Society's tolerance for crime is bizarrely irrational. There will be about 800 murders in Chicago this year -- yawn.
Now imagine if 800 Chicagoans were killed by radiation leaks from a nuclear plant. "Well, you can't have electricity without plutonium. Do you want to turn everyone's lights off?" Or if 800 African-Americans were lynched Emmett Till style by KKK thugs. "Regrettable, but what are you going to do? And don't white people have legitimate complaints?"
Even murder rates can be fudged -- turn the homicide into a "death investigation":
Another point to keep in mind when you see these too-good-to-be-true stories is that criminal subcultures are actually quite conservative. When laws and policies change, it takes time for people to collectively figure out what they can get away with. This makes crime rates a lagging indicator -- we're still experiencing the positive effects of the crime crackdown of the '90s, not just in incarceration rates but in cultural behavior.
The mid-'60s were another period when social scientists realized that punishment was a medieval anachronism. It took 10-20 years to see the full effects of these policies, and another 10 for the political backlash to get started. It seems like we're due for another round of this pendulum.
> Society's tolerance for crime is bizarrely irrational.
In 1940, a survey was taken of teachers asking them
to list the five most important problems in school.
They were: (1) talking out of turn; (2) chewing gum;
(3) making noise; (4) running in halls; and (5) cutting
in line.
Fifty years later, the survey was repeated. The 1990
list was substantially revised: (1) drug abuse;
(2) alcohol abuse; (3) pregnancy; (4) suicide;
(5) rape.
A bit later in the article, Krauthammer really succinctly sums up a major flaw in his own argument:
> As part of this project of moral leveling, whole new areas of deviancy–such as date rape and politically incorrect speech–have been discovered. And old areas–such as child abuse–have been amplified by endless reiteration in the public presses and validated by learned reports of their astonishing frequency.
Yes, perhaps the reason rape seems so much more common is that people in the 1940s didn't understand what rape is. Apparently some people still don't.
Yes, perhaps the reason rape seems so much more common is that people in the 1940s didn't understand what rape is.
I want to order a time machine and send you back to have a conversation with your great-grandparents, for whom you seem to have so little respect.
Sure, the "list" isn't real. People wouldn't have been passing it around in the '70s if it hadn't reflected the actual experience of living in the '40s, which many, many people at that time remembered well.
A time machine is not actually available. Your great-grandparents are probably dead. But you can still go read a bunch of books from the amazing, wonderful, astoundingly different, and yes -- not at all perfect -- world that they lived in. Chronological chauvinism is not a healthy emotion.
> Your great-grandparents are probably dead. But you can still go read a bunch of books from the amazing, wonderful, astoundingly different, and yes -- not at all perfect -- world that they lived in.
My great-grandparents were crossing the Atlantic to flee pogroms. My grandfather did similar, but lost the rest of his family who didn't leave Europe in the 1910s and 1920s when the 1930s and 1940s set in. There was this little thing while my grandmother was young called, "the Holocaust".
Fuck the violence, authoritarianism, and chauvinisms of the past. Today is far better.
While facts like that may seem rather startling at first, I don't think they necessarily reflect a degradation of society and values (the obvious implication); rather, it is a simple indication that society and culture have changed a lot, and our existing system of incentives and laws have not been able to deal with it. e.g. the natural reaction to this is to increase police presence, be stricter and harsher in punishments etc. But the root causes remain unchanged: rise of single parent homes, the failure of the war on drugs, economic inequality, changing views w.r.t marriage, children getting mature faster etc.
I guess my point is that we need to have a more holistic approach to resolving this issue than to simply be harsher with punishments and policing.
It seems like we're due for another round of this pendulum.
I fear this too. As someone who now lives in a city that suffered enormously from the 70s crime rise, and benefited greatly from the 2000s decline in crime, the prospect of another crime wave makes me wonder if I should hold off on buying a house.
There's a wide variety of explanations for the crime drop, including from increased educational attainment, overall better economic situation, and lead poisoning caused by leaded gasoline subsiding.
Attributing it solely to crackdowns in the 90's is pretty disingenuous; crime had been falling before Giuliani, and in a broad array of cities which hasn't instituted tough on crime policies.
Because the goal (or rather the means) of terrorists is to scare people. And it's much scarier to imagine your plane being blown up in the air.
Reason has nothing to do with it. The number of deaths due to car accidents, even falling down the stairs, is much greater. The main impact of terrorism is the irrational fear, not the rational risk aversion. But it's much easier to stamp out terrorism by force, hard as that may be, than to convert human beings into rational animals.
The goal of terrorists is to achieve power through violence. The gold standard would be the PLO, now the PA. The ANC also did extremely well with this strategy.
There are two effective ways to combat terrorism. One is to surrender to the terrorists. Neither the PLO, nor the ANC, nor the IRA, is setting off any bombs these days. Works great especially if surrounded by a cloud of euphemisms.
The other is to treat the terrorism as an isolated incident and counterattack on the political front. Consider the response to Timothy McVeigh or especially Dylann Roof -- textbook. Great stuff, America still knows how to do it.
If terrorism is committed in the name of the Confederate flag, ban the Confederate flag and crack down on white nationalists everywhere. Even the peaceful ones. Especially the peaceful ones. No one ever said that the best way to defeat racist terrorism is to satisfy the legitimate grievances of moderate racists. But if the USG adopted this strategy, the GOP would probably grow a "militant wing" in well under a decade...
