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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?
The ability to create a custom deck?
Nostalgia for the feeling of when I was 12 years old and would buy a new booster pack and get all excited about what awesome rare cards might be inside?
If Magic is too hard, you might try Pokemon. I believe it’s aimed more at children than Magic is, although there are adults who play it.
If you want to take another run at Magic, try installing the Arena online game and going through their tutorials. When you have finished them, you should have a solid understanding of how to play the game.
Is Pokemon still active? I recall playing it a couple times as a teenager.
Pokemon is still active. The major game stores here in Toronto run Pokemon once or twice a week. It’s not as active as Magic is, though. They run Magic events nearly every day.
Millennium Blades, the CCG board game?
You might consider Fantasy Flight’s Lord of the Rings co-op card game, which plays like Magic but has 1-4 players working together to over come monsters and obstacles.
Star Wars Destiny?
I think KeyForge is sort of like a CCG. Same with Android: Netrunner. They call themselves “Living Card Games” rather than collectible card games, I think (maybe?) because expansions all have the same cards (thus avoiding giving people like me traumatic flashbacks from spending way too much money on the CCG slot machine back in the 90s).
Keyforge is not an LCG like Arkham Horror LCG, Lord of the Rings LCG, or Android: Netrunner. (A:NR, btw, sadly out of print, but now community run, but much more complex than M:tG.)
You are correct that LCGs do not have random boosters, so there are no chase rares and money is less a part of the game (depending).
Keyforge has uniquely generated decks. Each one has its own cardbacks.
They are not to be modified. But they draw from the same pool of cards.
From what I know, it is cheaper and simpler than M:tG, has that collecting aspect Matt M is looking for, but not the customization.
Would you mind sharing more information about the particular starter set that you bought? Magic is a really great game, so if the problem is that you bought the wrong product, I’d encourage you to give the game a second chance.
One product I would highly recommend is the 30-card Magic Welcome decks that you can get for free at a store. My kids got a bunch of these last year, and I can confirm that they are as simple as it gets: single color, no weird mechanics, great for learning the game fundamentals. If these don’t work, then Magic is clearly not the game for you. https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Core_Set_2020/Welcome_decks
The bad news is that those particular sets cannot be ordered online – they are an exclusive promotion for game stores. Going to a store is probably not an option nowadays, but you might be able to find them on ebay.
The next best thing would probably be the Core Set Planeswalker Decks. They only have straightforward cards, and any special mechanic is spelled out in reminder text within the card.
It was “Monsters vs Heroes” or something like that. It was the one that sounded the simplest out of all such box sets that I saw were available. But apparently I miscalculated…
Interesting… that one is 7 years old now. Looking at the list of cards, it has way more fiddly mechanics than I’d recommend for a first contact with the game. It may have been intended as a starter-ish product, back in the day, but it’s not a very successful one.
I can’t guarantee that you’ll like the current starter products, but they’re definitely much, much more accessible for beginners.
I found an ebay listing where you can pick your color of the 2020 welcome decks for $15 each.
Is that a reasonable price? And which two colors are the most newbie-friendly?
Not a reasonable price, imo. You should be able to get them for free if you can find a game shop. While there you can spend the $30 on a complete game, too, like star realms, smash up, Dominion (almost), or a handful of keyforge decks.
As to newbie friendly, that would probably be green or red, but having an endless series of green vs red matches seems pretty dull, since what makes for newbie friendly means a less complex play style. Black or white are also probably pretty
friendlyeasy to play, with blue requiring the most game knowledge if it runs counter spells or relies on temp plays like bounce.Actually, since you have them, I’d recommend taking a red, white, or green welcome deck and mixing in just a handful of the cards from the duel decks you have that match that color now and then (along with a couple extra lands to keep the ratio the same). So you’ll have a bit more complexity over time than the basic but not be confused by several different triggered and keyworded mechanics.
Unfortunately, it’s a complete rip-off. Those are free products with 30 cards (and pretty bad cards, at that). You are better off with the Core Set Planeswalker Decks… I see they are 10 pounds at amazon.
As for the most newbie-friendly colors, with these decks they are all similarly easy to pick up, so I’d recommend choosing based on aesthetics. Summarizing a lot:
– White: Life magic, decks that are defensive or play many small creatures
– Green: Nature magic, decks with big creatures and ways to get extra mana
– Red: Fire magic, aggressive decks with damage-dealing spells
– Black: Death magic, many effects that destroy enemy creatures, make opponents discard, and recover your dead creatures.
– Blue: Water/Mind magic. Weak creatures, but many ways to counter the opponent’s cards
I suspect that most stores would be willing to send you welcome decks for free (or just the cost of postage) if you got in touch with them and asked nicely. If you get hooked they stand to make hundreds or thousands of dollars from you in the future. If your local one won’t (or isn’t open) try one of the big players like Channel Fireball.
Also, I strongly second the recommendation of going through the Arena tutorials to learn the rules. Two new players trying to learn the game without outside assistance does not seem likely to go well, but the game itself is incredible so it is worth it.
The Welcome Decks are a good idea. If they’re not available directly, it wouldn’t be hard to put them together from singles.
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Core_Set_2020/Welcome_decks
I’d highly recommend Keyforge, though technically it’s not a CCG because you don’t build decks. Instead all the decks you can buy are randomized and unique, and you aren’t allowed to swap cards from different decks. I recommend it because it removes the complexity of deck building, instead allowing you to get used to your decks and learn how to play them through experience, and also because I consider it one of the most mechanically beautiful CCGs out there. The core mechanic is simple yet deep. However in recent expansions they have added a lot more little effects, so I would avoid buying a Mass Mutation wave deck.
That actually sounds kind of appealing. While I like deck-building myself, I suspect my fiance won’t be as into it, and for this to be a viable shared hobby, we will continually need at least two equally balanced decks, that we can alternate playing (for variety’s sake).
I play Keyforge with my twelve year old daughter. I have about five decks, and we just grab one more or less at random to run. They aren’t promised to be perfectly–or even well–balanced, but with a casual attitude it doesn’t matter and gives a decent variety of play with no out of game deck-building chore.
It may be a little more new player friendly as you aren’t trying to actively kill each other, but just racing to a goal of 3 keys, though you do need to kill the other players minions time to time to slow them down.
But the range of play experiences doesn’t come close to MtG, from which you can build aggressive, combo, controlling, etc. decks–if you know the given card pool well and are willing to spend for it.
Which Keyforge set/edition/whatever would you recommend to newbies?
I would recommend getting decks from the Call of the Archons or Age of Ascension sets (they should say on the box what set they’re from, CoA is red and AoA is blue). Worlds Collide (purple) adds some new mechanics that might be a little tricky, but would probably be fine. Avoid Mass Mutation (black): it’s not meant for beginners and adds some confusing new mechanics.
If you get a two player starter set you’ll be provided with all the tokens and counters you need, a dead tree rulebook, and two decks. The CoA ones are very hard to find though. Personally I started by just buying some decks and looking up the rules online while using random stuff as counters and tokens.
Yeah, a quick Amazon search reveals that the only ones available for relatively affordable prices are Age of Ascension and Worlds Collide, with Age of Ascension being slightly more expensive. Although it seems like that’s the way to go.
Balance is a bit hit or miss TBH, but with 4 random decks (which costs as much as a two-player CCG starter) you should have enough variety to keep you going. Some matchups will definitely favor one deck over the other, but just treat it as handicap.
The game also features an explicit handicap mechanism (via adding a number of “chains”) which they recommend to use in casual play in case a deck gets too out of hand. There are even optional bidding rules for it – you can bid for decks by how many chains you want to play them with, so players choose between playing a weaker deck and a stronger, but chained one.
In store leagues, decks gain chains if they win often, and the number of chains also gives you some bragging rights – when the opponent declares they’re starting with 8 chains you know they’ve steamrolled a lot of people with it already.
I kind of agree that keyforge is mechanically beautiful in the abstract, but there are some serious balance issues (related to the game rules, not the card pool). Basically, the game leads to one-sided blowouts way too often, because it doesn’t have a strong notion of card advantage, (or actually paying for the power level of a given card). When you’re behind you often feel like you’re locked out of meaningful options. It’s not fun spending an entire turn fixing a clogged up hand, or having to choose between using cards on your board vs in your hand (this tradeoff is great and interesting when the game is close, but it’s horrible when you’re playing from behind).
Have these aspects been fixed in any way in the expansions? I’ve only played the base set.
Well, maybe? It doesn’t feel too one sided to me with the newer decks but I might be more tolerant. I will say this: blowouts usually happen fast, so you don’t have to slog through a long game to get to the inevitable conclusion.
The Arkham Horror LCG is quite fun. It’s also co-op, I don’t know if that’s better or worse for your preferences. Each session pack is a specific adventure with a story and cards relating to its particular location and encounters. Sessions are linked into longer campaigns. There’s a fair potential for player deckbuilding, but the prebuilt decks are generally okay.
Potential downsides:
– It’s not the most cost-effective game
– If you don’t like the 1920s Lovecraft theme, enjoyment will be hampered
– It can be pretty difficult (but in my experience, losing is fun)
I’m going to disagree with almost everyone here, because I feel like deck builders (such as Dominion) and CCG games (such as MTG) are not at all similar and don’t scratch remotely the same itch.
Now, maybe a deckbuilder really is what you’re looking for, but if you really do like the idea of MTG, Omen: A Reign of War is one board game that’s much closer to MTG than Dominion is. It’s relatively simple.
If you want something meatier, that’s a lot more like MTG than Omen is (with the whole element of building decks ahead of time) but much easier to get into than MTG, I’d suggest looking at what they call “Living Card Games” (LCGs). These do have a higher entry cost than just buying a pack or two of MTG cards, but if you intend to actually get into the game, they’re much more budget friendly because they basically sell you the whole set at a reasonable price instead of the slot machine of opening packs.
From my understanding, probably the simplest LCG is the Star Wars one. But the rules, while a lot simpler than MTG, are still not THAT simple.
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games/
Depends a lot on what you get out of the game, or more specifically, I think Magic can scratch the deckbuilder itch. I played Magic for about ten years and upon reflection deck building was always my favorite part of the game. Sitting on the living room floor with my brother and all our cards splayed out coming up with new deck ideas and testing them against each other was more fun for me than playing(this might just be niche protection though, as my brother was always the better player). I also liked booster drafts more than any other kind of tournament(although I only ever got top eight in a pro q once, and I won tons of booster drafts, so again my inability might explain some of my preference). Recently I started playing deck builder styled games, and I really enjoy them, and wish I had made the association to what I liked about Magic sooner.
I am extremely biased, so I’m going to recommend Pokemon. The basic rules are simple enough for children, but there are enough cards with interesting combos and powers that it can be challenging for adults too. Unfortunately, the metagame was (last I checked) not great. Right now it’s dominated by who can get the strongest pokemon out the fastest, without much strategy involved.
I’ve also played Yugioh and Weiss Schwarz, both of which were fun and easier to learn than Magic. Weiss Schwarz has the downside of being more niche than both Pokemon and Yugioh. I live in a relatively large metro area, and I don’t know a single card store with a Weiss Schwarz league.
If you’re willing to depart somewhat from the CCG theme, the Clank! series from Renegade Games might suit you and your fiancee. They aren’t CCGs, but they are deckbuilders, combined with a map you have to traverse, to get treasures at the end. In the original fantasy-themed Clank!, the map is a dungeon guarded by a dragon. The second game, Clank! In! Space!, is sci-fi, with a spaceship owned by one Lord Eradikus (kinda sorta like Ming the Merciless / Darth Vader).
I have more experience with CIS! than C!, and from what I know, I much prefer CIS!. C! has a single map, IIRC, while CIS! has several submaps called modules that you can mix and match and put together like giant puzzle pieces to create the ship. CIS! also has a few more gameplay features. Both have expansions with additional features. The art is whimsical and littered with sly thematic references; CIS!, for example, borrows from Star Trek, Star Wars, Futurama, Dr. Who, Babylon 5, and even less well known stuff like The Last Starfighter.
If you’re interested in a purer deckbuilding experience, there’s also Shards of Infinity. I’m told it has some of the same features as Keyforge, but without the balance issues. I enjoy it a lot, due to some of the “combo” plays I can pull off. And the entire game fits into a box the size of a book.
I am not sure how hard it is to do, but starting with cards from a much earlier set would help a lot, they have added a lot of rules and removed few, such that the current state of the game is way more complicated than earlier states of the game. Getting to a point where you have fun with a couple of decks from an earlier set, and then gradually learning newer rules might work.
Although honestly I don’t actually enjoy most of the new mechanics, the planeswalker card concept, and basically everything that came after it, has made a worse game IMO. So while this would be I think a good method for getting into magic, I can’t really recommend it.
Complexity has ebbed and flowed. Ikoria is a very complex set, but still not a patch on Future Sight (2007), and no modern mechanic comes close to the complexity/incomprehensibility of Banding. Contemporary core sets are much simpler than non-core sets from any era of the game.
I played regularly from 3rd edition to Kamigawa, so the reference to two complex blocks both after that, feels, appropriate.
Banding was very complicated I will grant that for sure, the only mitigating factor is that the game in general was much simpler.
I’m curious as to what you mean about the game in general being simpler, as distinct from the mechanics. The rules being less explicitly codified? Fewer cards having mechanics/rules text? Fewer evergreen mechanics? To my eyes, the most complex expert expansion in history other than Future Sight is almost certainly Ice Age (1995). Practically every card has a wall of text, usually text that does something weird, cares about something weird or both.
I mean there are fewer mechanics in general, fewer card types. Maybe my impression is wrong, but I see a distinction between card text and rule book text. I don’t really care how complicated an individual card might be, I am more concerned with how many rules there are in the rule book. In theory enough complicated cards with a very simple core rule set still makes for a very complex game, but I guess the difference I see is mostly in that you always have to read new cards to know what they do, the more core rules you have the more jargon ends up on the cards the more jargon you have to keep in your mind.
It reminds me of a difference between 4e and 5e of D&D. In 4e almost every game relevant aspect of your character is on your character sheet, it is very complicated, but when you sit down to play you just need your sheet and you reference your sheet. Similar to referencing the cards in front of you. In 5e a lot of the tactical depth comes from Chapter 9 – Combat, and if you don’t have your PHB with you, or a very deep understanding of the rule book, you are missing a lot of what your character can do.
Upon reflection this might be a totally personal preference, but I would always rather have a complicated tool tip/card/etc then have a complicated reference document/menu/etc that I have to keep on hand when playing a game.
Edit to clarify: As such it is possible that my impression is 100% an artifact of MTG gradually pushing more and more rules into a rule book, when maybe the total number of rules has actually gone down, I just remember my first rule book fitting in the box with my starter deck and the PDF I just googled is over 200 pages long.
It’s quite old and might be hard to get hold of, but maybe the Settlers of Catan Card Game?
It’s has a basic mode where you can only use cards from a set determined at the beginning of the game (like Dominion), and an advanced mode, once you’re familiar with the cards, where you build decks before the game using your choice of all the available cards and making use of synergies between them (like Magic, but a lot simpler).
My husband and I enjoyed playing it at a time when I found the huge range of cards and mechanics in Magic too intimidating (although I did subsequently get into Magic).
Seconding (thirding?) the Keyforge recommendation. It’s how Magic felt like when you were just a kid and nobody netdecked, nobody ordered cards online, there was no meta, and you opened a booster and were ecstatic about that cool rare that nobody else has, and the cool combos that you can pull off 1/10th of the time. Definitely the best, and least money-consuming, casual card game on the market right now.
The only flaw is that to an extent “the game plays itself” – there aren’t that many interesting decision points and many times you will lose to randomness, though I still view it as better than MtG in this respect. Card games really suffer from this effect in general, the only one I played that didn’t was Android:Netrunner… but that’s definitely not a casual game, and currently on community life support after the publisher dropped it.
That’s probably a benefit as I’m probably going to be more “into it” than my fiance is, spend more time thinking about the meta, reading stuff online, etc.
But she still needs to win a decent amount of the time or she’s not going to enjoy playing.
The Euclid is a Canadian math competition for high school seniors. You are invited to guess what portion of the top 20 contestants in 2019 had Chinese names. You can check your answer in this PDF, on page 11:
https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests/2019/2019EuclidResults.pdf
The top 20 are groups I and II.
I guessed 12/20. It looks like it’s 17/20 (and all in Group 1 are Chinese).
And your point is?
Obviously that being good at math will tend to confer upon the person a Chinese name and we should expect people who study math to gradually develop Chinese names over time.
Lamarckian Nominative Determinism for the win!
You mean it is now written that way, whereas it wasn’t before you studied math?
If nearly all of the winners happened to be from Lithuania or Portugal or wherever, that would also be interesting, wouldn’t it?
Yes, even just going by stereotypes I would have expected a more diverse mix. Shouldn’t there be some Russian names in there? Maybe some Indians? Jews? Nope. Wall-to-wall Chinese.
@zero:
> And your point is?
One theory (almost certainly wrong) is that at the upper extreme of math ability, the Chinese have an overwhelming genetic advantage. I guess this isn’t impossible, but it seems very unlikely. A more likely theory is that high performance in academic math competitions is a trainable skill, and the Chinese community in Canada has both a culture that encourages such excellence and a good method of training for this performance. To the extent that winning math competitions is a useful skill (or to the extent that it can stand in for other more useful skills) other groups might find it worthwhile to examine what this culture and training are like, and how it achieves these results, as well as what the downsides might be.
Yeah, Chinese-Canadian cultural affinity for math(s) seems a more likely culprit than any genetic explanation.
I find it nigh-impossible to believe there’s not a genetic component, but my personal experience does attest to at least a partial cultural explanation here. The top tiers of these math competitions require training. My private high school participated in an area math competition every year, and though we had plenty of smart kids and sharply outperformed the public schools by any academic metric you could name, they crushed us at the math competition. And our private school was about as large as these public schools, to be clear.
Unlike them, we didn’t have any sort of after-school “math team” that met regularly and drilled on these sorts of questions. A handful of us were just voluntold to show up once a year to the math competition, get asked a bunch of questions we weren’t familiar with (not remotely the sort of stuff covered in AP Calc or AP Stats), and get destroyed. A distant last place every single year. They at least bought us pizza afterwards.
How do Chinese who want to immigrate to Canada get selected? I live in the US in the DC area, and there’s a large Chinese and Indian population that I think is mostly scientists/engineers working at federal agencies and federal contractors/tech companies in the area. Their kids are, unsurprisingly, also very smart.
You can see what the questions look like here:
https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html
I was surprised to look at the US list and see that it is also something like 2/3-3/4 Chinese in recent years. I had thought that people of south and southeast asian descent were a more substantial fraction back when I was involved in the late 1990s, but when I look back at the names I see it was actually mostly white!
https://www.maa.org/node/124007
You’re conflating the protestors and the rioters/looters – the latter are taking advantage of the former.
The police don’t seem to have killed anyone, no. Although that may be more by luck than judgement given (for examplee) the comment immediately below yours.
Given the large number of videos that have appeared of the police doing similar things to protestors, I think the protestors are doing it despite the risk of being kettled, tear-gassed, hit with batons/rubber bullets/shields etc.
I’m not sure that’s a meaningful distinction at this point, given that the only discernable difference between protestors and rioters is that the latter are smashing/burning/looting stuff right now.
We can’t read minds and anyone going out with the intention of rioting and half a brain will vehemently protest that they are… ahem… protesting if asked.
The short of it is that once peaceful protests devolve into civil disorder, you only get the option of participating in the civil disorder. Even if you aren’t personally smashing and burning, your very presence on the streets is enabling the rioters/looters.
The thing to do, if you are interested in peaceful protest, as opposed to enabling the rioters, is to get off the streets until the situation calms down.
If that was actually followed it would allow a small group of rioters or looters to prevent any and all protests, because any sign of disorder would oblige protestors to stop and go home.
It’s also not totally relevant to my point. The presence of protestors may enable rioters, and it may be difficult for people to distinguish between the two at any particular moment, but Atlas said “The looters and rioters are out there committing theft, arson, vandalism and jaywalking because they’re worried for their lives if the police suspect them of committing crimes?” and I don’t agree this is the case. Protestors are protesting for that reason; rioters are rioting because they can. That distinction holds and is relevant to Atlas’ point.
This is, in fact, how things generally happen in my neck of the woods and I personally don’t recall things getting anywhere near as bad as they are in the U.S. currently before this happened.
The last protest I’ve seen disbanded for unruliness didn’t even really start properly before some idiots set off flares, which was sufficient grounds to turn it from a legal demonstration to an illegal public disturbance.
None of this has, generally, impeded the ability to protest and even force some concessions in the face of an authoritarian and less-than-legally-minded government.
I think the point Atlas is making here is that the protestors’ concerns appear to be detached from reality when the police brutality they are manifesting against fails to manifest in the face of massive civil disturbance.
If “[t]he protesters/rioters are really concerned that America’s militarized police are using unrestrained violence against suspected criminals, particularly African-American ones” one may justifiably ask why the police aren’t out there cracking rioter/looter skulls.
@Faza
There’s interesting. Where do you live?
In which case we appear to have incompatible interpretations of reality because I’ve seen lots of videos of police brutality in the last week. Very few (if any) people have died, which does show that some rhetoric is overblown. But I’ve been pretty shocked by the prevalence of police violence, so I don’t think this has really disproved the protestors’ point. My view is that yes, death from police violence is extremely rare, but police violence is clearly a problem. From a totally neutral “what things in the world are most dangerous” perspective, it should be ranked less highly. But 1) people really, really hate police brutality (with good reason) and 2) people don’t only rank issues for importance by what the statistics show is most dangerous.
Poland.
As have I. I’ve also seen lots of videos showing the rioters in action and my interpretation is that you could probably do with a whole bunch more police brutality.
Here’s the thing: I’m old enough to remember the social disturbances on the tail end of Communism and it’s immediate aftermath (which was no picnic, let me tell you). The old-school militia didn’t fuck around. If you got as far as burning down a police station,* you’d have the military shooting live rounds at you.
Things tended to settle down after we’d put Communism to rest and managed to make up some economic distance, but – nevertheless – the understanding has always been that if you’re peacefully protesting, the police will leave you alone, but if you try rioting, you’ll be crushed with the full weight of non-lethal riot gear: water cannons, tear gas, pepper spray, batons, you name it.
Living in a country with football hooligans, neo-nazis, anti-globalists and assorted other jokers, I consider this good.
* It was actually the Party Provincial Committee house. Unfortunately, the English wiki article omits most of the details.
@Faza (TCM)
No offense, but i think how you may be viewing this problem is colored strongly by the fact that you don’t live in America. But specifically to address your point:
Why is police brutality good? You state that
but that’s incomparable with the notion that the state, having a monopoly on force, must be held to much closer scrutiny and a monumentally higher standard than the civilians that live in it. If a civilian commits a crime, the justice system here will almost assuredly enforce punishment upon catching then. However, the same is not at all true for those in positions of power, such as police officers. When a police offer does blatant and unreasonable violence (i don’t need to link, i’m sure you’ve seen some), people are upset because they have the protection of the law to do that, and believe no punishment will come (i also don’t think i need to link proof of this). Therefor, the correct response to “the police are unaccountable and violent” is not “well the protesters are the same”, simply because the protesters are not unaccountable by the very nature of the existence of the first problem! And removing the first problem also doesn’t reintroduce the second problem, because what stops the first problem is justice, not violent justice without accountability.
Simply put, the crux of my position here is there is no reason for police to do this, and no reason they should use any level of violence except the exact minimal amount required to halt a situation. And from my experiences in the country itself, we are absolutely nowhere near that level.
@metalcrow:
Indeed. I consider this a Good Thing.
You misunderstand.
I completely agree with the idea that the police – by virtue of the powers given to them – should be held strongly accountable for their actions. Frankly, even with everything currently going on in Poland at the moment (COVID panic, attempted authoritarian coup), the shit that goes down in the States wouldn’t get off the ground here.
I mean: how is SWAT-ting even a thing? Here, it would happen at most once and would likely be a scandal sufficient to cause the Minister of Interior to resign.
It’s not like police brutality – even lethal police brutality – never occurs. However, compared to what I see coming out of the U.S., our local “Robocops” (they gained the appellation following the military-field-style uniforms adopted a while back) look like the English plod.
Hell yeah police should be held accountable for use of unwarranted force.
But…
When people are rioting, looting and burning things down the police should be coming down on them like a ton of bricks. It’s, literally, their job. It’s why we have them in the first place.
What I mean by needing more “police brutality” (scare quotes now to strictly indicate hyperbole) is that when you have people in the streets sowing indiscriminate destruction, the first and foremost responsibility of the police is to clear the streets. People who aren’t supportive of the wanton destruction (and let me register here that I don’t for a second believe that the sets of “protesters” and “rioters” are wholly disjunct) can do the right thing by their fellow law-abiding citizens by clearing the streets of themselves and their friends.
If someone chooses to, nevertheless, participate in the mob – and here, again, I refuse to distinguish between “protest” and “riot, because there is no way to tell which side of the line a particular person falls on until it is too late – I take it as a revealed preference that they are okay with being on the receiving end of the police trying to restore order.
This does not necessarily mean that any all actions undertaken by the police in pursuit of this task will be justified, but it does mean that a lot of harm could be prevented by the victim simply deciding not to be there in the first place.
I probably wouldn’t mind an expectation that non-rioters GTFO the way when people start smashing shit so that the police can restore order.
But does it create a variant of the Heckler’s Veto where, if I don’t like a protest and want to break it up, I can just hire a few thugs to start breaking shit? Then everyone has to run away.
@Faza (TCM)
I think i can agree with the majority of this. I am against rioting, looting, and general violence. While i reject that the refusal to distinguish between “protest” and “riot”, i do agree that in a riot, the police are justified in the use of tear gas and appropriate force to clear out the riot. I guess what i want to stress is that i think i see, currently, that when people are rioting, looting and burning things down the police are coming down on them like a ton of bricks. But they are also coming down on them like a ton of bricks in cases where where it is pretty clearly not a riot, however you define that.
I can agree with that, with the caveat that a riot is defined very differently between the police viewpoint and the public viewpoint. Like, the current attitudes of the police seem to be that throwing disposable plastic water bottles at them constitutes a “riot” in the same way actual burning and looting is a “riot”.
To go on a bit of a tangent here, my hope for these protests is the 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). These preserve the ability of the state to decrease crime and allow order, but also dramatically lower the amount of suffering and necessity for the police our current system has.
Already exists for any right-wing protest. All the left has to do is show up and counter-protest (with violence) and then the cops declare it to be a violent public disturbance and shut the whole thing down. They were pretty open and explicit about having successfully done this in Charlottesville.
Matt M:
Isn’t it remarkable, then, that there were a bunch of widely-covered anti-lockdown protests just recently that didn’t get shut down this way? Or that five minutes with Mr Google will get you dozens of examples of right wing rallies/protests/etc. that didn’t get shut down this way?
Why, it’s almost as though the authorities can usually distinguish peaceful protests with a couple assholes trying to start trouble from actual riots, and respond accordingly.
@albatross11
A little less snark, please?
The difference is obvious: there were no leftist counterprotests to the anti-lockdown protests. We’re talking about the heckler’s veto. There were no hecklers to the anti-lockdown protests.
If counterprotesters had shown up at the anti-lockdown protests and started throwing things, it’s plausible the police would have dispersed the entire protest, and the media reported it as a “violent anti-lockdown rally.”
Matt M wasn’t saying every right-wing protest gets shut down, just that the ability to shut them down has already been employed.
It’s really important to remember that the videos you see are:
a. Not a representative sample of what’s going on.
b. Curated by either your media sources or your social media circle to re-enforce a narrative they prefer.
This is a very big country and there are a lot of protests. Most of them are small and go off with no significant disturbances. Looters and rioters burning shit down and police wading in to gleefully bust heads have both happened in some places, but aren’t remotely the whole story. But there’s enough of each that you can find some video to make each one sound like the whole story.
California policeman fatally shoots suspected looter kneeling in front of store, the cop shooting through his own windshield.
You can just as easily say the protestors are covering for the looters.
…and I just watched a short video from Fox, where several people are presented as demonstrators, interviewed, and coming down in support for looting and vandalism, up to and including shooting the cops.
Obviously, this is not a representative sample, but neither are videos of police brutality, with dozens of cities rioting and arrests in the hundreds or thousands in each of them. And we live in a world where nobody cares about statistics, and everybody strives to produce and reproduce evidence supporting their own beliefs. Right now, people who feel at risk from police brutality get their fears affirmed from any number of videos of brutal behavior of cops. At the same time, white and well-off people who worry about drugs and violent crime can see for themselves that, yes, blacks and radicals actually do want to take their stuff and burn their homes.
We can maybe look to political leadership to try to calm things down and unify the nation? I think Obama is saying the right things, but he’s out of office, and Trump is not (how shall I put) endowed with the same eloquence and affinity delicate handling – and on the other side of the fence, D.C’s mayor just renamed the street outside Trump’s window to Fuck Trump Plaza.
What a mess this is.
I don’t watch Fox News, but I’ve seen this from white people on Facebook.
The confounding factor here is that I only friend people I’ve met face-to-face, and so most(but not all!) of those radicals are from the city I moved out of 6 months ago… Portland.
I wonder what fraction of people who justify looting during protests also worry about food deserts in inner cities.
On twitter justifying it? A circle.
Man, the hits just keep coming. Cops in Buffalo shove an old man over, he falls down and hits his head on the sidewalk hard enough that he can’t get back up and needs to go to the hospital. Here is an article with the video (although warning that this video is a bit hard to watch, that old guy really nails his head, and there is blood, although apparently he is in stable condition now):
https://news.wbfo.org/post/graphic-video-two-buffalo-police-officers-suspended-after-violently-shoving-man-ground
Anyway, what really got me was the statement from a department spokesman: “a 5th person was arrested during a skirmish with other protestors and also charged with disorderly conduct. During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.”
Naturally, after the local news station posted the video online, the department decided instead to suspend the officers involved and launch an immediate investigation. It’s amazing how these random innocent accidents keep turning out to be worth investigating if someone had a camera running.
Which is also why I am pretty darn skeptical about all those police violence statistics. Those stats aren’t, “How many unarmed people did police hurt or kill?” They’re “How many unarmed people do police acknowledge hurting or killing?”
Seeing police abuse an old white man doesn’t update my beliefs.
Police flexing like this has been a long-boiling civil liberty issue, but libertarians aren’t high-status enough to control the Narrative. Furthermore there’s the disturbing question of what police are for if they have no duty to protect us.
That’s mind-boggling.
I had assumed that this was going to be something like ‘the police are obligated to protect the public generally, not you specifically while being arrested’ or ‘while not technically a Constitutional right, we all agree this is what the police are for, cf. every related statute ever.’ But no, it’s that, according to the USC, the police don’t have to enforce mandatory restraining orders if they don’t feel like it.
Yeah, this kind of thing is why I can’t take seriously the occasional posts here that claim that only X number of people are killed by police. If George Floyd’s murder hadn’t been caught on video, he’d have been listed as dying in custody of a pre-existing medical condition.
I checked. Even if we assume that every arrest-related death is the result of police action (including natural cause and medical condition ones), that number increases to somewhere in the realm of 1,500-2,000 instead of 900-1,000.
I have no doubt that there deaths that are the result of police officer misconduct and/or malice which are then misreported or otherwise hidden (Note my proposals downthread). But that’s the rough upper bound for how many can be hidden that way.
So it approximately doubles? Seems fairly big if true.
I doubt most people, on either side, would have changed their mind if they found out the real numbers were 2x / ½ the numbers they thought before. People don’t have a good idea of the scale here.
It approximately doubles, if each and every arrest-related death is actually the result of the police. In which case rather than 0.1% of uses of force by the police resulting in death, it’s 0.2% of all uses of force by police resulting in death.
At most it doubles, but keep in mind that some people really do just have a heart attack while in the back of a police cruiser, without the cops doing anything at all to cause it.
How are those deaths being captured? At the start of the BLM movement it was discovered to many people’s surprise that no count was being kept of how many people are actively shot to death by police.
This led the Washington Post and other sources to begin trying to count it themselves, but presumably ‘wow, some guy tripped and fell and hit his head so hard he died, and a cop happened to be innocently nearby’ stories never even make it into the press, so how would they be captured in the data?
And of course we’re also not just talking about death. This guy didn’t die. How many people do the cops beat up for no good reason, and it never shows up in the data because they people in charge of recording that someone got beat up by the cops are the cops?
Do you have a source for that claim? I keep an eye on crime related statistics in general (both local stuff and the FBI, NCVS, and other BJS stats) and while there’s frank discussion that there may be under-reporting, as I said earlier the information we DO have is complete enough that we can put a rough upper bound on these numbers.
As far as use of force statistics in general, I suggest starting here: https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=84
As I mentioned, this was the case several years ago when Black Lives Matter really became a thing; the situation has changed in a number of ways since then.
But here’s the first thing I found on a quick Google trying to find articles from back then:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/
A number of the databases of police shootings that exist now were created specifically to address the fact that no one was even trying to keep an official, comprehensive count of police-related deaths or shootings as recently as 2014. However, by definition these databases are unofficial – these are places like the Washington Post or the Guardian trying to assemble the data with whatever is available to the public.
Probably more than died, but the number of those beaten probably tracks closely with those beaten to death. For this reason when we compare crime rates, or look for trends in crime rates, we use murder or death rates because it’s harder to hide bodies.
It reminds me of the murder case which just happened to be solved because someone found surveillance camera footage.
Bodies are pretty hard to hide, though planting guns is in principle easy.
What is the steel man argument for why the 57 resigned to protest the suspension of two accused officers in this incident?
The guy didn’t listen to orders not to come near, and they were afraid if they let one guy break their ranks others might try it as well, so they pushed him away, and he unfortunately fell over, but they feel the officers didn’t do anything wrong and are being made an unfair example of.
Moral steelman would be that they believe their colleagues did the right thing and are receiving an unfair punishment (suspension without pay).
Rational steelman. Whatever benefits they get out of being part of the Emergency Response Team (note, no one has resigned from the actual force, only from what appears to be a voluntary set of additional duties, which presumably came with some additional pay/benefits/prestige) weren’t worth running the risk of being suspended without pay.
Boss ordered them to do something. They did it. Now boss is angry they did it. This is obviously unfair.
So, my city has been graced by these mysterious unmarked security forces.
But first the background: I live in Miami and the protests in Miami have mostly remained pretty peaceful. The police dispersed a few crowds early on but things settled into a basically peaceful pattern within a day or two. The protestors have been highly disruptive but peaceful. There’s been an increase in property crime but the criminals have mostly been isolated incidents. They’re burglars who flee from the police, not rioters splitting off from the protests. There’s been virtually no riots.
There’ve been less than fifty arrests and there’s been minimal damage to city property (aside from graffiti, which was always common downtown but has become much more common and political).
The protestors put forth a list of demands that boil down to fairly standard Democratic fare. (They want more left wing politicians, they want some people to resign due to specific conduct, they wanted more tax and spend on social programs, they want protections for low income neighborhoods. You get the idea.) The protestors have been highly disruptive: very loud, lots of marches, speeches, that kind of thing. But not violent and the government has basically indicated they’ll accept this.
This is not new: this is how it’s been since roughly day three, and day one and two weren’t so bad either (still no riots). We’ve had daily protests for over a week and I’ve never felt unsafe to go out due to the protests. I went out to watch some yesterday. The police were just sort of watching from the sidelines. They chanted slogans at me and waved signs in my general direction. Didn’t feel threatened at all.
The police department is still in regular gear. They’ve called in reinforcements but only in regular gear. I’m pretty sure it’s just for manpower reasons and they’ve all been doing police duties in a single chain of command.
For some reason, Trump decided to order the same forces DC has down here. They were billed to Miami as specialized anti-riot police. No one in Miami or Miami’s government understands why they’re being sent here and there’s a strong conviction no one asked for them. Nor does anyone understand why someone would want them down here. Miami has been fairly peaceful so far. The mayor and the county both asked Trump not to send them and when they arrived anyway they asked them to leave. (They’ve also appealed to the governor who I understand has more authority to deal with this kind of thing and also has more of an in with Trump.)
They’ve refused to leave so far. The word is, unlike the guardsmen, they are staying outside of the local chain of command and are taking orders directly from DC. They have reportedly told the officials that if they don’t cooperate they don’t need local cooperation. They are in much heavier combat gear and have vehicles. They’ve mostly parked in downtown Miami and don’t seem to be doing much of anything. I’ve seen a few of them standing guard or walking downtown but not anything near saturation. The City of Miami has refused to give them billets so they’re renting rooms in a hotel.
No one appears to understand why they were sent here and they’re being tight lipped about it. The government is pretty sure no one asked for them and the city doesn’t need them. People have been shouting at them to go to Tallahassee, where the violence is much worse. And I’ve heard no small amount of unease at their presence. Some of the more conspiracy minded left wingers have said Trump sent them here to provoke an incident. (The conspiracy right wingers say they’re here to stop a coming violent rebellion funded by George Soros, because of course.)
The protests have been more subdued since they came but the protestors are claiming it’s because of bad weather. (We’ve had some pretty big rain and small thunderstorms.)
All in all it’s strange. I’m uncomfortable with the Federal government sending anti-riot forces over the objections of the local government to a place where there are no riots.
I am now really confused about what legal authority these federal agents have to be outside DC. The justifications I’ve seen for their presence in DC revolve around the feds’ special jurisdiction over DC. The Insurrection Act has not been invoked, unless I’ve missed something. How is this legal outside of DC without the Insurrection Act?
The Insurrection Act limits the military and National Guard. Their story is they’re not armed forces but a specialized anti-riot taskforce. Why they are in a city that doesn’t have, and hasn’t had, a riot is not a question anyone I’ve talked to can answer.
I am going to be profoundly amused at the world’s sense of irony if this actually results in liberal and progressive folks taking an interest strengthening federalism and state sovereignty. Pleased, mind you, but amused.
they might feign that interest for a week, but they’ll never actually take steps in that direction.
No, I think they’ll genuinely believe in it with all their hearts for about three days and then forget about it, and genuinely believe it’s the worst thing ever the moment a state tries to resist something they like. Most people just don’t think about it that much.
@toast
that is a more accurate take.
Eh, it depends. Even a shift towards “more federalism at the margins” helps.
they want to do things, not create space for others to do things. They might make noise about federalism, but when push comes to shove, what they’ll actually care about getting is their own positive vision.
Liberal federalism will look like: Lets get our president in, then he will sign a law saying X, Y and Z specifically allowing states to do things we currently like, and prohibiting states from doing things we don’t like.
They will believe in it as firmly and consistently as they did lockdown.
This. States deciding on their own whether gay marriage should be legal or not was fine when the federal law was “illegal.” But as soon as the federal law became “legal” all of a sudden federalism was unacceptable in this case.
@Jaskologist
Bingo.
I’m not sure why one would expect this any more than emissions regulations and bag bans result in conservatives taking a vocal interest in reducing local power. Both Republican and Democratic statements about local vs central power are rallying cries that are pretty much independent of their actual views on substantive matters.
At least we know who they are, though, right?
Not their names and SSNs, but “ATF agents, so we could call the ATF and they’ll tell us.” And if the ATF says “what? That isn’t us!” we can have the cops confront them.
Politico has a rundown. Spoiler: there are a ton.
What if you’re an art thief?
I need a movie of National Gallery of Art police foiling Thomas Crown Affair-style heists.
“Freeze, Police!” works for any law enforcement officer, even if they work for the Federal government. There’s no requirement to identify the specific agency.
I’d think they could just yell “Federal agents!” like they do on NCIS.
They’re actually pretty quick on the draw.
Best guess: they can operate to protect Federal property. So if there are ATF/FBI/DEA/whatever offices downtown, they can operate to protect those.
Does the Coast Guard only arrest drug smugglers on the shores of the Potomac?
Federal law enforcement officers have the authority to enforce federal law anywhere in the United States. With or without the insurrection act. Things like “don’t destroy federal property in a riot”, are federal laws. So the Federal government can send federal agents to stop that anywhere there is e.g. reason to expect that federal property might be destroyed in a riot.
And as long as they say that’s the reason, they can do it even if the real reason is that Donald Trump wants another photo op.
My guess is that Trump thinks that paying extra attention to Miami security will play well for him in the election.
I thought of that. Issue is he deployed them to Miami, not Palm Beach. If they wanted to respond to Palm Beach they’d need to drive through the protestors north for several hours.
I am within spitting distance of Mar-a-lago, and within 5 miles of the West Palm Beach protests. I don’t get out much, but I haven’t seen any unusual or unmarked security.
I think the more cynical take is Trump is sending the feds to peaceful protests and in a week he will tweet: The feds were all over the Miami protests, no wonder they were peaceful, NY should have taken the offer!
Cripes. That seems far too plausible. At least it puts a data point against all of the “Don’t blame them, look at what she was wearing!” riot gear arguments.
I dunno, to me this explanation puts you firmly in the “4D chess” camp where you are assuming Trump is thinking five steps ahead and is far more competent at long-range planning than we have any reason to assume he actually is…
Also it could be easily undone by a few well coordinated leftist groups saying “let’s go to Miami and escalate some violence now.”
Yeah, the problem with this theory is that I don’t think Trump is this crafty.
You are less cynical than me. I’m half expecting their presence to trigger actual rioting (even if they have to start it themselves), which they can then brutally suppress.
@Matt M
It’s really just one step. Like saying you’re taking hydroxychloroquine when you’re getting shit on for touting it. Crafty, but it’s checkers, not chess. Much less 4D.
That is bizarre. I googled around and found, this:
That’s it. Just D.C. and Miami. I could understand if it were something like “D.C. and Minneapolis.” But if there’s no riots in Miami…why? Is there something they know that we don’t?
If it were a different kind of threat that would be plausible (to my mind), like if it were a bomb disposal squad or something. But it’s not like you send in anonymous threats that you’re going to go looting. Like, that’s not how riots work. This is really weird to me.
What’s even weirder is that there are riots and damage in other parts of Florida. There’s been some issues in Ft. Lauderdale, from what I’ve heard. But they’re hanging out in Miami proper, which has been noted to be an outlier in how peaceful and cooperative both sides are being.
At this point, I am almost 100% positive that this is some kind of targeted play toward Cuban-Americans.
How do you figure? Are cubans particularly upset by the protests in Miami?
No, but Trump needs to win Florida to win the election, and he needs Cuban-Americans to win Florida. I assume one of his political advisors told him this maneuver would play well among Cubans; I have no idea if this is actually true.
Could try copying DC mayor Bowser and plead the third?
They did, actually. The National Guard troops the Governor sent down (who are cooperating/under local control) are getting billets and equipment and all that courtesy of the city. They get to use local staging areas etc. The Feds had to rent a hotel and a parking lot and are having to resupply themselves.
Has anybody heard from @The Nybbler recently? I don’t think he’s shown up in the last couple OTs or post comment sections.
He’s still active on the motte subreddit.
Apropos of not seeing people in comments section: is Nabil ad Dajjal still around? Or did he lose his password again?
I would hope so.
In fact, I do.
Updates from the DC Protests:
Protests have continued and are increasing scope. Pretty much every day this week I’ve seen more people than I’ve ever seen out in DC gathering for protests. Just today I was on a run and saw +1000 people at the Lincoln memorial and another few hundred at the white house (Lafayette park). Yesterday I saw another couple hundred at the capitol building, and more at the whitehouse.
It’s almost impossible to describe just how much more calm it feels than it did less than a week ago. Whereas earlier there was the sense of constantly mounting tension… now it’s more akin to a somewhat focused block party if that makes any sense. I was just running today, not actively getting involved in anything and within 10 seconds of getting into one of the protest blobs someone had handed me some water and someone else had sprayed my hands with disinfectant. I also saw a protester going around with a dustpan and brush wearing a sandwich board saying “Tear Gas Isn’t Very Punk Rock!” sweeping up litter.
Even the feds are friendlier. I don’t know if they’re under orders, but literally every group of agents or nat. guard members I passed had at least one person wave at me and say, “good evening, sir” as I passed by. LE forces are doing their best to be as inconspicuous as possible. When the protest started forming at the Lincoln memorial most of the guards left the steps where they had been standing and went inside so that they weren’t as visible during the protest.
The tone of the protest has also changed dramatically. Instead of violence and clashes with the police, I’m seeing people giving speeches and protest organizers more actively controlling the crowds (I saw someone who tried to knock down a sign literally boo-ed out of the protest yesterday, and people who try to throw things are literally stopped by others in proximity). The focus is way less on being antagonistic towards cops and more towards keeping the protest under control.
Overall, this has made me actually pretty hopeful/positive on the whole thing. Both sides seem to be maturing in their responses and getting better at doing their thing without trying to actively harm the other side. I think that violence and looting might have been an artifact of both sides not really being all that familiar with how to protest/respond to protests.
The atmosphere is very weird. I saw guardsmen (most of whom are unarmed) chatting up protesters yesterday.
That’s very nice. What do you think caused this change?
It could be less agitators/looters trying to rile the crowd due to better scrutiny or orders from authorities to lighten up after bad press or some combination.
That sounds very nice. I’m glad to hear it. And I really appreciate your continued updates. It’s great having eyes on the ground we can trust.
I found this great database of police killings from 2000 to 2020.
I downloaded this to my own Excel file, so I can do analysis on it. I looked at the trend of incidents over the years, and it does appear the trend is slightly up. Maybe just population growth. But certainly not down. Incidents were a bit below 1000 in the years 2000-2002, and above 1000 every year after that. Getting close to 2000 now. Sounds faster than population growth.
This seems slightly contrary to Atlas’s post where he said killing of unarmed Blacks is down. Obviously a different population, but I would think would be in the same direction. Atlas, do you have a citation of where you found this? I looked in the Washington Post database, but I can’t find that item. Or at least tell us the numbers of unarmed Blacks killed every year from 2015 to 2020 (and what date is 2020 cut off?).
The database I linked above could yield the unarmed killing rate I think, because it has a description of every killing. But I don’t particularly want to look at all 28,000 lines right now. If someone has time and lots of patience over a month or two, that would be a great project. 🙂
No idea how complete the statistics are at this site but it seems to confirm that police killings of unarmed blacks has declined from a local peak in 2015.
Too lazy to dig it up again, but I saw an article with statistics that urban police shootings/killings are down, while rural are increasing. It also depends on the time frame, if you go back to 1970, I think there has been an enormous decline in police shootings, especially of black men.
Thanks, Atlas. I found my way to the database using your link. I have now downloaded the WashPost database.
The Wash Post database is indeed different from the earlier database I linked to. My earlier link has almost twice as many incidents as the Wash Post database. It may be how they define a killing, but also different sources. I noticed in my earlier link they include “vehicle” as what killed the person in many cases (200-500 per year). This looks to me like folks who die in a car accident when fleeing from police. I don’t think Wash Post includes such incidents. But that is only part of the difference.
When I looked at the trend of killings of unarmed over 2015-2020, there is a large decrease from 2015 to 2020, whether one looks at total incidents or just Blacks. But the main reason for that is because 2015 is an outlier. 2016 to 2020 show little change. So I think little evidence of real change. And of course you are right that the numbers are so small it is difficult to make any kind of judgment.
One thing I found confusing was their listing of races. They have categories of A, B, H, N, O, W. I presume this stands for Asian, Black, Hispanic, Native American, and White. But I have no idea what O is for. Now I need to be careful to not offend the O race, if I can figure out who they are!
Edit: Oh, it’s probably “other.” I wonder what stereotypes people have about the “other” race.
The times that I’ve dug into crime statistics the “other” category usually includes a lot of “unknown” because not every law enforcement agency keeps racial data on every offence.
Another reason for the federal government to be responsible for keeping track of this stuff. If you’re conspiracy minded, you might be able to say that the reason we can’t have numbers that are clearly comprehensive and accurate is because the government doesn’t want them to be seen and keep defending/blocking attempts to standardize collection of them.
Judging by how often I see it in emails, it seems all of the important people at my university and my former university have uncritically accepted the Implicit Association Test as an indicator of implicit bias, and that this is something that needs to be worked on. My understanding is that this is not very well supported by the literature on the IAT. I’m just venting here, I don’t feel comfortable bringing this up to anyone I know IRL.
Edit: going to use this opportunity to also complain about “silence looks like complicity”, which while the intentions might be good, I can’t feel comfortable with. I suppose this is what I get for trying to pursue basically the only option to do research in the field that I was meant to be in.
As everything is a Zoom meeting nowadays, I got to listen to my wife be required to listen to an hour meeting about how important it was for everyone to go take a couple of IATs for racism and sexism (because that was the theme of the meeting).
When I gave her a look as it began, she was already prepared to let me know she already IATs were not reliable, but she didn’t want to be so disagreeable to this new group she’s joined (for other reasons) as to point that out. Instead, she just suffered through the meeting mostly on mute.
So I very much sympathize. There’s a lot of group pressure out there to conform to nonsense.
I believe the problem with IAT is that they don’t actually show any correlation to professed beliefs or to actual behavior. But I’ll be interested to update in response to anyone who has data.
I do not think the intentions are good. I think the intentions (of that particular tactic) is to force you to take a side based on surface impressions and to vocally lend your support of the movement which will be taken to be support of all its aims and assertions.
I thought we were against lines like “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists”?
But they quoted Desmond Tutu! How am I supposed to respond to that?
“Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” should work okay if you can’t find something said by Black Panther or Captain America equally fitting.
In contrast and in heartening news, though, NPR aired a How implicit bias training falls short segment this week. That’s some pretty mainstream skepticism.
By saying it “falls short” aren’t they sort of implying that the solution is that we need more of it? Or we just need to do it better?
While they are skeptical that the training solves the assumed-to-exist problem, it doesn’t seem to me like “implicit bias isn’t actually a thing” is really an option they are seriously considering…
Quite. The problem with implicit bias training is that implicit bias research doesn’t replicate and the classic experiment didn’t prove what people thought it did in the first place, even if it had stood up.
I read it; it’s only a few paragraphs. You can absolutely interpret it as “we just need to do it better” and I can prove it on request, but I’m eating right now and don’t want to type a ton.
It’s not a rejection of the IAT, but given that the IAT was previously sacred stuff all over NPR before this, even this much turnaround is notable. There’s hope that someone will point out the replication fail yet.
Vox has been on this beat for years already.
Has anyone tried giving the IAT to self-proclaimed racists? All the things I’ve read are always testing white people against black people. Has anyone tried taking a dozen white sociology professors and a dozen white KKK members and running a blind test? This seems to me like the obvious next thing to try.
I think this is just a wave that is gradually passing through the population. Certain communities had it 10-15 years ago, but it’s just cresting in certain levels of university administration. By the mid-2020’s it’ll be the standard tool of well-meaning suburban book clubs, and a decade later it will have fully passed.
Black pipe with 45 degree angle joints. Most hardware shops will cut pipe to length and thread it for you, for a fee.
This isn’t my preferred solution, but I think it’s probably the best combination of strong, inexpensive, and easy to DIY. You don’t even need to do 45˚ joints; you can make it a simple rectangle with 90˚ joints, which will still be rounded.
It might not be the aesthetic you want, but I suspect that 3/4″ EMT conduit would be strong enough for a suspended chair, and it’s fairly easy to bend with simple tools. It’s used for “hoop houses”, the 10′ pieces are about $5 each at any large hardware store, and you can buy a bender online for about $50: https://www.buildmyowngreenhouse.com/lowtunnelbenders.aspx. Alternatively, you can save the $50 and build your own bender out of plywood: http://www.ittybittyimpact.com/tag/homemade-low-tunnels/.
The “low tunnel” hoop house design often has a 48″ width, which means that a 10′ piece of tubing has some straight “legs” at the base. So if you had two pieces, you could join the legs of both together to get the elongated oval you are looking for. You can buy a dedicated “splice” online (https://www.buildmyowngreenhouse.com/8pack1teeconnectorhooptobaserail-1-1-2-1-2-4-1-1.aspx), or you can just use either slightly larger piece of tubing or an internal dowel to connect them. If 3/4″ is not strong enough, larger diameters of EMT (1″, 1.25″, 1.5″, 2″) are also available at a slightly higher cost. I think the 1″ could also be bent with a similar approach, but I only have experience hand bending the 1/2″ and 3/4″.
Separately, I like SamChevre’s suggestion of using thin strips to glue up something out of thin strips of wood. You could also consider using a “cedar strip canoe” approach, and using thin strips of wood with a covering layer of fiberglass and epoxy. Searching online with give you lots of info about this, or this book is good: https://www.amazon.com/Building-Second-Revised-Expanded-Build/dp/1565234839/ref=pd_sbs_14_1/132-7678922-6533618. I’ve never built one, but have often been tempted.
Second the EMT conduit recommendation. You can also buy pre bent radiused corners
But I’d probably go thicker than 3/4″. 1.5″ should be fine, maybe 1″.
It’s a very soft steel (which makes it easy to bend) and drills fairly easily. Drilling on a curved surface is a little difficult, but should be OK. Yes, the holes would reduce the strength, but even mild steel is so strong compared to wood that this might not be a problem. If it is a problem, you could go to a larger size of conduit (so that the relative size of the holes is smaller).
A greater problem might be that sharp edges of the holes fraying or cutting your rope. Maybe drill the holes vertically and use a small eye-bolt? Or it might be easier and simpler to skip the holes and tie around the entire frame. You may need some way to keep the rope in place from side-to-side, but some tape or twisted wire on each side might be enough to keep it from moving. Or maybe even a tight knot in the rope would be enough?
I will say drilling on a curved surface is pretty difficult, due to the bit walking. Some ways to improve this are to use a punch / ice pick to make an initial divot that the bit will sit in, or using an end mill instead of a drill bit.
Are holes necessary or could you secure the net with e.g. bowlines?
Yes, EMT is drillable. I would recommend tying the hammock bits on if you can, though.
If you’re not drilling, 3/4″ would probably work but if you can get it 1″ is better. I can stand my semi-fat ass in the middle of a ~3′ scrap of 1″ EMT I have in the garage without noticeably bending it, but the 3/4″ scrap has a slight bend to it after the same treatment. I forgot to check how straight it was beforehand, though. The load on a hammock would hopefully be more evenly distributed, though, so… eh.
If you insist on trying to drill it, but don’t have a drill press, V-blocks, etc you can improvise a jig. Cut a V notch into something (e.g. scrap wood) as symmetricly as you can, drill a hole at the center of the V as straight as you can along the axis of symmetry. When you lay the V-notch over the conduit and place the drill bit through the hole, it will be centered-ish and shouldn’t slip. A little bit of clamping never hurts. You would have to do something about the burs so you don’t cut the rope. You’re on your own there.
Give up on the round curvature. Calculate straight segments and joining angles, and use cardboard, glue, and duct tape.
Huh?? Why not something stronger like wood and screws/wood glue?
Whoops, I thought maybe Zephalinda had no woodworking equipment, either. If they do, yeah, this could certainly be done with straight wood segments, glue, and some bolt/nut assemblies.
So a lot of the main admirals in WWII were just about (or just over) mandatory retirement age when the war broke out. None of them had any real wartime experience (Leahy participated in the Spanish American War, and I think Nimitz did antisubmarine for about a month in WWI), and certainly no wartime command, during their entire time in the navy.
Were they happy that there was a war? Do modern generals and admirals get upset if they retire without getting a chance at glory and fame, or are they happier that they didn’t have to act?
I don’t mean to imply that they’re all warmongers, they aren’t, but I think that they would hardly be human if they spent their lives dedicated to preparing for something and were not a little disappointed that it didn’t come, even if the thing to come was awful. If nothing else they, like almost everyone, would see other people doing what they were trained to do and think that they could do it better.
Probably not. I mean, admirals today find ways to stay busy during their careers and pretty much none of the ones I’ve met have felt like failures or that they were lost to history.
I think you’re underestimating just how busy a peacetime military can be. Even if there isn’t “war” there’s still enough going on over the face of the earth to keep these people busy.
Also, and warning – personal bias here, the kind of person who becomes a flag level officer during peacetime is the kind of person who is happy with and comfortable in a peacetime military force. That likely means that they would have spent most of their career managing budgets, personnel and logistics not fighting. They’d be no more comfortable in the hot seat than anyone else.
I started to wonder (when I saw Steve Carell promoted to four star general in Space Force) – how do you advance in the ranks to become general or admiral? Do you just wait for your turn or is it based on merits? In that case, what merits?
You can reach Colonel by waiting your turn and not screwing up, though if there’s no particular merit you may make full bird on the day you show up for your retirement ceremony. For General, you have to make a deliberate effort with above-average competence. There are specific prerequisites in terms of service and training, even getting access to those prerequisites requires people to see you as being on the General track such that the limited opportunity won’t be wasted. And even if you’ve checked all the boxes, this isn’t like the 19th century Royal Navy where you automatically get the promotion.
Exactly what constitutes “merit” depends on what sort of general you want to be. Even within the same service, being recognized as the right guy to command an armored brigade is a different track than being seen as the right guy to run major procurement efforts.
One criticism I heard against NATO forces in Ex-Yugoslavia was that they were too reluctant to engage when there was trouble, allowing bad things to happen. The reason being that officers needed to participate on something resembling front lines to advance their career, but obviously didn’t want to be responsible for casualties or actually take any risks.
What about the following:
Category 5: shootings that stop a dangerous criminal from escaping.
Category 6: shootings that kill someone doing something deadly that could have been stopped in a non-deadly way.
Are these parts of Category 3?
I don’t suppose anybody’s got any resources on nuclear reactor control systems theory?
The EU is planning a Green recovery.
During the whole lockdown, I’ve encountered people saying things like: “Well, at least the CO2 production is down”, “The air has never been cleaner”, “People have stopped flying planes; you see, it’s possible!”.
It always seemed suspicious to me that many of the measures taken during the lockdown are some of the measures the extreme green left has been advocating for. People not using cars; closing factories; reducing air travel and tourism; reducing all travel in general. And now, they are using the same agenda for the recovery from the harms made by their idiotic cruel undemocratic coup.
It’s not that I believe anybody created the coronavirus situation. But I do believe this whole thing has been used to push through some of the policies environmentalists would like.
Not to mention the meat shortage in parts of the US.
Although I have to wonder how much of environmentalist antipathy towards beef is just signaling antipathy to the red tribe, and that makes me wonder how much of the measures are just anti-red tribe or local equivalent as opposed to environmentalist.
Well, meat consumption doesn’t seem to be lower in Europe, and if it is, it’s because of poverty. Thankfully, I haven’t met anybody who expressed delight at people not being able to afford proper nutrition.
We’ve seen price increases in meat, especially beef, and inconsistent availability(again, especially beef).
The rational part of my brain is pointing out that I shop at grocery stores frequented by working class families who view ground beef as a dietary staple and steak as the default “treat” food, and also that the local news has(possibly irresponsibly) been running news stories about a looming meat shortage with a “totally don’t panic buy!” message. The tribal part notices how well the whole thing fits in with hard left/green agendas.
Meat prices have increased, but veg and fruit has increased even more.
Cherries, for example, have gone from 5-6 euros the kg to 10. Oranges have gone up. All fresh veg has gone up.
Since those who hate meat seem to want people to consume more veg, that doesn’t seem to achieve their objectives. Although they also want people to eat less and reduce food waste…
@ana53294 It’s probably a different sides of the Atlantic issue. Local vegetable staple prices seem broadly stable. And dang, those prices would be high here even before the price increases.
I agree this is mostly just the effects of a lockdown that wasn’t thought through before implementation, but people whose priors are heavy on conspiracy theories or lean slightly in that direction are probably seeing them strengthened.
The US CPI report for April says the largest food price increase was far and away for Eggs at +16.1%, with (scanning the list) the only other double digit mark was other pork (roasts, steaks and ribs) at +10.1%. Then there were a few in the ~7% range, such as Pork chops and fresh whole chicken. For the broader categories its
Beef and veal + 3.7%
Pork +3%
Poultry +4.8%
With the category of Meats/Poultry/Fish/Eggs +4.3%, and the Dairy and Fruit and vegetable sections both up +1.5%, and Cereals +2.9%.
The eggs number is a huge outlier there.
@Oldio:
Those pre-crisis prices for fresh cherries don’t sound high to me at all. That’s like $3/pound. But doubling that is pretty crazy high, nothing like that here.
I have to wonder how much the CPI factors in discounts from weekly sales. I buy meat on sale a large percentage of the time, but those sales seem to have gone away and been replaced by an inability to find what I want and having to take what I can get from the store shelves.
The increase in egg prices is kind of a non-factor because eggs are still a crazy cheap food. Increasing from $1 to $1.50 a dozen doesn’t affect anyone’s life that much unless you’re feeding an army. And I haven’t seen any shortages there.
You seem to have seen this coming, but not in a high-profile way.
What I’m saying is, you need a quadrilingual newsletter. Or at least a monolingual one.
I don’t undertand what you’re saying. Could you elaborate?
This sounds like something you’ve suggested in this blog’s comments before it happened:
I was trying to say in a light-hearted way that if you’d said this in your own venue, in 1-4 of the languages you know, you might have gained fame as a predictor.
More likely, a crazy extremist who wants to kill old people to save their pension money.
I’ve tried to talk to people in real life about this. The kind of response I get is scary.
This is neither necessary, true, or kind. You comment stands without it just fine, and it detracts from the level of discourse.
When you’re telling people that they can’t go to a family member’s bedside as they die, or to their funeral, even if they’re willing to accept the risk, “idiotic” and “cruel” are perfectly appropriate.
The fact that many people have the stunning hypocrisy to say that people can’t make this choice, but they can make the choice to have large public protests only adds to the idiocy and cruelty.
(N.B.: ana is from Spain, and IIRC, in the UK, but we have plenty of this hypocritical idiotic cruelty in the US)
I can confirm what he said is necessary, true, and kind.
“Idiotic and cruel” might also be appropriate for policies that allow coronavirus to spread unchecked and kill hundreds of thousands of people. The point is that you should charitably assume that people who disagree with you are neither idiotic nor cruel, or everything would just degenerate into people throwing insults at each other. Don’t assume that people who are anti lockdown want to kill off the elderly and disabled. Don’t assume that people who are pro lockdown want to make everyone poor or deprive them of human contact.
Saying that for no reason certainly would be, but the circumstances are such that going to a funeral could kill someone else. Why do people always say such-and-such thing is bad without considering the alternatives?
+1
Locking children* down for more than a month in tiny apartments so they get mistreated by their parents is not cruel and idiotic?
Although it will take time to see the full figure, we have already seen an increase in teenage suicide in Spain (link in Spanish).
When they didn’t allow children to accompany their parents on the allowed shopping trips, or walking the dog, and no exercise was allowed, they were jailing kids. Some of them live in abusive houses. Some of them live in tiny one-room shared apartments with their parents and another family with no internet or TV, no balcony and a tiny window. Not allowing them to go with their parents for a walk around the block is cruel beyond what is necessary (and the UK thankfully didn’t do that).
There were reports that, after the lockdown eased, children were scared of going outside, because the only way to keep them inside while the lockdown happened was to scare them. Now you’ve got a whole generation with agoraphobia. Congratulations!
As for the coup part: in Spain, health and policing is a transferred competency. The central government had no right to impose its will on autonomous communities, but it did so anyway, and couldn’t be challenged in court, because (surprise) the courts were closed. What is this, if not a coup? Breaking with the constitutional framework without going through the proper procedures established by our constitution?
For the undemocratic part: I didn’t vote for this, nobody voted for a party that promised to lock them down, and elections where I could go and protest vote to burn to hell all the parties that in any way supported the lockdowns have been cancelled or postponed. And it’s not good enough to tell me that I can vote once the public health emergency is over! I want to protest vote the lockdowns while they’re happening, not afterwards. I’m not sure I will be able to maintain my state of righteous indignation and hold my nose once everything is over.
*And this was an entirely foreseeable scenario. I saw it from the beginning, talked to people, and they all agreed, yes, that’s gonna happen.
> And now, they are using the same agenda for the recovery from the harms made by their idiotic cruel undemocratic coup.
> As for the coup part: in Spain, health and policing is a transferred competency.
I understand your points, but you’re being uncharitable, to put it mildly. Regarding the coup part: the handling of the COVID crisis in Spain may have gone against transferred health competencies (I honestly don’t know – I had the vague impression that this was within the scope of the state of alarm, but I may be wrong), but it was triggered by an exceptional crisis, approved by parliament and, most importantly to me, a temporary arrangement. Barring any unexpected developments, the state of alarm in Spain will end in two weeks, and regional competencies will still be there. If that’s a coup, it’s a pretty lousy one.
> For the undemocratic part: I didn’t vote for this, nobody voted for a party that promised to lock them down,
Regarding ‘undemocratic’: Again, these are exceptional circumstances. I’m willing to cut the political parties some slack for not saying anything in their program about how they would handle an unexpected pandemic. You can be sure this will change for the next elections, though whether any significant parties other than Vox will run an anti-lockdown message remains to be seen. As for ‘cancelled or postponed’ elections, there have been no cancellations that I’m aware of – regional elections have been postponed three months, out of public health concerns. I get that you consider this the wrong call, but calling it undemocratic seems unjustified, to me.
> Locking children* down for more than a month in tiny apartments so they get mistreated by their parents is not cruel and idiotic?
> When they didn’t allow children to accompany their parents on the allowed shopping trips, or walking the dog, and no exercise was allowed, they were jailing kids.
This is, to me, the most valid of the points you raised. I have been staying home with my family for months, in a fairly nice house with a garden, and I can see the toll it’s taken in our kids (never mind ourselves). So I can imagine how hard it’s been for people with less space. The Spanish policy may have gone too far in that regard, and I can easily imagine the people writing that policy, not living in a tiny apartment, failing to correctly assess the challenges for the people who do. That said, it’s worth pointing out that the purpose of said policy was to try to avoid thousands of deaths, and that there is a lot of uncertainty about how the sickness spreads. The measure may have been unnecessarily harsh, and we may eventually learn that it wasn’t particularly effective, but it wasn’t entirely unjustified, particularly with the information available two months ago.
A coup is still a coup. They get to show all those pesky regionalists who’s the boss. Just because the bully returns the toys, doesn’t mean it’s OK to take them in the first place.
Yes, I think the postponing of the elections is a breach of my democratic right to express my opinion of something that is happening right now. I disagree that postponing it because of exceptional circumstances is OK. It’s not. I should have the right to protest something while it’s happening, not after it has already happened.
Well, I’m also convinced the state of alarm is undemocratic, and the fact that courts were closed, and we couldn’t even challenge it, makes me more convinced it was a coup. A temporary one, but still a coup.
I have already expressed my frustration at the lack of choices. I’ve decided to hold my nose and vote for Vox, although I’m a Basque separatist, socially left and a feminist. But nobody else is against the lockdowns. If I find an alternative, I’ll vote for them, even if I find everything else they stand for repulsive. I’m a single-issue voter on the lockdown.
Banning motorcycles and cars would also prevent thousands of deaths. We still shouldn’t do it. As for the uncertainty… There is a remote possibility that I might fall down the stairs and die. Should we ban stairs, too?
Uncertainty is a fact of life. The only way to be 99% safe would be to wrap everybody in bubble wrap and feed them a nutritious sludge, so they can’t choke on it. It would be a pretty lousy life.
Ok, I’m legitimately impressed. Given what I know about you, this, more than anything you have said upthread, really illustrates the degree to which you’re upset about the lockdown.
(Not that I’m happy about Vox getting votes for any reason, but I guess that is a lost cause at this point)
Am I correct to understand from this that the lockdown itself is much more important to you than the regional implications of the state of alarm?
I don’t know, that’s not the impression I’ve been getting from the news. The government is weak, and has relied on the support, or at least the abstention, of these regionalist parties in order to extend the state of alarm. Even Bildu has been on the table, which was unheard of in national politics. I’m not saying the regionalist parties liked it, mind you, but I’m pretty sure they at least got something in return to make it worth their while.
.
At least an order of magnitude less. Last year, there were 1100 deaths in Spain due to traffic, whereas the official death count from Covid is around 27000. Completely shutting down traffic other than public transport for three months would have a comparable (if not greater) economic impact than the lockdown, and would prevent around 300 deaths. If we assume the lockdown reduced deaths from Covid in the country by 20%, that’s 6000 avoided deaths, 20 times the benefit. So it’s not quite the same.
Yes, I’m upset about the lockdown itself. I’ve been a Bildu voter since it was founded, and I’m really, really upset at them. They seem to see this as an opportunity to bash medium-big businesses (like their insistence on closing factories, etc.).
But I’m also upset at the manner in which it was done, how the courts didn’t review the state of alarm, how people got arrested and fine and they couldn’t go to court, how businesses were forced to close and they couldn’t go to court, how people weren’t allowed to go to pray and couldn’t sue, how people couldn’t hold a protest against the lockdowns. While the removal of the regional autonomy was done according to the laws of the state of alarm, I’m not so sure the state of alarm itself is constitutional.
If I were to describe my newly-found order of political priorities:
1. No lockdown
2. No lockdown
3. No lockdown
4. No lockdown
5. Supports regional autonomy
6. Has reasonably liberal economic policies
7. Socially left
Before, PNV ticked most boxes, but I hated their corruption, so voted against them just to keep them in their toes.
If there was literally any alternative to Vox, I would vote for them, but sadly, there isn’t. I don’t even trust Vox to have the guts and balls to not impose a lockdown in Christmas, when the coronavirus will return. I hope they do, because they’re family-values Catholics. I’m not sure they will.
60% of the deaths were in care homes. I have been in care homes, I think they’re pretty miserable places, and I don’t think the lockdowns in any way helped stop deaths in care homes.
The lockdowns should have been targeted, not general. Lower the pension age, give everybody oven 60 a pension, tell them to stay home, give everybody who’s vulnerable medical leave, have everybody else lead a normal life. It would have been ultimately cheaper.
Nobody can vote in advance for policies to deal with some unexpected crisis: you are demanding the impossible.
Sure, but once it’s happening, and there’s an election, even if it’s a minor regional one, let me vote.
I find the indeterminate postponement (which I think is like cancellation in some sense), are not allowing me to give my opinion on the decisions they are taking on my behalf.
What exactly is the claim here? To start with, three of the things you list are basically the same: reduced travel. That is for obvious reasons in terms of transmission (i.e. not spreading it between regions / countries), plus a consequence of there being less need to travel because workplaces are shut, which is also to reduce transmission of coronavirus. These travel reductions are all temporary. The UK has a Conservative government, it’s not secretly enacting an anarcho-primitivist agenda.
As for the green recovery: if the government is going to engage in fiscal stimulus, given that we are facing environmental issues that require investment to solve, why not do that with the fiscal stimulus we happen to require? This has very little do with travel.
Other people have objected to the “idiotic cruel and undemocratic coup” comment. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a malevolent lunatic; there are sensible reasons to be support lockdowns, just as there are sensible reasons to oppose it or think that it on-net has been negative. You would presumably object to being characterised as a monster who wants to kill off the elderly and infirm for being anti-lockdown, so extend the same charity to people who are pro-lockdown.
Well, I object to being called a monster, but I still get called one, so I don’t see why I should refrain. Locking kids, which was done in Spain, was unnecessary and cruel. Cruelty is not the same as malevolence; notice the idiotic part. They’re cruel because they’re privileged idiots who don’t know how many people live (in tiny apartments, crammed to the top), and because they don’t care to think about that, not because they decide to ruin poor kids’ lives on purpose.
The cruelty I’m talking about is the cruelty of indifference. Not caring about all the self-employed people who have to make a living, not caring about the small businesses that will have to shut down, not caring about the employees of those small businesses.
I don’t see why the government should use green stimulus. The areas of the Spanish (and British too) economy that got harmed the most are those that have nothing to do with the environment or energy. It’s tourism, food and catering, flights, manufacturing, retail. How will green recovery help them? Green recovery might help the economy, but it wont’ help those small businesses.
I think the recovery should focus on the businesses that got harmed the most, not on those our government wants to save or promote.
My point generally applied to discussions here on SSC and how they’re supposed to be conducted.
I agree that the strictness of the lockdown in Spain and France was probably unnecessary. I’m glad that the UK didn’t go as far in terms of prohibiting exercise outside for example.
But I don’t agree that they don’t care, I think they’re making a trade off between the costs of lockdown vs. the lives saved by it. Sweden didn’t lock down for example – it’s not that the Swedish government was indifferent to the deaths that might be caused as a result but that they evaluated the trade off differently.
Most of those industries should recover naturally, and they should all in principle benefit from the green fiscal stimulus anyway: if it boosts jobs and incomes, people can spend on tourism, hospitality, retail etc. It’s also not an either/or proposition. Germany’s stimulus package does both.
If they cared, they’d have thought about this. They would increase the number of staff they have for victims of abuse (I know, from close people’s experience, that the queues at abuse hotlines are long). They would have tried to inform at risk kids about this.
Was anything done to prevent the absolutely predictable outcome that anybody with common sense could foresee (i.e., an increase in depression, suicide and abuse)? no. They could have provided people with phone lines for anxiety and mental health specialists for those who are suffering through this situation.
They didn’t, not because they rationally weighted the number of people they could save by inflicting mental pain and suffering against the number of lives they could save, because then they would have come up with things like more staff for hotlines, mental health hotlines, etc., but they didn’t think about those things, because they don’t care about them.
I disagree that any of those industries will recover “naturally” from having to shut down their businesses. They won’t. Many of them will close due to bankruptcies. New businesses won’t open, because who will loan them money?
And I don’t think we have enough money to pursue both goals. Focus on recovering the economy first, let’s do the green thing once we are back to January 2020 levels of employment and inflation adjusted GDP.
And I’ve been indirectly, but personally accused of being a murderer for breaching lockdowns, which I don’t do. On SSC. So whatever.
I don’t think they have even tried, but it’s worth mentioning that expanding hotlines (never mind setting up new ones) would have been quite a challenge during the lockdown. A call center is an office, which your workers are now unable to reach. It’s not an insurmountable problem – I know that my organization successfully migrated its call centers to a work-from-home model –
but it’s not trivial either.
@ana53294:
> And I’ve been indirectly, but personally accused of being a murderer for breaching lockdowns, which I don’t do.
I wonder whether part of the reason you object so strongly to the lockdown is that you are starting with the expectation that it will actually be strictly obeyed. That is, maybe your ‘scrupulosity’ makes the problem much worse. My impression is that many people (and lawmakers) don’t even consider that possibility that others might actually follow the law as written rather than following it only to extent that it is enforced in practice. They instead assume that everyone will (without guilt) cut whatever corners are necessary to make the situation livable. Or is the current enforcement in Spain actually as strict as the law itself?
I’ve found it pretty interesting to compare the public reaction to “government official caught violating lockdown policy” scandals in the US and the UK.
In the UK they’ve had one such high profile case and it has been a huge public outrage. Apparently everyone just expected that government officials believed in their own policies and would strictly follow them, would set a good example, would not cheat for their own selfish benefit, etc.
In the US we catch a public official doing this about once a day, and everyone basically just shrugs it off, because we naturally expect that our politicians are corrupt, don’t believe in their own policies, and will cheat for their own benefit at every possible opportunity.
I would think that a call center would be almost literally the ideal case for work-from-home. To a first order, you do exactly what you’d normally do but have one guy in the office set up call forwarding to the workers’ home phones (or department-issued cellphones).
If you’re using the difficulty of implementing work-from-home in a call center to blow off upstaffing the call center that literally directly saves peoples lives in this crisis, it would seem odd to simultaneously implement a lockdown and say “don’t worry, this won’t cause complete economic collapse because hey, people can still work from home”.
@nkurz
Current lockdown in Spain is not as strict anymore. Kids are allowed to go out. But when kids weren’t allowed to go out, the police really did enforce the laws China-style. And idiotically: detaining people who were walking alone in the park, thus risking infection, making people go back from their summer homes, etc.
Exactly. It makes me doubt the sincerity of those who say it’s all about saving lives. It seems to me to be about saving the visible lives.
Apparently, the transition can be tricky. In our case, they had to buy new laptops for every worker in the call center and ship them to their homes… probably they were using desktop computers that weren’t easy to move to a home environment? At any rate, I remember hearing the process described as a major logistical pain.
Maybe that case was atypical, I don’t know. I just shared this because I thought it might be interesting – I was surprised when I heard it because for the people in my office, the move to work from home was completely painless.
To be clear, I agree that expanding abuse hotlines is something that should have been done, and that technical inconveniences are not an excuse for failing to do so.
Did people actually say that? I thought the pro-lockdown arguments were more like “This will wreck the economy, but saving lives is worth it”. Or the excessively optimistic “This will hurt the economy, but the virus would have wrecked it anyway, so we are saving lives almost for free”.
Then again, this may be a national thing. Trying to sell people on the idea that the economy won’t collapse is an uphill battle in a country where the primary source of revenue is tourism.
In the United States, they absolutely did. Essential services would continue, the government would provide some stimulus and disaster-relief money, and we’d have a temporary disruption followed by a quick recovery.
That’s a pretty charged statement. You need to show, and not just assume, that Covid measuires acutally are a “coup” and not unavoidable necessities that happen to coincide in some ways with envoronmental aims.
Maybe you could also show and not just assume why that is a bad thing.
It’s clear that the COVID measures are not “unavoidable” by the fact that many other jurisdictions avoided them.
We have very imperfect understanding of that, which impacts both sides of the argument. The point is that someone making an argument against , or for, anti-pandemic measures needs to ackowledge that tradeoffs existg, and not go in the hope that if they don’t notice them, they are not there.
You are the one who claimed that some amount of these measures were “unavoidable necessities.”
So long as, for any given measure, at least one place in the world didn’t adopt it, that proves that you are incorrect.
Avoiding the measures may have come with significant cost, but they are not “unavoidable.” Nothing is inevitable. “Do nothing whatsoever and let COVID spread and the chips fall where they may” is, in fact, an available option. It might not be an option you like, but it is available nonetheless.
Some measure is unavoidable, providing you want to avoid unnecessary death.
No. Not adopting it and having zero extra deaths would prove it.
It’s physically possible. So is jumping off a cliff. In these kinds of discussion, it is tacitly assumed that life is better that death.
That’s assuming that the tradeoff our current measures are making is an “unavoidable necessity.”
That would make it strictly better, “unavoidable” would be justified if there would be a place without unreasonable number of deaths (depends on what you consider as acceptable outcome).
The government is not required to minimize “unnecessary death” (itself a highly subjective term that cannot be easily quantified) at the expense of all other priorities.
Therefore your statement is false. “Let’s have some additional unnecessary death” is absolutely an option that is available. Like I said, that might not be the option you prefer, but that doesn’t make it mandatory.
Edit: Dog-pile was unintentional. Forgive me, I’m going to leave this up.
No, not adopting it and not having your society break down would prove it.
States make decisions about what trade-offs are acceptable. Liberty comes with risk, and safety imposes restraint.
Now, you might think very tight restraints are justified by Covid risk. I can’t say you’re right or wrong, that’s a value judgement. Who’s making the judgement in this case is what determines if it is democratic or otherwise.
If you want to force someone to do something, you threaten to kill them if they don’t. That is posited on death being an unacceptable option.
If societal breakdown leads to extra deaths, that would be included. In any case, the topic is Spain.
Which government?
It is just as subjective as the other side. The asymmetry is between the people who acknowledge tradeoffs, and the people who say “it’s bad”.
I didn’t . though. I said people should acknowledge that the restrictions have a justification and are not random cruelty.
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Obviously. But Spain has a democratic government, as these things are usually counted. The objection was that the government they have doens’t fit the speaker’s notions of how things should be.
So sole and only priority should be reducing number of deaths, at expense of everything and anything else?
That is not going to work for many reasons.
What’s the thing that’s more important than life?
Freedom.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death. I’m also kind of fond of the pursuit of happiness.
The dead cannot enjoy freedom. Being free is posited on being alive.
Everybody dies. Choosing what to die for is one of the most vital freedoms.
This is about when you die.
Avoiding death as sole and only priority is dumb.
For start, anyone may blackmail you just by a credible threat.
On personal level: there is plenty of low risk activities that are done. Every single time you leave your home you risk death.
Taking avoiding death as sole priority would have you covered in a padded bunker.
There is no issue of making a 100% trade of life versus economics or stability, because if the economy of polity gets bad enough, then that costs lives.
Freedom, it allows each individual to determine what is most important to them, which includes life.
Everything of value, if “life” means “avoiding some probability, however small, of death.”
Like another poster I commented on a day or two back, you are writing as if all probabilities are the same. I will, and do, go to a good deal of trouble to avoid a one percent probability of death. I will go to very little trouble, and expect others to go to very little trouble, to avoid a one in a hundred million probability of death.
Your “what’s more important than life” treats those as if they were the same.
Those aren’t great examples, since many of them are being phased out or in. They are not robust examples of things anyone should be allowed to do to any extent.
