I can never hope to understand your pain, but I support your struggle” messaging pasted everywhere is making my teeth rot).
Just a note, it isn’t just the majority of funds given to change.org that go straight to change.org. It is 100% of the funds. And the way the fundraising is sold on the website is misleading.
I only found this out recently when a change.org petition to help save a small regional airline here in NZ got 100k of ‘donations,’ of which zero went to the airline. There were a lot of pissed off donors.
I find an interesting tension in decrying people “condoning violence” and “calling for an end to the police”. By the very nature of the job, anyone who is *not* calling for an end to the police is explicitly condoning violence, unless you have a very different model for police that doesn’t involve them being permitted to engage in violence.
I’m not sure where I stand on either of these issues, but I’ve realized in recent years that non-violence is actually an *extremely* radical point of view that almost no one actually supports. I’m torn between whether I should support it (and thus should oppose all revolutions everywhere, and call for an end to all policing) or endorse something more moderate that supports violence in support of certain righteous causes (though almost certainly not exactly the set that is directed by the particular laws of any actual jurisdiction).
the police represent (at least in theory) a defensive use of violence. the rioters are considerably more offensive. This is an important distinction.
I had trouble parsing your sentence because “an end to the police” sounds like it would result in a whole lot of violence very fast.
I thought the consensus mainstream position is that the police is a necessary evil where a limited amount of violence is used to curtail further violence?
Sure. But that’s not non-violence. That’s condoning carefully controlled violence. You don’t get to say you don’t condone violence if you condone the police. You can say that you do what you can to reduce the total amount of violence, but you don’t get to say you don’t condone violence.
My prediction is that abolishing the police force will lead to more violence, and less socially-controlled forms of violence, in almost all cases.
It seems to me that the major problem we have with police violence now is that the police are often powerful enough to resist attempts by elected officials or judges to limit their use of violence. But actually abolishing the police wouldn’t eliminate that violence, it would just move it even further out from under any social control. Private security companies, gangs, or vigilantes will step in, and none of them are likely to be even as easy to control as the currently out-of-control police departments in some cities.
Put another way, “abolish the police” needs to be paired with some notion of what you’d replace them with that actually looks plausible. (Not if it’s just an attention-getting slogan, but if it’s to be taken seriously.)
So, here’s my not-quite-serious proposal, which I call the Friedman Plan in honor of two different economists by that name: We replace the police with private security companies, and we give everyone a voucher that covers the current per capita cost of police services for them, and we all hire our own private security. The private security companies have no qualified immunity and their insurance companies will probably insist on body cams and such to protect themselves from lawsuits.
Cross-company disputes get settled between the companies via some kind of arbitration, with the government courts available as a last resort. Tragically, it will probably be hard to use this kind of police system to enforce victimless crime laws, so I guess we’ll have to somehow do without no-knock drug raids and such.
“Get rid of the police” is a position of extreme privilege. Lots of people in poor communities, while they urgently want the cops to be less quick to use force, also desperately want more cops in their neighborhood. https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/policing-america
This is a hard problem and it is going to require lots of effort and energy applied for a long time. Maybe an effective EA goal would be encouraging more patient and sensitive people to be cops.
Here’s a saying: “It takes two for peace, one for war”.
Non-violence doesn’t actually stop violence. All it does, is allow someone who does not subscribe to this idea to engage in violence with impunity. Much like MAD has (thus far) kept us from dropping nuclear warheads on one another, the threat of retaliatory violence is a good reason not to engage in violence yourself. Picking a fight you’re gonna lose is a bad idea.
State monopoly on violence, combined with accountability of those authorised to use violence is one of the ways we try to minimise violence in our day-to-day. In most cases, the state is able to apply overwhelming force to a confrontation, which serves as a deterrent – again, you don’t want to pick fights you’re gonna lose. Accountability means that officers of the state who apply force must subsequently justify their actions and suffer the consequences of any abuse of power.
When these break down (as seems to be happening now), you either get a police state (state maintains its power advantage, without accountability) or a war of all against all (those at risk of violence undertake to defend themselves, potentially through pre-emptive violence).
Honestly, you don’t want to be in either of those situations.
If it’s any consolation, as Nick pointed out, 58% of the registered American voters support invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with the protests (including 40% of the liberals and 37% of black people), and 30% oppose, so the views of your circle are in no way universal or even majority. That 58% may include a range of views, but it has probably little overlap with “there is nothing wrong with violent riots for the right cause, and the police should be abolished”.
This is why I’m a populist. If your employer is so woke that Eastern European blog commentors are saying “We had a lot of experience with this under Communism”, and the media are so woke, and the un-elected disease experts in government are so woke that they support laws locking people in their houses except to assemble in phalanxes and shout BLM slogans, but 58% of voters in your country support treating violence by the media/other big business/bureaucracy/academia’s foot soldiers as an Insurrection to be put down, nothing makes you feel safe except MAXIMUM DEMOCRACY.
Athens drew citizens’s names from a pot and made them magistrates for a day. The only “experts” in the Athenian government were the Generals, who were allowed to stand for election pitching their case for why they were best qualified for the job, because war was too high-risk to be led by a random citizen. Am I naive to admire that? Was Athens sexist, primitive, pre-scientific? Sure, but the scientific experts just burned a gigantic pile of trust in front of us by saying authoritarian infectious disease control doesn’t apply to woke protests.
For a year, actually.
Er, right. I got mixed up because sortition was used to select citizens for multiple political roles, not just annual magistrates.
Absolutely killer quote from Aristotle on the Wikipedia page:
Where would appointed bureaucrats fit into his schema?
They’re aliens or slaves. In the classical scheme, someone who depends entirely on the state for employment, with no independent base of sustenance, is not a free citizen.
Wait, this seems really strange. How does that square with 17% of respondents agree that the actions of protesters, including burning a police precinct is fully justified, and another 37% think they are partially justified?
Either there’s some fucking incredible polarization here to a degree i thought impossible, or something is strange.
I would go with extreme polarization+ push polling.
I feel like “partially justified” is a term with a huge amount of leeway, especially when you’re asking a broad cross-section of the population. It could mean anything from “this person has a firmly grounded moral right to keep doing what he’s doing without any interference whatsoever, even if it’s not quite the approach I’d choose to take,” to “I can see that this person has some intelligible reason for what he’s doing, even though it’s obviously wrong on balance and should be stopped immediately.”
So it seems to me there could totally be a constituency saying “yeah, rioting’s ‘partially justified,’ and also here are my opinions on which agency should step in to get the rioters to stop.” Just the same as you can think your friend has some justification to throw a punch at somebody while also thinking that once that’s happened, your role is to figure out how to break up the fight as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Eh, polls never mean what you think they mean. People could interpret that as send in the troops and ‘dominate the battlespace’, or it could mean that people really don’t like or trust the police, and would rather have the military doing the policing. I think it’s more or less consistent to think the protests are good, burning down the precinct was symbolically good, looters are bad, and the military are the best people to deal with them without anyone getting shot.
You should smile and nod and wait two weeks until something else horrible happens and everyone forgets about this whole thing.
Accept that you might end up alone. And work to spread the fire and enjoy the romantic view as the world burns.
In addition to what everybody else said, bear in mind the context: a large number of these people have been locked up for a long time due to COVID. In my experience, the ones who are most vocal about with-us-or-against-us tend to be the extroverts–the people who suffer most under lockdown conditions. Extroverts, under lockdown conditions, will look for human contact wherever it is available, and in this case it translates to spending an awful amount of time on the internet hearing other people’s unmoderated opinions without the benefit of body language, context, or normal social structures.
This is not how humans are supposed to live, and it is grossly unhealthy, and extroverts are generally not accustomed to second-guessing themselves (this is not to say that they are stupid, only that they don’t live in their own heads all the time–often that’s a strength). Finally, there are the obvious real-world stresses of protracted fear of disease, economic insecurity, and now people going around burning, shooting, robbing, etc. And all that bad news gets bounced around and magnified inside the glorious lasing chamber of extreme opinions that is the intertubes.
That last is probably a scientifically dubious metaphor but I don’t care at present. In short, these people, under extended and unnatural emotional strain, are completely out of their damned minds. Do not hold this against them, if you can, but strive to be humble, moderate, and a voice of reason. Not in the sense of trying to argue with them or talk them down off their messianic hobbyhorse, but in the sense of responding reasonably to safe topics in a way that lowers the overall stress level. This too, I think, shall pass.
I find that not being on social media goes a very long way to reducing my need to voice any political opinion at all, but leaving social media might not be a net gain for everyone.
This. I dumped my social media a few years ago when I got out of college and realized I’d probably never see any of my Facebook friends again, so what was the point. Politics just doesn’t come up. Occasionally (like once a year) one of my coworkers at the water cooler will say something about “how crazy things are getting out there” and I just nod and vaguely agree. For the most part, everyone is uncomfortable talking about it. Although in fairness I am in a very not woke industry in a not woke part of the country.
Are there some elements of the protest that you can agree with? For example, George Floyd’s death shouldn’t have happened. Police ought to be more accountable. This is a terrible situation and our country is really hurting.
Saying these things preserves your integrity, marks you as “one of us,” and then you just stay quiet about “ACAB” or “looting is good, actually” or whatever you can’t stomach.
Not sure I buy that depression is a mental health illness.
I’ve suffered from depression and spent a lot of time thinking of ways to kill myself. I tried to OD on drugs once but it didn’t work.
To be clear, I am not suicidal now and have not been for a long time.
I’m an introvert with bad social skills. When I was depressed it was because I was lonely. I don’t believe my depression had anything to do with a predisposition for for depression, I was depressed because my social life sucked, like I think anyone would be.
When I read that autiistice suffer from a high rate of deoression, I think, of course , because they are bad at making emotional relationships with other people.
Mental illnesses are usually thought of as something caused by w chemical imbalance or something else innate.
I don’t believe I have an innate disposition for depression. I have an innate disposition toward extreme introversion,which makes relationships hard , which makes loneliness easy, which can be an obvious cause of feeling bad.
My point is i think it’s wrong to treat depression as a mental illness, because most of the time it is legimate unhappiness with life which is rational.
My feeling is more that depression is a loose cluster of symptoms that often co-occur for a variety of reasons, rather than an illness, and that our current approach is a bit like lumping tuberculosis, lung cancer, CoViD-19, cracked ribs and chest colds together under the heading “chest pain” and expecting a common treatment approach to be fruitful.
I don’t think that necessarily follows; you’re assuming, if I understand you right, that because the unhappiness can be connected to an intelligible external cause, it does not constitute a disease, or that it is wrong to treat it pharmaceutically. However, in the absence of clear ways to resolve the larger issue–which may be intractable from the therapist’s perspective, and certainly will be extremely hard so long as the patient remains depressed–simple Prozac can go a long way towards keeping the patient balanced and non-suicidal.
Compare “the patient suffered a gunshot wound; artifically replenishing his blood and performing CPR will not repair the hole in his torso.” No, they won’t, but doctors do not currently have the capacity to reconstruct human tissue in situ in a matter of minutes, so the choice in this case basically comes down to “treat immediate life-threatening complications, then provide support needed to maximize body’s chance of long-term self-repair” or “patient bleeds out in the ER.”