"Jugurtha" is a pretty easy tipoff. Not that Americans would learn who Jugurtha was in school, except maybe grad school, but a few of us still read books...
Love to hear any book recommendations on the Algerian wars, especially older books in English, not by Alistair Horne, and not taking the standard Western "missionary position." Really like Wolves in the City by Paul Henissart, about the OAS episode...
Hard to think of something off the top of my head. I don't really think about this stuff with "internationalization" in mind so I've never paid attention to which authors were translated.
Not sure if you'd like content in a "History" perspective, I know Benjamin Stora is translated.
Henri Alleg also wrote about it (The Question. He was in trouble with Maurice Audin). Frantz Fanon was in the Algerian Liberation Front.
For novels, you can look up Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Camus, Assia Djebar, etc.
Wut? searches mental database for any trace of right-wing egalitarians... You must be thinking of... Nietzsche? Definitely not Nietzsche. Maistre? Mmm... no. Can't be Maistre. Bonald? Filmer? Okay, you win, I give up.
In case you're wondering how this plays out in practice:
"Right-wing" means something different from "rightward on the right-left spectrum". I too would have a hard time coming up with an example of a "right-wing" egalitarian. Reihan Salam might be a decent example of a right-leaning egalitarian.
A: "My neighbor's wolf barks all the time. Drives me crazy."
B: "That might lead you to suspect that your neighbor's 'wolf' is actually a wolf-dog. Or maybe just a husky? You should get out more, meet some actual wolves..."
Depends on whether you're willing to call a wolf-dog a wolf.
East Coast coyotes are apparently full of dog DNA, as well as wolf DNA. So maybe they bark, or even howl a bit. But I maintain that barking remains a dog thing.
Leftists won the last three big wars, so even most of today's "conservatives" are more than a little hybridized. You won't find any independent clade of wolves who bark for their own separate wolf reasons. Barking is a marker of dogness, egalitarianism is a marker of leftness.
What about people who support school choice, believe government should be local, and are strongly pro-life, but who believe in equality of potential and thus the need for equality of opportunity among all people? Lots of those people exist.
I think you're making the very common mistake of thinking about transmitted traditions phenotypically, rather than genetically/cladistically. This methodology leads you to wander around comparing birds to bats.
The question that enables rigorous analysis is always: "where did these ideas come from?" Some people invent ideas on their own, but that's so rare it's lost in the noise.
It's very, very unlikely that your hypothetical observer looked at the world and concluded independently that all members of the species Homo sapiens have equal potential.
First, this person would have to be thinking independently, which is very rare. Second, there is no empirical evidence for this proposition -- or at least, none has ever been brought to my attention. (Fortunately, equality of potential is by no means the only reason to believe in equality of opportunity.)
If I observe that someone is a Catholic, which is more likely: that he learned his Catholicism from another Catholic? Or that he independently derived the Trinity from empirical evidence?
Your hypothetical observer may have derived his or her opinions about school choice and local government from personal observation. More likely, they came from Rush Limbaugh. Their opinions on human biology are straight-up American humanism, ie, leftism. (With nontrivial historical links to Christianity, but that's a separate conversation.) So... a wolf-dog.
Perhaps you've seen The Big Lebowski. "Leads? Leads?"
The odds of the SFPD "investigating" a mere wallet theft are even lower than the Malibu PD trying to figure out who stole Jeff Bridges' car.
For one thing, after Prop 47, stealing anything under $950 is a misdemeanor. A misdemeanor is basically a traffic ticket for anyone already involved with the criminal justice system. Misdemeanors basically do not result in any kind of custodial sentence in CA today.
Only a reporter could get them to care at all. ("Journalist privilege" is real.) Even then, they can only care so much.
And yet, while "journalist privilege" got them to do something, it was a harder thing, and would have taken tons of work to yield anything. But not the easy thing, contacting Uber. It's odd. Maybe they were just messing with him.
Spoilers: thief is a 40-something Egyptian, appears to live in a French migrant shelter in Mulhouse and work as some kind of a pimp in Amsterdam, very religious but also watches porn and smokes a lot of hash.
Director develops sympathy for him, even sends him free credits because the spyware is eating his bandwidth. Later goes to one of the thief's hangouts and realizes that in fact, the thief is a weird scary guy and not lovable at all.
Sequel hook: phone has been reactivated in Romania. Stay tuned for next episode. "Diversiteit is onze kracht."
Chris Sacca seems very courageous, as does Kara Swisher. Unfortunately, it's probably only a matter of time before HUAC gets them fired for their brave, outspoken, original and iconoclastic political positions...
Now imagine if 800 Chicagoans were killed by radiation leaks from a nuclear plant. "Well, you can't have electricity without plutonium. Do you want to turn everyone's lights off?" Or if 800 African-Americans were lynched Emmett Till style by KKK thugs. "Regrettable, but what are you going to do? And don't white people have legitimate complaints?"
Even murder rates can be fudged -- turn the homicide into a "death investigation":
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-...
Another point to keep in mind when you see these too-good-to-be-true stories is that criminal subcultures are actually quite conservative. When laws and policies change, it takes time for people to collectively figure out what they can get away with. This makes crime rates a lagging indicator -- we're still experiencing the positive effects of the crime crackdown of the '90s, not just in incarceration rates but in cultural behavior.
The mid-'60s were another period when social scientists realized that punishment was a medieval anachronism. It took 10-20 years to see the full effects of these policies, and another 10 for the political backlash to get started. It seems like we're due for another round of this pendulum.