Same thing. There are limits at 65 or whatever to preserve life.
If you want to argue against lockdowns on the basis of QALY’s, feel free to do so. Just don’t pretend that keeping people alive is irrelevant.
If you freely take actions that kill someone, they no longer have that ability. Freedom does not allow people individuals to maximise aggregate freedom by maximising individual freedom.
Our society has to make tradeoffs of freedom and quality of life over excess deaths all the time.
Already mentioned is public health nutrition and speed limits.
Abortion is a much bigger one though. Millions of fetuses are killed each year because we value freedom more than we value human life in that case.
In a democratic order, you get to vote. You also get to go to court if some law is unconstitutional, or the police actions are unreasonable.
These two conditions weren’t met during the lockdown. Elections were indefinitely postponed (they’re happening in July, but at first we didn’t know when they were happening). And you couldn’t go to court after the police arrested you and gave you some unreasonable fine for walking around the block.
So yes, I consider it a coup. A temporary breakdown of the democratic order embodied in the collective agreement which is the Spanish Constitution.
I would use laminated wood–cut wood into sufficiently-thin strips on a tablesaw, bend around a form and glue together.
I do not think so–a lot of applications use laminated wood where there is some flex, like chair backs. I would just use regular wood glue (Titebond or Elmers), although some people use epoxy (especially common in boat-building) or urea-formaldehyde (plywood glue)–but both of those are fairly toxic until they cure, and regular wood glue is very safe and cheap.
I think there is a lot of potential behind the idea of Micronutrient testing, but I am considerably concerned about the accuracy of tests currently available.
I’ve done some cursory research (several hours today), and am not finding much positive of it.
Has anyone else here done research on it and came to the same/different conclusion?
Given the number of caveats with testing (at least some micronutrients can’t be reliably determined from blood levels AFAIR, what matters is the stored volume which cannot be directly tested) I’d go for saturating all the important ones with diet instead and hoping for the best.
Some micronutrients (e.g. iron) have very obvious deficiency symptoms, which you should be able to catch without bothering to test.
Two things you are almost certainly deficient in are omega-3 acids (or rather their relative ratio to omega-6) and vitamin D, courtesy of lifestyle, diet changes, and changes in food production. Your great grandfather probably got quite a bit of EPA and DHA from his diet, you are getting almost none unless you go out of your way to eat it.
Question for @DavidFriedman.
It seems obvious that anarcho-capitalism is the ideology that maximally glorifies capitalism. Why then do you think it’s orders of magnitude less popular with practicing capitalists than a sort of vague neoliberal statism?
I’m not David Friedman, but…
What makes you think “practicing capitalists” are interested in capitalism per se, rather than maintaining the status quo?
Naively we could model billionaires as losing the most from progressive taxation. That could be all wrong at the margin/psychologically (Bill Gates got so absurdly rich that he can’t think of any more ways to use post-tax income than to maximize its utility to poor total strangers), but it’s true of absolute dollar values and so makes sense as a first guess.
I think taxation levels are orthogonal to market-freedom, or at least a tangent.
There could be a heavily regulated market with low or high taxation and vice versa.
Gates, being in charge of a dominant corporation, benefits from regulations that punish start-ups disproportionately (as the increased cost is easier to absorb with economies of scale), and he can pass the increased costs on to consumers. This might well make Gates more money (or influence) than he loses in progressive taxation.
It takes a principled entrepreneur to continue to support a free market once they have moved into a dominant role in it.
And almost any regulation will punish start-ups disproportionately.
I’m not him but:
1. Competition sucks if you’re one of the competitors. Once you’re a successful capitalist, the upstarts are just eating into your profit margins. So it’s rational to try and limit entry, and since governments rarely grant exclusive legal monopolies nowadays, you have to make do with facially-neutral rules imposing large fixed costs on all parties. The consumer costs outweighs the benefit to producers, but the former are spread out and the latter concentrated, so this becomes the norm in almost all industries.
2. There’s substantial uncertainty about the feasability of any system not currently in use. Incrementalist reform is less risky and way more achievable, therefore that’s something people think about more.
Caplan’s “Explain your extremists” posts is a more generic framing of your question.
Yeah, given that modern society is not fully capitalist (or even very close to that), the most successful “practicing capitalists” in modern society are not really practicing actual capitalism as it would exist in an AnCap society. They are dependent upon a skillset that may be entirely different. The people who dominate a “mixed” economy have much to lose and very little to gain by the proposal that we transition to a purely capitalist one.
My takeaway from that is that the state being smashed in favor of stateless capitalism is vastly less probable than a violent social transition like the American and French Revolutions were. These revolutions had demographic constituencies acting in their rational self-interest: the wealthiest 1% of the Third Estate decapitated the elites above themselves, or the plantation-owning British American elites chased out the Peers and told the Episcopialian bishops they were no longer Lords Spiritual because there wasn’t an Established Church anymore.
+1
Because anarchy does not work, and you cant have capitalism under it, which is painfully obvious to anyone trying to run an actual business? Noone outsources to Somalia, and there is so many reasons for that.
Approximately none of which are “because it is too capitalist.”
It’s not too capitalist because you can’t have capitalism under anarchy.
I could swear someone wrote a book describing how to do exactly that, in substantial detail and citing historic precedent. Maybe he’ll drop by sometime and you can ask him about it.
Someone else wrote a book describing in great detail how to organize the economy to be completely free of private enterprise. Implementation attempts have been disappointing.
Like medieval Iceland? Come on.
Uh, wasn’t the upshot of Scott’s aborted attempt to engage with communist thought that Marx pointedly refused to do that? From the review:
Maybe you don’t think anarcho-capitalism can work, but I don’t think anyone sane can accuse David of being philosophically opposed to discussing economics.
I haven’t read David’s book specifically, but I’ve read some of his writings and heard the arguments of the ancaps before.
If Marx’s theory was at the level of “Oh, decisions will be made by a committee of workers”, then the ancaps are at the level of “Oh, private protection agencies will enforce the non-aggression principle without morphing into state-like entities”.
@viVI_IViv
Have you heard of minarchism?
It’s rare that this distinction comes up outside of libertarian circles. My Ancap friends think I’m a statist. But it does solve some coordination problems. As well as providing a stopgap on the strongman or warlord.
Yes, and it’s not anarchic, it’s more of an extreme form of what the US government was originally intended by the Founding Fathers.
It might not stable, because politicians have an incentive to expand the scope of the government, and expecially in a democratic system they have an incentive to use government resources and regulatory power to cater to politically significant groups that can vote as a block, but at least it solves the issue of Mad Max-style gangs running the show.
Chapters 30 and 55 of The Machinery of Freedom are on the subject of under what circumstances the institutions I am proposing will or will not be stable internally. There are two other chapters on the issue of under what circumstances they will or will not be able to defend themselves against aggressive states.
By “The Ancaps are at the level of” do you mean “everyone who has argued for that position with me online is at the level of”?
I guess I’ll have to read your book before continuing this discussion.
Of course it is not “excessively capitalist”, because anarchy precludes capitalism existing at all.
Developed markets are the children of the state, without the provision of law and regulatory frameworks you cant have sophisticated markets at all. Rudimentary ones, yes, anything worth calling capitalism, no.
and that’s why international drug cartels are impossible!
…. The international drug market is.. uhm.. approximately the platonic example of my point? Its rife with violence, fraud, extreme rent extraction, theft, monopolies and forced labor. If it is what you think capitalism is, welcome to the Party, Comrade.
Not the very best metaphor for your purposes. Children have been known to grow up and leave home.
Thomas Jorgensen says:
the violence in question comes about almost entirely as a result of the state actively attempting to crush the market. if your argument is markets can’t exist outside the state because the state will violently crush anything it can’t control, well, sure I guess, but that says a lot more about states than markets.
I don’t know if this is true, but even assuming it is, when was the last time that Coca Cola and Pepsi had a gunfight?
Whatever the drug cartel are doing it doesn’t look anything like capitalism as the term is normally understood.
@viVI_IViv says:
It looks like capitalism in a war zone. Which isn’t pretty, but still looks a hell of a lot more like capitalism than the “markets can’t exist without a state” theory predicts.
Of course people can sell and buy stuff without a state, but if this is capitalism then the hunter-gatherer tribes trading animal hides since the dawn of time were capitalist.
Capitalism is commonly defined as an economic system based on private-owned enterprise with strong property rights and contract enforcement. Pretty much by definition, this can’t exist without the state or a state-like entity.
Without a state, theft, fraud, violence, and other violations of the “non-agression principle” are commonplace.
This doesn’t quite do it. If Pepsi and Coke have a dispute, they can sue each other in court, or engage in private arbitrage. If two rival drug cartels have a dispute, they do not have the court option, because anarchy. To this extent the analogy holds. But the cartels private arbitration options are also very limited. If they tried to hire a private arbitration firm to mediate their dispute, none would be willing to work with them because if they did they would be immediately charged and imprisoned for it.
This doesn’t prove that drug cartels would be peaceful if it weren’t for government enforcement, but it is a thumb on the scales. Coke and Pepsi can use the government to their advantage. Joaquin and Pablo have to deal with governments being actively hostile to them. Nobody is left alone, which is the experiment we would need here.
I’d further add that this long-term hostility towards the entire industry probably has some adverse selection effects. The kinds of people who succeed in this environment are not likely to be very trusting of either the authorities or each other.
@viVI_IViv says:
hunter gathers spend the vast majority of their effort producing goods for their own consumption. A capitalist society is one where people are producing goods for sale on the market.
good thing the state has licked those problems then!
It has, for the most part. Violence rates in ancient and recent non-state societies are orders of magnitude higher than in state societies. And in modern states, most violence is in fact associated with the few industries that operate outside the protection of the law.
Private arbitration only works when if the arbitration fails or one party refuses to accept the decision then the dispute can be settled in a court of law that can enforce its decision using the power of coercion wielded by the state. It also requires the litigating parties to be generally not allowed to bribe or threaten the arbitrator, on the penalty of the hammer of the state dropping on them.
None of this can possibly work for drug cartels. Any arbitrator would be just another third-party with no plausible claim of impartiality, and no power to enforce any decision or resist any pressure.
There are good arguments for why this might not be true. Others have made them more eloquently than I could and several of them have already been linked in this thread. It’s perfectly understandable if you don’t find those arguments convincing, all I can say is I do.
My purpose was to point out that the observation “Existing drug cartels are more violent than existing soda cartels” is poor evidence for the claim “Economic activity under anarchy would generally be more violent than economic activity under existing liberal democracies.” The claim might well be true, but I think you would need different evidence to support it, for the reasons I mentioned above.
The WTO has no hammer to drop on member countries. It does not invade non-compliant members. Its entire enforcement mechanism boils down to:
Yet member countries regularly go to arbitration, and usually comply with the rulings.
TIL the WTO is a private organization /s
I think the whole point of AnCap is that if WTO doesn’t have any particular enforcement capability, what difference would it make if it were private?
I’m not so sure it is a great example, there are many other consequences to invading a country, so a trade dispute would usually not be worth it. On the other hand, Cyprus and West Sahara and Tibet remain occupied, in spite of some protests (now mostly forgotten) from the world at large.
So are far more socialist and communist economies than I care to name.
What capitalism is not, is the economic system that promises that there will never be any more violence or corruption. Violence and corruption are orthogonal to the captialist-communist axis; they’re more associated with rule of law.
The international drug trade has capitalism but not rule of law. It is violent and corrupt.
Venezuela has that thing that people get upset if I call socialism but really I can’t tell the difference, but not rule of law. It is violent and corrupt.
Denmark has that thing that socialists are eager to claim as their own when it works well, and it has rule of law. It is peaceful and honest.
Switzerland has capitalism and rule of law. It is peaceful and honest.
It is not necessary to have rule of law to have capitalism. It is necessary to have rule of law to cut down on the violence and corruption, no matter what economic system you have.
However, if your economic system is within spitting distance of communism, the forced labor and monopolies become worse with rule of law, because they are the law.
Somalia isn’t in anarchy, it’s ruled by warlords. Or was, at least, it has a recognized government now. Not sure how meaningful it actually is, but no country with a minister for tourism is in anarchy.
Southern Somalia was (and to a slightly lesser extent is) contested between various secular warlords and groups of religious courts.
In the northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland, the existing separatist movements filled the power vacuum. Since the powers that be support a unified Somalia, their calls for recognition have mostly been ignored.
Northern Somalia, aka Somaliland, was a functioning anarchy for quite a long time. For details see the chapter on Somali law from a webbed late draft of my recent book. For a more authoritative account, see the books of the late I.M. Lewis, my main source.
I wonder if this is a slight confusion between two meanings of the word “capitalist”:
1. The rare ultra-principled ancaps who have a philosophical commitment to the free market
2. Those who have managed to accumulate lots of capital
People in the second category are unlikely to be in the first.
I don’t think you need to limit your first category so narrowly. The problem is that “capitalist” usually means someone with a particular role in a capitalist society. In that sense, Friederich Engels, or at least his father, was a capitalist. It is occasionally used to mean someone who supports a capitalist system. In that sense it isn’t usually limited to those who want to go all the way to market anarchy.
In the first sense, the opposite of a capitalist isn’t a communist but a commissar, someone with a vaguely similar role in a communist society. In the second, the opposite is a communist or a socialist.
The single most popular human belief system is hypocrisy.
Why is communism not popular among the military? After all it’s the ideology that maximally glorifies the government. Marx even theorized the “reserve army of labour“: he wanted all the unemployed or underemployed people to be
enslavedconscripted into a workforce run according to military principles. So why aren’t army generals eager to embrace an ideology that would put them in command of unlimited soldiers and pseudo-soldiers while not having to deal with fat cat private contractors who only care about lining their pockets rather than serving the country?Maybe because they actually how to run such an organization.
Similarly, people who know how to run a business, don’t like anarcho-capitalism.
I mean no disrespect to David Friedman, I’m sure he’s way smarter and more knowledgeable than me, but he’s an idealist just like the communists are.
Most people don’t believe in anarcho-capitalism, but I would expect the Koch brothers or Peter Theil to be at least sympathetic to it. Thiel, after all, bankrolled the Seasteading Institute and Charles Koch was, as best I can tell, converted to libertarianism by Robert Lefevre, who was not merely an anarchist — he preferred the term “autarchist” — but a pacifist as well.
I’m not an idealist, I’m an economist. I spend a chapter in the current edition of The Machinery of Freedom discussing circumstances in which the institutions I propose would fail to produce optimal law and parts of several other chapters discussing under what circumstances those institutions would be unstable.
In both Soviet and Chinese communism, the army serves the Communist Party, and the generals can be removed from their positions and shot, if they fail to play the ideological game correctly.
OK, so maybe this specific army could organize communism differently, with army on the top and no Communist Party. But then, why call it “communism” instead of simply “military dictatorship”? Anyway, as a general, once you go this way, you have to spend the rest of your life guarding your back, otherwise someone will stab you there. However, if you don’t go this way, you can keep collecting your paycheck, then retire and enjoy a few peaceful years.
The idea that people always support whatever social system is best for them or glorifies them is a fallacy. This seems to have been a really big part of Marxism, but it’s just not true. It’s pretty common to see people support social changes that are bad for them in both the short and long term. Also, people can disagree on what kind of social changes could be good or bad for them.
tl;dr People are not evil robots always supporting what maximizes their interests (they often don’t even agree on what their interests are…)
There are lots of examples of people with money supporting Communism back when it was a going concern. The British upper classes were particularly notorious for this. We could also have the same kind of conversation about a lot of social justice stuff.
The British upper classes wanting to be dissolved in a Communist revolution is a great example. We could have a long discussion of the psychological/social dynamics of them systemically paying lip service to Communism in a state where a revolution was never going to happen and their changing attitudes toward the working class who they imagined would benefit from Thing That Never Happened.
I don’t see how to imagine a realistic psychological model for anarcho-capitalism as popular ideology, though. Who are the beneficiaries supposed to be? The poor would lose government transfer payments that are keeping their QoL up under the status quo. The most elite people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet made themselves what they are under the status quo.
Is the idea that regulatory capture by the large-cap publicly-traded corporations is parasitic yet unstoppable so long as the State exists (and doesn’t change into a dictatorship with a command economy)? That there’d be more stock market growth as competitors enter the Really Free Market, benefiting everyone with retirement savings in an index fund?
I’ve really only seen libertarianism (including the majority small-government tendency) from the deontological “Taxation is theft!” framing. You could treat it as a limit case for deontology, where the consequences of no government are understood to be strongly negative for most people but you support the rules anyway, but that could also make someone feel like they’re being strawmanned.
Also explains well all the woke virtue signalling from the big corporations: these corporations usually work in highly regulated markets and can afford to invest significant resources to hire diversity commissars and fund outreach and affirmative action programs to make sure they check all the diversity checkboxes, while small startups working on shoestring budgets can’t. Compliance costs create a barrier to entry for non-established players.
If you would like to see it from a consequentialist framing, there is a book I can recommend.
Using for the word capitalism the dictionary definition “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”, then there is extensive economics literature around the impacts of government regulatory power on the incentive structures of both private and governmental individuals.
Is that the sort of thing you were looking for? That’s assuming you were asking a serious question.
I guess the “short” answer is that anarcho-capitalism is about empowering individual choice by removing the largest monopoly organization in the economy, not about empowering large business-people to achieve their own near monopolies via association with the governmental one.
Because almost everyone, including capitalists, is a conservative in the literal sense of the word, takes for granted the institutions he lives under.
I would say the PVC pipe would be much too weak. Possibly a thickish piece of willow might do the trick – at least an inch thick, soak it for 5-7 days and then bend it round a frame of the right size. Tie it to the frame and let it dry thoroughly. My major doubt with this is that you’re probably going to end up drilling lots of holes in the (willow) frame for the netting and that will weaken it considerably.
Doubling up the frame is a good idea, but tricky to keep the two rods stable. Possibly if you had a flat section of something flexible behind them, you could bond/tie them all together.
I don’t know about the States, but in England it’s easy enough to get hold of willow for basket-making purposes. Getting something thick enough for your purposes might be a bit trickier – perhaps look for someone who makes baskets for hot air balloons. In Europe, at least, they’re still made with (thick-ish) willow.
Possibly use multiple pieces of smaller willow woven together.
Of course there’s a risk you’ll go too far and accidentally make a wicker chair instead.
So, apparently Michael Schellenberger will argue in his upcoming book that, yes, there can’t be such a thing as a country that has nuclear power plants but can’t build nuclear weapons, but it actually doesn’t matter, because nuclear proliferation is a force for peace. So, is that last thing true? It makes sense to the extent, at least from a common sense, game theory-like point of view: if you want less violence, you have to destroy the incentives for it, so 1) make the potential gains from it smaller (so you need less socioeconomic/status inequality) 2) make the potential costs of it bigger (by making it more deadly, and to do it you have to develop more dangerous weapons and distribute it more broadly). Also Pakistani-India relations are often used as an evidence for that thesis. But is it actually true?
We’ve had 2 world wars in the span of 30 years, but now we’ve gone 75 years without one. Considering how significant rivalry was between USA and USSR, the claim that it was not mutually assured destruction that stopped World War III is a very much an extraordinary claim.
I don’t think so. The idea that nuclear weapons were especially responsible isn’t necessary to the strategic situation that caused the Cold War. Two roughly evenly matched powers with leaderships that are both reasonably risk averse and believe they have a winning ideology (and so can spread their influence by nonviolent means) might have acted similarly in the absence of nuclear weapons. In fact, they did for a while despite only one side having nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons enter strategic calculus as very powerful weapons but they aren’t infinitely powerful and could be counterweighted by (for example) superior strategic bombing capabilities.
This means that if you have an existing balance of power (say between the US and USSR) then both sides having nuclear weapons might keep it stable, at least wherever it is. However, if you have an existing imbalance of power (say between the US and Russia) then the presence of nuclear weapons instead becomes a way for a weaker power to have one specific way to geostrategically punch above its weight. It does not become a reasonable path to victory though and indeed they will be forced to pull that card more often due to their lack of other options. Russia hasn’t so far but neither the US or China have pushed it that far and Russia is still dominant over its immediate neighbors.
Imagine if Assad had nuclear weapons. His military is weak, he’d need to have resorted to them to stay in power, as he has with chemical gas.
They might. Or one of them might decide to take their chances and start a world war. If the war goes well the country gains territory and influence, if it goes bad they can always sue for peace. This is how WW1 ended, and in even WW2, while Germany got razed and Japan got nuked, many Axis countries didn’t really get much destruction. Italy even managed to switch sides during the war, Mussolini got thrown under the bus but a bunch of Fascists got to keep their heads and their political careers.
Nukes are a game changer: you can’t attack a nuclear power and expect to sue for peace if things go wrong. If things go wrong they go wrong in the first few hours and your country becomes a radiactive wasteland.
If he had nukes no foreign country would have dared to attack him directly or even violate his territory, at most they could have tried to start some shit with the local rebels/terrorists, but without foreign air support and foreign boots on the ground, the rebels wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere.
Note the irony that Mussolini coined the term totalitario when the Kingdom of Italy under the Fascist Party turned out to have enough checks and balances to fire him and have a legally binding petition submitted to the King for his arrest.
And they couldn’t have with nukes? Except they almost did. There were major incidents bringing both sides to the brink of war every few years for decades at a time. The lack of these incidents are what periods like detente are describing.
You might want to study both sides’ actual plans for a conflict. You have a vastly inflated sense of the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. They are extremely deadly but not infinitely destructive and the conflation of the two is itself dangerous. It means we cannot predict the behavior of people who can launch them accurately because we’re presuming they perceive the weapons as more destructive than they actually are.
The US flew military planes over USSR territory illegally and the USSR violated US airspace. They both funded groups that directly attacked the other sides troops and domestically in the other countries. Both sides kept and repeatedly upgraded their conventional forces and put a huge number of them in Europe because they knew there would be a conventional component to the war. Further, multiple countries have lost wars or had secessions succeed despite nuclear weapons.
You seem to have this weird, godlike view of nuclear weapons where possessing them means that a nation is infinitely militarily powerful in all ways. The thesis that spreading nuclear weapons would bring peace is smuggling in the assumption that it will equalize military power, which it won’t. Not even all nuclear arsenals are equal to each other.
This potentially holds true, but only if we assume continuing security, regime stability, that no leader would ever nuke his own people, etc. Even if it makes international relations potentially more stable, imo the risk tradeoff still isn’t worth it.
Nuclear proliferation is a force for peace, but once WW III erupts we are unusually screwed.
Overall balance depends on
– how bad and risky WW III without (more) nukes would be
– how bad and risky WW III is and how it would be with more nukes (multiple known close calls where we were really close to use of nuclear weapons seems to indicate that it is a real risk)
– how much value/drawback you see in fact that nuclear states may bully nonnuclear ones
Overall, I think that even more nuclear states increases risks and is not helping to promote space.
What he means by nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons? Because even with working bomb you still need to deliver it.
And while I can imagine delivering it by truck/as a gravity bomb, ICBM tends to be useful.
And there are some ways to have nuclear power plants without ability to build bomb (RTG is the simplest case, some small research reactors probably also would count while being used as power plant).
Also, single bomb + ICBM is not getting you MAD, you need more.
@Scoop:
> Category 1 shootings are clearly fantastic and need to be encouraged
I think this might be a point of contention rather than a given. Although almost everyone probably agrees that killing the criminal is better than allowing them to kill innocent victims, it seems reasonable to believe that a non-lethal means of stopping the criminal would be even better. Is it actually better to shoot and kill the gunman than to capture them with a Spiderman net, or do we just lack viable Spiderman nets?
This may seem like semantics, but I think it may have a lot of effect on second order effects. Maybe the criminal is using a gun in the first place because he expects that the police try to shoot him? Maybe given inevitable errors of police judgment, it’s better in the long term to encourage the development of non-lethal strategies? Maybe glorification of violence by police creates greater societal problems than it solves?
I’d be interested to see how support actually exists for “fantastic and need to be encouraged”.
We lack viable Spiderman nets. Likewise magic lassos, tranquilizer darts, knockout gas, or stun rays.
He’s not. There are approximately zero criminals whose plan includes a “now I defeat the police in a gunfight” step. There are many criminals whose plan is “now I defeat a rival criminal in a gunfight”. This works best when the clever criminal who thinks it up is the only one with a gun, tolerably well when all the criminals have guns, and condemns the criminal without a gun to perpetual loserdom. Thus, lots of criminals will happen to have guns with them when they are arrested.
Next question?
This. Despite what movies and video games may suggest, if someone finds themselves actually exchanging fire with law enforcement, it means something about their plan has gone horribly, horribly wrong. And at that point, their best case scenario is to somehow escape and spend the rest of their life living underground and on the run. Far more likely is that the exchange ends with them either dead or in jail.
Is “suicide by cop” not a real thing?
(This kind of suicide might not necessarily be “I want to die so I’ll go out in a blaze of glory” and could be “I don’t care about anything in life except this one thing I’m trying to do with my gun, and if I get shot by the cops in the process then I don’t care”.)
It’s a real thing, but it’s a rounding error on the scale of the problems we are discussing. And it doesn’t require a gun – I think knives are more common, but I’m not sure.
Technical point: there’s a difference between a police shooting and a police killing. In an ideal world, an assailant is shot only to the point that they cease being a threat. Which may mean they are still alive.
Yes, but aren’t police trained to shoot to kill?
They are trained to shoot at the center of mass of the visible target until the target ceases threatening behavior. That should only be fatal about 20% of the time, assuming the victims receive proper medical treatment.
It’s possible that this gets pushed up by the police trying to put a few extra bullets into each perp after they’ve ceased being a threat but before they’ve fallen flat on the ground, and it’s possible that there’s even informal training to that effect, but police killings should still be a minority of police shootings and I believe actually are.
They are trained to treat shooting as if they are always trying to kill. Shooting to wound isn’t a thing.
Yeah. I always thought that most examples of “police shoots criminal 40+ times” were cases where the cops’ vision of the target was obscured such that they couldn’t really be confident whether their previous shots had sufficiently disabled the target or not. And their training is “keep shooting until you are absolutely sure the threat is disabled.”
@John Schilling I definitely meant the former. It’s great if violent suspects are taken down without harm, but police don’t go for limbs because it won’t incapacitate and has less chance to hit. My estimation of the lethality of a gunshot to the center of mass was a lot higher than that 20%, especially ruling out the shots that don’t incapacitate and leave the suspect a threat.
At that point he probably has a hole in his heart, lungs, or intestines. Guess modern medicine is pretty fantastic at trauma.
@Matt M,
Those ‘shot 40 times’ incidents are mostly because officers can’t hear the gunshots when they are under extreme stress. Sometimes they will only hear a ‘tick tick tick’ from their own gun and think it isn’t working right, and they won’t hear the other officers’ shots.
See On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace. Very interesting book with lots of cool anecdotes and studies about extreme stress affecting people in weird ways. I could only make it 2/3rds of the way through due to the Proud American Warrior attitude though.
@John Schilling:
> That should only be fatal about 20% of the time
That strikes me as a surprisingly low fatality rate. Do you have specifics for the survival rate for those shot by police? Searching, I do find that “about 20%” is the overall gunshot fatality rate, but that includes a lot of people who are shot by smaller caliber handguns than those used by police (ie, .22’s). It also includes everyone who is shot somewhere other than “center of mass”.
Searching briefly, Table 2 here seems relevant. It suggests that about 45% of people shot (anywhere) with a “medium caliber” bullet (including 9mm) die from their wound. It also suggests that well over half of those shot once or more in the “chest, back, or abdomen” (with any caliber) die.
On the other hand, this is a study of shootings by criminals, and it’s possible that their victims receive poorer/slower medical attention. Still, I’d guess that well over 20% of the people shot with a police weapon die, and that probably a majority die if the police hit their “center of mass” point-of-aim.
(I largely agree with your comment above that a logical criminals do not carry guns because the police are armed, but I’m doubtful as to how logical criminals are, and thus don’t feel I understand criminal behavior well enough to eliminate this possibility.)
The more significant bias is that shootings by criminals are often shootings by people who very specifically want their victims to be dead (as a terminal goal or so they cannot stand witness). Even if you limit the study to people who were shot only once by a criminal, there’s probably a reason they stopped at one.
I’m mostly going from the general experience with shootings in a military context, where you generally stop shooting when the target falls down because his thirty pissed-off mates are a bigger problem. A particularly informative data set is here, which shows an overall 24% mortality rate from pre-1995 military shootings vs 44% from criminal mass shootings – even though the military shootings were mostly with rifles and the civilian ones weighted more towards pistols. Of particular interest is the Northern Ireland dataset, which broke out military/paramilitary shootings by rifle vs. pistol and found 30% mortality for rifles vs 3.5% for pistols. Unfortunately, tracking that back to the source doesn’t quite allow for sorting out pistol wounds to the torso; the two were tracked separately but not in combination.
Well, there isn’t a difference. Cop’s training currently has guns fully classified as lethal weapons – you only use them when lethal force is authorized and your intent is to kill the other person. The other person living should be viewed as a nice positive, but you don’t want cops thinking that they can shoot people with the intent to wound.
Guns do not work that way. “Shooting To Wound” is not and should not be a tactic.
You “shoot to stop”.
This has a lot of overlap with “shoot to kill.” But it’s distinct from it, and distinct from “shoot to wound,” which is nonsense as you say.
But that is precisely what is at question in nkurz’s reply. It sure sounds like you are advocating putting a few extra bullets into the neutralized would-be killer.
The way to avoid this would be to say that category 1 killings should also be minimized, but in a very different way, by converting them to other forms of neutralization; rather than saying that category 1 killings should be increased. (None of the other categories you mentioned seem to incorporate the cases where someone was killed but could have been neutralized by non-deadly means.)
Police fiction has been more damaging than spider-man fiction in this respect. Taking two or three pistol rounds to the chest is frequently not enough to instantly stop someone from harming others. They certainly don’t immediately drop dead like in the movies. More creative solutions decline in reliability from there.
In the case of mass shootings, many people seem to be quite incensed if the shooter is taken alive (of course there is a racial angle usually added to that anger).
There are a series of problems with lower lethality weapons.
1. Range. If you want a low lethality weapon that works at 50 yards it is probably going to be lethal at 10 yards, make something that is non-lethal at 10 yards and it will be quickly ineffective at a greater range. Guns work at 10 yards and 50 yards because you are going for lethality in both cases.
2. Low lethality weapons don’t mix well. You can’t effectively hold a taser and and a pistol, which means if you are going low lethality and then suddenly the suspect pulls a gun then he gets the proverbial drop on you, so you need a minimum of 2 cops for an arrest with one cop having his fire arm drawn and a very aggressive response trained to protect their partner.
A bunch of people injured (some very seriously) at these protests have been injured with nonlethal weapons.
Similar problem – anything that will deter you if it hits you in the chest will injure you if it hits you square in the eye
People ought to bring PPE to protests that might go violent.
Safety glasses, foam ear plugs, N95 masks (if available).
Possibly rawhide gloves (unless it’s a PeTA rally).
This isn’t to say that less than lethal rounds won’t still be able to hit areas like the throat.
Knowing that police will shoot you if you are doing specific things seems like it could be a decent incentive not to do those things.
IinIncentives for criminals to not be violent/ dangerous seems like a good thing
I instinctively agree with this. But, I’m wary of creeping the scope of what cops are for. How can that be resolved?
The point of police is not to deter criminals by punishing them, it’s to catch people who may or may not be criminals, and then bring them to trial, so that if, but only if, they are found guilty, then then can be punished.
Police shooting people is sometimes necessary on grounds of prevention. But trying to justify it as a form of deterrence through pretrial punishment is morally wrong and absolutely against the basic principles of justice.
Putting on my consequentialist hat, why would we ever want to do something as daft as that? The punishment by definition hurts the punished, and there’s plenty of places this can go wrong and hurt the innocent. Meanwhile, the crime is over and done with, so that harm is a sunk cost. This is just more harm with no benefit to anybody.
Unless, maybe, the punishment deters other people (including the criminal’s future self) from committing other crimes in the future.
Yes, that the main thing punishment is for. Imprisonment also makes it more difficult for the convict to reoffend, and execution makes it impossible.
Easy (assuming I’m correct in interpreting “that” as “leaving punishment to the legal system rather than letting police dispense it on the scene as they see fit”?): because we have more faith in the legal process to decide who should and shouldn’t be punished than we do in the spur-of-the-moment judgement of individual police officers.
I very much agree with this, and is why i think police reforms needs to focus not just on “punishing bad cops”, but also transparency on what exactly the cops are actually doing. Civilian oversight boards would go a long way there, but there’s also the problem that body cam videos are unfortunately not public information. Which i understand to some degree from a privacy perspective, but mugshots and bookings are already public, so i feel making videos public (with some degree of reasonable wiggle room here for privacy) is a good step.
Also, an actual national database dedicated to keeping track of shootings, for the love of god. We had one (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/18/police-killings-government-data-count), but it got defunded.
IMO a major issue here is that the police have control over evidence that may implicate them in crimes. There needs to be a strong incentive for them never to delete that evidence, or it becomes much less valuable. If I control whether or not the video footage survives to be shown at the trial, then all video footage that is shown at trial will support my story.
I’m not sure I trust e.g. Facebook with access to public bodycam footage.
But a norm of all the footage that could possibly be relevant being brought up during discovery or what have you.
Also random requests for footage every now and then with stiff punishments if they don’t have it. Like ‘Everything recorded by PC John Smith, April 3rd 2023’
Who gets stiffly punished if that footage isn’t there? The officer, the officer’s sergeant? The sysadmin that was supposed to manage the backups? The guy who specified the wrong RAID system and it didn’t end up working as well as it should?
Right now I think the big issues w/r/t body cams are:
1) not all departments have them.
2) Of the departments that have them, they don’t require them to be on all the time.
3) Storage standards are all over the place.
Now, let’s not kid ourselves, a requirement like the ones I’ve outlined in my other posts will be expensive. If we really implement something like recording almost all of an officer’s 8 hour shift in HD, we’re talking something like 48GB per shift per officer. For, say, NYC (I’m not trying to suss out patrol vs. desk officers here, I’m ballparking) it looks like worst case is basically 10 facebooks of storage if you want to retain it all for 2 years, which is a LOT. So we’ll have to look at ways to trim that down.
You wouldn’t have to keep everything for two years though. Time spent in the cruiser driving around could be deleted much sooner. I’d guess that some cops go whole days without responding to a call, those days could be expunged a lot quicker than two years.
You can always keep a low-quality version longer.
That’s why CCTV hasn’t gone HD. Better to have a lot of SD than a bit of HD.
ADDENDUM:
Is the figure for FB hot or cold storage? At these scales, magnetic tape is much cheaper than HDDs.
Couldn’t night soil be safely used to fertilize food crops meant for humans if the night soil was composted long enough to kill all its bad bacteria? If you let it compost for a year, wouldn’t that be enough?
I think you’ll find many of your questions answered here or here.
Using human feces as fertilizer is a bad idea because of parasites, and parasites’ larvae can be pretty resilient.
Yep, using human feces as fertilizer is indeed a bad idea. Proper composting is the answer, and as long as a sufficient temperature is maintained for a sufficient time, there’s never a problem with parasites and their larvae.
You don’t need temperature*, just time.
True-ish, but you could also say that you don’t need time, just temperature.
And it’s not as if the increase in temperature (and therefore a decrease in the necessary time) costs you anything. If you’ve got grass clippings (and similar) to put somewhere, why not use them as a heat source for your compost heap?
The commercial standard for sterilizing compost is >150 degrees F for at least 3 weeks, its fairly easy to get a pile up to 130 in your back yard, or even 150 but to keep it above 150 for three weeks requires some effort in turning and possibly refeeding. Then if we are talking human waste on a small scale there are several months a year for many people where they have zero grass clippings available but still plenty of potential fertilizer.
Sure. We don’t have a flush toilet where we live – we use a ‘compost’ toilet. Instead of a ceramic bowl underneath the seat, there’s a nice hygienic bucket; instead of pulling a lever after using it, you empty a small saucepans worth of wood chip into it. When the bucket is full (ish..) it gets emptied onto a compost heap which then has a couple of spadefulls of leaf-mould or grass clippings added.
When the compost bin is full, it gets left for a further year (minimum) and then the compost is good to go. It’s a reasonably common system here in rural France and to my nose a lot less smelly than the alternative, which is a septic tank buried in the middle of your garden.
Why would a septic system be smelly? I’ve never noticed a difference between septic and a sewer hookup, which is to say, I’ve never noticed any smell at all. It seems to me that if you septic system smells bad, somthing has gone wrong.
I’ve often wondered this, but I’ve encountered a few dozen smelly gardens (I’m a semi-professional gardener) due to septic tanks.
My guess is that the venting systems haven’t been adequately installed – getting them right isn’t straightforward and I guess a lot of builders don’t install enough of them to learn to avoid all the ways they can be done wrong.
In theory, probably. You might be able to exploit differing temperature, oxygen or pH ranges of pathogens and other microbes to kill off the pathogens in a dung heap. Also you can grow things like peas and raspberries where the fruit is never in contact with the soil.
In practice, there’s a bunch of cows that poop a lot so we’re not going to run out of manure any time soon. Also the Haber process is a thing and superior for things like carrots.
You still have to compost it for above ground fruit because hard rain kicks up tiny amounts of dirt and bacteria can contaminate that way if the soil is laden with them.
We could look at areas where policy has forced police to shoot less or to wait longer before shooting due to fear of punishment, and see what effect it has had on crime rates in general.
That would be lots of work though. The only one I know off the top of my head is Oakland, where they cut shootings down 1+-.
(THE FOLLOWING IS MEANINGLESS INFO BECAUSE IT HAPPENED IN CALIFORNIA WHICH IS SOMEHOW ALWAYS DISCOVERING NEW HEIGHTS OF GENTRIFICATION)
(Pretty soon you won’t even be able to drive to Bakersfield to see the tweaker in their natural habitat. The end of an era.)
Cursory googling shows they also cut their police force down to a nub and regulate use of force; coinciding with a large drop in the violent crime rate until 2018-2019; when new reporting standards and a couple mass shootings pushed the numbers back up; unless it just climbed generally.
Weirdly, the arson rate in the bay area looks way higher than you’d think for a metro hub.
Doesn’t seem like use of force regulation and homicide are linked in any way; when you look at heat maps of violent crime they line up pretty much 1:1 with poverty
In summary: Unless you are willing to put real work in to figuring out your question; you will waste 10 minutes of your time sliding data on top of other data, only to realize you have recreated a population density map.
Isn’t a lot of the arson happening in the hills? Arson-started wildfires and such. So it’s about how the Bay Area is positioned such that you can drive less than an hour to get to hiking spots (and wildfire potential). You have the metro to get the technology for starting fires, but the hills can’t be monitored well, so it’s a prime arson location.
Categories 2 and 3 are basically the same thing. Sure, there may be some cases where a cop just shoots a completely unassuming person because the cop is crazy or evil. But in almost all cases, there is some logic to what he did, and if you try to understand his perspective, it may seem like shooting the person was a reasonable response at the time, even if it turns out his threat assessment was seriously wrong in retrospect.
Furthermore, category 1 is basically the same thing as category 2/3. Or rather, the cops in category 2/3 always believe themselves to be in category 1 at the moment of the shooting. You can only distinguish them in hindsight.
Since 1, 2 and 3 are the same category, therefore 4 is also the same thing, because it just means “shootings where the threat cannot be clarified in retrospect any more than it could at the moment”.
So the solutions to all four are the same: Cops need to be more reasonable about assessing threats. This can only be achieved by improving their education and mental health. And civilians need to be more understanding about what a situation looks like to a cop.
While I agree that massively changing the way police are trained would be a good thing, I think there are a number of other things that would help too, and are worth doing.
One is making shooting – or mistreating in milder ways – civilians scarier for police. At the moment, police officers know that they can generally get away with massive abuses of their position without punishment; I think that changing that would make them behave better.
And another is firing more bad police officers – improving the average level of police quality by evaporative cooling will help even if no individual police officer improves.
I’m also deeply wary of making “civilians need to treat the police better” part of the solution – I think the right not to respect the police, and to treat them badly in any way up to but not beyond the limits of the law without them being allowed to retaliate professionally in any way, shape or form, is a really, really important one, and at the moment I don’t think it’s one police respect.
I meant that civilians need to understand what might cause a police officer to shoot, not so that they avoid getting shot, but so they have some context when they hear about a shooting on the news.
There have been a lot of examples of cops giving contradictory orders and then shooting someone who is trying their best to cooperate. There’s nothing a civilian can do to avoid that, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And if you knew the victim this is probably no comfort, but on a global level such things are pretty much unavoidable. The cop doesn’t want this to happen either.
Sam Harris’s podcast had an interview with a police expert a while ago that explained their perspective pretty well.
I’d like to note that I’ve been contrasting police vs civilian in this post, but police officers are actually also civilians. I just couldn’t think of a better way to express “people who aren’t police”.
I’ve been complaining about that same thing. I hate saying “civilians” because the police are not the military, and I don’t want normalize thinking in those terms.
I think “the public” might work.
This seems a bit circular to me. “The public should understand why a policeman might shoot someone so that they understand why a policeman might shoot someone.”
The goal is to reduce the number of unjustified shootings, not to increase the number of justifications people will accept for shooting. (Well, technically it’s a solution if all you care about is the proportion of shootings that the public finds acceptable, but we also care about the absolute number of people who get shot.)
But there is something the police can do to avoid that – come up with ways to avoid giving contradictory orders, or be less willing to shoot people who don’t immediately follow orders.
I see this sentiment a lot. Punish the police, defund the police, make them economically liable, fire cops for too many complaints – in other words, get tough on them.
I think this is a left-wing/blue tribe stance.
Isn’t it just a mirror image of the red tribe’s get-tough-on-crime sentiment? If you make any of the above arguments, how well do you think the harsher measures works for reducing crime?
This. If you make the police scared, you get either scared police or less police. If you think “scared” means obsequious and compliant, that’s not the normal behavior for scared people with guns. If you think there’s a long line of nice guys wanting to be cops who have until now been passed over because the police departments keep hiring the bad ones – how many of you and your friends and all the other people you know who feel the way you do about the proper role of police in society, do you believe are actually going to apply for jobs in “reformed” police departments?
As a libertarian, I’d be OK with less cops. But all the cops we have now are mostly dealing with actual criminals who are making life worse for innocent people, and most of those innocent people aren’t as confident as I am in their ability to defend themselves against criminals. And as noted elsewhere, the communities that have been on the receiving end of most of the police brutality, still mostly want more cops.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/05/29/psychologist-police-bias-training
So ignore all of the implicit bias test nonsense, the part where they implemented something that actually seemed to work seems interesting:
Note that this solution is race neutral.
Obviously, it’s harder to make mindfulness happen in a situation where a cop might pull a gun, but having that “oh well I might get charged for murder for shooting this person” mental checkbox might push them towards better solutions.
See, for example, the case I linked above of a cop in his car seeing a potential looter (the man had a hammer, so he probably was) stop and kneel in front of the store, and then shooting the guy through his windshield. Fear for his life, my ass. The guy was probably kneeling to reduce his chances of getting shot.
This is exactly the kind of situation where it sure would be nice if the cop had a mental “hey maybe shooting this guy isn’t going to go over well” checkbox.
Google has Oakland’s crime rate falling from 2012 to 2018 by about 36%, but rose in 2019 by 15%. The article makes it sound as if the changes were implemented in 2017 or 2018, and the 15% would push the crime rate above 2015 levels.
Thanks for that tidbit that crime rose that much in 2019, that’s important calibration information.
Hold on a second. That’s not a sentiment, it’s at least two sentiments, with one I strongly disagree with smuggled in among some I agree with. Defunding the police is a terrible idea.
My belief about punitive regimes is that effectiveness scales very strongly with the likelihood of punishment, and somewhat, but much less, and with strong diminishing returns, with the extent of punishment.
At the moment, police officers know that if they break rules or even laws, they are almost certain to get away with it. I think that if every single officer who broke them – of even a high proportion of them – was punished, the existing rules and penalties would probably be more than adequate; the problem is that they aren’t.
In the analogy with crime, “get tough on crime” policies mostly refer to stricter sentencing, which I don’t think works well – you get a small increase in deterrence at the cost of inflicting massive suffering, and a cost-I-don’t-know-the-extent-of-but-suspect-may-be-heavy in converting potentially reformable criminals into career criminals. By contrast, “hire more police officers and catch more non-drug offenders, to reduce the proportion of criminals who get literally no punishment” is a policy I support, and would support more strongly if America had a less excessive sentencing regime or less inhumane prisons, or fewer police forces with cultures of mistreating non-police.
I don’t think you can treat all fear as fungible like this – the argument that making police more scared of the consequences of using excessive force will make them more likely to use excessive force is not one I find plausible.
I think that there is a serious risk that it will make them more likely to refrain from intervening in situations they should intervene in (c.f. Baltimore); at the moment I tentatively think that that’s a price worth paying.
The RUC was 7% Catholic; the PSNI is now over 30%.
That said, I don’t think large-scale personnel change is likely to be a big part of the solution. But I think that if you were to fire just the worst, say, x% of police for some small value of x (say 2-5), with the remainder knowing that being part of that x% was a realistic risk if they behaved badly, and seeing their departure as a sign of tangible change, you’d see a major cultural change.
And I don’t know how many applicants per place most police forces currently have, but the current surge in unemployment makes me bet it’s a lot more than 1, and that many of those untrained narrowly-rejected applicants would be massively preferable to the worst x% of experienced officers, especially if their ideas about how police should and shouldn’t act were formed by training in a culture where the worst x% were removed and the rest were seeing that happening.
I don’t. First, because you can’t make them afraid of the consequences of using excessive force; only of the consequences of being accused of excessive force.
And second, because fear kind of is fungible. There’s no mental state of “afraid of one specific thing, dealing with everything else rationally”. You’re either afraid or you’re not. In the times when you’re afraid, that’s front and center in your attention and dominates how you deal with everything. Fear is designed to focus your attention on dealing with the one thing you are afraid of.
If you’re afraid of being accused of using excessive force, and beating people up isn’t a terminal goal, there is always the option of just not being a cop (and still getting paid as much as if you were a cop). If you’re afraid of being accused of using excessive force but beating people up is a terminal goal, you’re kind of stuck with being a cop but there’s lots of ways to deal with those accusations.
Neither of those responses gets you good cops. Collectively, they get you less good cops, because one of the ways for the bad ones to deal with the accusations is to drive out all the cops you can’t trust to back you up when the accusations come. And who wants to be a good cop surrounded by a bunch of frightened cops who see you as the enemy?
Frightening people you don’t like usually feels really good. But frightening people with guns usually ends really badly, unless you take it to the extreme where they give up entirely and lay down their arms.
@Kaitian
Since both the entire discussion and the legal consequences are based on ex post facto analysis, this is irrelevant, and your lumping of the categories together is flatly incorrect.
Wrong! If you want to prevent bad shootings, but not good shootings, you need to distinguish them before they happen. That’s the thesis of the original post.
For judging a shooting that has already happened, I guess these categories are reasonable, though not clearly distinct.
You prevent bad shootings but not good ones by distinguishing them after the fact, punishing the bad ones and/or adjusting training and procedures as needed, and rewarding the good ones.
One thing I’ve wondered about for police shootings: There are only a thousand a year. Add in deaths in police custody and maybe you get to 1200? (I’m not sure)
That’s not a huge number. You could set up a federal task force that investigated every single one. The goal would not be to charge people with crimes, but to document what happened and work out whether something about use of force guidelines, weapons mix, training, etc., needs to change to have prevented it.
Possibly up to about 2,000 based on the statistics I looked at, but yeah, around there. And yes, that’s pretty close to what I think the solution would be. See my reply to your extended post on “what’s really wrong with criminal justice and why crying racism isn’t helping”.
Aren’t all police shootings already investigated pretty thoroughly? Isn’t that where the whole cliche about cops being exasperated that shooting criminals leads them to “so much paperwork” comes from?
Would making it federal really improve things so much? Are people really convinced that their local PD is racist and corrupt, but the federal agency (which sometimes is led by Donald Trump) will be much more fair and even-handed?
It does seem like investigating it outside the department would be good.
Cory Booker had a bill that would do more or less this.
EDIT: Thanks Eugene! I’ll look at that when I’m not drinking. If it’s close to this then I really, really hope it doesn’t get killed in committee.
Most shootings are promptly investigated by most departments, yes. The differences here are:
-Most vs. All
-Internal vs. External investigation.
-Shooting deaths vs. All deaths.
However, I want to emphasize that I think the most important component of any such program needs to be hammering HARD on everyone having body and dash cams and having them on ALL. THE. TIME. Because to a rough (very rough, I’m drinking ATM) approximation, 90% of the worst disputed and most ambiguous uses of force are the ones where it’s He-Said/She-Said. Even a third-party investigator is going to need better quality information.
As for how much of a difference this will really make? I’ll be honest up front: I don’t know. But here’s the part I like about this plan – If it is effective in allowing for reasonably swift and impartial investigations, it doesn’t matter which sides priors about the integrity of their police force is right.
If it’s true that, say, 80-90% of those 1,000 shootings are justified, then we can now point to the fact that every single one of those shootings in 2025 was reviewed by the FBI and that we have video footage of all or nearly all of them (because no system is 100% effective).
If it’s true that 50-60% of those shootings are unjustified, we have FBI reviews of video evidence saying so and the attendant criminal prosecutions.
Will there be people who are so committed to their narrative that they attack the process anyway? Of course! But I’d argue that this way we at least have a relatively robust process that can deliver results the majority of the public can trust, starting the process of restoring trust BOTH WAYS between police departments and the communities they are a part of.
@Trofim_Lysenko
There’s also a similar bill put forward by Tim Scott; I have only glanced at them so I’m not sure how similar they are to each other or to what you propose, but for people like albatross who seemed to suggest that they support police reform on a national level, these bills seem like a reasonable place to start.
It’s usually not a great idea to have people investigating their coworkers. Independent oversight can go wrong, too, but I think it’s less likely to end up with the investigators deciding to squelch the investigation because Joe’s a nice guy or it’ll look bad for the department or something.
But the main reason I’m wanting this done at a federal level is to collect information from the whole nation on deaths in police custody, and to produce guidance that might actually help decrease that number. “What went wrong that led to this death” is a useful question that doesn’t need to be associated with any kind of prosecution. It can be associated with questions like “what would we need to change to prevent this happening again,” where sometimes the answer is “nothing could have prevented this death.” Because I suspect that many times, there will be some different answer–maybe “change normal procedures during traffic stops in this way” or “redesign this piece of equipment to prevent this happening again” or “change training for this situation in this way.”
None of this is viscerally satisfying, the way burning a police station or sending a policeman who kills someone to prison is. But it seems like it might actually substantially decrease the number of people killed by police over the next few decades.
In our underpopulated world, getting people to have more children is one of the biggest “free lunches” we have available to us. We’re underproducing new people mainly because the benefits of having more children accrue to the children themselves and the rest of society rather than the people who bear the costs of having more children: the parents. Indeed, despite what many people believe, people who have no children are happier than parents.
To solve this, I propose phasing out our existing system of social security and replacing it with a new system of tax-one-generation pay-another-generation, but instead of putting all the money from one generation into a pile and using it to pay another, it’s a direct transfer between children and their parents. This provides an incentive for parents to have more, if you have more now, you’ll receive more later. The system pays out as soon as the children begin paying taxes, meaning that two 23-year-olds could start seeing returns when they’re as young as 45. This is superior to a straight natalist policy because it only works if taxpayers are produced; produce a bunch of criminals and layabouts and you see nothing. At the same time, there is no bureaucracy making political decisions about which families are “best.”
Now, what prevents parents from simply refunding the money to their children? Well, the social security system is gone, so they gotta have some income stream. And people tend to see their “need” for income rise as their incomes rise. But so long as you make the right to receive the income is tradeable, this objection will not apply because the parents won’t be the ones receiving the income. These rights will have an inevitably de-humanizing name, I’ll just call them “H-bonds.” (Yes, I know they are more like equities than bonds.) The H-bond market effectively allows financial institutions to make investments in new people; they pay the parents upfront; the parents use the money to raise the child, and the child pays the financial institution back. These H-bonds will have risk if the person dies before or during their productive years, risk which can be balanced through life insurance.
The H-bond payments will need to be made until a person reaches a certain age, say, 52. And they will last regardless of whether or not the parent is alive or dead. If a parent dies and has only one child, his H-bond ceases to exist, if he has multiple children it would, if divided equally, act to redistribute income from the poorer siblings to the richer and from the younger siblings to the older. Suppose a parent has his first child at age 23 and last child at age 35. He’d start receiving money at 45 and stop receiving money at age 87. What if he lives for longer? Well, he could use the money he begins receiving at age 45 to buy an annuity that would cover him for his whole life, however long it may be.
Now, we shouldn’t think about H-bonds as children making payments to parents. Because that’s not how it would work. In the real world, people don’t hold much capital, the capitalist class holds capital and ordinary people cover their needs through insurance. And when ordinary people do hold capital, they are encouraged not to hold a single class of capital which has a lot of risk associate with it.* You’d hold them if you were convinced that you had a strategy that could produce children who would pay more in taxes than the market believes. Most people will sell them as soon as they create them. If they’re responsible they’d use the income to buy annuities and gradually build up a reserve so that by the time they reach retirement age they’ll have a guaranteed income stream. And once they have that reserve large enough, they could spend the money they receive and have that motivation to produce more children and more H-bonds.
About the annuities, you could have a system of forced purchasing of annuities that would apply to everyone including the childless. It would say, basically, that if you are at a certain age, say, 35, you have to have a certain amount of annuities in the bank. At age 50 the amount is larger, at by retirement age it is enough to guarantee you what the government considers to be the minimum necessary income. This is not recreating the social security system. A childless individual would have to pay to their own H-bond and buy annuities and later receive income from the annuities but would have no H-bonds to sell. The system is all very regressive, but this could be compensated by more redistribution elsewhere, as a universal income could be set up which would, for those with no income and not enough annuities in the bank, automatically go to buying annuities.
* By this I mean smart people don’t encourage the all-the-eggs in one basket strategy, our politicians on the other hand….
Controversial opinion:
Social media bubbles are very unhealthy, but I’m also skeptical that the solution to America’s ills is for people of different backgrounds and values to talk to each other more. Anecdotally, I have observed that this sometimes leads to arguments where no one persuades anyone else to change their minds, and much more commonly, to highly restrained conversations where one person is basically afraid to say anything and gets lectured by the other.
On the rare occasions when someone’s mind is changed by a discussion, that person usually backslides to what they believed before after enough time passes.
I think that productive discourse in America is mostly handicapped because we have too many “ground rules” that prevent people from speaking their minds and raising valid points (e.g. – there are many things you can’t say without being labeled racist, sexist, etc. and having your reputation destroyed forever and your job possibly revoked; it’s too easy to block out another person’s ideas by claiming you are “offended” or “hurt” or “a victim of this previously” or “we shouldn’t talk about it yet because emotions are still raw”), and because Americans are badly lacking in critical thinking skills, self-reflection skills, and debate/discussion skills. Under these conditions, little can be accomplished by having people talk to each other.
I think it would be healthier if Americans sought out and spoke with people who were different from them, but I also think the social and political benefits would be very disappointing.
“Offended” is a very broad emotion these days.
It’s quite useful to know when someone means you harm. Also to know when someone has disregard for your feelings. Also to know when someone has poor social skills. Also to know when someone comes from a different subcultures.
But squishing all these offenses into the same category with the same indignation is unhelpful, since not all of those situations are equally good reasons for ending a conversation if you value truth.
It is also quite useful to not get offended even when someone is trying to offend you. That gives you a more power, and them less.
Good point. Having a hair trigger does you no good.
edit after below responses: I was originally leaning towards “Offense does you no good” but could imagine situations where it is useful.
It does you a great deal of good if you live in a society where other people set policy based on your trigger setting.
Right, it’s like a three year old throwing a temper tantrum. Bad strategy if your parents hold firm and never cave when you do it. Great strategy if they always cave to get you to shut up.
@John Schilling
Or assign status based on it.
Discourse is highly over-rated. If you want people to get along together having them work toward a common goal is the way to go.
It seems like the problem is that in modern communication environments (where speakers may be from radically different backgrounds or, on the net, from different cultures/countries altogether) the inferential distance is too great to allow for meaningful discourse. Speculatively, in the American context, the breakdown of communities in the past several decades may have destroyed those forums where “talking to people of different backgrounds” might actually be productive, mediated by shared norms of communication (I’m thinking specifically churches and classic town halls, I’m sure there are other examples of community commingling which produced productive discourse).
“Inferential distance” is a great term for a concept I had in mind when writing my OP.
Again, anecdotally I admit, I suspect another reason for the current dysfunction is the diminishing of critical thinking skills, self-reflection skills, and debate/discussion skills in America over the same time period you reference.
The notion that Americans are smarter than ever because more of us have college degrees than ever is a half-truth. I see no evidence that the average American has, over my lifetime, become less gullible, better able to grasp the truth, or to see their own mistakes, or to articulate why they believe in specific things. I strongly suspect that, in all of those areas, Americans were “smarter” in the mid-20th century than they are now, and we are still going downhill.
I have not observed this diminishment. I ascribe the phenomena you have observed more to environmental changes; modern Americans are a little better at critical thinking compared to mid-20th century Americans, but immersed in an environment that makes it a lot harder and failures much more visible.
Is there a particular group or generation you would hold up as being “smarter” in the ways you describe? “Mid-20th century” can cover a lot of ground.
I’m of two minds on this: it’s definitely true that just sitting two people with very different backgrounds and beliefs and expecting something useful to come of it is foolish; there’s a lot of inferential distance between people, lots of different priors and background assumptions, and lots of different ideas of what is inbounds in a conversation.
On the other hand, people don’t change their minds by rational persuasion anyway, and it’s useful for people of different backgrounds to have positive interactions with people unlike them to build trust and good faith, to lay the ground for productive conversations later.
My guess is, the most useful thing is to have people from different bubbles talk to each other, but mostly avoiding hot-button topics that are likely to remind them of their differences.
Pretty much this, but I think productive conversations are less important than knowing people with different values and outlooks and being comfortable with that. Hopefully that would change the societal background, make things better
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to get at: you want to build relationships with people unlike you. This is pretty much a necessary prerequisite to having a productive conversation anyway, since you’ll have built up the trust and good faith necessary, but even if you never have those conversations, you still have a mental model of someone you agree with and get along with who thinks differently from you and has different experiences.
Seconded.
Every conversation I’ve had with a conservative acquaintance ended with:
Them furious thinking I was some sort of godless communist with no respect for traditional values
Me furious wondering how someone who wasn’t totally insane could actually be so disconnected from reality.
It’s hard to have a productive discussion when we can’t even agree on things like “Climate change is real; and is not desirable” or “It is bad that police are not regulated to the same level as our military” or “A society that allows people to die of easily preventable illness due to lack of wealth is undesirable”.
A useful conversation on the legality of gay mirage presupposes both sides believe that gay people should exist at all; and are not inherently sinful.
Talking to people that disagree with me on a deep enough level has only ever caused me to respect them less, not more.
Following what Eugene Dawn says above, have you ever had useful conversations with conservative acquaintances on non-political topics? I think the plausible view is that by having enough useful conversations with someone of a different political persuasion, one can then earn the ability to have one political conversation with them where the two of you learn something from each other. But the ratio needs to be greater, the further the political views are from each other, and the more strongly they are held.
Conversing productively with people who disagree with you is a very different skill from building on shared assumptions.
I find it best to approach such conversations with the goal of understanding why your counterpart believes what they do. “Checkmate” moments are rare and not usually desirable. This does require entering the conversation with a willingness to assume that your counterpart is neither an idiot nor a monster (not something encouraged by our current media climate).
Nevertheless, I have found such discussions to be very valuable, even when they expose very deep disagreements. Perhaps I have had an advantage in this since my own beliefs rarely push me far towards the wings.
One possibly relevant observation:
If I believe X and you believe ~X, where X is something we both feel that there’s room for legitimate disagreement about, but we both agree that Y->X and ~Y -> ~X, and the actual disagreement is that I believe Y and you believe ~Y, where Y is something deep-rooted and important where one or both of us feels that disagreeing makes you a bad person, then arguing about X is likely to be much more acrimonious that you might naively suspect.
I think I would struggle to talk productively about gay rights or divorce against someone whose main argument against those things is that they are against the teachings of bible, because I believe that those things are against the teachings of the bible too, so either I’d have to resort to dark arts or I’d have to attack their entire world view, and that wouldn’t end well.
Maybe we talk so much about talking to each other because talk is cheap. Maybe instead it’d be better if people genuinely got outside their comfort zone for extended periods of time, rather than just doing some little symbolic thing that allowed them to claim they’ve been open-minded such as “engaging in dialogue”.
Interracial/interreligious/interpolitical romantic relationships (serious ones) are a great way to do this, because you end up getting immersed at least part-time in your partner’s culture, you meet their family, friends, etc. often while avoiding being treated like a tourist or imposter. Also, the culmination of these relationships (if they’re heterosexual anyway) is new people who have a stake in the well-being of, and harmony between, both their parents’ groups.
Cultivating a close friendship with someone of another race/religion/ideology is a decent backup option, and is not mutually exclusive with the first.
Not just in America, I assure you. Lack of “critical thinking skills, self-reflection skills, and debate/discussion skills” is an universal human condition.
It’s quite often claimed that a diet alone, or in combination with exercise, can’t make one loose weight and keep it low reliably. At the same time, it’s well known that 100-200 years ago obesity wasn’t a problem, in some developing countries it still isn’t, and the only relevant things that changed since seem to be to one or another
or wi-fi radiation or chemtrails. How do these two facts combine? At a first glance, the first claim seems like obviously wrong, just like all the claims that only a very specific diet can keep you thin, since it’s unlikely so many cultures across the world all shared the same diet (unless it’s exclusion of some popular uniquely modern type of food).(Asking out of plain curiosity, I’m quite content with my weight so don’t need any specific advice, and for the same reason don’t know much about the topic)
Scott has mused about this question before https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/
Not an expert at all, or well versed in the relevant literature, but my opinion: I don’t think anyone would seriously say that it’s truly impossible to lose weight and keep it off on a new diet, just that it doesn’t actually happen. I think the main argument that people actually make (or should be making, plenty are probably Motte-and-Bailey-ing) is that humans are really bad at actually changing their diets long term. If you lived in a box and had your food carefully selected for you, presumably any weight is possible. It’s a modern human living with modern grocery stores and fast food and vending machines, whose psychology makes it empirically ~impossible to stick to long term change.
I am always weirded out by your latter claim – I know several people who moved from obese to pretty-reasonable-slightly-overweight or fit, and I don’t know that many people. How is my sample so non-representative?
I’ve often thought that researchers don’t really have access to the kind of person who actually loses weight and keeps it off. When they go looking for data points, they are looking at people who are at places looking for help losing weight, who are all people who have already tried and failed to lose weight themselves, often repeatedly. By the time you get to “enrolled in a controlled medical study of a particular intervention” you are talking about people who are decades deep in failing to lose weight.
Meanwhile, if a dude starts eating food he cooks himself and hiking every morning he’s invisible to medicine. A guy who commutes to work on a bike is invisible to medicine. Even something like intermittent fasting self-selects – the person who gets really excited about it on reddit is a different person than someone who gets randomly assigned it as something to try by their doctor or a research program.
I’m sure there’s flaws and answers for my thinking on this, but I’m similarly sure that the average theoretical “tried to lose weight and nailed it” person is excluded from the numbers.
Yeah I agree that that research disagrees with my intuition, and I generally have mixed faith in it. I think it probably does get at *something* true, and I worry about letting personal anecdotal experience override what seems like a lot of empirical work, but “it’s impossible for normal people to sustainably lose weight” is pretty clearly not a complete story.
For that comment I was just trying to take the research at face value (in part because I figured someone else would argue against it), but I think my real view on the research is something more moderated like “most people who try to lose weight fail” rather than “nobody can lose weight”.
In theory, researchers could take surveys of people at random, to see how many lost weight and kept it off, and for those who have lost weight, ask them what they did. I have no idea if any such research is being done.
There’s a non-random version called the National Weight Control Registry. Doesn’t get you good population stats, but does get you case studies of people who successfully lost weight.
Note point reliably. You can do this, but apparently typical lifestyle, typical willpower and typical environment makes it rare.
For example I know that I will eat any accessible chocolate. With easy access to it (vending machine next to my home, supply in cupboard etc) I would be 150kg, dramatically obese and unhealthy.
So I am not buying it at all and try to avoid environment where I would have too easy access to it (for example – rarely visiting supermarket, not carrying cash or credit card while going outside etc).
I guess that it is not completely atypical and people in general have too easy access to more food that they can process, so everyone is getting overweight.
You will absolutely lose weight if you eat less that you excercise away. So it’s possible. Just like it’s possible to stop being sad, stop being a drug addict, not cheat on your wife with your secretary, not reveal secrets while tortured by the CIA or stop being gay. You just need enough willpower. I think people have very inconsistent views on what amout of willpower is reasonable to expect, in any situation.
You are mixing things willpower based and not. And some that are mixed.
All of those things at least someone somewhere would expect you to be able to achieve. Except maybe for not being gay, which is depending on your definition of being gay, but at least upgrading to celibacy is always an option.
And different people have different ideas on what is appropriate to expect from people to achieve.
“stop being a drug addict” for many drugs is not solely about willpower – there are also real changes in organism, alcohol withdrawal syndrome is real and may kill ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_withdrawal_syndrome )
“stop being sad” would work if you reformulate it to “stop acting like a sad person” – depression is real.
“stop being gay” and “be celibate” are different things
Are you sure that they were slim? I am betting that fat banker appearing in various kind of propaganda have not appeared from nowhere.
Also, from what I know, being fat (or at least not slim) was part of canon of beauty in ancient/medieval times.
I have seen such suff, but maybe it was a parody.
Is obesity ratio the same among people with access to tasty food basically unlimited by money, with access to food all day in their home, work and any other location?
I suspect that it nowadays describes most of people in USA, and in 1882 this was very unusual.
That paper doesn’t appear to have statistics by economic class – just deciles by gender, race, and birth cohort.
It’s interesting how clear it is that the change started around 1920 though, rather than around 1945. That suggests more of a connection with gas stoves and washing machines than with automobiles and suburbanization.
This is probably incorrect. A lot of things have changed over the past 200 years and any of them, or likely a combination of them, could be driving this change. The most likely suspect is the composition of what we eat: not only in terms of total calories but in the carb/fat/protien breakdown, sugar, various additives and chemicals, etc. And while we don’t have firm data (and probably never will) it seems likely that modern people have more stress and get less sleep than people 200 years ago.
Diet and exercise are valuable but anyone who’s tried to lose weight can tell you that pure calories in-calories out is a myth. It’s a factor, sure, but we know it’s a myth because various drugs have side effects that cause massive weight gain without significantly increasing consumption. Anecdotally, in March and April I lost six pounds in total, so far in May and June I’ve gained two pounds, despite not only eating at the same caloric deficit but, because the gym is closed and I meal prep extensively, having not only identical exercise routines but literally 75-80% identical food consumption, down to the specific brand. This is plateauing, it’s normal, most people who go through weightloss experience it. Why? It could be that my body reacted to losing six pounds, it could be that I changed up my exercise routine in March and my body has adjusted by now, it could be stress catching up to me from Covid and other things, it could be sleep or allergies. Most likely it’s some combination of the above plus my body’s own response to these factors based on my unique genetics. Good luck getting a singular causality from that.
The way I like to think about it is that a calorie is a calorie and gasoline is gasoline but you’ll get very different results if you fill up a Honda vs a Ferrari.
The most likely explanation seems to be that we’ve altered our food and our environment to the extent that our body’s weight control can’t respond appropriately and now we don’t know exactly what’s broken or how to fix it.
I agree it’s most likely, as it seems to make intuitive sense (though I need to be careful about that).
There is another possibility I’ve entertained. When we first started using feeding tubes, people would sicken and die. We realized we were missing something fundamental about nutrition. We added vitamins and minerals, and people stopped dying. But they weren’t healthy. There is something about whole foods that we haven’t figured out yet. It could easily be related to the obesity issue.
Depends on what you mean by that. I agree that it is ridiculously hard to calculate accurately either one of them.
But going by pure physics: you are not a perpetum mobile, you are not photosynthesizing sugar.
This. Nobody is claiming metabolisms aren’t a thing or that they can’t be altered. But if your metabolism was altered in a way that you need less food, then you need less food and can eat less.
Or maybe it altered your activity in such a way that you need less food and can eat less.
Or maybe it magically made your adipose tissue have less calorie-to-volume value and water content. Then you will lose weight when you have deficit at a greater rate, since it takes more volume to satisfy the deficit. In this case, normal-fat person and enhanced-water-fat person would, given the same diet, arrive at a healthy weight at the same time even though enhanced-water-fat person was initially heavier since EWF is losing more weight-per-calorie.
Or maybe the person’s body gets better at extracting energy from food; now they need less food, and can eat less.
This of course doesn’t address the behavior parts where a person who used to be able to eat 2700 k/cal now has to adjust their eating habits to eat 1800, but it also doesn’t contradict CICO at all. To contradict CICO, you have to show where the body is magically getting extra energy to make the fat from, and physics claims it can’t. At best you have an argument for better weight monitoring and more granular adjustments to diet for these folks.
I mean, I kind of agree, that makes the most sense.
But this leads to really scary scenarios where your base metabolic rate can swing by hundreds of calories a day depending on your environment. In which case, in terms of weight loss, why would we look at calories when environmental alterations can swing your basal metabolic?
Although I’m a little skeptical. It’s not unusual to have people report a weight gain of 15 pounds in four weeks. And yeah, these are deeply depressed people, I’m sure they’re overeating, there’s also probably water retention or something, but 1000+ calorie swing per day, bare minimum? That’s extreme. For example, assuming 5 pounds of that isn’t real weight gain, you could steal eat a whole extra meal at McDonalds and we’d still be pointing at a ~200 calorie/day change in your metabolism.
2 bars of chocolate is 1400 calories
around 400g of calories
Sounds like viable additional overeating for deeply depressed people, add lack of activity and it would not be surprising at all.
?
A standard bar of Hershey’s chocolate is 210 calories.
A depressed person eating 2 bars of chocolates, totally viable. But as anybody on Halloween can tell you, after six candy bars you’re pretty sick. And if someone’s literally eating six candy bars a day for a month, I don’t think there’d be any confusion about why people are gaining weight.
https://www.nutritionix.com/search?q=chocolate claims that 200g of chocolate has 1070 calories.
Similarly your link claims that 200g has around 1000 calories.
And it seems that standard one weighs 100-200g ( http://static.ilewazy.pl/dziennik/470/czekolada-do-wypiekow-tabliczka.jpg ).
Though on searching for “chocolate bar” it seems that most of images are not of solid bar of chocolate but of various products that involve small amount of chocolate (Snickers, Lion, Mars Twix).
So how one names bar of an actual chocolate? (sorry for a confusion).
Still, eating 200g of chocolate seems easily in range of overeating depressed people.
1000 calories a day isn’t a lot. A bag of chips is 1200 k/cal. A box of Oreos is 2400 k/cal. If you had your BMR/consumption ration zeroed out before (nobody does), then 1/3rd of a box of oreos and a half a bag of chips puts you on track for 12 pounds of fat a month, no water weight. And that’s assuming they weren’t gaining weight beforehand.
And people who overeat don’t typically eat right all day then sneak in one McDonald’s meal a week – those are the eating habits of a mostly-healthy person giving themselves a treat.
But that’s not the clincher here. Think of it this way:
Fat is made of stuff, but is pretty consistently 3500 calories per pound. So if we are talking about this woman gaining 15 pounds and we give her a 50% leeway for water weight, she’s had a swing of of 26250 calories that month(875 per day). Those calories either had to come out of her metabolism, or go into her metabolism; there’s no magic that generates fat from nothing.
If it came out of her metabolism, assuming she’s a pretty typical 150 lb 35 year old woman, she’s now working on an effective BMR of 600 calories a day. That’s not particularly plausible and is probably slipping into “this person is dying” range. She’d be the kind of medical oddity people would study.
The other alternative is that she’s eating more or exercising less, or some combination of the two.
The biggest effect I can recall seeing is in the “Biggest loser” weight loss study, which was summarized like this:
That’s a 23% reduction. In the worst case scenario I know of, they could have laid in bed all day and ate a 2000 calorie a day diet, and gained about a pound every three years. with mild bi-weekly exercise, that number goes up to 2600. That’s not starvation rations.
So you have a situation where “CICO is a myth” has a lot of work to do. Barring situations where this is all waterweight or her metabolism was unrealistically low to the point where you’d expect her to maybe die, the plausible explanation here is that she ate more and exercised less. Thermodynamics demands one of those three.
@matkoniecz
200g is almost half a pound. That’s not a standard size for a candy bar.
#1 Anyone eating half a pound of chocolate a day for a week is going to be sick.
#2 No one eating half a pound of chocolate a day is confused about their weight gain.
@GearRatio
Isn’t this exactly what happened? People noticed that everyone, or nearly everyone, who took this drug gained a ton of weight. Aren’t people currently studying it, trying to figure out the cause?
Why not both? Why can’t the drug cause overeating and other changes in the body that cause weight gain? Why are these mutually exclusive?
We all accept that metabolisms slow as you age.
We all accept that muscles burn more calories.
We all accept that hormones regulate the amount of fat the body stores and how it processes calories.
We all accept that some people have digestive issues and won’t get the same nutritional benefits from certain foods.
Two different things. Yes, people gained weight; yes, that’s worth studying. No, the drug didn’t lower their metabolisms to below what’s realistically needed to survive without any noticeable effects besides “they gained weight”. At 600 k/cal BMR, you’d expect to see SOMETHING. Hair falling out, lower body temperatures, degrading joints – none of these is for sure, but something like them is. But that drug doesn’t cause people to look like walking metabolic dead; it just causes weight gain.
And remember that’s only accounting for half her weight gain; if we aren’t being very charitable and saying half of it is water weight with no evidence, she’s working with -200 BMR; her body is producing energy from aether or something.
They aren’t, but remember that I’m responding to “CICO isn’t the explanation here”. If we actually look to what’s been researched on the drug, the primary findings are that people on the drug eat more and exercise less. That’s CICO in a nutshell.
I think part of the problem is you are reading a subtext into what I’m typing that says “people on this drug are deplorable overeaters”. I’m not saying that – if there’s a drug that consistently makes people overeat/under-exercise that doesn’t make them terrible people, and I would probably gain similar or more weight in the same situation. But it doesn’t contradict CICO, it reinforces it.
This is an argument for monitoring one’s weight/loss gain and adjusting the “CI” portion, not against CICO.
This part is important, because I think it shows the part you are missing here. Imagine this:
1. Dave eats 3500 calories above his BMR + Activity. He does not have insulin issues or anything; he gains less than a pound, over-performing what CICO predicts. Dave is a fraction of a pound thinner than we’d expect, and is pleased.
2. Bob has the same consumption excess as Dave, but his body hates him; it converts 100% of the excess into fat. He gains a pound of fat, exactly as CICO predicts.
3. Eustace has the same excess as Bob and Dave, and gains 2 pounds.
1 and 2 are possible. 3 isn’t; you can’t actually beat CICO in this way unless you defy thermodynamics, there just isn’t anywhere for the weight to come from. Even if the drug made his body metabolize muscle and bone to supply the fat, he’d lose MORE weight, because the caloric content of muscle and bone is lower than that of fat. He’d also probably die/get really sick, but that’s a bit off topic.
So the worst case scenario is that CICO just does what it predicts, everyone else either loses more weight or gains less weight. There’s only one direction we can go, and it’s “waste energy”, not “create energy”.
What this looks like in the real world is that at similar ages and sizes, the max observed BMR variation is about 20-25%; this is big, but not insurmountable and is somewhat counteracted by activity-calorie-costs and the fact that 20-25% outliers are kind of rare.
If someone is trying CICO and it “isn’t working”, then the calories need to be adjusted down or exercise needs to be adjusted up. The most likely problem at this point is over/under estimation of input/output.
After that, we get into people exercising more/less or eating more/less than other people. This explains the vast, vast majority of the rest of it. There are instances where someone can’t exercise or can’t eat less(drugs, disability, etc), but that’s a problem of not being able to adjust inputs rather than a failure of the formula.
The reason I’m so harsh on this is that all of the solutions that actually work in a thermodynamic sense are CICO solutions. If someone is trying calorie counting and it isn’t working, they either need more accurate measurements of input/output, a decrease in input or an increase in output. For most people, this means “I’m either miscounting my calories or my BMR is slightly lower than I thought; I will decrease my input and monitor until I’m losing weight”, but any solution besides that that doesn’t seek to alter input/output parameters isn’t going to work.
Two asides, then the main point.
Your stomach is not a anti-matter reactor. It does not, under any understanding, perfectly convert matter to energy. We’re far from themodynamics here.
25% of 2000 is 500. A 500 calorie deficit is generally quoted as the most you can safely sustain. That’s huge.
No, just no. Weightlifters don’t do this. Runners don’t do this, bikers don’t do this, bodybuilders don’t do this, nobody seriously involved in fitness does this.
I remember when IIFYM swept through a few years back. Not just CICO, but making sure you hit your carb/fat/protein targets. People tried it out, got middling to poor results, and now everybody’s back on chicken, rice, and broccoli. The only people I’ve ever seen consistently eat garbage are long distance runners/bikers who A. burn 600+ calories a day and B. are skinny fats who are just maintaining their weight and honestly seem like they need fat on their frame for endurance competitions.
And if I or somebody else were trying to help an obese friend lose weight, it would be irresponsible to advise CICO. Yeah, you gotta track your calories and eat at a caloric deficit, but you also need to completely change your diet, fix your sleep, hydrate, etc.
There’s just an obvious, observable difference in weight loss outcomes between someone at a 300 caloric deficit eating clean and working out vs someone who cut back their food intake to a 300 calorie deficit but still eats garbage.
Pure CICO isn’t tough love, it’s inaccurate and unhelpful.
EDIT:
And to forestall arguments on athletic performance, bodybuilders, especially competing bodybuilders, don’t do this (ok, some guys eat garbage while bulking). Bodybuilders don’t have any performance targets to hit except the highest muscle and lowest bodyfat possible. And they’re the originators of the chicken/broccoli/rice diet. None of them do this, none of them would touch “unclean” food while cutting for competition.
Weightlifters don’t do this. Runners don’t do this, bikers don’t do this, bodybuilders don’t do this, nobody seriously involved in fitness does this
No serious Scotsman.
You don’t have to do this to be at a decent weight, you just can. Serious athletes like those you listed don’t have any reason to because they would have to eat massive amounts to see any real weight gain.
Yeah, people sleep less because we have cheap electricity and internet. With two parents working, there is less time to cook at home; and when you buy food, it is usually full of sugar and salt. (Even when you cook at home; if you buy any preprocessed ingredient, it is usually already full of sugar and salt.)
Returning to 200 years old lifestyle would mean that my wife gives up her career so that she can spend the entire day taking care of kids and cooking, I switch to some manual job, and we both give up internet and chocolate. That would probably decrease our fat, but at a great cost.
“Calories in, calories out” is a simplistic theory that dismisses the actually important parts, such as: what mechanism makes your body decide when to release the fat from fat cells as an energy source, and when to keep it locked and just make you feel tired. (It just makes a prediction that if your body decides to release the energy, and you spend it, you will lose weight. No shit, Sherlock!)
I don’t know how good is my model, because I never studied this stuff deeply, but it seems that the thing you want to avoid most is: eating lots of sugar (carbs) in a short time interval, without also eating fiber. Because this is what drives your insulin level high, which has all kinds of negative effects; specifically it makes you feel more hungry, and tired. And of course, if you are hungry and tired, you are probably going to eat a lot and exercise little, with obvious consequences. But you probably can’t help yourself, if you feel genuinely hungry and tired. Instead of praying for magical willpower, it is better to avoid getting into this position in the first place.
What counts as “sugar (carbs)”? Sugar, all sugar substitutes, bread, pasta, rice. Also fruit, but fruit always contains fiber, so it is okay. (Fruit drinks, however, often don’t.) Whole-grain wheat means wheat with more fiber, which is why it is better. Avoid sugar and sugar substitutes completely. Bread, pasta, and rice should only be eaten with some vegetable. Surprisingly, lollipop is okay as long as you don’t chew it, because it takes a lot of time. Chocolate is bad, and will make you want to eat more chocolate. Everything is better when eaten with some raw vegetable.
Epistemic status: I watched some YouTube videos.
It could be that a few highly specific modern foods were not available to your ancestors- your great-great-grandmother had carbs, but very few of them were doritos- and that these are disproportionately responsible for obesity.