This is distinct from the matter of whether depression is always treated appropriately or whether enough attention is given to non-drug therapies. But if I hadn’t been on Prozac for years, I seriously doubt I would be in as good a shape as I am right now. I might even be dead.
Doesn’t check out with my personal experience. My life circumstances were similar when I was heavily suffering from depression, and when I wasn’t. YMMV but for me a combination of the way you frame your experiences, and what you actually choose to spend your time and mental energy on, is far more important than external causes.
Also, what does it mean for unhappiness with life to be rational?
If it is not pushing you to change your life for the better – and it isn’t, depression is pretty much a DSM label for persistent learned helplessness – then it doesn’t seem to be adaptive. A rational agent would not engage in this line of thinking at all.
Humans aren’t psychologically adapted to modernity, hence the high rates of anxiety and depression. The biggest issue is probably loneliness, which affects introverts and extroverts. In a hunter gatherer society, you were always surrounded by people. If not, it means there was a serious problem. Active socialization also means you are spending less time obsessively thinking about things. So yes, acting like depression is completely internal and utterly divorced from your circumstances is ridiculous.
It seems like you’re positing a 1-to-1 connection between loneliness and depression. This is really contestable. You can have a healthy social life and yet end up chronically down for one reason or another, it’s clearly not that simple, because life just isn’t that simple. The more generous and general interpretation of what you are saying is, I suppose, “external circumstances are sometimes responsible for a case of chronic bad feelings rather than a person being inherently gloomy”, and that seems reasonable to me.
Your characterization of depression is fundamentally at odds with my experience.
1. I am genetically predisposed to suffer from anxiety and depression. When I was an infant, my mother enrolled me in an observational study of babies born to mothers who suffer from anxiety. She suffered postpartum depression after having one of my siblings. My siblings and I don’t talk about it, but we have very similar manifestations of mental illness.
2. My issues are caused by what is manifesting in my mind, so it seems fair to characterize my malady as a “mental illness”. One of my mental habits is perfectionism. It is a gift, but a curse. I am very conscientious by nature, which has been a boon. But I cannot tell you how much mental energy I have spent in my life either beating myself up for a mistake that I made, or living in fear of the next mistake that I will make (even more humiliating if others can observe me failing). I have not handled failure with grace my whole life. We can debate whether I choose to think these thoughts of self-harm or fixating on the terror of impending imperfection or whether they arise unbidden. But one thing that cognitive behavioral therapy advocates is to treat those thoughts as if they do arise, and gradually train oneself to consciously think more kind and compassionate thoughts. Employing some of the CBT framework has helped me think less harmful thoughts. And Buddhist meditation has been a very helpful tool for getting out of my own head – partially because the Buddhist framework stresses that thoughts arise unbidden AND that you should not identify with your mind, and partially because the meditation practice mirrors the CBT practice.
3. My depression manifests itself as a state of resignation that I am not well-equipped to manage my own life, so why bother trying? Some years ago, I was listening to a podcast where Andrew Solomon described what his major depression (way, way worse than mine) felt like – paraphrasing as a state of feeling completely overwhelmed. I started weeping in the car when he described this because he identified how I had felt for more or less my whole life. I do a better job maintaining appearances than most – I have rarely missed school or work because I’m feeling down, for instance – but the effort required to keep going feels Herculean at times.
4. My feelings of being mentally unwell have no correlation to my personal relationships. For instance, I have a very special, close relationship with my wife. But my mental illness’s manifestation has nothing to do with how our relationship is doing. In fact, my wife is the one who finally pushed me to go see a psychiatrist, which helped immensely, because I was not capable of just managing on my own.
5. Getting put on a low dose of an SSRI helped me a lot. I’m not cured, by any means, but the SSRI definitely lowers the energy barrier for me to pull myself out of unskillful or unhealthy mental states. My wife has also noticed this change for the better, so it’s not just me imagining it.
Your point #3 hits really close to home. I once described it to a friend as that feeling you get when rock climbing, where you are in the middle and just realize that there’s no way you can make it to the top, it’s too difficult, you’re too tired to make the next move and you have to abandon the attempt – except about everything in your life, including being a functional adult.
It does get better, eventually.
Look I don’t want to diminish your lived experiences, but I’m going to need more than one person to believe this. My brother has struggled with depression his entire life, and yeah its obviously worse if his life is shitty, but he tried to kill himself when at least externally, things seemed to be going great for him. Later he fully admitted that his attempt on his own life was massively irrational and his life pretty great at that point.
So while I totally believe you w/r/t what you went through, I think the more likely answer is that depression is going to manifest itself very differently depending on a variety of factors from genetics to living situation, and you experienced something different than what a lot of people who suffer from depression do.
EDIT: I also want to push back on the idea that it is ever rational to kill yourself. I 100% don’t think that’s what you are trying to say, but I think that a reading of your post can lead to that end point. We here at SSC love to push some pretty “edgy” ideas, but I think that particular one is just going to cause people harm, especially if done in a public forum. I’m not saying anyone here is going to act on that, just that we should be careful when we put ideas out on the wild that could reinforce very bad/self destructive habits/ideas.
It is definitely definitely true that being in a really bad situation is a risk factor for depression. “Risk factor” sounds dismissive, like it just increases risk a few percent, but I mean it in the expansive sense where getting shot is a risk factor for blood loss.
Putting it a different way: most people in a good situation are happy, but some people are mysteriously depressed. Most people in a bad situation are sad, but some of them are able to look on the bright side and work hard to solve their problems. So there’s not just one thing, badness-of-situation. There are two partly-correlated things, badness-of-situation and badness-of-mood, and it’s fair to talk about them separately and to call the extreme bad end of badness-of-mood “depression”.
I think the thrust of your complaint is that you think it’s wrong to medicalize normal emotions. I only agree part of the way. Insofar as your emotions are helpful guides to what’s going on and what to do next, you should keep them. If your emotions become so paralyzingly terrible that you can’t function or do the work you need to get out of the bad situation you’re in, then I am happy to medicalize them if medicalizing them will help.
For me, the most interesting difference between depression from bad life events and depression from mysterious biological causes is that we can be hopeful the depression from bad life events will go away on its own. If that doesn’t happen, either because it sticks around or because realistically the bad life events aren’t going to change, then I think the differences between them aren’t super-relevant to the decision to whether or not to treat.
You can absolutely use drugs to treat normal emotions caused by things happening in the world – people do it with alcoholism all the time. The objection is moral – should you do this? For me, if my normal-emotions-caused-by-real-problems are debilitating and life-ruining, and the real problems refuse to go away, I say go for it.
I seem to suffer from depression, and have been diagnosed as such. My depression is highly variable, some weeks/months it is really hard, other times I feel fine, my life circumstances do not change nearly as often as my depressive episodes(Although this pattern did lead at least one of my doctors to diagnose me as bi-polar instead). I feel from the conversations I have had that my internal experience varies pretty significantly from at least some other internal experiences that I am aware of, such that I believe that people in general have pretty significantly different subjective responses to the same or similar stimulus. If most people seem well adjusted and happy in a similar situation to one that leaves me miserable and wanting to not exist, then this seems like reasonable evidence for something that could be called depression, and a justification for me to seek medical/professional help to alleviate my symptoms.
Unmet needs are sufficient to explain distress, but depression can pile on and trap you in it.
Hard to have an inner life to share with people if you don’t enjoy anything. Hard to be physically appealing if you can’t find the will to exercise, groom, and dress. Hard for people to be comfortable in your presence if your body language telegraphs fear and shame. Hard to put yourself in social situations if you don’t believe anyone could want you there.
For me, abating depression is not so much relief from loneliness as space to work on it.
Does anyone know of good resources for helping autistic adults improve their non-verbal communication skills? Specifically, reading other people’s facial expressions and interpreting emotions. All of the guides I’ve seen either involve cartoon faces or actors who are emoting in a fashion that is so exaggerated it’s not helpful (for example, like this).
Background:
I excelled in school, and was reasonably good at making friends. It wasn’t until I started interviewing for jobs that I realized my “subpar social skills” had a deeper cause than shyness and introversion. I was diagnosed with autism (the kind that used to be called Aspergers) at age 25, after a couple of years of struggling in the workforce. The psychiatrist who diagnosed me said I was “basically as high-functioning as you can be while still being on the spectrum”.
Ever since I was diagnosed, I’ve tried to find resources for autistic adults. I enjoy reading the autistic blogosphere, but it functions more as a support network than a resource center. The books I’ve found are geared towards parents of autistic children, not autistic adults. I’ve talked to various therapists, but all of them have responded with “sorry, I can’t find autism resources for adults”. I’ve talked to my local disability services, who told me I was too high-functioning to receive help. The few adult resources I have found are heavily skewed towards finding a job or finding a romantic partner, neither of which applies to me.
I stopped actively looking for resources a few years ago because it was using up too much time / too many spoons, and because my autism wasn’t negatively impacting my life overly much. Unfortunately, my inability to correctly interpret non-verbal cues is now causing problems with my extended family. I should probably start my search for resources again, but I’m at a loss on where else to look.
PS – I also struggle with theory of mind. I understand the concept in the abstract, but have problems applying it in everyday situations because other people seem to be operating on a different set of values and assumptions than I am. I suspect the theory of mind problem is going to be impossible to solve without a decent non-verbal communication baseline, which is why I’m focusing on that first.
While there are any number of good reasons you might not want to go down this route, I suspect that taking LSD even once would have a pretty good chance of making a permanent difference on this score. While you’re on it, you are much more attuned to other people’s non-verbal cues than normal, and a fair amount of that insight sticks around long after it’s left your system. I’m pretty sure I’m still a much better actor now for having taken it twice more than a decade ago, for essentially this reason.
Several good reasons, but most notably, I will lose my job.
That’s interesting though. I’d never heard of that particular side effect.
Now I’m starting to wonder if the LSD use in college prompted me to get better at it. Maybe made me realize improvement was possible. The time frame tracks.
You probably know this already, but a google session that starts with “Paul Ekman” would be the first step.
Maybe take a look at Mindware?
Thanks for the link. I’ve never heard of Paul Ekman before.
Edit: after looking at the book description, it doesn’t sound like it has much to do with social interaction or reading non-verbal signals. Could you elaborate on the recommendation?
No, you’re right. On second look it’s not relevant – sorry.
Edit: on Paul Ekman, I haven’t tested any of his work personally, but I know he was a pioneer in this, and also has a training program based on his research. Searching for it lead to this. Again, I haven’t tested it, but it’s probably a safer bet than a lot of other choices. And he is legit, research-wise.
Thanks! That course looks like it would be helpful. I can’t justify the price at the moment, but I will bookmark it for future reference.
Maybe it’s just me but the example you linked doesn’t look very exaggerated to me at all. The fear one is a little cartoonish but the rest seem pretty realistic.
That was the most realistic of all the examples I could find. Most of them are even more exaggerated than that.
None of my friends or coworkers emote that strongly. Maybe it’s just the people I interact with, or maybe my prosopagnosia is interfering with my ability to focus on facial expressions.
