Look at FBI recidivism statistics for your answer - I would hazard 60% from memory stay rehabilitated, depending on history of same. So, yes, sort of. Hope for good; not perfect…
I think this is the logical end point of "problematizing" and "deconstructing" everything. See that obviously necessary mechanism for maintaining safety (in the first example) or obviously necessary mechanism for people who are excited to care for orphaned children? Turns out it's oppression, and you should feel bad about everything you thought you should feel ok about.
And cynically I'd argue that McFarquar is just expressing the underlying idea that the state is a superior acculturating agent and that families are inherently suspicious.
Of course, when Romania took in a bunch of kids with special needs after encouraging people to have a ton of babies, the results of state parenting were tragic.
Apologies that I'm a bit fired up about this, my nephew is adopted and anyone who wants to talk shit about my sister and everything she went through to bring him here from an orphanage where the children did farm labor and were subjected to dogs-and-guns out searches from Chinese police, they can suck a fuck as Donnie Darko's sister suggested.
That article upset me too, Randolph. Couldn't get through the whole thing. Our now 20-year-old son (and our third child - the older kids are our biological children) was adopted from China in 2004 at the age of 15 months. An unlikely thing, a boy from China. His paperwork from China (most probably completely fabricated) indicated that he had been "abandoned" in a backwater area of Sichuan province. Somewhat rare in those days, as families mainly abandoned their girls in hope of better luck with a subsequent pregnancy. A few years ago I watched One Child Nation on Netflix (which completely broke my heart) and have since come to believe that he was more likely a second son who was taken from his parents by the state. He was a traumatized toddler, and it took many months for him to relax and settle in with our family. There was never going to be a future for him in China. He's now at the University of Delaware on an academic scholarship studying animal sciences with plans on becoming a veterinarian. A gentle, funny soul beloved by all who know him. And we're white, if anyone cares.
So happy for your son! I think people here have no idea what some of those kids go through - right after my nephew joined our family, we were watching the Super Bowl and an recruiting ad for the army came on, and he started crying - we tried to figure out why and he said that men with guns used to come to where he lived and he had to hide whenever they came. I haven't brought it up since because I don't want to make him relive that, but I get teary eyed thinking about it. Anyone who stands between those kids and happy, safe homes is a monster.
When a person decides to believe something, then ties their ego, self-esteem, and social status to it, and also receives financial reward for it - good luck undoing that.
There is a force that would get these people to change their mind. And that's skin in the game. If someone is high on idealism, there's nothing to sober them up like a little shot of experiencing the practical issue in their real, physical reality.
As long as your experience of a problem is mere paraexperience, it's easy to agree with your tribe. For pundits and politicians, it's even in their financial/political interests to simply follow the party line. You see a lot more nuance when you talk to folks who are living with a problem.
I’m not sure about that. There are a lot of homeless advocates who actively work with the homeless who are never dissuaded from their Pollyannaish views.
Quants get paid regardless of outcome as they simply present risk factors to final investment decision makers. The comparison to private prison industry is laughably callow considering rehabilitation doesn't exist in private prison industry. As I've yet to meet a homeless advocate that either prides themselves on having repeat customers or aims to have repeat customers. One doesn't become a homeless advocate to become rich.
San Francisco alone spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on homelessness. Given the astronomical amounts of money being spent on this issue asking "Cui bono?" is completely reasonable.
Years ago I worked in search marketing and I was talking to a guy who sold leads to rehab facilities and was willing to pay up to $200 for a click. I asked him how the economics worked, and he said, "The thing is, once someone signs up for rehab they're almost guaranteed to be a repeat customer."
The point is that there are very few people involved in the homelessness problem who will lose their job if the situation stays the same or worsens. Likewise, nobody who is working on the problem stands to achieve any direct economic benefit from fixing it. It's true that the magnitude of remuneration is often less in the social services space, but the fact that comp is not tied in any way to performance is also a valid observation.
FWIW I'm *not* saying that this means that homelessness advocates *want* people to stay homeless. Never! But I *am* saying that that means they are free to advocate policies that would not work without suffering personal consequences.
I do think it's also fair to observe that even if an advocate had exactly the right ideas that would avail them little because most homelessness advocates do not have the power to materially improve the situation. Like what can a social worker do to reduce the cost of construction and housing or prevent mental illness? But that again means that their ideas about what to do can be disconnected with what would actually work and they suffer no consequences from this.