It could be that some kind of 5g chemtrails effect changes the metabolic setpoint. IIRC some of the chemicals found in plastics have been shown to have similar results, but it’s difficult to find sources that are both 1) easily layman interpretable and 2) not clearly intended for crazy people.
It could simply be that the modern conception that diet and exercise can’t keep you thin is wrong. Wealthy people in the past who didn’t work physically were out of shape just like moderners and the health problems it caused were completely covered up by the other health problems inherent to a lifestyle with no modern sanitation, antibiotics, or medicine more advanced than leechcraft.
Personally, my money is on some combination of the above.
Animals are getting fatter, too.
That pretty much guarantees we are poisoning ourselves somehow, again. .. which ubiquitous molecule is *not* common place in Japan?
But has been getting more common:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18957932/
… So, it is something in.. wheat flour? Please dont tell me the people railing against bleached flour will turn out to have been right all along.
What the research says is that diet and exercise work very well either separately or especially in combination, but that generally the sorts of people who agree to be in weight loss RCTs aren’t good at maintaining them for long periods of time. This is glossed into ‘diet and exercise don’t work’ by people who don’t understand how to read medical studies, which to be fair are an absolutely inappropriate place to study diet and exercise in the first place – behavioral intervention trials are just not at all the same kind of thing as drug trials, and all the standards, verbiage, and methods for medical research have historically been really focused on the latter.
Until significantly better studies than I’ve read come out, my strong prior is that anyone who says they’ve found the One True Diet is, at best, describing something that happens to work particularly well for them due to metabolic or personality quirks and may or may not generalize. More often they’re trying to sell me something.
In a previous open thread, I noted that the number of black americans being shot by police was only about 300 every year, and that in my opinion, this number was not large enough to worry much about.
In light of the George Floyd events, I now see that I made a mistake in this analysis. George Floyd was killed by police, but he was not shot, and therefore would not be included in any statistics about how many people were shot by police. I had previously assumed that the number of people killed by police in ways other than being shot would be negligible. However, I know of two cases- Eirc Gardner and George Floyd- where people were killed by police in ways other than being shot. Since I know about very few incidents where people were killed by police, the fact that two of them did not involve guns makes me less confident that the number of people shot by police can be used as a proxy for the number of people killed by police. I do not have good numbers for how many people were killed by police by methods other than shooting, but I am no longer confident that their number is negligible.
What’s your upper bounds for negligibilty in terms of absolute numbers killed by the police?
I don’t think I have one in terms of absolute numbers- a million is negligible if the population is a quadrillion.
The Guardian’s database over people killed by the police in the US include the categories Taser, Death in custody, Struck by vehicle and Other (with specification):
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database#
I was not aware of this database. Thanks!
Below, souleater points out that there are 1000 people who die in encounters with the police a year.
There is also the DoJ BJS collection of “Arrest Related Deaths” which includes death from almost all causes including “natural causes” and “medical issues” and so on arising from police interaction OR while in custody. They stopped collection after 2014 due to dissatisfaction with the methodology and are apparently retooling it, but after reviewing it I feel pretty confident putting an absolute ceiling of about 1,500-2,000 per year, from all causes.
Just to have a benchmark: The German police has shot 562 people since they started to do a statistic of it 1952.
I appriciate that the situation in the US is different from Germany, but the overall murder rate in the US is ~5 times higher than in Germany, but the rate of police shootings is 100 times higher for all demographics, and 30 times higher for black people alone.
Cops mostly shoot people when they think the person has a gun. There are much more guns in the US than in Germany, so it’s reasonable to be more afraid there.
German police do have batons and riot police can be pretty eager to use them on some leftists. But overall they’re well educated and have a generally positive image. If you’d like an entertaining look into what German police stereotypically look and act like, please enjoy this satirical rap song:
https://youtu.be/z4w5cqM3F_c
I’m completly aware how the police sometimes acts against protestors. I just wanted to give an baseline how different police can act, given that OP argued that 300 is not a worringly high number.
And yes I’m aware of Böhmermann songs, but I think you misjudge this song:
1) The song is more a satire of the self image “Gangster Rappers” maintain.
2) The artist is literally the son of an police officer, which might affect his personal image.
I know, I know, but I do think to someone who has no context or mental image about German police, this song does a pretty good job at showing off a variety of typical equipment and behavior.
Just a little Schmankerl for any interested non Germans!
@Katian:
> this song does a pretty good job at showing off a variety of typical equipment and behavior
I’m not sure. As an American with a couple semesters of college German but no particular knowledge of current German policing strategies, I wasn’t able to figure it out. I’d guess that that it’s primarily making fun of the main character’s misplaced faith in the effectiveness of the police as a personal protective strategy, but really I wasn’t sure who it was satirizing or in what direction. DarkTigger’s comment helped a little, but maybe you could offer some more insight on what’s going on culturally in the song?
@nkurz
The central joke of the song is: It’s silly for gangster rappers to brag about gangs and weapons, when the police is better equipped and their use of force is justified by law. The singer, Böhmermann, actually has a lot of trust in police and the rule of law, so it’s sincere in that respect. But the emphasis on police violence has a certain ironic flavor.
Some things you can see in the video:
– just what German police looks like in general — green or blue uniforms with old fashioned hats
– there are different types of police with different levels of uniform for traffic, general order, detectives and riot police
– they’re shown using batons and enjoying physical violence, but no guns are used or brandished
– they have horses!
I have been paying attention to police misconduct and impunity of all kinds for many years now. And during that time, I’ve generally seen this surrounding ideology that explains police misconduct in terms of grand, sweeping theories of race and society, so that a black policeman shooting a black suspect in a majority-black city with a black police chief and a black mayor is explained as racism[1]. And this is pretty annoying, because I think that ideology is fundamentally broken. I think concepts like white privilege and structural racism provide very little help in understanding police misconduct in 2020, and reforms based on the assumptions that undergird those concepts will mostly fail.
And yet, there really is a big problem with our justice system. If you spend a few days digging into what modern policing for a profit looks like, you will be (or should be) shocked and horrified. It’s a massive machine to wring pennies out of people at the bottom of society who barely have any pennies, and it imposes huge costs on them and the surrounding community to do so. (For example, inmates in some places are billed for every day they’re in jail–they have to pay when they come out. Every prison system uses their phone system to extract piles of money from inmates and their families. In many places, when you’re released under electronic monitoring, you’re on the hook for essentially renting the monitoring equipment. Civil forfeiture extracts money from people who haven’t been and often aren’t even charged with a crime. Fines and court fees in some places make up a big chunk of the city’s revenue, and the local government runs a traffic court whose explicit job is to bring in revenue. And so on. It’s inherently corrupting.)
In the last 20 years, there have been cases of Chicago police using torture to extract confessions that came out. (One case I remember had eight people confess to a high-profile murder, two of whom were in jail at the time the murder took place.) Some police departments (NYPD, CPD, Baltimore PD) have reputations for being very willing to beat people up, and extremely resistant to any kind of meaningful oversight. (Police in many cities have demonstrated that they’re largely unwilling to be governed by elected officials–see the NYPD’s effective pushback against DeBlasio.) The quality of evidence used for trials is often just one hop up from a Ouija board. (Google for “bite mark evidence” for an extreme example.) Police in many places have arrested people for filming them. This seems to have gotten less common now, but still happens. In some places, after being arrested, you can easily sit in jail for several months waiting around for your case to be dealt with, which is why bail reform is a big deal. (If not making bail meant staying in jail another week until your trial happened, it would not be nearly so nasty.)
The ideologues who are loudest about this are, IMO, mostly captured by an ideology that makes them dumber. But they are 100% right that there are big problems with the police, and that we need to make this whole system better. The main reason we haven’t is a mix of things, I think: few people with any voice or resources interact much with this system, most of this is done at a state or local level so it’s not clear what I can do in Maryland to address a broken justice system in Illinois or Arizona. A lot of local governments will probably have a financial crisis if they’re forced to stop extracting pennies from their underclass. There are a *lot* of companies and private businesses who profit from the existing system and will lobby to fight against any changes. And so on.
[1] There is an almost exactly parallel situation with education–black kids underperfoming in a school with mostly black teachers, a black principal, mostly black school board members, under the control of a mostly black city government with a black mayor and city council and head of schools, is explained as the result of some form of racism.
A lot of the issues you mention are being tackled in a piecemeal fashion. There’s been decent progress on the asset forfeiture front, for example.
Pretty much this. My own formula would be, in order of decreasing importance:
1a) Mandatory body and dash cams. Dash cam is running from the moment the vehicle leaves the motor pool until it returns. Body cam is running from the time the officer puts on their uniform and leaves their private residence until they punch out at the end of their shift. All video is organized and stored for a minimum of 2-3 years, and the entire video file of a shift must be produced in a timely fashion upon receipt of a FOIA-style request (this will allow for copying and longer-term backup). We can carve out some things for police intelligence operations (undercover cops and CIs and such) MAYBE and still reap most of the benefits of this. Yes, this is a much more expensive and comprehensive plan than I’ve seen any department actually implement. I am generally against operating at the federal level, but maybe this is something that needs to be a federal mandate and funding, under threat of “if your department cannot meet standard another agency will take over policing duties in your area until you meet standard”.
This goes hand in hand with:
1b) Mandatory third-party call-related death inquiries with a tiered response level: Anytime there is a death related to interaction with a patrol officer, there is at least a basic inquiry in the first 24 hours, meaning a recorded debriefing/statement of the officers involved and a review of the dash and body cam footage. My suggestion would be that that this should be done by state bureaus of investigation or the FBI, and again, funded at the federal level. I say “tiered response” because a review should be able to distinguish as someone put it upthread the difference between a “Category 1” (obviously no malfeasance) and a Category 2/3 (obviously malfeasance, possible malfeasance). Possible malfeasance triggers suspension w/ pay while a more thorough investigation is mounted, whereas if the investigator thinks there obvious malfeasance they move to the standard criminal procress of investigation, arrest, and charges.
2) No public sector unions, to include police: The biggest reason why it’s hard to fire bad cops is exactly the same reason it’s hard to fire bad teachers: powerful unions that will make it extremely costly.
3) A 2 strikes or 3 strikes policy for sustained use of force complaints, and a system to track them between departments: I’ve reviewed some studies on police use of force, and a pretty consistent picture emerges where a tiny minority (often as little as 5 or 6 officers in a department of hundreds) account for almost ALL the complaints. For complaints where there is no death involved I don’t think we need the expedited and third-party review above, but we need a more effective way to weed out those 5 or 6 officers and keep them from just quitting the city force, going to work for county sherriff, getting fired by county sherriff and going to work for the next town over, etc etc. My preferred standard would be that 2 or 3 sustained (that is, investigated and determined to be valid, officer was disciplined) use of force complaints is a career ender and we have a database similar to the sort that I believe follows doctors and lawyers around where prospective future employers can see “Oh, hey, So-and-so was fired for excessive use of force in 2006”.
I think that these three reforms, implemented correctly, would go a long way.
There are a lot of other things we could say about criminal justice reform with respect to the other things Albatross mentions, but those are my formula for dealing with police use of force.
This is an excellent and well thought out plan that i couldn’t have come up with better myself. You wouldn’t happen to have any similar ideas on how to help propel these ideas to the national stage, would you? At the moment the only ideas that the protests are helping spread awareness of is “end police brutality”, which while good, isn’t an actual plan like this.
Maybe start by coordinating with other groups already trying to push ideas, if it gains a bit of actual momentum and there is a United front so the idea proposers aren’t going off in different directions to badly, then get a celeb or someone with clout to mention it
Someone here linked this https://www.joincampaignzero.org/#vision
This is ideal, thank you
If I had a good plan for that, I’d pursue it. As it is I’m just some rando on the internet. And to be clear, this is -very- top level and would require a lot of refinement. For example, I did some math and figure HD bodycam retention for 2 years for all NYPD officers would take about 10 Facebooks of storage (that is, 1,000-ish Petabytes, FB has about 100 total). So a practical, implementable version will need to compromise on time, resolution, length of storage, or we need better compression than the figures I found (which estimated about 128mb per minute of HD video).
You’re right that there are lots of problems other than race. But the fact that there *are* police systems and school boards with black cops and mostly black teachers, black chief of police and principal, and a black mayor and mostly black city council and school board, is *itself* a result of racism (primarily in the form of redlining, but also the various other forms of racial segregation).
Many notably black towns today were once radically white (notably, the Bush family briefly lived in Compton at a time that black people basically couldn’t rent or own any property in the city).
And given the “growth Ponzi scheme” that Charles Marohn notes underlying postwar suburbanism, many of these once-white-now-black municipalities are discards of an earlier generation that extracted the wealth they could, and then left behind an indebted local government that prevents the re-establishment of a successful municipality by the black people that got the land after white flight.
Many of these individual problems aren’t themselves about race (like the growth Ponzi scheme), but they then intersect with racialized things in ways that can at least plausibly be said to be racist, whether or not there’s any George Wallace type involved.
the idea that decades old redlining is the defining factor of modern american living patters ought to be patently ridiculous.
What? Show me a city anywhere in US history that extracted meaningful amounts of wealth for anyone other than the politicians running the place. And how on earth does this explain the cities, like detroit, that have been run by minority led political machines for decades?
I believe steve sailer calls this occom’s butterknife.
> Show me a city anywhere in US history that extracted meaningful amounts of wealth for anyone other than the politicians running the place.
Basically every single inner-ring suburb founded in the 1950s or early 1960s. They provided easy commutes for the first generation of auto-owning suburbanites into the city for 30 years, but when the roads needed to be repaved, and the next ring of suburbs had caused traffic congestion, these families sold to a lower-income successive generation, and the municipality got stuck in debt, while the descendants of that first generation moved to the second or third ring suburbs.
I would say that Detroit (and many other central cities with a major suburban belt from the time between 1920 and 1950) is an early example of this. The poor current city inherited its debt from the first generation of suburban development that stuck it with infrastructure it can’t pay for.
So basically the problem is that the housing market doesn’t price in decaying infrastructure?
Selling someone a house at its market value is NOT extracting wealth from them. And it certainly doesn’t represent a city government consciously extracting wealth from people. It’s not even possible for it to be that. First, what you’re claiming is that building the roads and maintaining them for 30 years was more expensive than simply maintaining them, which is hard to swallow. Second, infrastructure is not that big a share of local government expenditures. far more goes to police, education, and social services. Detroit did not go bankrupt paving the roads, they did so with massive (and massively corrupt) public services. third, your claim seems to be that the people who built the roads extracted money from the people who came after them, but how? they had left!
I didn’t use the “extracting wealth” terminology. The analogy I think is better is like a factory that operates for a few decades and then leaves a toxic waste site, and declares bankruptcy so it can’t be billed for the cost. It’s not that the later residents were ripped off, but just that the underlying resource was damaged in a way that perhaps makes it affordable, but causes concentrated problems.
The standard Strong Towns line is that most postwar suburban development (and some prewar development as well) is this kind of toxic extraction of wealth from land and leaving behind a toxic pile of debt (and decaying infrastructure) that the local government will have to deal with. I don’t know how accurate it is to say that this is the main issue, but it’s exactly the same character as the policies that stick cities with pension obligations. (And Marohn himself, and many of the Strong Towns commenters, are conservative Republicans.)
@keaswaran says:
Right, but the debt wasn’t run up in the 50s and 60s, it was run up after, and the largest debts, as you say, overgenerous pensions for city workers, which speaks to what I said about the people running the place. Cities were not stuck with large debts, they voted for people, repeatedly, who promised a lot in the 80s-now, and stuck people NOW with the bill.
Right, and the suburbs didn’t become majority-minority in the 50s or 60s either. The claim would be (which I haven’t checked yet) that in each municipality, the initial wave of infrastructure and pension policies are enacted by an initial wave of white settlement, and then the municipality gradually becomes less and less white as the debts build up, so that majority-minority jurisdictions are then stuck holding the bag, by which time the next generation of white suburbanites has moved one ring farther out.
I think there is a genuine and interesting problem you’re pointing out here but that the racial lens for understanding it is probably not especially enlightening.
The way it looks to me, in the US we have this pattern where we:
a. Build up a community, with working institutions and not too much poverty/crime/dysfunction and nice new buildings/housing stock. Traditionally, we’ve been *really good* at building new stuff. (Not so much now.)
b. Over time, the institutions become less functional and more captured by their incumbents and employees. The schools become mainly about jobs for teachers, the police department becomes mainly about jobs for cops, etc. Elected officials solve budget crunches by underfunding pensions and deferring needed maintenance, and sometimes resolve labor disputes by promising extra-generous pensions knowing the bill will come due far in the future. Infrastructure and housing stock decays, more poor people move in needing more services, people age and need more services/pay less taxes, and generally, things get less and less appealing.
c. Thanks to economic change, broken union/employer dynamics, technological change, etc., the industries that drew people to the region leave or die off.
d. In general, fixing the broken stuff, upgrading the housing stock, getting the schools and police and budget back in order, reusing the existing industrial land for new industry–all that is a lot more expensive than just starting fresh somewhere else. Other places don’t have entrenched public sector unions and NIMBY laws preventing anything new being built and an impending fiscal crisis due to underfunded pensions and infrastructure that’s not been maintained properly for decades because deferring maintenance was better politics. And so people leave. The kids of most of those families that grew up there move away and seek greener pastures. The younger and more ambitious people move away. They go off to college and find a job in Austin, TX; they sell their homes and retire to Florida; they sell their homes and take a transfer to their corporate HQ in Atlanta.
Now, none of those people had an obligation to stick around. The kids who grew up there certainly didn’t owe it to the world to go back to their rustbelt city and take a job as a social worker dealing with the local opiod crisis rather than moving to a tech hub and getting a job as a programmer. But even the adults who lived there and at least had a vote also don’t have some kind of obligation to stay while the schools fall apart and the police stop responding to calls and the county hospital shuts down and the streets are all potholes so the pension fund can be shored up another year. They’re allowed to sell their homes and leave, and they do.
My sense is that this is a general problem, and it has to do with US society not being very good at maintaining/recovering cities. It’s easier to move away and start over. I think addressing this as a racial justice issue is very unlikely to lead to much progress, because it’s a general issue of something we don’t do well, which lands more on poorer people than wealthier ones, and so lands more on blacks than whites.
Lately there’s been a lot of people looking at individual photos/videos and trying to suss out the demographics of people in them. To take the less-obvious-than-most-obvious example, prior to the most recent news cycle, there were lots of pictures of crowded public places (actually crowded, or “artistic” shots exploiting angle and lens) and people speculating on who was in them. My question is technical (and about a subject I am utterly unfamiliar with, so excuse me if it’s a dumb question), not CW:
How many pictures of an event (with a given number of people in a given area) would you need to establish who was there (from “the crowd was 60% male” to “Alice, Bob, and Clara were there”) with a reasonable degree of confidence?
I would be more interested in the demographics of the photographers to establish credibility. If they’re all professionals who have worked a long time at their publications, then they know all of the tricks, and serve the agenda of their publications.
Laymen using their phones simply don’t have the know-how or capability to bias their photos as well.
In that publications cherry-pick photos from freelancer/bystander/participant offerings, I would also have to make sure that photos from a diverse number of publications were present.
I second this. Keep in mind that a professional photojournalist will often snap several orders of magnitude more pictures than eventually reach publication.
But I will also say, there are still biases affecting where laymen point their phones and which photos they choose to publish.
I am not a stats major but if my half remembered stats class is correct it depends on how many people are in the crowd.
To be 95% sure you are within 10 percentage points of being right:
Statistics Calc
population: sample
10: 9
100:50
1000:88
10,000:95
Now thats assuming a “random” sample, but it you’re using pictures you can’t really make that assumption. Because of cameraman bais, or the tendency of same race groups to congregate. If you had Satellite imagery, or CCTV footage you could be a little more confident. but 50-100 people would give you a decent estimation
Not so much, since as you note the distribution of the sample is almost certainly nonrandom in hard-to-assess ways. I’d be inclined to write the whole question off and just say you can’t usefully assess the demographics of events without either at least an informal attendance list or photography of a plurality of attendants – less because it’s not possible that small-group photo is representative than because it’s not possible to prove that it is.
An assessment that is not provably correct, is still very often useful.
Absolutely, at face value. But in event demography, using source data that could be trivially manipulated in almost any dimension? I really can’t think of any situation where this doesn’t go unpleasant directions almost instantly.
Yesterday was election day in DC. There was also a curfew. You were exempt from the curfew if you were voting.
But cops started telling people waiting in line to go home because it was past curfew. https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1267982201561460740
How do you restore someone’s rights if they obeyed the illegal order? That’s mostly a rhetorical question, because this is such a mess.
I’m sorry, the mayor of Washington DC is actually called Mayor Bowser? How was this ever going to work out well? Every time she turned up in my cities on Sim City SNES it was a bloody disaster.
Maybe Plumber can suggest a solution.
Hmm, come to think of it, she has been keeping the city all koopa-d up with these curfew orders.
Too soon.
This failure really falls on the mayor, I think. At this point, she should have predicted that the police were going act unlawfully and interfere with the election. Does she not have control over the police?
I only say this half-jokingly: If governors and mayors fear that the police are going to riot, disobey, or target them if they issue something like a stand-down order, they need to consider calling in the national guard to restore the law.
As for practical solutions: Disband the police and redo the election next week. It’s only unlikely to happen because of the lack of political will to accomplish it, not because of any practical difficulty.
Also: Prosecute each individual police officer who did this for conspiracy to deprive people of civil rights under color of law. There need to be consequences.
I think this would be unworkable, actually getting convictions would require assistance from the police department.
What sort of assistance do you think it’d require? If you say they’ll, e.g., refusing to give lists of who was on duty that evening, then you can prosecute whoever’s refusing for also being in that conspiracy to violate civil rights.
This may end with the entire DC Police Department in prison, but in that hypothetical I believe it’d be a good thing.
You need a list of who was on duty, then they give you the list and you qusetion each of them why they didn’t respond or why it took so long to respond. Each ones has a response that is corroborated by another police officer. 1 alibi, plausible doubt, acquittal.
I don’t think this is how alibis and juries work. If it’s obvious that the “alibi” is just trying to protect their friends, the jury doesn’t have the believe them.
The jury doesn’t have to believe them, but you need some form of evidence to get a conviction. ‘There was a lack of response on a night you were on duty’ isn’t evidence that this particular cop committed a crime, it could have been the chief interfering in some way, the dispatcher causing the issue, or other cops ignoring the calls and not this one. With a conspiriacy if you don’t have them ratting on each other or a specific audio/paper trail of them conspiring plausibly doubt is close to baked in.
Really interesting NYT article on the failures of the CDC in the C19 pandemic.
The broad picture here is, as I see it:
a. The agency wasn’t ready for anything like this, and massively screwed up the early response. This was partly due to software problems, partly due to bad decisions. Clearly nobody had tried doing a simulation or dry run of how to respond to a pandemic that exercised any of the relevant systems. Many of the other problems seem to have been internal to CDC–publishing antibody and RNA tests mixed, not getting guidance out, etc.
b. There are leadership problems within the CDC–the director doesn’t seem to have done very well at pushing the CDC to move faster, and it sounds like there are conflicts at the top.
c. As the crisis moved forward, they and the white house committee on C19 got into various power struggles. This led to delays in guidance being published, contradictory guidance between the CDC and the white house, and sometimes minimal data being published by CDC without much additional information to help people interpret it. Worst of all, there are times where it looks like people in the white house overruled some CDC advice about spreading the virus based on political considerations. (This is a terrible idea, BTW.)
All these combined to make the disaster of the CDC’s C19 response so far. My sense is that CDC has lost a huge amount of stock in the eyes of a lot of doctors and scientists. Some of this can legitimately be laid at the feet of the Trump administration (once C19 became the top item on the news, they wanted to control the message and sometimes overrode technical guidance for political reasons, but it seems to me that most of the disaster was inherent in CDC, and would have happened under a hypothetical president Clinton or Cruz.
I think about this failure model, or potential failure model a bunch: we have these large, very expensive organizations who’s primary duty is to prepare for a hopefully rare catastrophe. If the catastrophe comes up – we need them to work, but there’s no way to really know before hand if the drills and simulations you’re running will translate to real-world success.
Like, take the Navy for instance. The last naval engagement the US was involved in (other than small boat skirmishes) was what, during the gulf war? And that was mostly a turkey shoot. No one sailing on any US warship right now has ever actually been in naval combat. How do we know if our people and/or platforms are actually capable?
The one “advantage” that the military has over other government bureaucracies is the additional feedback of “if you mess up, you may die.” This provides at least some real-world efficiency constraint, for those who are seeing actual combat.
(This probably doesn’t help out much at higher levels of the military, or with the Navy when it’s been a very long time since any naval combat.)
If the CDC spent all its time preparing for a rare catastrophe, they’d have been better prepared. the trouble is very few people like preparing for something that is never going to happen, and so the tendency towards mission creep is very strong, and hte CDC was certainly suffering from it pretty badly.
I was all prepared to accept that the CDC was involved in a lot of mission creep. But on looking through that fact sheet, I actually don’t see anything there that is very far at all from epidemic response. There’s a lot of things like “Preventing the Leading Causes of Disease, Disability, & Death ($2.0 billion)” and responses to the (still ongoing!) HIV pandemic.
I guess you might say “Protecting Americans from Natural Disasters, Terrorist Threats, Environmental & Occupational Hazards ($1.5 billion)” is outside of mandate if you don’t think of these things as diseases.
But a mission creep from “controlling disease” to “protecting from preventable causes of loss of life or health” seems pretty reasonable (since “disease” is itself a little bit of an odd category).
Except we have other organizations for all of those things. NIH, HHS, FDA, FEMA, DHS, EPA, and OSHA handle all of those things, and they all have mission creep of their own.
I mean, of 2.6 billion in grants, 728 million, almost 1/3 spent on cancer, diabetes, drug overdoses, and other things that are patently not infectious disease. More, really, since at least some of those state and local grants are going to get diverted.
but, no, I don’t think moving form “controlling disease” to “protecting from preventable causes of loss of life or health” is reasonable mission creep. It’s the definition of losing focus.
I see this argument a lot and I genuinely don’t understand it. I mean, on its face it sounds like a 5-year old’s logic – “They’re called the Centers for Disease Control so they can only work on things with disease in the name! Duh!”
CDC is the nation’s public health agency. Their job is public health. They just happen to have disease in their name. Like any sensible public health agency, they have interpreted their mandate to include threats to the nation’s health and well-being that are amenable to intervention at the societal level. Lots of non-communicable diseases and even things like gun violence have a social, environmental, or cultural component and seem more effective to treat at a higher level than just individual doctors working with individual patients.
The opioid epidemic (one of the top grant recipients according to that doc) seems like a perfect example – it’s not even a disease, but are you really claiming that the absolute most effective way to treat it is for individual doctors to focus on individual addicts and individual cops to focus on busting individual dealers? And no one should even ask whether there might be some societal component to the sudden explosion of deaths sweeping the nation out of nowhere, and no possible non-medical intervention or policy change that might help?
Here is the link to Public Health England’s mandate – would you be happy if CDC just changed their name to PHA?
Sorry this is so combative – it’s really more aimed at the zealots in Congress that think banning gun violence research is somehow going to make the world a better place.
There’s your mission creep right there. It used to be the Communicable Disease Center. That was a useful and legitimate capability for the Federal government to have, which it doesn’t have any more. Because “public health”, somehow.
They are not though. That would be the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the CDC is one operating division. Other divisions include the National Institute of Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Surely one of those would be better suited to dealing with the opioid epidemic or gun violence research, much less things completely tangential to health like terrorism.
If the CDC is going to change their name, they should change it to Karen.
@Jake R
Plus, most of those are under a subdivision of HHS called the Public Health Service, of which CDC is a component.
So not only isn’t the CDC the nation’s “public health service”, they’re supposed to be the part of the actual public health agency named the “Public Health Service” that focuses on communicable diseases.
This is kind of a complicated problem. On the one hand, cf. all news everywhere from about a month ago, CDC (and FDA, less controversially) have definitely dropped what should have been a core-competency ball here, and I can personally attest that public health training and messaging has really been emphasizing chronic/noncommunicable/not-in-any-real-way-a-disease stuff over classic infectious-disease epidemiology in recent years. Presumably these are related to some degree.
On the other hand,
allmany of those non-infectious disease problems are real problems that really do benefit from a national agency to address them. Opioids, overweight and obesity, stress and hypertension, etc. are all way beyond the capacity of state health departments to handle – although, on a third hand (new coronavirus symptom!) part of that is because states have been underfunding their health departments on the assumption that CDC will bail them out.Finally, poor performance doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be somebody around to do better next time (and there will be a next time). I’m not sure I believe any collection of local authorities would do better at coordinating a national response than CDC did here, even though CDC should have done much better.
EDIT: DHHS isn’t who you want doing public health work for the same reason DOD isn’t who you want fighting wars. Similarly, the uniformed PHS does great work where they are, but them being insufficient to the task of running national public health efforts is why CDC got the job by default. I don’t think this is correct or reflective of sane funding and organizational choices, but we have the ones made twenty years ago, not the ones we’d want to make now.
@add_lhr
In addition to the points others made abut there being other entities for public health there’s more fundamental issue. Government bureaucracies work best when they have a very specific core function that they can focus on and build a culture around. Bureaucracies are good at implementing straightforward plans and routinizing tasks. they are very bad at negotiating between stakeholders and balancing conflicting agendas. you don’t want big do everything organizations in government. As much as possible you want smaller and more independent entities where everyone comes into work with the same basic idea of their purpose.
@Statismagician
then create such an agency. Don’t ruin an otherwise useful one by diverting it away from its core function.
Any definition for which this is true also puts solutions beyond the reach of the federal government.
No, but a CDC with 1/2 the budget and twice the focus would have done much better.
People would be less annoyed at the mission creep if the CDC wasn’t utterly failing at the one thing it must be good at.
(The Navy is having a similar issue lately – if they fail badly at acquiring and piloting ships, every dime and minute spent on less obviously Navy things starts to gall)
@cassander
We agree on most of these, but I’m going to have to push back on the idea that the Feds don’t have more ability to, for example, come at the opioid problem from more angles than e.g. the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.
They changed their name to be far more encompassing and hide the mission creep, and then had even more mission creep. Unless guns are a disease now.
If the Coast Guard couldn’t rescue anyone off the coast but they were really committed to ending abortion, wouldn’t that be an issue?
@Statismagician says:
The feds have more ability to solve the opiod crisis in Kansas than the Missouri DHS, but they don’t really have any more ability to solve it in Missouri. They have access to some legal tools that the MDHS doesn’t have, but also some more restrictions. the feds have more money as it stands today, but it doesn’t all go to Missouri, and ultimately the federal and state governments get their money from the same place.
@cassander
Manufacturing, advertising, and prescription and distribution regulations/guidelines, interstate trafficking, and even basic stuff like ‘what if Dr. Feelgood gets run out of Missouri and tries to set up the same shady practice in New York’ are all pretty trivial examples of things the Federal government is better able to do than state agencies; I’m sure there are more I’m not thinking of right now. If any of these are signficant parts of the problem, I hope it’s not too controversial to say that the Federal government does in fact have some ability to affect the problem over-and-above the state agencies.
We can talk about this more in a new thread, if you like; this is getting cumbersome.
@Statismagician says:
except for interstate trafficking, there’s no reason to expect the feds to do any of those things better than a state. At most you can claim that multiple state efforts would be redundant and one federal agency would be more efficient. But (A) most of the work of regulating is enforcement, not writing the rules. (B) the benefits of experimentation and competition are not insignificant, and (C) if you want to argue that one federal code is easier, why not go one step further and just say “we’re going to use EU guidelines” and save even more.
It’s definitely not controversial to say that. It’s also not usually accurate. You can claim that the present division of resources/prerogatives/norms gives the feds the upper hand, but it’s rare to find a problem that the feds are intrinsically better placed to handle. But I do think this is important, so let’s continue upthread (downthread?)
I’m pretty sure that SAMHSA focuses more on individual treatment of substance abuse while CDC focuses on the public health aspect. I suppose the NIH might be a better home for some of these things than the CDC, but I think the NIH is only aimed at funding research conducted by other entities, rather than actually doing any public health work.
In any case, it’s clear that public health is something that we would want a government agency for. If you don’t think the CDC should do it, then we should create a new public health agency with the CDC as a sub-agency of it. Perhaps you just want the CDC to shrink to the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, which is the sub-agency that Anthony Fauci is head of? (I don’t understand why allergies and infectious diseases are in the same sub-agency – that’s legitimately weird.)
I would dispute that public health is something we want a government agency for. The person with the most incentive to take care of their health is the person themselves. It’s not clear to me that I should expect a government agency to take care of it for them any better. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
Here I’ll just say that if you’re going to have a government agency, it should have as narrow a focus as possible. I don’t care what you call it but ideally whoever is in charge of epidemic response would have nothing to do with guns, terrorism, or people falling down stairs.
By running good and realistic training exercises. One of the purposes of good live fire and combined arms exercises is to test and validate levels of training and doctrine. If you stop doing these exercises because they are expensive (and they are, if done right), you reap the consequences. And if you allow your military leadership at any level to turn them into rubber-stamps, then again you reap the consequences.
This is why the Army has dedicated OPposing FORce units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, CA and the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, LA. These units are basically there to learn the terrain of the training area and (ideally) to provide extremely tough and humbling opponents for US Army units rotating through these areas. I believe aviation has some “Aggressor Squadrons” that do something similar and they also do “dissimilar airframe” training where you have things like F/A-18s from the navy go up against Air Force F-22s. I don’t know what the procedure is for the Navy.
Another thing you can do is run hard training exercises with and against other friendly nation’s militaries.
I’m confused by the relationship between A, B and C here. There’s an acknowledgement that the CDC was, during the period discussed, absolutely botching everything it could get it’s ever loving hands on. But C at the end says that at times the agency that was currently doing a horrible job was contradicted, and that this was bad.
I hate the CDC and think they do a ton of bad stuff to the point where I consider them a net bad, so I’m in a different worldview. But even trying to adjust for that I’m not sure why I wouldn’t want an organization that is visibly incompetent during a period to only get conditional obedience from elected officials.
Reading through the article, it looks like A, B, and C are time-separated.
The idea is that it took them way too long to start doing useful stuff (A and B) and then by the time the CDC could possibly have started providing value, they were blocked by the WH.
Right. The way it looks, early on, it was deep institutional failures. They had a not-very-effective director who didn’t get along with his staff or agency, who was simply not up to the job of providing the kind of leadership that might conceivably have helped them overcome those failures. Within CDC, there are a bunch of highly competent and functional people, but when they produced useful information and guidance, they were (later on) getting overridden by the white house on political grounds, and also they were in a bureaucratic battle for primacy with the white house’s council on C19.
It wasn’t a single point of failure, it was a multilevel cascade of failures. And while we have protests about police violence (important stuff, IMO) that might involve a thousand deaths a year total, this comprehensive fuckup likely will result in additional hundreds of thousands of dead people and a massive economic crash. But it’s not very sexy and it’s hard to put on a video camera and there’s not much juice for CW stories, so it gets not so much coverage and attention.
From the article:
Here is part of the problem. Back when it was the Communicable Disease Center, something like obesity was not part of its mandate. I understand the temptation when decades go by without a pandemic of thinking, “Well, we’re not busy, we can make ourselves useful in other ways.” But now we see the harvest.
I don’t agree with your conclusion. I don’t understand how you carve out your a) and b) above as problems independent of the Trump administration. Look at the length of tenureship at the director level at the CDC over the last couple decades:
Julie Gerberding, MD, MPH (2002–2008)
Thomas R. Frieden, MD, MPH (2009 – Jan 2017)
Anne Schuchat, MD, RADM USPHS (Jan–July 2017)
Brenda Fitzgerald, MD (July 2017 – Jan 2018)
Anne Schuchat, MD (Jan–Mar 2018)
Robert R. Redfield, MD (March 2018–present)
Why do you believe a President Cruz or President Clinton would have an ineffective CDC like President Trump has?
Wow, I hadn’t realized there had been that much churn at the top of CDC.
I’m not sure of the dynamics at play at that level, but it’s entirely possible that the director of the CDC has as much real power as the (yes) Minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs. Trump or Cruz or Clinton can appoint whomever they want too that position; it’s still in the local Sir Humphrey’s interest to make sure that the CDC’s name is plastered all over the issue du jour whether that’s Gun Violence or Teen Vaping or whatnot, and to not waste his time on stuff that’s going to be ignored like boring old infectious diseases.
How does one find the money to do not just a medicine degree, but do it abroad, after already being in debt from your previous undergraduate degree? I don’t see how a 20something year old can procure £150,000 after already being $100,000 in debt.
Requiring an undergrad before going into medicine is an American thing, and not universally true across the world.
Also, very few undergrads have $100,000 in debt. That’s more of an elite grad school thing. You can get to $100K with an elite undergraduate degree, but even in the American medical profession the eliteness of your undergrad degree is not terribly important.
Elite grad school thing? Grad schools don’t generally put you any more in debt.
They do if you pay for them yourself, which is the norm in a lot of fields – medicine being one of them. Are you thinking of the STEM model, where everyone with any business going to grad school in the first place is offered an RA or TA position to pay for it? That’s not universal.
That’s only true of PhD programs, which often (usually?) set up students with “funding” where they’re paid for work as a Research Assistant or Teaching Assistant during their time in the program, enough to cover tuition and basic living expenses. These jobs usually dovetail well with a PhD program, since PhD programs are generally apprenticeships for an academic research/teaching career as much as they are advanced study programs.
It’s emphatically not true of Professional Graduate Degree programs (medical doctorates, law degrees, MBAs, etc), and is generally not true even of academic Masters programs (MS, MA, etc). For these, you might get some of your tuition subsidized by a scholarship or fellowship, but most students are mostly paying their own way. Tuition for professional degree programs tends to be very high, even at public universities.
Also, I’d be rather surprised if you’re smart enough to get into med school but weren’t smart enough to get a scholarship for undergrad.
Plenty of elite schools don’t provide merit scholarships. Harvard, for example, offers free tuition to families making less than 65K. You have to be making a lot more than 65K to pay for Harvard without any debt.
Harvard also only charges you 10% of your family’s income up to $150K, and then goes up proportionally from there. All things considered, Harvard isn’t one of the more expensive schools.
I don’t think you can get $100K of debt with an elite undergraduate degree. You can get it from a non-elite private school that charges full sticker price to all students. But the elite ones all have grants, fellowships, or scholarships reducing the price paid by students from families with median household income or below (and in most cases you have to get *substantially* above median income before your family is expected to pay the full sticker price).
If they do it almost anywhere in Europe it’s probably cheaper than in the US.
Can US loans be used for university abroad? Do American lenders really dish out $150,000 for an American to study in Europe?
There’s a few things at play. One, student loans for an MD is a pretty safe bet for the lenders. Doctors make good money, and it’s hard to default on student loans. So the lenders have plenty of incentive to give out loans for doctors.
Two, as was mentioned above, $100K in undergrad is quite a bit, and an unusually high amount. Average student debt after a bachelor’s degree is like $30K.
Third, they might come from money and are maximizing their loans because they are extremely low interest. I’ve known people where their family could have paid for their degree out of pocket, but they pulled loans instead because the interest was so low it made more sense than spending their cash or selling off assets to pay for schooling.
And fourth, there’s a lot of people that are bad at calculating the value of a degree. If there weren’t, colleges would lose a big chunk of their students.
In the UK there is only one lender, which gives loans unconditionally if you hold an offer for a university. Are you saying that US lenders treat their lending like an investment, giving it more freely to people going into science etc.?
Also, struggling to find this out for America, but in the UK you don’t have to pay back your loans until you earn above a certain threshold, is there a similar rule in the US?
The US system is complicated. The subsidized/government guaranteed loans have a lower (set by congress) interest rate and are broadly available, but limited in amount per person. Truly private loans exist, and by the time you’re talking about $100K in debt they’re a big part of the total.
Even in Quebec, where medical tuition is cheap and the government provides student loans sufficient to cover it, getting accepted into medical school would get you all sorts of offers for lines of credit and credit cards from banks, allowing medical students to borrow against their future earnings pretty much immediately.
Looks like it’s Chinese Webserver Mainainance Day again.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
The UK ups its offer for attracting citizens of Hong Kong.
I thoroughly approve of this, but I also hope some way of offering a good exit option for younger Hong Kong residents not eligible for BNO status can be found.
It looks like people who qualify for BNO passports could bring in dependants of people – but that presumably applies to only people who are still children, not people who were born between ’97 and 2002.
Some of whom, given the apparent demographics of the protests, are presumably at the absolute top end of the legitimate need to leave hierarchy.
What does it take to start a city? Coming from rural Australia, I’ve always been perplexed about how small our population is, especially after travelling around the country and in particular up to Lake Argyle/Kununurra in my teens and seeing the massively underutilised water storage in place there. Australians love to talk about how arid we are and some even postulate we’re already overpopulated, but having also visited AZ/NV I’m more inclined to say we’re just not really trying very hard to overcome the desert.
I did some reading on the Ord River Scheme today (the whole reason for the creation of Lake Argyle) and it really seems like all the focus of the government has been to just get the agricultural sector going and assuming the rest of the development will happen naturally. See for example this report. But there never has really been a big push to actually move people there and build out a city. Looking at the climate patterns for Kununurra on Wikipedia I can admit that I definitely visited there at the best time of the year, but there are plenty of big population centers in tropical zones elsewhere in the world. Really, looking at it, Australians just seem to be really reluctant to move to the tropics.
Why are Cairns/Broome/Darwin so small? Because there is no real industry there (tourism excluded). But how did every other city overcome this barrier? I’m tempted to think if you just start cramming more and more people into Australia some would start moving around, but in reality it seems like people would just choose to have 4 hour 1-way commutes into Sydney rather than deal with some humidity. I used to just chalk the lack of development up to increasing environmental and archaeological regulations since the 50s (having worked on a separate government irrigation project in another state and seeing the bullcrap first hand), but it feels like there is something bigger missing here.
I couldn’t really fit this into the narrative of this post, but seriously, why the hell are real estate prices in Kununurra so expensive?. The population is 6000!
In Poland cities generally have quite old history (1000+, 700+, 500+ years), it is normal that small town with 100 houses has banner “1620-2020, 400th anniversary of founding XYZ”.
And some more recent cities started (or more typically grown), as result of industry appearing there.
Maybe I missed something but there are no new cities or even new towns in Poland within last years, just growth of existing ones.
See for example https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadania_praw_miejskich_w_Polsce_po_1900#2020 – list of places officially recognised as towns after 1900
Ones from this year:
Czerwińsk nad Wisłą (was officially recognized as a town in years 1373–1870)
Klimontów (was officially recognized as a town in years 1604–1870)
Lututów (was officially recognized as a town in years 1406–1720 and 1843–1870)
Piątek (was officially recognized as a town in years 1339–1870)
Sanniki received town right in 2018, first mention of this settlement was in the XIV century.
The big thing you need is a reason why anyone who isn’t a Sim in your city-planning game to want to move to your new city rather than A: stay where they are and where their network is or B: move to an existing city whose networks they can observe and say “I want to be a part of that”.
Traditional reasons are, first and foremost, someone (whether a bronze age God-King or a committee of modern technocrats) decided to put the seat of government there, in which case if you want to schmooze with the highest ranks of the local power structure you’re going to have to suck it up and move there.
Closely related, the military decided to set up a garrison or depot or other permanent base there – see the number of American cities named “Fort something”. If you want to sell stuff to the military and/or to bored soldiers with paychecks burning a hole in their wallet, that’s where you have to be. And if you’re afraid of whatever it is the military was sent out to defend against, maybe your wholly independent enterprise might want to be right outside their nicely-defended walls.
And, finally, there’s a new industry or trade route that has some geographic advantage to being in that spot. Mining towns are an obvious example here, but as you note tourism also works. On the trade side, there are cities that grew up around major crossroads or rail junctions (Atlanta is a prime example). Classically, market towns could grow up to be real cities if they happened to have a better market than anyplace else within a day’s ride during a period of general economic growth.
Then there are one-off oddballs. Phoenix exists because someone found an abandoned irrigation system from a dead civilization. Salt Lake City because the Mormons were run out of every decent community in North America and, to build an even decent-er community, had to find someplace that was marginally suitable for city-building but not so good that it had already been taken. Hong Kong, because the intersection of British Imperial Colonialism and Chinese Imperial Isolationism made that the one place you could trade with a vast and largely untapped market under a stable rule-of-law government.
But, without a really compelling reason for people to move to your new city, then whatever advantages you promise, pretty much everybody is going to look and say “neat idea – I’ll take another look when you’ve got a hundred thousand people there and see how it’s going”. Which means you never actually get to a hundred thousand people. See, for example, California City.
How much preexisting development was there in the Huntsville, Alabama region before companies started putting plants out there because of tax incentives/it was cheap/etc.?
People started putting plants out there because it’s good cotton-growing soil, but that’s not what you meant.
The first round of industrialization happened because Huntsville was conveniently located where the railroad met the cotton, so you got enough cotton-centric industry for a mini-city of maybe 10,000 people. Where it stayed until 1941.
At which point some geopolitical stuff happened and lead to the United States Army (and later NASA) deciding to put a ginormous chunk of military-industrial complex there because, had to go somewhere and there were good railroads and influential politicians.
Pretty much all of the industrial development since has I believe been due to Huntsville having the concentrated industrial infrastructure and STEM workforce not normally associated with the Deep South. Tax policy is a minor factor motivated more by increasing the diversity than the scope of Huntsville’s industrial activity.
Thanks, I suspected as much.
That’s mostly right, but Phoenix isn’t really an oddball. Yes, it was exactly where it was because there was already a bit of infrastructure there, but that infrastructure was there for a reason, which is that in the middle of a desert there was actually some water there. All of that is kind of an aside to why Phoenix became a major metropolis though. That was because it was really easy to build the railroad on the nice flat ground there, and Phoenix was nicely situated. Then, since the railroad was there, it became a military town, which attracted people, and it grew from there.
Ultimately though, Phoenix is huge mainly because it has water, and there wasn’t an obviously better place to put a city between the West Coast and Texas.
The largest “city” I’m aware of that was intentionally built from nothing within living memory without being a seat of government or something like that is Columbia, MD. It’s pretty small in the grand scheme of things (~100k people), and even so James Rouse kinda cheated by founding his new city within commuting range of two longstanding major cities: Baltimore and Washington.
Irvine, CA is a similarly “built from nothing” city. It was a family owned ranch that the University of California asked to build a campus on, and then they built a planned city around that campus. It now has about 300,000 people. It’s interesting because it really wasn’t looked at as a suburb, the plan was to develop an entirely new city with its own industry, and they succeeded.
Shenzhen is a bigger example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen#1950s_to_1970s
But it’s doubly special, as a special economic zone founded just across the border from the even weirder jurisdiction of Hong Kong, in the most rapidly urbanizing part of the world.
In 1930, the year before Nevada legalized gambling, Las Vegas had 5,000 people and a train station. If Nevada hadn’t legalized gambling – or if California had – it wouldn’t have much more than that today.
The Hoover Dam construction starting in 1931 didn’t hurt either.
I just have to mention Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice, a wholly fictional story involving – among other things – the turnaround of a town in Australia where the youth, particularly female youth, pretty much always left out of boredom and lack of opportunity. It was a great place for ranchers, and for no one else.
@DinoNerd >
Must’ve been an inspiration for the 1982 “New Wave” song Town Called Malice by The Jam.
I never guessed that before, thanks!
I’m not sure AZ/NV are examples in favor of arid region development, see e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/arizona-could-be-out-water-6-years-180951814/ and https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2019/11/18/water-scarcity-nevada-hits-critical-mass-says-state-director-of-natural-resources-brad-crowell/4232710002/.
Plus recurring wildland/urban interface fires prompting evacuations (in Arizona, less so in Nevada). I’m not saying it’s a slam dunk, mind, the most apocalyptic predictions are probably wrong and with enough cheap energy you can make a lot happen, just that “I’ve visited AZ/NV and can confirm that they exist” isn’t too strong an argument for terraforming the Australian interior.
Fair points on the sustainability side, but at least AZ/NV have some development and they seemed a lot drier to me than many of the parts of “arid” Australia I have spent time in (pretty much everywhere except the interior of Western Australia and northern interior of Qld, and the actual geographic areas designated deserts which did not contain a highway).
The real kicker for me in looking into this is that the region I’m looking at (Ord River Scheme) basically has already done the terraforming work, but we just can’t seem to get people to move there. It definitely seems like since WWII there has been some form of political rhetoric to get a population center in Northern Australia to assist with national defense strategies, but other than a military base in Darwin nothing really seemed to eventuate.
Looking at some of the “land release” detail, it seems like a lot of arrangements set up are not actual transfer of title but merely leasehold agreements from the WA government, so maybe that explains some of the lack of investment in more advanced infrastructure and the crazy property prices?
Australians also really love (or if you’re on the left, hate) border security. With only 4000 people in immigration detention it feels like setting something up North as part of a seed of development, having cultural training for those awaiting processing and the immediate opportunity for paid labor once fully vetted would make equal sense to locking them up in the middle of nowhere Woomera. At least there would already be some adaptation to the climate and any Aussies screaming “They took our jobs” would quickly be met with “Took who’s job? There was no one here*”. Are “prison towns” a thing? I guess Sydney could count as such…
Alternatively, maybe I should become an Australian ambassador to the “charter cities” movement. We’re generally fairly open to economists opinions and trying different things (QE and negative interest rates aside, for now).
To everyone else above: top notch comments, thank you.
* mea culpa for inviting Terra Nullius comparisons, would it be better if I said “the people already here were paid appropriately and are likely benefiting from this increased investment”?
I think if any country were being populated today, it would be far more concentrated in the urban areas than any existing country other than city-states. Australia is actually probably a good example of this, as a fairly urban place, and a fairly late developed area. Modern technology has increased the value of being located geographically close to other people, and decreased the value of having large amounts of land. 19th century development (and existing development in many developing countries today) meant that a certain fraction of people benefited more from having their own land than from being near other people. Thus, there was a certain amount of population scattered everywhere that was arable. And then once those people were there, small towns were scattered throughout to serve as markets for those agrarian communities, and bigger centers grew to serve specialized needs that couldn’t be served in every small town. But with modern agriculture, very few people need to be on the land in order to cultivate it, so you need far fewer small towns. So for most people, it’s much more valuable to be in commuting distance of a lot of potential co-workers or co-shoppers, and thus a more specialized workplace and market.
But because we’re stuck with lots of old towns everywhere, the plains of the United States and Europe are only slowly depopulating. (The much faster process of urbanization in China, India, and now Africa, is likely the same as the process of urbanization that happened in the United States in the 1880s and Europe possibly a bit earlier, as industrialization came.)
Re 538:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-still-so-rare-for-police-officers-to-face-legal-consequences-for-misconduct/
Am I interpreting this right that they use a database that covers 8000 cops, or a little over 1% of the total police force? Let’s be generous and say it’s 2% of non-federal officers.
1000 killings a year times 2% is 20 killings annually, times 15 years since 2015 makes it 300 cases. From this, 110 officers were charged, and 42 convicted of various degrees of manslaughter.
This looks like massive over-indictment to me, but 538 talks as if officers generally get off scot free, and in partiuclar laments the lack of murder convictions (which also seems absurd, intent yes premeditation hardly). Maybe the officers in the database are selected on some particular criterion, or maybe just I completely misunderstood the whole thing?
I don’t think the 8000 cops are a random subset of all officers. I think the 11,000 arrest cases are the number of times police officers have been arrested.
About 15,000 people* (~1000 a year times 15 years) have been fatally shot by the police and police officers have been charged or prosecuted 110 times – over half of which have led to no conviction. Which means ~0.3% of all killings by officers have led to criminal convictions.
It is confusingly presented (they change time frame and data source without making it clear what they’re doing).
*Here it seems to switch to using the Washington Post database instead of Stinson’s.
Thanks for the clarification!
For a sense of scale, this Vox article from 2018 says about 60% of murders are ‘cleared by arrest or other means’, which I think roughly means 60% of murders lead to an arrest, assuming ‘other means’ are rare. According to the BJS, about 70% of cases which were adjudicated lead to conviction. I think this means about 40% of murders lead to a conviction. That is way higher than I would have expected, so I might have screwd up somewhere.
Presumably the circumstances that allow you to determine that a murder occurred often also allow you to find out who did it.
To phrase it the other way around, if someone is murdered in such a way that the murderer cannot be identified (no witnesses, no obvious clues) it may often not be obvious that it was a murder at all.
So maybe it’s the definition of murder that makes it easy to find a suspect.
Even if it’s obvious that it was a murder, the police probably can’t find who did it unless they have some idea who the likely suspects are. When a newly-divorced mother and her boyfriend are found shot to death, the police have a pretty good guess about where to start; when some random guy turns up mysteriously murdered with no witnesses, I think the police are usually at a loss about where to even start looking.
@albatross11
My thought is, if someone turns up dead and there is no clear reason to suspect anyone — how can you say for sure it was a murder? Even if the corpse has obvious injuries — maybe he killed himself. Maybe someone killed him in self defense. Maybe it was an accident.
To call it murder, you have to have some idea of what happened, and that will usually include at least a vague idea of who did it.
Either I’m not understanding your point, or it obviously fails in scenarios where the cause of death wasn’t feasible for someone to have done to themselves. Like, someone stabbed in the back or shot without the gun still being in their hands are both obviously murder.
Are you just talking about times when there’s a dead body found and no apparent cause of death? That can’t be all that common, right?
“The victim was found at the bottom of the lake with his hands died, six bullet wounds to the chest, and a knife plunged into his back. Foul play is suspected.”
@Aftagley
We’re discussing why murders are “solved” more often than other crimes. I’m arguing that it has to be “solved” to some degree to count as a murder. There are certainly some cases where something is clearly a murder but no suspects can be arrested. That’s why only 60% of murders end up solved, not 100%.
But if you find someone who was obviously killed by someone else, and you don’t know anything else about the situation, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was murder. It could be self defense, manslaughter, or something weirder.
So the options are:
– Dead body found with unclear cause of death — not murder.
– Dead body found who seems to have been killed by someone — maybe murder, but not definitely. Might not end up in the murder statistics.
– Murder with witnesses or other clear evidence of what happened — definitely counts as murder, very likely to be solved.
@Aftagley:
On the contrary, I’m told it happens a lot more often than we’d suspect.
I have two such cases in my immediate family: my father and my uncle. I believe an autopsy is mandatory in such cases (I remember signing the consent form for my father).
I am further told that in many such cases the official cause of death is pretty much the determining physician’s best guess, in the absence of evidence one way or another. In my father’s case, it was ruled to be a heart attack – which, for all I know, may be true (he died in his sleep, in his mid-forties). In my uncle’s case, I’m told the official cause of death was “cessation of cardio-respiratory function”, which sounds like “He’s dead, Jim.” to these ears.
But, yeah, it seems that people ending up dead for no readily apparent reason is nothing out of the ordinary.
@Faza
That’s terrifying and I hadn’t considered it. Thanks!
@Kaitian
Ok, I see what you’re talking about
I’m sure there are some murders that get misclassified as suicides or accidental deaths. But my strong suspicion is that most murders are correctly labeled as murders and investigated as such. In particular, most ways you can murder someone with a gun, knife, or blunt object, particularly while they’re resisting (as people are inclined to do when you’re trying to murder them) are going to look enough like murder that when the cops find the body, they’re going to be investigating it as a murder. If you find someone mysteriously dead in a room with no marks on him and no indication of the cause, maybe that’s a very subtle poisoning or something, but if you find a guy with half a dozen bulletholes in his torso, lying dead in a pool of his own blood, there’s not a whole lot of ambiguity there.
Well, let’s see – Cabot Cove averages 5.3 really cleverly camouflaged murders per year, which would have gone unrecognized if not for the fortuitous presence of the town’s gifted amateur detective. That extrapolates to a homicide rate of 149 per 100,000 per year, suggesting close to half a million murders per year nationwide that don’t show up in the statistics because Angela Lansbury can’t be everywhere.
Alternately, we don’t actually live in the cozy-mysteryverse and this sort of thing is really quite rare.
@albatross11
First, yes, some murders are clearly murders but don’t have a suspect. 40% of murders are never solved after all. I’m not claiming that this is super rare.
Second, I assume murder mystery scenarios where someone is found dead in a locked room in a puddle of water etc are very rare. But things like this seem reasonably common: a kid goes missing after a party. He’s found three weeks later in a nearby lake. His parents insist that he would never get drunk and fall in the lake, someone must have murdered him. Theoretically, this might count as an unsolved murder, but I suspect it wouldn’t.
Murder is rare, and unsolved deaths are also rare, so I might be wrong here. Maybe murder is just inherently easier to solve than burglary or rape. But my theory still seems plausible to me.
My understanding is that the typical “unsolved murder” maps much closer to “gang member shot on streetcorner, rival gang is almost certainly responsible, but specific killer is impossible to identify because nobody in the neighborhood is talking” than whatever crazy upper-class mystery complete with multiple suspects and intrigues scenario we are routinely bombarded with in popular fiction.
But what actually happens here? In 9X% of cases when the cops find the kids body in the lake they are going to try to figure out if it was murder. The amount of murders that are committed which leave behind nothing suspicious (not just unsolved murders, but cops interviewing the last 50 people the kid talked to, retracing his steps a bunch of times etc) that keeps the investigation open are going to be rare almost by defnition.
Incidentally, this is basically the death of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the patron of Richard Wagner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria#Death
I expected better from 538. They’re right that prosecutions for police shootings of civilians are very rare, but they don’t seem to even try to use data to try to find out what percentage of shootings are misconduct.
Most people think that salt is bad for you and try and reduce their salt intake. Could the obesity epidemic be caused by people having natural salt cravings which make them eat more food than they otherwise would?
Hmm. we need to disentangle the terminology a bit here.
If a “salt craving” is a desire to add more salt to food, or to specifically eat salty foods, then I’d say no. In my experience salt cravings are caused by eating less salty than usual, and have nothing to do with the absolute quantity of salt present in food. It is quick and easy to adjust to different levels of saltiness in food. Takes a few days at most. Even acute electrolyte shortage does not produce a desire to eat salt (speaking from my experience with 3-day fasts).
If a “salt craving” is an increased appetite for food in general as a result of an electrolyte shortage in the body, then I’d say maybe. It’s an interesting theory, but your only evidence seems to be that obesity and cultural mores to reduce salt are correlated, which is pretty weak.
A quibble. I have been doing Keto for 3 years now. When in Ketosis, I crave more salt (about 50%). I believe it is because your water retention is lower in Keto, and thus you are losing more electrolytes. I’m open to a different theory, but I’ve never heard one.
My impression is that despite whatever measures people take (and I am sceptical that most people do anything serious to reduce their salt intake anyway) most Westerners get far, far more salt than they need.
In addition, I certainly don’t think your average obese person is getting too little salt. To the extent people have excess salt cravings in the US, it is probably more because they eat so much salt that their (our) bodies are tuned to expect salt at all times.
On the other hand, most professional cooks keep banging the drum that for flavor profile purposes, most people aren’t putting nearly enough salt in their food. (They also hate iodized salt, so I wonder about their IQ levels, but that’s a separate thing.)
On the other other hand, apparently people eat out way more than I expected, so they are consuming chef-approved levels of salt on the regular.
What does this mean? One way I can interpret it is that chefs use a lot of salt, so they want everyone to use more salt so their use of a lot of salt seems normal.
What does this mean?
Iodine is added to commercial salt because an iodine deficiency growing up causes, among other things, lower IQ. Tongue in cheek, surely.
I always assumed that just made it cheaper or have a longer shelf life or something.
Nope! It’s arguably one of the greatest public health successes of the past few years. The individual impact of iodine deficiency isn’t quite on the level of early lead exposure, but it was arguably way more widespread. For something like a nickle a year per person we’ve dramatically improved outcomes globally.
Not if kosher-salt-loving cooks have anything to say about that!
(I do wonder about the kids of chefs. Do they have iodine deficiency problems, or do chefs get it to them in other ways, like seaweed or something?)
They tend to say, “there are enough sources of iodized salt in people’s life and the total amount of iodine required is so low that you’ll still meet your requirements even if you use the tastier salt in your cooking.”
I’m not positive how true this is, but it wouldn’t shock me if it was correct.
If the chefs use fleur de sel they have iodine in their salt.
All the chefs who swear by non-iodised salt will regret it once WWIII starts.
How much salt they need is irrelevant to the question at hand; we’re interested in how much salt they want.
Maybe all the medical authorities agree that people need 2100 mg of sodium per day. And so the average Weight Watchers meal has 700 mg of sodium. But the average western couch potato wants 10,000 mg of sodium per day, and feels vaguely unsatisfied until they get it. Fortunately, a 12-oz bag of Doritos has 2,500+ mg of sodium. So, three Weight Watchers meals and three bags of Doritos, and everybody is happy.
Maybe they’d be just as happy if Weight Watchers put an extra 2500 mg of sodium in their meals, and maybe that wouldn’t do any harm to anyone but a handful of congenital hypertensives. But, better that ten couch potatoes blob up to 300 pounds than a single hypertensive die early because they couldn’t read the label, because even if the 300-lb blobs die early as well we can blame that on their lack of moral character.
Or maybe not, but figuring that out would require gathering data and applying reason, and most people find it easier to blame someone else’s lack of character.
Partisanship is often listed as one of the negative aspects of the US political system. In the UK, which similarly has a two party system (slightly less so than the UK), there are periodic calls for proportional representation. But I rarely see people call for that level of reform in the US. The British parliament could be switched to PR with fewer drastic changes than the US system – although if you changed the Senate and Congress, the President wouldn’t have a lot of choice about cooperating with the largest coalition (assuming you could reintroduce some of the checks / limits on executive power). I see lots of complaints about the Senate or the electoral college but rarely see anyone advocating for PR.
Why isn’t there much of a movement for this in the US? Or is there one and I just never see it? Do you think it might take the edge off the culture war? What would a plausible US PR system look like?
Isn’t that what that Interstate Compact’s for?
Do you mean this? If so, kind of, but still not quite what PR means here or in Europe. PR is usually for the legislature to start with and leads to multiple parties of actual significance (usually still two main ones at any one time). This seems to be a way to switch the Presidential vote from “do you win more states” to “do you win more people nationwide”. Which might make more sense and be better, but still isn’t quite PR – it switches from a combination of 50 first past the post elections to 1.
The obvious way to institute PR in the US would be as an add-on rather than a change: add, say, 30 top-up seats to the Senate (10 in each class) and 100 to the House, assigned on a party-list basis after the geographically-determined seats have been done, so that if you win 25 Senate seats out of 33 with 60% of the total vote cast in a two-party contest, you get 1 top-up seat and the other party gets 9. The president can just be elected by popular vote. Votes cast in places like DC and Puerto Rico also count towards top-up seats, even if not towards state ones.
I think that this would be a massive improvement on the current system.
I think that the main reason there’s so little call for it is that Americans hero-worship their founding fathers and have a really strong emotional attachment to their constitution, and are very, very reluctant to acknowledge how much wrong with it there is.
Also, proportional representation would reduce the power of the Republican party, so it’s pretty much guaranteed that they would oppose it on partisan grounds.
It depends upon the level at which it’s done. Individual States could probably switch to PR for their CongressCritters without any significant issues, and the impacts on party representation shouldn’t change all that much except in the most extreme versions of Gerrymandering.
One of the challenges is that, at least for Representatives, you’d no longer be able to vote for the *person* representing you. So at-best I’d just have some party apparatchik appointed to my district. Most likely, there’s just be a central office for all of the Reps to collate and ignore my concerns.
That’s why I proposed adding top-up seats rather than making all seats national – you’d still vote for a local congressperson, but there would also be some non-local ones.
It doesn’t help that the superiority of PR is so much more often assumed than argued for.
I think there are two really obvious arguments for it.
One is so obvious that I actually find it quite hard to articulate clearly, beyond “it’s more democratic”. The central idea of democracy is that when more people vote for A than B then A should happen.
That’s not the only property you want in a democracy – I think that representative democracy is preferable to direct democracy, despite the fact that it will sometimes result in B happening, because I think that the set of situations where it will result in the majority being overruled will correlate strongly with situations where the will of the majority would be different if everyone were perfectly informed.
But the set of situations where constituency-based FPTP democracy overrules a majority but PR-based democracy would does not have that property – in fact, it’s probably the reverse; worse in outcomes as well as in principle. So the extra deviation from direct democracy that it provides is not justifiable.
And secondly, and less importantly but not trivially, there’s the psychological effect – it would make fewer people feel disenfranchised. If your constituency consistently splits 60/40 then two fifths of your population are more likely to feel that their votes are wasted and the government does not represent them, and hence to question its legitimacy. In a PR system, people are more likely to feel like they’ve contributed to the outcome. And that may not be rational, but that doesn’t mean they won’t feel it.
Another argument is that PR forces more coalition-building, and hence keeps government policy on a more even course instead of lurching from one extreme to the other.
PR also empowers single issue voters who really care about an issue, where the majority has a mild dispreference. The minority can then back the agenda of the majority in return for a compromise on this topic.
In a winner-takes all system, the majority would get their way much more.
I think that in an informal setting, most groups would be willing to humor a group member who really, really wants something that the rest of the group is a slightly down on, so the PR outcome seems to match informal decision making more and is therefor probably seen as more just (in this scenario).
It all depends on what your model is. If I’ve been part of the 40% all my life and have watched the 60% trample my rights for the last thirty years, I’m gonna feel pretty damned disenfranchised, representatives in Congress notwithstanding.
I, like you, can think of situations where this isn’t true, but no matter. It still seems to me to be neutral between representative democracy with PR and representative democracy without it.
When my side loses an election, as it does regularly around here, I don’t feel like my vote was wasted. I feel like… there was a fair election and my side lost. It would actually be quite a good thing to have a system that would let us kid ourselves that we didn’t lose– but I doubt that even voters are that easy to fool.
My counterpoint to this is that I know for a fact that lots of people feel differently, because I have seen lots and lots of people expressing disarghI’veforgottenacompletelybasicwordbeginningwithdis with the electoral system because they live in a safe seat for a party they oppose.
Excuse me now while I go and try and look at the tip of my own tongue in a mirror. It’s not disenchantment…
@Tatterdemalion
Are you claiming that Republicans in Los Angeles are disenfranchised? That’s certainly a non-standard use of the term.
No, though I can totally see why you might guess that was what I was trying to claim!
But a) the word I was groping for was “disillusionment”, not “disenfranchisement”, and b) I’m very specifically talking about “feel”, not “are” here – living in a safe seat for a party you oppose doesn’t really* mean that you are disenfranchised, but, empirically, we know that it does make a lot of people – especially people who aren’t especially systematic thinkers – feel as though they are.
*I was originally going to claim that it obviously doesn’t mean that in any sense, but then I thought about gerrymandering; arguably if you live in a safe seat for either a friendly or a hostile party, your vote genuinely is being given less weight in the democratic process than that of someone who lives in a marginal. But that’s a new point that’s just occurred to me, orthogonal to my original point about the psychological impact; I think that people who live in totally safe seats for their own party tend to feel quite good about that, and the implications probably don’t really sink in for most of them; it’s mostly people who live in safe seats for their opponents who get soured on the democratic process because of it.
It’s in the interests of the two parties of the two-party system not to make things any easier for third parties.
See: the UK AV referrendum.
A PR system gives seats to a party, which assigns it to members, who are chosen for party loyalty and other in-group selection methods. These members are typically going to be more partisan than the individuals that citizens vote for.
The Party List system is just one type of PR. I like the PR “Single transferable vote” approach, where you vote by listing candidates (not parties) in order of preference; and if your top candidate doesn’t get elected, your vote transfers to your second preference, and so on. It’s used for all elections in ireland (see here).
And yet, the countries with insane levels of partisanship are all first past the post.
Seriously. PR politics are a whole lot less vicious. This might be down to some other factor (the very partisan countries are also almost all anglophone, so maybe it is Rupert Murdoc and various dysfunctions of the anglophone internet that causes it) but you cant credibly claim “It causes more partisanship” as a flaw of PR, because that damn well flies in the face of Reality.
Are they? What’s your metric for partisanship?
You shouldn’t take the current levels of “partisanship” in the United States as a permanent feature of the system. Even though the system has been very stably two-party, for the most of the periods from about 1828-1850 and 1896-1968, it was far less polarized than in the periods before and after (mainly because these two periods are the ones where both parties agreed to allow both pro- and anti-racist ideas within their own party, so that party disagreements would be about boring issues of tariffs and currency rather than charged issues like whether black people are people).
I feel like this is burying those years after FDR got elected that he was scared of the anti-capitalist platform of Democrat Huey P. Long and a priest with a radio show. Though maybe it wasn’t such a big deal since Long was assassinated in September 1935 and FDR was able to get around Father Coughlin’s First Amendment rights in 1939 and more strongly in April 1942.
That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. You didn’t have Republicans on one side of that issue and Democrats on the other, amplifying the divisiveness of the real racial tensions of the time. Instead, those were intraparty disputes. Huey Long and Father Coughlin’s only objections to the New Deal were that it helped Jewish and black people, and they thought it should have been harsher on bankers and more generous to low income white people. They didn’t work with Roosevelt’s actual opponents in Congress and the Court from the Republican party.
@Edward Scizorhands
That is the exact opposite of my experience.
The Dutch political system is a hybrid model, with party lists, but politicians can also be voted in due to their personal vote count. So if a party wins 2 seats, where their list is:
1. Jane
2. Bob
3. Scott
And only Scott got enough personal votes for a seat, then Jane and Scott get a seat, but not Bob, even if he was higher on the list than Scott.
Whenever this happens in my country, that popular politician seems to usually be more partisan and stubborn than the politicians who are not personally popular (except for the cases where the politician is a prime minister or such). Dutch political parties sometimes choose to take in these stubborn partisans because of their popular appeal, but these often clash with the leadership and lack loyalty (at least, according to the leadership).
In a PR system with coalitions, politicians who actually want power have to switch on a dime between supporting their more partisan party platform and the compromised coalition agreement. A true partisan is not going to accept this and is going to clash with those who are more pragmatic.
For centrist parties, the leadership is typically more pragmatic than the dissidents. In more extreme parties, it seems more typical for the leadership to be extreme and dissidents to be pragmatic, who want to soften the rhetoric to get to govern. However, in the latter case, these dissidents almost never seem to be popular with the populace, unlike in the former case.
I have always supported direct representation as my ideal, not-going-to-happen political reform. The honest reason it doesn’t come up is that the US system is so messed up that getting to the UK system would be a big step up. And the US constitution is really hard to change, so it’s reasonably assumed that nothing major will change.
I do find it funny that historically the US has been resistant to having official roles for the major parties (as is often the case in proportional representation), which ironically has made partisanship stronger.
Let’s say [name your favorite deity] secretly removed all racist feelings from everyone on earth, forever. He/she/it doesn’t change anything else. People have the same jobs, same salaries, same education, live in their same houses. But no one is ever racist again.
How long would it take for us to notice? How would the world be different in one year? How many years before we’d (let’s say the US) had parity among races in terms of income, education, wealth, etc?
What does “no more racism” mean, exactly?
Do people just completely forget any concept of “human races” (e.g. black, white, red, etc), regardless of how they feel about it? Or do they forget all ethnic hatreds and prejudices regardless of whether they map to “race” in the modern US sense?
Will books and other documents that discuss racism also be disappeared, or will they stay around?
I think you’re trying to argue that the “x race lives in y circumstance, hence I feel z when evaluating an unknown person who looks like them” will come about again quickly if nothing changes other than people’s feelings. But I’m not sure it will — maybe “this person might be a criminal” will be completely tied to cultural markers, and “this person might be a recent immigrant” completely to things like accent and behavior, and the association with a perceived race will be completely forgotten.
Worst off will probably be the US indigenous people, who will continue to live in horrifying circumstances, but no one will remember why.
A long, long time. The biggest impactor on the differential outcomes people of colour face is the depressed socio-economic backgrounds that a disproportionately large number of them come from / are in. A long history of institutional racism is certainly a large factor in the socio-economics, but removing ‘racist feelings’ isn’t going to change that overnight – a young black kid growing up in [crime-filled urban centre]*, with poor infrastructure, inadequate schooling and a strong local gang culture is going to have no significantly greater opportunities after the world’s racism-ectomy than before.
*I’m not from the US. Pop culture makes me want to say Compton or Baltimore, but I’ve no idea if they are accurate perceptions.
This is pretty much what I would have said.
What does this mean?
As soon as the media reports on it en masse, wjich might just not happen
Presumably never, because for that to happen, the current situation would have to be completely attributable to “racist feelings”, when that doesn’t even appear to be a major cause.
Flip it around. How many years of no “racist feelings” would be required before the NBA achieved exact proportional representation by race? Surely that makes it obvious that there is more going on than just that, even if you completely discount the experiences of Chinese immigrants or black immigrants in the United States.
Uhhhh, based on the number of church-goers with no direct evidence of their Lord, I’d say at least 2000 years to notice.
Based on British American average income being 33% higher than Dutch American, I’d say the response to your second part is “never.”
It’d help if you defined this term.
How long till i next go to /pol/?
The answer is the summation of one half of a year, plus one third of a year, plus one fourth of a year, and so on.
When you move a part of your body, do you 1. consciously manipulate dozens of muscles with precisely the right timing such that you achieve approximately the motion you intended, but do it so swiftly that you can’t tease apart in retrospect the order of operations, or 2. apply an automatic algorithm developed through trial and error by waving your parts around for many years as a child, which you can’t introspect very clearly about because after being triggered by an intention, it’s mostly automatic?
Backdrop for this question: I have frequently felt like when I move my body, I don’t really “know” what I’m doing. That is, I know the motions I intend to make, and I can see that once I “release” the intention the body moves roughly as I want it to (generally a chain of intentions is required for a sequence of motions, of course). However, most actions, even small ones, are actually pretty complicated, and I don’t obviously have any conscious knowledge of why my body is doing exactly what it is doing to achieve the result that I am intending.
This is why, I’ve always figured, learning physical skills like drawing or gymnastics are pretty hard. You’ve got to override old automatic muscular habits in order to form new ones (which may also be somewhat automatic, but nevertheless more fine-grained).
Consciously? Very very rarely. Only if I’m learning a new and different skill, like how to position fingers for playing a musical instrument.
2 sounds more correct, but I’m not sure I entirely understand the options. What do you mean by “consciously” in 1? More generally, what’s the observable difference between the options?
I think a large part of how we move is that we remember what the action looks and feels like, and then we start doing it and make adjustments when the actual feeling deviates.
So when you learn a new skill, you have to learn what the associated actions look and feel like.
There are some skills I’ve learned by deliberately moving each muscle in some prescribed way (pronouncing foreign phonemes, doing yoga, taiji, that kind of thing). But in each case the goal is to drop the conscious control once you’ve mastered the task. In the case of physical exercise, it’s even explicitly the goal to force these patterns into your brain to the point where they influence all your physical movement forever.
My theory here is that “adjust this motion to fit a remembered motion” is a subconscious skill, and the obstacle to doing something smoothly is not remembering how the motion feels well enough.
I don’t think most things could be very conscious. I’ve seen at least a few people who were surprised that finger-centric exercises made their forearms sore; to me that implies that they had very little idea of how the process of using their hands worked in the first place, and it seems like they’d need to know that for the kind of control you are asking about to be possible.
Never so extreme as 1, but generally can focus on smaller macros if I want to improve the general 2 type movements. A lot of specific physical skills have seemed easier for me to pick up than for others, I think this is why.
2 is normal for me.
The process of learning a new muscular skill (which, when it comes down to it, is essentially any skill at all) is often one of slowly making the movements less and less conscious, so a movement from 1 to 2. Indeed (this is speculation) part of why toddlers are so bad at walking (and just about everything else) isn’t just that they lack the muscular development for it (though that’s part of it), it’s that they have to think about what they’re doing.
There’s a lot of literature on this in things like sports and music psychology. A useful search term would be “focus of attention”, which will bring up a bunch of studies showing that when you get skilled practitioners to focus on the actual movements they are making instead of the results of those movements, performance usually drops.
The only circumstances in which I recall moving “manually” is when learning a new skill that requires a lot of coordination – e.g., pitching a baseball correctly, balancing on roller blades, learning a new instrument… maybe even typing?
I assume some general-purpose “algorithms” are developed early on, early enough that we don’t remember forming them, and those are enough to get us by most of the time.
It’s basically #2, and the technical term for it is motor learning.
Spinal reflexes also come into play, to a degree. (flinching away from a source of injury is the obvious example, but there’s others like the extremely rapid adjustments necessary to keep your balance on uneven or shifting surfaces without looking down at your feet)
Some philosophers have noted that this is very clear with more abstract agential processes. Obviously, forming an intention to do something is a precursor to actually doing the thing. But it’s very hard to form an intention to do something other than by trying to do the thing. (See Kavka’s toxin puzzle.)
A related phenomenon is “transparency of belief” – usually, to figure out whether or not you believe that P, it’s much easier to just try to figure out whether or not P, and then use your answer to that as answer to the first question.
Speech sounds are a good example of this (I have an interest in phonetics). People speak all the time and yet most of them have very little insight into exactly what they’re doing when they speak in terms of physical movements in their mouth. In language teaching, very little attention is paid to getting people to produce the right sounds, relative to other aspects of the language, and I believe this is because most language teachers simply have no idea how to convey how to produce the sounds of the language they’re teaching to somebody who doesn’t already know it. The phonetics of a language are generally thought of as something you just have to pick up via exposure, and it’s accepted that the vast majority of learners will always have a “foreign accent” to some extent.
However, I’ve found personally that it is not particularly difficult to learn how to produce novel sounds by simply reading descriptions of the sounds in question given by phoneticians in the language of phonetics, given an understanding of that language of phonetics which allows one to map these descriptions to actions which one can then consciously carry out. You start off only being able to produce the sound slowly, in isolation, but by practicing repeatedly, the process gradually becomes more automatic. So it’s most like your option 2), except that this is not a process that was developed as a child through trial and error, it’s a process that was developed during adulthood, through a combination of instruction and theory-guided experimentation.
Is there any particular reason why race is the lead factor when discussing police brutality as opposed to gender?
The widely-sourced Washington Post link…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/
…shows the 2019 stat that black people are 23% of fatal police shoots but only 13% of the population.
But it’s quite obvious from the link that men (of all races) are 96% of fatal police shootings but only 50% of the population. That’s the lead stat, no? Men are disproportionately fatally shot by police. Black men suffer the worst. Then Hispanic men. Then white men. Women (of all races) are fatally shot by police disproportionately less often then men.
Every so often I see some (usually conservative) commentator mention that white men are fatally shot by police more often then black men, albeit relatively less often proportionate to their share of the population. But then it’s back to discussing race and no one seems to harp on this male/female divide.
So if it were #blackmenslivesmatter, that would make sense. But at #blacklivesmatter, I’m like, where all these black women being fatally shot by police? Black women being fatally shot by police is not a thing.
Not dismissing the racial angle. It’s definitely a thing. But it’s a sub-component of the police brutality thing where all men are the victims not all black people. Why the emphasis on dividing by race and not dividing by gender in this instance?
I’m genuinely curious, not looking for conservative talking points. My best guess is the black men police brutality thing is just used as a jumping off point to address broader racism that impacts black men and women. And if that’s the answer, then OK, fair enough. But just wondering if there was something else I was missing.
Would it be construed as a conservative talking point to suggest that in the current climate, the idea that men are perhaps sometimes disadvantaged in certain regards is in general a no-no topic, at least on most mainstream media platforms?
I imagine this has a lot to do with the fact that men commit far more crimes than women, so it’s not too surprising that men interact with the police more often, and as a consequence get shot more often. That being said I think this only explains part of the difference, and police probably do interact with men and women pretty differently.
It’s pretty clear why liberal commentators don’t discuss this more: it generally doesn’t fit very well with feminism, as Beans noted (or at least with the simplistic approach of “women disadvantaged, men advantaged”). I’m not totally sure why conservative commentators don’t bring it up more, except that if they’re mainly focused on defending the police and minimizing the problem of police shootings, they’re not likely to focus on another dimension of police shootings that might be problematic.
the same is true of blacks and whites, whites are actually shot more, relative to their share of crimes, than blacks are.
It’s a no-no to point out the black crime statistics though, same as men being shot more
@inhibition-stabilized
Conservatives tend to believe that only bad men engage in violence, while bad women lead men into temptation, get abortions, etc. Their ideal police story is one of heroic men stopping bad men from acting evil (if necessary with lethal violence) and saving women.
The feminist story is only partially different, with their ideal police story being heroic men and women stopping bad men from acting evil (preferably never with violence) and saving women.