As a side note, I’m pretty sure those pictures are of actor Tim Roth. Tim Roth starred in a cable TV series called Lie To Me, about a team of psychologists who helped the police solve crimes by analyzing body language and facial expressions. The series was loosely based on the real life work of Paul Ekman, who others have mentioned in this thread. I can’t help wondering if that image was really meant as a guide to emotions or if it was some sort of stealth advertising for the show. Of course it could be both.
ETA: On second though, if you want someone to realistically portray a variety of emotions on command for reference photos, a successful actor is exactly who you’d want for the job.
What Every Body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People by Joe Navarro.
Thank you for the recommendation!
I don’t think that I’m autistic, but I certainly had poor social skills for a good chunk of my childhood, including not reading facial expressions or body language.
What solved it is that I picked up a hyperfixation where reading facial expressions/body language was the main thing: I got into following Asian idols.
Most normal people are similarly instructed through media, taking their cues from film and television, and then celebrity culture. Many Gen Z and younger arguably consume far more celebrity culture (your Youtube and Instagram influencers, your Twitch streamers, Tiktok/Vine stars, etc.) than narrative media these days.
Fandom provides a safe-ish space to speculate and interpret facial expressions and body language publicly. Fans happily post gifs and spin out tales of how those 5 looping seconds extrapolate into FEELINGS that the character obviously feels, and we have several awards ceremonies to reward those who do The Most Acting. Additionally, you can also interpret fan reactions for additional study/calibration of social dynamics, because they not only clue in how you should feel, but also if the thing you watched successfully made one feel how the thing wants them to feel. The Room, for example, works well to instruct how to fail at expression.
Now I do think that following celebrity culture is somewhat more practical, because writers can write unrealistic scripts, but celebrity culture might be advanced for some autistic people, and scripted narratives could be a good first step since you’ve got music and cinematography as additional clues as to how to interpret what you’re seeing.
I actively avoid celebrity culture because it bores and annoys me. I also avoided live action shows until I was in college. Now that you mention it, both of those probably stunted my ability to read non-verbal cues.
I’m in so many fandoms for animated shows that sometimes I forget live-action shows also have fandoms. This is a good suggestion, if only I can find a show that I want to watch, one where the fandom isn’t dead. (RIP Tumblr, with your gif posts that contain 30+ tags filled with fangirling.)
You can’t go wrong with Shakespeare adaptations. You get to see various different takes on the exact same text, often with promotional interviews and reviews and such even explaining the specific expressions they’re trying to convey compared to past productions.
Classic teen movies are also a good bet, as they have hyperbolic expression to match the heightened feelings of adolescence, as well as plenty of ink spilled by fans and film critics as to why this or that movie is particularly good. Teen movies also won’t get caught up in aesthetic distractions so much, or rather, aesthetics are all about conveying character emotions.
Mind you, I am including things like the McElroys or Rooster Teeth in celebrity culture. Let’s Players could be your gateway into personality-driven stuff, since gaming is still front and center.
Not a guide, but once you have one, you can take a look at some datasets used to teach machines to interpret human emotions from images or audio samples. Usually such data contains an image(e.g from a movie) and an associated emotion (called label or y). You could use these to train and test yourself once you have a found a useful guide. This is an example of a dataset that you can obtain if you email the researchers :https://computervisiononline.com/dataset/1105138659.
The images are taken from movies, so the emotions are probably a bit exaggerated/unnatural, but likely way closer than examples generated to specifically demonstrate an emotion.
@Lord Nelson
I replied on another thread.
The books didn’t really help me much. They just let me know for sure I was deficient. videos like this are what was ultimately helpful (combined with my own people watching to fine tune).
And yes, the theory of mind was also incredibly useful, and I finally got it by reading Marvin Minskey’s Society of the Mind. It teaches it like a programming class.
I still have trouble with facial expressions, though. So if you figure out that one, let me know.
I’m a serial poster when I’ve been drinking.
Related to my post below about music, I really don’t think young people care as much about music as they did, 30, 40, 50 years ago. I believe this is a major change in culture that gets little notice.
Sure, some of you care as much about music as anyone did 30 years ago. But I’m talking about culture. In the 80s we didn’t have video games high schoolers played (exceptions proving blah…)
I’ve noticed this as well, but I don’t know if it is actually true, or if I just don’t see it because I’m not looking in the right places. That said, I don’t listen to pop music at all, but I’ve always been able to name the top pop stars. However, now I don’t think I can name a single one off the top of my head that hasn’t already been around 10+ years.
Now, I don’t know if this is because “kids” aren’t listening to as much music, because I’m just an old guy completely out of the loop, or if, like all entertainment nowadays, it’s far more fractured than it was in the pre-internet days, and I don’t know who is popular because there aren’t any mega stars anymore.
As a potential counterpoint, I am told that the Eurovision international music contest is nearly as important as the World Cup in Europe. Possibly more so, at least among certain segments of the population.
(At least, I think it’s called Eurovision. Anyway, I certainly hear it’s a huge deal.)
It’s mostly considered a curiosity – certainly most people don’t care about it to the extent they care about the World Cup. Still, I always hear about who won Eurovision by cultural osmosis, so it is pretty popular.
Also, Eurovision is not really the kind of music people are very enthusiatic about, for whatever subgroup of “people” you pick – it’s supposed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, with some weird genre stuff put here and there to stand out. Basically what you’d hear on the radio with a bit more edge.
Ah. I’ve never been across the Atlantic in my life, so I wouldn’t know. I just read Scandinavia and the World from time to time, etc.
Eurovision has little to nothing to do with what actually sells/makes the charts (if that’s how they still measure success). Acts will certainly copy popular genres, but ballads are perennially popular, and some countries will send singers/groups who are pop music stars at home – the UK always does this but has had less success than it used to, with its last such Eurovision winner/successful pop group act being Bucks Fizz in 1981. ABBA are of course the exception to the rule, their Eurovision win catapulted them into stardom but very few if any have been able to repeat this.
Recent years the contest has deliberately gone down the quirky route, with everyone tacitly agreeing that it’s not so much a popular music contest as a variety show. We watch it for the spectacle, the ridiculousness, the interval act (which gives the host nation the opportunity to really show off) and the best part – the voting!
I’m really sorry it was cancelled this year because that deprived us of the chance of watching such performances as Armenia and Russia. I really liked the Ukrainian entry as well.
The Israeli entry is different this year 🙂
Anecdotally I agree as well and wish I had some hard numbers. My sense is that “back in the day” there were lots of people who would buy something to play music (record player/tape deck) and something large to listen to it (bookshelf / floor speakers), and then actually just sit and listen to music without doing anything else. Today, to a person, I know no one under 40 who has their own home audio setup.
I sometimes blame the rise of iPods/smartphones, and their crappy headphone speakers for the decline in music quality (as instead of mastering for a living room or car, people are mastering for earbuds), but I don’t know if this is empirically supported. The same would be true about assuming the rise of video games and smartphones has simply taken up the “free time” that one would have otherwise used just to listen to music. So it feels like a technological/free time shift more than a conscious effort to deprioritize music.
I strongly disagree with this.
One only has to look at the screaming fans at lives for any top to mid-tier star to see how this is not true. The concert documentary is being produced more often than ever. There are more radio shows and podcasts centered on discussing music than ever. One can easily look at the growth of people writing professionally and semi-professionally about music online. All Songs Considered launched in 2000, and Tiny Desk Concerts launched in 2008.
The fact that artists get far more money from touring and merch sales than promoting new releases indicates that there’s a strong population paying the tickets and attending the lives, and I’ll bet that the numbers show an increase from before.
What’s changed is that it’s breadth over depth. No one listens to the same album over and over again, because they’re listening to far more albums in sequence.
An additional point: audiophiles are less prominent because the shifts in accessibility have changed the priority of music lovers from listening to creating. Why spend money on an expensive speaker system when you could be uploading a low-resolution acoustic cover to Youtube instead?
Tyler Cowen has commented on this, suggesting the the centrality of music to youth culture was tied in with status games, and to some extent has been replaced by games that center on food: see here, here.
The novel/movie “High Fidelity” is an example of a cultural artefact that makes sense in the 1990s, where young men obsessing on music knowledge and expertise was a common trope, but much less sense today.
I didn’t really agree with the parent post, but your example really spoke to me. However it seems to rather counter Tyler Cowen’s point to my mind, I can’t really imagine a food base modern day High Fidelity.
Did any music completely change your orientation on music? For me it was Frank Zappa when I was 15. Before that i was, in the 80s, into rock music only, and then I started buying Zappa albums and I realized I liked more than just rock. I wanted to hear more weird shit that wasn’t rock. I got into jazz. I got into Indian music. I became a very pretentious 16-year-old proud to say I thought rock was kinda stupid (even though I actually loved it).
In retrospect I don’t find much Zappa listenable anymore (maybe 3 albums) , but Zappa was the one who opened my mind and made me unpopular at school.
Anyone have a similar experience with any artist?
I had a similar experience with Zappa except I was in my very early teens in the late 90’s and came across it via my Dad, who loved Joe’s Garage and You Are What You Is. To date those are the only two Zappa albums I really listen to.
For me the real breakthrough was going from being a teenage metalhead to getting into ambient music. The band responsible for this was Isis, who made densely-layered atmospheric doom-rock with long ambient interludes. When I described my love of these interludes to a family friend, they suggested I watch Deadman for the Neil Young soundtrack. That film changed everything.
Not really the same thing, but I always thought jazz is something I should like in principle, but I just don’t because I’m not sophisticated enough. So when I bought a new sound system, among the first things I did was to get a 10 album jazz pack. And guess what – now I like jazz. The think that shocked me the most is how relatable and listanable it is – either I had been scared for nothing, or I had matured enough.
I’d say Pavement and/or Bob Dylan, for mimetic reasons — when I was in 7th grade or so my college-aged brother started listening to Pavement, and I found it unlistenable but persisted until I liked them. (I still love them.) He also had a Bob Dylan album I stumbled upon, and while my brother was no Dylan-head he mentioned in passing how intensely critically beloved Dylan was. Again, I found him unlistenable but persisted until I loved him because I wanted to have the same taste as the Smart Serious People. I became a borderline Dylanologist. I very soon turned into a know-it-all hipster obsessive about music — indie/rock/rap. My friends from high school still talk about how insufferable I was re:music when I see them.
These days I mostly listen to top 40 radio because I’m too lazy to connect the Bluetooth when I get in the car.
Hearing Blind Guardian in my teens made me a metalhead for a decade, and made me realize that music can be actually interesting instead of pleasant but forgettable.
I still enjoy their music sometimes, despite largely dropping rock and metal for various kind of electronica.
My dad playing “I Am The Walrus” for me when I was 12 was a revelation. Previously I hadn’t really been into music at all; since then music has been one of the most important things in my life. Discovering Radiohead at 16 similarly made me realize that good music exists after 1979.
Anime songs changed my mind on pop music. (Ironically, though, I now find most anime insert music trite, since it is its own ecosystem of artists with a standard style.)