Housing advocates don't build housing. They don't provide medical attention, psychiatric counseling or treatment. They help people try to placed in housing/shelters and facilitate in some manner a pathway for a homeless person to get into permanent supportive housing.
The notion that housing advocates are supposed to solve all of the intractable social problems that contribute to homelessness is beyond absurd. It's like expecting the sanitary sewer guy who cleans out the fatberg to be responsible for making sure all of the shit people flush down their toilets don't turn into a fatberg.
The issue I think, is expecting housing advocates to act as you/I would if you were a housing advocate. Most of the people who criticize the proffered solutions also have little understanding of what would actually work because they to are disconnected from the situation as well.
I really have no idea where you get the idea that housing advocates are disconnected from their performance having an impact on their income. Non-profits regularly have to provide impact statements or evaluations of their programs and poor performance can in fact result in less grant money (or if you prefer, the other org who shows better results is more likely to win future grants). Less clear about the incentives for government agencies but they do have mandates to pay attention to outcomes. Pure awareness or policy advocacy probably has more of this, but even there they won’t gain much traction unless they can point to plausible solutions, and as BGP2 states, you can’t exactly blame them if the political and economic structures around them aren’t responsive to their concerns. Of course, with all of this there’s the question of how do you know what works and what doesn’t, what’s feasible, etc. But that’s orthogonal to the idea that people in this area of work have misaligned incentives or no consequences.
Those homeless advocates don't have any skin in the game though. Homelessness can worsen and worsen and the NGOs and advocates just receive more money and power.
Putting suspicion on care workers and advocates in that way doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Not that there’s no effect at all of the kind you’re implying, but it seems to misunderstand both the clear motivations of the human factor involved and incentive structures of people in these positions. No doctor will be successful if they can’t make people feel better and keeping your patient sick gets you malpractice not more profit. No non-profit will get funding if they can’t show proof of impact; any sizable grant comes with some strings attached to report on outcomes and that does have an impact on your average charitable donor too even if they aren’t digging in any depth to verify themselves. No advocacy group will gain traction with a target population if they can’t show that they care about the needs and interests of that group. Of course, measuring impact is hard even if you’re doing it right and many don’t do it that well, knowing “what works” can be contextual, etc. And of course people have opinions on how to solve a problem that are influenced by all sorts of moral and aesthetic assumptions, personal experience, etc. that go beyond just the evidence. But that’s all a very different problem than the misaligned economic and political incentives you’re assuming for key actors (I guess I’d grant some of that in the realm of pure politics mostly the electoral kind, but not much else). The economic incentives don’t even add up, unless you believe no new healthy person ever gets sick or no housed person ever becomes homeless. You kind of have to believe that these problems would be easy to solve and they continue because care workers and advocates know on some level if they work too hard they’ll solve themselves out of a job. That ain’t how this works, we can alleviate but the sick and poor will always be with us. And more importantly, you have to believe that a large number of people committed to alleviating a social or material problem secretly want to perpetuate it or are actually indifferent. What, do you think Act Out was ambivalent to the AIDS crisis and just wanted to make some noise? Being cynical in this way might give you points online but it’s BS in the real world.
Right its like childless adults talking about what parents should be concerned about with respect to their children's safety, education etc. I'm sorry but I honestly dgaf about your opinion, parenthood, especially motherhood is a deeply changing process and quite frankly you won't know until your experience it.
I'll split the difference here---skin in the game definitely helps. My lefty friends who have become suspicious of the online left and wokeism are all, like me, people who directly interact with the conditions of material life in poor communities: teachers, social workers, even a buddy who's a real estate agent and landlord who voted for Bernie. The ones who've become the most committed to utopia are all remote workers who didn't spend almost any time with other humans in 2021, let alone 2020. Their perspective seems somewhat permanently damaged by being Inside.
Yep, some people are just absolutely convinced that their idealism will trump reality. I'm sure there's a lot of Game of Thrones fans here, and this reminds me of one of my favorite subplots: Quentyn Martell trying to tame the dragon.
This is true across the political spectrum. Unless you have experienced that 'something' your views are colored by priors and personal biases. Such priors & biases can be either utopian fantasy or callous disregard. I've come across a lot of people who haven't had many real world experiences that would afford them either a realistic view of the world or empathy for others' choices or conditions.