Both stories see it as just that more violence is used against men.
Men also make up 88% of police officers, according to Wikipedia, with that ratio likely growing more skewed as we select for officers who see more field work. And men victimizing other men doesn’t make for a politically catchy “us vs. them” narrative.
I think that most black people shot by cops are actually shot by black police officers, though.
It’s always important to remember that the overwhelming majority of crime and violence is intra-race.
Source?
He’s not quite right, but black cops punch above their weight when it comes to how many black men they kill.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/black-cops-are-just-as-likely-as-whites-to-kill-black-suspects
In contrast, “we find that nonwhite officers kill both black and Latino suspects at significantly higher rates than white officers,” they write. “This is likely due to the fact that minority police officers tend to be assigned to minority neighborhoods, and therefore have more contact with minority suspects.”
This seems like a place where the rural / urban divide is really important. Policing a high crime urban area is very different than policing a quiet suburb or small town. I don’t know that we’d expect police violence to scale linearly with the crime rate either… there may be some critical mass of background violence where cops naturally flip to being on edge all the time and assuming every interaction is dangerous.
I don’t know how well demographics of police map to demographics of their cities, but roughly it seems like large city PDs have a high percentage of minority officers and leaders.
I think it does make the “racism” angle harder – 3 of the 6 officers involved in Freddie Gray’s death were black. Is “internalized racism to the point of homicidal behavior” really that common? Seems unlikely.
@Edward Scizorhands
The claim was about the proportions of victims, not rates. Table 1 in the paper linked by that article says 1/3 of nonwhite victims were shot by black cops, meaning “most black people shot by cops are actually shot by black police officers, though” is not at all correct.
While the oppression narrative is catchy where applicable, I seriously doubt having more female officers would change how much attention is called to men getting shot more
I think you’re close with your last paragraph. Statistically, black women are less likely to be shot/killed by police than white men. However, just because they’re unlikely to be shot doesn’t mean that racism (specifically, racism in the context of encounters with law enforcement) is no longer a problem.
I’m a white woman, and every encounter I’ve had with police officers has been amicable. I got pulled over today for going slightly over the speed limit. I apologized, the cop ran my license, told me he would waive the ticket, and sent me on my way. Being a woman gives me advantages over being a man, in this specific scenario. But being white also gives me advantages that black women do not have.
If I’d been black, would the cop still have waived my ticket? Would he have been antagonistic rather than friendly? Would he have asked to search my car, hoping to find something else to charge me with, something that could lead to jail time or higher fines? These are things that happen to black women with higher frequency, things that I don’t have to worry about. My biggest worries when being pulled over by the cops are “how much is this going to cost?” and “I hope no one sideswipes my car while I’m parked on the side of the road.”
Black women have a reputation for being more sassy, rude, assertive, etc than white women, which may have an impact on the encounter. It seems to me that the way these encounters go is often caused by choices of both parties, not just of the cop.
The very ‘cops abuse blacks’ narrative may be partially self-fulfulling in that it seems to make some black people very belligerent, which can cause more aggressive behavior by the cop than when the person is more reasonable.
I was not trying to imply that all cops are racist, and I apologize if it came across that way. What I am saying is that some cops (probably a very small number) are overtly racist. And some of the cops who don’t think they’re racist may still have biases (conscious or subconscious) that can lead to unequal treatment. I have the luxury of not worrying about racist or biased cops because I’m white, but my black friends do not have that luxury.
Because essentially everyone instinctively knows that men are more violent than women, and essentially everyone thinks that male lives matter less than female lives. Some people say they believe otherwise, and they might have convinced themselves that they believe otherwise, but their actions reveal their true beliefs.
These facts are fundamentally hard-coded in the biology of our species: the difference in reproductive cost between men and women makes men effectively disposable from an evolutionary point of view, and related to this, higher testosterone makes men more physically and psychologically prone to aggression, which is an adaptation to pursue a more r-selected reproductive strategy compared to women.
Men definitely are more more dangerous and violent than women as even a cursory glance at crime statistics will confirm. It is utterly unsurprising that more of them die in police shootings and entiry correct that police treat them with more caution.
The same logic can be used for black Americans, but then it is not acceptable to many people. So the question is why men are treated differently.
There are lots of factors here but part of the reason must be that most people more or less believe either
1. What I suspect most here roughly believe: Men are inherently significantly more violence prone than women (at a biological level) whereas differentials in black crime are a product of social forces
2. The more SJ version: Higher levels of male violence and black violence are both socially driven. But the society driving it is dominated by white men which means that men unlike black people (a) are sort of responsible for the system that is harming then and (b) are generally better off in all sorts of ways so we shouldn’t focus on trying to help them out.
My suspicion is that in practice most SJ types believe (or ‘alieve’) 1 as well but for other reasons tend to frame sex differences as socialised.
Why do you think the case where people believe what their eyes see and act accordingly is the case which needs explanation?
Massive resistance to treating black people differently based on skin color is the stad out. No real mystery here though, its a political live wire for obvious historical reasons.
Wait, they’re protesting against affirmative action and minority business loans?
At a considerable tangent, there has been a good deal of concern with the fact that blacks are substantially more likely to die of Covid than whites but essentially none about the fact that men are substantially more likely — roughly twice as likely — to die of it than women.
Don’t think it’s a tangent at all, sort of goes along with my question..
Covid-19 discussion goes like this in prioritized order:
1. Disease with massive impacts, everyone has some level of risk … let’s think this through
2. Elderly people and people with compromised immune systems are most at risk … let’s make sure we focus here
3. Black people seem to be over-represented as victims…let’s address this angle too
If police brutality followed the same logic:
1. Police brutality is a thing, everyone has some level of risk … let’s think this through
2. Men are 96% of the victims … let’s make sure we focus here
3. Minority men get it the worst, black men the worst of all minorities .. let’s address this angle too
But the current environment alludes to #1, skips past #2, and obsesses over the last part of #3
There’s a perpetrator-victim angle influencing things here.
COVID-19: #1 is the sick infecting the healthy. #2 is the risk of the younger infecting the older. #3 is more about class systems, so the rich inflicting bad situations upon the poor.
Police brutality: #1 is the police hurting non-police. #2 is men hurting men. #3 is the perception of non-minority men hurting minority men, even if the statistics put that into dispute.
It’s about which situation has the easiest time playing the blame game.
FWIW I hear Breonna Taylor’s name come up nearly as often at protests as I do George Floyd’s.
Because the answer is so obvious people would wonder why you were asking and if you meant to imply some similar justification in the racial gap.
Hmmm, I guess what I’m struggling to articulate…
Seemingly all dialogues on the topic go like this:
A: Another black man killed by police #blacklivesmatter
B: Well, more white men are killed by police than black men so maybe there’s a broader police brutality thing to address beyond race
A: Well, in absolute terms, sure, but in relative terms, black men are killed disproportionately #blacklivesmatter
But I’m curious if dialogues like this ever occur?:
A: Another black man killed by police #blacklivesmatter
B: Well, more white men are killed by police than black men so maybe there’s a broader police brutality thing to address beyond race
A: Wow, white men too? Wow, looks like Hispanic men too. I still emphasize that black men have it the worst here. But a lot of men are killed by the police we should try to stop this from happening.
Previously-created support/organizing structures? Black advocacy has a long history, established thought leadership and organizing experience. Male advocacy, doesn’t.
I’d assume these things follow paths of least resistance. If you are a black male who feels they’re being killed by cops too much, you can either create an entirely new movement for men’s rights* or plug into the existing black rights network.
*Yes, I’m aware these kind of exist, but not at the same organizational level and they have no where near the support even within their own demographic that black activism does.
Don’t forget:
A: Is that really the right denominator to be using? On a per-arrest, per-commission (overall and just violent crime), and per-victim basis it looks like white men are excessively killed by police. How about we all work together on the police brutality issue, and then have the organizations which best understand the needs of black people work on the underlying issues causing greater levels crime to be perpetrated by (and presumably thus *on*) black people?
Governor of Virginia proposes genocide (see 7.6)
I’m so angry I can’t think straight and will probably not say anything I don’t regret.
This is possibly the worst way to refer to removing a confederate statue possible.
I get that you’re angry… but you and I both know he’s not proposing genocide and trying to paint his actions with a boo word is not helping anyone.
Ok, I’ll bite. I read your second link and still don’t understand how taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee is genocide.
Part of the definition of genocide is “destruction of…symbols of the targeted group”
No, the actual definition is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The destruction of symbols is merely one of the things OSAPG (who are not, as far as I can tell, believers in voodoo) list as evidence that the people who put the actual, non-symbolic hurt on a group, did it with “intent to destroy”.
Attempting to steelman this, the 7.6 item referred to lists among many indicative/related actions to genocide:
“The destruction of or attacks on cultural and religious property and symbols of the targeted group that may be designed to annihilate the historic presence of the group or groups;”
So maybe the argument is that tearing down a statue of Lee constitutes a kind of damnatio memoriae of the entire historic presence of white Southerners or of the historic heritage of their civilization, or something like that.
Which of course it does not, even if you believe that removing a statue of one person is somehow erasing an entire group of similar people, which it’s not. The history books are not about to have references to Lee removed, historic sites where he actually did things are not going to be destroyed, etc. Even the statue itself won’t be destroyed, just moved someplace where it doesn’t have a connotation of public veneration of a slaveholder and defender of slavery.
But that’s the closest thing I can see to an argument here.
I can just about see it as only part of a broader elimination of the older culture, though. Virginia is increasingly a blue state (and, notoriously the governor in question has riled up a large geographic portion of the state by rapid, blue oriented reform since attaining office with a majority in the legislature) because of the arrival of large numbers of in-migration to the DC suburbs and outlying towns. Lots of people from elsewhere in the country move to NOVA to work for the Federal government, Federal contractors, or companies servicing one or the other, and bring their ideals and values with them.
The descendants of people who have lived in Virginia for a long time are increasingly outnumbered by people who have moved into the area in the last generation or two. These ‘newcomers’ start voting for social and economic policy that the old-heads don’t like, they start taking down hateful symbols of the heritage of the old-heads, and completely changing the valence of local historical figures in terms of the public consciousness.
People who have lived in Virginia for hundreds of years can feel like their lifestyle and history is being erased and re-written by people they view as hostile outsiders.
That’s the best steelman of the general feeling I can give. It ignores that:
1. The newcomers are citizens, too. They don’t like you, you don’t like them, but this is a democracy and there are more of them.
2. There is a particular group of people whose families have been in Virginia for a very long time indeed who probably have some differing thoughts on the virtue of Robert E Lee who aren’t being included in the discussion of old versus new.
Ultimately, though, I think the craze for tearing every statue of a Southerner born before 1840 down is a bit unhealthy, even if understandable. The healthiest attitude towards the American past surrounding the Civil War I’ve seen in my lifetime is that embodied in the movies Gods and Generals and Gettysburg. There’s a moment in the former where the focus (and they pull a good bit of bait and switch during the movie on whether he’s the ‘hero’) is on General Thomas Jackson, where he’s standing outside a house at night with his enslaved cook, where Jackson says a heartfelt prayer for the good of the cook’s family and friends. Extremely sympathetic portrayal of Jackson.
Then his cook takes the opportunity to continue the prayer by asking Jackson (by way of prayer to God), “So if you are such a great guy and care about me and mine so much, when are you going to set us free?”
The look of disappointment and despair on Jim Lewis’ face when Jackson gives him an empty, non-answer (still in the context of praying to God) is one of the best acted moments in what is a very well acted movie.
A lot of Confederates were pretty sympathetic people. Good men with virtue in their hearts.
But they owned slaves.
Many of them were good soldiers with a flair for bravery and courage in the face of death.
But they fought to defend slavery.
Robert E Lee was, by all accounts, an exemplary Virginian who, in other circumstances, would be a source of pride for his state and his descendants.
But he led an army to prevent the abolition of slavery, an institution in which he partook.
Remembering these men as ancestors and forebearers is beyond the pale, apparently, and what virtue they had has to be erased. I don’t think that’s particularly healthy. Hearing about how Robert E Lee’s own church removed a statue of him (and was talking about removing a statue of George Washington, who shared the church) made me shudder for some reason. This was a church he was a prominent parishioner of. It was the church that he had personally attended his whole life.
A nation that begins to hate its past really has no future in my eyes. You cannot build something from nothing. A nation that understands the evils in its past and loves itself anyway is one that can pick up, put together, and move on.
When the most stirring speech in the whole movie is this one, by Col. Chamberlain, a character who is rather dry and not obviously a particularly virtuous man, you know what the movie is about. No matter how brave and kind a man it portrays Stonewall Jackson as (a portrayal that is apparently more accurate than not), the movie knows what he did and what he fought to defend.
Personally, I always preferred the exchange of monologues between Chamberlain and Kilrain in Gettysburg. It’s where the book, The Killer Angels, takes its title from. But to me it perfectly embodies the way that I think about race (I have the same debate in my own brain that the two have).
My (predictably ridiculed by more liberal friends) take is that Richmond, VA is the only place in the country there should continue to be statues of Confederate generals. Let the whole world come to this city, see the mighty works of the rebels and slavers and despair.
Chevalier Mal Fet: Yeah, what incredible movies they are.
There are some ideals that underlie American history and I’m just not sure you can keep those alive while throwing out the parts you don’t like.
This comment says it better than I can manage–thank you!
Not the biggest reason why I disagree, but that list is not meant to be used as a list of different ways something could be genocide, but rather a list of factors taken into account to determine if something is a genocide.
The actual definition ” killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and]
forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” doesn’t say much about statues.
I think you need to, at a minimum, state which “genos” is being “cide”. Is it Confederates? We did smash their state, but we didn’t kill their leaders or any substantial part of their population as part of an effort to depopulate the region or reduce their demographic presence. Is it White People? I think you would need to put in a lot of work to make Confederate statues into culturally significant to White People generally. Is it Modern Conservatives? Not really a “Genos”, and I suspect that they’d prefer not to claim Confederate Statues as critical to modern Conservative identity.
Statues and monuments to leaders of a failed rebellion show up occasionally (Guy Fawkes? Uh… Spartacus?) but usually only once they’re far enough in the past that nobody cares, and usually because they represent values that are appreciated more in the present than in the past. The Confederacy’s values (re: Slavery) are widely regarded as maximally odious to most (>50%) of modern Americans.
Finally, it seems odd to consider it “genocide” to obliterate Confederate statues when all the Confederates are already dead.
The “targeted group” in this case are the people of the state of Virginia, who seem to have made it clear that they want this statue gone. Unless you’re calling this genocide against the Red Tribe?
I have been encouraged to donate to The Bail Project. Which appears to be a national version of the thing Scott examined and (gently?) endorsed in Bail Out
I actually like this idea and support their cause. However, I am hesitant to donate for two reasons:
1) Short term, I worry that they are going to be bailing out a lot of protesters. Protest arrests seem to come in largely three flavors: people rounded up in a catch and release effort to disperse a crowd (many of whom basically get arrested on purpose), actual rioters, and actual looters. I assume most people in group one aren’t even charged bail (correct me here if I am wrong), and people in the second and third groups… I’m not sure I want to be helping to put them back out in the streets in the current environment. I’m also worried, with so many arrests in a “righteous cause”, the folks at the Bail Project will be less diligent than usual, so maybe I should donate in a few months instead.
2) Long term, their stated opposition to using algorithms of any kind bothers me. Reflexive “disparate impact = racism” rejection of data based solutions just generally rubs me wrong.
Can somebody please talk me out of these two objections?
I can’t argue with objection 1, that is definitely plausible (The cynical part of me says likely).
I do think that using algorithms for criminal justice is a terrible idea though. Algorithms are generally poorly understood, cannot be appealed, and in the case of government projects, extremely buggy. I don’t agree with a reflexive “disparate impact = racism”, but given the nature of many modern algorithms, a disparate impact will almost certainly lead to racist software, regardless of the initial cause.
I’m also not convinced that the algorithms begin proposed are “data based solutions” in any meaningful sense. A real data based solution would involve varying your strategy and honing in a better solutions based on their results. My impression is that when people talk about using algorithms in the legal system, what they are proposing is cramming as much irrelevant information as possible into a Neural Net, and letting it make critical decisions (Though I don’t know *that* much about this so feel free to provide counterexamples if you think I am being unfair). I have never seen any evidence to support the idea that this would be an effective strategy, and I have no idea why anyone thinks it is a good idea.
Luckily, nobody is yet stupid enough to put a neural network in charge of criminal sentencing 🙂
When they say algorithms, they really mean ten if/then statements based on features like “is first offender” and “is violent crime.”.
The point is that the bail process is specifically about making sure people come to trial, and don’t commit crimes between now and then. Judges hopefully make this decision as well as they can, but it’s very easy for bias to slip in to this simple process. The algorithms are meant to make the decision more along the axis of chance of abusing freedom.
Getting bail right is hugely important, because the time between charging and trial can be on the order of months, and holding someone presumed innocent for this long borders on unconstitutional. Simple algorithms that are easy to examine and based on expert-specified features can make this process much fairer. I think they’re pretty unobjectionable.
I’m having trouble finding technical details, but it seems like the algorithms in question are more along the lines of neural net abomination than objective criteria. I very much doubt that nontechnical people would even refer to those things as algorithms.
Also, I hate to burst your bubble, but: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/
Here is the pretrial assessment algorithm used by New Jersey. A quick summary:
It tries to assess three separate risks: skipping trial, committing a crime before trial, and committing a violent crime before. A total of 9 factors are considered, such as age, has_prior_felony, has_skipped_court.
For each question, they ask 5 or 6 yes/no questions based on those features (e.g. is this person above 23, or has this person skipped trial before). For some questions, a “yes” is worth double. You tally up the number of yesses, and that’s your score.
Scores are linked to probabilities using past data, and decisions are made based on those probabilities. So it is very simple and human-readable. The biggest question is how they chose the features, and if they’re missing important information. But they are well-aware that people don’t want a black box putting people in jail and designed these things accordingly.
The article you sent is (in my opinion) misleading on the complexity of the algorithm.
The person appeals the fact that they aren’t allowed to look at how the algorithm is made, but the next paragraph says that algorithms like this are human-understandable. I assume (not positive though) the appeal’s complaint is they can’t see how they chose their decision boundaries. Extrapolation from this to neural networks is total speculation though, even in the author’s own words.
Awhile back we had a fairly strong argument from a computer science academic who had done work on “algorithmic fairness” claiming that they were extremely objectionable, and counterpoints from a commercial programmer. Do a search for SSC + Stucchio (I think was the commercial Programmer) + algorithmic fairness and I think you’ll be able to find them.
Here is their statement from their FAQ:
So to me anyway, that reads less as “we are opposed to a couple of particularly bad algorithms” and more “we are opposed to ANY algorithms, and also any other alternatives to bail”.
Not a huge deal I guess, I just worry it makes their program less efficient and creates a “perfect is the enemy of the good” scenario wrt bail reform.
Heart disease etc. have been major problems for long enough that I’m doubtful the marginal protester would be able to make a significant impact by shifting their attention to them, especially if I’m allowed to account for whatever decrease in willpower that having to work in Far Mode/against their personal incentives would cause. I’ll grant COVID as an exception, although limiting its spread among protesters should be in their self-interest anyway.
Even if I’m wrong about that on the object level, though, the utilitarian perspective doesn’t strike me as ideal here. If all there is to deciding what issue to focus on is the cost-benefit analysis, then I could be arbitrarily evil and get away with it as long as I made sure to ratchet up the costs of opposing me accordingly. I’m uncomfortable with this.
This is basically idle speculation, so take it with as many grains of salt as you consider appropriate.
I have been thinking about that statistic that Derek Chauvin (the cop who kneeled on George Floyd) had 18 internal affairs complaints against him in 18 years as an officer; and that the only consequences he suffered were two “letters of reprimand.” And I have also been thinking about something that was mentioned a couple threads ago which was new to me, the phenomenon of gypsy cops – basically cops who do get fired for misconduct, and just move to a new place and work as a police officer there.
I realized this sounded familiar – is it possible we’re looking at something like the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal?
The issue with pedophilia in the Catholic Church was not that lots of priests were pedophiles. It’s that a very small number of priests were pedophiles, but that the practice of Church leadership was to cover up their crimes, keep them on the job, and if they were at risk of exposure, move them to a new place and let them continue to find new victims. This meant that a small number of perpetrators could rack up a lot of victims, and basically act with impunity, knowing that even if caught the worst they would face would be a transfer.
I’m wondering if you could explain the experience of the large numbers of people who complain about police acting with total cavalier brutality in a similar way? Suppose that only a small number of police officers are the ones who are flagrantly brutal, and abuse citizens with total impunity. But then also assume that the rest of the police act to shield these officers from any punishment more severe than a stern talking to or a firing from one department and hiring at another.
If a large department has only one or two Derek Chauvins, but nobody else in the department actually stops them from brutalizing people, could that account for a general perception of police brutality? How many people do you think Chauvin assaulted in 18 years on the force up to now? How much could a single cop like that poison the perception of police in an entire city, if left to run wild for all that time?
As I said, this is basically pure speculation, and I don’t know that you could ever actually prove any of it. But I wonder if it might explain both sides of this – the perception by people who know police that the police they know are by and large good people, and the perception by people in poor and/or black communities that the cops are constantly brutalizing them without cause.
I think this is certainly A factor, though not the largest. At least, once you subtract the “the leadership would move them” part of the model. Instead, the movement happens at the individual level. Remember:
-It is extremely risky for previous employers do say anything about a former employer to their prospective future employer. Current legal advice is for HR to verify employment and say nothing else.
-Most police departments are chronically underhanded. Any applicant with prior experience is going to have a big leg up in the hiring process.
-The SEP field. The moment your problem officer quits or is fired and you find out they’re getting hired by a different town, or even better another STATE, Officer “Crusher” Malone officially Someone Else’s Problem.
I thought I’d heard that it’s harder for a lot of the urban PDs that are both being protested and dealing with the protesters to hire when compared to nearby suburban PDs where they have to deal with less shit (literally and figuratively) and are sometimes even paid better.
It’s a lot WORSE for some urban PDs (though they usually pay MORE, not less for obvious cost-of-living-index reasons). Portland PD’s average overtime per week per officer has more than doubled for example. But it’s pretty universal, with about 80% of departments reporting at least SOME shortage.
I’ve seen this argument made before, as a justification for the ACAB philosophy (though I doubt those people would agree on the exact proportions of offenders to enablers you propose). I hardly think the Catholic Church is a special case of this kind of thing anyway – I’ve read stories of abusers easily bouncing between groups in both corporate and fandom contexts, and even in my old Scout group (before my time, thankfully).
It’s definitely a phenomenon in lots of other organizations, although the Church seems to have been unusual in scope and breadth – ie, it appears to have been a sort of shadow policy in place in many countries all over the world out of a conscious effort to protect the Church’s reputation, vs. the more common version where it’s just individual actors covering their own ass.
I think Chauvin should clearly go to jail for a long time, but as for the prior complaints, I haven’t seen anything to show a baseline of how many complaints a typical officer gets.
For example, I have a friend who prosecutes bar complaints against lawyers. He has a stack of complaints against him, all of which were dismissed without penalty (like 16 of Chauvin’s 17) – he says bar prosecutors and regular prosecutors get them very frequently, because there’s a lot of people who don’t like you, and it’s free to file a complaint.
I think on a previous thread somebody found a stat that the average cop would expect to get a complaint about once every 10 years, or about 2-3 in a career.
It would help if the complaints were public.
Here is the relevant BJS summary. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ccpuf.pdf
Thomas Jorgenson in response to me? Note that the stat is number of complaints and averaged over all cops (I list some caveats in the thread).
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/27/open-thread-154-75/#comment-904430
Right. You raised some reasonable objections to taking that 1 in 10 number at face value, but barring some numbers in the other direction I still think “18 complaints with 2 reprimands is an unusually high number” should be our starting position.
Thanks – that’s helpful on both sides.
Clearly, you can’t have unsubstantiated complaints count, since that gives anybody with a grievance an easy way to kick out any cop they don’t like. You can use it to post facto condemn Chauvin, but without knowing the rates for comparable officers, we don’t really have enough data.
If you want to argue stricter penalties for transgressions (two
strikesreprimands, you’re out), that’s potentially a good idea. How many police officers would be terminated by such a rule? Or maybe stronger sanctions (fired instead of reprimanded) in general? But we don’t know the details of the complaints, and under the current system, a reprimand was considered the correct response.@Ketil – if someone’s unsubstantiated complaints are noticeably and significantly higher than comparable officers, then I think it’s worth at least putting that officer under additional scrutiny. (E.g. reviewing body cams, switching partners, maybe additional training or assessment).
From the link, if we assume that 2002 data is still relevant and that each complaint involves an average of two officers, then municipal officers who respond to calls can expect about .3 complaints per year.
Those assumptions are wild guesses, of course, so it’s possible that Chauvin’s ~1 complaint per year was within the norm or just bad luck, but Minneapolis presumably has better data to work from. (And unfortunately a series of police killings of civilians – the current police chief was put in to replace the last one and reduce misconduct when Justine Damond was killed, and the one before that was trying to reduce misconduct from when Jamar Clark was shot.*)
* Clark is a closer case – officers say Clark was not handcuffed and took an officer’s gun in a fight to avoid arrest, and some witnesses claim that Clark was handcuffed and not resisting. Without body cameras, there’s no way to say for sure, although some of the evidence supports the officers’ story.
First of, no, it is not possible that many complaints are a coincidence, not statistically. If you are this much of an outlier, there is a common cause.
Most likely the cop, but “Being the neighbor of a paranoid with a penchant for filing reports” is in the general case a possibility. Not in this case, because if this particular cop was the victim of a persistent nutcase, the department would have been all over the press with that.
Further
It is not just the complaints. He also had two fire arms discharges.
Only one in four cops ever fire their guns off the range. Over their entire careers.
So his personnel file is firmly into “Glows in the Dark” territory.
Seriously, does the cops computers not red-flag this kind of thing automatically?
@Thomas Jorgensen, unfortunately, you can’t even say that in isolation. Take an extreme case – if you’ve got four officers investigating white-collar fraud, and then Officer Bob who’s responding to burglaries, Bob is going to have a whole lot more weapons discharges and uses of force than his peers.
I definitely don’t think Chauvin’s in this situation, but you can’t make bright-line rules because of asymmetries like this.
It surely matters what kind of policing you’re doing and where you’re doing it.
I was thinking something similar, but there’s a second factor in both cases. The jobs involved are naturally more appealing to people with risk factors for the problematic behavior. If you find yourself feeling anti-social sexual urges, you may gravitate towards a profession that calls for celibacy (or at least, not be as turned away from it as someone whose sexual urges are celebrated by society). If you are the sort of person that likes bossing people around and using force to support those commands, then a career in the police is naturally more appealing.
In the previous OT, in a discussion of the ways in which journalism necessarily contains biases, Aapje said of statistics vs. anecdotes:
I disagree that using statistics in a misleading way requires trickery. Things like where you source the statistics and what context you give to them can be a way of injecting bias either intentionally or unintentionally (quite commonly it’s the latter) and in neither case is it necessarily obvious at all.
The obviousness I referred to was merely about the specific kind of trickery where the statistics purport to say something about group A, but they actually polled subset B. If the pollsters honestly tell you what group they polled, you can usually easily tell that A and B are different.
This didn’t refer to other types of lying with statistics.
My point was more that bad statistics requires a mismatch between actual facts and what the statistics say that the facts are, so there has to be a form of trickery (not necessarily intentionally). Cherry picking anecdotes is inherently never representative, since there are no middle of the normal distribution people that you can identify and then ask. So anecdotal evidence is inherently non-representative, unlike statistics, which can be representative.
So you cannot use anecdotal evidence to make a claim about typical experiences without ‘trickery,’ as the very method itself is trickery.
Something else about statistics is that when they mislead people, they don’t do so in a way that pushes their behavior as radically as a misleading anecdote does. With an anecdote you are basically squeezing all the emotion out of an event and hoping that emotion drives the thinking of
I think it’s far easier to ‘fix’ someone fooled by data by giving them more, better, data, then to fix someone fooled by anecdotes with either data or anecdotes.
B/c when someone’s been socialized into a method of thought through anecdotes they’ll eventually just not respond to more data or more anecdotes.
I think that describes one way statistics can be “bad” but there are other less obvious ways. Take for example the ambiguity around how many deaths are because of C19, in which both the numerator and denominator depend on how/when things are counted, who’s doing the counting, etc.
Also, “bad” doesn’t necessarily mean deliberate lying. Journalists can provide bad statistics by not thoroughly examining or disclosing how those statistics were sourced — not because they’re trying to hide or distort anything but because they don’t have the technical expertise necessary to know to scrutinize harder.
And that’s OK: journalists are people who majored in stuff like English and Acting, who got to where they are because they’re good at spinning up stories on tight deadlines. We should not have the same expectations of them we would have of scientific researchers, even though the only real job of a journalist is to make you think he is equally or more authoritative than a scientific researcher.
One thing I see maybe most often is “using data and pretending you are doing statistics”. Which is usually one of a couple things:
1) failing to give a denominator, misleading by reporting “big numbers” instead of percentages. E.g. “the United States has the most COVID cases of any country!”
2) failing to provide a base rate e.g. “this doubles your risk of whatever cancer!” (from 0.00001 per year to 0.00002) or “1000 more people were homeless this year!” (from 1 million to 1.001 million)
(A non-decline of society post!) Has anyone else been….. accidentally oversleeping, and feeling tired during the day, and then discovered that sleeping a bit less actually makes them feel much better overall? I know that Literally Every Health Recommendation is to get enough quality sleep, but I feel like oversleeping doesn’t get discussed as much. I’ve found that by cutting down to 7ish hours, I do feel groggy in those initial 15-20 minutes after waking up, but after that my whole day is better. My thinking is clearer, less fogged, and I definitely feel much more alert….. Would be interested to hear other people’s experiences
I tend to be more immediately alert on wakeup after sleeping for ~6 hours as opposed to 8, though I can’t confidently say anything about how this carries over into the rest of the day. I’ve attributed that mostly to supplemental melatonin, though, which I assume causes me to wake up at a better point in my natural REM cycle.
Anecdotally, too much sleep is definitely a thing. It sort of feels like sleeping past the optimal point activates some “hibernation software” that encourages being a sack of potatoes for longer than is really necessary.
I think the recommendation has always been 6-8 hours. There’s an emphasis on the 8 so not everyone will immediately think “so six is enough!” without considering their individual circumstances. But obviously there will be people who do better on the six hour end of the range.
So if you feel best sleeping about 7 hours, that’s absolutely within the recommendation and totally legitimate.
Absolutely! I made a conscious effort to reduce my sleep by 1 hour per night about a month back and it made me much more awake during the day.
The people who experiment with polyphasic sleep schedules often say that if they oversleep their “naps”, they feel groggy all day.
That’s a recognised phenomenon. The explanation I heard back in my psychology class was that your body produces melatonin to make you feel sleepy when it’s time to go to bed, and if you spend too much time sleeping your body produces too much and some remains in your system after you get up.
This has been something that has vexed me my entire life. If I get less than 4 hours of sleep I feel awful, but between about 4 and 8 hours I feel like I’m just gambling on the result. Sometimes 5 hours is plenty, sometimes it’s not enough, sometimes 8 hours is refreshing, sometimes I am incapable of forcing myself to stay in bed for a full 8. It’s never made sense.
Also I’ve noticed that different beds will cause me to need different amounts of sleep, but this isn’t something I can intuit based on how comfortable the bed is. Truly maddening.
I find that there’s a sweet spot, usually in the 8-9 hour range, where I feel good and rested. More than that and I’m slightly tired all day, in the way one is after eating a large meal (not exhausted, able to think straight, but not full of energy)(. Less than that and I feel run down, especially if I get under 7. Too little sleep is worse than too much.
Sleep cycles are 1.5 hours long, more or less, but you need about 15 minutes to transition from awake to sleep, and vice versa. Hence the recommendation for 8 hours, which is a round 7.5 hours, or 5 sleep cycles, plus two transition periods.
This doesn’t match my experience at all. I generally sleep for ten hours a night. When I get nine I feel worse than when I get ten, when I get eight I feel worse than when I get nine, and when I get seven I feel worse than when I get eight.
Back when I was getting eight and a half to nine hours a night and still feeling tired my friends’ first suggestion was always “perhaps you’re oversleeping”. But experimenting with limiting my sleep never made me feel better.
I really wish I could get my ten-hours-sleep level of mental function, mood, and physical performance after only eight hours, but I just can’t. It’s annoying.
Thoughts on publicly-traded corporations like Sony publicly condoning the looting of stores that have purchased their products for retail sale?
It’s certainly a relationship between anarchy and capitalism…
A literal reading does not seem to condone looting, from someone in the pro-protest anti-looting camp.
But the Sony Twitter is full of tweets promoting what’s going on, and I can’t find a single one that says anything remotely like “looting is wrong” or “respect property rights.”
No offense, but that’s pretty weak evidence for your inference.
I’m not sure anyone thinks there’s a systemic problem of property rights being frequently ignored by authority figures that is relevant to any current event. Unless this is about civil asset forfeiture? (Looting is clearly not a systemic problem, unless you think that shoplifting has been a dangerous epidemic causing corporations to fear.)
Some Possibilities
1. Calculated decision that not siding with anti-racists is financially more harmful than being perceived to be on the side of the racists. (I suspect this is true, at least for now)
2. Being silent or condemning the violence won’t stop your stores from getting looted, but condemning them might cause your business to face further targeting/boycotts when this is all over. (I also suspect this is true)
3. Corporate leadership knowingly subordinates profitability to social justice (I think some corporate leaders think this way, others are thinking #1 and #2)
Politics operates in the visceral realm, it’s the autistic type that says: “if riots and protesting have nothing to do with each other what’s wrong with condemning rioting”
Do you have a broader theory about why Corporations make these overtures to left activists? I’ve seen this discussed before, it’s not apparent to me why you wouldn’t lose an equal amount of business from the other side of the political spectrum, unless you’re a company that already brands itself towards woke liberals. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for companies like Gillette.
To me it almost seems like a collective action problem. If all companies decided that public opinion on twitter didn’t matter than they could go about their business, but the risk of being the ONLY company singled out on twitter is very high for some reason.
I mean, in this case, my response to Nintendo posting their BLM thing on twitter was to roll my eyes. Pretty sure I’m still buying the next Zelda though.
Nintendo wants to sell games. They’re posting on twitter about games they want to sell. Then their feed is full of angry people yelling at them to say “Black Lives Matter.” They can either:
1) Ignore the angry people and keep having their @s be about stuff that isn’t games they want to sell.
or
2) Post one “yah #BLM” tweet, and then go right back to talking about games they want to sell.
I think the choice is pretty obvious.
Flip side is that other people will end up rebelling. That’s my thesis for the election of Trump – it’s right-ish wing political rebellion.
I think if this was the explanation then you’d be very hard-pressed to explain why *this* is the incident that every corporation is now tweeting about. Why did none of these corporations do anything remotely similar about Michael Brown or Sandra Bland or Trayvon Martin or any of the other incidents of Black Lives Matter?
@keaswaran
1) Because there have been justifications of looting stores based upon insufficient dedication to black people.
2) Because there is a boycott campaign on twitter for brands that don’t.
I don’t recall either of those things on those other times. Though there was a bit of brand awareness over Trayvon.
If you’re at a high enough level in a corporation to make decisions of that sort, you’re surely either Gentry or Elite, and may be only dimly aware of the existence of the people who will be annoyed by your action.
The stock explanation is that it’s easier and more useful to convince a 20 year about brand loyalty when their lives are still in flux and they have 60 years of purchases to make, than it is to convince a 60 year old who’s set in their ways and only around for 20 years.
Also, these protests are broadly popular, so making broad claims in support of the goals of the protest without talking about methods is probably the safest bet.
It’s highly unlikely that there will be any real pushback to putting up a black lives matter post. Yes, it might rub some people the wrong way, but even if they are extremely upset, they aren’t going to be able to stage a successful boycott, because too many people wouldn’t want to be on the side that says “we should boycott this company because they said black people matter!”
However, on the other side, if they don’t say anything at all, they run a very real chance of showing up in the news as the company that doesn’t care about black people, which could be bad for business.
A lot of these companies show support for “the troops” and other red tribe friendly things as well. They do their best to look friendly (or at least not hostile) to all customers
I’m not sure how this squares with the treatment of Colin Kaepernick though. Every team chose to boycott him, and no team was willing to risk being the “Black Lives Matter” team.
Because with Kaepernick there was an out that people were upset at him, not his message. Lots of people said stuff like “I understand his complaint, but during the National Anthem at a football game isn’t the time for grandstanding!” It’s harder to sell “don’t support this company because they put up a generic post saying racism is bad.”
I think that something like 84% of the United States GDP is to be found in large urban areas [https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Urbanization/US%20cities%20in%20the%20global%20economy/MGI_Urban_America_Full_Report.ashx page 2]. Not all of those people are liberals (Dallas and Oklahoma City are places that exist, though even they are more blue than red,) but I would be shocked if any large company with aspirations of selling to everyone would choose the red half of the country over the blue half if forced.
It’s narrowed in recent years, but Republicans still skew wealthier than Democrats. Keep in mind that while most of the economic activity happens in cities, there is also a lot more poverty in cities than suburbs and rural areas, so while a city might be a Democratic stronghold, it doesn’t mean that the people with disposable income are Democrats. Trump got 20% of the vote in New York City, and even won Staten Island, which has the second highest median income of the five boroughs.
Here’s a lengthy Twitter thread from a Minneapolis City Council member, detailing how the police department has undermined any substantial efforts by elected officials at reform. Key quote:
The dynamics are similar in New York between the mayor and the NYPD, and probably in many other police forces nationwide. The police may theoretically be a department of city government but in practice they are a separate, autonomous power beholden to no one. In an earlier thread, some wondered about inflammatory remarks by union leaders and how they could get away with that kind of insubordination without being fired – well, who’s really in charge, the people with the fancy titles or the people with the guns?
Obviously this plays into libertarian and public-choice theories of how unionized civil servants behave. But the partisan valence is inverted from the usual people we think of as civil servants, so aside from the handful of principled libertarians it never comes up. The notion of police as a street gang is, ah, more accurate than many of us polite law-abiding UMC folk would like to admit most of the time.
Since people are talking about calling in the guard agains rioters etc. I wonder whether a better way to deploy them would be to send in MPs to do the police’s job during slowdowns.
Are there that many Military Police?
Posse Comitatus prevents that.
You can only send in active duty military for LE purposes when the insurrection act is invoked or if federal law explicitly allows it.
I thought that didn’t apply to the National Guard while under state command.
Although as Randy M says, numbers of MPs might be an issue- from what I can find out, the Minnesota Guard has a total of two companies of military police, plus some Air National Guard security forces.
Yep, I totally missed the word “guard” in Lambert’s post. Thought he was referring to active duty MPs, not national guard. My bad.
This sounds a lot to me like when Clooney and Damon came out and said ‘we knew Weinstein was a womanizing bully, but we kept working with him because we didn’t know he was THIS bad’, except that those two guys are actors and not people who make careers out of promising to do things for the public.
Who sounds like them here? Steve Fletcher?
Yes. ‘The MPD was bad, we didn’t like it, now that someone else has done all the heavy lifting of exposing them we will build a new, better police department. This line
Is reminiscent of how Clooney and Damon talk about making Hollywood safe for actresses now that Weinstein is gone.
The cases are pretty similar though. Damon and Clooney can’t do much without getting a producer to work with them, and a city council member can’t do a lot for their constituents if they can’t get the police to work with them. They all concentrate on other issues that won’t piss off an important person for half of the work they want to get done, even if this person is standing in the way of some other work they want to get done.
The cases are similar in that they can’t do the specific job that they want to do. Clooney and Damon could do indie movies, or stage acting or commercials etc etc, but they wanted to continue to be big budget, A list Hollywood actors and so worked with a repugnant person by assuming he was merely repugnant and not an outright criminal.
However that isn’t the important bit, the important bit is that these insiders who had far more power an influence than most people went along with the corrupt system for years. Now that someone else has done the hard work of removing a major obstacle now they are positioning themselves as champions of good and promising that they will help build a new and better future. Both groups, the city council and the actors, have demonstrated that they will play the game rather than take a stand when there is personal risk involved. This makes them poor guardians/designers of the future.
There is a reason the military is not allowed to unionize. I think that reason applies to the police too, frankly. If they want to collectively bargain pay and health benefits, I can live with that. But the degree to which we allow them to collectively bargain (both officially and via involvement in politics) themselves out of accountability is crazy and not something a free society ought to accept. Unions protect bad cops.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives …”
Honestly I think unions generally protect the bad employees in general nowadays. Haven’t researched it, just anecdotes
That makes sense. Assuming employers even vaguely care about jobs being done well, bad employees are going to “need” more protection i.e. be more at risk of losing their jobs.
(An argument to still be in favour of unions despite the above is that in a situation without unions, good employees may need protection too.)
Some countries, most notably the Netherlands, do allow military unions, and participation in the Dutch military unions is around 80%. But from what I can see, these are basically just there for collective bargaining on wages and benefits, plus as an extra avenue for complaints. They definitely don’t have the right to strike. All of this sounds pretty reasonable, and I wouldn’t object to something similar for the police. But that’s not what we have now.
Huh. Sounds an awful lot like “The Deep State.”
This was my first thought as well. A couple OTs ago someone asked exactly what was meant by the “Deep State.” Well, here we have a pretty good example, with the usual political affiliations reversed. Virtually every Minneapolis elected official is a Democrat, and I bet most of them are on record somewhere calling for police reform. The Minneapolis chief of police was specifically chosen to be a reformer. And yet those stated policy goals mysteriously fail to affect things on the ground level.
As Francis Bacon almost said: the police, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
I’d like to see some cities try out this guy’s plan. Not everyone at first, but if it works, then great! If not, then we learned something.
What? Doesn’t the mayor of Minneapolis have the power to fire the police chief? I know it’s not an elected position. Unless police chiefs are appointed for life it seems like a total disregard for what words mean to call them autonomous and beholden to no one.
It sounds like the Twitter thread is describing cops screwing over the councilmen of individual wards, in which case the accountability problem lies not with the cops but whatever mayor, council or other governing body doesn’t care enough to pressure the cops to fix this.
Camden, NJ actually disbanded their police force a few years back and created a new one. Not sure how well that worked out but it is possible. (My guess is this allowed them to strategically not rehire some folks who were otherwise protected by the union, but who knows?)
I wonder if that sort of compromise “We’ll implement whatever sort of procedural reforms you want, but we’re going to double the amount of cops on staff” would actually be welcome/accepted by the various activist groups?
Matt M or Matt Y?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/hire-police-officers-crime-criminal-justice-reform-booker-harris
Don’t know about the activist groups, but I think the actual communities in question who are most skeptical of police and believe they are treated unfairly, still in general wish to see bigger police presences in their community.
For example, my link above is to a poll that finds that, in the wake of the Laquan Macdonald shooting, 68% of Chicagoans wanted a larger police presence in their community, even though 60% say people in their area have a negative view of the police; the numbers are 54% and 42% on average elsewhere.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if a “more but better police” compromise satisfies most people.
“This food is terrible! Yes, and such small portions!” applied to inner-city policing?
I mean, one question is about your own opinion: do you want more police presence, and the other is about your perception of the opinion of others: what do you think the view is of the police in your community–so maybe people just misjudge the attitude of their community.
But it also might be that a bunch of survey questions only imperfectly capture the sentiment, “I would like more police presence, but under the condition that the police treat me and people like me more fairly”.
There are a few hurdles. First are the classic pilot program issues, if you fire all of your police, rehire the best 90% and then add a hundred officers (roughly what Camden did) and are the first to do this your pool of new officers is the best that it could be. If you are the 10th city to try it your pool of potential officers has been plucked by the other 9 cities, and refilled with the least desirable members of their force. Diminishing marginal returns set in pretty quickly with every city paying more for smaller improvements.
Secondly you have the size issue, while Camden had a massive problem in terms of crime it has fewer than 80,000 residents. 100 extra police is a significant addition, while that would make no real difference in Chicago representing less than a 1% increase in the total police force.
Also if I look around and use numbers from wikipedia it appears that Camden has ~ 52 police officers per 10,000 residents, while Washington DC has 66 and Chicago has 44. The problems do not appear to be rooted entirely, and possibly even largely on being under policed*.
*Or perhaps police presence needs don’t scale linearly.
Sure.
I should be clear that I’m not actually endorsing it as a strategy, only arguing that, if it were possible and we had good reason to believe it was generalizable to other cities, I think it would be an acceptable compromise.
Obviously the “if”s matter a lot.
Back in 2005, Georgia (of the Caucasus, not the Appalachians) fired their entire traffic police force due to corruption. Quoting the Wikipedia article:
This report (Reforming the Police in Post-Soviet States: Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) is pretty interesting. Some quotes (emphasis mine):
@Eugene Dawn
Or people could believe that the police behave poorly because they are understaffed.
The question was actually along the lines of “should the police spend more time in your neighbourhood”, so probably isn’t explicitly getting at numbers of police overall, but sure, there are lots of possible ways to interpret the survey data.
It’s also only one survey, let’s not go nuts here; all I wanted to do is point out that “more cops” is probably not much of a poison pill for people who want to reform policing.
When you call the police, I could easily see things being better to have more-but-less-armed cops showing up.
The fewer cops you have the more armed they’ll (think they) need to be.
You can see that argument, but can you get there realistically? More but less armed works if they arrive at the same time. If you haven’t expanded your force then more but less armed probably means slower response times, if you have expanded your force then it is ‘more but at a higher cost’.
There are likely to be knock on costs with public frustration. I was pulled over once for being out past curfew on my bicycle at 17 on my way to work at 3 am (literally the last day I was scheduled to work before I turned 18 and curfew would no longer apply, but since they didn’t know my age that wouldn’t have prevented being pulled over). The cop called for backup and sat in her car behind me for 20 mins waiting, and (after they let me off) I was an hour late for work.
Yes, this means more police.
If you think of the police as an O-ring type job, where the quality is measured by the worst performers, then more police means worse police.
But consider this toy model: we double the number of police, and we send two cops where we send 1, or four where we would send 2, and only the most senior cop in each group has a gun.
(Late edit: the other cops have guns locked in the trunk of the car, so if there is a need to arm up for some reason, they can do it)
I’m not saying this is a bad idea, just want to remind us that in the Floyd case, four cops were indeed involved.
Very true. And it was the senior cop who killed him, without even using a gun.
But I think this is close to what minority communities with lots of crime want when they say “more cops.” They want more presence and more expectation that they will come quickly when called.
@Edward Scizorhands
and bear in mind, that solution probably requires 3 times as much money.
There is the ability to do something on paper, and the ability to do it in practice. If the Mayor fired the police chief and brought in some outsider to clean the department up, that would probably result in a police strike that would look very bad for him.
The mayor can fire the police chief, but can’t unilaterally reset the collective bargaining agreement (and doing the former against the wishes of the rank and file will make your life a lot more difficult when it comes time to do the latter, assuming you stay in office that long).
The Minneapolis city government’s web site is behaving very badly at the moment, but I think it would take a majority vote of the city council to fire the police chief. And the price for being the city councilman who calls for a vote on the matter, would be that the police would basically abandon that councilman’s ward to whatever criminals would rather take advantage of the situation than demonstrate their solidarity with a suit-wearing ally. This would happen even if the council does vote to fire the police chief. If you try to fire all the cops who keep finding excuses to always be busy somewhere else when a crime is happening in that ward, you’ll either be tied up in union grievance committees until Ragnarok or you’ll be facing a general strike, and either way your ward still doesn’t get police protection.
You could set it up so that the mayor can arbitrarily fire the police chief on his own, but that would risk the position being filled by the mayor’s idiot brother-in-law. Who legally could be fired, but practically won’t because of all the sex the mayor wants to have ever again. The city council could hypothetically not vote to confirm the mayor’s initial appointment of his idiot brother-in-law in the first place, but the voters won’t notice because who pays attention to local politics any more whereas the mayor would definitely notice which councilmen don’t go along with his plan for domestic tranquility.
Or we could have a robust culture of public involvement in local politics, but that’s only slightly more plausible than the plan where we ask johan larson’s friends with the moon-sized spaceships to appoint honest and ethical police chiefs everywhere.
It’s not even clear to me that that police chief could fix the whole “service slow-down” mentality. It seems to be more a lower-level emergent phenomenon. A way to push back against what they see as improper treatment from above.
Is there a way to create incentives for the police union to want to remove people who are doing bad shit? I’m imagining some law where 10% of all lawsuit payouts for police misconduct have to be paid by the union or come out of the police pension fund.
The most interesting part of this post to me is the assumption that this hypothetical politician primarily has sex with his wife.
or brother-in-law.
But what power does the police chief have? They almost certainly can’t unilaterally fire people, and heading a department where everyone hates you is not an attractive job.
Yes. As a result, the last two Chiefs of the Minneapolis Police Department have been reformist political appointees brought in by the city government with a mandate to improve accountability and reduce brutality in the department.
Here’s an article about Janeé Harteau (chief 2012-2017). Pull quote:
She was fired after the murder of Justine Damond by a police officer, after which Medaria Arradondo was brought in to do the same job. You can see how well that went.
The mayor has the power to hire and fire the Chief of Police. The Chief of Police does not seem to have the power to reform the department (or at least, no-one who’s tried has been able to effectively wield that power so far).
So what power does the police chief have?
They have non-zero power to fire individual police officers (immediately firing the four involved in Floyd’s death was Arradondo’s call). But in practice there seem to be a lot of limits on this power – in the past, there have been many cases of police chiefs trying to fire officers for misconduct, losing lawsuits against the police union, and being forced to reinstate them (example source).
The Chief of Police also in theory has the power to set direction and marching orders for the department as a whole, but it seems like there is low buy-in from the force in terms of following these directives. In short, there’s been a power struggle in recent years between the Chief of Police and the leader of the police union, both of whom want to be seen as the “true leader” of the force by rank-and-file cops, and it seems like the union leader has been winning (example from before Floyd’s death).
Is it now? They’re certainly less left wing than your civil service union, but hardly a right wing bastion
Did you read the thread?:
I don’t think those business owners complaining about calls taking too long want “non-violent resolving of confusion.” The whole point of having police is to use violence or use the threat of violence to make people comply with the law.
why not?
You want the police to show up promptly and resolve the situation. And you want “resolve the situation” to be done in such a way that nobody gets killed, bashed, maced, tazed, or arrested unless the situation actually calls for it.
There is at least plausibly something especially abhorrent about the state’s most visible arm of coercive power unjustly killing members of a historically oppressed minority at a disproportionate rate, particularly when significant segments of the police and broader public publicly display indifference toward or even sympathy with the killers.
Your statistics may be right and certainly don’t seem far off, but they are a numeric argument. Not everyone is a utilitarian, and not all issues are readily susceptible to utilitarian analyses.
The first section about the statistics of death does not exist in a vacuum. To go from 40 deaths a year to 9 is a stunning success for activism, and think of the lives saved through that reduction.
The necessity of for the incessant presence of pressure is evident by how the Floyd case would have been covered up if not for the protests. Similarly, the death rates do not stay at 9 without the concrete and cultural work done by activists.
See also the above thread on how many of those health-related deaths are categorized as such to minimize law enforcement responsibility.
I was pretty impressed that we went from 40 to 9. But it kind of puts a lie to the “we have been ignored for so long, riots were the only way to make you listen” narrative some in the media were pushing. If we went from 40 to 9, maybe we can just keep on doing what we were doing?
If we went from 40 to 9 during a period without riots as well, that puts a whole different color on it.
Uh, you guys were around in 2014-2015, right?
Theres a pretty direct line from ferguson to body cameras.
I’m not sure your point. The argument seems to be ‘this riot is justified because if we didn’t riot the death rate would go back up’, which seems countered by the observation that the death rate went down through 2019 without a steady number of riots from 2016-2019. This seems to be an argument of ‘if the rates don’t go down we need to riot to get attention/if the rates do go down the riots have worked and we should keep them up at any provocation.’
But saying the changes were completely independent of rioting just because the rioting preceded the changes in laws that (presumably) led to the change in rate of killings.
I don’t think the argument is “constant rioting is needed for change”. But “riots in 2014-15 prompted changes that reduced police killings from 2016-2019” is at least plausible.
Except no one said it was independent of rioting, you just jumped to that conclusion. The point is that if the rate actually fell (and not was manipulated into falling) during this period then claims that riots are needed to maintain the trend are weak.
It may be like Scott’s postings on Moore’s Law. You need a significant every now and then to maintain the rate, but not constant major events. Perhaps activism doesn’t sustain its own momentum, and so needs a riot every now and then to re-fuel.
It might be like that, but that is a hell of an assumption to start with to justify riots.
I agree, it would certainly take a lot of study to figure out if it’s merely correlation or not.
I thought 2015 was an outlier. Were the numbers for say 2010-2014 not similar to those for 2016-2020?
2015 was an outlier. I don’t think this came up in this thread but I said this in a thread I started above. Unfortunately the Wash Post database only goes back to 2015, so we don’t know the data before then.
When I downloaded the data, I got the following numbers for unarmed Blacks killed by year:
2015 38
2016 19
2017 22
2018 22
2019 15
2020 6 (through June 2)
I don’t know why my numbers are slightly different from what Atlas said (although I do show 3 unarmed killed in 2020 with no race indicated, while only 1 for this the entire previous 5 years, so maybe we should treat those 3 as Black).
Honestly, those are both such small numbers compared to the entire US population that I think they may be entirely swamped by noise.
I feel that safety issues can somewhat be the exception. I certainly would not want to work at a company that says “well our rate of employee injury is just within the noise region ¯\_(ツ)_/¯,” much less “well our rate of people choosing to shoot other people with guns is just within the noise region.”
That’s all because of the denominator, though. If your 100 person company has a zero annual fatality goal, well that’s hopefully setting the bar a little low (unless you are a mercenary company, I suppose). If Osha attempts to set regulations such that workplace fatalities drop to literally zero across the nation, rather than the current ~4k, that’s probably going to run into diminishing marginal returns.
Where is the point at which even one would be remarkable? It changes based on technology and individual risk tolerance.
And yet, that statement will be literally true regarding just about any company you choose to work for, right?
I mean, I get that you don’t want them to say it or to display a cavalier attitude about it… but just because a company says “our goal is zero workplace fatalities” doesn’t automatically mean it will be so (particularly for inherently dangerous jobs).
The noise region for workplace safety in the past was a hell of a lot higher than it is now, and with a smaller population, so I’d rather err on the side of believing that cultural changes can further lower it today. If we even maintain 9 a year from now on, that’s 30 people saved a year from if we had accepted 40 as within a noise region, especially in such situations as a shooting, where there must be an overt perpetrator.
Any guesses/bets on who these “unidentified DOJ officers” actually are, and under what legal authority they’re allowed to be out there without giving their names or who exactly they report to?
https://twitter.com/MikevWUSA/status/1268286448018522117
IANAL, but as far as I know there are no blanket laws requiring police officers to identify themselves in most states or at the federal level, and it is mostly controlled based on internal policies set by agencies. The DOJ has criticized state and local agencies for doing it, and suggested they stop, but obviously if those are DOJ officers what’s sauce for the goose would appear not to be sauce for the gander.
As for exactly who, it’s Washington D.C.. Accepting for the sake of argument that they are DoJ officers, you have FBI, DEA, BATFE, BOP, USMS off the top of my head and that’s not counting uniformed officers attached for enforcement purposes to the DoJ’s other divisions. If I had to guess, I would say that most likely you have multiple different agencies represented there.
I once saw a GPO squad car…
I think every department of the US Government has its own armed law enforcement division, though in a lot of cases all it does is guard that department’s buildings and/or investigate malfeasance by its employees.
Exactly what I was driving at with my “This is Washington DC” comment, yeah. My prior would be that in DC a lot of poorly identified police-like people showing up out of the blue are likely drawn from those sort of forces, hastily given riot gear and semi-matching uniforms.
Prison correctional officers.
Yeah, this was my guess; although they might be BoP’s riot squad.
The claim I heard was that the federal BoP’s riot squad was being deployed. I’m not 100% sure these are guys who are selected for their careful attention to the rights of civilians to peaceably assemble and petition the government for the redress of grievances….
I’ll guess Marshall service, and they’re there directly under the direction of AG Barr.
I was going to make a comment specifically about this, because I hate it. It’s like saying (it comes after a list of 5 other things you are required to believe) “Alright, so you’re on board and you agree with me. But you still can’t be my ally until you openly subject yourself to deep shame for not joining me sooner”.
Why do so many Facebook warriors think struggle sessions are a good way to win friends and influence people?
It worked with Christianity. What does this thing look like?
There is a game theoretical argument for responding more strongly to negative events deliberately caused by agents that respond to incentives rather than natural phenomena.
Punishing agents for their socially undesiderable behaviors causes deterrence, while letting them get away with them invites these behaviors.
Hurricanes, viruses and heart attacks, on the other hand, don’t respond to incentives (this isn’t completely true because these things and/or their negative outcomes are partially influenced by people’s behaviors, but the causal chains are more complicated and stochastic).
If the protests double the current death toll due to COVID (ain’t exponential growth fun?) it will be more like “kills as many black people as police violence in a century“
True. But the effect will be statistical, so it will be impossible to single out individuals to punish, unless of course you just decide to punish anybody who joins a protest, which is kinda hard because of that pesky freedom of assembly (not that the lefties had any problem with suspeding freedom of assembly when it was the “armed rednecks who wanted to go to the hairdresser” that were protesting).
On the other hand, if you catch somebody breaking a window, stealing stuff, setting things on fire or assaulting a cop, it’s easy (ok, easier) to individually punish them.
I’m not asking for the protestors to be generally punished, I just wish I didn’t see healthcare workers and experts actively encouraging (or even participating in!) the public protests.
People ascribe bigger motives to a death caused by a person than a death that happens because of, say, heart disease.
This just is. You can roll this boulder up the hill all day, but if you are trying to change irrational things about human nature, you are being the irrational one. So compare death-by-police [1] only to other agency-driven deaths.
[1] 9 is the “death of unarmed black person” but it undercounts by ignoring people who were technically armed yet shouldn’t have been considered threats, and overcounts people who were unarmed but still fucking psycho.
The issue you run into with this is that once you start from the position that “the police, on the whole, are corrupt, dishonest, and brutal, and medical examiners, courts, and prosecutors are willing to lie to cover for them”, that position is basically unfalsifiable with the available evidence. Of the ~1,000 police shootings of individuals in 2019 (which is, from looking at previous years’ survey data from the DoJ, something like 0.1% of all police uses of force, which is 0.02% of police-public interactions), pretty much ALL of them received scrutiny in the form of a formal investigation or review process, whether via Internal Affairs or a Civilian Review Board or by the local DA’s office.
But the people claiming that there is widespread and systematic misconduct are also claiming some combination of:
-These investigations are insufficiently independent
-These investigations are insufficiently thorough
-These investigations are based on dishonest testimony and/or falsified evidence that the investigators either cannot or choose not to expose as falsified/dishonest.
In previous cases, the FBI has gotten involved in an attempt to be a trusted evaluator of the evidence. This has notably failed to change the narrative, such as in the case of Michael Brown.
EDIT: To be clear, I think you absolutely should make a PERSONAL effort to look into the evidence of each individual case as it comes up, if you want to form strong opinions on the individual cases. I just wouldn’t be particularly confident that after doing so you will be able to convince anyone of anything.
What kind of claim would you find satisfactory?
Because as it is, George Floyd’s execution would not have become a statistic about police shootings – he never got shot, but it didn’t take that for him to be killed and the murder covered up. ‘We can’t trust the data, because we can tell the police covers it up when they murder someone’ is a claim that appears outright true on the face of things.
EDIT to reply to DeWitt:
The FBI and the MBCA were investigating the death before protests started. You’re arguing facts not in evidence. Declaring “Coverup” when not only was there an investigation, but an investigation that predated public outcry, is basically the exact opposite of a satisfactory claim.
AFAICT the strongest claim for “Coverup” in the case of George Floyd is that the preliminary ME autopsy on Floyd conflicts the autopsy commissioned by the family. I think that the appropriate response to this is to evaluate A) the credentials and backgrounds of the respective physicians and B) try and get a third opinion or at least expert analysis by other qualified physicians on the findings of the first two.
@Atlas
And on the flip side of THAT, we have historical and even fairly recent (last 20-30 years) examples of relatively widespread corruption in specific sub-units of law enforcement agencies. The LAPD Ramparts Division scandal being a good example. On the other other (other? Are we on 3 others now?) hand, the more widespread the corruption the more isolated and spectacular actual provable instances are.
On the other other other other hand is the claim that the more widespread the corruption is, the harder it is to prove because everyone’s in on it…and around and around we go…
Are you trying to make a point here or are you just being obnoxious for no reason I can discern?
We should stop referring to Floyd’s death as an “execution”. The officer is being charged with 2nd degree murder, and I hope he is convicted of that and given a harsh sentence, because I think he is guilty. But that’s distinct from an “execution”.
The reason I’m especially sensitive to this is because there is a tendency for people to demand a harsher indictment than the facts justify, and that will lead to an acquittal, which will lead to more riots. I would much rather they charge a case they can support and secure a slam dunk conviction.
Some states allow a jury to find not guilty on the charges brought but guilty on a lesser charge, anyone know if Minnesota is one?
@DeWitt
I was actually trying to point out to Atlas re: conspiratorial thinking that, to be fair to those arguing for the existence of police conspiracies, there actually IS some historical evidence that they can exist.
I was writing that post before your question to me, and my response to your question is edited into the point above. What part of what I’m saying are you objecting to, and what part are you finding obnoxious?
@Trofim_Lysenko
I think the strongest claim for a coverup is that the first thing the Minneapolis PD did was issue a statement that Floyd had developed an unexpected medical condition and died as a result. The officers had body cameras, so either the department leadership watched what happened and then consciously lied, or issued that statement without watching the footage.
Either one seems to qualify as a cover-up.
All the rest of it – the FBI investigation, the increased scrutiny by the state government – only happened because there happened to be video that proved the department was lying about how Floyd died. But they definitely lied about it, right out of the gate.
Which is also why I find the questions about “the cop was arrested, what else do the protesters want?” a bit disengenuous. This is an instance where we actually do know that there was a conspiracy to cover up the killing, which went at least as high as whoever ordered the police department spokesman to issue a false statement.
Granted.
But now that each of the 4 cops has been charged and an investigation into the entire force and their actions over the past decade has been announced what else is needed ?
If we can prove that the department leadership saw the footage and then consciously lied, that would be strong evidence, I agree. “Evidence of a coverup” means evidence of knowing misrepresentation of the facts of the case. Any other fact pattern may well be evidence of other bad things, ranging from bad internal procedures to negligence and dereliction of duty, but is unlikely to be strong evidence of a coverup.
Furthermore, “If not for the public outcry this would’ve been swept under the rug” is ALSO not self-evident. The incorrect and misleading statement is evidence in favor of that, I’ll certainly agree, but not conclusive evidence, since the pattern of “official makes statement, further investigation proves statement was wrong, official has to retract/correct statement” isn’t exactly unknown.
In an alternate universe where the MPD makes that statement, either conducts no inquiry into the death or conducts an inquiry and finds no wrongdoing, and THEN footage is released, I think you have an absolutely slam-dunk case for coverup. But that’s not the fact pattern we’re dealing with in this case.
Which, again, is not the same thing as saying:
-MPD Leadership acted entirely appropriately and without fault
or
-The officers involved in George Floyd’s death did nothing wrong
@baconbits9
Some type of policy change to address the fact that this keeps happening at police departments all over the country.
And before someone brings out the low fatality stats again – consider two things. One, if someone hadn’t had their cell phone camera out, this wouldn’t have just not have been counted as shooting an unarmed man, it wouldn’t have been counted at all. Unrelated medical condition, remember?
When Walter Scott was shot in the back, we also got to see video of the cop planting a weapon on the victim. No unarmed shooting statistic there, either.
And another thing – those four cops were totally blase about this. This wasn’t some grand moment of malice for them, this was just another Thursday on the job. Imagine Floyd was merely hospitalized but didn’t die – once again, we never hear about it, and it certainly doesn’t go in the statistics. How many other people in Minneapolis would you guess have gotten the same treatment but were lucky enough to live through it? When answering consider that the guy kneeling on Floyd has averaged at least one misconduct complaint every year he’s been a cop, but not only was he not fired, the other cops joined right in helping hold a guy down and kneel on his neck.
This stuff is blowing up because the protesters are sick of cops having carte blanche to commit violence without consequences- that’s what needs to change.
(Note – I don’t actually expect it to change, mind you.)
I actually dug into the numbers some when doing math on my own, and I took that into account by looking at the BJS “Arrest-Related Deaths” numbers for the years they were available. Unfortunately, the dataset was limited and they stopped collecting it in 2014 so I don’t have them for most recent years. Going off the trends though, the change in the numerator doesn’t actually change the overall percentage much.
As far as procedural changes, state (or possibly federal) laws requiring arrest-related death investigations by a separate agency (State bureaus of investigation, say) are a possibility, in addition to the usual suspects of making it mandatory to have body cams, to have them running for the entire length of the shift, to have the footage retained for an extended period of several years, and most importantly to have the entire, unedited footage for given cameras subject to mandatory public release upon request.
Yeah, I think there are actually a number of legal and policy changes which could make a substantive difference here. I am deeply skeptical that we will see any of them happen, though.
I actually quite agree with a lot of folks here who think the protests don’t actually accomplish anything. I agree with the goals of the protesters, and I can understand on an emotional level why they are angry enough to take to the streets.
I just also think our political system has learned how to ignore protests, and that there hasn’t been a protest in my lifetime that actually accomplished a tangible goal. I’d sincerely love to be proven wrong, of course.
Yes, and it was the concern as to whether or not they were lying that prompted Trump to order the DoJ and FBI to investigate the next day.
Because the killing was caught on video.
“We will definitely investigate police killings if someone manages to record us on video and prove we’re lying” is probably not a sufficient standard.
Yes, with all the blathering going on about this case, this seems to me the most important issue. We will always have some crazy cops that will brutalize suspects. We should hope to minimize that, but there will always be some.
But I think the biggest problem here was that with the three cops that accompanied the knee to the neck guy, none of them made any objections. They seemed too willing to accede to the senior cop. There does need to be more training for cops to help them make the decision to stop their abusive partners. And to make it clear that the junior cops will be supported, even if they make mistakes sometimes in stopping aggressive maneuvers that are called for. And also training of the senior cops too, telling them they sometimes have to follow insistent junior cops, and that the department will support these junior cops. This is not a easy task, but should be done.
Have you considered the possibility that this is actually what happened?
People like to call this an “execution” or “murder” to stir up emotion, but if you look at the available evidence, it is pretty clear that Floyd is heavily intoxicated, has symptoms of fentanyl effects (dyskinesia, coughing blood, paranoia), collapses on the way to the police car. At the beginning, you can see the officer struggling to pull him out of the car, at first, I thought he was resisting, but I’ve come to the conclusion that he was just hammered.
This doesn’t excuse the officer sitting with his knee on his neck, but the claims that this somehow constrained blood flow or air simply makes no anatomical sense. He also talks for six of the eight minutes he is held down, while it worries me that the doctor from UMinn disagrees with me, I still maintain that if you cut blood to the brain, you are unconscious within seconds, and if you constrain the windpipe, you don’t talk.
That they intended to kill him seems equally far fetched. Everything is calm and reasoned all the way until Floyd allegedly panics when they try to put him into the car (somehow nobody managed to catch this on video?), and after he fell/jumped/was pulled out of the car on the other side, they called an ambulance for him. What would they have done if it had arrived two minutes earlier – told them to wait a bit until he was properly dead? At one point Lane is worried about Floyd’s condition asks Chauvin if they should turn him over, but he answers that’s why we have him on his stomach.
The least charitable interpretation of the evidence is that the cops got fed up when Floyd fell, and decided to give him a beating in the car or something – but even the coroner-for-hire didn’t mention any injuries from this. Or maybe they suddenly remembered they were a bunch of violent racist assholes, I don’t know. It’s not important anyway, because we have a black man dying while crying for his mama while there’s a white cop on top of him. No other facts matter.
You make decent points Ketil and I’ve updated my beliefs accordingly. But its still manslaughter. And that was still brushed off as being due to a medical condition. Whether or not you think this is a symptom of racist institutions depends on your prior beliefs. But this is still poor practice, and the fact other Western nations have far fewer police killing suggests the US has a problem.
As to whether this is worth all the protests, again it depends on your priors.
Basically you have started with the assumption that ‘this’ is a systemic issue and that there is some top level policy change which will fix it.
The first assumption is as far as I can tell unjustified. Should black people be more concerned about the police than white people? On a per captia basis yes, but this logic is awful. I can take that same exact argument and show that white people should be afraid of black people, and that black people should be afraid of black people by showing violent crime data. I can also probably show things like white people should be afraid of white people, and latinos afraid of latinos and Asains should be afraid of everyone*. Whatever range, number or mental conception you want people to settle on to represent the issues between the police and black people it clearly falls well short of capturing the broad issues in America.
Broadly the only point we get to from this approach is one that everyone already agrees on: Black people are generally struggling in America relative to non blacks but it does not suggest the assumption that black people are struggling specifically because of a systemic racial bias.
To the second point- we have tried this before! There have been multiple attempts at a national level to close the black/white education gap, there have been attempts to dramatically increase funding for low income schools (DC has the 2nd highest per student spending and some of the worst outcomes), big pushes for better student to teacher ratios, calls for better testing etc, etc, etc. Every time this fails at a national level** the narrative is retained with a different frame. Underfunded schools has steadily morphed into ‘testing itself is systemically racist’, and for every shift in
excusesreasons we still fail to close that gap.*the last one is highly speculative
** There are some local successes which are great but they also strongly stand in opposition to the idea that these are systemic issues which can be solved via top down mandates.
@baconbits9
How would you characterize a case where a disparate impact continues to manifest despite all sorts of solutions being put in place to address them, then? Even “your culture fundamentally causes lower rates of success because it’s not so compatible with the broader culture underlining the economic system” concedes that there’s a bias against said minority culture, and brings into question if the broader culture is unjust in refusing to further increase its compatibility accessibility.
This, of course, gets into the debates about how attaching -ism and -ist to this is playing Worst Argument In The World rhetorical games, but if we do choose to avoid that, how should we call this kind of situation?
The situation is (very roughly) this:
Large scale top down interventions intended to address systemic issues have failed, while small scale interventions sometimes work locally. This is the opposite of what you would expect from a systemic problem, but even if it were a systemic problem it is still evidence against trying a large scale/top down approach at the least. If persistent failure of those attempts won’t get you to abandon the strategy then what possible could?
Disparate outcomes do not automatically imply a bias, and this sort of statement only highlights one specific bias: that of the writer who will take any position as evidence of their conclusion. If two cultures are different the basic assumption is that you expect them to have different outcomes, not the same and the only way to come to this conclusion is to also toss in the assumption that culture has no impact on anything that could be related to educational attainment, employment, propensity to save/spend etc, etc etc.
I still have to disagree with the second half.
Nerds’ culture may not benefit them in high school compared to jock/preps’ culture, when it comes to getting romantic/sexual partners, even if high school culture isn’t overtly trying to stop them. Do we call this a bias against nerds or not? Either way, that doesn’t mean that high school culture is correct, and instead changing high school dynamics such that a wider variety of students can find romance/sex is better.
Some deaths are far more traumatic than others, for the person dying and their family, and for society.
For an easy example, let’s say you fall on a skateboard and the ground hits you in multiple places. This is painful but the context makes this not traumatic. Now, let’s say that you’re a teenager held down in a locker room while someone beats you. That’s a violation of your person: it is a lowering of your status, it means you may never be safe going to gym class and might not be safe anywhere, worse things could happen in the future, it makes you feel weak and powerless, it exposes you to evil things in the world which you now have to think about. It is extremely traumatic even though it is objectively the same pain and injury and you’ll be thinking about it for weeks if not decades.
Is that difference in trauma irrational?
Okay. One Muslim extremist killed more innocent people in one day than the entire number of unarmed people were killed by police last year. And this was part of a pattern of Muslim extremists killing innocent people throughout the western world, in accordance with their sworn ideology. I’m pretty sure if afterwards hundreds of thousands of people took the streets, looted businesses, and burned mosques the media would not be calling it “understandable” while every major corporation signaled their approval of their actions because lack of action against the ideological system that produces these unjust deaths is complicity.
Not to be glib, but I’m all for cancelling any state salaries or pensions allocated towards supporting muslim extremism. I also empower you, Conrad Honcho, by the power vested in me by the world conspiracy of muslims, to not follow any orders given by random muslims on the street. But when your argument is that the yearly killings by islamic extremists is about the same as the unarmed people killed by the cops, my reaction is not that the state is behaving in a good or normal manner.
I think you’re being glib. There are definitely parallels to be made with the whole “silence is consent” thing, or just posters that say “Stop killing us!” Or that many other police and communities are taking anger for the actions done by a few bad cops hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Consider also murders committed by illegal immigrants.
If the government has to be involved, how about government responsibility for allowing/encouraging mass muslim immigration, or enacting sanctuary cities and refusing to deport criminal illegals?
There really appears to be an isolated demand for concern for innocent life here.
There have indeed been protests that the government isn’t doing nearly enough about homegrown white terrorists, who kill more Americans every year than Muslim terrorists.
I mean, let’s run with exactly the example of islamic terrorism, sure. It has killed some amount of Americans, on the level that it is noticed but not so much that it is more than a blip on the radar. Despite that, the American people have decided to spend literal trillions on two foreign wars, heavy-handed domestic security measures, have severely currailed their own civil freedoms Because Terrorism, and violated the rights that remained because… Maybe Terrorism.
If there were even a hundredth of the attention paid to police brutality as opposed to terrorism, with the prssident going out to say ‘I will set aside ten billion dollars to deal with the Great Moral Issue of our time’, that’d be one thing. As it stands, the state response to police brutality and islamic terrorism are nothing alike.
Also, we can hope to encourage people to behave better by incentives, whereas it’s kinda hard to do that with nature.
Dutch fixed expressions are so rich in diversity that researchers are investigating whether other languages can benefit from them, similar to how researchers look for new medicine in the rainforest
‘Jezelf klein(er) maken (dan je bent)’ = Making yourself small(er than you are)
Efface yourself.
‘(G)een stobreed in de weg leggen’ = (don’t) put a straw width in the way
A small amount of obstruction. Usually used to complain that not even an attempt was made to stop something bad (like: not a straw width was put in their way) or to threaten people when any attempt at obstruction is made (ie. if someone puts a straw width in my way, I’ll …).
This expression was originally a bit different: ‘(don’t) put straw in the way.’
‘Geen duimbreed toegeven’ = Don’t give in a thumb width
Not budging an inch.
‘Gouden bergen beloven’ = Promise golden mountains
(Falsely) promise the world.
‘Iemand een loer draaien’ = Turn someone a lure
Cheating or fooling someone. The expression may refer to a lure that is used in falconry: a chase object (a piece of meat or a fake bird) on a rope that is swung around to lure a bird of prey, to catch them or for training. Another explanation is that ‘loer’ refers to a cheap piece of cloth (see the explanation for ‘In de luren laten leggen’).
‘Op de loer liggen’ = Lying on the leer
Lying in waiting or covertly looking. In this expression, ‘loer’ has a very different meaning, being derived from the verb ‘loeren’, which means covertly looking at someone or something.
Just for the record, police brutality is bad, and bad when its done to anyone regardless of color.
But (In decreasing order of confidence)
0) The police officer would have gotten away with it if not for the public outcry.
1) I’m not convinced that the police in general are motivated by racism.
2) I’m not convinced that this specific police officer is motivated by racism.
3) I’m not convinced that the higher arrest rate of minorities is due to systemic racism
4) I’m not convinced that the higher arrest rate of minorities can’t be explained away by the fact that low income people in general are arrested more
5) I’m not convinced that the higher arrest rate isn’t a result of legitimate arrests due to cultural factors.
6) I’m suspect that low income people are likely to have bad experience with cops because cops are more likely to be in poor/high crime areas and low income people are perceived to have less political power.
330,000,000 people in this country, and there is 50-100 unarmed police homicides per year. link “death by cop” is already incredibly rare and the easy/obvious solutions have already been implemented. To actually reduce the numbers here would require a sober, close examination of the data and blaming it on racism is a red herring, and distracts from real solutions. Scott talks about this in Against Murderism
I don’t share the concerns of the protester, but I do care about their frustrations. I think people would be willing to work with them on implementing solutions. But they’re not proposing anything substantial, and by blaming a really complicated problem on racism it makes me think that there isn’t a solution here that will both satisfy them and actually reduce police brutality.
I’d wager that the MPD officers in question cared more that Floyd was part of the underclass (or maybe bottom end of the working class) than that he was black, and that they’d have treated an obviously-underclass white guy the same way.
I’m not sure that it makes any difference at any level. Floyd was black, the underclass is disproportionately black, so we get a bunch of black people and their allies highly motivated to set this right and in a way that reaches far beyond Minnesota. I hope they succeed, and I’ll overlook some broken windows and burnt-out squad cars if that’s what it takes.
I’d prefer a more nuanced approach, if only because of the risk that they’ll win a narrowly-tailored victory that only protects poor black people and not poor white, hispanic, asian, etc people. But that’s not realistic; the choices are a possibly effective coalition that’s more focused on race than I prefer, or one composed of the impotently small handful of people who care about this issue enough to fight for it but are scrupulously pedantic about the distinction between race- and class-based discrimination.
+1 to this. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that
Yes! this! You said in 2 sentences what it took me 12 paragraphs.. I couldn’t agree more!
This is where we disagree. I don’t think its possible for the protester to succeed if they’re fighting police racism instead of police brutality.
I want the protester to be happy. I want them to get what they want. Could you tell me what would success look like to you?
What kind of reforms do you want to see?
What metric would you use to decide if your reforms are working?
But they’re fighting racist police brutality, not e.g. racist profiling in traffic stops. And it’s going to be much easier for them to win on the “brutality” front than the “racist” front.
you must have a different perspective than me… I agree with your premise, but it looks to me like they’re fighting police brutality.
hopefully congress perceives it the way you do, because I think many people would like to see police officers be reigned in and less inclined to use force.
Then their poor understanding of the data will prevent them from achieving success.
Racial profiling leading to increased police “encounters” with blacks is the only plausible reason that this is even a problem. So long as you assume that due to accidents/malice/unpredictable crap some percentage, say 0.0001% of police encounters are going to lead to shootings, then the way to reduce police shootings is to reduce police encounters.
Huh? That assumes that you can’t reduce the rate of shootings per encounter, but I think you emphatically can. You also seem to be assuming that only the amount of racially disproportionate “excess” brutality against black people is a problem (i.e. no brutality against white people is a problem).
I doubt BLM would turn down a magic button that made police encounters 10x less likely to result in use of lethal force across the board.
@gbdub
That will reduce the absolute number of black (and other) people killed by the police, but it will not result in the percentage of blacks that are killed by the police to match the percentage of blacks in society.
It’s not about what they would turn down, but what outcome they would accept.
There have been plenty of cases where people took what was offered and then remained angry or got even angrier.
Can anyone get me some reasonable information on this? On one side, I’m seeing “George Floyd was a criminal, he had been charged multiple times for offences to do with cocaine, he was part of an armed burglary gang” and on the other side I’m seeing “George Floyd was a Gentle Giant, a loving caring peaceful man who campaigned against gun violence”.
Given that the original interaction with the police was for an alleged fraud (?) there must be something more on the “criminal” side than the “peaceful community activist” side, but I don’t know where to get any information that is not being weaponised by the respective side providing it.
I have no idea what George Floyd’s previous criminal history was, but does it really matter? Is it okay for the police to summarily execute individuals if they have a criminal record?
Exactly – if he would be arresting Stalin/Hitler/Mao/Pol Pot (one may dream), I am still against a police summarily executing people.
And if you are unaware that people need to breathe then you are underqualified to work as a policeman.
And from there, Chauvin’s dubious record is far more relevant than Floyd’s.
No, but it’s also not okay to lie about a victim’s virtue in order to emotionally manipulate the public.
Shit, man, I’d join a movement against media misconduct in a heartbeat.
Well, thanks guys for demonstrating one thing to me – this is all about optics. Now I’m angry and I’m going to engage in a full and frank exchange of views.
Where did any of you get the implication from what I asked that I thought “it’s okay to kill criminals”? I’m anti-death penalty, for fuck’s sake! That means that even where someone is proven and convicted as a torture-serial killer, I don’t think the State has the right to take their life. So if you can follow along with me here, that also means that I don’t think someone being arrested should be killed and the police officer get off with not even a “tut tut PC Plod”.