I was also meh on classical music until I started playing in the school band.
From The Obscuritory, h/t Hacker News: When SimCity got serious, a piece on the business simulations division of Maxis. They made simulations that let you play with very, very simple models of complex businesses like oil refineries. The agent-based simulations are prescient—maybe a little too prescient, since Lord knows we still can’t scale those up today—and making the SimHealth model’s assumptions fully editable is just awesome. It’s funny that one of Clinton’s staffers had such an obsession with decoding SimHealth’s supposed agenda; this is actually a very real problem with simulation games, but it’s a little rich to fulminate against one that lets you read and change all the assumptions. Anyway, uh, the pixel art is cool, too.
(Incidentally: is that an SSC commenter on the Human Transit blog? Avatar checks out.)
I have actually argued with people who thought SimCity was evidence, so I’m sympathetic.
Not sure if that’s about urban planning or a very oblique attack on the Imperial paper.
Either way, Cities Skylines is better. But the zoning system is still the kind of thing that makes @wrathofgnon angry.
I am one of the commenters on one of those posts, and I think the avatar on both services is the same phone selfie I took 11 years ago, but I would not be terribly surprised if there were another SSC commenter on Human Transit.
I’m there occasionally! Though, I think I use another avatar there.
I would totally play SimRefinery
Tucker Carlson strikes me as the natural successor to Trump in the GOP. Policy-wise, he aligns almost perfectly. He can likely destroy any GOP rival in debate.
But the political weakness I see in Tucker is that he can’t sell that positive vision, however (and usually) phony it is. He seems born to go negative.
If not Tucker, who is a good candidate to inherit the Trumpist GOP?
Tucker Carlson can’t win the presidency. Dan Crenshaw can.
Wouldn’t he be mired in scandals like “Les Enfants Terribles”, being a former close ally of the man who created the AIs that constitute America’s Deep State, coups in Asia, etc?
Your model of Crenshaw is way off. He maps far closer ideologically to your standard, boring, Jeb Bush neocon than he does to Tucker Carlson. He’s been completely pro lockdown, in favor of “red flag laws” for gun control, etc.
He does fine in his district because it’s full of suburbanites who can’t bring themselves to become Democrats, but who believe all the politically correct positions on all the social issues.
Agreed. I would not vote for Crenshaw in a primary, and I don’t think most other Trump voters would either.
I am in Crenshaw’s district. You all know how generally conservative I am. I am seriously considering voting for whoever his Democratic opponent is just because I’m that disgusted with his particular brand of RINO politics.
Considering it for Greg Abbot too. Pretty much anyone who supported lockdowns needs to be punished at the ballot box.
@Matt M
I doubt the Democrats in your district didn’t support a lockdown. But keep fighting the good fight.
The problem is that reelecting Republicans who supported the lockdowns would confirm that the conservative voter base generally accepts or tolerates “pro-lockdown” positions. This causes a shift in the political discourse in which the anti-lockdown position is no longer relevant. If lockdowns are important enough of an issue to someone, it may be preferable to have a balance of “elected pro-lockdown Democrat vs. a Republican consensus that includes anti-lockdown discourse” compared to “elected pro-lockdown Republican vs. a Democratic consensus that includes pro-lockdown discourse.” The latter eliminates most anti-lockdown discourse, because it has been accepted by the voters and is no longer a point of inter-party contention.
For an example of this, look at how the Republican party has shifted under Trump; in many areas, anti-Trump candidates are no longer viable, even if their personal policies haven’t shifted at all. Trump has become the new normal for the Republican party.
I think Tucker has a real shot, too. (Not coincidentally, Ross Douthat has been saying things like this for a while now.) My one big issue with him kind of overlaps with yours: I think he focuses too much on the purported malice of the elites to the detriment of his vision. Of course, this is a standard feature of populism, and he’s often laying the blame at the right feet, but I’m a pretty hard mistake theorist, so I wish he’d recognize more often that they’re screwing up because they’re blinded by their own biases or the like. The way he talks about “our ruling class” frankly makes me uncomfortable sometimes.
DeSantis/Carlson 2024. It’s all of the great things about Trumpism without the negatives about Trump.
I know it’s better to have an actual politician on the presidential side of the ticket for a multitude of reasons, but man I want to see Tucker wreck people in the debates. Can they switch places for that or something?
I was going to say that DeSantis has the same history as Trump of being a big business executive who makes money defrauding people, but then realized I was confusing him with his predecessor as governor of Florida.
Tucker’s positive vision is an economy where Americans who don’t have college degrees can afford to raise large families. I think Carlson is the most likely 2024 Republican nominee, if he wants it.
I mean, can Tucker sell a positive message convincingly with his body language. It doesn’t matter what the message is, it matters how good a salesman he is. Trump’s entire talent is sales. Trump could have been a Democratic populist if the wind had been blowing a different direction.
Some republican governor with a little more tact and a knack for twitter seems far likelier than a talking head. there are 26 republican governors, at least one of them will have a covid/economic record that’s above average. DeSantis, maybe? Or someone midwestern.
OTTOMH:
John Kasich, formerly of Ohio – probably not viable. I’ve heard Democrats who say he’s appealing, but the way they spoke, it was more like his devil horns were marginally the least like to gore them. On the right, I get the sense he’s got zero appeal for the Trump camp. Then again, he did hail from Ohio, and never lost an election there AFAIK.
Susanna Martinez, formerly New Mexico – probably not viable, given her approval ratings toward the end of her tenure.
Nikki Haley, formerly North Carolina – probably took a hit during the transgender bathrooms issue, but that’s probably old news now. Took a hit as UN Ambassador during Curtaingate, but AFAIK it was minimal. Seems to have walked the line between support for Trump and not seeming wild-eyed about it. Well liked by Republicans who aren’t Tillerson or Kelly. Scheduled to talk at CPAC this year. Might be viable in 2024.
Greg Abbott, currently Texas – best looking politician in a wheelchair that I’ve seen since FDR. Which is not to say it’ll necessarily help him; just that it probably won’t hurt. Probably appealing most to the Huckabee camp, and to gun rights advocates.
Larry Hogan – currently Maryland – an unexpected GOP win in a normally blue state, due to (IIRC) dissatisfaction with Democratic budgeting during the Glendenning administration. Cancer survivor, which raises health concerns. Aggressive posture toward quarantine won him some blue support, possibly at the cost of red, but it’s hard for me to say.
That’s all I can think of.
Yeah, Kasich will just not work on the national stage. We do have lots of Republican governors, though, and Republican governors tend to be very popular. It frustrates me to no end that, with a long list of competent and popular executives, the only “electable” presidential candidates we have are senators and TV stars. And I say that as someone who practically endorsed Tucker above.
If I could pass a single constitutional amendment, restricting the presidency to current and former governors, cabinet level officials, and flag officers would be very high on the list. Maybe even number 2.
Let’s see which former Presidents would be ineligible by this standard. (Wikipedia says a flag officer in the U.S. is a brigadier general (or equivalent) and up, so I’ll use that definition) I’m not counting people who only held the office of Vice President before the President died.
Abraham Lincoln
Benjamin Harrison is listed as a brevet brigadier general, which doesn’t give the authority of that rank
Warren G. Harding
John F. Kennedy
Barack Obama
Obviously, Trump would also be ineligible by this standard.
Lincoln I’ll give you, but I’d argue that rest of that list is nicely illustrative in its lack of distinction.
Nikki Haley is South Carolina, not NC.
Either way, though, she’s got a good resume.
Whoops, thanks. That’s what I get for talking OTTOMH.
South Carolina does remind me of Tim Scott. Not a governor, but I get the sense he’s on track to be one if he wants it. Probably appealing to the business and religious wings of the GOP, which seems unusual, now that I think about it.
A knack for Twitter may be the future, but the ability to speak on camera live is so very hard I suspect that’s still the most important talent for at least another decade.
I’d say “ability to play the president on TV” is more the quality you’re looking for, but yes. I don’t think that’s going away, but it’s something I expect to be more common among governors than tweeting. Of course, tweeting can be outsourced in a way the acting can’t.
So many governors turn out to be horrible on camera once they are on a national stage. Consider Rick Perry, or someone O’Malley. Governors, even in big states, aren’t tested much by live TV. Most don’t have the skills to come off as sharp on national TV. Yeah, the run of Carter, Reagan, Clinton, W, makes it seem like governors are good contenders. But Reagan was an actor, had the skills im talking about, W had politics in his DNA. Carter was a n unusual politician.and…
My own examples refute my point, but I still think it mainly comes down to your charisma on TV.
@Uribe
Do I really have to defend Bill Clinton’s charisma? It’s his strongest stat line by far! And that +2 Charisma sax solo…
Also O’Malley may have hamstrung himself by being the inspiration for a not entirely virtuous character on the Wire…
I think activists’ claims that the US (or any liberal western state) is a “white supremacist” country show the same phenomenon. In an actual white supremacy, if you called somebody a white supremacist or said that some policy disproportionately benefitted whites or harmed blacks, responses would range from “Yea, so?” to “Darn right!” It’s precisely *because* mainstream society hates white supremacism so much that it’s even worth using “That’s white supremacist!” as an argument in the first place.
In practice the idea of ‘Systemic racism’ means you can have white supremacy in circumstances where visible opposition to racism appeared overwhelming. So this argument isn’t convincing to those who don’t already believe it.
> no access to steaming
Steaming is surprisingly easy (if time-consuming) to do at home. A chunk of PVC and a few fittings over a pot on the stove or tea kettle will let you steam a straight piece of lumber. Let it sit (not in the water itself) for a few hours. Then take it out of the pipe, bend to shape and clamp in place. Let it dry for a few days before unclamping.
Can we talk about the New York Times for a second?
A few days ago Sen. Tom Cotton published an op-ed calling on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, using means military or otherwise to quell the riots. This recommendation—last accepted in 1992 for the LA riots—was met with wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Times newsroom. Reporters publicly stated the op-ed put them in danger. Others claimed they were losing sources because the Times published it. So they ginned up a mob on Twitter to rage at the Opinion section.
Op-ed editor James Bennet caved, admitting that reading it has caused terrible pain to many. Elsewhere he added that some readers have just such a hard time telling news apart from opinion. (Bennet and I agree there, but not for the reasons he thinks.) He also promised* that from now on all op-eds would be “interrogated,” and suggested scaling back op-eds in general. The current line is that the piece has “errors” which its editor did not catch; you can judge for yourself whether this is scapegoating or just evidence of incompetence.
You might think the op-ed is advocating something shameful or disgusting. (I know I don’t agree with it.) Bennet too suggests that the Times may be seen as legitimating Cotton’s view. I don’t think he needs to worry about that, though. First, the supermajority of voters who agree with Cotton have placed his views squarely in the Overton Window already. Second, this is an oddly recent worry for the Times, which published an op-ed from the Taliban… earlier this year.
Meanwhile, I am confused how black reporters are being put in danger.
As Rich Lowry pointed out over at National Review,** Trump doesn’t read the Times, and we know he hates it, anyway. So what could publishing the piece conceivably do to put anybody in danger?*The tweet I read was deleted while I was writing this, hence the picture. I’m not sure why; did Tabuchi mishear? It’s possible Bennet promised nothing of the sort.
**Not Lowry’s, actually. I adapted this argument but cannot find the original source. Mea culpa.
Why would Tom Cotton want to publish the piece, if he thought it would have no effect on the likelihood of any of his proposals coming into fruition?
I think the argument of “Trump doesn’t read the Times, therefore nothing published in the Times could effect Trump’s behavior” is missing a lot of pieces. No second order effects at all?
I just checked my source and it wasn’t actually in Lowry’s piece. Whoops, and mea culpa. I’ll find the correct source, since that argument was adapted from someone else.
Anyway, you raise a good point, but it seems to me it’s in Cotton’s interest to be the public advocate of this even if those efforts don’t convince Trump, because Cotton will get the credit for it. There are also indirect ways an op-ed could affect Trump’s behavior—like if he heard about it and it annoyed him—but I don’t think they apply here.
Cotton seems to be one of those rare few who aren’t actually afraid of being the most right-wing guy in the room. I suspect this is less about him trying to influence DJT and more about him trying to bolster his conservative credentials in order to bolster his future political ambitions.
He’s so hated by progressives that he’s probably #2 on the national “vote for me if you want to annoy the left” list, trailing only Trump himself. Stuff like this helps him tremendously.
The chain I see here is: Cotton publishes Op-ed > Position becomes more popular (particularly among people who are inclined to be influenced by Cotton) > Trump becomes more likely to do the thing in the Op-ed, because he wants to be popular/get reelected
That explanation founders for me because I don’t see Cotton’s op-ed influencing anybody. Remember he already suggested it on Fox and Friends beforehand. There’s a way in which the Times lends concreteness to the argument, since it’s now been laid out in print instead of being suggested extemporaneously on air, but folks’ opinions are pretty set on this.
(I welcome counterexamples, of course.)
the same two reasons that motivate most political behavior: he thinks it will help him win an re-election or he can, wants to, and doesn’t think it will hurt his chances for re-election
In a liberal worldview, exposing the Times readers to a thoughtful conservative perspective is a valuable exercise in itself. But the younger generation of Times employees is no longer liberal.
Yeah, my impression is that it’s not the older Times writers editors who have an issue here—people like Bennet or, in that fracas last year, Baquet. It’s some of the younger ones.
The consensus leftist position is that Tom Cotton is worse than the Taliban. By posting his op ed, they are giving a mouthpiece to someone in the US who doesn’t accept the orthodoxy and activists can’t let the prestigious NYT get away with it without saying something. All those other arguments are irrelevant. In their eyes, it’s the equivalent of letting a Satanist preach on Easter.
That seems… unnecessarily reductive?
Right, and the activists sort of have a point when they say “the NYT publishing this legitimizes it,” because it does in fact imply that it’s not a position so far beyond the pale that the NYT wouldn’t want to be associated with it at all.
Like, they aren’t going to publish an Op-Ed by a literal Neonazi saying “Now it’s time to start rounding up the Jews.”
The committed progressive sees Cotton as basically that, and the NYT implying he isn’t is considered completely unacceptable.
But they published an op-ed from a senior member of the literal Taliban just this year, and nobody seemed concerned about this legitimising the Taliban’s views.
Outgroup vs. fargroup. Literally no one is persuaded, “you know, the Taliban might have a point.” And even if they are, so what? The Taliban has no power in the US. But somebody might be persuaded by Tom Cotton. And Cotton’s ideas have power in the US.
Less of this, please.
The referenced Taliban op-ed was back during the peace talks, and despite being somewhat flowery, (and being written by a monster) it basically just sets out what they want from peace talks. The idea they were pushing for, IE peace and reintroduction of Afghanistan into the international community was not particularly controversial. And even then, you saw critiques of the NYT from all over the spectrum of not giving any context to what was written.
If this is the case, why did no one give a shit las year when he wrote an op ed about how we should totally buy Greenland or when he defended killing Suliemani in january, or when he complained about 5g in the Wapo.
After less than 5 minutes of google-ing I was able to find multiple examples of Tom Cotton writing opinion pieces for the NYT and leftists collectively not freaking out. I get that your satanist on Easter line was pretty good, but come on. Don’t be a dick.
Things move fast. A month ago Biden said we needed more cops and more spending to facilitate community policing (which is well supported by evidence). In, like, 5 days, we have now moved to a consensus position where cutting police budgets by only 3% is reactionary and we should now consider abolishing the police and replacing it with the Committee of Public Safety.
Welcome to 1792 France.
And FWIW, I remember plenty of social media outrage regarding Cotton’s op-ed on Suliemani.
It’s not just that he’s a satanist. It’s that he’s preaching on the holiest day of the year. You can post about buying Greenland. But you absolutely cannot question any part of the narrative on racial issues.
In addition, I agree with A Definite Beta Guy that things have moved fast. We already have Struggle Sessions. They’re trying to get a Committee of Public Safety. Who knows what will happen next?
I can tolerate anything but the outgroup. But the fargroup, who cares?
Yeah, this. The Times publishes op-ed apologias by murderous authoritarians for their murderous authoritarianism all this time. Recent examples that come to mind: Erdogan claiming the Turkish slaughter of Syrian Kurds was “counterterrorism,” Naftali Bennett making his thoroughly euphemized case for outright apartheid in the West Bank. It’s not an easy call how to balance the public interest in knowing what arguments these people make with the desire not to legitimize those arguments, but hardly anyone ever makes that call in a principled way.
I actually had a sentence referring to that post, because the al Qaeda thing seemed too apt, but I ended up cutting it.
Scott covered this many years ago in his basically most famous post. Tom Cotton (and anyone who agrees with him) is the outgroup. The Taliban is random desert people.
I was alluding to that post.
This is report worthy, no?
The fact that the Times literally ran an Op-Ed from the leader of the Taliban advocating for the goals of the Taliban on February 20, is, I think, Necessary context for this discussion (I would not have known that without this comment) It was not phrased in a Kind way. YMMV whether it was too reductive to be True, but it is not exactly false.
I think it’s definitely true, right? If leftists complain enough to get a response for Cotton, but did not complain enough (or at all?) to get a response when the NYT ran an opinion by literally the Taliban, then empirically they consider Cotton worse than the Taliban.
Now, I think this is an outgroup/fargroup distinction, but it certainly seems to qualify as “true.” Necessary, sure, since that’s what we’re talking about. It’s neither kind nor unkind, though.
@Conrad Honcho
No, it does not make this “empirically true”. You are acting as if the content of the article is an irrelevant aspect to the backlash.
As someone else pointed out, this isn’t even the first time Cotton ran an article in the NYT.
@Conrad Honcho: The statement “The NYT thinks Tom Cotton is worse than the Taliban” is almost certainly false. I’d be incredibly surprised if there was a single person working for the newspaper who genuinely held that belief in earnest.
No one had a problem with Cotton himself, as evidenced by the multitude of articles he wrote for the Times that didn’t produce any controversy; it’s the content of his latest op-ed that people had a problem with. And the Taliban article was written during the peace talks, as a way for the Taliban to express the goals they were seeking in negotiations; it’s not like they randomly decided to give the Taliban a platform to unconditionally espouse Islamist rhetoric.
Okay, their revealed preference is more revulsion at the opinions of Tom Cotton than the opinions of the Taliban?
@Conrad Honcho
I think its more to do with these two specific opinions. Had the Taliban tried to post an opinion piece openly calling to execute homosexuals, I think the NYT wouldn’t have run it. Similarly, as has been expressed, Tom Cotton’s previous opinions got basically no public outcry.
@Conrad Honcho
Again, you are rhetorically framing the content of the op-ed as immaterial to the controversy. Numerous people, including myself, have already explained that the reason we are opposed to it is because of what it is advocating. Not because it’s Tom Cotton, or “Tom Cotton’s opinion”, but because its this specific opinion.
At what point does your inability to understand our position begin to look intentional?
I think we agree? Tom Cotton’s opinion is more objectionable than the Taliban’s opinion.
It’s a little interesting but mostly irrelevant and I don’t think worth arguing about.
I disagree. Scott himself wrote about this in the context of the Taliban/Osama Bin Laden vs. Margaret Thatcher.
You’re going overboard on the rhetoric here, man. Please tone it down.
It’s certainly a leftist position. Citation very much needed for the “consensus” part.
I suppose you could argue that context matters: the Cotton op-ed came at a supremely painful and inopportune time, since the unrest stems from an extremely egregious instance of police brutality and the US has a long history of invoking state violence against black activists. (Granted, it’s true that many of the most obnoxious, er, participants aren’t actually black.)
The Babylon Bee predicted this last year.
I don’t know about you, but if there was an angry mob outside my office I’d print whatever they’re damn well chanting.
Maybe I can help with that confusion with a couple of questions:
a) Do you believe that someone publically advocating for the use of US military forces to quell protests by American citizens has measurably endangered themselves by doing so?
b) Do you believe that journalists might feel that the public will mistakenly attribute opinions (theoretically) endorsed by their employer to them?
If you believe (a) and (b), then it logically follows that these reporters are endangered by the act of publishing the editorial. If you believe (b) but not (a), then at least their careers and social standing are endangered by the editorial’s publication.
IMHO, I don’t think that the journalists are scared of leftist violence against them in reaction to Cotton’s op-ed.
My guess is that they think that by increasing the probability of military support to quell the looting, they are at greater danger from the military.
to quell protests
I hate Cotton’s idea, but he explicitly distinguished them.
“My outgroup wants to bash protestors heads in” is a weakman, just like “my outgroup wants to disband the cops and approves of riots.”
After Trump’s tear gas-enabled photo op, I don’t have a lot of faith in the government’s ability to distinguish between peaceful protestor and rioters.
When a sufficiently large number of protesters start rioting, all the “peaceful protesters” are actually accomplishing is to give cover to the rioters, whether or not they personally are engaged in any riotous behaviour.
I’m in the difficult position of being on Trump’s side because of his enemies’s stated positions, but yes, tear-gassing a non-violent protest to physically reach a specific church was a mistake that changes the calculations.
Mr X:
By all accounts I’ve seen, the operation to clear people out from the church for Trump’s photo op were not in any way rioting, so I don’t think this really offers much defense.
That’s because you believe that blocking a street is an act of peaceful protest. If someone were to block your street, just for a couple days, to prevent you from going anywhere, I wouldn’t explicitly endorse their action…
Yes, my outgroup deserves no charity either.
From time to time, I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, I might sort of occasionally speak up in defense of Trump, just as an intellectual exercise. But about this one I’ll say shooting smoke bombs and rubber bullets at people for a photo op was f*cking dumb.
@ERC
Acting like blocking Lafayette plaza or H street in front of the white house are equivalent to blocking a random commercial or residential street seems disingenuous to me.
broblawsky:
I think the standard you seem to be advocating would basically make it impossible for the NYT to cover any news or take any editorial position. To use the most obvious example, which is more likely to lead to retaliation against New York Times reporters/employees:
a. Publishing this op-ed.
b. Publishing an editorial calling for greater oversight of the NYPD?