What I wanted to know, if possible, was “where is the truth behind on the one hand – this guy was a vicious criminal and probably coked up to the gills so that is what killed him (and people are already pulling autopsy reports to ‘prove’ that) and on the other hand – this guy was a literal innocent lamb only singled out by the Evil Murderous Racist Cops as a victim because he was black”. I’d like to get a sense of what could have been going on if we don’t presume any party here was either Monster or Martyr.
But you’re all so busy jumping on the virtue bandwagon you couldn’t read what I was asking? Here, have some social justice ice cream to eat as you express your indignation.
EDIT: America has long had a police brutality problem, you are the nation whose police invented and boasted of “the third degree”:
“Flambeau and his friend the priest were sitting in the Temple Gardens about sunset; and their neighbourhood or some such accidental influence had turned their talk to matters of legal process. From the problem of the licence in cross-examination, their talk strayed to Roman and mediaeval torture, to the examining magistrate in France and the Third Degree in America.”
“The most modern of countries, America, has introduced with a vague savour of science, a method which it calls “the third degree.” This is simply the extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which is surely uncommonly close to their extortion by bodily pain. And this is legal and scientific in America.”
“For that matter, it would be easy to find examples much nearer than this one to the torturing of the Roman slaves. There is a very close parallel in the Third Degree, as applied by the police to the criminal class on suspicion, especially in America; for the criminal class is a submerged class like the slaves; and it is but an experiment on the nerves in one way instead of another, like a preference for the rack rather than the thumbscrew. But the point is that it is applied to the criminal type without any proof that it is in this case criminal; and the thing is justified not by the criminality of the individual but by the needs of the State. The police would answer exactly as the pagans answered: “We are not punishing the crime; we are protecting the community.””
This was just a refinement of the older methods involving rubber hoses and the like, and that it really happened and was unremarkable enough to be familiar to the public was demonstrated for me by an early novel by Rex Stout called “The Red Thread”, where a young white woman is brought in and questioned under ‘the third degree’; at one point she is so dazed that she thinks that the police officer has pushed her off her chair but no, it is just that she has been interrogated (with lights shining in her eyes) for so long and without water, food or rest that she fell off the chair herself. Reading this I thought “no, surely such things could not have happened, she would be well within her rights to get a lawyer and take a case”. But it was treated as commonplace behaviour in the book and presumably by the reading public.
Such a system and such a state may well need violent overthrow by revolution and rioting. But the cause is sufficient in the rottenness of the corruption, not the exaggerated innocence of the spotless victim. Be as indignant as you like about the police, but at least first find out what was going on.
I don’t know about his history before the arrest, but from the 911 call and charging documents, it sounds like the clerk at a store believed that Floyd had bought cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 and might be drunk or otherwise impaired. When the officers arrested him, it sounds like he cooperated, then struggled a bit but was never a threat to anybody.
Which explains a little bit why the police had him on the ground in the first place, but after that, there’s no excuse for what happened.
And we don’t know whether he knew the twenty was fake.
Absolutely true, not that it would matter much if it was.
Okay, thank you J Mann for answering my question. In all the outcry nobody has really explained what was the inciting incident that got the cops there to arrest Floyd in the first place. Now I know.
There is an ongoing debate on the Wikipedia page on whether to include his criminal record, to remove all (arguably) irrelevant biographical detail, or just include the positive, gentle giant, stuff.
IIRC, he has a criminal record, including serving five years for armed robbery. New York Post quotes the Daily Mail:
It doesn’t have much relevance to the case at hand, though. Well, maybe it bumps the probability that he knowingly used a false bill (which is why the clerk called the cops), and that he, in fact, was on drugs.
I have to admit I have no idea what you are talking about. Did you respond in the wrong thread? Since I was one of the people who tried to answer your request, I am completely bewildered by your anger.
Agree. The responses made weren’t “Deiseach thinks X,” the answers were “We think the information you are asking for has little relevance to the situation.” As matkoniecz said, Floyd could have indeed been a vicious criminal coked up to the gills, and Chauvin still should not have kneeled on his neck, especially after Floyd expressed trouble breathing.
“I don’t think that your question has any direct answers of consequence” is a valid answer, and has nothing to do with optics.
As matkoniecz said, Floyd could have indeed been a vicious criminal coked up to the gills, and Chauvin still should not have kneeled on his neck, especially after Floyd expressed trouble breathing.
And again, I am saying “where did I say anything about if he were a vicious criminal then that makes it okay”?
“I don’t think that your question has any direct answers of consequence” is a valid answer, and has nothing to do with optics.
It means you were putting an interpretation on why I was asking this question, or assuming that there was some ulterior motive behind it. J.Mann answered what I asked. The rest of you were tripping over yourselves with “why are you asking this? what are you trying to insinuate?” in a manner that did make me think you weren’t interested in plain unadorned fact but in what weapon a possible answer might be chipped into.
That I was asking the equivalent of “hey, I’m hearing from one side that Mike Mackie is Literal Hitler and from the other that Mike Mackie is the Second Coming, can anyone give me unbiased information as to what this guy Mackie is like?” didn’t seem to be an interpretation that was much in evidence. It may well be that “your question has no useful answer” but that is not the same as “your question doesn’t deserve an answer”.
This whole topic is a minefield, even asking “what is the reality between Sainted Martyr and Vicious Thug” gets us all het-up. I didn’t appreciate “why are you asking this” with the implication that I was pro-choking criminals to death, but getting angry over that isn’t helping either.
Floyd and Chauvin knew one another (from working together, not from Chauvin having previously arrested Floyd or anything, though admittedly that could have happened too). It is thus an obvious suspicion that Chauvin had a specific motive and took advantage of his position to target a personal enemy. But so far the media hasn’t reported anything further about such possible motives, and if the prosecutors know anything, they aren’t yet commenting. Not an answer to your question, I realize, but like you there are aspects of this I want to know more about, and that’s the one which most interests me at the moment.
My understanding is that they both worked as bouncers at the same venue, but didn’t often work at the same time, and so probably would only have known each other in passing. Has more on their work relationship come out?
Not that I’ve heard of, but since the reports are that they sometimes worked at the same time, it just seems to me that the possibility they knew one another better than has so far been reported and that that had something to do with motive is worth considering. So I’m hoping more does eventually come out.
Is there any chance of a narrow victory that only helps black people?
None of the concrete demands i’ve seen made by protestors involve race, except for improving data gathering relating to race. Nobody’s calling for the end of QI unless the plaintiff’s white.
I think so–remember, the last unjustified police shooting in Minneapolis was by a poorly-trained but politically important African-American policeman.
At the level of official policy, everything is going to be race-neutral for the obvious reasons. But the problem may not be solved at the level of official policy. If the official policy is “no busting civilians’ heads” but the informal messaging is “look, we know sometimes you’ve had a bad day and just have to bust a head or two, we get it, but we can only let that slide if it’s a white trash head”, then that could lead to a really bad institutional culture.
I don’t think that’s likely, but see e.g. Rotherham.
Also see some schools, where they stopped policing black kids.
This definitely seems to be an agenda of a solid block of people, who form a minority of the populace, but who can be a local majority (or can have outsized power). They certainly seem to have more power already than their numbers would suggest.
Well, some of the protesters are demanding less (sometimes down to zero) policing in black neighborhoods, but no matter how wildly unlikely it is, it would not actually *help* black people, though many activists would consider it a great victory.
And that’s all you’ll have to, because the media won’t report on the deaths by shooting and arson.
+1
Dutch Moroccans are mostly Berbers, which was a group of oppressed mountain people. You might compare them with the Appalachian people in the US. They have a reputation for intolerance (for example, harassing ‘loose’ women, gays & Jews on the streets) and being extremely sensitive to losing face.
Turks seem to have a much better culture in lots of ways. For example, they are far better organized than Moroccans, have more politicians representing them, run their mosques better, have more people with good jobs (I’ve worked with several Turks, but never a Moroccan), etc.
While the Turks and Moroccans very similarly sized (both being nearly 400,000 people), 70-80% of those who went to fight for ISIS were Moroccans (with the rest not just being Turks, but also other other groups, including Dutch converts).
I have high confidence that if you’d be asked to rank ethnic groups by likability, (black) people from the Caribbean would rank above the Moroccan Dutch.
I think you need to add somewhere to this list the likelihood that the officer would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for the outcry.
Done.
I am 100% certain that the department would have covered up the incident (as they tried to do) if it wasn’t caught on video and publicized.
You have linked to a database about police shootings, but George Floyd was not shot. This seems like a potentially important distinction.
It’s not just that, he wouldn’t even have been counted as a murder victim if the department’s cover-up weren’t exposed. Trusting the data seems like a fool’s errand to me.
It is well established that police will plant weapons on people they kill. The “50 unarmed people per year” statistic is factually false, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised the true number is a factor of four or more higher.
Even if we don’t trust the police to be honest, we still can trust they can’t disintegrate bodies. So what’s the upper-bound, if we give them the least amount of charity?
There are ~1000 people who die per year due to police encounters.
That would be the upper bound in my judgment.
I thought the 1,000 was police shootings. I think the question here is about people who have a police officer kneel on their neck and then die a short time later.
I was trying to address tossrock and Edwards points referring to police planting weapons on unarmed people.
The upper bounds for the number of unarmed people police could kill per year is 1000 people.
I concede that it is theoretically possible for them to shoot and kill 1000 people in a year (none of them armed) and plant guns on them, then strangle/beat to death some additional number of people, but I feel reasonably confident assuming that:
a) The vast majority of people killed by police are shot
b) The majority of people killed by police are probably armed to some extent.
If either of those assumptions are not true, I would have to fundamentally rethink my worldview.
I would not be so sure. 50 similar undocumented accidents per year seems plausible (strangulation, beating, deliberate not calling for an ambulance, withholding critical medicine…). I am not going to estimate but 50-100 per year is not something unlikely.
Coroners and medical examiners throughout the United States routinely report findings that minimize the responsibility of police.
They’ve basically made up a medical condition to apply to drug users who mysteriously die in law enforcement custody.
I can’t address the role of MEs in these cases. But excited delirium is a thing, or, at least real enough of a thing that standardized protocols for EMS are being rolled out on how to measure and treat it. See, eg. training video. Starting point is where the medical director advises worrying about excessive force by the police. Watch the whole thing for an idea of what’s going on in more recent EMS training on the topic.
@Garrett: Thanks for pointing to that video! I have been insistent about the restraint of Floyd not causing asphyxiation, but it looks like I was wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_asphyxia
This is very (I would say suspiciously, but the page has not been substantially edited since before Floyd) consistent with the preliminary coroner report (combination of restraint, drugs, and heart condition, and restraing occurring after exertion)
Priors changed to posteriors, and I now think it more likely that handling by officers contributed to his death.
I’ll concede that excited delirium might be somewhat real, but the police are certainly using it as a magic buzzword to bust out the excessive force and fear no repercussions for it.
More relevantly, it still disagrees with Scoop’s perception that most people who die in police custody are shot.
Didn’t that religious leader guy in 1st century Judea die of positional asphyxia?
@Lambert
I heard about that. But are you sure it was in Judea? I thought he was Hispanic.
Fortunately Wikipedia has statistics for all killings and not just shootings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States
As well as a comparison between countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country
George Floyd’s death would still not have been counted as a killing were it not for bystanders’ cameras and chance fueling outrage.
True. Do you have like a Fermi estimate of how many people the cops are quietly murdering, to add to the official statistics? I feel like establishing some upper and lower bounds on the problem is important.
According to this BJS paper 61.5% of “arrest-related deaths” were classified as homicide. As people here were pointing out when discussing COVID statistics it’s pretty hard to hide a death, so I imagine the vast majority of quiet police murders are intentionally mis-classified rather than hushed up entirely. Therefore, I’d expect the total number of murders to be more than the official number by not more than a factor of 100/61.5 ~= 2.
Switzerland : 0
The Swiss also have a nearly goddamn perfect homicide clearance rate – there are years where literally every single murder in Switzerland gets solved. Perhaps one ought to contemplate copying their training manual?
Yeah, when Switzerland writes the manual on how to deal with deeply entrenched international drug cartels with really damn strong allegiance from their members trafficking $100 billion of drugs (about a third of the global market) into your country, I’ll get right on that.
Step One: Police a nation which allows the local community to vote to deny citizenship to anyone they believe to be not their kind of person.
It looks like Sweden’s police shoot and kill about ten people each year. Adjusted to the population of the US, this amounts to 350 person, so by this metric the US police is about three times as brutal.
According to Wikipedia, Sweden has 1.6 gun-related deaths and 0.32 gun homicides per 100K population, the numbers for the US are 12.2 and 4.46.
So adjusted for gun violence in general, it looks like Swedish cops are about four times as brutal as US cops.
(Obviously all these numbers are too high, and in any case, you cannot just transplant the policies of one nation into another.)
The Swiss get to vote on whether or not immigrants are granred nationality, yes. If it turned out that Chauvin and Floyd were immigrants, or even that their parents were, it’d be news to me.
Why is this policy the one you cared to mention?
I think you can tell us what you think 🙂
The country to look to is, I think, the UK. With a population twenty times Sweden, they manage to have fewer police killings, in fact so few that we don’t need statistics, Wikipedia just lists them all in a table.
While the discrepancy between Sweden and Switzerland can be explained by immigrant groups with high crime rates, the UK also has large contingencies of immigrants, yet manage not to shoot them (regardless of crime statistics).
This may be due to cultural differences (lack of a gun culture among criminals) or to polices like unarmed cops backed by designated Armed Response Units.
If your region can reliably keep out most of the poors, a whole lot of policy objectives, from welfare to policing, become massively easier.
Note this doesn’t actually make things better for the underclass. You’ve just shoved the problem someplace else. But your numbers look good and people rave about your policies that achieve such low levels of poverty!
I had a discussion with John Schilling a few OTs ago, in which he mentioned that EU nation policing deliberately cracks down much harder on gun violence cases, in exchange for lower levels of response elsewhere. So adjusting Sweden police shootings per gun violence won’t get a comparable brutality rate to the US.
That was specific to the UK, not the EU generally. It might be happening elsewhere in the EU, but I don’t have nearly as much data (among other things I don’t speak Swedish), so I’d be careful about generalizing from it.
@AG
I’m not sure I see how that matters? The gun crime rate is a passable metric for “how deadly dangerous is this place?” Whether or not the response to the gun crimes is heavy or light doesn’t really matter in regards to how dangerous the place is.
On the wikipedia link for killings by law enforcement officers, the US is 5x worse than Sweden (~30/10M vs ~6/10M). The gun homicide rate says the US is about 14x as dangerous (4.46/.32). So if our cops are 5x as deadly but we’re 14x as dangerous, the Swedes are not quite 3x as brutal, no?
Taking my reasoning to an absurd degree: Imagine two groups of police. They have the exact same shooting rate, for the same size populace, and both populaces have the same gun violence rate.
Group A’s shootings-to-gun-violence is lockstep. Their shooting cases are always in response to gun violence, and no shooting cases where there are no guns.
Group B is flat rate. They have shooting cases in response to gun violence, and shooting cases when there are no guns.
Group B is clearly more brutal.
Something something the integral is what matters here, not the derivative.
What’s the shooting rate for “no guns” for Sweden, then? I don’t think we have that information.
I guess it comes down to how you define brutality. Some even more absurd hypotheticals:
Group A shoots every person with a gun (except other cops, I guess) – legal gun owners, hunters, occasionally they just go to a gun range and shoot everybody there. Group B only shoots people who have a gun and are presenting a deadly threat, but they also end up shooting one person who is trying to run down his ex wife with a car, and another person who is trying to set off a car bomb.
Group A shoots 75% of the people with guns, and nobody else. Group B shoots 15% of the people with guns, and also 5% of the people with swords or crossbows.
@J Mann
I don’t follow your hypotheticals. Group A is clearly more brutal, they’re shooting non-criminals. Mine is specifically talking about cops responding to crime, and even excluding a “mistakenly shoots innocent person” case.
The more brutal country is the one in which the penalty for being late and for rebellion is death.
The good news is I think the most likely things to help are not particularly race focused:
1) Modify police policies (and laws, if necessary) on use of force
2) Limit the ability of unions to use collective bargaining to impose onerous arbitration rules that make it very hard to fire cops, impose “privacy” restrictions that limit the ability of the public to access data on complaints against officers, and other rules that tend to make officers less accountable
3) Institute more Community Review Boards and give them more teeth
4) Limit Qualified Immunity (but note this is not a panacea since it only impacts civil liability – it might be the least important item on this list)
The great thing about civil law is that it is privately prosecuted, by the victim or his agent. With criminal law, as long as the offense isn’t public enough to cause riots or sizable political costs, the state can simply not bother to prosecute.
And for the love of God, end every form of policing for a profit. Make a law that says that not one dime that the police extracts in fines may go to the police budget, nor to the budget of the government that employs the police, and not one dime of reward for levying fines, fees, seizing property, etc., may go to either the police or the government that employs them. Actually send a few people to prison for violating this law, until it becomes as rare as hitting people up for a bribe when pulling them over for a speeding ticket.
+1
+1
This is the important thing. Police reform is not what should be being protested – criminal justice reform is. Our current system is full of injustices and issues and “defunding the police” does nothing to address them.
Yeah this too.
The “or the government that employs them” part is arguably the most important part of this, but also the hardest to enforce. Even if you do something like make it go into a state K-12 education fund (to use a not quite random example based on my experience with casino regulation and fines), you still have the money becoming part of the taxation and budgeting decision cycle by elected officials.
I think you could accomplish something by requiring that *all* the money go to compensating victims of crime. That would be able to absorb all the fines, fees, seized, and unclaimed money the police could ever hope to collect and then some.
Ehhh, I think that either the state or federal general budget is enough separation to help. I’m a federal employee, and I couldn’t *possibly* care less to change what I do to help something that divorced from my agency’s budget.
Note that I care very much about doing what I believe is the right thing, but I don’t feel any pressure from my superiors to do anything that could have effects so remote. I’m also fortunate in that I actually believe my immediate superiors care more about doing the right thing than may be typical for federal employees–I’ve gotten into a yelling argument with my bosses’ boss about the right engineering standards to apply during emergency repairs, and he still supported my impending promotion to the next GS grade next Monday. So maybe my experience isn’t typical, but it’s real.
Stepping back, however, I’d fully support doing away with civil forfeiture at all levels of government. Just from a deontological perspective, I’ve heard enough stories of people getting their life savings stolen by cops who say “Oh, you have $10,000 in cash, so you must be a drug dealer. Yoink!” that I don’t care one bit if it makes it harder to prosecute drug cartels, get rid of civil forfeiture entirely. If I can’t have that, though, at least make it go to the general treasury rather than the organizations responsible.
Federal is probably enough separation, yeah, although remembering when the ATF ordered 2,000 Multitools to be engraved ATF – Always Think Forfeiture I have my concerns there too. Maybe just dump it all directly into National Debt servicing payments or something.
But I don’t think it’s an insurmountable problem. Just a matter of crafting the right incentives.
You might not care about the budget, and that’s fine, but you have a boss who cares about your department’s budget, and if your boss can argue that your department brings in more revenue that will get your department’s budget boosted, and your boss will encourage the policies that bring in revenue.
Money is fungible.
Good fences make good neighbors. I had schemes of my own, but they all seemed like they could be prone to abuses.
Even if the scheme succeeds, the schemer remains.
How about if, instead of schemes to prevent abuses, we support prosecution of abuses, and we try harder at using honor and shame to get people to put contributing to collective well-being back near the top of their priority list?
(My initially preferred scheme was: municipal fees/bonds/tickets are paid to state school budgets, 50% in state assessing fee, 50% in state of fee payer. State fees bonds tickets paid 50%-50%, to federal foreign aid budget and federal public defenders / federal innocence project. Federal fees/bonds/tickets paid on per capita basis to all state budgets for health infrastructure. I don’t like Anthony’s scheme because the last thing we need is any incentive for people to fraudulently claim to be victims of crime.)
+1
I think this would be the single best thing society can do to improve police-citizen interaction
Yes, this would help a great deal. Classic punishment theory – punishment needs to be costly to the person doing it, not beneficial to them.
The flip-side is that it appears that “policing for profit” primarily occurs in poor cities or areas. That is, the people who live there are unable to support the level of taxes required to support the services they want and professional police.
So they need to accept a lower level of government services (probably including police), or a higher minimum tax burden.
That is not why. Policing for profit happens to the poor because they do not have attack lawyers on leash to fight it. The well off do.
I’m generally for it, but there is a central conflict here. In an idealized world, assuming you have a public police department, you want their resources to reflect the needs of their responsibilities. Because crime is correlated with poor areas you have a problem, in fact you might even end up with a Giffin good situation, where as policing becomes more expensive you have to consume more of your budget to cover it and you end up consuming more policing in a cycle.
If you take a neutral police department with strained resources and say ‘you don’t get a cent from speeding tickets and other petty violations’ then pretty much every petty violation goes unpunished. If you fund them by their crime rates then the police incentive is to have high crime rates, if you fund them by % of crimes solved then there is an incentive to pin crimes on people who may not have committed them.
This is a structural problem when you try to provide services for people who can’t pay for them, it goes for schools*, homeless issues etc. There are no obvious solutions, only hopefully less terrible solutions.
*Underfunded inner city schools are another example of this, many (but not all) low performing schools spend far more per pupil while getting poor results.
You could do none of these things, decide that the statistics are very easily gamed, and somewhat eyeball things. Which is how many funds end up getting allocated anyhow.
And then you end up with low income areas with high crime rates having less police resources OR you have some distant manager at the state or federal level making decisions for local spending.
I don’t agree with your fundamental concern. The reforms used to reduce police brutality against blacks should reduce brutality against all racial categories across the board, unless they implement very specific “don’t engage black people at all” types of rules. Like, body cams, no chokeholds, making it easier to fire bad cops, etc….all that should make whites safer as it makes blacks safer.
My fundamental concerns is that I trust cops a hell of a lot more than I trust BLM and their “yup, this is mostly peaceful except for the white supremacists and Russia ruining everything” water carriers in the media. Unfortunately, the current standard bearer for the opposition is Donald Trump. I would rather prefer someone like Jeb! or Rubio or even Cruz, because I believe they would have enough electoral ammunition at this point to win 2020 handily, with huge majorities, appoint justices, and obliterate these morons for the next generations and channel what few points they have into something more productive…but instead it’s Trump.
The anti-lynching bill is certainly tailored specifically to “minorities”. I don’t see why police reforms couldn’t be also.
@A Definite Beta Guy
That depends on how those are used/policed. If cops who get caught on camera abusing a black person much more often get punished than if they get caught abusing a white person, the use of the body cam is not actually race-neutral and the lesson taught to the police is to be less violent to black people, rather than all citizens.
Ostensibly neutral rules/measures are often not implemented neutrally, when there are incentives to be biased.
According to Steve Sailer, the support for requiring bodycams among BLM-types has fallen off considerably, because early adoption has shown bodycam footage is more likely to exonerate a cop falsely accused of racism than it is to prove one’s guilt.
I have heard that as well, but all the proposals I have seen still include them.
How we should interpret this depends a lot of how much power the cop involved or his immediate supervisor have to “accidentally delete” the footage.
It can’t. http://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differences-in-homicide-rates-are-poorly-explained-by-economics/
Urban poor are mostly not white, rural poor are mostly white. If you add a rural/urban axis, does it explain things?
Police brutality is an instrument of class war against the poor. I’m very wary of the way the issue is getting racialized, because that’s the first step to it being ignored by the majority, but maybe black people are the only portion of the American underclass conscious enough of their position to raise a stink.
I’m not at all convinced that the best policing system attainable in the United States would stop accusations of race racism [and resulting race riots or race adjacent riots] Though, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting a better policing system.
Yes I do wish they hadn’t made this about race. This is a police issue, not a Black issue. But I am keeping my mouth shut about this outside SSC. I very much suspect that if I say this the average person will immediately conclude that I am a racist trying to hide the fact that Blacks are killed more than Whites and so cops are obviously racist. If I bring up statistics they will consider me a racist trying to use sophistry. Facts don’t matter here. Emotions are king, so it is time to lay low.
Yes, most of the fixes being mentioned are to police practices and so are racially neutral. But with all the racial rhetoric going around, there’s plenty of “fixes” that will involve racial stuff such as training and Black quotas, neither of which will do anything about the problem. And of course when they measure if the “fixes” are working, it be done by seeing if the racial disparity of killings have changed. And that will never change as long as Blacks commit more crimes on average and live in higher crime districts.
It is also true that even if it was seen as just a police issue, we still would have had the riots and looting and fires, so that part isn’t made worse by treating it as racial. Mostly I just find it very annoying that we have all these people making such a big deal about this issue, and they have the main problem wrong.
Incentives matter more than any implicit racism in the police, politicians, etc.
Make losing a lawsuit in a police brutality case (even settling in a way that requires a subatantial payout) bankrupt the policeman involved, and a lot less brutality will happen. Let the police buy private liability insurance on the market, but legally forbid employers from paying for it or negotiating a fixed rate for their officers, and at least after your first payout in a police brutality case, you will no longer be able to afford to work as a police officer.
While that is a valid question, another one is “how do we prevent the ‘police to just ignore ongoing crime’ problem from happening now?” Because there are a few cases of this that crop up sometimes, and the courts decide that it’s fine. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html
Not saying it is or isn’t bad, but this problem seems like it’s occurring irrespective of the proposed idea.
Typically, by telling them that if they’re responding to an ongoing crime they can bust heads and even shoot people all they want, which is wicked fun if you’re into that sort of thing and don’t have to fear real consequences.
@John Schilling
Is it fun? Like, i would assume that a cop, given a choice between
1. solve crime, which varies from beating people up, to getting in a dangerous gunfight, to tedious paperwork
2. Don’t do that and go get donuts
They would choose 2, even if they very much enjoyed beating people up with no consequences. There must be some sense of duty that allows the majority to do 1, and i’m not sure that will go away with increased risk of punishment for wrongdoing.
There is no shortage of civil service jobs that allow one to basically sit around eating donuts if one is so inclined, while facing zero pressure to run around the city getting in fights with criminals. Policemen, are mostly the people who didn’t want those jobs.
@John Schilling
Fair enough. But in relation to my original question, are you saying that the reason we don’t see the problem of police ignoring crime frequently at the moment is that the police wanna have fun busting heads and shooting people? if so, then i’m not sure that increasing punishment for excessive actions of that sort, and as a consequence decreasing their likelihood of doing that, is actually a downside. After all, a majority of police interactions are non-violent, and that’s the way it should be imo.
Simultaneously optimizing for “police effectively respond to serious violent crimes”, “police effectively respond to numerous lesser crimes”, and “police don’t hurt people any more than they absolutely have to”, is going to be a hard problem. Which one would be least unpleasant to let slide for a generation?
@John Schilling
I mean, “police effectively respond to numerous lesser crimes” is the answer from a deontological harm-by-those-in-power-is-worse-then-other-harms perspective, which i believe is one the average voter sees (and even as a utilitarian i find hard to shake myself).
But i reject the claim that we have to choose one to focus on. My original question still hasn’t been answered. Without an answer to it, my current viewpoint is that i assume punishing violent police actions is as likely to decrease police effectiveness as the closing of donut shops (i.e very minimally). And if the answer to my question is “because the police like being violent”, i would doubly want it to happen, since i reject the notion that we want our police to like violence.
I’ve already been accused of being racist by friends for suggesting that. Meh.
Saturday, I was in a bar near closing time. A mixed group of about 8 black and latino people came in and started shouting about shooting all the racist white people (sometimes. Othertimes it was just shortened to “white people”). Besides the bartender, I was the only white person in the bar. A black friend of mine tried to calm them down. They ignored him. Police were called, as they wouldn’t leave. I had just had a long conversation with my friend about how everyone with intelligent parents gets warned about how to respond to police presence. He was unconvinced, and kept pulling the “you can’t understand” card, no matter how many stories I had about police acting offensively to me for no reason.
When the police arrived, I got the hell out of there, as I always do when they show up. My black friend remained, calmly drinking a beer after hours.
I don’t consider him particularly close-minded. This is now a religious belief, and as such, any contradictions are ignored.
This is the grain of important and useful truth in the (IMO) not very useful concept of white privilege. The social world presents differently to different people, enough so that there can be big, important things going on in your society that you simply never see.
If the primary goal of the US federal government (legislative + executive) were to enrich the common man – drive up wages for the working class, low unemployment, increased purchasing power, that sort of thing – how would it go about it?
My assumption is that there are some easy wins I’m unaware of that just don’t happen due to politics and entrenched interests but that most economists agree on (for the stated goal). What are those, if any?
Are things that encroach on fundamental rights off the table?
Yes, but I suppose I’d be interested in what you were thinking of anyway.
Mandatory work, getting rid of the feeble, disappearing the old.
Just killing off half the low skill population would greatly decrease the supply and be great for the unemployment rate and wages of the rest. Oh, you said human rights encroachment is off the table, I thought you said it was okay. I suppose that would be ignoring human rights.
IMO, the most effective way to improve the living standards of the poor is to eliminate labor regulations as much as possible, so the poor have the right to accept any job, regardless if the left thinks they are being exploited somehow. Yes, many of these jobs would be more dangerous and lower paid than what is allowed today, but those who would take those jobs would be otherwise unemployed in today’s world. And in the long run, having empowered workers making their own decisions will result in most of them getting better jobs. Also, this implies that setting up their own business is also much easier, even if it is just giving people rides, doing errands, or cutting grass. All this means less unemployment and more opportunity for the poor. Of course 95% of the left will disagree with me totally, because they think these regulations save the poor, and that the poor are not capable to solving their own problems. Pretty fundamental ideological differences here.
Or maybe the left believes that this opens up a Molochian rat race to the bottom. Consider, for example, grocery stores, where this is starting to occur. Once everyone institutes productivity-increasing practices, comparative advantage goes away and competition drives wages right back down to minimum, the employees having to do more on the same dime.
Removing labor regulations only works in conjunction with a UBI, which we have seen during this pandemic, as some people have been able to choose not to come back to a particular employer if they believe that the safety procedures in place are insufficient.
No. It does work better with a UBI, because the poor have more options. I still think giving the poor more options is better than fewer options, regardless of UBI or welfare or any other program. And of course there are many who don’t believe fewer regulations would work even with a UBI, because whatever UBI we had would never be enough.
I will edit this to add a postscript about your “race to the bottom” comment. Of course all businesses ALWAYS race to the bottom if you call trying to give less wages a “race to the bottom.” That’s how supply and demand work. That’s how it works even in today’s world, but the regulations don’t allow all supply and demand that would exist otherwise. Those workers who would be working now at the lower wages are now unemployed. The push that allows wages to move upward is the supply side, where the poor don’t accept the low wages or poor safety. IF we gave the poor more options, then they’d be able to have more power to make these decisions, and would have more effect on the supply and demand of the workplace. But they are boxed in my regulations so they can’t accept many jobs and they can’t create their own jobs because of regulations. The “race to the bottom” is worse because of regulations.
BTW, I do believe that welfare is a good thing, because there are people with low enough skills that they can’t earn enough money to make a decent living. But the current welfare system in the US is so complex and dysfunctional that it doesn’t achieve that goal very well.
Historically, the poor haven’t been able to stop the race to the bottom, because they’re trying not to starve. Only the rise of unions during a time of unprecedented plenty moved us away from Industrial Revolution horror stories to a 40-hour work week.
Neither unions nor the free market saved us from toxic shit getting put in our food and water, or shitty fire hazard cladding getting put in our cheap housing, though.
@AG says:
You have it backwards. Prior to the industrial revolution, almost everyone lived with the fear of starving. The IR is what made it possible to escape the Malthusian trap and allowed 40 hour weeks, not the unions.
Again it was prosperity that made that possible.
I’m not convinced that the poor would have been able to benefit from the plenty generated by the Industrial Revolution without union action.
Sure, working 80 hours a week with the risk of your fingers getting chopped off at the factory might be better than toiling at shitty subsistence farming, but I am very glad that we don’t have to do either.
A significant portion of the economic recovery from the financial crisis hasn’t gone to the poor, as a potential counterfactual.
Nothing comes to mind that is good policy and serves that purpose. If we single mindedly pursued such a goal then issues like effective marginal tax rates stop being as much of an issue.
Find some justification to force through various yimby measures and similar loosening of housing laws nation wide so that it is much easier to build mid to low income housing. Maybe claim that yimby has disparate impact to justify this constitutionally.
Laws that prevent people from dividing lots etc maintain high housing prices and make housing more focused on high income. Removing them should enable a spree of building that would over time considerably lower working class housing costs or at least reduce working class commute times. Further, that this was happening on a national scale would avoid some of the problems that would happen on an individual city level.
Work to address cost disease sectors. Purchasing power increases without the need for wage growth if less of each paycheck has to go to housing or healthcare.
Housing deregulation comes to mind. But the common man is just as likely to get in your way as to help you.
Are we taking higher wages and low unemployment as strictly necessary for enrichment, or would an effective UBI suffice?
Cut taxes, reduce barriers to trade, and otherwise get out of their way.
Do economists generally agree that this leads to increased wages for workers?
End the Federal Reserve, the minimum wage, most licencing requirements for small businesses, slash public expenditures and taxes, reduce debt.
On people’s reaction to the protests, leaving aside whether or not certain details of them are warranted:
I am an academic, living in a highly liberal bubble where I see a lot of unconditional support for the protests. What dismays me is that, more than ever, I am seeing statements from experienced scientists and tenured professors saying (or at least quoting from others), in essence, “if you don’t agree with every item in [long list of principles and demands from BLM or whoever else], you are shit and you suck”. There’s obviously a lot of room for interpretation and analysis of the way that these protests are occurring, and it seems to me to be overzealous to commit en masse to polarizing, uncompromising, and intentionally provocative statements like this. These people are capable of cautiously evaluating evidence and entertaining the possibility of being incorrect under normal circumstances, but when the right issue comes up, all that rationality flies right out the window.
Some go as far as to say “if you don’t overtly express your agreement with all of these concepts, you’re shit!”, which makes it even worse, since it totally precludes the possibility of even asking innocent informational questions about the various concepts and claims at issue. You must -automatically- agree, and if you don’t and ask for clarification, it’ll be taken as a roundabout criticism and thus, evidence that you’re metaphorical Hitler. At least it seems to me to play out this way. This feature of the discourse may well be a motivator in the bizarre state of things pointed out above, I realize. Not towing the line is too risky, if you’re in public view and live in this bubble.
There’s a lot of things that are unclear to me about this situation, but for the above reasons, I’m fairly terrified to ever ask questions in any form where my identity would be easy to figure out. I wish it weren’t like this.
These protests seem a perfect storm for polarization. I am seeing a lot of the right moving further to the right at least on an emotional level and losing a decent amount of residual trust in in the left because of the rioting. I find that and the polarization on the left terrifying.
On the more humorous side, I think the are now elements of the right who might not quite be favorable to assorted latino gangs that have prevented looting, but if asked would probably give mixed approval if asked if they approve of them.
If it’s any consolation, I feel the same way.
In a similar trend, many companies are coming out with statements that have a similar flair to our aforementioned scientists and professors. I work in the tech industry and my company has publicly posted strong-BLM support as well as in internal emails from various VPs.
One question I find myself asking is, “what is the expected value for companies/VPs/professors not explicitly voicing support for these protests”? Sort of a progressive’s Pascal’s wager. For example, I could be the CEO who is silent on the subject but in doing so risk people coming after me because, following the Desmond Tutu quote I’ve seen posted in my city, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”. That is not good for my image, my career, and my business. The expected value is negative.
But if I voice a strong pro opinion, even if I don’t fully believe every facet of the movement, then my only risk is angering the people who disagree at various levels with the protests and their motivation. These are the same people who are in the boat of “if I speak against the movement I may risk my image, my career, and my business. Therefore, the backlash signal from that group of people is significantly dampened.
Not sure if this is an accurate way to think about this kind of virtue signaling/woke capital. To clarify, I’m not condoning anyone’s violent actions (you see, I’m even defending myself in anonymity!) by calling strong pro-BLM “virtue signaling”. Just trying to understand the trend of strong support for multi-faceted behaviors.
A particularly funny example.
When the plague started, I starting getting messages from nearly every website I’d ever bought something from, including fountain pen companies and poster companies, about how much they care. A similar thing is happening now, but with BLM. Reality is making fun of itself at this point.
This is really surprising to me, as someone also in academia in a liberal bubble. Most of the people I interact with professionally haven’t said anything except on twitter, and the response from the administration has been a letter from a vice-president I’d never heard of that expressed “our hearts and minds are challenged in such painful ways” and “horrified, angry, and appalled at the killing of George Floyd”, but the response is to “expand both virtual and on-campus spaces that promote intercultural student-centeredness”, which is not exactly sticking it to the man. So, killing Floyd was bad (as is racism), ‘these times’ are ‘challenging’, and let’s all talk it out. No mention of protests, much less specific demands or reforms.
My current east coast bubble is really really liberal, moreso than the still-quite-liberal place I was previously.
To me the issue is not the protesters themselves. It’s possible they indeed think that stopping systemic racism is worth X number of Covid deaths (and granting the highly unlikely possibility that these protests will even come close to stopping systemic racism).
The issue is the public health experts, who have a responsibility of dealing with the covid crisis. And it’s not their personal views, indeed they may also sympathize with the protesters and think that stopping systemic racism is worth X number of Covid deaths. Rather, it’s their professional responsibility as public health experts, to not privilege certain values such as ending systemic racism, over others, such as religious worship. How can they possibly think that people (for example, religious people who would like to attend services) will take them seriously regarding lockdowns if they have such a blatant double standard? They are figuratively shooting themselves in the foot.
I hear people talking about removing qualified immunity as a way to encourage police to be on their best behavior. What’s the downside to removing QI?
A general increase in crime that would logically follow from police officers being fearful that doing their jobs may lead to them and their families being sued for millions of dollars?
I think the likely, long term outcome would be police embracing body cams and a push to set up a system for dismissing claims countered by the video very quickly.
I thought police had already started embracing body cams, because a lot of places that use them have laws set up such that the videos never get released unless the police want to release them (which is presumably only in cases where the footage supports the police narrative of an event or otherwise paints the officers in a positive light).
As someone who is opposed to state surveillance (obviously this isn’t the most egregious example of that), I already didn’t like body cams and that development sealed the deal for me.
Why can’t this be solved by the free market, with police officers buying insurance against this? Of course, some police officers (for instance those with a history of complaints being filed against them) might find their premiums are too high and have to find another job. This seems like a feature rather than a bug.
Because, “let the market decide” only gets brought up when it looks like it will lead to the outcome desired by the people using it (except for the hardcore, true libertarians who will say it about everything, but that isn’t usually who you hear this from since there aren’t that many of them outside of the SSC comments section).
I’ve been wanting to comment on the sociological phenomenon that it seems consistent libertarians are very rare and most of them on Slate Star Codex (but formerly Usenet).
Nonsense. I can think of at least half a dozen who aren’t. Probably more.
I should invite them.
I know four. I’ve been trying to get them to comment.
We had some discussion on the last thread about this. Search for “i n s u r a n c e”
@add_lhr had the best critique, that the insurance companies might not really be able to distinguish these people in any way, but that it was still worth a shot.
And you’d avoid that by spending a lot of time in dunkin donuts.
Presumably, you’d see a lot more lawsuits against police officers. In an area with strongly anti-police juries, you might see some unfair verdicts. Police morale would go down, and city budgets would go up. On the bright side, you might discourage some misconduct.
My sense is you would want some kind of lesser presumption on behalf of police.
I don’t think “anti-police juries” would be a factor – QI only applies to civil suits in federal courts. QI does absolutely nothing to protect police if they are in a state court.
Do any individual states have anything like QI? Or is it exclusively a federal thing?
I do not know – maybe cassandrus woudl?
The answer is quite complicated and a full answer is beyond my ken. But QI is a rule for claims asserting federal constitutional violations.
These claims are typically brought under the federal 1983 statute, which makes it unlawful to deprive someone of their constitutional rights under color of law. (Side note for technical lawnerdery: SamChevre isn’t quite right in saying that QI doesn’t protect people in state court. You can bring a 1983 claim in state court if you want–state courts are empowered to hear federal claims. QI would apply to such a claim brought in state court. But because it’s a federal claim, the defendant has the option, but not the obligation, to “remove” the case to federal court. And since federal courts are widely perceived as being more defendant friendly, defendants almost always use that option, which is why you only ever hear about this issue in federal court.)
Purely state-law claims, by contrast, don’t assert a constitutional violation but just a normal tort claim for assault, battery, etc. These are the same claims you would bring against me if I randomly punched you in the face. But whereas you can just sue me for punching you, state legislatures have set up a bewildering warren of requirements for asserting these types of claims against state officials. The fact that this is done by legislatures makes it different than QI, which is an entirely judge-made doctrine. But at a high level, and depending on what state you are talking about, certain of these requirements can resemble QI (and frequently are even more officer-protective than QI.) There are also frequently a range of procedural hoops you need to jump through. The difficulty of jumping through these hoops is one reason that these state law torts have really been abandoned in favor of federal constitutional litigation under 1983.
(There are also technically claims brought under *state* constitutions, rather than state statute or common law. I don’t actually know off-hand if those claims are subject to a state analog to QI.)
Thank you!
How often would Federal court be the proper jurisdiction for a lawsuit against a city police officer? Civil rights violations, but what else?
@Conrad:
Just to build on my answer above: when you assert both a federal civil rights claim and state law claims arising out of the same set of facts, the state claims can “come along for the ride” in federal court.
Oh, very interesting, thank you cassandrus. Also for your other informative response.
Opening everyone in the government up to being sued personally in federal court for reasonable exercises of discretion in doing their job seems likely to have a lot of downside. (Remember, QI only applies to federal suits: it originated in a case where the losing bidder on a contract sued the people responsible for contract evaluation on the grounds that he thought their motives were retaliatory.)
ETA: I think QI should apply even-handedly, so eliminating it would affect every government employee with any discretion, not only the police. I think that “reasonably obvious OR clearly established” is bizarrely over-narrowed in practice.
Agreed. It’s fine in theory – the courts don’t want to spend their time second-guessing a police officer’s snap decisions – but in practice it winds up as “Well, we’ve never had a court case dealing with this specific chokehold technique so there’s no way a cop could have known that choking someone out might violate their rights.”
The other issue is that the “clearly established” part often winds up preventing the precedent from being established. If the victim chooses not to sue because a lawyer tells them “You probably won’t win since there’s no established precedent,” then no precedent gets made. Or if the court rules based on some other factor – like the lack of precedent! – then they might not need to decide if the officer’s actions were wrong, so no precedent gets made.
My ideal law would be “Qualified immunity still exists, but with a definition of “reasonable person” that’s actually reasonable,” but that’s not really something you can codify. Maybe restrict it to cases of self-defense or defense of others – you know, where the “snap decisions” thing actually applies – rather than things like prison conditions or search warrants, where you have all the time in the world to figure out how to do it right.
Basically QI started as a doctrine that said that you cannot sue the police for doing a bad job if the actions were reasonable. It was meant to prevent police from being in a double bind where they want to arrest someone but can’t be sure they’re correct. Without QI, the police officer has to arrest and then hope they’re correct or get sued. QI says that to sue them for a bad arrest, you have to prove they were badly motivated or violated normal policing powers and not just that the arrest was wrong.
This seems pretty reasonable to me. If officers get sued for every minor mistake policing becomes impossible. But it has since evolved into meaning a police officer cannot be prosecuted for violating the law if they don’t know they’re violating it at the time and they’re not violating clearly established law/precedent. This means it’s basically a presumption of correctness in government action, which is pretty in line with the jurisprudence that allows the administrative state in general. However, people are more keenly aware of police abuses and so the cases where it’s been used to get police officers off from doing things like raiding wrong houses or misapplying force have been (rightly, imo) gotten a lot of people upset.
The big downside is that it could reintroduce that double bind that QI initially ended. However, I’m not hugely sympathetic to the idea that the state needs to have such extraordinary special legal privileges when it has more money and attorneys than almost any potential victim.
Some relevant history:
In the 19th century, police had to worry about being sued for things like illegal searches. As the law changed to make such suits more difficult, the exclusionary rule was brought in as a substitute. On the face of it, that looks like a worse solution, since instead of punishing the police officer you are rewarding the criminal when the evidence against him was obtained illegally.
(Background for context: Lawyer who doesn’t practice civil rights litigation.)
Two main downsides to eliminating QI:
First, cops are going to occasionally get blindsided by developments in constitutional law that they couldn’t have really anticipated. This most commonly happens as technology evolves. For example, let’s say a cop plants a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car in a way that hasn’t been dealt with under existing law. The Supreme Court subsequently rules that using the tracker that way violates the suspect’s Fourth Amendment rights. All of a sudden, Joe Schmoe cop is going to be civilly liable for violating the suspect’s constitutional rights, even though that cop would have had no way to know that he was doing something impermissible. That possibility strikes many people as unfair, and was the original motivation behind the development of QI as a doctrine.
Second, attaching civil liability to constitutional rights may discourage courts from enforcing those constitutional rights in the first instance. In the example above, if the judge knows that finding that the tracker violates the Fourth Amendment might subject Joe Schmoe Cop to civil liability, then the judge might not be so eager to find the constitutional violation the first instance. Qualified immunity (in theory) allows the judge to rule on the constitutional question on the merits, without that consequence of civil liability tilting the balance. (Note that this second rationale for QI was mostly eviscerated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223 (2009), which permitted courts to decide that QI applies without first deciding the underlying constitutional question of whether a right was actually violated.)
More broadly, it’s valuable to distinguish “QI in the abstract” from “QI as it actually functions today.” In the abstract, QI seems entirely reasonable: how is it possibly fair to hold a cop responsible for violating constitutional rights that he didn’t (and in fact couldn’t!) have known he was violating? The baleful effects of QI have flowed mostly from how the doctrine has evolved and is used in practice. Courts have interpreted the “clearly established” requirement incredibly strictly, and as a result QI has been applied to exculpate conduct which any reasonable person would have known was wrong. There are also a number of technical aspects of QI (such as the right to immediately appeal) that have placed civil rights plaintiffs at an enormous disadvantage for reasons having nothing to do with the merits of their cases.
As a result, there are in theory a number of reforms short of elimination that could ameliorate many of the harmful effects of QI. As a practical matter, though, I think the doctrine has been so tainted that root-and-branch elimination is the way to go.
Individual cops, yes, but my understanding is that individual cops are largely indemnified by their agencies and/or unions, and don’t really risk being sued into personal oblivion for this sort of thing.
Police departments, who are the ones paying the bill, I’m not inclined to allow the “blindsided” defense. If a police department can afford to buy a bunch of GPS trackers, they can afford to have a civil-rights attorney on retainer to advise them on what uses would or would not be constitutionally risky when the courts get around to ruling on it. And, if they chose to play in the grey areas, to pay the resulting judgements.
@John Schilling
You are correct that almost all individual cops are indemnified by municipalities or agencies. The main exception to this rule is punitive damages, which are typically not indemnified. (It may even be illegal to indemnify punitives–I’m not sure offhand.) But that exception kinda proves the rule–the only times cops are held personally liable is when their conduct is so egregious as to merit punitive damages. I sat through a 1983 trial while I was clerking that resulted in punitives, and let’s just say that the severity of misconduct that was at issue was such that I did not feel particularly bad for these officers having to pay out of pocket.
For some reason I’m under the impression that QI also stops a lawsuit very early on, even avoiding things such as the discovery process which might allow a light to be shined on bad conduct. Am I misunderstanding this?
Also, if a department is uncertain about certain categories of things, couldn’t they preemptively get a warrant? (Applies more to intrusion-like things rather than use-of-force situations, I suppose)
I suppose it depends on how “grey” the area is and how far you go with this. I’m thinking of the related issue of whether cell phone tracking requires a warrant — before the Supreme Court declared a warrant requirement, a few Courts of Appeals went the other way and said plainly that such tracking did not require a warrant. Even if you have a civil rights lawyer on retainer, if your applicable Circuit Court of Appeal says straight out that your behavior is perfectly Constitutional, I don’t know how many departments would say, “well, the Supreme Court might overrule them in five years, so let’s not do this?”
I think to some extent it’s a situation where the devil is in the details.
As far as I can tell nobody really likes QI outside of cops themselves plus maybe a few conservative appellate judges. Otherwise there’s a general bipartisan consensus that the doctrine hasn’t really worked out the way it was supposed to.
The problem, to me, is: what does one actually mean by “get rid of it?” Since the Warren Court the bounds of permissible police activity have been extensively determined by ever-evolving judicial doctrine. To hold an officer responsible for overstepping those bounds you need some kind of standard for establishing that he was reasonably on notice that what he was doing was against the law. What, specifically, is the new standard you would write that would fill that need without being open to the same abuse as QI?
I suspect that’s part of the issue here.
Miniseries suggestions for the historically minded, both on Hulu:
The Great. Don’t look for historical accuracy, but it’s pretty funny, and Nicholas Hoult as Tsar Peter steals the show. Elle Fanning is not unpleasant to look at, either. For extra credit, watch this simultaneously with the serious Russian series Ekaterina (on Netflix), which is pretty good for the first season and a half and then completely falls apart. The weird thing about Ekaterina is wondering to what extent Vladimir Putin takes a personal interest in what appears on Russian TV–I wouldn’t be surprised if he interfered with the production to make that era’s Russia look better than it actually was.
Das Boot. Interesting and erratic, with half the action taking place on a submarine and the other half in the Nazi-occupied town of La Chappelle. Moral ambiguity abounds. As with Ekaterina, it’s interesting to see a show about Germany’s Nazi era appearing on German TV, with the requisite tension of distinguishing between “good” Nazis and “evil” Nazis (as well as “good” resistance fighters and “evil” resistance fighters). Great cameo by Vincent Kartheiser, late of Mad Men, as an American businessman.
Watching Babylon Berlin on Netflix, set in interwar germany with some vague gestures at historical events. The game of ‘he seems like a nice character, shame he’ll eventually join the nazis’ is indeed weird.
I started Babylon Berlin, but I can’t stand dubbed series. Is there a way to watch it with subtitles instead?
There’s a language and subtitles option at the bottom right corner of the screen.
That is good to know (and I probably should have guessed). That means I can also watch Into the Night, which is getting some good reviews.
Netflix is also good at being able to customize subtitles, for the poor of sight/TV, which I find really nice (amazon, get with it).
It’s also worth noting that the language selector will only display up to six options, no matter how many are actually available (which is sometimes in the dozens). If you want a language that isn’t available by default, I’ve found the best trick is to switch your profile to that language. The current language of your profile will always appear as an option in the switcher if it is available.
Ok, you didn’t ask for it, I don’t personally subscribe to it, but here it is, a steelman defense of rioting. NB: There have been a lot of motte and bailey arguments between ‘riots are an understandable and unavoidable outcome of social situations/riots are the cops fault’ and ‘riots are actually good’. I will be arguing that riots are actually good.
-Protests are largely about getting attention, and destruction gets attention. We live in a decadent society, and to get us out of our stupor and paying attention you need to at least set something on fire. Peaceful protests would not have broken through the corona wall of coverage, and deep down we all know it.
-Protests are also about punishing bad actors, or imposing real costs on people capable of making change. There are many best practices on how to run a police department that isn’t violent (see Camden, NJ, or more or less all of europe), but for the most part the US doesn’t follow these practices. The reason is that it takes a lot of political capital to change; police are a powerful force that can ruin politicians with work slowdowns. In order to get people on board with change you need to make the alternative less appealing. Business owners have outsize political power, and the threat of looting makes it in their best interest to vigorously support police reform.
-Civil unrest disproves the police’s argument about their essential role in society. The story the police tell, best encapsulated in the rhetoric and imagery of the ‘thin blue line,’ is that they are the only thing standing between helpless citizens and violent mobs, and that they need all the tools, discretion, and violent methods available to keep the mobs at bay. To quote the fictional Col Jessup “you want me on that wall–you need me on that wall”. Besides being morally distasteful, this argument is factually wrong. Police violence doesn’t prevent violent mobs, police violence instigates violent mobs. And if the people do rise up, the police are more or less powerless to stop them. If you happen to ever find yourself in a city that isn’t rioting, the explanation isn’t that police are maintaining control, it’s that the people are choosing not to riot. And if we want to think about preventing riots in the future, we need to make people less angry, which in this case means curtailing the powers of the police.
I think I can summarize as follows:
-Hurting people is justified if it makes people pay attention to my cause.
-Hurting people is justified if it will make them do what I want.
-Hurting people is justified if it makes my enemies look bad.
You can change it all to property damage and arson if you want, the coverage would be the same
The thing is, this is also an indictment of a lot of police conduct.
Problematic I agree, but you’ll find people willing to defend it.
See point 3: Hurting people is justified if it makes my enemies look bad.
Property damage and arson falls under hurting people, unless you think the owners preference was for their property to be destroyed.
@FLWAB
Your post is intended as snark, and like most snark, fails to show why your opponent’s position is actually wrong.
If my cause makes the world a better place, hurting people can be justified in a net-utility sense.
Every political movement or ideology “hurts people” in some sort of way (i.e., there will be losers and there will be winners). There’s no escape from it. So pointing out that the rioters “hurt people” should not move the dial one way or another for a person’s opinion of them.
So you think my simplified summary was correct, and you agree. You just think that “hurt people” is too general?
I’ll try to be more specific. Then.
-Killing, maiming, attacking, and robbing people is justified if it makes people pay attention to my cause.
-Killing, maiming, attacking, and robbing people is justified if it will make them do what I want.
-Killing, maiming, attacking, and robbing is justified if it makes my enemies look bad.
@FLWAB
All political ideologies and movements rely on the underlying threat of physical violence the achieve their goals. The rioters are not distinct in this regard, from whatever ideology you advocate.
If killing people to make them do what you want is never acceptable, should we disarm the police and disband the army? Because this reads like a completely general brief against the use of force.
Do you think it is always justified to kill people to make them do what you want? I certainly don’t, but apparently your steelman supports that position, since the only justification it gave for rioting in that subsection was that it might make frightened citizens do your bidding. As if that excused the rioting and needed no further justification. “Oh, no, you see it is okay to kill, maim, rob, and destroy because it gets people do do what I want them to do.” The purpose of a steelman for riots is to provide a justification for why behavior we normally limit to government actors (the “monopoly on violece”) is acceptable in private hands during a protest. The only justification provided in that section (in all the sections, really) is that it may be expedient.
@FLWAB
This security of the government’s monopoly on violence may be something that you strongly believe in. But I would wager that many people, perhaps even yourself, would be willing to make exceptions for particularly egregious cases: Slavery, the Holocaust, the American Revolution, ect.
zzzzort’s assumption, I think, is that police murders are bad enough that we should no longer defer to the monopoly on state violence on this issue. For instance I would argue that, in a hypothetical where he was given the option, Floyd should have fought back in some sort of way, rather than submit himself to be strangled to death.
“You may only respond with force to force” is a justifiable position. In fact, it should be the default, and exceptions should require careful proof, whether that’s military, police, mobs, or individuals.
So your argument is that police murders are bad enough that it is now okay to kill, maim, or rob people in an attempt to get them to stop the police?
In other words, it’s fine that Uncle Hugo’s Bookstore got burned to the ground, because maybe now the owner will do something about police violence. Presumably if more police violence occurs, we should hit him over the head with brick. That will stop them.
Is no one thinking of the poor tea?
If you are calling for the overthrow of the government, then sure, use the Tea Party as an example. If you aren’t looking for a bloody civil war, then I don’t think it’s a very instructive comparison.
Interesting fact about the Boston Tea Party…. because their grievance was against the stamp tax on the tea, they were careful to only destroy tea. To the point where not only was nothing stolen or looted, but after they broke a padlock personally owned by one of the ship’s captains, they replaced it for him the next day.
So I guess the equivalent would be if the rioters today only did damage to the police?
There was also the Boston Massacre, though.
I think that’s caricaturing rather than summarising.
Try “Hurting people is justified if it will prevent sufficiently greater harm”.
That’s a principle most people accede to, but they tend to attach an extremely high exchange rate to “sufficiently”. The two things that traditionally bring the exchange rate down are
1) The hurting is being done under the lawful auspices of a legitimate democratic society – see, for example, https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
2) The person being hurt is responsible for the harm being prevented – most people are happy to lock up murderers to prevent murder, but in some weird hypothetical where we could prevent the same number of murders by locking up innocent people we’d oppose it.
In general, I think that a lot of the rioters probably reject 1) – I think a lot of them feel deeply disenfranchised and see law enforcement as something that is done to them without their consent by an overclass they are socially distinct from, rather than as something enforced by a body they are part of. And I suspect that as far as 2) goes, many of them see anyone who isn’t actively protesting with them as complicit in their/other people being hurt.
Obviously they think so. But I don’t think this is as persuasive as they think it is.
You point out one motte and bailey but I think your second and third points fall victim to another one, namely not really differentiating between peaceful marches, property destruction, looting, direct attacks on police… Where is the line drawn, and which behaviors are actually “good”?
The biggest objection to the second point is that property destruction and looting tends to primarily impose costs on the rioters themselves (or rather their community) rather than focusing on bad actors.
On your third point, you say “Police violence doesn’t prevent violent mobs, police violence instigates violent mobs”. But how does it follow then that riots are good? If we should be rioting, why wait for the police to get violent on a peaceful protest? We should instigate now! Plus if you’re going to steel man rioting, I think you need to do so more generally. These protests and riots were instigated by police brutality against George Floyd. But not all riots start off as anti-police, e.g. the WTO riots. Are those riots also good?
EDIT: actually I think your steel man falls victim to the first motte and bailey here – “police violence instigates violent mobs” is just a restatement if the motte.
This was only meant to be a steelman of rioting in this instance; the general case is a bit absurd.
I don’t think this is a pure restatement of the motte. Say I lived in a society that believed that a human sacrifice would keep away elephants. If I imported a bunch a bunch of elephants, it would disprove the theory about sacrifice and so save future victims. It’s confusing in that the thin blue line theory is exactly wrong, but the logic is distinct.
This seems like it would disallow rioting but justify lynch mobs.
They are good or bad insofar as they get attention and impose costs on leveragable political actors. Peaceful marches are a very minor annoyance, property destruction/looting is a major cost. They will also impose costs on the rioters, but most punishments impose costs on the person doing the punishment. The state ends up paying for room and board so it can keep people in prison, but it can still be a net benefit to the state.
I strongly disagree with this, and I would say that the opposite is far closer to being true. Compare the plight of African Americans over the last 50 years vs homosexuals. There was one well known violent riot based on gay issues, but it was 40+ years after it that things actually improved dramatically for the gay population. In the meantime, there were years and years of things like Pride parades that were non-violent, but (slowly) made people realize that gay people weren’t some terrible threat until it hit a tipping point, where now something like gay marriage is hardly even questioned any more.
On the other side, we’ve seen riots like the current ones pop up every few years, and I would argue that things have not improved for African Americans nearly as much as they have for homesexuals.
A riot might get a lot of eyeballs and it might be big news, but they also make your opponents dig in deeper, and, I believe, slow the effectiveness of your cause.
the threat of looting makes it in their best interest to vigorously support police
reform.Well, on the other hand, if there is actual looting (not just a threat of looting) which the police don’t stop every time something like this happens, it might be in their best interest to help solve whatever problem is leading to the looting.
True. It just depends on whether the shopkeeper decides the rioters or the local government are more responsive/reasonable.
And possibly also how stubborn they were about essentially being blackmailed.
I don’t know that you have to “trust” the rioters.
“Every time the police kill someone with no justification, we suffer thousands/millions of dollars in damages” might become a good reason for someone who otherwise doesn’t care to support efforts to reduce police violence.
But remember, policing and police reform are local issues.
If you’re a small business owner in Minneapolis, maybe you could at look at the current riots and decide it’s efficient to spend some time trying to implement reforms to the Minneapolis police department (I’m skeptical, but let’s assume for the hypothetical).
If you’re a small business owner in one of the many other cities around America where rioting and looting has occurred, how would it possibly be more efficient for you to try to (a) support effective police reform efforts in every city in America rather than (b) support your local police department being strong enough to quash riots and looting when someone gets unjustifiably shot by a different police department in a different city, or even just (c) ignore the whole reform thing and buy the “looting” insurance rider?
A plausible explanation is that rioting is worse in towns with particularly bad police departments. I would rather be a small business owner in camden than in philly
The inability of the police to handle the crowds simultaneously is the proximate cause for the looting. People loot because other people are looting and can get away with it. (or rather, one looter can be stopped easily, hundreds of looters cannot be)
The fact that the protests
1. Have no coordinated leadership capable of making demands
2. continued after the officers involved were all arrested
3. Occur despite the fact that killings by police have fallen since 2015
all suggests to me that neither the protests nor the looting are conditional upon anything. That is: They will not disperse simply because a law was changed or a particular individual said something.
*Maybe… Just maybe* the best case scenario is that the only problem that actually needs solving is the fact that the protesters aren’t aware of #2 and #3.
But I think it’s more likely that the act of protesting and/or rioting is so much fun that the people involved won’t take yes for an answer.
What if the police purposefully don’t stop the looters because they are doing their own attempts at behavior modification of the populace?
This is an actual police problem in some places, where the police slow-roll responses in any district whose representative gives them grief. It’s a more evil version of Washington Monument Syndrome.
Or it might be in their interest to support increasing and militarizing the police force so that it could do a better job of putting down riots.
My general feeling is that violence and chaos make people more willing to support state force, not less.
+1
Ah, yes, because the police response to looting is so competent.
So it’s more that the threat of looting makes it in their best interest to vigorously support the 2nd Amendment.
Do you feel a bystander is in greater danger from the police or from the rioters? Any data beyond anecdotes of severe fuck-ups which probably can be matched by similar or worse from violent mobs?
The police have access to military equipment, and a bystander can’t legally fight back against them. In the above video, the store owners (who had guns) had successfully held off the looters (who did not have guns), and were trying to direct the police to chase after the looters. They were most definitely in far more danger from the police.
I have seen zero stories of journalists getting hurt by rioters in these protests. Now that’s not always the case, as previously journalists were at risk at political rallies/protests, but those often stemmed from protesters being unable to tell various civilians apart, or perceived journalists to be a part of the opposing faction. In this case, police are attacking journalists after they display their press IDs, and so clearly are not among those who were looting stores or throwing things at the police.
The sheer number of videos coming out is showing that “severe fuck-up” by those who are supposed to do better is the norm.
I have seen zero stories of journalists getting hurt by rioters in these protests.
I know for a fact that a Fox News crew got mugged and robbed, and the replies I were seeing on Twitter were saying “no, that’s not journalists getting attacked, they work for Fox News, yuk yuk yuk.”
The police are in uniform. The rioters are using peaceful protesters as camouflage and human shields. Making sure the protesters are in nontrivial danger from the cops is a deliberate strategy of the more organized rioters.
A reporter and her crew were attacked in Birmingham.
Edit: Also a reporter for Reuters.
Thanks for the corrections. However, by the numbers, it does still appear that journalists in this particular situation are at higher risk from the police.
Not everyone is as rational as rioters 🙂
And that’s why authoritarian countries like North Korea are in a constant state of rioting.
This has to be one of the dumbest things that is considered the consensus view. It’s trivially easy to stop these riots. The fact that it isn’t happening reflects a lack of courage on elected officials, who would rather let their cities burn than be called a racist.
Generally agree. Let the cops start firing a few rounds of live bullets into these crowds and see how quickly the crowds stop forming.
I’m not saying that would be morally justified, but it would stop the protests. Not that many Americans are willing to literally die for this sort of thing. The reason they are protesting is because they are confident that in the context of a protest, the police will not respond with real violence.
I’m not sure I agree with the suggestion that the only “real” violence is lethal violence.
There’s a massive difference between tear gas and actual bullets.
Lethal or life-altering. The kinds of violence that we’ve already established the cops will happily employ against anyone accused of anything from selling loose cigarettes to trying to pass a fake $20 bill who doesn’t immediately submit to their authority.
The protestors are out there because they are confident that the police will treat them with far less violence than they treated George Floyd himself. Possibly because of their superior numbers, possibly because of the heightened media attention, and maybe even possibly because of their race/class.
And they are correct. A solitary person with no media around doesn’t get away with this stuff. They are made to submit, by whatever force is necessary to make them submit, including lethal force if it comes to that.
@Wrong Species
Um, obviously? Who is disputing that? Both are still clear examples of violence, which was the only point I was making.
@Matt M
I completely agree with your general point. The phrasing that implied anything short of lethal (or life-altering) force isn’t violence just didn’t sit right for me.
Supposedly, DC is calm because Trump has the authority to actually stop rioters and he did it without even shooting them. But that’s just what I’ve heard.
Yes, if the policy were “throw rocks, catch bullets,” there would be an awful lot more peaceful protests and a lot less rock-throwing.
Is that what happened in the wake of the Kent State shooting?
The Kent State shooting was immediately framed as an unfortunate and regrettable accident. Not as a “Yes, we shot them, and if they keep protesting the war we’ll do it again, **** around and find out.”
I don’t think one scared group of cops shooting some people and then everyone around them immediately denouncing and condemning them would change behavior here.
I think multiple PDs publicly announcing “we are switching from rubber bullets and tear gas to live rounds and have authorized our officers to fire on anyone who disobeys orders to disperse” and sticking by it even after a few people are shot, might.
For some reason I cannot find anywhere on youtube the Reagan quote about “if it takes a bloodbath then let’s get it over with.”
But yeah I saw pictures on social media of a white girl with a shirt that said “if the shooting starts, get behind me.” I’m sure she got a lot of likes and shares, but, I don’t know, I don’t think she’d actually stick around for that.
I’m not saying the government should do this. The people who live in the cities where the riots are going on seem to approve of them, so, there you go. This is the way they want to live.
The people who live in the cities where the riots are going on seem to approve of them,
I’m not sure what “them” is. Are you saying the people who live in the cities that are getting blown out by riots approve of the riots? If so, how do you know this? If not, never mind.
Yes, that’s what I’ve been led to believe.
I’ve seen polls, social media posts, including by small business owners whose own business were burned to the ground, that this is acceptable in the fight against the police brutality/racism. We’re into week two of riots and major corporations are all tweeting their support for the ongoing events. The only people who really seem to be expressing distaste at this sort of thing are a few of the people who don’t live there, and at that quietly.
Like, I think this is all a bad idea, but I don’t live anywhere near any place with rioting. So…all I can do is a “stop, don’t.”
ETA: Informal poll, are there any left-aligned/Democrat SSC posters who think the protests/riots either:
1) Were unjustified before?
and/or
2) Should stop now?
On the other hand, which response will elicit more sympathy and thus donations?
@Conrad Honcho > “bullets” “rocks” or see the 1980 Korea link elsewhere in the thread
@Conrad Honcho > “…The only people who really seem to be expressing distaste at this sort of thing are a few of the people who don’t live there, and at that quietly…”
“…Informal poll, are there any left-aligned/Democrat SSC posters who think the protests/riots either:
1) Were unjustified before?
and/or
2) Should stop now?”
Sure, once the fires start it’s past time to go home, but let’s unpack a bit more, I’m pretty sure you know from previous posts my “bubble” (most I encounter are fellow unionized city employees and the inmates, my wife is a non-white college graduate Romney Republican/Bloomberg Democrat, her friends are more like her than they’re like me), I’m out sick since Monday but before that the only notable thing I heard on the death of Floyd at work was from a young black man new hire who said: “I’ve had a cop lean on my neck like that and once he does you just do whatever he says”, but thanks to the magic of my joining Facebook this year I also have the deluge of opinions from my “friends” (9/10th of which are people I knew when I was a teenager 30+ years ago), the guy who now owns a motorcycle repair shop in Berkeley (which is close to my house in [Hobbitton]) is very anti-looting, one black male (who I’ve known since I was 13) did a moving “Why the Rage” post in which he shares his fear for his (half) black son and daughter, but he noted his friendships with some cops, also a black man and my closest neighbor (now a fellow [Hobbitton] resident who like me spent most of his life in Oakland) who’s a “Facebook friend” (that I’ve known since I was 16) wrote of two bad encounters with cops (one black, one white), and of the white cop who saved him once, a half black ex-girlfriend of mine (yep, knew her as a teenager) who moved to the U.K. has lots of “S.J.” pro-antifa posts, and she emphasizes that young white protestors are mostly responsible for the violence (how does she know since she’s in England? from stuff she reads internet), two white guys are still ’80’s style anarchists/punk rockers and are all in favor of “fuckin’ shit up” just as they did as teenagers, but the majority of posts on the subject are from a couple of Latinas and many white women (all former punks in the ’80’s) who are now all school teachers and post at length this week on “systematic racism” (last week it was mostly stuff on Covid-19 and handling their students graduations during shelter-in-place from them), and from one of them I read of her attending a protest in Tucson, Arizona and her “first encounter with racism” at 14 (her getting yelled at by some white guys on University Avenue in Berkeley while she was walking with a black guy), from another teacher I saw a re-post from a white women school administrator of how “beautiful” she found watching and being very close to the property damage (which she was careful to not admit to doing any of) being done at a riot in Oakland by “beautiful black children” (some of effects of which I drove by on the way to the hospital on Monday).
So FWLIW (paraphrased) my peers via Facebook as of Monday: from one white local business owner: “Looting is bad”, from two local black men “Cops scare me, but I know some good ones”, from an expatriate “American racism is so very bad, so is English racism, except my husband who’s cool”, from two guys who really should’ve grown out of it by now “Yay destruction, smash the system dude!”, from many teachers (and my brother who works for The State of Maryland) “Stopping systematic racism is the most important thing ever”, plus a re-post of “Looting is beautiful”.
Hibernation is appealing to me right now.
@Wrong Species
This is a little unfair, I think. The United States has many deep-seated political and cultural reasons why out police system is very unlikely to become akin to North Korea.
While you are correct that DPRK levels of policing would crush the riots, the more relevant consideration should apply only to US levels of policing. It could be parabola shaped: Both extremely low and extremely high levels of policing results in no police-violence riots, while some mid-level results in the most.
No, low levels of policing(in response to riots) results in death and destruction. These governors aren’t even trying to stop the looting and yet that somehow proves that policing is ineffectual? How does that make any sense?
It changes from the short-term and long term. You are seeing the sort-term results and mistakenly extrapolating it to long term.
For example:
The best way minimize being punched, is to not throw any punches. This seems straightforward enough. I have never been punched in the face in my life, and I strongly suspect this is because I have never punched anyone else in the face.
However, if I did punch someone in the face, in the short time-span immediately following that, the best strategy to minimize myself being punched in the face is to threaten to keep on punching. The absolutely worst strategy would be for me to punch a person once, and then never punch that guy again.
You are seeing this short-term strategy and extrapolating “hmmm actually the more I threaten to punch people, the less a I get punched back, especially compared to when I punched a guy a single time, and then just stood there”, without considering the possibility that throwing no punches at all is actually the best long-term strategy for minimizing punching.
Just to be clear, the police aren’t just randomly deciding to be violent. They are being provoked by protestors. What you are suggesting is the equivalent of someone punching you in the face, and then you begging them not to hit you again and that’ll you just give in to their demands if they promise not to be violent. Except it’s worse than that, because the protestors aren’t that much of a threat against well armed National Guardsmen who are willing to use force. So it’s more like cowering in the face of a five year old and then you give in to their demands and they constantly threaten to hurt you indefinitely.
@Wrong Species
I disagree with this quite strongly
I realize that it’s not your intent, and that all metaphors are bad, but the fact that you’re implicitly advocating punching 5 year olds might lend some credence to the thesis of ‘the american justice system is unnecessarily punitive’.
@metalcrow
Then explain why other protests don’t automatically turn violent. It’s very convenient to turn the camera on as soon as the police fight back.
@Wrong Species
Because this one is about the people who are then coming in to break up the protest?
Edit: also come to think of it i’m very very certain they have, but it’s extremely difficult to google anything related to those keywords atm and get older results.
Your right, its is extremely convenient, and one of the greatest gifts of this current era. Cameras are our only way of truly proving the police are actually violating their role to the community. If you have counter evidence for any of https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality, i would like to see it. But you can’t dismiss evidence by claiming it’s out of context without proof of said context.
Is it up to your opponent to disprove each and every video? Or if someone proved that, say, the cops were attacked in 5 of those videos, would that be enough? Especially given that it is going to be really hard to disprove someone showing up as the sole source of video and most members of the protest would by assumption be unwilling to provide counter-evidence if it exists.
(I’m not taking a side on the object-level here. I have issues with the meta-level method of determining truth.)
How many stores got looted during the anti-lockdown protests? How many windows were smashed, buildings burned, people shot?
I know “cops are really just that racist and every act of rioting and looting was a direct response to police excessive force against a peaceful protest” is the sexy explanation but I don’t think it holds up all that well.
Fundamentally, the people involved in and around these protests are clearly more interested is breaking shit compared to the lockdown protests, the million man march, environmental rallies, etc. And there seem to be a lot more people willing to use the existence of these large protests as an excuse to go looting in an apolitical “I’m here for the cash” way.
Now maybe that attitude really is the fruit of a long history of oppression against these particular people. And this may be a vicious feedback loop, but I don’t think you can expect the cops to be unaware that the context here is that the crowds they are dealing with are more likely to be volatile, more likely to result in they or their colleagues not getting home safe tonight. I don’t know what the right answer to de-escalating that is. Maybe you can’t. But I don’t think you can ignore it.
@Wrong Species
Neither side is “randomly deciding” to be violent. It is a calculated political decision all around, from the police to the protestors.
The question of police violence/riots correlation could be determined empirically, but I suspect neither of us are invested enough to put the time in. I strongly suspect that the correlation is parabola-shaped, that countries with near-zero police killings (e.g., Japan) also have low levels of rioting.
@Edward Scizorhands
I took the statement that “It’s very convenient to turn the camera on as soon as the police fight back.” as a dismissal of many, if not all, of the recorded cases of police brutality during these protests, and was curious if Wrong Species would be able to back up that claim for the attached videos. It’s all well and good to claim videos are taken out of context, but out of context is more proof of something than nothing at all. And it’s not even established that the videos in question are out of context.
From a truth-determining perspective, i am for innocent until proven guilty, yes. But when shown evidence for guilt, that evidence can’t be rejected because of a theoretical possibility.
@gbdub
The last of these is very very different than the ones before. I would rate death via looting/mugging at a much higher utility harm then property damage, but i have not heard of any cases of it myself.
I agree here, i definitely don’t believe that all looting and violence is reasonable. My statement is that i don’t believe Wrong when they said “the police aren’t just randomly deciding to be violent”.
I agree, and i am opposed to looting/violence against civs/private property destruction.
Like I said elsewhere, there are a number of videos where I can’t imagine any proper provocation.
But disproving any specific video would require a huge amount of work, so I was wondering if it would be worth anyone’s bother, or if disproving one would merely knock one off the list and we’d be told to keep on assuming all the others are still true.
Collecting a raw list of videos with unknown provenance and very difficult to disprove is fine work. But if we are making policy decisions, I’d want the people pointing to them as evidence to have done some work to curate them.
@Metalcrow
After opening up your link, I went to one of the incidents that was in my area and of course, it’s a lie. I’m not going to say which one because of anonymity but it immediately makes me suspicious of all the other claims.
Ok, and why do you think they are breaking up these protests when they don’t automatically do that to other protests? What reason is there for these ones to be different? Considering that we already know that actual riots have been going on, the answer is right in front of you.
Back when the Trayvon Martin case first happened, I kept trying to figure out what actually happened. I really wanted to know what was going on before having a strong opinion on it. But no one else was interested. And evidence kept coming in that made me seriously doubt the official narrative but if it was reported, it was downplayed. They did the same thing with Michael Brown. So yeah, I don’t exactly trust people to tell the truth about all this crap. Posting an out of context video of a cop tackling someone or whatever doesn’t suddenly change my mind.
@Edward Scizorhands
Frankly i’m not really sure this matters, and secondly this is immaterial to my original point. But to answer your question yes, i would say that disproving any one video does not disprove them all, in the same way disproving one murder doesn’t disprove another unrelated one. It calls into question others from the same time frame, however.
My policy decision is “you know ‘all those videos where I can’t imagine any proper provocation.’? Stop those from happening and punish the offenders”
@Wrong Species
Honestly dude at this point i’m not going to even engage with you. I don’t think this is a good faith argument anymore.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gu3s6j/police_shoots_protestor_for_no_reason/ is one from my city (San Antonio). There is 0 reason it should have happened.
@metalcrow
I get it. If I were in your position, I wouldn’t believe me either. But whenever I have trusted the official narrative, it was always at least oversimplified. Thanks to the Chinese Robber fallacy, I’m not interested in argument by a few anecdotes. Maybe after all this is over someone will look through the data to see general trends, but it won’t get much traction either way. If you want to call that bad faith, fair enough, but there’s a reason behind the skepticism.
Looters are mostly just trying to get free stuff. People smashing and burning things are mostly just having fun smashing and burning things. Mostly those aren’t the same people as the ones doing the protesting (though there’s some overlap).
@Guy in TN
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but you must have lived a very sheltered life. Please entertain the possibility that this may be informing your opinions on matters of violence.
Is it fear of being called a racist, or is it because they don’t want to be responsible for ordering the executions of a bunch of civilians whose crimes do not warrant the death penalty (and in some cases, may not have actually committed a crime at all)?
The non-lethal methods of crowd control are still effective, but the people doing them need to be disciplined/well trained.
However it will still involve people getting roughed up.
Non-lethal methods of crowd control are literally effective at getting a crowd to disperse, sure. But they aren’t very effective at discouraging people from forming crowds in the first place, or from re-forming the crowd at another time/place.
Consensus seems to be that police should be less confrontational, not more.
For several minutes, actually. In an enclosed space. As part of gas mask training in the military.
It wasn’t fun by any means, but it wasn’t any big deal either. Half an hour later I was totally fine and it wasn’t unpleasant enough to be psychologically traumatizing or anything like that.
It would not meaningfully deter me from showing up to a protest for a cause I believe in. But “10% chance of being shot” most definitely would.
The effects of tear gas clear up rather quickly. Now, if I was threatened with OC spray I might never show up in public again.
We went through that piece in the previous thread, the actual consensus presented is that cooperation to restrain violence between protesters and cops is what works but there is no reason to think it works if just the cops de escalate.
Part of it, though, is that the cops’ initial move of showing up in force, in riot gear, is itself beginning the game in an escalated state. Cities where officers in regular uniform marched with protesters did not have riots.
Cities where officers in regular uniform marched with protesters did not have riots.
This would be wonderful news as it gives us a good way out.
It would also be extremely strong evidence of “the cops started it.”
Do you have a citation that makes a reasonable effort at sorting out the cities that did it and comparing it to the ones that didn’t?
Sure, but that still requires there not be very many people in the crowd interested in hurting cops, which requires a lot of pregame prep as it were. Otherwise the shirtsleeves cop takes a chunk of concrete to the head and the perp escapes into the crowd.
That said, I do tend to think riot gear is inherently escalating, because it a) looks aggressive and b) dehumanizes the cop. I think you’re less likely to huck a rock in the first place if you can see the officers face and know that rock isn’t gonna just bounce off.
Starting in soft clothes and working the crowd a bit while it’s early and calm might go a long way toward humanizing the cops (and the protesters).
And you can always keep a van full of riot police hidden behind a corner in case things suddenly go south.
Exactly. As a random observation I don’t know where else to put, I do object somewhat to the idea that American police are as much an outlier on the militarization scale as typically believed.
I was in Paris and Strasbourg over the holiday and the cops going to deal with those protests were all in riot armor. And there were a lot of them. And most had sub machine guns. Plus a bunch of dudes with rifles and camo.
Is your assumption that these actions were entirely independent of the police/citizen interactions over the past years?
There have certainly been protests in the past year where the police did not show up in riot gear, and things didn’t escalate, yes.
Given that in the current situation, looting is currently happening away from the protest sites quite a bit, I’d prefer that the police set up a moving patrol a block away from the protest, which gives them more mobility to respond to looting instances as they occur, rather than having to triage between addressing incidents Over There while still wrangling the protest.
This also more strongly incentivizes the protesters to self-police, for the looters within their own midst.
At least when it comes to casually carrying long arms, I think I saw more of them in the hands of Parisian police (or gendarmes, if you must) over a long weekend some years ago than carried by American police in all my decades in the US.
Agreed, I’ve spent all of two weeks of my 40 years in France, and I’ve seen more military police there than my entire life in the States. Same goes for Italy and Spain.
What do you actually think the result would be if the cops opened up and killed, say, 500 protesters. Say, there was some disorder and a couple people were tossing rocks but the police were not remotely in any danger for their lives. My guess is that the mayor of that town and the police chief either retire or are removed from their jobs very soon, while the policemen who fired on the crowd and their commanders get indicted for murder.