Alternatively, how do you feel about the NYT reporting on the terrible things done by Mexican drug gangs, the Chinese government, the Saudi government, or the Russian government? These are, note, all organizations with a history of violently retaliating against people who sufficiently annoy them.
To a journalist, it might feel that some ideologies are worth taking a risk to promote\defeat, and that others aren’t.
A lot of what the NYT’s “product” is people on the left considering them to be a reliable ally they can reference with relative surity that they are on the same side. What keeps them afloat is at least in part an army of people, almost all on the left, who support the notion that NYT is exceptional and especially credible.
If they lose the support of those people, they lose a lot. And I can’t think of many things that would lose the support of those people faster than something they would think of as “The NYT fires a bunch of noble heroes in defense of a Nazi”.
I’m not 100% sure any risk to a large, expensive to run old-media property is a short-term risk. At the same time, I’m not sure that the path they’ve taken is necessarily a huge long-term harm; how many people in their actual paying audience are both paying attention to this and not actively cheering it?
Editorial speaks for the institution. If what it says is unconscionable to a significant portion of the institution, that is a problem. There’s not some kind of holy independence here to be protected at all costs.
My read is that the NYT is not really caving to it’s employees, it is caving to twitter, which is something almost all corporations do from time to time. I imagine if the employees tried to similarly flex in the future, without twitter support, the NYT would simply fire them, and any confusion as to the score would be cleared up for the other employees at that point.
Although I actually imagine the employees are largely aware of this as well.
The young reporters built a Twitter-base to be able to overthrow their employer.
https://archive.is/KEf1N is a very long article about the NYT. It’s written in the NYT, but it’s by Ben Smith, who doesn’t really care if either the young- or old-sters at the NYT doesn’t like what he writes.
I’m not strong enough to live without society. Society is built on institutions. And one of our primary truth-seeking institutions has now given up on truth-seeking. This is bad.
What makes you think the outrage was created by Times reporters? Like, do you think that people on Twitter normally wouldn’t get angry about a Senator saying we should deploy the military against American citizens? That if it hadn’t been for the Times ginning up outrage, all the people tweeting support for the protests would have seen this op-ed and gone “Yeah, the military sounds great!”?
(Also, a few days before the op-ed, Cotton had tweeted that the military should be deployed, “no quarter.” Which, as many people pointed out, is a war crime. People were already upset at him before the op-ed.)
We already know that police have attacked several journalists. (https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/30/media/protests-journalists-arrested-assaulted/index.html)
The claim is that by sending in the military to do police work, the danger of these attacks would go up, and so Times journalists would be likely to be among those killed.
The military actually has rules of engagement. If a soldier shot me, there would be a tribunal of some sort. If a group of soldiers was told “don’t shoot, even if you get shot at, until a superior officer authorizes it” I’d have high confidence that would be obeyed. No soldier is gonna rush off to bust some heads because he got called names.
The military explicitly does not exist as a self-licking ice-cream cone and works hard on a culture that says they serve their civilian leadership’s goals. They work hard to justify their existence, but they have no union and can’t fight back against budget cuts by slow-rolling response times in those bad Senator’s states.
Cops acting like soldiers would be an improvement.
Yes, I strongly suspect this is right. But I was just explaining what I took to be the reasoning behind the claim that “this op-ed will put black NYTimes journalists in greater danger”.
I think this is a bullshit justification.
The way it looks to me, a bunch of Times staff thought calling out the military to quell these protests was a terrible idea (they’re right, IMO), and got mad because the Times allowed an op-ed that proposed such a policy. The relevant question for the NYT is whether or not they want to accept that their newsroom staff can veto op-eds they dislike. That sounds like a pretty bad policy to me–I expect those employees have at least as much influence on what stories they cover, as well–but it’s their newspaper, and they can run it as they see fit.
A Very Short Rant.
The New York Times is our Isengard. Their productions are the argot of the information processing class. Stopping the presses would cause our society to become less synchronized and this would be good.
NYT is the failure mode of Liberal political doctrine in every category.
Starlink! It’s been a while since I’ve posted about space, let’s get into it. Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched its eighth Starlink mission bringing the total up to 482 satellites in orbit right now. As some of you may remember from my last post, Musky-boy claims that 800 satellites are needed for limited US service. 2 more launches are scheduled in June, which would bring the total up to a solid 600, and at this pace it seems we will reach the 800 number come summer’s end, which I think is nothing short of shocking. Elon Musk? Delivering on a timetable? Who’s writing this shit?
Far more interesting to me though is the workhorse behind the launches – the Falcon 9. I love the Falcon 9. I love it’s design. I love its re-usability. I love it’s stupid star wars name. I love that each time it lands it lands on a barge with a progressively stupider name (last night’s was Just Read the Instructions if you are curious). I love this thing to death, and it hit two milestones this week. First at 85 (now 86) launches, Falcon 9 is the most used rocket in US history. Second, Falcon 9 B1049 has been flown 5 times in less than 2 years, which is a pretty damn elite club containing only Challenger and Discovery.
With successes in both manned and unmanned spaceflight, I expect to see more investment in SpaceX both from the private coffers of America’s space happy rich people and the government. Say what you want about trump, at least he funds space stuff.
Since people almost never do this enough, I’d like to admit that I was wrong about my previous SpaceX skepticism. It seems that they really are doing something special.
Minor quibble, but there are only two drone ships and their names have not changed. They are ship names from the Iain Banks “Culture” novels.
As long as he doesn’t start launching ones called Grey Area or Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, it’s probably fine.
Grey Area would be better for the training ship where they do psych assessments on prospective astronauts….
Really? Goes to show I pay more attention to the rockets than the barges.
Still think their names are dumb.
They refer to their barges as “drone ships” just to add another ladleful of teeth-grinding twee to the dumb names. (Like you, I didn’t know the name provenance until looking it up after the launch, and like you, still think they’re dumb)
It’s still an amazing technical feat, despite the dumb names.
This is extra funny because originally the word “drone” referred specifically to remotely-flown target aircraft, used for target practice by battleships or other weapons. The more general term was Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). I’ll occasionally run into older RC plane folks who insist on this distinction, although I think it’s safe to say that ship has sailed.
Yes, that people find the names of those ships kind of dumb, is kinda the point of the names in the source material. In the books those ships name themselfs, and make fun of people who think their names should have more gravitas.
See the proposed name of the third ship: “A Shortfall of Gravitas!”
I always interpreted it more as them trying to have clever or playful names that referenced concepts that they thought emblematic of their character.
You should watch this video by Robert Zubrin. He is one of Elon’s co-conspirators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKQSijn9FBs
I’ll be joining the Mars Society when I can and hope to one day join the colonists or at least provide support. Closed loop systems are the part of the tech tree that opens up new advances in sustainability, health and environment.
Get Hype!
Comments with links aren’t turning up for me – but you should search youtube for Robert Zubrin’s presentation “robert zubrin why go to mars”.
Get Hype!
I don’t think it’s quite so clear. I’m wary of reducing Category 4 shootings at the expense of privacy. I’m not sure what X is, but I’d rather have X Category 4 shootings in the US per year than live in a top-to-bottom surveillance state.
New thread continuing @cassander and I talking about the relative efficiency and efficacy of Federal vs. state-level responses to large-scale public health problems.
Cassander says:
A) ‘Enforcement’ here means not just arresting people selling opioids on the corner, but also stuff like inspecting drug factories in India and making sure multinational companies aren’t bribing physicians to prescribe their products preferentially. It’s true that state governments could do this themselves, especially major ones like California, Texas, or New York and especially with reciprocity agreements and cooperation among the states, but this would require a significant reworking of the balance of power between states and the Federal government. I don’t know that this wouldn’t be a good idea, and I think it’s probably more representative of what the Founders had in mind, but undoing a hundred and fifty years of Federal centralizing tendency is perhaps a little out of scope.
B) There’s definitely a tension here. I think we could do with quite a bit more experimentation, but my sense is that the state governments don’t have the funding/prestige/perceived authority to attract the staff they’d need to generate very good alternatives to Federal policy. A lot of that is self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, since those people all went to work for CDC right out of grad school, but we live in the world as it is and not as we’d like it to be.
C) We do substantially this for all sorts of things, e.g. the International Building Code which is incorporated by statute into many (most?) city codes, and in reverse since most of the developing world effectively exports their medical research arm to the US and/or EU. If one set of practices really is just the best set, of course we should want everybody to be using it – but here we’re just back at the experimentation/consistency tension, which I agree is an important problem that I don’t have a great answer to.
Further:
What do you think governments are besides different aggregations of resources, prerogatives, and norms? This seems like a distinction without a difference; we have the results of choices made decades ago to work with, not the ones we wish we’d have made now.
There’s also something to be said for the ability to move resources around between jurisdictions based on a birds-eye view of the problem – I believe state-level efforts to set similar things up have run into problems when e.g. the firefighters on loan from NV to CA combating major wildfires are called back home to deal with much smaller-scale ones, since their incentive to care about NV problems is way higher than their incentive to care about CA ones.
the US has no jurisdiction over indian factories and doctors, so we can’t stop them there. and if we’re trying to stop that activity in the US, you need just as many inspectors for 50 state inspectorates as one federal.
We’re not talking about any sort of plan, just the nature of the problem. that centralization almost invariably justified (in part) by the assertion that the feds can do it better. that’s rarely the case.
I’m not sure that’s the case, but, as you say, it’s a circular argument. the feds hire all the good people so that’s where the good people want to work. It’s not an argument that the states are intrinsically less able to handle the problem.
Building codes being a perfect example of something that’s pretty essential, and almost entirely handled at the state or even local level without issue.
Well, at the very least, we could stop making the argument that the states can’t handle tasks like this. that the feds currently do does not imply that states can’t. And if we got really bold we could start pushing things back away from centralization.
Sure, but equally there’s something to be said for organization suited to local conditions and taking advantage of local knowledge. I don’t know how the Oregon state fire service is organized, but I’ll bet it’s very different from the Delaware, and probably for the better.
Just so, thanks for clarifying.
Is it fair to say that your position is that the states could handle large-scale public health problems as well or better than the Federal government does if substantially all of the resources the Federal government is currently using for for those problems were redistributed back to the state agencies?
Recommendations for effective altruism re: police violence in US?
Oh, and as to your original point, I don’t think Arbery fits the pattern.
For Cooper, the media narrative is “white privilege,” but the reality is nothing bad happened to the black guy and society wrecked the white woman. Her treatment is evidence “white privilege” is not all it is cracked up to be. If you had to pick one of the two people to be in that story, I would rather not be the one with the “white privilege.”
For the Floyd riots, the media narrative is “cops are unaccountable and brutal,” but if the cops were actually unaccountable and brutal there would be no riots. Looters would be shot on sight and if you threw rocks you’d be catching bullets.
Arbery…the media narrative is “lynching bad” but what happened to him is akin to lynching*. His case doesn’t prove the opposite of the media narrative, just that if you look at further statistics the narrative is misleading.