Authoritarian countries like North Korea are in a constant danger of violent mob, yes. The general term for this risk is called revolution, and for some recent example, you have Sudan and Libya.
That’s a fairy tale you are taught. In reality, revolutions are facilitated by a division between those in power, usually through the military. Bottom up revolutions rarely succeed without support. If you are waiting for the oppressed masses of North Korea to overthrow Kim Jong Un, don’t hold your breath because it ain’t going to happen.
Everyone should read The Dictators Handbook where he talks about these issues.
George Washington was arguably the richest man in the colonies. So the American Revolution was the richest man in the colonies versus the richest man in England.
I mean, he’s still amazing, because had he lost he’d have been killed and all that wealth meaningless, and he didn’t make himself king, but yeah it wasn’t exactly the downtrodden rising up.
The American Revolution was fundamentally a tax revolt. Aggravated by the British hiring tax collectors who were rejected from Robin Hood movies for being too cartoonishly stupid and evil, but they weren’t so stupid as to think they could pay off the British Empire’s debts by taxing the poor American colonists into oblivion.
A failed revolution has a legitimacy cost, and any revolt might inspire entrepreneurial middle class or upper class to do a coup, or a foreign democracy to declare war on your police state. And even when the mob doesn’t specifically want to overthrow you, they are still very dangerous (cf Iran, a police state with serious mob problem).
Compare this to the yellow jacket or the current situation in the USA, where there is no real attempt to change the regime.
How does that justify burning and looting a store instead of attacking the policemen who are conveniently lined up right in front of you? Or police and administrative buildings, if you must set something on fire (and not sufficiently pissed off for it to be someone). Also, consider the incentives. Any business owner who will publicly increase their support for police reform after their business was destroyed is basically putting a huge “Burn me to support your cause” sign on their storefront. And if they do it privately, the looters wouldn’t know so there’s no reason to do it.
Physical violence has stronger moral implications, and attacking armed police is bad for your health. There have been a lot of burned police cars and the precinct in minneapolis. But police have the capability to protect some structures, and they’ve tended to choose their own.
There just aren’t that many causes like that in practice. And many stores do try to emphasize that they side with protestors, to varying degrees of success.
@AlexOfUrals
I think the assumption is that most businesses (particularly the big ones) have already allied themselves with pro-police organizations. Thus, targeting them is equivalent to targeting the enemy. The question of “turning them away from the cause” is about as relevant as turning the police away— that ship has already sailed.
This doesn’t apply to literally every business that has been looted, only in the more general sense of “why target businesses?”
How’s that? Are you telling me businesses of all sizes and occupations are not in a shouting much with each other to show how much they support the cause (if not the protests themselves)? Freaking DoorDash has send me email the other day about how concerned they are. Even in our startup of 14 people which has nothing to do with retail or police or Minneapolis or whatever we have an all-company meeting next week to talk about that. I can’t imagine anyone – save maybe Chick-fil-A – openly siding with the police.
Also Xbox, Sony, and Nintendo.
@AlexOfUrals
“All sizes and shapes” is not a meaningful category. What percentage of businesses, do you think? I would guess that they are highly concentrated in media/young-trendy sphere.
And even so: Releasing a statement<Pro-police actions. I mean, are you suggesting that Microsoft supports police abolition? Really now?
The most charitable view of this might be that many large businesses do stuff like offer discounts to police, or donate to the local police department’s annual fundraiser, etc.
It’ll be fascinating to see if any of the big companies who have been running “WE OFFER FREE STUFF TO OUR HEROIC FIRST RESPONDERS” ads because of COVID suddenly pivot to “WE OFFER FREE STUFF TO FIRST RESPONDERS… except the police who are racist murderers.”
I’m not sure exactly how “cops are heroes” and “cops are murdering black people for no reason” can co-exist in the general national psyche, but if anyone can figure out how to spin it properly for maximum benefit, it’s corporate PR departments. Your move, Target!
> “WE OFFER FREE STUFF TO OUR HEROIC FIRST RESPONDERS”
(Side note: I volunteer in EMS, but work in the tech sector; I make bank compared to the people who do EMS full time in my area so this doesn’t impact me financially.)
One of the things which is found to be annoying by people in EMS is how EMS is frequently ignored by such offers. There are lots of places which will offer discounts or “free stuff” to police officers and firefighters, but not people in EMS. It leads to the perception that EMS is the “red-headed stepchild of public safety”.
1. Attention isn’t nearly enough to cause society level change it has to be favorable attention. People might pay more attention to riots but the intersection isn’t ‘more attention=more progress in our direction’, its ‘more attention + on net more people agreeing with us’. The only obvious way to be sympathetic while rioting is to have a disproportionate response (in the eyes of the watching pubic, not in the demonstrators eyes) from the authorities. If your group is being violent then to achieve that effect will require the police being really violent. This is a bad strategy because you don’t control the police response and a really over the top police response can crush your movement even if it is retroactively seen as way over the top.
2. If you are advocating for a minority position then violence is almost always the wrong way to go simply because you are a minority which puts you at a huge numerical disadvantage. Proportionate reprisals can crush you and disproportionate reprisals can crush you.
3. Specific to this situation: If violence becomes a major tool who has the advantage? The well armed police and national guard or the protestors? Who is going to have an advantage in a blue/red conflict, the side that has tried to demonize guns and limit their spread or the side that has embraced the 2nd amendment and has a strong pro-gun culture?
This type of argument has a strong conditional component: If we are violent and then we win it will be because the violence did X, Y and Z, meanwhile you miss all the losing conditions that are created by initiating or responding with violence.
Really, it’s going to be the group with the largest group of organized and disciplined supporters. Possession of weapons at the outset of the conflict is actually a fairly minor factor; by the time you need guns, there will be plenty lying around.
Right now, that is the police and the military. But the protesters on the left have I think substantially greater numbers and organization and discipline than their counterparts on the right, and the gap between a tight skirmish line with rocks and clubs and a loose skirmish line with rifles, is a lot smaller than the gap between lots of people with guns and an army.
If you get to the point where you need guns it is to late for the left in this situation (ie need guns, not we are getting guns to start the conflict ourselves).
The police and military lean right, and that is who the violent protesters are setting themselves against, not a counter protest of right wingers. If the violence continues then those people who have committed to their 2nd amendment rights will be organizing to protect their homes and businesses and more or less end up on the side of the police (accidentally or intentionally). Protests also tend to skew young which limits their depth, they have the most impact when the violence against them goes over the top (Kent State) and the generations above them come down hard on their side and swing the political power their way.
To a large extent these groups just don’t live in the same places, and I can’t envision a scenario where the violence plaguing cities right now manifests in rural areas or red ‘burbs. It’s easy for the protesters to muster their strength in cities; they’re already all right there. I can’t conceive of how the logistics would even work if they tried to organize and turn it loose in red tribe areas, let alone if red tribe areas were serious about defending themselves with lethal force. Seems like rural / red america would be highly effective as a radically decentralized defense-in-depth.
Small buisiness owners who have purchased guns to protect their homes/businesses are going to lean heavily red even in blue areas, or will be pushed that way if the violence continues to escalate. Its not going to be red vs blue, it will be protesters/rioters/looters vs cops+armed citizens who have embraced the 2nd amendment.
It seems to me the more interesting question is whether peaceful protests are justified when you know there is a high likelihood that they will be accompanied by violence by other parties (rioters, police, etc.).
As of today, more people have died in these protests than died in Charlottesville. Anyone in the mainstream willing to describe Charlottesville as a “peaceful protest”? After all, 99.9% of attendees didn’t run anybody over with their cars, right?
+1
I don’t see what that has to do with my comment.
I liked Matt M’s point, I thought it was very clever. but I don’t really see how it related to you either
I guess I was under the impression that you were suggesting these were largely peaceful protests that were somehow co-opted by a small minority of violent folks. I was attempting to compare this situation with a similar such example, only partisan-flipped, to show that the framing is dependent upon partisan concerns rather than the literal balance between peace and violence.
It seems clear that many of the protestors do not want there to be riots or looting, but large protests are often accompanied with violence. Acknowledging that such violence in itself is bad, is it morally justifiable to hold such protests knowing that violence by others may come with them despite protestor’s best efforts to prevent it.
And to be clear – I think your question is a good one. My only point is that I’d like to see it applied to right-wing protests as well as left-wing protests.
Were protestors making best efforts to prevent it? Did any of them go to people carrying off television sets and try to persuade them that what they were doing was wrong, both because they were stealing and because they were making the demonstrators look bad?
My understanding is that in most cases, the looting is happening in different locations and at different times than the protests.
There are plenty of videos of protestors shouting down / turning in / chastising the people doing bad shit.
@Matt M,
It seems to me that the right is yet again complaining when they are already heavily favored: there have been at least two instance of a right protest going with weapons onto a federal building without any consequence or violence from the police.
And the Charlottesville comparison doesn’t work because of the goal of the protester, the ratio of murder compared to the ratio of protester…
No kidding… you don’t say!
there have been at least two instance of a right protest going with weapons onto a federal building without any consequence or violence from the police.
Should there have been violence? Were they trespassing?
I had bought into the “they stormed the capital building” narrative, because Gell-Mann Amnesia, but @runham showed how those protestors entered the building single-file and were individually temperature-checked by a cop on the way in.
I disagree with those protestors’ goals, but the government must be viewpoint-neutral in these matters. People who walk single-file through a cop-managed, government-controlled checkpoint are inherently obeying crowd-control measures.
Without shooting anyone, or threatening to shoot anyone, causing no harm to anyone. And there is a long tradition of right-aligned protesters showing up with weapons and the firm intent to not shoot anyone, with I think zero instances of anyone being shot, such that it is not reasonable to expect from the simple presence of such protesters that any sort of unprovoked violence is at all likely. You may not be aware of this, and in your ignorance believe that there was an imminent threat, but I’m pretty sure that whoever was in charge of responding to those protests knew the score.
I think this style of protest is ill-advised in most cases, but it has a really good track record of nobody getting hurt.
I recently watched people doing actual violence on live TV, with no consequence or violence from the police. And far more people doing actual violence with the police response being limited to chasing them away.
If we’re even going to entertain the notion that the police should offer such limited response to people throwing rocks, starting fires, and the like, then what really is the sort of violent response you want the police to deliver to people who have done zero violence and will predictably do zero violence?
The lifespan of an organization that shows up to protests armed and behaving badly is going to be short in the US.
As I think I’ve said before, I -do- worry about this trend. For various reasons like cultural differences and such, the “red tribe” armed protesters have been pretty disciplined and well-behaved (both during the COVID stuff and earlier gun rights protests). But in the long run, regression to the mean tends to win, and I think that’s a recipe for something bad happening eventually. All it’s going to take is one dumbass to set the public discourse back decades, and if there’s one thing life teaches is that dumbasses are ubiquitous and come in ALL ideological and cultural flavors.
Getting back to Charlottesville, this is specifically why many prominent right-wingers (including Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys) specifically disavowed that protest and encouraged their followers not to attend.
Because they figured something like that would happen. And they were about 80% right.
Back when Glenn Beck was a big deal in the early 2010s, I think he used to make people attending his rallies sign some sort of “non-violence pledge” that he claimed was patterned on a similar one used by MLK so that in the event someone at one of his events killed someone, he could specifically point to paperwork proving “But I specifically told them not to do that!”
I’m vague connected with some right-wing protest circles and they all make a pretty big deal of encouraging their participants to be non-violent, and denouncing violence that does break out.
I’m not as well-tuned with the left, but if that’s going on for them, I’m certainly not seeing it… and it certainly isn’t working…
Still much less deadly than the flu 🙂
There might be a small issue with per capita risk of death here….
Which was disbanded as recently as 2013?
Um… Italy? Spain?
This would make sense if people thought electing the far-Left would make riots less likely, but who’d think that?
All they need to do is start shooting. The police are powerless because they’ve been made powerless, and the solution isn’t to keep listening to those responsible for that problem.
How do you explain why most of the riots in the 1960s were in the North and West? Was the Black population happier with their situation in the South?
I guess you are playing devil’s advocate, but anyway:
I don’t think the people who I watched smash the window of the liquor store across the street from me and then went in and grabbed some booze were doing it as some sort of intense protest because nothing else would draw people’s attention to social issues they cared about. In the videos of looting I’ve watched no one was saying anything about those issues. My sense is:
– young men are already at risk for this sort of antisocial behavior
– these young men must have a particularly weak sense of morality, or at least one that doesn’t think smashing windows and stealing from strangers is wrong
– they had seen other people doing it and no police came to stop them (at least a hundred people went in and stole from the liquor store over the course of the night)
– there was common knowledge that lots of looting was happening which probably normalized it in their minds; they wouldn’t have done it on a typical night
No, the threat of looting is going to make people want more aggressive policing. Before my neighborhood was looted I thought curfews were crazy (I hadn’t really read the news about riots elsewhere). Now I think there absolutely needs to be a curfew until we break the common knowledge among morally-bankrupt young men that the night-time is when they all go out a-looting. In the meantime I want a much bigger police force, enough that they can arrest all the groups out breaking the curfew and get them off the streets. If necessary, the National Guard, though I don’t think it’s necessary.
Protesters want more attention, but looters want as little official attention as possible.
I don’t think looters generally have a list of reforms (I also don’t think that looting is good). But I think it’s plausible that anger over real issues becomes generalized anti-social behavior. I also think it’s possible for rioting to have good effects regardless of the intents of the rioters, just as I think the police response can be bad without every individual cop choosing to escalate.
Well, they seemed to have convinced the people they needed to.
I need a bit of feedback on this to see if I’m thinking straight. Does anyone else think that these riots are going to give Trump a big boost come November?
Few would argue that Trump has positioned himself as a Law and Order candidate. Looting, arson, mob violence, all of this looks bad to middle class moderates, particularly small business owners. A lot of them are looking out there right now and seeing businesses looted and torched with minimal attempts by the police to intervene. That’s frightening. Biden, as far as I can tell, has positioned himself in support of the protests and has certainly positioned himself as opposed to Trumps reaction to the protests. And what has Trumps reaction been? He’s publicly proclaimed multiple times that the death of Flloyd was a travesty of justice and that he supports the protests, but he has even more clearly come out in opposition to looting, rioting, and mob violence. He’s called for a return to peace and order and he has rhetorically committed his administration to stopping the violence, by putting pressure on governors to intervene and making moves to bring in the military.
All of these actions are unpopular with the left, but it’s not really the left who is in play for the election in November. It’s the moderates. And when I ask myself, what does a moderate care more about: protection from arsonists and looters, or….well, or what? Or stopping police violence? But Trump has already made it clear that he thinks the officer in question did something deplorable and should be punished. And the officer in question has been criminally charged. So what exactly do the protesters want that would appeal to a moderate? And would justify, to a moderate, all the violence, destruction, and theft? And Biden can’t get close to matching Trump in opposing the rioters and looters without alienating his base.
In other words, aren’t all these riots liable to make swing voters prefer a strongman at the tiller? Or at minimum, considering Minnesota is a swing state, might all this push it to red come November?
I’m definitely concerned about it. In fact, I suspect that Trump thinks the riots are good for him as well and is deliberately inflaming them.
I hinted at that a day or two back as well.
+1
And one reason he is unfit for the office.
I think voters are both more and less sophisticated than you model.
In the less sophisticated column, incumbents get blamed for bad things that happened when they’re in charge. The argument ‘elect trump and prevent riots’ doesn’t make any sense. This can be unfair and counterintuitive, but at least it’s impartially results oriented.
In the more sophisticated column, people can distinguish between handling a situation and expressing pro/negative views on different groups. I think (I hope!) the median view is that looting is bad, but that looters shouldn’t be shot. Trump is quite law and order™, but not very calm, and maybe that’s what people actually want. But his numbers on the protests and looting are not very good.
Interesting. I think the opposite: that the median view is looters should be shot (or rather, it is acceptable for shop owners and police to shoot looters in the act of looting). Do you have any data on that, or are we both just typical minding?
I agree that people should be able to defend their property against willful destruction, including with deadly force if necessary.
But I also think an implied threat by the Chief Executive to deploy the military to shoot looters on a broad scale is a whole ‘nother ball of wax.
Looting is acivilizational behavior that disincintivizes all productive activity and harms real people’s livelihood. Arson is worse. It should be stopped swiftly and surely. As gently as possible, but it doesn’t usually occur in a situation where it is possible to be particularly gentle.
I agree it’s a bit of a catch 22, but the demands of the electorate are not known for being exceptionally self-consistent.
I think any gains with the middle class he gets from being the law and order candidate are lost by how unpresidential he has sounded throughout this. I think the people that don’t have a strong party affiliation tend to care a lot about how the president carries himself.
I find this ambiguous, is it just me? If I would argue it, it means I believe it. But you seem to mean that it is too obvious to argue against.
You know, I rewrote that sentence twice before saying to myself “Eh, people will get it.” You’re right: it is ambiguous as written. I tried “Few would argue against the idea that Trump” (far too wordy), and “Who would argue that Trump has” (definitely more confusing than the final draft). I’m still not sure what would have been a better way to communicate the idea. I probably need caffeine to clear my brain fog before commenting.
has->has not
But it’s probably better not to use the expression because it takes some mental bandwidth to process, being a double negative.
“I suspect many believe that…”
I definitely think it’s possible, but some things to keep in mind:
Polling suggests that people are mostly supportive of the protests: importantly in that poll, 49% of independents supported the protests as of a few days ago, with only 21% opposed. That’s a lot of undecideds, and of course peoples’ opinions can change (and it’s not clear if support or opposition is correlated with geography, in which case the implications for actually winning the election become less clear), but at least so far, the protests don’t seem to have turned off the people who might swing either way in the election. Heck, even Ben Garrison seems sympathetic to the basic cause of the protesters.
What’s more, Trump is now the incumbent, so he needs to be careful that people don’t see him as a failed law and order candidate: someone who promised to bring peace and order, but couldn’t do it. To this end, the fact that in recent polling Biden’s response to the protest has equally high approval numbers as Trump, while 49% disapprove of Trump’s response (there are way more “undecideds” for Biden) doesn’t bode so well for Trump.
The most thorough information I can find is this polling data from June 1, which has 27% of independents supporting Trump’s reaction to the protests, and 41% disapproving. Biden has 24% approving, and 28% disapproving.
There’s a lot more data (you can look by past voting history, etc.), so I certainly don’t claim that this is an exhaustive analysis, but it would worry me if I were Trump.
Finally, we should not overlook the possibility that with COVID and COVID-related economic distress, this will be mostly forgotten by the time November rolls around.
This polling notably fails to disaggregate protests from rioting. My interpretation of other results I’ve seen is that a moderate majority (probably around 60%) broadly support the protests and their goals but less than 20% think the violence is justified, with very, very few undecideds on either question. I suspect Trump’s instinct for the public mood is probably about right, but of course that doesn’t guarantee that he, his policy or his public statements will be well-received.
I can’t find a poll on looting/rioting in general, but this Monmouth poll finds the rather stunning result that 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. And again, the partisan breakdown doesn’t seem great for Trump: the numbers for independents are 16% think fully justified and 42% partially justified.
Even if you are suspicious of this poll (I am!) and don’t want to read too much into it (I don’t!), I think it’s clear that there’s probably a majority or near-majority of people who support the protests broadly, and are at least sympathetic to the anger that leads to rioting and looting–combine this with a view that it’s Trump’s fault race relations are so bad (54% of independents say race relations are worse since Trump became president), and I’m not convinced Trump is going to be able to capitalize on this as much as you’d initially guess.
Given how the questions are phrased in that Monmouth poll, my inference is that most of the “partially justified”s and pretty much all of the “depends which protests” are broadly in favour of the protestors’ goals and of peaceful protest but opposed to violence/rioting, including the destruction of the police precinct (note that the question doesn’t even mention more general rioting or looting). Hence (very roughly) 20% pro riot, 40% pro protest but anti-riot, 40% anti-protest.
Yeah, like I say, I am skeptical of that polls results as stated. Here’s another poll that looks more reasonable to me: 76% disapprove of looting and 65% believe burning down the precinct is not justifiable.
I think the potential problem for Trump is that results like the Monmouth poll seem like people are willing to work hard to disentangle the violence from the protests, even if asked a question that tries to ask them about the violence directly–John Schilling’s “I hope they succeed, and I’ll overlook some broken windows and burnt-out squad cars if that’s what it takes.” I am not sure Trump will get the law and order bump if people are willing to excuse or overlook the looting and violence for the larger protest.
A bit of an aside, but I am much more sympathetic to the burning of the specific police precinct where a murderous cop worked than I am to generalized looting that hurts random people. I feel like this divide is revealing for whether one’s views are authority or harms based.
But justified is definitely an ill defined term in this instance.
I would guess the median voter wants the culture wars to simmer down, particularly after these riots. Trump is a Culture War president. Sleepy Joe is probably perceived as less of a Culture Warrior, so I think that gives a strong advantage to Biden.
That is true. I want Trump to win because I like his policies and do not like Joe’s and think the country will be better off under Trump, but if Biden wins I will console myself, “at least I won’t have to hear about how there’s nazis under every bed until four years from now.”
I’m still trying to figure out what would happen under his presidency. He’s obviously not a cultural warrior but I doubt he’s going too push back to hard against them. If the Democrats had some kind of figure who was willing to rein in the extremists on their side I would be a lot more comfortable. Biden won’t put up a fight against rioters.
On the plus side, Joe Biden doesn’t seem to support street violence against BLM’s outgroup.
On the minus side, he’s so very ditzy.
I really don’t know where this leaves us as far as suppressing extremist Democrats.
I seem to say this every four years, but Jesus Christ, how on Earth did we end up with a choice between *these* two dipshits for president?
A wise man once told me “I don’t care who you voted for in 2016, as long as you held your nose while doing it.”
It looks like this will be my motto for 2020 as well. I’m so tired of presidential elections where I dislike both of the candidates. (On the bright side, at least my state finally decided to include 3rd party candidates on the ballot. Still no write-in option though.)
Pretty obviously the primary process is.. not fit for purpose.
There’s about 330,000,000 Americans.
That’s about 2^28.
The election only decides one of those 28 bits of information needed to decide the next President.
You need to look at whether the other 27 bits are fit for purpose.
I’m sure I’m stealing this idea off someone. (Yvain?)
People are mostly unconcerned with riots over there. They are really upset with riots right here. There is a pair of tweets I can’t find now, from an NBA player cheering a burning building, but within 24 hours Very Upset when looters try to break into a gated community. While a stark example, I don’t think he’s unusual. Most people are like that.
If people get scared that riots are going to plausibly come to where they (or their family/friends) live or work, that’s a strong move for Law And Order.
I can see a narrative where Democrats at the state and local level, afraid of doing the extremely hard work of enforcing public safety while allowing the protests to continue, just decide “fuck it” and stand the cops down, and then everything goes to shit, and then people decide they need a strong hand back in charge.
I don’t think there are all that many undecided small business owners, American politics is already an upper-class game. It’s been 50 years of growing poverty and inequality since Nixon’s silent majority, and I think we’ve reached the point where swing voters (i.e. disaffected populists) are more likely to be joining the riots than be horrified by them.
I’m voting Green and despise Biden, but I’m following the debates on the left and the “Trump’s a fascist dictator/most important election ever” argument gets a lot easier to make when he’s advocating crushing protests with military force.
There are a LOT of black and Hispanic small business owners, and while they are conservative relatively few are Republican.
People really don’t want riots in their own town. Especially the poor down-trodden minorities, who are going to take the brunt of the direct damage (their stores, their homes, their workplaces getting burnt down) as well as the blowback (when the Law And Order regime comes in their jackboots).
The media overplays how much the people in these neighborhoods support rioting, because the media knows lots of (well-off) anarchists and communists, especially relative to their real numbers in society. Those well-off anarchists aren’t going to be the ones that get their stores burnt down or the boot on their neck.
In addition to lots of videos of cop abuse over the past week, there are also lots of videos of black people screaming at white kids who are starting shit.
Can you offer data in support of that claim? Looking at the Wikipedia graph, the poverty rate in 2017, the last year graphed, is almost identical to what it was fifty years ago.
If you look at the video I linked above in response to Randy M, that’s an excerpt from Fox News. They’re no longer seeing the police as necessary Law and Order. Police escalation is Law and Chaos, especially in conjunction with violating Constitutional Rights just to make a photo op happen.
In fact, Trump’s image has always been about chaos. Many have characterized their populist support as about introducing chaos to the Government swamp, hoping to burn the Establishment down.
The initial reaction made me think yes, and then Trump (probably) ordered a peaceful demonstration to clear out for a photo op. This was among the dumbest things he could have done, and for the general contempt I have for him already this is still exceeds his largest other political stupidities.
Yeah I support Trump and that was the dumbest thing imaginable. Worse than a crime, it was a mistake.
Huh, I would have said worse than a mistake it was a crime. Of all the impeachment noise an order of a physical attack on citizens exercising a constitutional right OUGHT to be an impeachable offense.
But by the same logic, Governors who have shut down churches OUGHT to be impeached and removed from office under the 1st+14th Amendment and the salient clauses in their state Constitution, where applicable.
Yep, sounds good to me.
It’s a quote (mis?)attributed to Talleyrand. It’s not saying it’s not a crime, but at least crimes done for a good reason can be excused. Mistakes, no. If you’re going to do crime, at least be smart about it, but this is bad optics, so crime or not it’s dumb.
Tear gassing clergy, reporters, and protestors assembling to express their views and petition the government was a hard to pull off 5 for 5 violation of the first amendment. Impressive in its own way.
Please lets everybody agree not to tell Donald Trump that the third amendment is a thing.
They would almost certainly give any non-Trump incumbent Republican a big boost, but the same can be said for COVID-19. The script on that one pretty much writes itself – filthy lying Chinese sent us this deadly plague, America First, we have to postpone thriving for a bit so that we can survive, and we can’t trust those globalist immigrant-loving Democrats for that.
Trump, as I’ve just noted elsewhere, can’t execute well enough to get any respect for his actual accomplishments, and his messaging is too narrowly tailored to his base to move his support outside the 35-45% range no matter what material you give him. And he’s not running against a Scary Socialist Democrat, but against Obama’s Kindly Grandfather. The race is still Biden’s to lose.
At the end of February of this year, I would have said it was Trump’s to lose. In fact I’ve been saying since 2018 that Trump was going to win the popular vote in 2020 barring some major national setback, irrespective of who the Democrat nominee wound up being. Well, the double whammy of plague and race riots certainly qualifies as a major national setback, so he’s going to lose. When things go bad, regardless of how they have gone bad, the incumbent party gets the blame, which means the challenging party get the vote.
Given that the riots are driven in great part by the lockdowns and massive unemployment resulting in large numbers of young people with nothing better do, I would say that Trump lost the election when he bungled the response to COVID-19. Which in turn I consider a fine reason to boot the current administration and institute a new one. Much like national defence, dealing with plagues is one of the reasons why we even have governments to begin with.
The electoral college is and remain a wildcard, but I doubt it will turn in Trump’s favour a second time. The margins were already razor thin the first time around, enough so that I think Clinton won in most timelines. So yeah, at this point all Biden has to do to be President is not drop dead.
Wait, why would he ever win the popular vote? His approval ratings track with his 2016 showing.
And yet I believe he can do it. At this point if I was his campaign manager I would tell him to refuse any debates and simple state that “Trump is a lying, belligerent racist and we won’t be giving him any more attention in his last few days in office than we can help.”
I still say that come October this will be mostly forgotten and we’ll be arguing about Hillary’s emails again. I mean, look how quickly we forgot about COVID.
If only Covid had forgotten about us….
@FLWAB says:
There’s some historic precedent for that, in the ’60’s non-violent protest moved public opinion “Left”, while riots moved opinion “Right”, but (as others mentioned) Trump is the incumbent now not Johnson, my best guess is it depends on for how long and damaging the rioting is, what we’ve had so far hasn’t moved opinions much but more will benefit the anti-rioters candidate.
It’s interesting to compare with the Rodney King riots, when a right-wing government was in charge. Somewhat surprisingly to me, this paper finds the riots caused a “liberal shift in policy support at the polls”.
I wonder if there’s something thermostatic: riots under a left-leaning government are seen as being due to the government being too soft, and requiring a turn to law and order; riots under a right-leaning government are seen as being due to the government being too hard, and requiring a lighter touch?
That is verrrrry speculative, of course. I’d love to see more research on this.
Or just a general “riots look bad for whoever is in charge.”
In general, yeah, though that wouldn’t explain the specific result that the LA riots in ’92 led to more support for liberal policy.
I made that point here a day or two back.
I’m not certain, but my guess is that Trump is correctly calculating the politics of both the riots and the lockdowns.
Yes I definitely think the riots make it a lot more likely that Trump will win here in Minnesota. The first few nights here the looters and arsonists had basically a free rein in Minneapolis. Hillary only won MN by I think 1 1/2% in 2016. I think there will be at least that many Hillary voters who are thinking now “this is what happens when the Democrats run things.” If the election was held in June I think Trump would win handily. Maybe it will be forgotten by November, but it will help Trump some.
I’ve come to the conclusion that large-scale silent kneeling, Kaepernick-style, is probably superior to the current methods of protesting.
– Most COVID spread is probably from large droplets, so if everyone kneels silently instead of shouting over each other, that would reduce the risk of a superspreader event.
– It’s much harder for the police to justify hitting or gassing a crowd if they’re just kneeling.
– It’s much harder for looters, burners, and brick-throwers to blend into a crowd if everyone is silently kneeling.
– If done on a decent scale, silent kneeling crowds are probably more emotionally resonant than screaming people waving signs.
– Kneeling is symbolic, for obvious reasons.
It seems difficult to coordinate, but does anyone know of any attempts of something similar to this strategy?
I think it is going to be hard to convince people to re-adopt that strategy after the treatment it got in 2016. In fact, the response to the kneeling protests in 2016 is what some people are using as justification for more violent forms of protest now.
It probably will be difficult. But I don’t think its fair for them to make that justification
1) Kap protesting at his place of employment is different that protesters protesting on their own time.
2) Kap kneeling for the National Anthem rubbed people the wrong way.
3) Many people just disagree with the fundamental premise of the protest (that Black people are specifically targeted).
Its not really clear to me what the protesters want in terms of law or policy, but I think oriscratch is correct that in all his points
This this this. Almost everyone who opposes Kapernick believes his entire premise is incorrect. And if that’s true, the manner of his protest, whether it’s properly respectful, when and where it is done, etc. becomes entirely irrelevant.
The notion that red tribe agrees that police brutality targeted specifically at black people is a large and serious problem but opposes Kapernick just because they think it disrespects the flag or whatever is a complete and total fabrication of the media. They disagree with what he is saying, not just how he is saying it…
Complete and total fabrication.
Ironically, I agree with you that the red tribe doesn’t think police brutality against black people is a problem. But for some reason many prominent representatives keep denying that that’s the case, and that they merely oppose the form of protest.
@cassandrus
Even *if* people think the premise is bogus, the apparent number and conviction of the people who do believe is sufficient to scare them into compliance. It’s just isolated individuals who might know a bit about the crime stats, but there’s no belief-industrial-complex large or powerful enough to mount a proper counter-offensive.
Being racist is literally the single worst thing a person can be, so people evade the matter entirely, and end up making it about disruptive behavior or disrespecting the flag.
Politicians, celebrities, and journalists – not regular people.
The whole “I support his protest but the manner/venue is wrong” is the response that a PR agent would write for someone to be as maximally inoffensive as possible.
FWIW, I want to point out that the inverse is not necessarily true. That is, I have skepticism of the overarching narrative behind BLM, and I definitely disagree with many of their specific object level claims. But I am not (and was not) bothered by Colin Kaepernick’s means of protest at all. I get that it rubbed some people the wrong way, but I think silently kneeling to express disagreement is not just an acceptable means of protest but a particularly good one that we should encourage (when speaking in an abstract way about forms of protests).
It sure beats what is happening right now.
(Sidenote: I misclicked the report button on Matt’s post. Apologies–it isn’t clear how to clear the report out?)
As I said, I suppose you are correct as a sociological matter. But why then did so many react so hysterically to Kaepernick taking a knee? (I don’t know if you listened to sports radio when he first did this, but let’s just say that people did not react well ….) If it was about “respecting the flag,” at least you have a plausible explanation for why it made sense to get het up about Kapernick’s protest. But if, as you suggest, it’s actually a disagreement about the underlying normative position, then hoo boy, that’s dark. Because if you are going to react that viscerally to the protest, it can’t just be that you think Kaepernick protests of cops kill black people exaggerated the scope of the problem. In order to explain that level of emotional response, it has to be that Kaepernick was is *wrong* to protest cops killing black people *at all.*
@ cassandrus
What you are saying, and what Matt M is saying, aren’t the same. The “targeted specifically” matters: a large portion of the red tribe thinks the police are brutal and corrupt–a non-trivial portion have first-hand experience of that brutality. But they disagree (and I disagree) that that brutality is targeted specifically at black people.
@samchevre
I agree that is a distinction you *could* draw. And the underlying argument probably has a certain amount of merit to it, for Radley Balko rise-of-the-warrior-cop reasons.
But again, it doesn’t explain why so many people got enraged by Kaepernick’s protest. If I agree that police violence is a widespread problem that sweeps beyond the black community, I might *disagree* with Kaepernick’s decision to focus his protest on police violence against black people specifically. But people weren’t just disagreeing with Kaepernick—they were ENRAGED by him taking a knee.
Right. I’m not opposed to the belief that the George Floyd situation is worthy of outrage. But I am struggling to come up with any valid reason why I should be more outraged at this than I was at Justine Damond. And Kapernick didn’t care about her. None of the people protesting today cared about her. So these protests aren’t about “police brutality.” They are about police brutality only as it effects people whose race isn’t mine. Which I find highly objectionable.
It seemed to me that people were ticked off at him because it was done in the middle of their football, and they felt forced to assent to his views to continue watching their sport.
I could be wrong, I don’t even know what base Kaepernick guards.
We don’t really have counterfactuals, unless we can find athletes who tried other methods of protest, so we have to guess, but let’s assume that instead of taking a knee during the Anthem:
(1) Kaepernick started a charity devoted to advocating police reform, educating kids about their rights, raising money for criminal defense/lawsuits against police, etc.;
(2) Kaepernick wore a black armband or something;
(3) Kapernick started a practice of kneeling for a minute before the Anthem, but got up and sang the Anthem when it happened; or
(4) Kaepernick stated making it a point of going to police stations associated with violent incidents and kneeling on his own time.
My guess is some people would be offended by any of those, but many fewer, but I don’t really have a way to verify it.
Some of the issue with Kaep was that the NFL normally severely restricts players individually expressing political or personal views in their official capacity as NFL players. So accepting Kaep’s protest meant kind of a tacit acceptance that his protest was valid and important enough to suspend the normal rules that apply to all other causes.
But I don’t think you can totally remove the form of the protest from the content. The form was basically “America sucks and I refuse to participate in the standard ritual saying otherwise” which should not be surprising is something people would react viscerally to, for the same reason (although lesser in degree) as flag burning or cussing loudly during church.
@Matt M
You don’t know that and it probably isn’t true.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/22/black-activists-minneapolis-race-reacted-justine-damond-shooting
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/07/21/justine-damond-rally-minneapolis-police-shooting/499726001/
I agree with Randy M, I think the anti Kaep response was more about keeping politics and social justice out of football. People hate it when SJW stuff gets into TV shows and movies and entertainment, and a live football game was the last straw so a line was drawn there. It isn’t as much about disagreeing with it as not wanting to be lectured all the time by your outgroup.
If we can create incentives for police to avoid brutality, it won’t matter so much whether they’re not bashing you because you’re black or not bashing you because you’re an underclass white.
If we create incentives for police to avoid having their brutality broadly reported in the media, it may very well matter. That’s something to keep in mind as we evaluate possible solutions.
@Matt M
It’s obviously not a “complete and total fabrication”. Drew Brees literally yesterday:
https://www.espn.co.uk/nfl/story/_/id/29262906/saints-drew-brees-says-never-agree-anybody-disrespecting-flag
Actual poll from two years ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2018/05/23/poll-53-percent-of-americans-say-its-never-appropriate-to-kneel-during-the-national-anthem/
Obviously comparing the people who said Kaep was wrong to kneel to the same people saying that you should do non-violent protest is funny.
But what was Kaep owed for his protest? If I protest something non-violently, what do I deserve? Surely it’s not “have all my demands met.” Do I even deserve to have no criticism of my protest?
The conventional view is that what Kaep is “owed” is “to have kept his job.” That is to say, the Kaep-supporter believes that he is a good enough quarterback that he should be a starter or at least a backup in the NFL, and that the only reason he isn’t is that the various NFL teams are colluding to exclude him because of his protest.
The counterview is not “yes and that’s right and just because you have no right to protest” or anything of the sort, but rather “no, he’s not a very good quarterback, and he doesn’t deserve an NFL job strictly on the basis of his performance.”
There are plenty of statistics to support both positions, depending on what timeframe you look at. (He was very good for a short time, then very bad shortly thereafter, so “he’s a good QB” and “he’s a bad QB” both have merit as an argument)
@Matt M re: Kap as QB, while I agree with you it’s nonsense to pretend he was still the QB he was when he nearly won the Super Bowl, it’s impossible to pretend he wasn’t more qualified to be a backup than many of the vets who have been signed over the years (ignoring rookies who are on rosters b/c of potential). That being said, it’s still unclear to me if he was willing to be a low-paid backup.
Indeed. My personal assessment is that he’s probably better than several backups currently in the league. He certainly has the potential to be great, and having a “high risk high reward” backup is certainly a viable strategy (particularly for teams that have more reliable starters).
There is certainly speculation that he has been offered, but is unwilling to accept the monetary compensation and/or prestige associated with a backup role.
But that’s what makes this a perfect “toxoplasma of rage” type issue. If he was a little bit better, or a little bit worse, this debate would largely go away, as it would either become obvious that he’s being discriminated against because of his protest, or not…
@NostalgiaForInfinity
I can think of a great way to test it. Go to a large protest with a sign listing the names of a bunch of the white victims of police. I’m sure you’d be showered with solidarity.
More likely, no one will recognize the names at first and ignore it. When someone finally figures it out? Well, what do you think the outcome would be?
Re: Drew Brees. Less than 24 hours later, here’s the inevitable apology…
We don’t need counterfactuals – and you don’t even need to go as far as physically showing up at a protest. Even doing something as simple as trying to point this out on a d-list celebrity’s instagram post is enough to get you publicly shamed by the media. (This story was apparently big enough news to make it to my default MSN homepage).
And less than 24 hours after that, Drew Brees is now lecturing Trump on how Black Lives Matter.
Pretty efficient media bullying campaign. From “Kapernick is wrong” to “Trump is wrong” in about two days.
The thing about professional sports is that you can be good and a PR problem, you can be mediocre and a good citizen, but you can’t be mediocre and a PR problem. If a team had to choose between Kaepernick and someone that is 90% as good as Kaepernick, but everyone likes, the second guy will get the job every time.
Also, this quote from his wiki page would make me think Kaepernick wasn’t willing to take backup-level money just to stay in the league:
This, and specifically the position of backup QB gets so little play on most teams that their value is largely tied in to being a good teammate and helping everyone prepare. A backup offensive lineman can be used for 4 or 5 line spots, a backup rb or WR will often also been on special teams, but a backup QB is for holding FGs and clipboards.
I dunno, Nick Foles won the Super Bowl a few years back as a backup. (And 2016 Manning was kind of a backup too!) if you have a good team ready to win now, it seems worth having a good backup.
Assuming — and it very much may not be a correct assumption — that Kaepernick was willing to be both a backup and modestly paid, a team like the 2017 Packers would’ve been perfect. Rodgers gets injured a lot, and when he went down they were 4-1. Kaepernick would’ve had a much better chance than Hundley at keeping them afloat until they got to the playoffs.
Then the next year Hundley backed up Russell Wilson instead of Kaepernick being signed.
Also in response to JayT, when you say “everyone liked” the hypothetical alternative backup QB — certainly Kaepernick would’ve been a media attraction, but I don’t think there’s any indication teammates disliked him. Obviously a few Drew Brees types would, but he clearly inspired a lot of players throughout the NFL as well.
Kaepernick only ever really had success when he and Harbaugh found some synergy and built an offense around his unique strengths and limitations.
You don’t generally want your backup QB to be a weird player that you have to tailor your offense around, you want “generic NFL QB skill set” which doesn’t really describe Kaep.
The players aren’t “everyone” though. When I say a player that everyone likes, I mean a guy that the players like, the coaches like, the front office likes, and the media likes. If you get on the bad side of any of those, your career will be a lot shorter.
@gbdub Hundley ran plenty in college so the Packers weren’t concerned about that, and Russell Wilson runs a lot, too, so it’s not like the offense would be baffled by a running QB. Rodgers also runs a bit too, though he is kind of sui generis.
I also have always suspected a running QB is a higher-floor lower-ceiling proposition than choosing a pure passer, but that I can’t prove.
Yes there is value in having a good backup, but the value is different for QB compared to other positions which changes the locker room dynamic. A backup wide receiver who causes some friction in the locker room has more opportunities to redeem himself on the field than a backup QB which creates a different dynamic.
And from the perspective of the head coach, whether or not to bench the QB in favor of the backup (assuming the team and/or QB is struggling) is always a media circus, even in the best of times.
Imagine the treatment you’d get from ESPN if you have a white starting QB, and he’s not doing great, but you keep playing him rather than putting in Kapernick, his backup. Nobody wants that.
You’ll be stoked to know this is happening. Periods of kneeling have been a facet of every protest I’ve been to over the past week.
The issue is, the time window you can keep a large crowd kneeling is ~5 ish minutes or so before people start to get restless. If you’re kneeling to commemorate something specific, IE Kneeling for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to commemorate George Floyd’s death, you can generally count on the crowd being down for that… but long-term kneeling just isn’t an option. People are going to want to do other chants, people are going to get distracted… etc.
Thanks for the info. I guess that level of long-lasting coordination is harder than I expected.
That is something I’ve been constantly amused by over the past few days – your minute-to-minute experience at a non-centrally led protests like these are:
-Someone starts a chant
-people chant it for a while
-it starts to die off
-awkward silence
-someone starts a new chant
It’s vaguely reminiscent of a high-school pep rally or something. The point of the protest is to be there, but once you’re there; there’s nothing really to do. You don’t want to leave, but you’re also severely constrained in what actions you can take.
If I had to guess, I’d say that if a protest turns violent boredom is a significant causative factor. I’d guess this is why you’ll see protests at single locations turn violent, but not really see the same dynamic during a march, even with comparable numbers.
Does that support the idea of curfews being a good idea? Nothing good happens after dark, and creating a Schelling point for everyone to go home and sleep it off seems like it would solve the “no one wants to be the last one clapping for Stalin” problem.
This is kind of a squishy answer, but I think it depends when you set it and likely not for this reason. I think violence is most likely to happen when police and protesters come into contact. Upon writing this, it sounds obvious, but the best way you can prevent police violence is to reduce this contact. It’s why barriers, no man’s lands and the like are such a great tool.
The problem with curfews are that if they widely aren’t respected, what next? Take D.C. We had a curfew for 7 p.m. last night. Come 7, no one left. Having been there, I’m fairly certain that had the cops tried to clear people out or arresting them for violating curfew, it would have turned ugly. Thankfully, the cops didn’t do anything and people eventually got tired and left by around 10 or so. I guess this was a success, but only because all parties involved ignored the curfew.
If you set the curfew too early, you’re also forcing people to choose whether or not to break the law when they previously wouldn’t have. Like, if you get off work at 6, you can’t get to the protest before 6:30 or so, and would need to leave soon after you arrived. But, you’ll get there and see no one else leaving, so you decide to stay. Thus, a bad law has forced someone to choose to become a conscious law-breaker. My gut tells me the guy who knows he could already be arrested for violating curfew might be more willing to keep breaking the law.
On the other hand, I’m a little more supportive of a late curfew. Something around 11 or midnight where it’s a safe assumption that people who are still out then aren’t going to be doing any more productive protesting.
I think creating a Schelling point for almost anything is dangerous when you’re dealing with an uncoordinated protest. By definition it invites spontaneous coordination. A curfew allows people to bravely defy the authorities by taking no action, and then the authorities are forced to respond. It says to the protesters “things are going to get spicy at exactly 7:30.”
I think this varies a lot from person to person, but I would find it extremely difficult to kneel for as long as five minutes, and I don’t think I’m alone in this.
+1. I’ve knelt for around an hour (at an outdoor Low Mass) and it’s surprisingly uncomfortable, even kneeling on a coat spread on grass.
Isn’t that sort of the point, or at least strongly aligned with the point? If you’re going to insist that your protest be comfortable, then just use an ergonomic keyboard and don’t overstrain your tweeting thumb. The value and effectiveness of protests is that they demonstrate a willingness to endure unpleasantness for the cause.
Tonight I am going to protest this sick and disgusting comment made by John Schilling by going home from work early, eating tacos, and playing video games.
Take that, John!
Hey, that’s my plan, too! We’ve started a movement, Matt!
I’m not saying a hero… but I’m not not saying it…
I’m not sure how different the ideological bubbles we have been living in, but i have been seeing literally hundreds of clear videos of police behaving violently and using excessive force against non-violent protesters. While i won’t post them all here unless asked, https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality contains quite a number.
The problem here is always a) context and b) scope
On a) it’s often easy to see the cops throwing gas or pepper spray against people who, within the period being recorded, appear nonviolent. It’s harder to see the rocks getting chucked or the things being burnt out of frame. You can almost never tell “who started it” from a cell phone video B) with literally millions of encounters occurring, it’s basically impossible to expect there not to be some egregious cases you can pull. You can also find hundreds of videos of rioting / looting / people getting beat for trying to defend their property. And hundreds of videos of cops and peaceful protesters getting along! You can literally spend all day watching whichever your bubble steers to you and get a completely different perception of what is happening.
To address these in order
A) I don’t think “assuming the benefit of the worst” for protesters is reasonable. When i see police attack people who are non-violent, who are not presenting a clear and present threat in the moment the police aggression begins, that is wrong, full stop. If you wanna stop rock throwers, then do that either in the moment they are doing it (which i have not seen in any of the videos, and yes that would be 100% captured on cellphone cameras recording the police themselves, the videos i linked are not short out of context clips, they show pretty lengthy interactions with police before and during the moments of violence) or do it in a more targeted manner.
B)The reason why i put more weight of wrongness to when cops do it as opposed to looters/civ violence is that i expect the civilians to be prosecuted and found by law enforcement. The law works great in that regard, plus civs are untrained for this stuff so i expect less of them. While those attacks are bad, there is known and reliable redress. When police attack someone without reason that is failure both on the level that 1.they are explicitly trained and selected NOT to do that, so they betray their job and position of power they hold over any other citizen, and 2. i don’t trust the justice system to actually hold them culpable. For examples of the latter, see https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/fs9i0yj/
To the question of scope, there are only 800 or so officers in the minneapolis PD, several of these incidents involve that PD, and most of them involve several police that could have moved to stop or report these actions. The fact that you don’t see that makes it unlikely that the percentage of police that would use/allow excessive violence is small. Even just the initial video of 3 cops standing around while the 4th killed george floyd. If only 5% of the PD is the type of cop that would stand by and let that happen, then chances that all three of the bystanders did nothing is only one in 8,000.
@scoop
Well, by their nature as a small group, they wouldn’t be able to bring the city to a total halt by blocking off streets, but assuming they’re some major artery highway they could block off to achieve that…
assuming it is a legitimate case for clear unlawfulness and unethicalness on the protester’s part, attacking them is still wrong for the police. I am not against the use of violence in general, but it must be carefully and judiciously applied in proportion to the threat. If people are blocking a street by kneeling or any other non-violent action, it is unethical to disperse them with tear gas, pepper spray, or beatings. Police here should, in case all other democratic communication efforts are exhausted, extract the protesters individually and arrest them. If the crowd is large enough this is unreasonable, then divide and conquer strategies can be used to separate the crowd into smaller parts and arrest individually there. Crowd division can be done via body blocking and the movement of body barricades. There are plenty of measures that can be taken just by movement and tactics without large indiscriminate violent acts.
Without violence? How exactly are they supposed to do that? Have you ever seen a protest? Do you think the protesters will politely step aside, and the person the police want to arrest will calmly lie down on the ground with his hands behind his back?
How? With your magic crown divider app? In real life, when police want to divide crowds that won’t listen to direction they use tear gas, pepper spray, billy clubs, etc.
And what happens when the crowd blocks back? When the cops are outnumbered 10 to 1, how exactly are they meant to move the barricades when oppposed?
@FLWAB
No, but i have seen plenty of cases where the police walk forward, take a person in the front row of the protest out, and they come along peacefully and are arrested. This behavior is also seen in many environmental protests where people link themselves together in front on trees. These are often broken up by the police arresting each one-by-one.
Crows can be divided with force, but not with violence. Pushing through a crowd with a structured group of riot police in formation to divide them is possible and i have seen it done.
If the cops are outnumbered 10 to 1, you no longer have a small crowd, and if they are non-violent should probably be addressing their concerns instead of breaking them up. And my use of barricades may have been the wrong word. I mean like, human barricades, people linking arms, that kind of thing.
Ah, I see, we’re having a semantic problem. As far as I understand it force is violence. If you’re making someone do something they don’t want to do with physical force, then that’s a form of violence. Your comments don’t seem as ridiculous with the knowledge that you do not consider physical force violence.
So any large protest can do whatever they want? I would imagine in the majority of protests that gain national attention the police are outnumbered 10 to 1 or more.
@FLWAB
Ah, yeah my bad for being unclear. I think I’d differentiate between the two by harm caused. Force is pushing/moving. You can cause some harm here, but no one should be going to the hospital. Violence is beating/breaking.
I’m not so sure. Apparently the Minnesota police were only outnumbered 4 to 1, so 10 to 1 is huuuuge.
Tear gas and rubber bullets basically are the closest thing they have to “magic crowd divider app” – it makes the crowd disperse and you can be fairly sure that anyone that sticks around at that point is in the “no, I really do want to engage in aggressive confrontation with the cops” stage.
There is not really a polite way to disperse a crowd that doesn’t want to disperse. More importantly, there is no polite way to separate the bad eggs from the crowd unless the crowd is actively participating in this separation – they have to be willing to let the cops among them and cooperate with identifying the perps. Otherwise you’re likely to end up with a cop beat to hell and dead protesters when the police react to that.
There was a confrontation on CNN in California that was basically a line of riot cops trying to keep a mostly peaceful crowd of protesters from getting into what appeared to be a business district (lots of shops and restaurants to damage). The cops were leaving the crowd alone, except for the use of gas grenades (not clear if it was actually tear gas or just smoke) and plastic rounds to maintain a “no mans land” wider than you could reasonably huck a rock across. I.e. the cops did nothing unless people (usually individuals clearly trying to provoke the police) ran into the cleared zone or it looked like the crowd was threatening to encroach forward.
This went on for quite some time. If you pointed a cell phone at the cops for 15 minutes you would see what looked like cops shooting grenades and rubber bullets for no apparent reason. You wouldn’t see what the CNN crew saw when they went through the police line, namely several fist size chunks of concrete laying among the cops, apparently thrown by protesters. Several fireworks were being thrown from the crowd into “no mans land”. Even on HDTV, there was no way to identify who in the crowd was throwing these, or even see the fireworks until they went off.
How do you propose the police should have dealt with these individuals throwing potentially deadly objects – actively committing felony assault! – other than employing the tactics that they did?
Anyway I’m sure you have better examples than that, and I’m not denying that there are some legitimate cases of serious brutality out there, but I do object to the idea that it’s necessarily possible for police to not use some degree of violence that will necessarily impact some innocent people as well, without completely abandoning the scene to looting and vandalism.
To keep these totally peaceful, you need better cops that relate better to the community, sure. But you also need better, more organized protesters willing to work with the police to establish safe boundaries – and with enough ability to self police that they can hold to those agreed boundaries. Otherwise the rock throwers will use the crowd as human shields until they get somebody hurt.
I’ve watched a lot of those videos of police violence, and many are unexcuseable, but many are also vague.
“Just do what the crowd wants,” while it should be explored as an option, cannot be a policy. If the protestors want the cops to take a knee, and then the crowd will disperse (this happened somewhere! it worked!), then great. If the protestors are bored wypipo looking to provoke a response, well, there is no way to give the crowd what they want that isn’t going be messy, because the crowd is looking for a confrontation.
@gbdub
I think you’re arguing a lot of different points here, so i’ll do my best to address them each.
I’m not sure. Environmental protests where people sit in front of forests seem to be dispersed fine, but you could argue those aren’t “crowds”. In cases where the crowd or some of it’s members is clearly and deliberately attacking the police, like the California example you give, I am not saying the use of police violence is always inappropriate. I’m saying it should be proportional and not an escalation from what the crowd is doing. In your example, members of the crowd are actively attacking the police, and the police are responding to that with a reasonable separation to only prevent these assaults. Great! That’s fine. But I’m not really arguing against that, i’m more arguing against cases like https://twitter.com/bleeezyy_/status/1266894195865931778 (literally the first example i opened from https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality)
I agree with this. Again, violence can be used, as long as it is appropriate and only in proportion to what the protectors are using. A peaceful protest can be broken up peacefully, by definition. If it refuses, it is no longer peaceful. In many cases i am seeing, the police appear to be starting the violence. I want the police to only respond to violence.
I would love that, for sure. The protests would be much better with better organization. But i do think that many protests have rather good organization! Here in San Antonio, we had a protest where the main body of protesters acted for a set period of time, then dispersed, and there was (AFAIK) no police violence in that part. Later violence happened after the main, organized part of the protests had ended, at night.
@metalcrow – I think we are closer on our definition of acceptable violence, but I don’t think you’ve really addressed the issue of context.
My point with the CA story was that it would have been very easy to extract a video from that situation that looked like excessive force. E.g. if you were in the crowd pointing at the cops with a cell phone, you could see what looks like the cops shooting at you – with the rock throwing and the no mans land provocation out of frame.
Actually the example video you use illustrates this well. You have what looks like a line of police blocking off an area. They are all facing the same direction, which gives me the sense that they have established that protesters should be on that side, and civilians shouldn’t be on the other. The person filming is above and behind the police, and I gather that they are not alone (the cop doesn’t appear to be shooting directly at the camera, more off to the side). This may be a dangerous situation for the police, who are now potentially being surrounded!
We have no way of knowing how many people are with the camera person, what they are doing, or whether they were previously warned to disperse or in an area they should know they should not be in.
So I agree that from what we have to go on, that looks really bad and excessive. I’m just noting that a context that makes the response more reasonable cannot be ruled out from the video.
Again this speaks to context. If you’re only seeing videos from the earlier peaceful protest, and juxtapose that with videos of cops busting heads in the later violent protest, that can very easily create a false impression. Day / night may be a useful distinction, in that I would tend to assume any video that is obviously at night is more likely to be in an area where bad protester behavior is going on.
@gbdub
The ambiguity you describe only applies to the case of a police line formed in front of a protest crowd. There have since been many, many more videos outside of such ambiguous situations, such as police demanding the local residences be searched for protesters, watching a couple simply making quiet conversation by themselves for a few minutes, and then shooting them because it’s after curfew, shooting paint canisters at people on their own porches, attacking property owners trying to fend off looters, and the many journalists who have been injured, including non-American journalists covering the news for foreign countries. A good number of these videos come from people who were neutral to the police before this time, and are posting those videos out of disbelief at how they got caught in the crossfire outside of a protest context.
@gbdub says:
Maybe, but that’s not true in every case. And absent other evidence I will give the protesters the benefit of the doubt 9/10 times before i give the police it.
Alright, sure. A small line, which if extended straight would still put the videographer in front of them, but sure
A) I am not willing to give the police that much leeway. I don’t get that sense at all.
B) Police shouldn’t be able to do that. You can’t designate an entire area that you are not physically blocking as “no go” to a civilian. That’s absurd. You wanna do that, use a chokepoint or get a line, but you can’t say “that area over there is off limits but you just gotta know that!”
The answer to “oh crap i’m surrounded by people” is not “well better shot them”. Plus that’s give a looooot of leeway to the police. Why would they shoot, anyway? I didn’t see any projectiles or rocks, which should have been pretty evident.
Ok, sure but at this point you might as well be saying “what if the protesters actually ha their family hostage behind them and they were gonna kill them if they didn’t shot!” You are giving their actions so much leeway and benefit that i would not ever do, nor do i think is appropriate to do, in the face of this evidence. Innocent until proven guilty is a thing, but that isn’t infinite. Once one side presents evidence of wrongdoing the attacked has to counter with proof it’s not wrongdoing. Otherwise, it’s enough proof to be guilty!
I guess i don’t understand why you would give them this much doubt. Is it so hard to believe that police just act aggressively for no reason? In the face of hundred of videos that according to you only seem to show this? You have to see a pattern in behavior here.
I do that as well, yes. I had a bias against nighttime videos of police violence.
First let’s be clear here by what you mean when you say “shot”. That’s a paintball marker firing (probably) pepper rounds, which are really unpleasant but not particularly dangerous. Plus at that range he can’t actually hit anything. That’s clearly “there is a crowd where I don’t want them to be and I want them to disperse” not “I’m gonna go a murderin’ now!”
Getting surrounded makes everyone nervous. And by everyone I mean it’s a survival instinct that basically every animal has. Cops are humans. Humans are animals.
Why would you expect to see projectiles or rocks? Why does the fact that you don’t convince you there were none there? You’ve got like 5 seconds of video before the shooting starts, and none after, and the frame cuts off the entire area around the camera. And the camera person is the one who got to choose where to start and stop. Again, I could have cut a video from the CA protest, put an angry caption on it, and it would look just as bad.
And if I had those same priors we would be 100% in agreement. Your priors are doing a lot of the work while you claim the evidence can only be interpreted one way.
I could dig up hundreds of videos of looters and rioters engaging in violence and destruction with no immediate evidence of provocation. You have to see a pattern in behavior here.
I could dig up hundreds of videos of peaceful protesters getting along with peaceful cops. You have to see a pattern of behavior here.
All of these positions can be supported with more irrefutable video evidence than any of us have time to examine, because there are millions of recorded encounters running the full gamut and no two riots are alike. That’s been my point all along, not that you should ignore these videos, but rather that you should not take them uncritically and draw broad conclusions about which “side” is mostly responsible.
@gbdub
He had 0 ethical right to do that. And please don’t construct some theoretical “well maybe they deserved it”. Sure! Maybe they did! But i am going to assume the protesters were innocent until proven guilty.
Maybe, but when a human attacks another human we punish them. Will this happen here? Sincerely doubt it. Besides, i though the point of cops was that they were trained to NOT act this way. Not just be emotional and act on aggression.
Because what other valid reason is there to shoot? If you aren’t being immediately aggressed, then this is an unwarranted act of violence by the state. That seems pretty clear to me.
I could have sworn i said this before, but there is a huge difference between cops and civs. I hold one is a much much higher position than the other, and as such when they fail said failure is much much worse. A person riots? Shit, but i didn’t except much. The courts have and will handle this. A cop does unwarranted violence? My trust in redress is very very low.
Frankly, even if the violence was exactly 50/50, i would still put more blame on the cops and hold them more responsible, for the reason given above.
Look, i think one of our key differences here might simply be that of axioms. Do you trust the police? Cause i don’t. I’ve read enough history and read enough cases in US history that my distrust in them is monumental. In fact, my distrust in pretty much any US government authority is monumental. This isn’t unreasonable in my view. MKULTRA wasn’t an accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change wasn’t an accident. Guantanamo Bay wasn’t an accident. Our prison system and it’s forced labor isn’t an accident. The defunding of the program tracking the number of people killed in interactions with US police wasn’t an accident. (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/18/police-killings-government-data-count)
Trust is earned, and easy to lose. And for me, trust in the government, or it’s agents, is basically nil. Not just because they never get punished. But because they keep doing evil and getting away with it.
Prediction: Between C19 and the recent riots/looting/head-bashing/protests, I think the trend of ambitious well-off people gentrifying the big cities is likely to stall or reverse. If crime goes up substantially, either due to the police being made much less effective or due to the police engaging in work slowdowns in protest, then that’s going happen even more and last longer. If the whole racial justice struggle leads (as is likely, IMO) to desegregating the nice public schools where well-off people in the cities can send their kids now, that will also happen more and last longer.
My guess is that in the next couple years, we see a lot of people quietly move out of the city and into a nice suburb.
Yup.
I escaped from downtown to the suburbs a few years ago. I was conflicted about it at the time. Now I’m very glad I did so when I did.
That was kind of the outcome of the 1960s race riots, right?
And it’s even easier now, since people have gotten used to working from home. I think decentralization is going to be a major long-term effect of the COVID-19 lockdown.
This is not a particularly bold prediction, since “white flight” is exactly what happened last time we had equivalent unrest! This is basically the story of Detroit for the last third of the 20th century.
For all these things, it’s important to keep not just likeness in mind but also scale: what’s going on now comes from a similar cultural place, but is an order of magnitude less destructive that the Detroit race riots. From Wikipedia, in five days and one city,
That’s what I call progress! I’m sure you weren’t trying to draw an exact parallel — nonetheless, from everything I understand, these are a lot less scary to be near than those.
Right, we definitely aren’t at that level of actual violence yet (although serious issues seem to be occurring in more cities maybe?). Just saying that there’s a historical precedent for a qualitatively similar impact.
Maybe more relevant because more recent, did the Rodney King riots result in significant demographic shifts?
That’s a good point. Ongoing violent crime is probably a bigger deterrent to people wanting to live in an area. Risk of riots is still probably a big deterrent to the sort of investors who also drive / support gentrification. I suspect a lot businesses, particularly chains, might consider relocating rather than rebuilding.
The phenomenon of people working from home (b/c of covid) might help this along.
Personally I am torn about this. In the abstract… I would prefer it if economic activity was more dispersed so that the gains from wage growth are not sucked up by landlords. (Also negative effects on family formation and fertility)
However this is also an obvious case of people saying one thing and doing another. People can continue saying and believing what they want because they can always remain a few miles away from the fallout it collectively creates. The number of spaces on the earth that people run from grows and the number of spaces on the earth people can run to shrinks continuously; nothing is learned.
I think a lot of the people pattern matching onto white flight in the 60’s are overlooking the role that deindustrialization played in urban decline.
I suspect there is less overlap between the areas seeing violence and the areas seeing “gentrification” than you think.
My wife and I moved to a gentrifying mostly black neighborhood in Northeast DC almost a year ago. It’s been incredibly quiet here for the past several nights. Contrast that to Georgetown in Northwest DC, a very expensive, upper-class area (with a university), where I’ve heard about windows getting smashes and stores being looted.
I work for (INSERT MAJOR TECH COMPANY) and we often receive polls asking how well working from home is going for us. All it takes is a quick Hacker News search to see that a number of high-profile companies are considering or are in the process of switching to more permanent, large-scale work-from-home model. Especially in these global companies where teams are scattered all over the world, anyway, the need to live where you work (at least in certain industries) is getting weaker, it seems.
Personally, I’m conflicted because I thrive when I feel like I’m part of a team. On the other hand, I cannot wait to get out of the city. The older I get the more I dream about that cabin in the woods. I’m willing to take a location-based pay cut for that kind of peace.
Weren’t cities traditionally plague-ridden cesspools where the young and ambitious would wager their health against the chance to make a fortune (or at least escape the farm), and if they made it retire to the countryside or at least to a gated enclave within the city?
We know civilization can thrive in spite of this. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if we had to go back.
in comments for the review of “Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,” John Schilling et al were talking about how hard it would be to understand a newly discovered tribe’s internal mental processes without understanding their language upon arrival. My question is on that topic but not about the bicameral mind:
When making first contact with a new tribe, how did the arriving people learn the language, and how long would it take to have any somewhat accurate understanding independent of hand signals like, say, pointing at a turkey and saying “turkey”? For instance, this Plimouth Plantation page details the first treaty the Pilgrims signed with the Indians. How could both sides be sure they were sure what the other side was saying? (Unless the answer is the Indians had no concept of a treaty and just said shrugged and the Pilgrims pretended to themselves that they were behaving justly.)
Not a general answer, but in the specific case of the Plimouth Plantation–Squanto, who had spent 5 years in Europe, was able to translate.
I’m in awe of the whole Squanto story. The man gets kidnapped by an English expedition led by John Smith (yes, that one), learns English, makes his way back to his home area with Thomas Dermer (who sober historians title “adventurer”), finds that a plague Indians had no resistance to wiped out the Dunbar’s Number people he’d ever known before his abduction, and so continues to hang around and help English who would otherwise starve for lack of local knowledge.
There’s a legendary book in the conlanging community called Describing Morphosyntax written to help field linguists describe the grammar of a newly encountered language. That doesn’t quite answer the question, but it’s in the vicinity.
Let’s say I stumble across a total stranger on a desert island. Neither of us has a common language, and neither of us are linguists. How do I start figuring out how to communicate with him?
Same ways kids do. Point at things and grunt.
There’s an argument in philosophy the upshot of which is you can’t know for certain you’re talking about the same thing when you and the stranger point to something and say a word. Like, if he picks up a coconut and says gavagai, does that mean coconut, or food, or brown, or hairy, or something else entirely? He might point at your own hair later and say gavagai. Well, your hair is brown and hairy, so that might narrow it down*, but in the least convenient possible world you can never narrow down exactly what even one word means, much less learn a whole language.
But of course we teach language just fine. I suppose it comes down to having similar minds; we divide up the world in similar ways and make similar assumptions about salience. Number words will be taught easily; some of the colors, too. The word for water will be taught before words like liquid or sustenance, and so on. But that’s just my opinion.
*on the other hand, he might be remarking for his own amusement that you have a coconut head
On the other, other hand he might have been saying ‘food’ all along and you are in trouble.
There’s a book that I think was recommended on here which is pretty amazing:
Hell Is So Green: Search and Rescue over the Hump in World War II. You might be familiar with ‘the hump’ which was the extremely dangerous, large scale airlift into China during world war 2. Many many pilots and crews went missing, and this book is the memoir of one of the search and rescue guys who would parachute into the jungle, link up with tribes to try and find missing crews and get them out.
What this guy did is far beyond the toughest explorers and adventurers of today, and he was just one random soldier in a random corner of the world at the time. Amazing!
SSC, I need some advice. My (our?) wedding is in November. We’ve spent approx $6-$7k already, sunk cost. We anticipate needing another $15k to complete the event. Fairly standard, 70ish person event–low cost for the area. However, we’ve delayed in sending save-the-dates or invites with the current social/political/virological mess we’re in. We need to decide very shortly if we want to move forward as planned and get the invites out.
We’re concerned about: 1. ‘rona round two come fall, 2. continued social unrest (potentially escalating?) 3. our wedding is 3 days after the election. These variables combined lead us to the idea of cancelling the wedding, or dramatically scaling the event back to immediate family. We ourselves are at low risk for ‘rona and not overly concerned, but I do not a superspreader event on my conscious, either. We live in a major SE US city (+1.5mm pop.) and our guests would be coming from all over the country. Our families (immediate and extended) are primarily age 60+, with several over 70. Two grandparents have already declined, as they’re very, very high risk and would need to fly–understandable. Most of our friends are white collar and should be able to swing the ticket and hotel for a weekend, but I haven’t yet asked if they’re willing to fly/travel (and I think it might be weird to?)
I need a sanity check, and understand that there’s no right answer here. Our gut says cancel and elope, as we don’t “feel” very celebratory at the moment. Please let me know if you’d like add’l information and I’ll provide as much as possible without doxing ourselves.
My hunch is to tell you that November is a long way away and you’ll be fine. Think of how quickly COVID concern disappeared with these protests. Now think of all the things that might happen between now and November that could cause the protest-fever to vanish.
But I feel for you deeply. My wedding was originally scheduled for April and has since been postponed until August, and lately I’ve been putting off an inevitable phone call where I put my family (traveling from many states away, many of whom are in the wedding party) on the spot to commit to coming or not, and I suspect most of them will say “not.”
I don’t know if you’ve asked all your vendors about their refund/rescheduling policy. I know ours took place within a government-ordered shutdown and the most common response was “no refunds but you can reschedule to anytime we’re not already booked.” And the vast majority of them seemed to be of the “we won’t shut down unless the government forces us” variety, so unless you’re projecting another government-ordered lockdown in November, your costs probably truly are sunk.
70 people is not that big, and complies with many of the current social distancing rules
The same could be said about many church services, but they’re still banned across a huge chunk of the United States.
I definitely want to find a way to punish the elected officials who ban church services but have spoken out in favor of protests.
Yes, it’s terrible that a cop killed an unarmed black man, but we’ve been told that giving up our First Amendment rights was necessary to prevent potentially millions of COVID deaths. That was either a bald-faced lie by government officials, or they’re systemically thinking with their bias rather than logically and must be punished for the deadly sin of Sloth.
I disagree a lot with Matt M about the appropriateness of the initial lockdowns to the virus, but there’s no doubt that he’s justified in feeling a lot of whiplash about the messaging.
Here’s a guy who has been told for months that there were No Exceptions to the need to lockdown to stop coronavirus. The Exception he wanted wasn’t getting a hair cut. He wasn’t allowed to spend time with his friend who had to die alone. He couldn’t even give things up like agreeing to be forcibly quarantined until clear.
https://twitter.com/LeonHWolf/status/1268168284081459201
When someone is repeatedly told by the authority that there are No Exceptions, but then the first time the authority’s buddy needs an Exception it’s granted without even asking, because hey of course we aren’t evil robots it’s all a balancing act, that leads to an extreme distrust of the authority.
My wife and I were in a not-dissimilar boat, though substantially less exposed financially.
We had already eloped, with a timeline decided in part by immigration.
We worked with our vendors to reschedule the celebration to next year. We have enough guests who are travelling, either domestically or internationally, that weren’t confident in what the actual wedding would look like in August. We also had possible US immigration concerns as well, as we could face potential issues with re-entering.
If you delay, your guests will likely be sympathetic; ours were very understanding. Hopefully your vendors would also be flexible. If you haven’t discussed the possibility with them yet, it might be worth considering.
That’s rough. My hunch is that both of these crises would blow over by six months, but the election could lead to a reignition of riots either way, and as the weather cools and people are relaxing, covid could flare up again.
So I can’t give much advice, just sympathy. My sister-in-law is also planning on a wedding soon, and has had some changes of plans lately, though I don’t think they’d paid anything yet .
My fiance and I were planning an Oct. wedding, which we elected to postpone, but we didn’t lose any money.
Rona 2: electric bugaloo is a legitimate concern.
Don’t worry about the social unrest. I think that these protests will be gone and forgotten by the end of the month.
Trumps election will probably not be as big of a deal as you expect. even localized rioting seems unlikely to me. but if your family is very political it might cause some bad feeling.
I would elope and cancel the ceremony. Plan another event to celebrate the marriage after a year when things are hopefully more predictable. The sunk costs are sunk costs.
I view another round of extensive Coronavirus-related disruption as actively very likely, and November is a very plausible time for it. If it was me I would cancel. Your risk tolerance may vary.
I second JEA. Even if there is not an active flare in November, at least some of your guests will be concerned. You may have different priorities, but I would want my wedding to be a party where people are dancing / hugging / mingling without reservation. Even the specter of a winter resurgence is probably sufficient to put a real damper on the party. So I would write off the sunk costs, elope / courthouse wedding, and then wait to throw a blowout X-Year anniversary / wedding party once we have a vaccine or life returns to “normal.”
Cancel and elope. You don’t want memories of your wedding to be damaged by the fear that it was the cause of one of your older relatives getting COVID-19.
I would scale back and live stream a video of the wedding due to corona concerns (depending on location).. I doubt the social unrest will be an issue for you by then, and am not sure why the election
If you live in NY you’re probably fine for corona, differed states are at different stages of epidemic
It is almost certainly the case that you could hold this in an event that would not endanger the health of you, your fiancee, your guests, or anyone else.
But it is still too likely that a second COVID-19 wave and/or post-election violence will cause a great many people to irrationally fear that a wedding can’t be held safely. If that includes any significant number of your guests, the event won’t be the celebration you want it to be. If it includes the state, federal, or local government, the event will be a criminal conspiracy.
So, if your family is the sort to turn a criminal conspiracy into a festive occasion, have at it. Otherwise maybe elope.
what no one else has asked is how big a hit is the 7k you’ve already spent. sunk costs are sunk, of course, but relevant in this case.
I can see several options. Here are two that I don’t think I saw anyone else mention:
1. Continue as planned, except trim the guest list if corona is a concern. Livestream the wedding so anyone who wants to watch (but doesn’t want to risk the travel) can still see it.
2. Get legally married on/before the planned date, either at the courthouse or with only immediate family, and push the reception to a later date (venue permitting).
You have my sympathies. Planning a wedding is extremely expensive and stressful, even when pandemics aren’t a concern. There were times when I wish I had eloped and saved myself the stress.
Parents of SSC: What are your favorite details about being a parent?
I have a lot but to illustrate the level of detail I’m looking for: I really like the sounds of my kids quietly snoring, and of them smacking happily on food, too interested in the food to talk.
I love just sitting and playing with them. I love when there’s something in their mind that clicks and they start *getting* a new skill. Seeing them become a person, and their features lose Universal Babyhood and start outlining the adult they will become.
They can also be very precocious — repeating back to you something you said ages ago, when you didn’t even realize they were listening.
When they were younger, the smell of babies sweating as they lie on my chest was intoxicating. (The pre-teens are deodorized without mercy or sentiment, however)
Seeing their delight in the small, insignificant parts of life. Raising chicks, chasing lizards, etc.
Waking up to seeing the oldest reading to the youngest.
Watching them develop their passions.
Having something to entertain everyone else with at family gatherings so I don’t need to actually come up with any small talk.
I am very much looking forward to that last one.
Fat little toddler hands. We knew our kids were growing up when the knuckles at the base of their fingers switched from concave to convex. Bittersweet.
Yes! Knuckle dimples are one of my favorite things, and I too feel sad when they go.
I like how my kids (9 years old) get my jokes, and surprise me with witty remarks of their own. I like how popular and well-adjusted they are, compared to my own miserable childhood. I like how they’re by far the youngest kids in their class (they’d be a grade lower if we were still in New York), and still two of the smartest.
However, all that said, I still don’t like being stuck in the house with them for, what is it now? Going on three months. I remember the Before Time, when three-day weekends would send me screaming back to the office for some peace and quiet.
I love my daughter’s infatuation with zombies and zombie movies. It started when she was 4, and she’s 5 now, and she’s seen basically everything. Zombieland, World War Z, I Am Legend, The Girl with all the Gifts, Walking Dead, even Train to Busan and various other asian zombie movies we have to read the subtitles for her. She loves ’em. And so when she meets somebody new, she has to show them her zombie impressions. She’s got a fast zombie, and a slow zombie. Just picture an adorable 5 year old girl with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, head to the side, eyes open, walking stifly going “rlwawl…rwlawl!!!” She’s just so funny.
You’d think it would give her nightmares, but she insists on watching them.
A friend of mine was apparently infatuated with Hammer Horror films from the age of about two. His father would stay up into the wee hours taping over the sex scenes so they were safe for him to watch in the morning. It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm…
I love the way children make me notice things that I’d otherwise just glance at. This morning we went for a walk in the park; we stopped to look at a chipmunk, and a frog, and an interesting fan-shaped leaf (from a ginkgo tree)–I wouldn’t have stopped to look at those things if I were by myself.
Smiles and giggles.
Donor kidneys.
The joy they find in simple things, and even the 15 year-old is still affectionate. That said the four year-old really misses pre-school (his mother even more!) and is exhausting (but really my wife and I should be grandparents not parents at our age).
Having people around me who understand my jokes. Who I can talk to about interesting ideas without feeling as though I need a translator.
My children are all adults at this point, but most of that was true when they were not.
Over my lifetime I’ve heard several people claim that antiperspirant is bad for you. I don’t know if this is true but it seems like it could be. Is this claim bogus, or valid? And if it’s valid, what viable alternatives do people propose, for those who refuse to be stinky?
My limited understanding is that the aluminum antiperspirant can be absorbed via the underarms. I can’t speak to how valid this is, but I use an aluminum free deo from Arm and Hammer and am pleased with it’s performance.
When I was a young teenager, I suffered from hyperhydrosis for years and ironically an aluminum-containing antiperspirant was the only thing that worked to control the sweat. I don’t know if that product “cured” the issue, or if I simply outgrew the condition, but it was horrible.
I use deodorant instead of antiperspirant, so it doesn’t have the aluminum that people say is bad for you. For me, I made the change because I always had a bad reaction to antiperspirants, I’m not a particularly sweaty person, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where it isn’t particularly hot. I use Old Spice deodorant.
Ammonium Alum. crystal.
Lasts long, no liquid hazard when travelling, environmetally friendly little packaging for the long use, and best: no smell of its own.
The aluminum danger is overrated. A dermatologist here wrote in her book (iirc) that the skin doesn`t let enough through to be a problem. Drinking from an Al flask that has no interior coating, or wrapping the sandwiches in Al foil introduces more into the body than the Al containing cosmetics.
I’ve heard this a bunch, and my impression is that it’s in the realm of “evidence is inconclusive” (at best), but I’ve never investigated it. It doesn’t affect me either way, because I just use deodorant.
Alternative: be healthy (fit) and eat well, occasionally use alcohol to kill bacteria in stinky areas and/or shave those areas
It seems to me that the last six months or so have made a very strong case for:
a. Why we need a competent executive branch.
b. Why DJT is utterly unsuited to leading such a thing.
As long as there was no major crisis, things could tool along normally, as they have for many years. There were big festering problems (regulatory rigidity, lousy disaster prep because it doesn’t pay most election years, unaccountable police, big racial divides and resentment, lousy social mobility, poor economic prospects for many Americans), but you could kind-of hope none of them would come due and need a competent response from the top. And so we managed to get to 2020 without a major disaster. During that time, the country became more and more polarized, probably partly because of social forces beyond anyone’s control and partly because DJT is an incredibly polarizing figure. That wasn’t a crisis, but it made sure that any response to a crisis would be harder and work less well.
And now, we’ve seen the C19 pandemic and a really awful federal-level response, with DJT’s contributions apparently being contradictory tweets and statements for/against lockdowns, sniping at his advisors on Twitter, and occasional word-salad speeches that probably didn’t actually spread a lot of misinformation but also were not at all reassuring to hear from the boss during a crisis. (I eagerly await Joe Biden’s competitive entry in the category of incoherent word-salad speeches about technical subjects he will never understand.) A lot of the rot was there when DJT arrived, but it seems to me that competent leadership would have put us in a way better place. At the very least, there was no inherent reason for the whole C19 response to become yet another front in the f–king culture war.
Next, we got the murder of George Floyd. That could have gone unnoticed, because sometimes stuff like that is only local news. Probably for random reasons nobody could control, it became a nationwide story, and led to massive protests. This is a place where the president could plausibly have tried to calm things down instead of pour gasoline on the fire. There was even a good story to tell–the feds were dispatching people from the DoJ to independently investigate the incident, the cop who murdered him was fired and arrested. I don’t know if this could have worked, but calming things down isn’t in DJT’s repertoire. He’s made conciliatory and sensible public statements, and also outrageous inflamatory ones, and three guesses which one got more attention. The bit in DC with sending armed goons to chase away everyone (including the priest) from a church with so he could get a photo-op is a drop in the ocean, but it’s also like a perfect little demonstration of what kind of guy he is.
I started out thinking Trump was a terrible choice for president, but I didn’t think he would be this bad. The last six months have convinced me that he’s dangerously unfit for his office, and every day longer he stays in that office is another opportunity for him to do godawful damage to the country with his inability. I fully expect DJT to make the current crisis worse, and to mishandle the next one, and the next, and so on.
I’m not even sure Biden will do much better. But holy shit, it’s hard to imagine him doing much worse.
Donald Trump is a festering pile of maggot-encrusted botox whoBreakfast is the most important meal of the day.Are you sure that strikethrough quuuite brings this comment to the level generally expected here?
Hey, that’s why I struck it through!
Mostly I’m pissed off that we’ve managed to go from “everybody believes George Floyd’s death is awful and we need to change” to arguing about Trump again in the span of a week. Basically none of the things needed to long term fix the problem are within the President’s direct control, so I’m deeply worried that the Democratic mayors and governors who actually have the power to fix these things will just deflect the anger into Trump and everyone will pay attention to the Presidential race instead of the local races that matter. (This goes for the COVID response too. Cuomo getting anything other than outright disgusted condemnation for how NY handled the pandemic is baffling, let alone being specifically praised for competence.)
I feel like the media bears a significant amount of blame for inciting and sustaining these riots and turning what should have been a unifying issue into a divisive one. The complete failure to offer any perspective on the frequency of incidents like this and the legitimate reasons why black people might have far more encounters with the police, framing the issue as prima facie evidence of “white supremacy” and “institutional racism” instead of run-of-the mill horrible police brutality, the refusal to accurately report on the mob violence occurring alongside the peaceful demonstrations, the blatant attempts to turn everything into an attack on Trump, etc., etc., has all lent fuel to the fire. There are legitimate grievances, and what happened was horrible, but to a large extent this looks to me like an emotional outburst based on perception, and the media is certainly going out of their way to sustain that perception, reality be damned.
If it’s any consolation, people elsewhere on the political spectrum are mad at the media for completely different reasons, such as not focusing enough on the peaceful protests and not reporting enough on the violent and escalatory responses by police.
I think the institution to blame here is the police, not the media.
The claim that everybody agrees that we need to change is pretty clearly false – see, for example, MattM’s post in this very thread. The Blue Tribe thinks – in my view correctly – that many American police forces have ingrained cultures of bad behaviour, including institutional racism (no scare quotes) and systematic brutality, and reform is desperately needed; the Red Tribe largely disagrees.
I agree that in some cases specific accusations are exaggerated; I think that people understating the extent of the problems with American police culture is both more prevalent and a more serious problem.
And I don’t think attacking Trump for deliberately exacerbating the problem and egging on the worst excesses of the police is a bad thing.
I hear you. Personally, I would say that prior to the protests, riots and looting:
– Substantially everybody agreed that George Floyd’s death was awful.
– Some people thought that death required systematic change in the police departments, and some other people thought that the death was a crime for which the correct remedy was firing the police officers, sending them to jail, and suing them, the department and the city.
I confess that I wonder what changes are possible when the death happened in a city with a progressive police chief, a progressive mayor, 12 democratic city council members (plus 1 green, but no republicans).
I think removing qualified immunity and limiting police collective bargaining are promising, plus maybe some additional drug war legalization, but those all have costs too.
The media is making this seem like a pandemic of white-on-black and cop-on-black violence. I don’t think the facts bear that out. This very much feels like an isolated demand for rigor given the reality of the statistics on police violence and interracial crime, and thus the entire outburst is arguably based on an exaggerated premise. The media is definitely guilty of lending fuel to that fire by not offering any sense of perspective and acting as if the protests in their current form are morally justified.
I very much agree this is true, and a problem. I’m fully on board with changing cop culture to end the protection of bad cops, ending qualified immunity, demilitarizing police, and breaking the grip of police unions. Of course, I also believe that private property is sacrosanct and essential to the functioning of a civilized society, and that using force to defend the private property of innocent third parties is morally appropriate. It’s hard to sympathize when I see innocent people being beaten and having their businesses smashed, looted, and burned by mobs.
It’s not, but when you focus so much on Trump, you distract from the source of the problem. What I worry is going to happen is Trump will get voted out of office, everyone will pat themselves on the back and declare mission accomplished, and the Democrat / FOP machine politics in these metros will roll on unimpeded and nothing important will actually change.
Also, you’re making this a “red tribe vs blue tribe” thing, but most of the problems are occurring in Blue Tribe cities where all the relevant leaders are Democrats (and most of them Blue Tribe Democrats, although rank and file cops might be arguably more Red Tribe Democrats). So the opinions of the Red Tribers in the burbs and hinterlands shouldn’t really matter to their ability to address these issues.
My understanding is that American police officers – especially lower-ranking ones – are mostly and increasingly red-tribe Trump-supporting Republicans.
This. If the rioters are looting because they’re Marxist rebels operating on the premise Property Is Theft and assaulting people of races other than their own, I’m on the side of arresting them because their demands have frightful consequences. If you want me to be anti-police, make sure your demands are reasonable (and not in the sense that Marxism is actually a pretty intellectually consistent system!).
Almost every single police officer belongs to a union that almost exclusively endorses Democrats, so mapping the partisan politics onto the cultural tribes is fraught. Urban police (like most urban public employees) are classic blue collar Democrats.
Rural police may well be more Red Tribers with no caveats necessary, but they are by and large not the ones committing riot inducing murders.
Are you sure? I’m in no way confident you’re wrong, but a quick google search throws up far more hits of police unions endorsing Trump than Democrats.
Police are very definitely pro-Trump; in 2016 apparently 84% of cops preferred Trump. The national Fraternal Order of Police endorsed, as did a number of local FOPs, and the head of the Minneapolis Police Federation (the union guy from the department at the center of the George Floyd killing) appeared with Trump at a rally last year.
While the FOP refused to back Romney in 2012 (because of his opposition to public sector unions), it seems that Romney still had the support of 76% of individual cops; what’s more, the FOP endorsed Republicans in each of 2000, 2004, and 2008.
Because a lot of big departments are in cities that vote overwhelmingly Democratic, their endorsements for positions like mayor, alderman, etc., will naturally be for Democratic politicians, but I am not sure that there is any more to it than that.
Mea culpa on the FOP Trump endorsement. That was easy to check and I failed to do so.
Either way, they seem to be pretty good at getting what they want from the very Democratic metro governments, and that seems like a big problem.
My understanding is that American police officers – especially lower-ranking ones – are mostly and increasingly red-tribe Trump-supporting Republicans.
This has been sitting in my gut and it bugs me.
First off, I get the problem that even single-party polities can have trouble effecting policy changes, because sometimes things are just really hard to change. And sometimes you have an entrenched interest — a union, a guild, someone with veto power, that is stopping a real and necessary reform from taking place.
But something is just wrong with “state A cannot fix a problem inside state A, so we need protests and demonstrations in state B, and hey maybe some rioting it’s just the voice of the unheard.” When maybe state B was doing just fine B having people being heard.
It’s even a bigger problem if we are saying “well, the people in state B have sympathy with the entrenched group in state A.” This doesn’t give state B any steps it can take to stay protest-free.
Again, I really empathize with “we’re stuck in a bad place because entrenched interests want it to keep going.” I can come up with any number of those interests that code as red-tribe or blue-tribe, but it seems wrong to make it the problem, at all, of red- or blue-tribe people who live a thousand miles away.
I feel like we’re in that situation in the “Foundation series” when there are no more Salvor Hardins and the like to bail the world out.
I don’t know. For me, the seeds of destruction have been sown long before Trump, and they have blossomed, and anyone else atop this edifice would just be a bandaid, if at all. There is no system to preserve; it’s rot, rot, rot all the way down, by design or by neglect, who the hell knows.
Edit: perhaps I exaggerate. If there was NO system, everything would break down even more than it is. But the bureaucratic rot is substantial.
I don’t think COVID-19 or Floyd/police violence are issues for the federal government. I’ve got no race riots in my city, my police seem to be doing fine, and yes we have a relatively large black population (I live in the south). We’ve had I think a total of 50 C-19 cases in the entire county, and I think both my local government and my governor have done well. I’m not sure what the President was supposed to do to make it better.
Where these are problems in other states and communities, this largely seems to be the doing of those communities, the people in them, and their elected governments. NYC was bad for COVID-19, but maybe the government’s “put the infected in the nursing homes” policy was ill-advised. With regards to police brutality, these complaints are mainly coming from blue tribe cities with Democrat mayors and governors. If they would like to reform their police to be less brutal, they should, and are well-situated to do so. No one is stopping them, certainly not me or DJT. As for the riots, I don’t see much indication they want them to stop, as they are 1) not stopping and 2) appear to get wide-spread approval both in polls and from posts I see on social media.
I agree Trump’s clearing of the protestors at the church was worse than a crime, it was a mistake, but oh well. I’ll be voting for Trump in November because on the things that actually are in the purview of the chief executive, like trade, immigration, foreign wars and judicial appointments, Trump has the more correct policies and Biden does not.
I think the idea is that having competent, reassuring leader in place to make people feel heard would go a long way to alleviating things (as it has in the past). Instead, we have Trump provoking further resentment, stoking the flames, and dividing people even further.
Even if you don’t think solving police problems is a federal issue, unifying the country is definitely something a lot of people look to the President for in troubled times, and something we have gotten in similar situations in the past from both sides of the aisle.
I think it takes two to tango, though. The press does their best to frame every issue as to how whatever it is is awful and Trump’s fault, and then the press conferences are extended games of “racistsayswhat?”
I have my own complaints about trump, but I can’t help but feel that in an alternate universe where John McCain, Jeb/George Bush, Ted Cruz, or any other republican were in charge, they would be getting a thumbs up from the media/the left.
Perhaps that wouldn’t be true for you, but I think you’ll agree that that’s true for enough on the left that its reasonable to tend to ignore complaints about the bearing/gravitas/persona of republican president. I feel like the only president some people would be satisfied with is a democrat one, in which case, why worry about their approval?
Any single person who would bother to speak compassionately to the pain and anguish of millions of out of work people who believe the institutions of the country are designed to cause them death. The power of the president is not exclusively hard power – it is the bully pulpit and the ability to make people feel heard. Condemn riots and looting with one sentence, speak of the fear people feel in the second. Say something about how you know cops are better than that and announce the DOJ investigation. Score some cheap political points by reminding your base that everyone in power in Minnesota is a democrat – claim that keeping people safe is a non-partisan desire. Say the phrase “black lives matter” or if that will kill you with your base, just channel Lyndon Johnson and say “We will overcome”. This is literally the time for thoughts and prayers – people just want some goddamn compassion.
I cannot image a George Bush, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, Martin O’Malley or any other politician bungling this so badly.
The problem is that many of us do not believe that this is true, and that the “pain and anguish” is largely a result of innumeracy and a media induced panic brought on by political actors. It would be like compassionately responding to the Summer of the Shark by validating people’s irrational fear of sharks.
+1 to Conrad.
The last time I used this analogy was about COVID, but it applies here too.
If your child is terrified of monsters under the bed, the correct approach is to assure them that no, there are no monsters.
Not to let them sleep with a loaded firearm so they can kill the monsters if they happen to attack.
People who believe obviously wrong things (not, I have a different opinion things, but things that can be proven to be factually untrue) need to be corrected, not empathized with.
And how do you propose to factually prove your claims?
Cite the correct statistics? I keep meaning to do this but haven’t gotten around to it, but you can get information on the number and nature of police encounters from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and police shootings from the WaPo database. The naive* estimate would be ~40 killings of unarmed people with about ~55,000,000 police encounters per year. So the police are getting the right answer with regards to life on 54,999,960 out of 55,000,000, or a success rate of 99.99993%.
If the people who, as ltowel said,
are correct, then we have done a catastrophically bad job designing these institutions. They’re only correctly causing death 0.00007% of the time. The institutions are unbelievably bad at accomplishing their purpose and need to be completely scrapped and redesigned from the ground up to cause death.
* I say naive estimate because this doesn’t account for some of the other entries in the WaPo database, like “unknown” armed status, or “toy gun.” Is “toy gun” a Tamir Rice situation where we had an innocent person playing with a toy gun mistakenly shot, or is that a situation with a really dumb criminal who was robbing a store with a toy gun and the cops shot him? I’d have to dissect that. Also break it down by race. Would probably be a good idea to separate out the police encounters where the cops initiate the encounter versus a member of the public. Regardless, the naive estimate is probably right within an order of magnitude.
I believe the origin of term is that bully means really good/fun, as in ‘its really fun to tell people what you think and they have to listen because I’m important’.
@zero
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has done a ton of work compiling these statistics.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/the-myth-of-systemic-police-racism
This op-ed from yesterday was published in the WSJ (paywalled), but you can likely find lots of excerpts from it.
Yeah, I have a vague impression that it’s still common knowledge that Teddy Roosevelt liked to say “Bully!” and he meant 😀 , not “Take that person’s lunch money!”
@Conrad / Matt
Are you suggesting that because people’s beliefs are irrational a politician couldn’t use them to calm people down? Or are you just saying that they shouldn’t.
@baconbits9
Neat! I’d never really thought about the etymology of the term.
Shouldn’t. Should correct them, but I don’t think they would listen to him anyway. Really, the best way for Trump to end the riots would be for him to come out in favor of them.
Shouldn’t.
You can indulge your child’s “monsters under the bed” fallacy if you want. In the short/immediate term it may even look like the best option (“all I have to do is check under the bed with a flashlight, claim I scared them away and he goes to sleep? sounds like a great deal!”)
But long term, your child needs to understand that monsters aren’t real. It is absolutely not in their interest for you to allow them to continue to believe otherwise.
This is the one area where I actually kind of sympathize with the rioters. If I believed what they did, I’d be rioting too. If it were true that we had an epidemic of white cops routinely murdering black men for no good reason other than pure racism and getting away with it, violence to overturn such a regime would be completely and entirely justified. The problem is none of that is true – not even remotely.
For a partisan-flipped example, imagine the Westboro Baptist Church was more popular and more violent. Imagine hordes of them roaming the streets smashing windows because they blame societal tolerance of homosexuality for God punishing us with COVID-19. Would you say that these people “just need to be heard?” Would you think it’s a good idea for Trump to have a press conference where he proudly shouts their slogan (“God hates ***s”)? No. They would be wrong, and they would need to be told that they are wrong. And “just make gay marriage illegal so they’ll stop” would not be an option worth considering.
I made a sign for my son’s closet door that said “NO MONSTERS! EVER!!!” underlined three times so you knew it was super serious.
I was saying that I believe any milquetoast politician could’ve delivered a unifying anti-riot sentiment, and suggesting an approach how. I’d think acknowledging the validity of the protest while condemning the riots is the way you’d do it.
In this other universe, Jeb would send out thoughts and prayers for those suffering from police violence while condemning those opportunists using other people’s suffering , you’d call it meaningless grandstanding and we’d all forget about it in a week.
@Matt M
I don’t love your counterfactual – I don’t see that slogan as equivalent to the ones I mentioned – it’s more like an “All Cops Are Bastards”
Here’s another one: There are massive March for Life protests across the country emboldened by anger at the government for banning masses and equating Covid deaths with abortion deaths. Underneath that there’s a current of out of work people looting, anarchists smashing shit and some possibly racially motivated violence. I’d expect an average politician to share some platitudes about religious freedom, valuing life etc. Wouldn’t you?
Sorta like this, maybe? I think this would have been applauded for any other milquetoast politician. For one particular politician, it was removed from several social media sites, and most people haven’t seen it.
@Controls Freak
Yep, that’s a good statement and video and pretty much exactly what I’d expect and want. The only criticisms I have are that it would’ve been better last Saturday instead of last Wednesday, and I’m not convinced it would’ve been delivered as effectively without the backing track and editing. I agree with your post completely.
Kinda disagree with that. Issue for the president? Maybe maybe not. Since the president has huge latitude on how to instruct the DoJ to prosecute things, a president who cares about police violence and brutality can very easily make a significant impact on this without any laws. Furthermore, they are in a definite position to end qualified immunity for police though SCOTUS.
Issue for the Senate/House? Absolutely is an issue. They’re the ones who can end police militarization/sending military gear to state forces. They’re the ones that can end police qualified immunity in law. They’re the ones that can use federal funding as carrot/stick for enforcing state police reforms. Saying this isn’t a federal government issue at all is pretty wrong imo.
Question to that: why hasn’t it happened yet then? This issue certainly isn’t coming out of nowhere, it’s been a very big flashpoint since at least 2012 with Trayvon Martin. Claiming that people can just do it themselves seems incorrect just on the basis that a lot of people have wanted to for a while, and yet it hasn’t happened. Unless you think I’m overestimating how many people see this as a problem, and that the majority of voters aren’t interested in reform?
It hasn’t happened because the people who can make it happen aren’t actually motivated to do so. Most of these cities have had single party Democratic rule for decades, so the only chance to “throw the bastards out” is in the local primaries, which approximately nobody pays attention to or participates in except for people organized to do so, i.e. the police unions i.e. one of the prime contributors to the problem.
I can agree with that, and i think these riots and massive protests are a …powerful way to raise awareness of these issues and promote an increase in voting.
Not if all the coverage focuses on how this is all Trump’s fault.
I mean, my opinion is that it’s not a solvable problem. There are so few unarmed people killed by police each year (~9 black people, ~41 of all races, plus some unknowns), but so many police/public contacts (~55M-60M) and arrests (~11.5M)…I don’t know how to you get that down to zero beyond “and suddenly everyone was perfect and no one was bad and no one makes mistakes.”
I understand that’s only talking about lethal force, and violence itself is a muddier issue.
However, the protestors seem to disagree. They believe this is a solvable problem. The people in power in their communities tend to be people who agree with them that Black Lives Matter. I should think they should be able to get together and implement whatever policies they think will fix this.
I’m extremely skeptical such policies exist, but I’m also not any sort of impediment, and whatever they do I will be cheering from the sidelines that it works because I would like the number of people killed by police to be zero.
I mean, i don’t disagree it’s a hard problem, but i think there is definitely a lot of low hanging fruit here. For one, while ending police violence is hard, increasing prosecution for it and ensuring police don’t get away with it is much easier. Just get a good DA with some scruples, and/or end police qualified immunity.
But to your point that you don’t think this is a solvable problem, another question: how do other countries do it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country has the US rate per 10 million the worst of any first world country. You can blame some of that on the prevalence of guns/gun culture in the US, but i don’t think that’s the entire story
Perhaps cases of police violence could be reviewed/prosecuted by outside prosecutors who don’t have to work with the police department every day.
Beyond that, I think the framing might be wrong. It’s not that the police get special treatment, it’s that other people who don’t have strong legal representation get crappier treatment. Not in all cases, for sure, but it’s pretty rare I see the facts of a case brought against a police officer who got off and think I would have voted differently. On the hand, I see cases against non-police people* all the time that I think they got screwed by either overzealous prosecutors or bad plea bargains. The goal shouldn’t be “treat police officers like everyone else,” the goal should be “treat everyone else like police officers.”
I do not have nor have I looked for data to back this up, it’s just the impression I get.
From your link, they don’t? There are plenty of countries on there with way worse outcomes than the US.
I think the US is a large and diverse nation, with pockets of high criminal activity. I’m not surprised that small, homogeneous, low crime nations have few police killings. I’d be interested to see how frequent police killings are in, say, Vermont.
* I really wish we had a term for people who aren’t police. “Civilian” isn’t right because the police aren’t military and shouldn’t be thought of that way. “Citizens” doesn’t work because the police are also citizens and some of the people they police aren’t citizens. “The public” doesn’t work either because “the public” is everyone.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that the US also has more crime than most of those countries, so there is just going to be a lot more interaction with police here vs some of the other places.
@Conrad Honcho
Sure, i would love that!
I mean, i think both can be true. Police definitely have a significant backing in the courts, not just from their union and other officers https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/nyregion/testilying-police-perjury-new-york.html
and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
but also from lack of prosecution for very clear cases
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/fs9i0yj/
and from the inability for citizens to bring civil claims against them due to qualified immunity.
I would be fine with that end goal, sure.
Sorry, i may not have been clear enough. I was talking about first world countries in that link specifically. Those ones do much much better than the US
That is a very good claim, i would be curious is it’s a few individual states dragging the US as a whole up or not.
@JayT
That’s also a very good point, but we literally do worse than Mexico, and i would assume they have a higher crime rate per capita.
Probably a lot of unsolveds, too. Perhaps this comes down to the effectiveness (or lack their of) of Mexican police.
To some extent, it has. That doesn’t help with issues in other cities though.
Two possibilities spring immediately to mind:
1. They don’t know how to.
2. They don’t actually want to (at least, not relative to all the other issues they could work on).
Neither of these problems get any better by moving them from the local level to the national level.
Most likely, it’s hard to do. Taking on the police is hard and unpleasant, and the only way the mayors/city council members are going to do it is if the voters make it clear that failing to do so will get them voted out of office.
Yeah, albatross11 has it right. If you piss off the police, you get stuff like this happening to you; here’s a Minneapolis city councilman claiming that whenever he’s complained about the police, police will slow-walk calls in his ward. Police are generally popular and powerful, and tangling with them is probably more trouble than it’s worth for most politicians.
I think this is exactly a good reason why some progress can be made at the national level; things like Amash’s bill to end qualified immunity, Obama’s EO limiting the transfer of military-grade equipment to police departments and establishing oversight for such equipment, and DOJ interventions all are federal-level approaches that have some promise.
There was a somewhat bipartisan consensus in favour of criminal justice reform, and a few measures at the federal level could make a difference all at once, rather than having to have a thousand different cities each fighting it out with politically powerful police departments.
Trump:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-police-nice-suspects/story?id=48914504
Except Trump didn’t change any laws, and isn’t in charge of the MPD. Minneapolis and Minnesota can make whatever laws and policies they want about the behavior of their police, and Trump can’t stop them.
Then Trump is plainly a liar. Not that’s news to anybody I suppose.edit: It was actually a pretty standard politician lie and not that interesting. Please ignore.
He does have form for trying to force states to do things if he disapproves of their actions.
Trump could stop them, except three years ago Trump decided to stop investigating police departments for civil rights abuses, and also stopped the use of consent decrees used to reform police departments. If Trump can’t stop them, it’s because he willingly gave up the tools.
Do you genuinely believe that the federal government has no particular role in fighting COVID-19? How about the simple image that the president consistently refuses to wear a mask and that lots of people seem to be taking their cues from him? How about procurement of PPE in advance of the pandemic reaching American shores? Instead, the federal government was actively seizing it from state or local purchasers because the federal government did not procure sufficient supplies on their own. We had a long warning and taking action on PPE would not have required going against any GOP agendas and would not have hurt the economy. How about not burying the CDC’s own recommendations for what measures reopening businesses should take? I mean, even this meme does a good job highlighting things that the administration merely needed to not actively undo.
So, you don’t think we should have restricted travel from China or Italy at the outset? You think that e.g. Wyoming should have tried to develop its own SARS CoV-2 test, or independently assess the multiple competing tests offered by private vendors some of whom are opportunistic snake-oil salesmen?
Pandemics are one of the things that, even as a capital-L Libertarian, I think we really do want the Federal government heavily involved in.
Police brutality, there are legitimate separation-of-powers issues, but when you have people in California protesting a police murder in Minnesota the way that e.g. Belgians conspicuously don’t protest police shootings in London, I think you kind of have to admit that you’ve allowed the issue to become federalized in your nation in a way that can’t be fixed by just throwing it back to the states.
Agreed on the pandemic part.
But the latter point about the distributed protests really seems more a factor of modern media, social or otherwise, that make far flung events seems immediate. I don’t think this means the separation of powers needs to shift any more than the protests in Poland(!) over this do.
Eliminating qualified immunity and civil forfeiture could be done at the federal level (congress + president). Neither Democrats nor Republicans have done so so far.
Civil forfeiture exists under state law as well, although I’m not sure if that is the case for all states. And we had a recent post sketching the ways in which some states make civil actions against police difficult.
Trump is unequal to the task, but any solution that amounts to “If only Minnesota had voted for Democrats, this wouldn’t have happened” has a pretty gaping hole, too.
I actually do believe that if Hillary had won, *this wouldn’t be happening.
And by “this” I mean the scale and intensity of the riots, not the officer killing Floyd. The reason these riots are as bad as they are is because they are being roughly sold (particularly by the media) as anti-Trump riots and a lot of potential rioters hate Trump.
If someone the rioters were more sympathetic to was in the public position of authority, they’d be far more inclined to behave more reasonably.
A different President would probably also be willing to appeal to the protesters and at least verbally address their concerns, rather than antagonizing them.
Eh, I don’t think there’s anything Trump could possibly have said (except maybe, “I resign”) that would have satisfied the protestors to any reasonable degree.
Trump’s early messaging on this was “You should honor the memory of George Floyd by protesting peacefully, and not by committing violence and destruction in his name, which he probably wouldn’t have wanted.”
That’s not particularly antagonistic. It’s entirely reasonable and acknowledges that something bad happened and is actually more mature and reasonable than I would have expected from Trump.
While acknowledging that basically nothing would make many of these people like Trump, can we at least admit that “when the looting starts the shooting starts”, threats to “dominate”, threats to deploy active duty military, etc. are not the sort of thing someone not trying to be deliberately provocative would say?
Trump is just acknowledging that reality is starting to look an awful lot like the Division.
He could just stop talking. That would make a lot of people a lot happier.
Especially his supporters, I suspect.
For once, my liberal friends seemed glad that Trump was staying out.
Normally they are really big on having him Do Something Stupid that they can get angry about, and the media helps egg him on to Do Something Stupid. I am not a fan of this.
But most people seemed aware that nothing good would come and were fine with the White House issuing simple platitudes.
I disagree because this sort of thing was happening with great frequency under Obama. I think this is Trump’s first race riot.
I also believe this wouldn’t be happening if Hillary had won, because
(a) Hillary’s Justice Department would have had a much higher (than zero) likelihood of cracking down on the MPD’s history of abuses
(b) Trump being the President, and spewing the rhetoric he spews, emboldens and encourages police to be abusive.
It’s not just that the protesters hate Trump; it’s that they view police as an evil occupying army who are culturally and philosophically in league with Trump. This is about the whole mentality he represents and the subculture and values of his supporters, of which Trump is a symptom as much as a cause.
A) Amy Klobuchar is directly responsible for George Floyd’s killer being able to wear a badge in 2020, and she was on the short list to be Biden’s VP. What makes you think Hillary “career party woman” Clinton would come down hard on fellow Democrats?
B) This must be why police abuse and resultant race riots basically never happened during the Obama presidency (snark, but seriously, death by cop has been overall pretty flat for years. If “Trump’s rhetoric” makes police brutality more likely, where is it in the data?)
With a democratic governor and mayor? No it wouldn’t have.
Seriously? trump is encouraging this? this has nothing to do with it?
The Ferguson and Baltimore riots happened under Obama, who was presumably seen in a pretty favorable light by most protesters. This seems like at least some evidence against your idea.
The Ferguson and Baltimore riots happened under Obama, which seems like some evidence against your idea.
(I thought the site had eaten my previous comment.)
I was at a peaceful protest two days ago when The President ordered federal law enforcement officers, without notifying the city, to disperse the crowds with force, teargas and flash bangs so that he could take a photo in front of a church. I don’t know what overall policy this fits in to, but I cannot overstate how strongly I object to it.
I wonder what this will mean for the religious right.
The Religious Right has been hollowed out.
Lots of liberals hated the Religious Right and tried to drive a wedge between them and the conservatives. Well, good job. Do you like the result?
This is a warning for other people who try wedge issues to break a group apart. You might not like what you end up with if you succeed.
Hmm, the idea either that the Religious Right has been hollowed* or that it’s a result of liberals driving a wedge between them and conservatives are both new to me. Would you mind elaborating?
*Unless you mean here that the religious right was never actually motivated by religion, which is an argument I hear all the time on the left.
[placeholder so I remember to reply when I can look things up]
I couldn’t quite find what I remembered before, but I’ll give the best I can.
The Religious Right are no longer the force they were. They are a part of a coalition that doesn’t care much about what they care about. Even among Evangelicals, during the primary it was notable that Trump’s major support was from people who “sometimes” or “seldom/never” attend church. [1][2] There is a manic clinging to Trump, but it is out of fear as being seen as under attack. It’s much more of a social or cultural movement now than religious.
And if Republicans are your outgroup, the irreligious among them are the kind you probably like the least. Church attendance is positively correlated with warm feelings towards racial minorities, are positively correlated with church attendance and negatively with strict border control [2]. But this group has been getting squeezed more and more and more. 75% of Trump voters identify as Protestant or Catholic [2] but lots of them are just barely there: 43% of Trump voters attend “a few times a year” or “never.” [3] It’s more of a cultural description than a religious one.
Political coalitions are always full of weird alliances, and the Democrats have their own.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/03/29/where-is-trumps-evangelical-base-not-in-church/?noredirect=on
[2] https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/religious-trump-voters
[3] https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls
Was this the same peaceful protest that had set the church on fire the day before?
No, it was a peaceful protest that happened in the same location where other people torched a church the day before.
Eh, I do get kind of annoyed with the “peaceful protestors” meme. I have seen peaceful protests, where people peaceably assemble, peaceably demonstrate, and then peaceably leave.
I have also seen “the peaceful protests turned violent…” which really just means, “the violent rioters didn’t start their violent riot until enough people had arrived and it got dark enough.” I’ve also seen “peaceful protestors” who serve as human shields to the violent rioters throwing rocks behind them.
I’m not saying that was going on here, but I’d bet the people who torched the church were also peaceful until they decided it was time to torch the church.
What is actually relevant is the specific protest in question, and by all accounts I can see, it was 100% peaceful. Heck, we have a firsthand witness in this very thread who can tell you that.
This specific protest apparently included the priests who ran St John’s church. The people responsible for the property were sitting right there!
As John said, any other President would have at least figured this out. You have intelligence. Maybe you someone out to take a look, ask who is in charge, ask what it would take to get them to leave.
Minor quibble – I don’t think it was the specific priests from St. John’s church. The stuff I’ve read was that it was priest from the same diocese as St. John’s and a seminarian from St. John’s who were at the church giving out water and snacks. (just to make things more confusing, the priest in question, Virginia Gerbasi, is the priest of a separate St. John’s in Georgetown).
That being said, the priest of St. John’s (the one near the white house) came out and condemned this action.
Can and will, it wasn’t in any way shape or form out of control. Put a gun to my head, and I can’t promise you no one had thrown a water bottle, but the vibe was definitely more “chant with your grandma” than “get wild with antifa.”
I would like you to point to a single other example in the last fifty years of federal officers clearing out a lawful protest without warning in order to clear the way for a president to walk somewhere.
I notice that you didn’t actually answer cassandrus.
@Scoop
I don’t disagree with Trump clearing the people out, but there’s disagreement as to the methods. According to official statements, they issued verbal commands and when people did not comply, they used force. According to Aftagley, who was there, they did not issue verbal commands and simply opened fire with smoke/rubber bullets. I kind of believe Aftagley, because government officials lie with impunity but I’ve never seen him do that.
@Conrad
For what it’s worth, I’ve read multiple other accounts of people not being ordered to disperse in advance as well. So either the orders weren’t given, or they weren’t given loudly enough to be heard by a significant percentage of the crowed. (And Lafayette park isn’t *that* big, so some loudspeakers and bullhorns probably would have been enough to do the trick even over a loud crowd.)
There’s also the matter of them clearing out the crowd in advance of the 7PM curfew. Now to be sure I doubt people would have cleared out on the dot at 7PM. But the choice to go early certainly suggests that the police were not, shall we say, using best efforts to clear the crowd out peacefully before resorting to physical force.
There are conflicting narratives of this event:
From the U.S. Park Police
Apologies for the seriatim posting–I’ll take a break after this. But the park police did use gas-that-causes-tears-and-fits-the-CDC-criteria-to-be-called-tear-gas. They appear to be hair-splitting about the fact that they didn’t use CS gas, as opposed to other tear-inducing agents.
As noted above, there are also multiple on the ground accounts of no warnings being given.
Finally, the suggestion that the reaction was induced by protestor behavior on the ground, as opposed to the desire to stage the church photo-op, simply isn’t credible. After all, Trump immediately walked over as soon as the protestors were cleared out. You don’t do something like that without at least a little advance planning. There are also press reports that clearing out the park was done at the orders of Bill Barr, although those reports are obviously, and necessarily, more speculative.
All-in-all, I would suggest that this isn’t so much “conflicting narratives” as “attempting to paper the record after the fact.”
Thanks Cassandrus.
1) I offer the alternate report because, in my view, almost every report I have seen on the protests/riots is completely one-sided. I can select a group of sources that tell me that the protests are mostly peaceful with the occasional bad actor that is either a) instigated by aggressive police or b) actually a white supremacist trying to discredit the protesters. I can also select a group of sources that tell me that the riots are a completely lawless excuse for looting, chaos, and mayhem that has little to do with Mr. Floyd. Neither collection of sources is accurate. While the Park Police’s account may not be 100% accurate, it may help some update their understanding of what happened in that park.
2)
The fact that Trump walked over as soon as the protesters left is not really evidence at all that aggressive enforcement wasn’t caused by behavior on the ground. Which is more plausible:
A) Secret Service requested help from the Park Police in clearing a path. They went into the park and immediately started using rubber bullets and acts-like-tear-gas-but-technically-not-tear-gas to clear the crowd. Once the crowd was cleared, Trump walked over.
B) Secret Service requested help from the Park Police in clearing a path. They went into the park, requested disbursal over loudspeakers, and began to erect temporary fencing for a clear path. After coming under attack from violent protesters (perhaps a very small portion of the crowd), they responded with force. Once the crowd was cleared, Trump walked over.
YMMV on which of A or B is more plausible. But the last sentence of those scenarios provides nearly zero probative value in proving A or B.
It looks to me that deciding on A or B depends more strongly on your priors than on the actual reports.
The Washington Post has a chronicle of various voices, including those inside the White House, of what was going on. We can add Aftagley’s to it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/this-cant-be-happening-an-oral-history-of-48-surreal-violent-biblical-minutes-in-washington/2020/06/02/6683d36e-a4e3-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html
https://archive.is/xQxRm if paywall
But isn’t option B pretty much excluded by the fact that noone at the protest appears to have heard a demand to disperse? I totally agree that it’s a different kettle of fish if the police were using best efforts to clear things out and eventually had to escalate as repeated demands to disperse were ignored. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Either the park police’s statement that they ordered people to disperse is a lie, or the orders were given so ineffectually that it might as well be a lie.
(Also, rereading my post, I apologize to the extent my tone imputed the Park Police’s statement to you.)
I thought option B was excluded by Trump walking over right after the crowd was cleared out?
To be clear about my motivation here – I am not arguing in favor of either narrative – just that its not obvious, on its face, that one is false.
We have the word of Park Police vs. the word of protesters as to what happened to cause the escalation. It would be very easy for either or both to be lying.
Both are motivated to tell the story they want to tell. Indeed, from the perspective of those who are talking, both may be telling what they believe is an accurate version. Lafayette Park is not that big, but it’s also not that small. Different portions of a crowd there could easily experience different things.
One piece of evidence I have (that I trust) in favor of either narrative is Aftagley’s reporting which strengthens my belief in the protester side of things.
On the other hand, in the WaPo link posted by Mr. Scizorhands, the CNN reporter notes that she heard warnings.
What’s the point of focusing on the exact details of how the protestors were moved? The force used was no more or less excessive than in a hundred other places this week. If the police were moving to prevent imminent destruction or death I doubt anyone would care.
The problem was that the objective was unusually stupid. The need to use force to disperse that crowd was absolutely predictable, and there was no good reason to do so.
Closing a highway for a planned motorcade is fine. Deciding to close the highway in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam is stupid.
+1 to gbdub.
I don’t think it’ll matter much, because the outrage meter for Trump has always been pegged at 11.
@Scoop
There were multiple reports by people on the scene of no warning being given. I can probably dig them up if needed. So either no warning was given or it wasn’t given loudly enough to be heard by a substantial part of the protest (and Lafayette park isn’t really that big—a couple of loudspeakers probably would have done the trick.)
There’s also the matter of them clearing out the protest in advance of the 7PM curfew (i.e., while it was still entirely permissible to be in the park). While I certainly don’t think we need to credulously assume that people would have cleared out at 7PM on the dot, it does suggest that the cops were not, shall we say, trying particularly hard to avoid using physical force against the protesters.
The late 90s WTO protests would fit this bill wouldn’t they? I remember a lot of people being upset how the protestors were treated when clearing them out so the meetings could be held.
@JayT
Weren’t the WTO protests famously violent and chaotic? I’ll admit to not having a timeline of the events in ’94, but (assuming I’m right about the WTO protests), I don’t think it’s a good analogy for what took place at Lafayette on Monday.
Don’t be ridiculous. Only Nixon can go to mingle with the protesters; everyone knows that.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I am fairly certain that if Obama, or Bush or Clinton or the Other Bush or the Other Clinton or Cruz or whoever had wanted to go to St. John’s on that night, their Secret Service liason to the Park Police would have reported back that this would require tear-gassing apparently peaceful protesters and did they really want to do that, and the photo op would have been rescheduled or relocated. None of them are stupid enough to pay that cost for a photo op.
More generally,
Yeah, this is one of those policies that, if true, is going to have me wanting a different President (or none at all). There’s nothing in the Constitution about POTUS being able to go whenever he wants, wherever he wants. The President is not above the law, and the law for everybody else has generally been that if it would take excessive force to clear a path for them to go someplace safely they don’t go to that place. See, e.g., the bit where everyone in DC who isn’t the president is subject to a curfew.
When Obama visited the city I was in they closed off the streets he was going to drive on to all traffic. It’s how things are done: if the president is using the road, you’re not.
I’m going to guess they announced that well in advance, and closed off the streets with zero violence. And almost certainly listened to the advice of local officials saying “No, if you close off that street at that time you’ll seriously piss off fifty thousand registered voters”.
The Trumpian version is to show up without warning, with a combat engineering vehicle leading the convoy and bulldozing its way through the gridlock. Because, hey, whatever degree of force they feel necessary, right?
That would be bad.
But man, that would be cathartic.
We routinely allow presidents to shut down whole freeways whenever they feel like it. what trump did looks worse than that, but caused less harm. Can we please keep a sense of perspective?
If we’re comparing violence with non-violent harms involving no injury, the perspective of almost the entire human race is going to be that you sound like an Evil Robot for even making the comparison. Trump, for all his shortcomings in other areas, is functionally neurotypical enough to understand that violence is perceived differently than other harms, and chose the plan with the gratuitous violence.
I’m not sure I’d call the secret service cordoning off a freeway non-violent, it’s just that people normally don’t bother resisting. And given that, as far as I’ve seen, no one was hurt in trump’s violence, the two seem pretty comparable if you’re dispassionate about it. that doesn’t mean it was smart for trump to do, it was not, but the problem is image, not result.
You don’t consider “subjected to tear gas” to be harm?
“People normally don’t bother resisting” is also disingenuous. People normally get plenty of advance notice to leave the area being cordoned off.
@AG says:
My understanding, which might be incorrect, is that brief exposure to tear gas is briefly painful, but not particularly dangerous and causes little to no long lasting harm. It’s about the lowest level of activity one can reasonably construe as violence, and I don’t think I’d say anyone was harmed.
My understanding was that the crowd was ordered to disperse, didn’t, and got gassed in a pretty compressed time frame. More time should definitely have been given, but if I’m driving down the freeway and run into a motorcade, I don’t get much warning either, and If I try to ignore the barriers, I’ll be met with considerably more violence than tear gas.
https://argumate.tumblr.com/post/619962891976785921/gaysemiotics-bearded-shepherd-cnn-live
Does this look like no harm to you? Does that match anything like what encountering a motorcade barrier back looks like?
um, yeah. it looks like no one got seriously injured. a few people got shoved.
it looks like precisely what would happen if a bunch of people refused to move out of an area that was going to become a motorcade route. I walk past that area frequently on my way home from work, and I can attest that the cops do not fuck around near the white house, even in normal times.
You have very different standards from me. In fact, the cameraman that got punched, and then the reporter whom the cop struck with a baton from behind while she was leaving were both Australian journalists, and the PM got involved in getting those cops put on administrative leave. So people in power thought that it was inappropriate use of force.
@AG says:
That looks to me like a camera getting struck, not a face.
And people in power are famously honest and level headed, right? They never jump on bandwagons…
If she was injured, presumably she went to some sort of hospital. If I’m wrong, it should be easy to show that and I’ll recant.
@cassander
Usually when a camera is struck, it hits the person (usually their face, which it appears was there in this case) behind it with equal force.
Besides being a required level of proof that seems to be applied here without reason, plenty of people can get injured and not go to a hospital.
But like, look at that video, does it appear this level of aggression is warranted? Honestly, from your view, why is that amount of force ok on a journalist?
Since cassander suggested the comparison to a motorcade, can we find out how many people have been teargassed to make way for motorcades, or how often news crews are punched to make way for them?
My prior: I don’t like the way Presidents can get roads shut down for their convenience/security.
But emptying a flow is very easy compared to emptying a stock.
Close off all entry points to a road with barriers. Existing traffic naturally leaves the road. In a matter of minutes, you are done.
To limit the example to cars, compare to emptying a parking lot. You need to find the drivers, get them into their cars, convince them to leave. Or tow them. And what if the owner is in the car but doesn’t want to leave?
Around 2010, I lived in a very tall building above a highway and a river. President Obama came to my city to speak. Around maybe 4:30 PM, I noticed the major highway was totally empty. This was weird, so I kept watching. After a while, a huge motorcade came by, and I realized it was the president. What struck me was that on the river, which paralleled the highway, there was this weird police boat with guns speeding alongside the motorcade. I’d never seen anything like it—it was like something out of a movie–something about the unexpected, professional demonstration of force. I’m pretty sure this was not announced, at least not in full detail. The roads, river, and nearby paths had obviously been cleared out pretty quickly and thoroughly for that short time period, probably about 20 minutes. There was not a person in sight. I saw this happen twice—I can’t remember if it was the same trip or not. I’m sure they closed the other streets that were used also.
Since then, I’ve assumed it was normal procedure to forcibly clear out the public if the president has to get through. (I’ve seen the same thing, minus the police boat, done for sports team motorcades!) I don’t know when this started, and I didn’t have an objection to it—it was done very professionally and quickly. This is, of course, a separate issue from the use of teargas or smoke bombs—the method matters, and the circumstances matter.
Actually, I would predict that many presidents would forgo a planned photo-op if it would require riot police and a helicopter flyover to clear the space.
I’m hearing a lot of commentary in conservative media suggesting that Trump chose that space specifically because it would require riot police to clear it out. A “show of strength” or something.
As a supposed “law and order” candidate it doesn’t exactly reflect well on Trump if the public image is of him hiding in the White House Basement while unruly mobs storm just outside the gates, and he is powerless to disperse them.
The reported narrative, which makes to since to me, is that the Square was already supposed to be clear in order to expand the White House security perimeter.
This makes a lot of sense when you consider the WH security perimeter was starting to fail, the Secret Service was getting wounded, and the lights were going out (you know, certain people at the top of the White House may have special imaging tools to help them see in the night that work better with the lights out…probably not exactly for reconnaissance purposes. )
See, the smart way to deal with that problem is to have a photo op at one of the many, many places that are neither the White House basement nor the site of a peaceful protest. Or, as with Nixon, hold the photo op with the peaceful protesters. Either way, do the location scouting and the prep work to ensure that the photo op can be stage-managed the way you want, and tell everyone that whenever and wherever you wound up holding the op is what you wanted all along. This shows you as a strong leader who can get their way, even if it was really your plan D after your team told you they couldn’t make plans A, B, or C work.
What we got, either shows that the bit with the tear-gassed protesters is what Trump wanted all along, or reveals him to be the sort of “leader” who can’t get his way.
I think this is woefully naive. If Trump had approached the protestors to talk and they gave him the photo op he wanted those protestors would be vilified on social media for humanizing the horrible monster that is Trump. They know this. Even if the location were scouted ahead of time and they agreed to talk to Trump, it would almost certainly be a trick: they’re not going to give the monster his photo op.
They do not want anything from Trump except his resignation.
If we’re imagining that the protesters will flee for fear of the Social Death Penalty if caught in the same camera frame as Donald J. Trump, then what did they need the tear gas for?
Also, as photo ops go, Trump parting the protesters like Moses with the Red Sea would have been a pretty effective way of showing him as The Man In Charge. Just remember the magic words, “I meant to do that”.
Coincidentally, I happened to be literally at the Supreme Court on the day that they handed down an opinion concerning just such an event. There was a previously-established protest. The President called an audible in real time, wanting to stop by a restaurant; the secret service decided to move the lawful protest “without warning”. They weren’t even physically in his way. Just the location they were in, the secret service felt like they couldn’t adequately protect the President while he was eating outside (within certain “shot lines” or whatever of where the protest was). Not necessarily anything equivalent about the means by which they were cleared, but just the fact that, yeah, when the President wants to go somewhere, they pretty much make it happen… even if you have an otherwise lawful protest all set up and everything.
Interestingly that’s a qualified immunity case as well! Telling protesters to go somewhere different then where you tell supporters to go strikes me as something weird to have personal liability for, but I’m not a legal scholar…
You’re missing the one that was really getting at me last week: the Joe Scarborough thing. Why aren’t more people talking about that one? Why are Trump’s statements on that not the most shameful things he’s said at least since “Lock her up”?
I just found it amusing that Scarborough does not enjoy the taste of his own conspiracy-mongering medicine.
Fitting into the overall consideration that journalists/”people on TV” seem to think they’re some sort of sacred priest caste. They can lie with impunity, accuse people of ridiculous and unfounded conspiracies, impugn the character of anyone they don’t like, but the instant the target of their ire claps back at them, “oh, it’s an attack on the free press!” No, “journalists,” you are not special.
Joe was happy to dish it out. Joe could not take it.
Please provide a citation for Joe Scarborough falsely accusing someone of murder.
I don’t think he’s ever done that. I didn’t say anything about murder. But he was one of the chief Trump-Russia conspiracy theorists. As soon as Jeffery Epstein hung himself Scarborough immediately tried to blame the Russians.
Is this what you are referring to? Because that’s not the same as falsely accusing someone of murder.
That was one example, yes. And Trump didn’t accuse Joe of murder. He was just asking questions. Asking for an investigation. What’s wrong with that, right? Just like Scarborough spent every morning for years speculating about how investigations might uncover that Trump was a treasonous Russian spy. Nothing wrong with that. Scarborough has extremely low standards for evidence, but that’s okay for him because he’s a Journalist, I guess.
The bit that Cassandrus linked to isn’t, I think, trying to blame the Russians. It’s saying that America has become a place like Russia, where inconvenient people get quietly murdered.
Biden will almost certainly begin a new war that Trump would not have.
War and military conflict is where the President is strongest and has almost untrammeled authority.
Trump has not begun a new war, a first for a US president since Carter, maybe earlier. The worst foreign policy decision he’s made in Utilitarian terms is supporting the Saudi blockade in the Yemeni war, a horrific decision but it’s just a continuation of an Obama decision to support it in 2015.
By contrast, Obama intervened in Libya twice, intervened in Syria and Iraq, and approved the Yemen famine. Biden promises to be a continuation of the Obama presidency and Obama’s actions were not unusual by the standards of his predecessors.
If Biden or Clinton had become President in 2016, what war would or could they have initiated that Trump has refrained from?
Trump did get quite close to starting a new war when he blew up Qasem Soleimani earlier this year.
The most obvious places would be the ongoing military conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Historically, probably something in Central/Latin America and between Venezuela, massive drug gangs, and the migratory “caravan” crisis there’s probably an excuse somewhere.
Realistically, the US can start a war with just about anyone it wants and the conflicts are usually discretionary, driven more by domestic politics than international necessity.
The Netherlands?
Why? Obama presided over US policy at a time when the Syrian conflict started, when it escalated to a full-scale civil war, when civilians were nerve-gassed when it became an international war, and when it passed through the period of decision. By the time Hillary could possibly have taken charge, Aleppo had fallen, Raqqa was solidly besieged, and everything else was a mopping-up operation leading to the inexorable Syrian/Russian victory.
Why would Hillary Clinton have sent tens of thousands of US troops into a lost war, when Obama kept them out of every phase of the war where they could have made a difference? You seem to be assuming she was looking for an excuse to fight any plausible war because, what, she’s a fanatical interventionist warmonger on general principle?
Clinton was very much in favor of having a heavier hand in Syria and Libya when she was Secretary of State, but Obama restrained her. I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that she would have wanted to “fix” Obama’s mistakes.
Here’s an article from 2017 when she was calling for bombing of Syria.
Seriously, this has been the one thing that Trump has actually done, and kept the new conflicts entered into way down.
I’m not happy about abandoning the Kurds, and his policies may end up leading to war with the Norks or the Chinese. But his intention is to not get involved in a bunch of places.
I read point A and I agree completely. I read point B and realize you are not talking about Governor Cuomo, Governor Waltz, or even Mayor Frey. All big mistakes have been at the State level. I personally am having good time, because I’m living in a state with a competent executive branch, at least from my perspective. I really hoped Trump would teach the Democrats the benefits of Federalism, but their executives seem to be doing such a bad job, they have no choice but to blame the President.
Funny because I see things the opposite way. Trumps complete absence of leadership is the reason that our state and local leaders have been forced to step in to fill the void, to varying degrees of effectiveness. Luckily the ones where I live are doing a great job IMO.
So…you would have preferred a world in which Trump and the feds were directly in charge? Over the world we have, where your own local leaders have done what you consider to be a great job? Do you think Trump would have done a better job than your local leaders if he put himself in charge?
I would have preferred a world where everyone did a good job.
Sounds like, for your case in particular, that that is the world we got. Trump did a good job staying out of the way so that your local leaders could do a good job. What would you have liked him to do differently?
No, he really, really didn’t – C.F his attempts to pressure state governors to end lockdowns prematurely.
@Tatterdemailion
I agree that he shouldn’t have done that. But my whole point in this thread is that Loriot criticized Trump for an absence of leadership, and your point is an example of Trump actually trying to take charge and provide leadership. Bad leadership, in this case, and just reinforces my point that by leaving most decisions up to local leaders Trump did the right thing.
To the extent the FDA and CDC have been in charge, things have not gone so well.
At this point, I’ve gone all the way over to the Matt M camp. Trump was right; we should have opened up back in Easter. We wouldn’t be in the current state of anarcho-tyranny, the riots which are likely making the lockdowns moot probably wouldn’t have happened, and the lockdowns were mostly vitiated anyway by state governments who stuffed COVID patients into nursing homes while harassing the low-risk.
@Jaskologist: Yeah
My concern right now is that there are still closed churches in the United States, out of a fallacious belief in deference to the civil authorities. Many have re-opened, of course, but that any are closed as of the Sunday after these riots started is morally and intellectually unconscionable on Christians’ parts.
LMC:
Getting a bunch of people packed together indoors in close quarters to sing for an hour (which is what our normal masses look like) is a catastrophically bad idea. Much worse than outdoor protests.
Indoor vs Outdoor is relevant, but so is the size of the crowds and the density of the people, and the vigor of the respiration. It isn’t obvious to me which is the worse set of circumstances, and I suspect there’s a lot of overlap.
Except for one thing, the age demographics. I’d expect a church to skew considerably older (albeit with more young children) than a street protest. Could be wrong, though.
For what it’s worth, my church is meeting to discuss how to re-open, and sent out a survey. They’re considering using more buildings and service times to be able to meet at a lower density.
I think the assumption that churches will necessarily be packed is absurd.
@albatross11: The Catholic Church could do outdoor Masses to address that risk if it was serious about not obeying a hostile government. All it takes is a priest, portable altar and the congregation.
For that matter, many Orthodox Christians are already used to going to (indoor) services without any pews.
@Le Maistre Chat
Yeah, many places already do outdoor Masses for special occasions. My parish in high school did. There was also a local shrine with a large open air chapel.
And the not having a hostile government. I believe De Blasio already came down on the NYC Jewish community for an outdoor wake with what he considered inadequate social distancing; I know Newsom’s original lockdown order in California made both indoor and outdoor church services equally illegal and I don’t think that’s been changed.
@John Schilling: the Catholic Church could very well hold Mass – taking all and only the health precautions it autonomously determines science calls for – under a hostile government if it understood Public Relations and game theory. Dare the omnipotent State to put Catholics in jail for outdoor Mass while not jailing leftists out standing shoulder-to-shoulder and many ranks deep in violent protests. Think big, man. Think Investiture Controversy.
Unfortunately, we have Pope Francis.
That, and all the pedophiles. Regardless of who your Pope is, this probably isn’t the best time to dare Caesar to arrest all the Catholics denying him any of the things he believes are rightfully Caesars.
This is mostly under the authority of the bishops, and the bishops tend to be conservative, in the “let’s obey the state and not get arrested” sense.
@Edward Scizorhands, I’m coming around to the point of view that all those bishops, and Protestant church elders who’ve made similar decisions, should be dismissed for heresy or cowardice and replaced with people who will stand up against persecution.
@Edward Scizorhands
I think the word you’re looking for is spineless, not conservative.
This seems to assume that the bishops don’t believe in significant danger posed by Covid.
@Randy M
Yes, because Edward was assuming as much, too.
I’m pretty confident there’s zero scientific evidence that forming a phalanx to protest for Leftism, shouting at the cops, is a lesser COVID risk than a packed church service if moved outdoors. It would be one weird universe where the ideological content of standing or kneeling in ranks and files and using your voice made a difference, especially in the secular activity’s favor.
Scientifically speaking, the only factor that could count against churches as a public health risk is being indoors. So the priests/pastors could just change that for awhile.
Didn’t the God of the Old Testament frequently punish the Isrealites insufficient faithfulness by allowing them to be subjugated and conquered by various enemy tribes (who, in terms of obeying God’s commandments, were clearly worse than even the worst Israelite), to sort of teach them a lesson?
LMC:
The fact that some people are acting in ways that further spreads the virus doesn’t imply that everyone should start acting that way. This is just as true now as it was of the anti-lockdown protests, or the people widely ignoring lockdowns in some places.
John Schilling:
I think the pedophilia scandal undermined a lot of the church’s moral standing, but I don’t think that has anything at all to do with not reopening. The bishops are listening to public health authorities at the national/state/local level and more-or-less following their advice, probably because they’re trying to make the best decisions possible and they don’t know how to do much better. Yes, the Church could decide that the public health authorities are wrong and have mass anyway. And if it seemed like the authorities were just using C19 as an excuse to attack churches, quite possibly we’d do it. But I think that would be a stupid and reckless thing to do right now. I think there is a high probability that going back to holding masses under any kind of normal circumstances will lead to a whole bunch of people in the church getting C19, and (since people regularly attending church include a lot of the old and infirm) killing a fair number of them off. I think there’s a substantial-enough-to-worry-about chance that one of the well-documented superspreader events would happen at a mass, and that this might well lead to lawsuits for negligence against the church. By ignoring the orders or even just the guidance of public health authorities, I think the church would make itself far more vulnerable to such lawsuits, and rightly so.
@albatross11:
I strongly disagree. If some people are acting in ways that further spreads the virus with the enthusiastic support of the experts and (Democratic) rulers, we need to exercise the same civil rights at same risk at them. Obedience to a double standard makes second-class citizens.
The anti-lockdown protesters were also allowed to protest.
That’s a good point, I implied Democrats in general, but there are a lot of good Democratic Politicians In some states, just not NY or MN.
I don’t necessarily want an overreaching executive tell us how to do things, when it is so easy to get it wrong. One the Pandemic first started, the media was praising Cuomo and saying he should be the VP, because of how great a job he was doing. The nightmare scenario is a president that told all the states to take the NY approach, instead of Trump doing nothing.
@aristides says:
Californian here who feels that did happen, but Mayor Breed and then Governor Newsom ordered shelter-in-place earlier than New York did, plus we had the west coasr example of Seattle and many Chinese speakers that warned us of what their relatives were experiencing (relatives > Chinatown residents > Dr. Zhang > Supervisor Peskin > Mayor Breed > Governor Newsom = earlier Statewide lockdown > fewer deaths than New York and New Jersey), California was also probably helped by Trump cancelling flights from China earlier than flights from Europe were (which hurt New York).
More competence than I would’ve expected.
Are you talking about the policy proposals, or the policy achievements?
My objection to approximately 100% of Trump’s policy proposals is that he tries to implement them by saying “make it so”, reaching the limits of his attention span shortly thereafter, and then when he finds out that it hasn’t been made so, tweeting something that makes 40% of the population cheer and the remaining 60% despair and then losing focus again.
Related to this, the policy I most specifically object to is the one of hiring incompetent yes-men to fill out his administration, because “Make it so” works if you’ve got the command staff of Enterprise-D, not so much with the crew of Spaceball One.
I’ve generally rolled my eyes at the over-the-top Trump-bashing of e.g. all of non-Fox media, because Trump isn’t capable of being a Hitler or even a Mussolini, and is mostly just outrageously impotent. But albatross11 is right that, at the moment, we really need a president who can get some important stuff done and done right.
To be fair, if you take out the tweeting, that was his predecessor’s approach as well.
The US handling of coronavirus has been abominable, but I have a hard time blaming Trump when there are so many basically competent European nations doing no better in terms of per capita cases and deaths. Yes Trump routinely says painfully stupid stuff, but it doesn’t seem to be mattering unless you posit that all of Europe is messing up something else badly enough to throw away their “not being led by Trump” advantage.
Personally I put most of the blame on bureaucrats and organizations like the FDA. We could have had a vaccine tested in March if those obstructionist bastards would just allow the countless eager volunteers to participate in a challenge trial. But no, hundreds of thousands of people have to die because it wouldn’t be ethical to allow a few hundred healthy young people to consent to a small chance of death.
The only policy I consider acceptable here is to start firing bureaucrats and not stop until the organizations are reduced to yes-men who will let this through. If I had my way people would hang for this. This is the single most important decision most politicians will ever make, and through either idiocy or cowardice they’re all choosing not to rock the boat.
FWIW, we disagree on a bunch of things but I am 100% with you on this and have been calling my reps for months now to say so.
Same, you’re the first. I would consider attempting revolution over this (radical centrism!) if I thought I could convince more than five huge nerds to go with me.
+1
We should be doing challenge tests on healthy young volunteers, with a big financial reward and guaranteed gold-plated medical care for any problems and a goddamned parade down 5th Avenue when they’re all recovered.
Hang on, you’re ignoring manufacturing. At the moment these vaccines can only be made in the lab. I suspect a lot of the delay in starting phase 2 studies was simply having the scientists make enough doses. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if almost every dose they make at the moment is ending up in a human – just with some extra tracking on the back end. If it works, then it’s already protecting people.
They are also already working to build manufacturing facilities for all of the vaccines I’ve heard good things about, pre-approval. But a vaccine can’t have a significant impact on covid spread or masks or etc until it’s available in very large amounts, 10’s or 100’s of millions of doses, not thousands of doses. At the moment, speeding approval would just mean a different reason for why you can’t get the vaccine yet.
@David W Speeding testing would mean that rather than producing eight different vaccines to stockpile in the hopes that one of them eventually gets approved, we could avoid throwing away most of our capacity making vaccines that either don’t work or work but won’t get approved by the obstructionist bastards. It would also mean that the value of producing that vaccine became concrete rather than speculative, and self-interested investors would join forces with Bill Gates to make more of it. Furthermore, it would mean the doses that are currently being produced could be given to people we actually want to protect rather than low-risk participants in handicapped trials.
@Ninety-Three:
I think you are misunderstanding the bottleneck. I think every vaccine company already has as much money as they can spend, mostly provided by the federal government and philanthropists. The challenge at the moment is that you can’t instantly transmute money into a factory, it takes time for the engineering to be done, the pieces to be fabricated, workers hired and trained. Not only is this all work, it can’t be done in parallel. You can’t train a worker on procedures that haven’t been written yet, you can’t write procedures until you have locked down your plant design, you can’t lock down plant design until you have finished analyzing everything that changes due to scale.
At all of these steps, the fundamental limit is information bandwidth. You need to pass on information from the experts in one field to the experts in the next field, slowly and rigorously enough that you end up with a factory which makes vaccine, not a factory that makes something that looks like a vaccine but isn’t. Speaking as an engineer in a non-biotech field, for a new process there are a lot of ways to mess up, where person 1 meant to say something different than person 2 heard. Which means you need time for person 1 to explain her work, person 2 to do his work, and person 1 to review it and catch the discrepancy.
At this point, you’re not talking about getting vaccine faster or opening the economy sooner, you’re talking about avoiding building a few factories. The value isn’t lives or $trillions anymore, it’s just the extra ~$7-10 billion in factories that might be built and not produce a viable vaccine.
Really, I don’t think there will ever be a ‘stockpile’. We will likely still have a wait after ‘vaccine approved’ before ‘first batch rolls off the first production line’.
Most of the people who are participating in the trials are people at high risk of catching or passing on covid: nurses and doctors, EMTs, etc. This is a deliberate choice, to give the trial as good odds as possible of showing an effect. I submit that this is already a pretty good match to ‘who we want to protect’, as long as the numbers are only in the thousands. Much better to ensure we have a healthcare workforce and to arrest the exponential growth.
I made the point on my blog just over a month ago.
The value of challenge testing is that you get data on effectiveness much more quickly, because instead of waiting around for 5% of your subjects to be exposed over the next year and periodically checking them for the virus/symptoms, you can just expose them all now and find out if you get protection much more quickly.
@Albatross: I understand that. But when we’re not waiting for that data to start building the factory, and the factory is the long pole, it really doesn’t help us much to have proof of effectiveness early. It’s not like software, it can’t be replicated the day it’s known to work.
If we got proof of ineffectiveness early, we could stop building the factory and save that money – that’s all the value that’s remaining to run a challenge trial now. But now we’re just talking about the cost of one factory, not the ‘1000’s of deaths a day’ – those would still be happening. It’s just that you’d be blaming the engineers instead of the FDA.
The bit in DC with sending armed goons to chase away everyone (including the priest) from a church with so he could get a photo-op is a drop in the ocean, but it’s also like a perfect little demonstration of what kind of guy he is.
Okay and you have nothing to say about the graffiti and boarded-up windows on that church? Which got wrecked because – well, so far as I can see, because it was a handy target? It’s an Episcopalian church so it was all in favour of BLM and whatever other causes you may want to list off, so it wasn’t the politics that got it targeted.
Don’t worry, Bishop Mariann is just as outraged as you are. Me, I’m left wondering – if there were nothing but “peaceful protesters” in the vicinity, how come the church windows got smashed? Must have been some very strong breezes!
I admit, this might be the first time in his life Trump has ever held a Bible in his hand, but it’s a little precious of people to start complaining about politicians using churches to burnish their image at this point.
EDIT: I’m annoyed about this because yes, Trump was using it as a photo-op, but I am also dang sure that were it President Hillary in office right now, she’d be marching herself over to the church that is literally opposite the White House in the same way, and Bishop Mariann would be turning up to grin and wave beside her, and there would be no scolding messages about politicians using churches. Bah, humbug.
It’s not about the photo-op, it’s about the clearing out of protesters with violent means to make it happen. The photo-op would be, as you say, just a usual politician thing if they had notified the protest to please back up a block for an hour so the politician can safely have their photo-op, and people would have rolled their eyes about it and written their hot takes and it would have been business as usual.
But the way he just casually ordered violence and cruelty upon his own people has caused even the person with him at the photo-op to recoil.
So because some assholes busted out the church windows and spray painted crap on the walls, that makes it okay for a *different* bunch of assholes to run off the people legitimately there so some politician can have a photo op?
I’m befuddled by Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comics. Now, I really admire his comics and I also admire his autobiography/self-help book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, which is a great coverage on psychological biases which you can watch out for and take advantage of.
Now comes the interesting part. I’ve also read Scott’s book Win Bigly, which covers how Donald Trump’s apparent stupidity is actually a massive persuasion tactic. And I think I buy it, at least partially. Scott even proclaims that he is quite liberal at the beginning of the book, and makes sure to let his audience know that he is not just some red tribe commentator. However, I went to check his blog and his twitter, and it seems like he’s red tribe incarnate. I’m confused, I guess. I really respect him as an author and comic artist, but am not sure what to make of his recent behavior. What does everybody else think is going with Scott? Is he using his persuasion and other human skills to decode behavior correctly or has he just joined a tribe?
I used to pretty regularly read his blog pre-Trump and he came across as someone who was slightly more sympathetic to conservatives than the average California celebrity, but still generally blue tribe (the cause he was most passionate about back then was legalizing assisted suicide).
I think that early on, he started predicting Trump would do well, which drew more Trump supporters to him, and built him a little niche that was too enjoyable/profitable to abandon. I haven’t read much of his more recent stuff, so maybe this has gotten worse, but early on his deal was less “Trump is good” and more “Trump isn’t stupid.” To the extent that the anti-Trump side keeps insisting “Trump is stupid” this requires Scott to be defending Trump (and to a lesser extent Trump supporters) frequently, which probably itself maps to and blurs over into general red tribeness.
I know that he has said before that it is quite “dangerous” to be living in California as a person sympathetic to some Republican issues.
I find it so hard to separate a true “individual thinker” from someone who takes hold of their party’s flag and fights for it with vengeance. Maybe it’s a disease of today’s age. For me, I find a hard time separating a person from the political party on which they seem to fall unless they explicitly say they hate politics (e.g. Naval Ravikant). It’s probably the polarization of today’s age and the need for us to lump everyone into a tribe. If I want to be in a tribe, I guess I’ll stick in the grey tribe which Scott (Alexander) says that he most falls into.
Yeah, whether consciously or not, he panders to his audience. I always liked the other stuff (like Dogbert’s commentaries) better than the office stuff, but over time Dilbert had more and more of the office stuff because that was what was popular with most of his audience. Probably just more of that here.
My read on Adams is that he’s kind of a black box idea generator – he’s not constrained by conventional wisdom, and he’s a pretty good observer, so he comes up with a lot of original ideas, some of them useful.
I put Adam Carolla in the same box – he’s innovative and observant, so he is a pretty good observational comic, and like Adams he’s a self-made success who has thought a lot about how success works, but I wouldn’t reorganize my life around his ideas without some additional thought.
Depending on your priors, you might say that Adams and Carolla are what you get when a successful white guy looks at the world without examining privilege too closely, or you might say that they’re what you get when an observant person looks at the world without preconceptions.
I think one of Adams’ theses on Trump is not really consistent with the data – Trump may be a master manipulator, but Adams’ other idea was that Trump would be a pretty good president because Trump was a successful guy who wants approval, so he would be likely to perform well as president. I’m not hugely anti-Trump, but it looks to me like he’s so reactive that he can’t get out of his own way, even if he does want to be seen as a great president.
I think it’s clear that Trump is a world-class genius at crafting an image and manipulating media. (And that’s consistent with his previous life.) There’s no reason to expect someone with that one-in-a-billion level of talent in one area to also be good at, say, running a huge organization full of super-ambitious people with lots of internal politics and power struggles and such, or negotiating with legislators to implement some agenda, or….
I can’t tell what Trump is doing. All of the Democratic-inclined people I know think he is crazy and stupid, and many (moderate) Republicans I know still think he is crazy. However, I try to ignore politics as much as possible so I usually don’t get too deep into what he is doing and saying. Usually the response is just dismissal and rage.
This was kinda how I looked at him back before I dropped Twitter. I didn’t agree with him a lot, but he offered a unique perspective that was often useful.
How do you separate the black box idea generators from those you just wave their tribe’s flag? I find it hard with Scott Adams, because he takes us generally Republican notions, for the most part. I personally kind of hate how politics has infested everything, and as soon as I identify someone as not having their own “voice” I immediately feel repelled from them. I like people who don’t fit in neat tribal categories.
Adams is pro-assisted suicide and pro-abortion. (He’s called himself “pro-death” in the past). Not sure where he stands on other issues, like gay marriage or drug decriminalization.
I think Scott Adams whole “master persuader” shtick is basically a load of BS, but I can certainly see how it’s possible for someone who identifies as “quite liberal” to come across as downright reactionary, because this is pretty much how I feel these days. I’m a lifelong cultural blue-triber, and somewhere between a Clinton democrat and a classical liberal, but my disgust in the last few years is mostly focused leftward, and that’s where most of my ire gets directed. That said, I suspect Scott Adams doesn’t actually consider himself liberal, in the “left-wing” sense of the word, and is just saying that as a strategic framing.
The problem with “master persuader” is that you can never hold them to their lies. “Aha, that was a lie to persuade you! And because we’re talking about it, it worked!”
It looks like a classic case of confirmation bias, analogous to what Scott Adams sees with Trump’s name calling. Trump’s name for Jeb and others were confirmed by the candidates’ actions. Maybe that is the case for Scott’s own “master persuader” persona of Trump as well.
Adams was one of the first public people to actually take Trump seriously, and he gained a lot of recognition for that. At this point, I think there is some level of him needing Trump to succeed so that he continues to look correct, and that has manifested in him becoming much more red-tribe. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him move back towards his old positions when Trump is out of the limelight.
I should note that I stopped really paying attention to him when he started doing most his content as videos instead of blog posts, so I might not have a great read on his current state of mind.
I think Adams gets way too much credit for calling Trump’s victory. Yes he was one of the first people saying it. But he didn’t just say Trump would *win*, he predicted a landslide when in reality he didn’t even get a plurality. At almost every other point where his predictions were falsifiable, they have been falsified. Adams displays about the level of accuracy I would expect from a stopped clock.
He was well suited to win a primary in that time and place, and to some extent well suited to win the general. He appears to have virtually no idea of how to manage the helm.
It’s not necessarily genius if the individual’s behavior is extremely well adapted to a specific time and place.
Just to be clear though, I’m talking about his presidency in general.
I guess my main intuition of this is that he really wasn’t ever particularly liberal. I’ve believed this since the article about equal pay that he wrote in 2011 which (to me) seems incompatible liberal beliefs and his subsequent replies about it. Link to an article about it, the original article has since been taken down. My view of him is that he’s like a lot of other white well-off self-declared independents that I know. He basically votes for entirely Republican candidates for anything that he thinks matters and then votes Libertarian for city comptroller or similar. Using this model, backing Trump in the 2016 election was unsurprising. It’s also unsurprising because he backed Romney in 2012, for reasons that I think it’s fair to call convoluted.
I think in the past he believed that outing himself as having consistently conservative beliefs would have been bad for his brand. Maybe a positive response to his articles about Trump has caused Adams to be more willing to out himself.
I suspect that Adam’s whole Trump = master manipulator thing is a subconscious way to make *himself* feel better. Scott Adams believes himself to be a hypnotist and believed Trump to have similar qualities, and thus by predicting Trump’s success, he validates himself. The rest is just the usual polarization and sorting at work.
I hadn’t really paid much attention to him prior to 2016, then when he went MAGA I continued to not pay attention to him.
Out of curiosity though, I checked out his blog. Clicking on the most recent episode, it starts with a story explaining how he’s actually super familiar with discrimination because he’s “lost his job three times” as a result of his race and sex. I figured I’d dive into this:
The first time is when he was working at Crocker National Bank. He apparently was due for some kind of promotion (he doesn’t specify in his story) but instead he was called into his managers office where she told him that he couldn’t be promoted since he was a white male. He quit, and went to look for another job. He explicitly says he was told it was because of his race and gender; this is not something he says he put together afterword.
The Second time is when he was working for Pacific Bell. He was in their management fast track, but when it came time for him to be promoted to the director level, yet again he’s called back into his boss’s office and told he can’t be promoted because he’s a white male.
Then, after Dilbert is a thing he starts the Dilbert TV show. It apparently does very well, but then the show’s network (UPN) decides to shift towards african american content and deliberately sinks the show.
I promise I’m going somewhere with this.
Let’s look at these three claims in reverse order. The 3rd one is easiest to check out. First off, this “UPN shifted it’s demographic focus” claim seems relatively new. Back in 2006, here’s what he had to say about it:
Ok, so here he’s blaming UPN, but no mention of a demographic changeup… but maybe he just didn’t want to say it in that interview. Let’s look at UPN’s history – did they make some pivot during Dilbert’s run towards African American-focused content?
Likely not. Every source I found indicates that by the mid 90s, almost a half decade before Dilbert was on air, UPN had already solidified itself as an African American focused network. That NPR article even claims that by the late 90s, UPN was trying to pivot away from African American demographics towards younger male audiences, but this was contradicted by other sources, so I can’t say for certain. Looking UPN’s Broadcast History, yes, there is a focus on African American content, but not obviously to the exclusion of everything else. There’s also no obvious programming shakeups that occurred around the time of Dilbert’s demise that would indicate it got dropped for not appealing to the African American Market enough.
I think it’s fair to say that his account of why Dilbert went off air is incorrect. He’s either deliberately lying, or he’s managed to convince himself of this alternate reality where diversity did him wrong.
Let’s move on to why he left Pacific Bell. I can’t find any evidence that specifically contradicts his claim that his boss told him that since he was white and male he wouldn’t be promoted; likely no such evidence exists one way or another. But, in interviews, he’s stated multiple times that the freedom of no long caring about his work or getting promoted is what led him to focus on Dilbert. He also continued to be employed at Pacific Bell long after this one promotion was denied. It’s kind of disingenuous to say that this meeting ended his career; it would be more accurate to say it delayed his promotion which caused him to focus on another income stream.
As for the bank, well, I can’t find anything about that at all, so baring that I’ll take him at his word. I will point out that when he had this conversation with his manager the bank he worked at had just finished paying for his MBA, however, so it doesn’t seem like it was too toxic a work relationship.
In summary – he makes the claim that he can understand discrimination because, again quoting, he’s had multiple careers “go down the toilet” due to discrimination. The first instance is him quitting after being denied a promotion, the second is him again begin denied a promotion and then choosing to work on something else instead of trying for promotion anymore while still being employed at the company, and the third is, as far as I can tell, inaccurate.
Ok, why did I do so much research into a five minute story he told on his blog? Because most of what he says or does is like this – half true stories with certain parts amplified and others ignored to spin a more compelling overall narrative. The dude is, to use a scientific term, a bullshitter. He’s always been on the right, so his support of Trump is totally in keeping with expectations, he just uses the smokescreen of BS to try and make his support for Trump seem more impactful or mysterious than it actually is.
Was he calling Trump a master persuader before he was obviously going to win the primaries?
This seems like an important point in whether predicting a Trump presidency was rooting for the tribe or an astute prediction
The majority of Republican primary voters supported Trump in the election. Do we count every supporter of Trump before his eventual victory as astute predictors? I think he just liked Trump, was part of the demographic that Trump tends to appeal towards and used his overall BS to justify the positive feelings he had for Trump.
When he did this doesn’t really matter, unless I’m not understanding you properly.
Are you sure about that? I’m too busy to check the numbers right now, but my recollection is that a majority of the Republican voters cast their ballot for someone other than Donald Trump in almost every primary where someone other than Donald Trump was still in the race. It wasn’t until Cruz and Kasich withdrew that Trump went over 50%.
good point, I’ll look…
You are correct. With the exception of the Northern Marianas Islands, Trump never broke 50% until basically everyone else had dropped out. I should have said plurality.
Adams started his shtick in…I think July/August 2015. He was one of the very first prominent people to call it for Trump. Him and Ann Coulter. At the time, people like Nate Silver were giving Trump a 2% chance to win.
He predicted Trump winning in August of 2015.
https://www.scottadamssays.com/2015/08/13/clown-genius/
At the time, Trump was leading the polls, but he only had about 25%, as there were still like 50 candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_2016_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries#Polls_conducted_in_2015
Note that Scott Adams did all but declare war on the United States government a few years back, declaring that he literally literally wanted to kill about half the nation’s political leadership in the slowest and most painful way possible (but was too wimpy to do it so please don’t arrest him).
It’s not out of the question that promoting the presidency of a charismatic but incompetent and divisive buffoon is part of a 3-dimensional chess plan to cause as much damage to the US government as possible for a clever wimp with a modest degree of media access and blue-tribe credibility.
Weird, because I think that “my dad wants to die but can’t, I hate you all” is one of the few essays he’s written that makes Adams sound like he has any kind of empathy.
Oh, I absolutely sympathize with him on this. But it may have broken him, in which case we’re dealing with a smart broken man on a personal mission.
Or maybe he got over it; I haven’t seen anything to say one way or another.
Yeah, I sympathize with Scott, too. I’ve been scared about my family and I dying in hospitals ever since I’ve read the post on this blog about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Scott Adams was always a liberal but a ‘sensible, everything in moderation’ type liberal. He had also described himself as libertarian but only the ‘sensible’ parts. He’s always had some interesting ideas but he is about half as smart as he thinks he is.
He predicted Trump would win and claimed to support Hillary because he could get in trouble if he supported Trump, which to me sounds like someone trying to impress everyone with how clever and independent he is.
He also predicted that after the election Trump would use his master persuader powers to unify the nation and get the left on board with Trump. That obviously didn’t happen and I don’t watch the guy’s videos but I assume he doesn’t bring up that missed prediction too often.
I think that, like Adam Carolla, he worries about the emasculation of American people and policy and thinks that Trump’s macho persona is the solution. I’m sympathetic to that argument but Trump exemplifies a lot of the worst masculine traits, and none of the good ones. Trump is the polar opposite of a Jocko Willink or Mike Rowe for example, who are both excellent male role models and leaders.
He also predicted a 99% chance Trump would win in a landslide. One thing that really drives me crazy is when people ignore the magnitude and only look at the sign in assessing prediction accuracy. No, Adams was not a genius for predicting Trump’s victory. He was way, way, off. Meanwhile, Nate Silver looked pretty good for predicting a toss-up with Clinton ahead in the polls and Trump having an EC advantage, which is exactly what we got.
There’s lots of reasons to not give him credit for his Trump prediction[1], but he was willing to make the Trump prediction when everyone else thought Trump winning was a completely insane idea and only laughed at people who said it might happen.
[1] like, he wouldn’t take bets on it. Plus more.
I would like to thank everyone who responded to my request for suggestions for East and South-East Asian-set espionage novels last week, especially Incurian, Trofim_Lysenko, littskad, John Schilling and Sharper13.
Following on from that, does anyone have recommendations for material covering the same area in other forms? Non-fiction books, films, TV series, computer games, documentaries, podcasts, blogs, subreddits, you name it. As far as films and TV go, all the better if it’s an Asian production that’s available with English subs.
I’d also be interested in good locally produced TV/cinema with slightly broader ranges of subject matter – procedurals, for instance. Taiwanese most of all. But still with the constraint that I need to in some sense be able to consume it in English (or French, I suppose, if that somehow helps).
Spy thrillers are a-plenty in Kdramas, but I can’t necessarily speak to their quality or compatibility with your tastes, as they tend to focus on relationships more than world-building. Iris is one of the most famous examples, and is on Netflix and Amazon.
The other films I’m familiar with would likely be characterized as other genres above espionage, even if their characters were technically spies. Heists and martial arts action, and such.
Netflix has a fairly good selection of subtitled Asian content, in general. Be aware, however, that Cdramas are pretty much always dubbed over (meaning that the very pretty faces have their Mandarin lines redone by voice actors). And a whole lot of the TV series are way more geared towards women, centered around romance.
Amusingly, Kdramas have had a spurt recently of remaking US procedurals, redoing their first seasons in a more serialized and localized fashion.
So… the literal perfect show would be a slick, intelligent adaptation of the work of some Taiwanese Le Carré with English subs (and occasional in-world English language conversations involving the main characters so I can get a sense of how good the actors’ English is).
But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that no such thing exists, and Iris looks more than good enough for government work.
You’re right that one of my major interests is getting a sense of how those cultures see their own shadier elements, but honestly there are a lot of different things I can potentially usefully learn here, my personal tastes (a secondary consideration anyway) are pretty inclusive and I suspect I have no shortage of time to spend on this.
Am I interpreting you correctly as saying that it’s standard practice (in Asian TV in general?) for the actors to be dubbed in the original language, à la David Prowse/James Earl Jones? That is fucking wild to me. I mean, I’ve done it myself, but only for bit players where the producers got cheap and cast local actors in Romania to play English speakers, then had us dub them in ADR, and even for that the results aren’t exactly ideal.
Anyway, thanks very much for your help.
Getting dubbed in the original language (a la Singing in the Rain) is only a thing in Chinese dramas, as far as I can tell.
If you enjoy Iris, I can provide further recommendations, but only in the sense of broad consensus of which shows were good. I don’t actually watch Kdramas myself. (I did make a go at Iris, but eventually started fast forwarding through it.)
I’ve watched a couple of Asia heist films, which is pretty amusing, because the aesthetics are clearly aping the western films’ flash as much as possible, but cultural elements still slip through. So you could check out The Thieves (Korean) or Bitcoin Heist (Vietnam). The latter was on Netflix when I watched it years ago, don’t know if it still is, don’t know where the former is streaming.
Viki has quite a lot of Asian content, with ads (you can pay to have no ads). I’m not sure what is licensed in the US or not.
As AG says, most of them have a lot more romance than American thrillers. But they do have the advantage of being much shorter and a tighter plotline.
Korean Spy dramas:
Healer (also on Netflix).
The K2 (Netflix)
City Hunter
Man to Man
Vagabond (Netflix)
Crash Landing on You* (Netflix)
Secretly greatly (a movie about North Korean spies who are ordered to commit suicide).
Legal drama:
Suspicious partner
Lookout
Chinese police:
Love me if you dare
When a snail falls in love
Doctor stranger is neither a procedural or a spy thriller, but it’s a drama about a North Korean doctor who tries to get his girlfriend to the South while trying to get a medical license in the South.
*I recommend this one. Its plot is absolutely ridiculous (the love story between a South Korean heiress and the son of a North Korean general), but it’s apparently quite well researched, and the details of North Korea are stunning. They even do the accents.