Back to the first two, though, yes, this is something I dislike about the concept of “punching up.” There is no such thing as punching up. If you are punching, and not immediately getting punched back, then you are punching down. Power is the ability to punch and not be punched back.
We know that the lord has power and the serf does not because the lord can punch the serf in the face and shag his wife and the serf can eat sh*t. The lord is punching down. If the serf tries to “punch up” at the lord, he is quickly dispatched.
So when a feminist on a college campus launches into a mean-spirited tirade against men, justifying it because she’s “punching up” at the Patriarchy, and the Patriarchy does not promptly return her to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, that’s pretty good evidence that she’s not actually punching up. She’s punching down, because if she were punching up, she’d be getting punched right back and harder.
* I’m still waiting for the trial and not prejudging. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if this followed the pattern of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown where the media narrative presented during the run-up does not match the facts when it comes time to lay everything out in court. But it’s pointless to argue the facts right now when we don’t have them.
Cops can be unaccountable and brutal and still not kill literally everyone who is breaking a law. This doesn’t prove, or even indicate, anything. The view that cops are unaccountable and brutal doesn’t even require that the cops care about the looters (and if the cops don’t care about the looters, why would they shoot them even if they thought they could?))
But maybe kill some of them? They’re not even trying.
The problem isn’t that the police routinely murder people, it’s that when a policeman bashes someone or even kills someone, they usually get away with it with no legal consequences, and surprisingly often even keep their jobs.
I don’t think I agree with this – I’d say power is the ability to get what you want without having to punch.
Okay, would you agree with,
“Power is the ability to a get what you want without having to punch, but if you feel like punching, you can do that and not get punched back.”
I guess that’s reasonable. I think punching without punching back mostly happens because others stop the victim before they can punch you, which mostly strikes me as a symptom of gaining or losing power. I don’t see those that are unnecessarily cruel maintaining power too long.
The lord doesn’t stop the serf from punching back. His guardsmen do.
And after enough times, one particularly charismatic guardsman says “you know, it’s really shitty we have to get in a fight every time Lord Farquah wants to punch a serf.”
Why not both?
Admittedly if you’re the one doing the punching then you’re probably not that high on the totem pole, depending on your definition of ‘punch’.
I’ve seen chicks and hens pecking at the rooster of a flock repeatedly. It clearly annoyed him sometimes, but he still usually ignored it.
Younger siblings often provoke the old ones, knowing their parents will protect them.
Sometimes you can be punching up without (much) fear of reprisal
Amy Cooper…I don’t want to say “must be happy about” Floyd, but…I mean, everyone’s completely forgotten about her.
Not so fast! The “We OpPoSe RaCiSm!” email I got from my previous employer’s alumni newsletter lumped Floyd, Arbey, and Amy Cooper all into the same bucket as “recent disturbing examples of racism.”
Because surely those three scenarios are of approximately equal importance!
Oddly, of those 3… Floyd’s death seems to be the least overtly racist?
Warning: Unmitigated brag incoming. I apologize but I’m a lonely guy w/o many people to brag to.
Several months ago I posted here in SSC asking for advice about studying for the LSAT. The overwhelming response was “don’t take the LSAT, you’re not going to do well enough to make Law School worth it”
Bite Me.
Congratulations!
How did you study?
Early on I followed the Mike Kim LSAT Trainer – but found it wasn’t really helping me. I struggled with very specific sections, for example I had no issues with Logic Games but would sometimes get up to 4 wrong on Reading Comprehension. Instead I started taking practice tests and tracking questions I missed. Once I had about 10 tests worth of data I focused in on practicing on the question types I was struggling with. Once I did that for a month or two I went back to complete practice tests.
Congratulations!
That’s excellent. My hat is off to you.
Congratulations on the excellent result, plainly the reverse psychology worked! 🙂
Congrats!
I was immediately skeptical of this claim, since I’ve seen a lot of SSC threads about people considering law school, and every one of them looks the same. They all focus on how law is a really shitty career in general.
Looking up your old thread with Nybbler’s search tool confirmed my suspicion. Not a single comment there could reasonably be characterized as a challenge to your personal ability to do well on the LSAT.
Perhaps my wording could have been better. I didn’t mean to imply people challenged my personal ability – I think it was more of an “it’s not worth it” was what I was trying to get across. I’m not actually upset I’m just trying to have a bit of fun and am very excited. Rereading this post I can see where I should have made different word choices.
Actually on second review, I’m going to stand up for myself a little. Several posts were like “don’t study its not worth it” or told me basically not to do it if I can’t like get into Yale. Look maybe these are not meant to be disparaging, but both on initial read and reread they don’t sit right with me. I felt challenged by them then, and still kind of do now. Regardless I do want to stress I am mainly just johning it up a little – I’m obviously over the moon and don’t have a lot of people to brag to right now.
Here’s the Yale post:
It’s not even about the difficulty of getting into Yale! It’s about the shittiness of all Law jobs other than the one you need to get into Yale to do. The poster (who is banned right now and so cannot clarify this themselves) makes this point even clearer in the followup comments.
If the non-disparagements of these commenters sat unwell with you then surely you can see how your actual (inaccurate) disparagement of people who took time out of their day to answer your question didn’t sit well with me.
Again I think your point is fair. I also think arguing about this is probably not helpful for anyone, least of all us. I’ll concede my initial post wasn’t accurate in the way it made it seem like I was “overcoming adversity” or anything like that. Again I was just trying to be more like:
I asked for help, most people told me not to do it, I did it anyway, I did well, cue that picture of the guy on the 3rd place podium flipping everyone off.
But I’ll try to tone it down. Again I’m just really excited right now and I probably am too emotional to post online.
I thought “LSAT – FLEX” was an excellent summary and I congratulate you.
@Eric T
Fair enough! This probably wouldn’t have annoyed me much if I weren’t independently on edge right now, so don’t put too much stock in it.
Whizow, great job dude!!! That is amazing!
Cool. You still shouldn’t go to law school. It didn’t make economic sense back in December, and that was before the Covid Depression hit and rule of law broke down.
If I’ve made one thing exceedingly obvious, it’s that I’m going to ignore this objectively correct advice and do it anyway.
Congratulations! You may not be a shoo-in everywhere, but you should be applying to any t14 you would consider attending if admitted with a generous aid package. They may or may not offer, but asking is (comparatively) cheap.
Do consider informational interviews, and multiple days literally following people around if possible, for a) people who have the job you’d like post-law school and b) the jobs you might have to take along the way to get there. The primary mistake most unhappy law school graduates have made is failing to grasp what their career trajectory might be like to live. The LSAT is not much like law school. Law school is not much like the bar exam. The bar exam is not much like the practice of law, and many practices are materially distinct from each other. Most popular depictions of lawyers at work bear the same resemblance to reality as the Mission Impossible franchise does to a day in the life of a CIA analyst.
I cannot emphasize this enough: the long list of lawyers who hate their lives (or at least their work/life balance) is substantially composed of people who from ignorance or arrogance opted into a career whose daily demands they did not actually understand, and remain there due to sunk costs. Have a goal, have a fallback, and good luck!
Friedman, below, is entirely correct about the potential tradeoffs between status and money. Further along that line, if you are confident in your regional living preferences, a top regional school may be functionally competitive with a t14, though this also depends on your intended career path.
what if I put the advice to song?
Hmmmm compelling – but alas I’m a simple man who wants what he wants.
Other well-respected, parent-friendly careers receive more positive musical endorsement.
Congratulations!
Congrats. That’s awesome. We need some good news.
Functionally what does a 180 mean? That you get into T14 no matter what? Or that assuming you did at least OK at a large state school or “better” and have average of better recs that you are guaranteed a top 30 law school? Or something else?
Just kind of curious about how much impact an outlier LSAT completely on it’s own has (my impression is, “a lot”).
So I don’t really know. Plugging my numbers into any LSAT predictor would have you believe I am a shoe-in anywhere – I choose not to believe that. My GPA is good enough that unless I get quite unlucky I should get into a T-14 school, and I’ll have solid recs.
The only thing I’m deciding on is how heavily to play to my autism in my essays. Unlike most of the internet, I am actually quite autistic, and part of me thinks it could help to write about it, part of me thinks it’s probably for the best to leave it be. Gotta talk to some people about it.
But yeah for me, I think T-14 no problem. 7Sage estimates that a 180 is about the 99.97 percentile, so I think it’ll make me stand out.
How long have you been working on coping strategies? In my youth, explanations of Aspergers were met with “no duh”. After decades of work, it is now met with strong skepticism.
Since I got diagnosed at 11 years old. I was a shit kid in Middle School, got suspended 7 times. Principal asked my mom to look into other schools for me, but my parents stuck it out, got me a school counselor that worked for me, found some medication that calmed my ADHD, and bam! I sorta just… got there. Sometime around High School I was pretty much high-functioning. I mean it’s still pretty obvious if you meet me I’m on on the spectrum, but I make do.
If it’s still obvious, I say go for it. But don’t rest on your laurels, so to speak. Faking normal conversation and being able to look people in the eye will open a lot more doors.
Have you taught yourself body language yet? Because that one was key for me.
Apologies for jumping into the conversation, but can you explain how you did this? After I was diagnosed with autism as an adult, it became very clear to me that I was missing or completely misreading a large number of non-verbal cues (body language, facial expressions, etc). I’ve asked various therapists for help on this, but no one has been able to provide me any resources.
@Lord Nelson
Books were the start. Those didn’t get me very far. Went through various online resources, found some videos that were very helpful. Looking at youtube now, there appear to be a ton. I then people watched to test out my new knowledge. You can fine tune that way without having to interact. Just look at people (to a point, the further away the better) interacting with each other. If you’re correct about their body language, you can usually predict how the interaction goes. That allows you to level up the accuracy of your new skills with no real risk.
One thing you may want to think about is the tradeoff between school status and money. Is it better to go to Stanford or Chicago and pay full freight or go to a school a little farther down the list and get a generous scholarship?
Awesome! Congrats! That’s an amazing score!
Congratulations! If you want advice on fancy-pants-law-school stuff, please just mention it here and I’ll drop you a line. There’s a lot of not-neccessarily-obvious implicit knowledge that I wish someone had passed on to me back in the day.
First off, congratulations to Eric indeed! That score is no joke. Well done!
I’ll be applying in the same cycle as Eric, as a late-30s guy trying this as a second career but with #s that’d put me more or less in the same pool.
Would *love* some advice on fancy-pants-law-school stuff, imagine some of that could actually be very interesting to/appreciated by the community at large.
I’d love to talk fancy-pants-law-school stuff!
Are there email addys I can reach you at? (Or is there a way to see what addresses are associated with accounts that I am not seeing?)
Didn’t want to auto-dox myself, but I just set up an email specifically for anybody who wants to reach me from this site. It’s sscjaco [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks!
Re: Ahmaud Arbery / Color of Crime
This is entirely explained by the proportion of the subpopulations. If 80% of people are white and 20% of people are black, then you’d expect that same 4:1 ratio in crime victims (if the perpetrators are not racially motivated and also not geographically segregated). Your actual stats show a clear trend towards black-on-black violence beyond what you would naively expect.