You have received a parcel by mail. It contains a piece of high-tech gear about the size of a hardcover book. The thing, whatever it is, looks sleek and feels substantial, like a high-end audio component. The bottom has four little rubber feet and a battery compartment holding two D cells. The top has a tiny red LED and two buttons marked + and -. The LED is currently lit. There is no apparent way to open the device, it has no other markings of any kind, and there are no plugs or ports visible.
Do you press any of the buttons on this device?
I’d probably start by Googling to see if I could find out what it was, asking tech-savvy friends and possibly posting in a few places like this to see if anyone could enlighten me.
But if no-one had any idea, then, yeah, I’d try playing with the buttons to see what happened. If someone knows where I live and wants to do me harm, there are simpler and more reliable ways than making it some kind of elaborate trap.
> There is no apparent way to open the device
That’s never stopped me before.
But yeah, I’d press the buttons a bunch of times. If it did something dangerous it would have a warning sticker on it.
I would leave the premises immediately and call the bomb removal squad.
Look at this guy,
Won’t accept the parcel; Won’t accept the premise; Won’t even remain on the premises;
Depends – is this before or after the moon-sized spaceship aliens started messing about with core infrastructure?
Wasn’t this a Twilight Zone episode (and then a terrible movie?) Mysterious stranger shows up at door with above-described box. “Press this button, and someone you don’t know, halfway around the world, will instantly die and you will receive a million dollars.”
After much agitation, the recipient presses the button and gets his money. He asks the mysterious stranger what he plans to do next. “I’m going to go halfway around the world and offer this box to someone else.”
It was a web-short and changed into a longer episode of something.
But the punchline was that, after emphasizing that the person who died would be “a complete stranger, no one you have ever met in your life,” the stranger says that the next person who receives the box will be “a complete stranger to you, someone who has never met you in their life.”
It was initially a short story written in the 70s, then it was adapted multiple times with different endings, including as an episode of the Twilight Zone.
If you haven’t already, I recommend reading the original story, available for free at http://jhampton.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/47378440/button .
If we exist in the real world, something the size of a hardcover book that can be shipped in the mail and runs on 3V is almost certainly harmless. Worst case it’s some sort of device to spy on me I guess, although this is a really dumb delivery mechanism in that case. But I’d probably double check the addresses on the parcel and try to figure out what I have before messing with it, more out of curiosity than anything.
The obvious worry is that it’s got a bomb in it. That won’t kill a random person somewhere on Earth, but it will do fine at blowing you to bits if you’re the guy who pushes the button.
If the goal is to kill me, this is a very weird way to do it. It’s not how mail bombs are usually designed. Well made implies a degree of professionalism, but this is not what a bomb meant to be used by professionals would look like.
I would find someone with access to an x-ray machine, and while waiting for the results rewatch “The Box”.
The fact that it runs on D cells is a bit odd — I’d expect AAs for something without obvious motors these days. But I’d probably pull out the Dremel and create a very apparent way to open the device.
Press all da buttons (one at a time and in combinations)
I press the minus button, then the plus button
With no on-off switch this can’t be a mass produced device, so I would have to assume someone is screwing with me in some way. I’d still push the buttons but I would do it outside and using a pool cue with some goggles on.
These boxes are from our alien friends. Our friends are sorry for all the trouble they have caused. The boxes are advanced prototypes of gifts they plan to give us as an act of contrition.
Pushing the + button summons a large treat, like a chocolate cake. Pushing the – button summons a collection of small treats, like a plate of cookies. The treats a localized, so in Greece you get baklava, while in the Netherlands you get stroopwafels. The treats are delivered in several different ways. In cities with food delivery services, they arrive through regular channels. In less accessible places, they are brought by drones. In really out-of-the-way locations, the treats just teleport in. You can only get two deliveries per day per box.
The initial trials did uncover some problems. The delivery drones don’t understand human buildings and fly right through window panes. Also, some of the treats are miscalibrated. New Jersey probably wants something more festive than Cheetos and cans of Coke, and Sweden probably wants something other than pickled herring.
Attempts to discover how the boxes work are not likely to succeed; they are opaque to mundane human sensors. If attempts are made to destroy or breach the boxes, drones arrive to take them away. If they are prevented from doing so, the boxes teleport away.
Knowing me, I’d instinctively push the buttons to see if that did something that revealed the device’s function.
But thinking about it while sitting here in my chair, removed from the situation, I realize that is a bad idea since the device could be a bomb. Having it activate when someone pushes its buttons is a great way to ensure it safely makes it through the mail and is detonated at the target destination.
My five-year-old daughter is capable of reading way above her grade level (at least fifth grade, I think, though it’s hard to say for sure), but she has pretty typical five-year-old girl interests and wants to read stuff that’s mostly happy. She avoids anything with much sadness or serious danger. Anyone out there have books to recommend that would work?
The early Laura Ingalls Wilder books worked well.
She likes fantasy stuff but the classic kids stuff I can think of is too intense; e.g. with Harry Potter she never get past Harry being mistreated by the Dursleys, or with Narnia the sacrifice at the Stone Table would be far too scary.
Try some of Enid Blyton’s books. It has been a good forty years since I read them, but I don’t remember the protagonists being in all that much peril.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Seven
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_Series
The Adventure series does occasionally have some life-threatening moments as I recall, and also (very occasionally) so does the Famous Five series. I loved them all anyway.
As for the OP, for an advanced five-year-old Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning is charming. All of Lauren Child’s books are good too, they were my standbys with my daughter.
Is Nancy Drew too scary?
There are the Magic Treehouse books — definitely much lower than fifth grade level, but gentle, and there are lots of them!
“Half Magic” and others in the series.
Asterix comics.
The Phantom Tollbooth
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass
The Wayside School series
Second Wayside Schoool, and also the Wayside arithmetic books, and also Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes. These books are the closest I’ve seen to “I am a strange loop” for the precocious non-mathy 3rd grader. Things like, “when adults are wrong, they don’t know they are” and what it feels like to think you’ve learned to count (and can prove it by counting to 10) but whenever you count 6 potatoes or 4 apples you go, “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten” so even though you *do* know how to count to ten, you don’t know how to count at all. All with a great sense of fun. I loved these. And Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes may be my favorite book, ever. It’s not that impressive an achievement in terms of making you think it’s writer is impressively erudite–it’s just that there isn’t a word I would take out. It’s just perfect.
The Holes book has some dark themes (spoiler: basic plot is, rot-13, pevzvanyf raq hc va punetr bs n fhzzrepnzc sbe jnljneq oblf, chg gurz gb uneq ynobe va n gernfheruhag) significant danger (qrnqyl irabzf, syrrvat zheqrebhf nqhygf gbjneq nyzbfg-pregnva qrngu-ol-urngfgebxr) and the subsequent books in that series are better saved until after reading Holes. So maybe don’t try those.
Queen Zixi of Ix could work.
I think when I was that age or at most a smidge older (and also reading well above my age) I really enjoyed Willard Price’s Adventure stories. However, they do involve a fair bit of peril (protagonists getting shot at, bitten by snakes, that sort of thing) and are possibly more naturally appealing to boys anyway. They also have, ah, the attitudes of the time in which they were written in certain ways… Oh, and having gone back to them as an adult for professional reasons, the writing is pretty rancid, so if you’d have to inflict them on yourself too that might be another reason to avoid.
How about Swallows and Amazons? That’s a terrific book featuring more or less only the kind of peril one can encounter as a posh English kid on an early-mid-20th Century lakeside holiday.
Or the Just William stories, about schoolboy misdemeanours?
I hesitate to suggest Enid Blyton, but, well, Enid Blyton?
Top recommendation: Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
Also good: the Just William stories by Richmal Crompton
Kinda nauseating but she’ll probably like it: Enid Blyton (I was particularly fond of Shadow the Sheepdog)
I loved them as a child that age or not much older but she may find them excessively perilous plus also having read some of them as an adult they’re actually crap: the Adventure series by Willard Price
Try Astrid Lindgrens childrens books, most of them are pretty happy. Some of the more fantasy like stuff (Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, The Brothers Lionheart, “Mio, my son”) might be a little to scary for a five year old, but it should be age appropriate, and is aimed to be read by early readers.
Here’s stuff I’ve loved as a kid and recommend for other families.
Louis Sachar! Not his most recent stuff though, but I swear by everything “Wayside School” and my brothers both really loved “Marvin Redpost“.
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (the 1950s stuff, not the new reboot).
There’s a Young Amelia Bedelia series which is pretty nice.
Also, Shel Silverstein’s poetry – “Falling Up”, “A LIght in the Attic”, and “Where the Sidewalk Ends”.
What I’ve heard of but never read:
Try classics such as Beverly cleary’s Ramona books, but I’ve never gotten into them. People have said good things about “Magic Tree House” as well, but I never read it.
If she wants a little bit of drama, try the Boxcar Children.
Finally, if she’s ready for it (don’t think she is at 5 though) you can start classics like Heidi, though there is some misery there.
The first boxcar children book, the kids are sorta on-the-run and literally make-do in an abandoned boxcar for a bit. I read 12 or so subsequent ones, and they were all significantly less dark/dangerous and more fun-kids-solving-mysteries feeling. There’s >100 of these, so if she isn’t too challenged by the first one, the others are a good volume of books you can make available.
Young Fredle by Cynthia Voight is not going to challenge her, but the protagonist being a mouse whose superstitious family never leave the farmhouse kitchen, to the point of not knowing what is outside of the kitchen’s walls (and view Fredle with suspicion after Fredle has adventures with cats and cellar mice and etc all around the farmhouse)–versus Fredle, who has seen *stars*.
The Hoboken Chicken Incident is great. Probably won’t challenge, but it’s great. Also everything E.B. White–Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan–are good ones. Not quite as good as the Hoboken Chicken Incident though.
Anne of Green Gables (although it does have a death in it).
The Anne of Green Gables series seems likely to be a good fit.
The Secret Garden was one of my favorites when I was in that mindset, with detail that I imagine a LIW fan would like. E. Nesbit and Edward Eager were a level of droll that matches what other commenters are pointing out. So was Eva Ibbotson.
I can definitely second The Phantom Tollbooth. I loved the Hardy Boys and the Redwall series when I was a young reader, but I’m not sure how she would respond to the peril in the Hardy Boys and the fantasy violence in Redwall. Maybe when she’s a bit older?
Little Women might be good as well.
My ten year old loves Redwall and has for years, fwiw. There’s a lot of funny and non-violent adventurous parts to them, though they do all have battles and threats and the like.
Tove Janson’s Moomin books
S A Wakefield’s “Bottersnikes and Gumbles” series
DarkTigger has already mentioned Astrid Lindgren; I recommend Pippi Longstocking
Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm series
I have been lurking on this site for years and never felt the need to comment. Until now. I’ll try (but probably fail) to keep this a reasonable length.
* Thornton W. Burgess was one I read a lot of at that age (I was also a very early reader, but highly sensitive). There are a ton of his animal books in print.
* Astrid Lindgren. Famous for Pippi Longstocking (the original chapter books, not the cut-up shortened versions), but the Noisy Village books are among our absolute favorites. The Troublemaker Street books are excellent too, if you can find them; ditto Mardie.
* Maud Hart Lovelace’s “Betsy-Tacy” books. Fictionalized autobiographical books like Wilder; haven’t yet met a girl who didn’t like them (and my brothers enjoyed my dad’s read-alouds of those too).
* Carolyn Haywood. “B is for Betsy” is the first in that set; Haywood was pretty prolific so there are a lot available.
* Sydney Taylor’s “All-of-a-Kind Family” series.
* If she’s liked the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, there are the Martha years, the Charlotte years, and the Caroline years. The ones by Melissa Wiley are good, but mostly very hard to find in the non-dumbed-down versions (but you can at least figure out which ones to look for via Wiley’s website). The ones by Maria Wilkes are also excellent and easier to get. Helpfully, the publisher had them pick pen names that would get them on library shelves right next to the originals.
* My favorite book at age 5 was “Twenty-three Tales” by Leo Tolstoy. Maybe skip “The Bear.” I’m not sure what possessed him to classify that as a children’s story, though I’ve certainly never forgotten his description of what it was like to get bitten on the head and face by a bear.
* Rumer Godden’s “The Kitchen Madonna.” Also, at Christmas, “The Story of Holly and Ivy.”
* The Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy stories by Johnny Gruelle. (Caution: these had me entirely convinced that my dolls were alive. This did not bother me, it just meant I had very strong rules about how my dolls were to be treated.)
* Anything by Sid Fleischman, James Marshall, Arnold Lobel, or Cynthia Rylant. They all have short chapter books that have great pictures and great writing (Puppy Mudge excepted) such as: McBroom; the Fox books and “Rats on the Range”; “Fables” and Frog and Toad; “The Blue Hill Meadows” and Mr. Putter (the only kids’ books I know of with an elderly protagonist). Also, Russell Hoban’s Frances books.
* A.A. Milne, both Pooh and poetry. Again, the originals, not the modern Disney sap.
* Jean Little. “Mine for Keeps” is one example, but there are lots of good ones.
I’ll second the Thornton Burgess books–my 5-year-old daughter likes them. Also, you can visit his farm (it’s a plausible daytrip from NYC via train, and I’d be happy to drive the last little bit.)
I knew I’d forget something.
Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (just the comedies for your daughter). We ended up painting some double-sided peg dolls to help keep track of all the disguised characters as “Rosalind pretending to be Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind” can get a bit dizzying.
The Texas Bluebonnet Awards tend to favor coming-of-age stories that aren’t genre, or at least that was the case when I was growing up. I feel like the Newberry Medal was the same. So that’s a good list of books where the conflicts don’t revolve around danger.
Some danger can be mitigated by whimsical prose. Some Roald Dahl books might work.
You could also try introducing her to poetry.
Does she like horses? If so, Marguerite Henry. Lots and lots and lots of horse books, I don’t remember any of them being particularly scary (though I admit I was really young and my memories may not be perfect), and I really liked them when I was that age or a little older. If not, my recommendations for children’s fantasy would be Edward Eager, Patricia Wrede, and Diana Wynne Jones. Edward Eager doesn’t have much in the way of real risk that I remember; almost any of his will do, I feel as if Half Magic was the original, but Magic by the Lake and Seven-Day Magic were also good. He isn’t brilliantly inspired but he’s fun (though I haven’t reread as an adult). Patricia Wrede, I would recommend Dealing with Dragons and its sequels, which are fun and funny, and not to my memory too dark. Diana Wynne Jones is more complicated because she does get dark in spots, but it depends on the book – I might try Howl’s Moving Castle or The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant, and definitely steer clear of Aunt Maria or The Time of the Ghost or Hexwood. The thing is, she’s also a very good author of children’s fantasy. (Tale of Time City is also not very dark, but it’s not one of her strongest.)
I really liked Rosemary Sutcliff for children’s historicals; I can’t recommend my favorites because they’re all war stories, but The Armorer’s House isn’t, and I remember it as pleasant and definitely low-stress.
I liked Understood Betsy, which is not dark and dangerous at all, although it is certainly arguing a point.
What about All Creatures Great And Small and the various sequels? Set of short stories written by a vet about his work in the country, a number of them very sweet. I remember I liked those. Though again, I was very young, and might not have noticed anything that didn’t bother me.
I don’t know how it works for the reading level, but I remember liking Swiss Family Robinson, and I don’t remember any particularly sad or scary bits – it’s about a family that has been shipwrecked, but the whole thing is played much more as an adventure than anything else.
Also, um… I read Swallows and Amazons and sequels around that age (first had read to me, then read myself), and I found multiple elements of the first book creepy (the Amazons’ reaction to the little sister – yes, they’re just playing, but I was pretty young and it still bothered me) and really disliked Swallowdale (because of the “how we got into this mess” scene). It’s not that they aren’t good books, they’re on my reread list, but if she feels more strongly about “no sadness or serious danger” maybe be careful with those?
And for horse books, there’s the classic Black Stallion books and Black Beauty. The Black Stallion movie isn’t half bad, either.
My post on this must have gotten eaten by the filter because I linked most of the books I recommended.
Trying again without links.
These are books I loved as a child, and recommend to other people with kids, and read to small kids myself.
-Louis Sachar’s Wayside School series (including the two Sideways Arithmetic Books) are excellent, and also great for read-alouds. The books are absolutely brilliant, especially if you’ve ever had to deal with a public school. Also “Marvin Redpost” series.
-Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, by Betty MacDonald — the 1950s version, not modern reboot. Plus it’s gentle satire of 1950s parents, and an interesting historical look.
-Young Amelia Bedelia — the original is great, but might be below her reading level; these are chapter books
-Shel Silverstein’s Falling Up, A LIght in the Attic, and Where the Sidewalk Ends — book of poems, and they’re great. Also great for memorizing.
-Adventures of Homer Price — short stories, including one about a donut machine that can’t stop making donuts and one about a jukebox with a song you can’t get out of your head. Also good for learning some historical background of first half of 20th century.
-The Boxcar Children – some “sadness” but not that much; most of the series are mysteries.
There were also Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, but I never read those myself.
-You can start on older European classics for kids, like Heidi — though again, there’s drama and sadness in that one, but that’s a higher reading level.
Seconding (thirding?) Wayside School.
Thinking back on books that I enjoyed at that reading level, most of them have some kind of danger for the main characters. When she gets a bit older, I’d highly recommend Redwall and Wings of Fire, if she’s at all interested in fantasy books with animal protagonists.
What about the classics? Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, The Incredible Journey, maybe The Borrowers. I also remember enjoying Beverly Cleary and Bill Wallace when I was in grade school. I’m not sure if Beverly Cleary’s subject matter would interest a 5 year old, but Bill Wallace’s probably would.
Many of the recommendations I was going to make have already been made, specifically Swallows and Amazons, the Phantom Tollbooth, Moomins, Pippi Longstocking, and Redwall and Alice in Wonderland if the peril isn’t too much.
The Land of Green Ginger, by Noel Langley, is excellent (though may be out of print).
I’m also going to add some things my younger sister liked when she was that age or a bit older:
Dick King-Smith, specifically the Sophie series.
Noel Streatfeild (Ballet Shoes, etc).
Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies may be too old for her.
What about The Just-So Stories? The sad part isn’t going to be something she is likely to notice, without the context.
The Jungle Books? Probably too many scary bits.
Does she like poetry? My daughter did, even younger than that.
I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned My Father’s Dragon and its sequels, which works as a first chapter book for kids. I usually figured that anything I remembered 35 years after I read originally read it might be worth recommending to my kids.
Thank you for all your suggestions, SSC!
There was an interesting passage in Sapiens about enhancing memory retention in rats by modifying a type of NMDA receptor B2 (NRB2) in rat forebrains. They found the mice responded slightly quicker, learnt aspects of maze-solving earlier, better recognised warnings to dangerous stimuli etc. when they were adults. This kind of villifies the hyposthesis NRB2 played a causal role in neuron plasticity in rats. The paper was called “Genetic enhancement of learning andmemory in mice”.
But why nature didn’t implement this change? Maybe the genetic change was complex and only provides a benefit because of mutations that occur a short evolutionary time ago. Hence, nature just hasn’t had the chance. But given techniques from 20 years ago sufficed, this seems a little suspect. Perhaps there’s a major cost that’s unclear from laboratory tests on the mice. If not that, then some defect in their children. Or it might just not be that useful in the wild.
I have no clue what’s the truth. Does anyone more qualified have some papers they could recommend?
Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about biology.
I thought the way natural selection worked wasn’t so much “survival of the fittest,” but “death of the unfit.” It’s not the smartest rats who live but the dumbest rats who die, so there’s not much selection pressure to favor the super-smart rats over the merely smart rats.
Not really anything that tidy, either; it’s ‘rats who die before reproducing don’t pass on their traits.’ Summed over enormous spans of time and all the rats on Earth, that can look like death of the unfit, but at no single point is that the explicit process at work – sometimes the smart rats are just unlucky and some terrifying new predator moves in, sometimes the dumbest rats have slightly thicker fur and so get access to new and exciting food supplies half a mile up the mountain. Evolution is ‘just’ interacting probabilities.
Something like that would only be [arguably] surprising for humans, for whom the pressure for greater intelligence was immense. Rats only have some rather mild evolutionary pressure to become smarter, so if this change made them e.g. require a bit more calories, or react a bit slower, or somehow else was slightly maladaptive, there’s nothing strange that this outweighted the benefit of better memory. Or maybe it wasn’t maladaptive but just sufficiently unlikely and the few times it did occur it didn’t reach fixation.
Good point with the fixation thing. Also I messed up. They’re mice, not rats.
And although there are billions of mice, there are also many strains. Perhaps the strain (C57B) used in the study was unique and for other mice the necessary mutations are complex. Does anyone know if that’s the case?
But if you ignore the complexity of the gene, there’s still decent odds it could have reached fixation in some population. In which case, some similair mice species may be smarter than other.
If that’s not the case, then its probably maladaptive. Which is what I was enquiring about.
Its also important to note that intelligence and memory are compounded by the length of time an individual lives.
I quickly looked at the paper, and I’m not quite sure what you mean by “…kind of villifies the hyposthesis NRB2 played a causal role in neuron plasticity in rats.”
Also, they didn’t modify the NRB2 gene as such – they added another copy of it that was only active in a subset of neurons in the brain, increasing the amount of the NRB2 protein present in the cortex and hippocampus to ~ double the normal level. (they did it this way because the levels of NRB2 normally decline in adulthood)
(and the methods they used to generate the transgenic animals might be more labor-intensive and expensive than the CRISPR magic wand, but they produce the same results, and the fact scientists could do it in a lab 20 years ago really has no bearing on how “easy” or likely it would have been for an equivalent mutation to evolve naturally)
And as you say, laboratory behavioral tests are hardly the same thing as “real” natural selection. Take one of the tests they used (the water “maze” test – mice have to find a hidden platform in a tank of opaque water) as an example:
On first try, both the mutant and wild type mice take ~ 55 seconds to find the platform. On second try, the mutant mice do it in a little under 40 seconds, and the wild type in a little over 40 seconds. Third and forth tries, the mutant mice are about 10 seconds faster, by fifth try the gap starts to shrink, and by the 6th trial the mutant mice have maybe a 1 or 2 second advantage.
How do you correlate that with survival in the wild? How many chance to learn from its mistakes does a mouse normally get? (It’s not exactly a realistic scenario, it’s used mainly because it’s very easy to administer in a consistent way and not especially cruel or painful. Mice hate getting dumped in “open” water and are highly motivated to get out, but there is no real risk of injury.)
Sorry, I meant mice when I was writing the post, not rats.
By “…kind of villifies the hyposthesis NRB2 played a causal role in neuron plasticity in rats…” I was referring to a hypothesis they mentioned that certain NRB2 receptor components were critical in gating neuroplasticity. Their results sort of support the idea.
And yeah, it seems unlikely this would provide even a small advantage. That’s why a more rigorous examination would be interesting to read about. Given its been cited 2000+ times over 20 years, there’s likely somone who’s refuted it or shown there are limitations to its techniques or so forth. In fact, I think I started reading one but I can’t find it again.
Does anyone know any forums where I could connect with IoT developers? I’m hoping to recruit one to join an early-stage startup as a partner.
I know a few. My experience is IoT developers tend to hang out in physical spaces like hackerspaces or makerspaces. These days a lot of them are on listservs or the odd FB group, begrudgingly since their in person meetups got corona’d.
Anyplace online you could point me to in particular?
Not so much. I’d suggest signing up for any local hackerspaces or makerspaces you know. They usually have chat rooms or listservs. If you want to give me a job description I can print it and post it on their boards.
Hey, I’m game. IoT isn’t my specialty but it’d be a “take a week to get up to speed” kind of transition. EMail address is my handle here at gmail.
What’s the application?
User name checks out, IoT must be more out of hand than I thought.
Embedding computers in to the toaster is passé.
In all seriousness though, industrial IoT could do a ton of good. If you watch the Chemical Safety Board’s Youtube channel, one sensor in the right place and a computer that raised holy hell if any of the assumptions that make the plant safe were violated would have prevented almost all of those accidents.
My job is programming those exact computers to make sure they raise holy hell. Our industry conferences are always fun. Half the presentations are “how to set up a thousand wi-fi relays blanketing the entire plant so everything talks to everything else all the time.” The other half are “how a single unsecured ethernet port in a supply cabinet let hackers shut down this entire plant and kill eleven puppies.” I tend to agree more with the second half but the dichotomy is always entertaining.
A computer that never allowed the plat to operate at all, would have prevented all of those accidents.
You can’t get safety by writing a bunch of safety rules and mindlessly enforcing them all – that way leads to nobody getting hurt until everybody starves to death because all the food-processing plants have been locked down for months. You need informed judgement about which rules to enforce and which to ignore, and if there’s a computer that won’t let you do that, the computer will be bypassed one way or another.
Do I have to pick a side? My paranoia says the options are “the people who would kill me”, “the people who would kill me and I find morally repugnant”, and “people who would be killed by one of those two groups”.
Can anyone make a case that we won’t see the US descend into large-scale political violence over the next decade?
Can anyone make a case that we won’t be having a do-over of the 20th century?
If Trump loses the election, I think it’s plausible the race war loses a lot of steam. How much varies by how much momentum you think the media adds to the mix and how motivated they are to make one side or the other’s reign look good/bad.
The race war, in my view, is just a proxy for “people who could be turned into fascists” vs “people who could be turned into communists”. Of course, I’m not so naive to believe that this is ever going away. The concern is the brakes won’t be put on until it’s too late.
A war can only happen if there are two sides approximately equal in both ability and willingness to fight.
Putting ability aside for a second, it seems for now that only one side is at all willing to actually fight. It’s possible that circumstances could change such that the other side suddenly changes their mind and starts fighting back, but there’s no evidence as of yet that this is coming any time soon…
And you think the other side will just go quietly?
They have so far. There are no meaningful counter-protests or counter-demonstrations, unless you count the “token resistance followed by prompt retreat” exhibited by various law enforcement agencies.
Where are the roving bands of Proud Boys and KKK members that I’ve been constantly assured are super active, incredibly numerous, and are just hiding in wait for the exact right moment to start the race war?
There is no meaningful resistance to these protests coming from anyone other than the police (and the police’s own resistance is pathetic and hardly even meaningful in most cases)
Matt M:
Police and protests are both local. There are places where the police joined the protest marches, and other places where the police broke up peaceful protests violently, and still other places where the police were chased off by rioters. In many places, it looks like journalists have been targeted by police. (My guess is that this is directly related to the decreasing power of media outlets. Authorities and media have played a long iterated prisoners’ dilemma game, but now, everyone can see the end of the iterations coming.)
It’s like police misconduct itself–there’s not one police force, there are thousands–some pretty well-run and clean, others mismanaged and corrupt and violent.
Race war is a fantasy in the minds of a very small number of white nationalists and an even smaller number of black nationalists. It will never ever happen.
Increasing racial tensions leading to everything going worse in the US, that’s a different matter. Lots of mainstream journalists, political figures, etc., benefit from increasing that tension. They won’t lead us to a race war, but they can and may throw enough sand into the gears of our society that lots of stuff works a lot less well.
Yeah, we haven’t descended into that kind of violence in forever, this isn’t the Balkans.
OTOH, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.
The US has only descended into a civil war twice, arguably three times if you count the English Civil War spilling over into the colonies. Both were proceeded by about a decade of blatant military action. No state capitals, as far as I know, have been laid siege to with cannons. Nor are there competing governments arguing for legitimacy with two state capitals, two capital cities, and two militias. Civil war requires two approximately equal sides willing to wage a war against each other over a political issue. What is that issue, and if it exists and is important, where is the war?
Or are you referring to something lower level than an actual civil war?
What parts of the 20th century? The 20th century was not defined by civil strife. It was defined by external conflict. If you looked at US society from 1900-1930 you might have concluded the century would be dominated by economic and racial conflicts and arguments about role of government and American society. Indeed, there was a plausible case to make this was a continuation of the late 19th century progressive civil strife. That wasn’t remotely what happened: it was defined by a new international order and a conflict with totalitarian powers.
Okay maybe there won’t be an actual civil war, just a perpetual spiral of escalation until one side manages to capture the entire government. Which will still lead to large-scale political violence.
What are you imagining specifically? Because the riots at the moment are poorer Democrats attacking wealthier Democrats in basically disorganized fashion, not Democrats working in a united way to attack Republicans.
Yeah, but both sides are blaming republicans.
I am not sure I agree. Germany in the 20s was internal strife which lead to external strife, as was Russia in the late teens into the 20s, and I have seen WW1 characterized as being caused by the weakening of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I don’t know anything about Japan pre 1930, hopefully someone steps in and gives me a bit of info there as well.
“Internal” strife generally does not originate from something called the Great War. Nor can the weakness of Austria explain why half the continent dogpiled what was a fairly local conflict. Further, the internal politics of Germany or Russia were less influential than the external politics of World War 2 and the Cold War.
(Japan had instability but what occurred in the 1930s was not such a regular break from what was “normal” Japanese politics at the time. Assassinations, political suppression, and violence had been a regular part of Japanese politics since at least 1870 and arguably since 1853. Likewise, the transition of effective power between various political institutions at times of crisis had been very normal. The so called Taisho Democracy began as a shift to democratic institutions which could solve the legitimacy crisis that occurred in 1912. Likewise, the shift away from it began with a crisis of efficacy in the 1930s. It didn’t involve things like widespread scaling back of voting rights or the abolition of Parliament.)
What can I do to safely encourage the US to “descend into large-scale political violence over the next decade”?
Why would you or anyone else want this?
The state’s been effectively captured by the upper class and the electoral system can’t provide any meaningful breaks on this process, what with politicians depending on donor cash? Nonviolent change would be preferable but I don’t see it as a realistic alternative.
Maybe people just didn’t like him.
That seems like a bad agenda.
The best you can do is probably just to look for scissor statements, try to get people to join infowars and other groups doing things that increase societal distrust, push the envelope on racist statements (especially nonchalant and based sounding remarks, make use of the riots as proof character for example) and on accusing others of racism in the appropriate groups respectively, same goes for rape risk and false accusation risk (make each seem as scary, systemic as possible).
Alt r1ght and extreme anti-white groups could use more strength, if more people get pushed there it would help your goal.
Instigate attacks (edit: not actual, physical attacks, that would be despicable and counter productive) on religious institutions in the cw, as well as any other institution that gives people community, values etc. Whether the values are good or bad, they generally stabilize things unless they’re brought directly into the culture war
Who’d be willing to fight?
People can freely engage in violent rhetoric on the internet because it is close to cost-less. But when you’ve got a gun on your shoulder, you are forced to ask yourself “how important is this really?” Is the Red Tribe boy really willing to get shot to prevent Democrats from having abortions? Is the Blue Tribe boy really willing to get shot for transgender bathrooms and affirmative action?
In the 20th century you did have lots of men getting shot because of distant abstractions. A generation of Brits were willing to go fight and die because of a signature on a piece of paper signed by a government that, at the time, did not let most of their ancestors vote. But the men of that age had a sense of manly honor that really is a double edged sword. Consider the white feather. How would people respond if you tried something like that now? Everyone except male feminists and misguided tradcons would laugh at it.
@zero >
Sure, that’s easy – I remember when it was more violent than now, and I remember my grandfathers tales of when it was even more violent.
Right now rioting looks to me about the same scale as in the early ’90’s, and I remember the ’70’s and ’80’s (and the domestic terrorism then), and there’s plenty of documentation of the riots of the ’60’s, and street violence of the ’30’s, and the worse violence of the earlier 20th century and the 19th century, we just have a long way to go before achieving those depths.
Mostly I place my faith in what I observe of younger adults who (compared to my generation and those older):
1) Don’t have many kids.
and
2) Don’t commit many murders.
Yeah it may get worse, but to me this looks more like an early 90’s style blip, we’ll see which in a few years.
From a twitter poll:
https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1267531729767522304
“Are you white or asian? || If you press the button, everyone’s skin tone in the United States changes to the same exact medium brown, including babies born in this time. All changes revert after 10 years. Do you press the button?”
I thought the answer was: “Obviously press the button, because racism is a huge problem and this neatly gets rid of it for ten years.”
Half of white-or-asian people, and two-thirds of not-white-or-asian, people disagreed with me.
What are good reasons to not press the button?
(I recognize there are some reasons like “this doesn’t completely solve the problem because people will still infer each other’s race from their name or their hair.” I’m interested in more fundamental reasons.)
White guy here;
a) I don’t like the idea of dramatically changing my appearance so I wouldn’t want to press the button.
b) If it made everyone white, I still wouldn’t press it because I don’t want to change everyone appearance semi-permanently against their will. Giving someone a haircut against their will is assault, I don’t see how forcible changing their skin color is any different.
c) I have no problem with a button that lets people choose their own color
I’m also white, and I agree completely with b) and c).
Also, if the button removes *every* indication of race, not just skin color, I think a lot of people would object to no longer having names that reflect their heritage.
I agree that changing people’s appearance against their will is bad. But do you definitely think it’s worse than racism?
Racism causes a lot of problems, and I think it’s worth taking the changing-people’s-appearance utility hit to make those problems go away.
I’ve never been the victim of racism, and I would suffer from some degree of body dismorphia, so for me its a clear net negative. I used to be a utilitarian, but I moved away from that mindset a few years ago.
I also don’t think this changing white american’s skin color will actually solve the problems plaguing black/latino communities. The problems these communities have are educational, social, and familial.
I’m not sure racism is really as big a problem as perception of racism. If you painted all the people the same tone, there’d be some other difference to unite over–especially if underlying behavioral differences due to culture or genetics remained. Accent, facial features, whatever.
So I don’t think it accomplishes anything. And it seems rather like a violation to significantly change everyone’s appearance.
Who made the button? How does it work? Are there side effects? You should have a strong default of not activating technology if you don’t know where it comes from and its purported effect is far beyond humanity’s capabilities.
Going back to the spirit of the question, you may not find the following reasons good, but I’m guessing that people were motivated by some combination of these reasons (even if not fully articulated):
1. Just because some *&!%s are racist doesn’t mean I should erase my identity.
2. How do I then know then who’s in my tribe?
3. How do I make do without an initial, albeit noisy, signal of how potentially dangerous and how potentially trustworthy someone is?
Possibly, in some cases, there was also the cynical:
4. But then it will be harder for me to play the “racism!” card.
If you believe that to solve the problem we need to treat races differently (e.g. affirmative action, but also just on the social level) as many people evidently do, then pushing the button would only make things worse. Besides, you’d ruin the whole Bl*ckLivesMatter movement making their name nonsensical.
Well, if you believe consent is important at all, that’s a reason.
It naively assumes that pigmentation is the ultimate cause for these kinds of conflict. It’s like watching people burn a flag and think things would be different if the flag had different colored stripes.
It ignores the possibility that people dislike each other because of how they (or are perceived to) behave or whether they (either in reality or by misperception) contribute too little (poor) or take too much (rich) in the economy or society at large. Appearance becomes an easy visual signifier. It also ignores historical rivalries, for example, why a dominican might harbor more dislike for africans than, say, a hungarian. Irish vs. English. Jews in europe vs. Blacks in europe. Lots of cases where ‘Hate’ clearly does not scale with difference in appearance.
And people are very good at creating and identifying signifiers based on what camp in some rivalry people fall. That means accents, clothing, musical tastes, choice of automobile, bumper stickers, etc. etc.
There’s an interesting question here somewhere: How much of the black/white gap in day-to-day life would change if there were no way to tell blacks and whites apart short of, say, a DNA test? My guess is that some stuff (any kind of discrimination, police behavior leading blacks to get hassled and arrested more often than whites) would change, and other stuff (unwed parenthood, worse performance in school and on standardized tests) wouldn’t change much. But I’m definitely open to learning.
One data point here: there are subsets of whites and blacks who do better in most areas than the majority of the members of their race–Eastern European Jews for whites and Caribbean and some African immigrants for blacks. Presumably most people interacting with them don’t know the difference, and certainly someone who hates/fears/assumes the worst of blacks isn’t going to think better of you because your parents came here from Nigeria or Jamaica, and presumably the people interacting with you mostly don’t treat you better because your ancestors were Russian Jews instead of Irish Catholics. At least those observable differences probably don’t come down to differences in treatment.
I wonder if you can find low-performing groups of whites with a lot of social dysfunction (Scots-Irish?) in the US, and find similar patterns the other way.
Would Roma Count?
But again there are ways to tell culturally and behaviorally people of the same ethnic or racial background apart.
This is also why, in all likelihood, a white peron will feel more comfortable around a black person that has their accent and dress. In a suddenly mono-chromatic society, accent and dress would be the signifiers and wealth and educational attainment [and other trinkets] would be the basis of distrust and conflict.
The thing about skin color as a source for racism is it’s incredibly pervasive.
If people want to discriminate against me because I speak Russian, or because I’m a furry, or because I like classical music — that sucks, but I have a solution, which is I just don’t talk about that stuff at work. If people want to discriminate against me because of my skin color, there’s no way to get away from that.
And if some asshole cop pulls me out of my car and he’s racist against furries who speak Russian, I can just not tell him I’m part of those cultures.
I like blondes.
First, I think you’re going to find out that the people who say it’s about culture and not race, mostly really mean it and will still be able to figure out people’s cultural backrgound even without skin color as a cheat. Then you’ll find out that a lot of the people who thought they cared about race, find that they really care about culture.
After that, someone will reverse-engineer the button and create a new one designed to end all the kerfluffle about transgenderism by giving them the fully-functional primary and secondary sexual characteristics of their assigned-at-birth gender. And maybe magically disintegrating any non-gender-appropriate clothing they try to wear.
The next step will be the button to solve the whole LGBT mess by rewiring everyone’s brains to experience sexual arousal exactly and only w/re people of the opposite assigned-at-birth gender. Or maybe we make them all perfectly balanced bisexuals; I’m not sure that’s going to make any difference.
At some point, the idealistic button-pushers are going to find out that fucking around with core issues of other peoples’ identities in order to fit them into the nice rectangular grid of your ideal society, is going to make those people righteously annoyed to the point where they fuck around with the button-pushers’ identity as living human beings.
Ten years later, the rest of us rebuild a messy kludge of a civilization without you all.
To add to your first point, I would encourage people who think pushing the button is a good idea to reflect on how much of the “culture war” is fought primarily between white people.
After all, someone already pushed the button to make the Jews look like everyone else, and that was a qualified success at best.
I agree with your first paragraph. I actually think switching people from discrimination-based-on-race to discrimination-based-on-culture would be a big step up. Police generally can’t tell someone’s culture at a glance, so cultural discrimination would not be a motive for police shootings.
Your second and third paragraphs seem to be sort of a weird strawman of what I said. I don’t endorse them.
I’m unhappy with your last two paragraphs because they seem to be death threats. I don’t think making death threats was necessary here.
I don’t think “wouldn’t it be great if we imposed bodily mutilation on the vast majority of the population” is necessary here. But here we are.
Strong disagree. It is very often quite easy to tell someone’s culture at a glance through clothing and hairstyle choices. You can tell Europeans from Americans by the kind of shoes they wear. You can tell the difference between an Indian born and raised in the US and an Indian who moved to the US later in life apart by their clothes (especially women). You can spot conservative Jews because their women wear long skirts, which in this day and age is more noticeable than you might think. You can tell this difference between an African American man and someone who immigrated who immigrated as an adult by their clothes.
And if people aren’t as reliable at this now they will get better at it fast because 1) people like being able to tell other people’s culture at a glance and will adapt and 2) people like showing other people their culture at a glance and will come up with new ways of signaling their culture. Heck, just think about gang colors. Large groups of people who were of otherwise indistinguishable culture invented two new cultures and ways to tell each other apart.
Racism isn’t so big a problem that we need to rewrite every American’s genetic code without their consent. Also, you cannot guarantee you eliminate racism when people are actively constructing identities and finding new forms of racism (or, charitably, evidence of racism). Rewriting genetic code will not undo the fact that a huge number of black men spent time in prison, and therefore lost human capital and employment opportunities.
I find it a little odd that someone who remembered Asians exist seems to assume that race equals skin color.
If I had to steelman, I would guess some combination of:
1) It wouldn’t work – people would still figure out who was who.
2) It wouldn’t work – the legacy of structural racism would still affect most of the oppressed, and now it would be harder to build a coalition around it. (The counterargument is that now you could try to build a coalition based around class instead of race, but if you think race based oppression is a historic wrong that must be remedied, a restart leaves all those crimes unanswered).
3) It would take away some of the positives of a particular identity while leaving some of the negatives, as above. It’s a kind of appropriation, like people acting like another culture or wearing dreads or kimonos, and a kind of erasure at the same time.
If we take our cue from civil rights leaders like MLK we should be striving for a world where we treat others as individuals and this thought experiment doesn’t accomplish that. What it does is to remove some individual variation which reduces their individuality. To highlight this imagine if the question said ‘what if we had a button that made every person’s skin tone a the exact same shade of white?’ How many non white people would react to this in a positive manner? How many should?
Pressing it would increase the prevalence of skin cancer at low latitudes and of vitamin D deficiency at high latitudes.
Humanity should have to figure out their societal problems the hard way.
Biological problems with biology yes (lead for example), systemic oppression/ blaming the system based on a (probably motivated) grossly exaggerated belief in the inherent evil of the society in general – by large portions of society no
No. I have a personal aesthetic preference for the white phenotype and wouldn’t want to look at the mirror and see a non-white face. It would have substantial economic costs. People would still want to raise their children in an environment where there is cultural support for high-investment parenting. Under the temporary homogenization it would become more difficult and you’d have a whole industry spring up in order to trace genealogy and tell you what parts of the city are inhabited by who and it would be so unnecessary. And imagine the embarrassment in stuff like the dating world, people having to ask that awkward question. Now you could say well that’s a good thing if there’s more mixing, and you might even be right in a strict utilitarian perspective. But the more fundamental question is is it moral to force the white community(or other communities) to mix if its individuals do not want to?
Other people have posted thoughtful, valid reasons, many of which I agree with.
So I will post a stupid reason that is nonetheless the important to me: I am somewhat faceblind. It’s particularly bad when watching TV shows / movies. Skin color is one of the most reliable ways to tell characters apart. Everyone having the exact same skin tone is going to be really annoying, especially if Hollywood still insists on the “all of our male actors have the same three haircuts” shtick.
I don’t think it is.
I’m reminded by something GKC, or possibly C.S. Lewis wrote, to the effect that every culture worries about the problems it doesn’t have, the ones that are the flip side of the problems it does have. A culture that is too religious worries about the lack of religion, one where nobody really believes any more worries about how dangerous religion is (my examples — I forget the ones in the original).
Modern American society has strikingly less discrimination by either race or gender, especially the latter, than most societies that have ever existed, so we worry a lot about racism and sexism. In order to worry about the former, we have watered down the meaning of “racist” from “someone who hates or despises people because of their race” to “has a different opinion on some question related to race than the person applying the label.”
Scott had a pretty careful analysis some time back of the question of whether police targeted blacks more than other people and concluded that there wasn’t good evidence showing that they did. Yet lots of people, including some here, simply take the opposite view for granted as obviously true.
Reasonable academics will say that our ancestors lacked racism, that it was socially constructed in the 16th century to justify seizing land in the Americas and buying sub-Saharan Africans to work it.
Unfortunately you can’t get them to reason from the empirical facts that the Islamic world had an African slave trade and a white slave trade long before the 16th century. Somehow it’s a structurally racist atrocity that Western slave owners had anxiety about their wives having sex with black slaves but we can’t say anything about the fear of getting cuckolded by slaves in the Thousand Nights and a Night frame story.
I would make fun of this argument as a ludicrous straw man, but I’ve heard people make it almost word for word.
‘America is a classless society’
I complained in a recent thread about “caring on command.” The concept I was trying to get across is that I think these people really do genuinely care about the cause du jure, but only for as long as they’re told to, and not in any consistently logical way that will tell you what else they care about.
This is something of a third way between mistake theory and conflict theory. The other side really does believe these things, but that won’t stop them from believing the opposite next week just as fervently. You can model this fairly accurately by just treating them as insincere, but I don’t think that’s what’s really going on.
I really need a term for this concept. It seems to drive so much of our politics now. I see no other way to understand all of the politicians and media organizations who were so passionate that we needed to lock down everything because of COVID last week, and have forgotten all of that this week.
I propose “strong opinions loosely held.”
It’s quibbling about definitions, but this to me is mutually contradictory. If I said “Does he genuinely care about ending chinchilla fur harvesting?” and someone answered “Well, he said he did for a couple weeks, then stopped as soon as his bubble deemed it a secondary focus at best” I’d assume what he genuinely cares about is signalling membership in his bubble or non-membership in his other.
To me this is relevant because it tells me things about how much he should be resisted; if he cares about it from a fundamental, persistent and self-generated place, then him not having his way means he will experience long term discomfort that I can solve by giving him the thing. If he was going to care about something else next week as soon as he got the memo, I haven’t solved anything time wouldn’t and now he’s asking for something else that also won’t be helped by me giving him anything.
People’s motivations in things matter to me. Drinking kills more than twice as many people per year than guns; if somebody wants guns banned but isn’t a prohibitionist, this tells me that “people not dying” is not their motivation. They then have extra work to do if they want to convince me that gun bans are a good thing, because this moves “I want people who aren’t like me to be forced to do what I want” higher on the plausibility scale for their motivation. If my motivations are “give up reasonable things so we all get along better” than it matters if “so we all get along better” is actually something I get for giving something up.
Again, kind of semantics, but I feel like if “genuinely cares about” = “cares about this week because someone told him to” then I need another word for someone who cares about things in a way where he won’t forget them and move on to other demands next week.
In some sense this might be true, but I want to mention that I think a lot (most?) of signalling isn’t something we consciously set out to do, but is instead caused by some internal status thermostat that motivates things below the conscious level. Analyzing the algorithm from the outside, a causal model might look something like “brain perceives this as something important for tribal affiliation, therefore creates desire to do that signalling, which the ‘consciousness-as-PR-executive’ then fills in with human communicable reasons X,Y,Z”. From the inside though, it just feels like “I learned about this, and it seems important to take these steps for reasons X,Y,Z”.
The fact that it’s signalling accounts for why people are unable to care about it once it’s no longer in mainstream discussion. However, since the desire to signal happens at a below conscious level, I think that trying to persuade people by telling them their actions are merely signalling won’t work, you’ll somehow have to convince the ‘consciousness-as-PR-executive’ they’re wrong.
I feel like this is probably rehashing previous discussion on signalling in this community, so feel free to point me to good links if anyone has them.
I don’t think we actually disagree on the the part where they might genuinely have an intense feeling that this thing is bad, bad, bad and needs to be resisted. Where I think we might differ is that if they aren’t doing the bare-minimum amount of monitoring necessary to temper this after X “adopt belief as most important thing, drop it for whatever” occurrences, I probably judge them more harshly than you. At the very least I raise their standard of proof to the roof.
I’m not super-worried about convincing the person who ‘genuinely believes’ in the will-switch-next-week sense. I’m primarily worried about whether or not I should resist them or give them what they want, and advising teetering third parties. Cause-of-the-day guy is a lost cause to me.
While there’s merit to your line of logic, there are other ways to believe “alcohol shouldn’t be banned” and “guns should be banned” at the same time, besides just being power hungry.
1. Believing that banning alcohol or significantly reducing its consumption is impossible and/or impractical (see the prohibition), but that banning/significantly reducing the prevalence of guns is possible.
2. Deontologically believing that gun ownership is not a moral right in the same way that the right to drink is, for reasons probably involving use of violence.
If a person came to the discussion with those or other valid reasons for alcohol /= guns in terms of evil or practical ban-worthyness, I’d probably listen to them much closer; it indicates they’ve thought about it, which is what I’d expect a person who honestly opposed guns because they honestly oppose avoidable deaths to do.
This sometimes happens on the internet when I bring it up, both because people on the parts of the internet I go tend to have thought about such things and because if they haven’t they have time to while drafting their response. I’ve never had it happen in person, and I’ve used this argument kind of a lot.
If I get stutters or crickets in response to this and the person clearly hasn’t thought about it before, then there’s almost certainly something besides “death is bad” as primary motivation for them wanting guns banned, whether they know it or not. And whether or not they know it, that means it’s really important to me to know what their actual reason is, because if it’s something like “Well, guns are a ‘you guys’ thing, and I fucking hate you guys” then giving them guns just gives them bandwidth to come after something else I care about.
My argument has always been that lowering speed limits significantly or forcing everyone to install breathalyzers in their cars would save more lives than making guns illegal, but I find very few people that are in favor of those, fairly benign, policies.
Lowering speed limits is benign?
If you are driving 30 miles (about average daily drive for an American), dropping your speed from 70 to 55 would mean that your trip would take an extra five minutes. However, I’ve seen estimates as high a 9% increased fatalities per 5mph increase of speed limit.
Five minutes out of your day seems pretty benign in comparison to the possible savings of life.
I don’t really have anything to say to that other than sometimes people drive more than 30 miles. If I had to make a drive of over 150 miles capped at 55mph, I’d join the rioters.
How many times a year do you drive 150 miles or more? Lowering your speed to 55 would cost you 35 minutes. How many lives are those 35 minutes worth?
It would be more than just 35 minutes – 35 minutes per person per trip of such length. A quick google showed that Americans spend about 70 billion hours driving each year, so if such a policy decreased speed by about 5% on average, that’s 3.5 billion minutes, or 6,659 more man-years spent driving each year.
This raises interesting utilitarian questions like “how much worse is your life while you’re driving a car?” If we assume the worst case scenario – that being stuck going 55 on the highway is as bad as being dead – then this speed reduction policy would be roughly equivalent to the deaths of 110 healthy 20-year olds in terms of lost life.
As per wikipedia there are about 37,000 motor vehicle deaths per year in the U.S., so a nine percent reduction in fatalities would save maybe 3,330 lives. Which is a lot more than 110.
I started off this comment sort of critical of this idea, but looking at these rough numbers it seems pretty good. The best objections I can think of are as follows:
1. Getting people to actually follow the new laws. It’s my impression that speed limits are generally fairly loosely enforced as-is, and if the limit suddenly drops by 15 mph it’s likely that going 20 over will remain socially acceptable and not be widely enforced.
2. The economic effects of slowing down land cargo transportation by 10%. I imagine these could be pretty significant, but I have no idea how I would go about estimating them.
3. A potential slippery slope argument – why stop at 55 mph? The math might work out down to 30 mph or even lower when all we’re considering is raw time lost. Are individual-use cars even a net good as a whole?
Not with the way congestion works. The total number of cars a set space of road can handle depends on the speed they are traveling. A 70 mpg limit might keep traffic flowing while a 55 limit could well cause congestion dropping the average speed to much less than 55.
For #1 the government could easily require governors that stop your car from going over 55. My car has the abilty to set this already as a “valet” mode. They could even make them location based so that you never go over the speed limit.
I think #2 is the strongest argument against it, but in reality trucks tend to drive slower than the rest of traffic anyways, so they wouldn’t be going from 70 to 55, it would be a smaller amount
#3 is part of my argument for lowering speed limits instead of getting rid of guns. A lot of people say no one needs a gun, but when you start digging in to numbers it’s questionable how many people really need a car.
@baconbits9 Yeah obviously there are otehr factors at play. I was just illustrating how small the difference would be if you were driving at the current maximum speed vs a lower speed.
@baconbits9
I thought that this was more than counteracted by the fact that cars driving more slowly require less space between them, so you can get more cars on the same stretch of road. This is one reason why major highways in many places have temporary lower speed limits at rush hour.
Here in the Netherlands, the speed limit on motorways during the day was recently cut from 130 km/h to 100 km/h- this was a widely unpopular move, and the decision was made because of emissions regulations not for safety. Various experts said that in theory the maximum road capacity is reached with an average speed of 95 km/h.
(Many motorways around major cities already had 100 km/h or 80 km/h limits in place during rush hour- often this was combined with allowing traffic to use the hard shoulder when the lower limits were in effect.)
@Scoop.
$70 to $150
At 270 million cars in the US, that gives $19-40 billion to equip every card.
This site estimates an annual cost to the US economy of $132 billion, so it would pay for itself in a few months. It would presumably also be a lot cheaper if it was mandatory (due to scale), and if it was done in the factory for all new cars.
It would also save up to 11,000 people a year (assuming it stopped ALL drunk driving deaths, which is not the case – some of those accidents would presumably happen anyway).
Generally I think car safety should be taken a lot more seriously given how prevalent it is, that it affects young people as much or more as old people, and that it’s eminently avoidable.
NB. all very rough numbers.
Probably a dozen.
I need to drive 100 million miles to kill 1 person, statistically. So let’s say at 70 mph I kill 1.09 people in that same 100 million miles, based on your 9% increase estimate. Over that 100 million miles I will have saved myself over 389 thousand hours (44 years) and killed 0.09 extra people. Worth it in my book.
Edit: scrolled back up, apparently it was 9% per 5 mph increase. So 0.27 people dead for every 44 years saved. Still seems like I’d rather be going 70 mph.
But also, a change in speed limit incentivizes infrastructure changes, as wages to cover commute should lead to favoring more local businesses and hires.
@Fahundo
I think that math doesn’t quite give an accurate estimate of the impact this policy would have on an individual. Driving 100 million miles would take 163 years at 70 mph, and 207 years at 55 mph. Since those lengths are well above the current lifespan, it’s safe to say that 44 years is a major overestimate of the time one person might lose to this policy.
What is a good upper bound estimate? Let’s look at a trucker who has to drive, say, 500 miles per day. That’s about 7.1 hours at 70 mph, and 9.1 hours at 55 mph. So two extra hours per day, times maybe 60 years in the average career, for a total lifetime timeloss of around 44,000 hours, or 5 years.
So in the extreme case, this policy could mean a person spends 5 more years of their life driving.
In a more typical case, if a person drives about 50 miles in a given day, they go from .71 hours to .91 hours, for a rough total lifetime timeloss of 4,400 hours or 0.5 years.
To compare this more accurately to the numbers I calculated in my earlier comment, the trucker would lose 30 days of time to driving each year, and the typical person would lose about 3 days per year.
Since there are about 230 million drivers in the US, assuming they all drive a typical amount, we would lose a total of….about two million years of time per year. Which is 300x higher than my original estimate. Oops.
I went back and checked my math, turns out I accidentally a factor of 60x, and also estimated a 5% increase instead of a 25% increase, which is where the difference comes from.
So the actual expected timeloss across the country per year might be between 400,000 years and 2 million years, to save roughly 3,000 lives. Assuming each life saved lives out say, 40 more years, the gain is 120,000 yearss per year. So the simple answer is that this policy loses out pretty hard.
The actual analysis is more complex for a few reasons (on top of the three arguments from the first comment):
1. Most people spend most of their driving time commuting to work, which is probably less than 55 mph? In which case, the lowering would be favored more.
2. Car crash fatalities aren’t distributed evenly across all driving, and might be weighted heavily towards higher speeds. This would probably make the math favor the lowering of the speed limit as well.
3. Being stuck driving isn’t literally as bad as being dead. (Podcasts are a major harm reduction tool, it seems)
My conclusion is that regardless of the specifics, lowering the speed limit doesn’t seem to be particularly low-hanging fruit as far as saving lives.
(bolding mine)
Do you believe that all small numbers are equal?
If not, how does it make sense to treat “possible savings of life” as a value to be balanced against a cost?
I and my family have been going to a great deal of trouble to avoid Covid, due to the fact that my getting it has about a .015 to .05 probability of killing me. If it were .00000000001 we wouldn’t bother.
Or am I just misreading you? Is what you meant “compared to how likely the savings of life is”? That didn’t seem the natural interpretation, since you didn’t give any information about how large that probability was, which would depend not only on how much speed changed mortality but on how large the base mortality risk it was changing was.
@David, I’m not certain I understand your question, but let me try and explain my point better.
If you are in favor of getting rid of legal gun ownership to save lives, I think you, personally, should also be in favor of lowering speed limits to save lives.
The upper bound on lives saved from murders would be about 12,000 and gun deaths in total about 35,000. No, obviously you wouldn’t stop all the suicides and murders that happen even if you were successfully able to get rid of all guns, but that’s the upper bound.
There are about 38,000 traffic deaths per year. If lowering the speed limit 5mph would drop that by 9%, you would save 3400 lives per year.
If you drive 10,000 miles per year and average 40mph, dropping it to 35mph would mean you spend an extra six minutes a day in the car.
On the individual level, I think that if you are willing to take away something that millions of people consider a right (gun), but you are unwilling to add 6 minutes to your daily commute, then I don’t believe that lives saved is really your goal. You are either trying to control the outgroup, or you are just ignorant to the actual numbers at hand.
ETA: One benefit of lowering speed limits is that it would be much, much easier than pushing through a constitutional amendment to ban guns, so the odds of actually saving lives with this policy is higher.
@nzot, one thing you have to keep in mind is that lowering the speed limit wouldn’t increase the amount of time professional drivers spend in their vehicles. Truckers, for example, are limited to 11 hours per day. The amount of time they spend in the truck wouldn’t change, it would just mean that their trips take longer, but that isn’t a direct issue for them*.
* Obviously if it took too long to truck things then maybe cargo transportation would move back to rail which would directly affect truckers. However, truckers only average 55-60 mph so, a lowering of highway speed limits won’t affect them as much as passenger cars.
@nzot:
In fact, by far the safest roads (per mile driven) are limited-access divided highways, even though those are usually the roads with the highest speeds. This is because they don’t have a lot of the situations that tend to cause crashes, like pedestrian crossings, traffic light-controlled intersections, or blind corners.
The statistics for the UK in 2018 are 0.64 deaths per billion miles driven on motorways, compared to 5.67 on urban roads and 7.10 on rural roads.
Orwellian is often taken to mean a surveillance state but it’s an accurate description of this in the sense of “appears in 1984” or “a concept Orwell wrote about a lot”. Famously, the “we have always been at war with Eastasia” scene was inspired by his seeing people turn on a dime politically to toe a party line. For example, British left wingers going from pacifists/non-interventionists to advocating war with Hitler the moment they heard about the invasion of the Soviet Union. Or his experience with learning that left wing militias would declare people who’d been their friends yesterday had always secretly been their enemies.
I really just see this as a praxis of conflict theory. I’ve always called this performative belief: the person believes something in order to maintain or take on a role. The role is then the central point which the beliefs spring from, which can lead to some truly shocking reversals if you consider beliefs to be something a person takes seriously. But in this case they’re taking the role, and not the belief, seriously.
The important thing to predict their behavior, then, is what the role demands in a given situation, and not anything resembling intellectual consistency. Likewise, the best form of argument to convince this sort of person is to point out their actual actions are in conflict with their self-conceived role while minimizing the idea that you’re taking on an opposition role.
I don’t know what to call it, but the number of people who went from ‘the government should be able to order us in our homes due to Covid’ to ‘protesting is a fundamental right and governments should never interfere with it’ while Covid is still a problem (and as a rule were generally against reopening) makes it hard for me to believe that these are sincerely held beliefs. Similarly people who had at one point claimed to believe that you should never judge a person by the color of their skin now start every post by highlighting the color of every person’s skin in the frame. I expect that if my sphere was more right wing I would have a similar experience from that side, but since my bubble is 80% left, 15% an-cap and 5% anti-trump republican I don’t get it from that side.
This thread is fairly representative. The ones who were trying to convince people on the right to take COVID seriously are now either in a rage at having let themselves be taken advantage of, or sheepishly repenting. The ones who said this was overblown and we need to end lockdown are saying “I told you so.”
I wasn’t thinking specifically of the exact current events, just that all my examples are left wing (ie Kavanaugh vs Biden sexual abuse allegations) hypocrisy and that I don’t know of right wing ones for specific bubble reasons and not that I think the left wing is more hypocritical, although I am starting to shift that way.
I think the go-to example of recent hypocrisy on the right is the set of evangelical Christian leaders who have often made strong statements about the importance of moral leadership from the top, and who support the lifelong playboy/casino mogul on his third trophy wife for president.
ETA: I think hypocrisy is almost *required* to be a consistent supporter of a political party.
In my country protests were given a lot more slack from the beginning by the goverment than other activities.
This points to protests actually being something the goverment should have a harder time blanket Banning than other things like getting a haircut or going to work. I would assume that it’s a checks and balances thing, you can order people not to do arbitrary things but can’t (needs more justification at least) order them to stop protesting your orders
I doubt these people are explicitly reasoning why this isn’t a contradiction though
I don’t think these are actually contradictory. I still see a lot of talk in the press about coronavirus and worries about whether protests will spread it, news coverage about protesters attempting to maintain social distancing etc.
My understanding is that the left wing protestors at least still care a lot about stopping COVID, they just also care about stopping police brutality.
This is like the classic “if you really believe in X, why aren’t you doing Y also” argument. Scott has talked before about why this is not a useful argument.
The argument for lockdowns was specifically ‘social distancing alone isn’t enough, it has to be mandated to work and saving people’s lives is the most important thing.’ Further the same general group was criticizing lockdown protesters for putting people at risk (with smaller and shorter gatherings, general social distancing and mask wearing being common) and that protesting shouldn’t be allowed under lockdown.
Right. And while a justice system that treats all people fairly (granting the premises) is a good worth risking some lives for, so are many other things we were told would have to be delayed indefinitely, like religious practices, numerous forms of employment, and social gatherings.
If any of these protests result in a serious second wave outbreak, it wouldn’t be implausible for the death toll to exceed a century’s worth of death by police brutality at the current rates. Do you think the people who flipped from “stay home to save lives” to “protests are necessary now” have actually weighed this and made the conscious decision to bite that bullet?
If we grant the sincerity of the belief, that also makes it fair to criticize what things they have decided are NOT more important than preventing COVID.
I think in this case it is fair to ask the question because last week the standard line was that by not locking down you are risking the lives of thousands, maybe millions of people. There were constant posts saying you have to stay home not for yourself, but for grandma. The people that posted that stuff have to square that with their approval of these protests.
Either the ~1,000 people per year that are killed by police are more important than the thousands of grandma’s these people are risking or you never really believed in the lockdowns except that you were told to believe in them.
Coalitions aren’t individuals. The set of people who were/are very concerned about C19 precautions may not have all that much overlap with people who are currently protesting.
Mayors and governors are people, though. And they seem to have pretty consistently declared one set of COVID rules for the people they don’t like and another for their rioting/protesting allies. Cuomo is still working to stamp out the threat of Jews going to funerals.
In my comment I’m specifically talking about people that have both decried the anti-lockdown protestors for spreading disease, and then a week later supporting these protests. It’s not hard to find people that hold both positions.
On my facebook feed at least, its a very strong overlap.
In theory they “may not”. In reality, they very much do.
Do I need to name names? Megan McArdle, Ken “Popehat” White, Jonah Goldberg. All (for the moment) on the list of people I pay attention to because they sometimes have something intellligent to say, all solidly part of the crowd mocking and berating the anti-lockdown protesters for endangering the lives of millions, none offering more than a passing and supportive mention of the risk from the current protests spreading Covid-19. Heck, even Derek Lowe goes on that list.
Most of my social media feed, but you’ll have to trust me on that. Virtually all of the other media sources I follow have been so consistently “lockdown protests Dangerous and Bad” and “George Floyd protests Good, let’s hope they don’t get sick but otherwise forget about the coronavirus” that I really don’t feel the need to go through them byline-by-byline to see if they’ve somehow neatly segregated themselves into two consistent blocs.
Coalitions are not individuals, but they are made up of individuals and if you find a statistically significant level of blatant hypocrisy among the individuals I think you can reasonably ascribe hypocrisy to the assembled coalition.
Ken White specifically calls out the health system messaging being markedly different for the different protests. I don’t know if he just realized this after a few days or if he thought it all along:
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1268174654285295621
The Jonah Goldberg who just RT’d this?
https://twitter.com/BridgetPhetasy/status/1268289516999069696
Or who’s been condemning the riots since, well, ever? E.g. on Jun 1:
https://twitter.com/JonahDispatch/status/1267416192672727040
Look, maybe other people you follow have been hypocritical, but Goldberg specifically has hardly been “George Floyd protests Good, let’s hope they don’t get sick but otherwise forget about the coronavirus.”
Neither has McArdle, for my money.
https://twitter.com/jneeley78/status/1267967994203910144
https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1267424982616997888
https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1267237944705847302
Literally after my post, I believe. Maybe he’s getting a clue.
@John Schilling:
Okay, how about this, from May 31?
https://twitter.com/JonahDispatch/status/1267091722066178049
That does not sound like someone who supports the protests and is poo-pooing risk of increased transmission. In particular the phrase “mass urban riots” is not very sympathetic.
Here’s a small list. Some are random blue-checks, but some are governors.
(Credit is due to Matt Yglesias for not falling into this trap and has called others out for the disconnect.)
I propose Emotional Reasoning
You can get peoples emotions riled up by showing them upsetting pictures/videos about the cause du jure and getting them thinking about it. but if you stop displaying upsetting images they revert to basline.
If Facebook, Reddit, Instagram etc. all spend a week showing a video of a white man in Appalachia dying of a Oxy overdose, then showed his crying and broken family, and the news organizations all asked why is no one doing anything and answering that it because the government/society just doesn’t care or hates the poor miners in Kentucky…
I’m sure you would get the same emotional response from people. They care about all the bad things in the world, but can avoid dwelling on it if social media allows them to. But when they see a bunch of people talking about it, it triggers them to talk about it continuing the cycle. Maybe like a “toxoplasma of caring”
I definitely think this is right. Remember that one week where all of a sudden we cared a lot about capturing KONY? Viral marketing and a media push can launch just about any issue into the mainstream.
My Fiance is like this a little,
If she sees or hears a graphic description of an animal in pain it easily drives her to tears. Its not performative, its not because anyone told her to cry, and she would go out of her way to drive an (invasive) duck that was hit by a car (real example) to the animal hospital. Shes aware that this stuff happens everywhere, but seeing it makes it real for her in a way that statistics don’t.
She can live a full and productive life by not dwelling on this stuff, but when the media/activists push your social groups to think about/talk about an upsetting incident, its painful to her in a way its not for me.
As in… Joseph Kony? Lord’s Resistance Army Joseph Kony? When did that happen? How did that happen?
Some group of weirdos (no seriously, one of them was later arrested for pleasuring himself on a public streetcorner) made a documentary and somehow got it to go viral for a little while, until everyone suddenly realized this wasn’t a thing worth caring about.
I can’t even remember when… I want to say this was back in like 2012?
Kony 2012. It was a huge deal at the time in my circle. I still have a Kony 2012 sticker on my car that I got at the time.
link text
If you’ve got time for a 17 minute video, that does a great job explaining it.
If you don’t, the basics of it is that some well-meaning people with pretty good marketing skills tried to be humanitarians. They made a very-well produced video that made a compelling case for why people should stop the LRA and Kony, but their ability to make videos outstripped their actual ability to do anything.
Wild. I wrote a report on the LRA for a risk management company I used to work for, back in I think early 2005. Obviously the dude is a monster, but it was difficult for me not to find him the world’s most hilarious murderous warlord, and learning about this whole business (and especially the Carl Weathers trolling campaign) is not helping with that.
Incidentally, I always assumed that Book of Mormon‘s General Butt Fucking Naked was based on Kony, and now Wikipedia tells me that he was, and was originally called Warlord Kony in the script, but after Kony 2012 Parker and Stone decided to change the name… to that of an actual real Liberian warlord who used to carry out human sacrifices but is now an itinerant Christian preacher. What the actual fuck?
The best thing it led to is one of my favorite South Park songs…
(crude language warning)
I feel like this isn’t strong enough, its emotional certainty with whatever emotion being present is treated as the truth.
What if they just think that fighting racism is more important than fighting Covid? Believing that “fighting racism > fighting Covid > fighting malaria” isn’t irrational. They just have different priorities.
There’s also coordination issues. No one likes police brutality or police militarization but they’ve been going on for decades without real reform. When you suddenly have a lightning rod like George Floyd where everyone is shocked by it and no one on the other side will really defend it, you have a unique opportunity to try to get change through.
This is a unique opportunity for a lot of people to try to get change they think is very important and they can rationally decide it’s worth the risk of assembling under Covid. You might disagree with those priorities but I doubt you disagree with the logic. For example, if (ridiculous extreme) Trump threatened to nuke China, we’d all be protesting in the streets regardless of Covid because, well, not getting nuked is super important and this is a special situation.
As for the news, they have to sell intense emotions. The media industry has been shrinking for decades at this point; anyone calmly analyzing the news has been driven out by shock merchants long ago. There may be no more reason for this flip than that Covid is old news and riots are the hot new thing (we’re all talking about it). You might call them hypocrites but they’re looking at the ratings and they’d rather be hypocrites than unemployed.
I don’t think many people think that way. I think if you asked: “How many additional people will die of Covid-19 as a result of the protests, and is it OK?,” most people who support the protests would argue with the premise – “The beaches were open anyway,” “The government didn’t have an effective response,” “Look how many people at the protests are wearing masks and the protests are outside,” “That’s concern trolling,” etc.
I think it would be a very rare person who said “my best guess is 5,000 more people will die and that’s worth it.”
It is irrational if the reason they are fighting racism is because of the actual impact in lives that it has. Unless they didn’t actually believe that Covid was that much of a risk.
But if they are protesting because black people are being killed at an unacceptable rate, it’s irrational to do so in a way that has a high risk of spreading a disease likely to kill a much much greater number of people including blacks.
Ridiculous indeed. It is much more rational to risk thousands to save millions than to risk thousands to save dozens.
Now, saying that it is perfectly rational, they are just mislead about the scope of racism’s lethality is a fair argument.
Also @J Mann and @baconbits9
They can include alternative costs in their calculations and can look at future impacts. If you believe that racism is responsible for widespread poverty and social stigma/harm against people, then you might weigh those and their effects over 100+ years against a one time increase in mortality.
I don’t think people usually rationally think this way but I think there’s a gut level feeling that racism is superbad and fighting the superbad thing is worth the covid risk. And if you ask them why racism is superbad, you’d get something like the above.
Also, I can’t remember the Scott post, but I remember a quote that we don’t call people liars because they don’t pursue their goal in the most effective manner possible. Something about abortion, where people claim that because fundamentalist Christians don’t support birth control, they don’t really care about decreasing abortions. The fact that these protesters aren’t pursuing their goal very effectively is at best limited evidence that they don’t believe in it.
The rational way to look at it is to compare protesting now to protesting at some point months from now, not never. Unless you think the Covid restrictions have to be in place henceforth.
And if you think there won’t be another incident bad enough to motivate people to protest, than that says something about the scope of the problem.
In some cases, I think this does show dishonesty, when you can point to a commentator decrying the recent, calmer anti-lockdown protests in harsh terms. But,
We were discussing rationality, not honesty. The fact that they aren’t pursuing a goal efficiently either means you differ in your analysis, someone is not clearly articulating what the actual goal is, or they aren’t being maximally rational. Doesn’t mean they’re necessarily lying.
But that’s not really what’s happening here. The most important goal last week was “stop the spread of COVID”. The most important goal this week is “stop police racism/brutality”. The issue is that the methods being promoted for this week’s goal will completely upend progress toward last week’s goal, not in some subtle way but in a glaringly obvious first order way.
It’s hard to square “stopping COVID is so important that 50% black unemployment, thousands of people being forced to die a slow and painful death completely alone and unmourned, etc. is an acceptable cost” with “this very important issue that by our own claims is hundreds of years old is not merely more important but suddenly so urgent that it outweighs stopping the spread of COVID (and therefore more important and more urgent than all the other things we declared less important and urgent than we said COVID was last week)”
@Randy M
The fact that these are the largest and most notable protest/riots since…probably the 60’s indicates they’re a fairly unique event. Rather than argue why this is a special occurrence, let me just observe that this is a pretty unique response we’re unlikely to see again in the near future.
I think there’s a bit of goal shifting going on here. They may not be maximally rational but remarkably few things are. How rational should we demand they be?
How would we meaningfully distinguish between people irrationally shifting their “cares” from one issue to another VS people revealing their preferences for one issue over another in a special circumstance?
@gbdub
Do you honestly believe the protesters, and the left at large, believe there is a greater moral issue than ending racism? I agree, it’s revealing that they value this over personal autonomy or poverty or religious observation but that’s not irrational, it’s just a value preference.
To reverse this, can you imagine any issue where these protesters would accept any increase in racism in exchange for x “good things”?
I agree that people genuinely believe ending racism to be very very important.
But the issue is urgency. America is not substantially more racist than it was 6 months ago. These protests are not going to “end” racism, at best they will lead to an incremental improvement in one aspect of it.
What IS different from the America 6 months ago and 6 months from now is that we are in the midst of a pandemic that has a very real chance of causing thousands of unnecessary deaths as a result of crowding during protests.
So the question is not “should we support action against racism” it’s “should we support MASS PUBLIC PROTEST against racism RIGHT NOW, given this serious risk to life that we were hyping a week ago”.
What is different is that there are now 40 million unemployed people on near full pay.
I was just trying to highlight that rationality isn’t binary. I think they are more irrational than not if they’re stated goals are to be believed.
I just think they haven’t really done the math, certainly not to the extent that they were demanding of others recently.
I think he meant “what is different about our evaluation” not “what is different about their motivation”. But it’s a good point about idle hands.
I think you missed the step where you multiply that first term by the probability that the current round of protests are going to erase the legacy of 100+ years of poverty, oppression, etc. Forgetting to multiply by zero when the math calls for it, leads to really perverse results.
It changes my evaluation to see groups of people shift their priorities based on their comfort level. That many of these protesters don’t have to go to work tomorrow, but also don’t have to worry about their bills. There would certainly be a bit more concern about the looting aspects if many of the protesters woke up the next day and found themselves out of a paycheck because their place of employment had been burned or ransacked the night before. Employment is a stabilizing force for societies because it provides structure and aligns other wise unaligned interests. Its another major shot against UBI, maybe the single strongest point against it.
First their belief has to be that Fighting Racism right now, and not after Covid is dealt with is > Figthing Covid and then fighting racism after Covid is beaten/controlled. Secondly you have to believe that Fighting Racism via protests is > Fighting Racism via other mechanisms + beating Covid and then protesting. Finally there were literal posts in my stream that because Covid disproportionately hit minority communities that protesting while Covid was around was its self a racist act.
Are you sure? There are absolutely people who celebrate police brutality (generally, as best I can tell, under the assumption that anyone who gets hurt by a police officer had it coming), and are in favor of police militarization. It certainly isn’t a majority, but I don’t think its a small enough group to ignore either.
Why not ignore it?
Do you honestly believe that the primary constraint on preventing police brutality is a small minority of people celebrating it or the inherent inertia and complexity of changing hundreds of local police forces without central control? Because I’ve seen exactly one piece of media justifying the killing of George Floyd and it’s…very extreme.
Because the risk of not ignoring it is it shifts us away from a mistake framework to a conflict framework.
Yes, because some of these people are police.
Is that relevant? I’m not talking about what the media (left or right) is portraying.
I’ll be honest, there are certain issues that just don’t seem to fit in the mistake framework, and excessive violence is usually one of them. Maybe someone could make a compelling case for why it still works under mistake theory, but I don’t really think so.
@acymetric
How would it not be mistake theory?
Unless you believe any amount of police force is illegitimate, there’s gonna be cops and sometimes they’re going to have to arrest people who don’t want to be arrested. This inherently involves using force in highly risky and dangerous situations. How would there not be mistakes? How could you possibly, in a country the size of the US, have police arresting people without some cop, somewhere, making a mistake in this extremely difficult and highly variable task?
Doesn’t the whole argument around excessive force and police brutality inherently suggest there’s an appropriate amount of force necessary to conduct the job and we’re just trying to get the proper limitations around it? And cops want as much leeway as possible because it gives them as much safety and control as possible?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding mistake vs conflict theory here.
Mistake theory says that no one, not even Derek Chauvin, wanted George Floyd to die and his death is a result of horrific misjudgment on Chauvin’s part.
Conflict theory says that Chauvin woke up intending to kill George Floyd or someone like him.
Am I missing something?
It might be a little bit of semantics, but I’d read mistake and conflict theory as:
Mistake: People disagree with me about the appropriate response to George Floyd’s death because we have different priors.
Conflict: People disagree with me about the appropriate response to George Floyd’s death because they have different class interests than I do.
It is possible I am misunderstanding the term as well, but I don’t think you can apply it to the specific incident, I think mistake/conflict theory requires a big picture view.
It was almost certainly a mistake that he killed him, but I don’t think you can ascribe the pattern of police brutality in general (which sometimes, as in this case, results in unintended deaths) to mistake theory.
I see a lot of “increase training to eliminate these incidents” which makes sense under a mistake framework, but I don’t think the problem here was that he didn’t know better.
The fact that the police seem to treat their interactions as a conflict with the people they are interacting with also makes it hard not to see it through a conflict theory lens (in fairness, a lot of civilians also see it that way, so that is a two way street).
I’d say the mistake theory view of this is that there are better and worse policies on running police forces, rules about use of force, police training and selection, oversight of the police, etc., and that better ones would lead to fewer instances of tragedies like the murder of George Floyd.
To me the issue is not the protesters themselves. It’s possible they indeed think that ending systemic racism is worth X number of Covid deaths (and granting the highly unlikely possibility that these protests will even come close to ending systemic racism).
The issue is the public health experts, who have a responsibility of dealing with the covid crisis. And it’s not their personal views, indeed they may also sympathize with the protesters and think that ending systemic racism is worth X number of Covid deaths. Rather, it’s their professional responsibility as public health experts, to not privilege certain values such as ending systemic racism, over others, such as religious worship, when it comes to their professional dealings. How can they possibly think that people will take them seriously regarding lockdowns if they have such a blatant double standard? They are figuratively shooting themselves in the foot.
I was curious what actual “public health experts” were saying, so I looked up Sara Cody, but it doesn’t seem like she’s said anything about the protests, or that if she had, it wasn’t reported in the media. The only recent story I could find was this:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/02/more-changes-to-santa-clara-countys-stay-at-home-still-weeks-away-health-officials-say/
Here is the “open letter” about it
So when you boil it down this seems to be:
a. A statement that the signers think the BLM protests are in a better cause than the anti-lockdown protests.
b. A list of suggestions for how to minimize the added transmissions from the protests.
I more or less agree with everything you’ve said. But I’ve heard this (more or less) a few times around here, and I think there is another way to look at it. As maddening as the situation from a CW perspective, I think it will be very good for the country, simply because it means that reopening ceases to become a partisan issue.
There is of course the possibly of a completely catastrophic spike in COVID cases. That would be a national tragedy, and the fact that these “experts” are downplaying or ignoring the risk for political purposes is odious. Ultimately, though, I think it will turn out that COVID doesn’t really spread that well in open places, especially during the summer, and with this being so we can start reopening with less fear. Just as important are the optics: after sanctioning these protests, the liberal health experts will simply no longer have any standing to insist upon lockdown to the exclusion of other considerations – in that respect, their moral high ground has been completely obliterated, and I think they know it. So they’ll back off. And safely reopening can become a bipartisan project.
“It’s over, Anakin! I have the moral high ground!”
You left out one of the clearest examples of this I have ever seen: the children in cages thing at the border.
Actually reminds me of the recent discussion of demisexuality and how people’s attraction to others works. For my part, when I find someone physically attractive, the halo effect kicks in and I infer all sorts of other ways they must also be amazing on the sketchiest of evidence. So while I’m generally only interested in sex with someone I find emotionally engaging, I am almost always guaranteed to think someone physically attractive is going to be emotionally engaging until I find evidence to the contrary. And once I do get to know them a bit better, and (usually) find they aren’t that interesting after all, I lose interest. Which in a lot of cases is functionally equivalent to physical attractiveness being the only standard and only wanting notches on the bedpost (or would be if I were more successful at hooking up with the people I find attractive), it feels very different from the inside, and obviously also works out differently when somebody is genuinely interesting. But based on their own reports, there also seem to be some people who are deliberately looking for notches on the bedpost for status reasons. No idea which pattern is more common, or what other patterns exist or how often, as combining the unreliability of introspection and people’s inclination to lie about their motives, all of the data is suspect.
I posted this previously but it was kind of buried and I want to signal boost it because I think it will be of interest to anyone who likes sci fi and film scores:
Bear McCreary’s Blog
McCreary has scored numerous sci fi shows, movies, and games (Battlestar Galactica, Agents of Shield, Outlander, God of War). The best content on the blog is the Battlestar posts, where he walks through exactly how he composed every episode starting with Season 3. My favorite is the multi part post on Season 4’s “Someone to Watch Over Me”, an episode where the show’s score actually becomes integral to the plot (and Bear was nearly cast as a key character). The little scribbles that look like notes above Bear’s name on his blog are a key element.
Really cool stuff if you’ve been curious about how the sausage gets made on film and TV scores.
Thank you. I watched an interview about the “All along the watchtower” cover and am glad to find more.