Comparing white-on-white to black-on-black violence is highly misleading here. I don’t know the name for this fallacy, it’s not quite the base rate fallacy. But it’s similar in spirit: compare asymmetric things as if the natural prior should be for them to be symmetric.
The stats listed in this thread are far more nuanced than ‘blacks attack whites 4:1’. If crime was random and you had an 80/20 minority the numbers would look something like
1. Minority rate against majority is at a 4:1 ratio to majority rate against minority.
2. Minority share of all crimes is 20% of the total.
The stats actually cited show
And
Which clearly shows that the crimes are not randomly distributed and invalidates the simple form of your argument.
Sorry, maybe my post was a bit unclear. I only meant to address one of the points, namely the claim that blacks disproportionately target whites. I’m not gonna address each and every stat quoted. The statement I have a problem with is this:
Regarding your points:
1. Agreed, but an even stronger thing is true, namely that the rate of crime of any group against the majority vs the rate of any group against the minority would be 4:1. It has nothing to do with the weird crossed over b-w vs w-b comparison you’re doing.
2. I never claimed this, and it’s not needed for point 1 to hold.
My claim: blacks don’t disproportionately target whites. This is confirmed by the statistics cited next:
So, if there was no targeting going on, you’d expect blacks to target whites ~80% of the time, but in fact they only target them ~40% of the time. In other words, blacks target whites disproportionately little.
No, this is wrong. If Whites are 80% and Blacks are 20% of the population and they both commit crimes at the same, and random in terms of victim’s race, rate then for every 80 crimes that Ws commit Bs commit 20. So the 4:1 you reference would be represented by the 80% of victims * the 20 crimes for 16 W victims and 4 B victims, while whites would commit 80 crimes with 16 B victims and 64 W victims, so the actual raw total of victims would be identical, not 4:1 as you claim.
False because you are ignoring the other statistics. The previous post I made highlighted that these events are clearly non-random, once that is established your point becomes meaningless, you then have to compare the subrates of each group because some other factor (targeting, proximity, whatever) that causes the random baseline to be of no real value. The key ratio for black/white then would be whites targeting of blacks vs blacks targeting of whites vs their % of population
Blacks are ~13% of the population, and whites 61% of the population, so black victims of white attacks are 3.6/13 or 27% of what you expect if the sample is random and the reverse is 63% of the expected result, which implies that Black perpetrators are far more resistant to whatever the con-founders are that prevent perfectly distributed violence than whites are. You can start inventing scenarios where this can be true but also blacks aren’t targeting whites but at that point you have already conceded the general thrust.
Ah, I think I now get what you’re saying: You claim that the “random choice of victim” baseline is meaningless because there clearly are factors that push all groups to disproportionately target themselves, so when a group targets itself less disproportionately you interpret this as them deliberately seeking out victims of other races. I hope that’s an accurate representation of your position.
Sure, and that sounds like it might be something interesting to try to understand better. However, this whole thread is in the context of being a possible victim. So I guess I disagree with Atlas’ framing when he states that
(which I interpreted as “whites are the ones who should be worried about other races, not other races about whites”. Maybe I’m misreading this and something else was meant?)
I see no reason why I should be concerned about that specific thing at all, rather than about violent crime perpetrated against me from any source. And if I’m worried about any source, then my way of comparing the numbers is more relevant.
Hope that clarifies my position as well. Frankly, I get exhausted quickly from these kinds of politically charged debate, so I’ll respectfully bow out at this time. For the record, I would have appreciated if you had laid out your argument more clearly from the beginning. I had to work quite a bit to tease out the point you were trying to make.
IIRC, in the murder statistics, blacks commit murder at 7x the rate of whites, but only murder whites about 10% of the time.
The issue with the Arbery case is that it took 74 days for the District Attorney to arrest the offenders despite possession of a video showing that the perpetrators had chased him and shot him. It’s the impunity with which the people who killed Arbery were treated that makes the case galling, and what separates it from other murders. It’s also where I think the comparison to lynching is strongest (not to defend the comparison in full): the point of lynchings isn’t that they were white-on-black murders, it’s that they were white-on-black murders sanctioned by society. No perpetrator of a lynching ever worried about prosecution; that’s why people make the comparison: some white men chased down a black man on fairly flimsy pretenses, shot him, and despite the whole thing being recorded on video and available to the legal authorities, were on track to never face even the slightest legal consequences before the video was made public.
So far as I know, there are no high-profile cases where a black man committed a random murder of a white person with the level of evidence available against Arbery’s killers, and had DAs stand by and let them walk.
What do you suppose makes something high profile?
I think outlets like Breitbart, etc., would report on it. If you are aware of such an incident, please let me know.
Ugghh. You’re going to make me go read stormfront, aren’t you? Mainstream right-wing sources are pretty pro law enforcement.
You must be open to the possibility, as you qualified with high profile. It is a big country, with plenty of corrupt police forces. But I cannot find anything that would meet these criteria. The very act of having to dig for it means that they are not high profile.
So I’m going to bow out on a technicality, because I really don’t want to dive into those cesspits.
Or that they’re much less common.
I’m generally sympathetic to Atlas here. But I really don’t think you could find cases where a black-on-white killing was kept buried by the DA. That’s not how this country works.
Arbery’s killers were basically overzealous vigilantes with local law enforcement connections and without criminal records, killing someone with a criminal record whom they perceived to be preying on their community (more likely correctly than not, as far as I can tell). This is a big country, but I’m pretty sure that with races reversed, that scenario happens literally never. And that’s exactly the sort of scenario where a perhaps overly-generous definition of “self-defense” is most likely to be accepted.
It’s not like claiming “self-defense” could have helped OJ escape prosecution, even though he was vastly more rich/popular/connected than the people he murdered. You actually need some factors that offer plausibility.
The stuff that came out yesterday revealed things which the state had to be aware of: that the second vehicle had already “made contact” with Arbery, and that Arbery had been shot before the hand-to-hand fight started. Again, the state knew these facts but didn’t act on them.
Of course, I got that news through my own filter bubble, so maybe it’s not true.
Wait, what?! Source?
https://twitter.com/ssiddiqui83/status/1268568101412462593
You can scroll down for the video of the court session. I will admit I haven’t watched it myself.
A week or two ago people had done frame-by-frames of the video, and pointed out how the person in the front truck had raised his gun to shoot Arbery. From what I gather, that is when/where the first shot that hit Arbery happened.
Well, the video’s three hours long so I’d need a timestamp. But that’s something. So when we saw in the viral video where he’s running, the man with the shotgun confronts him, and Arbery reaches for the shotgun and then gets shot, before that video started rolling, Arbery was already running with a bullet wound in the chest? That’s very different from the story I’d heard before.
Arbery was allegedly hit with “the side of”(?) Bryan’s truck, but I don’t find any mention of him being shot before the final confrontation.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/04/us/mcmichaels-hearing-ahmaud-arbery/index.html
Edit: Deleted, I found a better video. This seems to give an objective account of the events. The first shot goes off as they initially grapple, but it happens in front of (and thus obscured by) the truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nKf0TW-L1M
Note that it can be extremely unusual case. You can have unusual cases where significant attention causes unusual outcome.
For example lets say that 1000 dogs in a city were lost, running away within last uear. 999 of them were never found again. In 1 extremely publicized case dog was found.
You may have at the same time “Outcome is basically always A” and “Outcome in widely publicized cases is basically always B”, due to fact that wide attention changes outcome, preselection of cases or other effect.
I would not assume that it is a representative case. No, I have no idea how to find a representative case.
Media attention is rarely focused at actually important things. Feel free to compare also with thousands dying in Syria/Whateverstan and latest celebrity scandal. Syria alone has abut 500 000 deaths – from looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_civil_war .
If more eyes on the case results in a less racist outcome, this is evidence that the public–those eyes–are not as racist as commonly implied.
Whose eyes are those eyes?
Yes, this is also true. And to continue example with dogs – maybe both in 1 highly shared case dog was found, but also in all 999 other cases dogs also were found.
There’s a story many media sources really want to tell w.r.t. racism in America, and they’re very interested in finding events that will let them tell that story. In many cases, it turns out that the actual facts of the event don’t support the story, but surprisingly often, the media narrative continues along anyway.
Attn: Card game players of SSC
Is there a currently active CCG out there you would recommend that simpler and easier to play/understand/learn than Magic?
Basically, I thought a CCG would be good for my fiance and I (she likes board games, I like to collect things, it’s a win-win!) so I bought us one of those Magic starter sets with two pre-constructed decks and it… did not go well. Everything just seemed so complicated. Both of us really struggled to learn what was going on, and it seemed like every other card had some non-standard rule that I had to Google and even then wasn’t really sure if I was playing it right. Maybe I just picked a bad set for beginners, I don’t know… but I’m wondering if there’s a different game that’s similar in concept but designed for a more casual audience we could adopt instead?
Dominion. Seems to be the same theme – also a deck building game, but is not a pay-to-win sinkhole, split into well defined sets, also plenty of replayability.
links, hopefully will not be eaten by spamfilter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deck-building_card_games
https://dominion.games/ free to play (without ads/scam/pumping for money – free users have access to basic set or need to wait for a paid player)
To be clear, I’m looking for something with actual physical cards. Not online.
Dominion is primarily played with actual physical cards.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:En_upps%C3%A4ttning_av_Dominion.png
http://nerdsinbabeland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/dominion.jpg
I agree with the recommendation, though I disagree with some points.
The deck building in Dominion happens in game, which is better for introducing players to it, as it requires no out of game commitment.
And while both have a vaguely fantasy milieu, Dominion has no monsters and little warfare, which might be a big plus or a bit of a minus.
Once you have one or two expansions, the possible set ups will provide a great deal of depth.
Yes, for a given game both players start from the same position[0] with access to the same cards
[0] except (1) order of actions, someone must be the first to play and (2) random results of shuffling cards
Particularly for 2 players, I might be tempted to recommend Star Realms over Dominion. It’s also a deckbuilder, but has more direct interaction between the players (rather than amassing Victory cards, you’re directly attacking your opponent). There are some other differences that I like- for instance, rather than the same 10 cards being available to add to your deck throughout a given game, there’s a constantly changing row of 5. The cards are also divided into Factions, something like Magic’s colours- each Faction has a few specific things that it’s good at, and you get bonuses if you play multiple cards of the same Faction in a turn.
It has an SF theme rather than the fantasy theme of Magic, but there is also Hero Realms which started out as essentially a fantasy reskin (though the two have since diverged).
Strongly second this. Star realms is a great game that gets lots of little design decisions right. The core mechanics are fun, there are lots of viable strategies with very different play patterns, the game is accessible while having a lot of depth for more advanced players.
I specially enjoy the skill of center row management, predicting the pace of the game (when to dump your economy, etc), and valuing cards correctly in context. But all of that stuff is invisible until you are quite good at the basics, unlike dominion, which tends to punish you brutally for even slightly suboptimal play.
At this point, I think dominion is a historically important game, being the first (prominent?) deckbuilder and all, but I’d actively recommend against playing it.
What is it you are looking for that a standard-deck card game like Gin Rummy doesn’t provide?