My gf believes that libertarians are disproportionately people who did indeed pull themselves up by their bootstraps and thus suffer from "If I can do it why can't everyone else?" bias.
A question implied by the article is why the tribe of the Left is so prone to either perfectionist thinking or a desire to wish away consequences, when it comes to things like adoption and crime. In other words, in certain social issues, the Left cannot reckon with a "limit to the possible."
I think it's the wrong question, personally. I think, absent a small number of Pollyannas (who I grant may have disproportionate influence), the Left actually understands the costs of perfectionism quite clearly. They know fine well the consequences of letting violent criminals roam free, for example. They would just rather have those costs than the costs of a law-and-order alternative. But because - and this is a recurring theme of this blog, and one of the reasons I subscribe - we can't have honest discussions about costs and benefits, there is no scope for saying that "by reframing criminal justice to be restorative, we acknowledge that there may be fewer times when criminals are incarcerated, which may lead to certain increases in crime." This is the honest statement that, again, I think the vast majority of Leftists know, but wouldn't articulate.
The natural cycle of the political system in the United States is control that oscillates between both parties. Part of the problem now I believe is that one side is trying to disrupt that pattern.
In the sense that both sides will get their two years in power turnout is kind of irrelevant. Where it will make a difference is in terms of who gets to set the agenda in the Democratic Party: the centrists or the radicals.
Your theory does not match my personal experience with leftists, or leftist rhetoric that I am familiar with. It isn't even that they don't know that consequences of letting violent criminals run free, it goes even deeper than that. They don't really think there is such a thing as a violent criminal. To them people do violent stuff and commit crimes because society has failed them. In their view, all society has to do is stop failing and there will no longer be violent criminals.
Similarly, they don't accept the costs over the costs of a law and order alternative because they don't think there is a law and order alternative. They think law-and-order policies fail to deliver on their promises. There definitely is some truth to this in my view, a lot of hardened criminals became hardened criminals by socializing with hardened criminals in prison. If they hadn't gone to prison they might have just been small-time crooks instead of hardened criminals.
In general I think the implied question is the right question. Human beings, for the most part, have the same values. They differ primarily in terms of what methods they think are most effective at achieving those values. The idea that there are tons of people out there with radically different values is an illusion created by most people having an underdeveloped theory of mind. They literally can't imagine people believe different sociological facts than they do, so they imagine other people must believe the same facts, but value very different things.
It's possible it can be both. I mean, there's definitely some truth in what you're saying, that where a right winger might see "a murderer" a leftist might see "a murderer with a heart of gold and a tragic backstory." (The left winger is probably a woman and the right winger is probably a man, for what it's worth.) But it doesn't follow that because they think the criminal is made and not born, and it's the responsibility of society to undo the criminal, that there is no crime and no consequence of the crime, and those are the two things I'm talking about here, rather than the genesis of the criminal person.
This thing about people coming into prison as wide-eyed innocents and leaving as hardened criminals... okay, I'm sure it's not literally *never* happened, but a far better explanation is that if you go to prison in the first place, you're already on the wrong track. Americans seem to think that prison is full of first offenders and non-violent criminals; it's really not. Your average prisoner has been arrested multiple times, and been sentenced more than once, before receiving a prison sentence. It's far more likely that they were on a bad track anyway and weren't somehow converted to armed robbery by being around other criminals. (You can definitely make the case that being around other criminals doesn't *help*, and that would be fair, but nor does being away from productive citizenry and having a prison record.) This would be one example of the two of us believing different facts (I don't believe prison to be a crime breeding ground but rather a place where the already-very-criminal tend to end up) rather than different values (although I do think we probably have those as well.)
That said, it is fair to say that many do believe there is no point in policing because it either doesn't do anything or the police are ackshully the real killers - these seem to be pretty standard (although not universal) views. This, however, I believe can be a reflection of values rather than just a clear-eyed, statistical study of police. You're well aware (presumably) that much of what we think is reasoned discourse is post-facto justification of our already-held views. That's what I think is happening here, and I do think it reflects a genuine difference of values, rather than just a different set of facts we're working off. For example, the phrase "defund the police", I simply don't believe you can arrive at with the same set of values as "society has the right to be free of violent crime" (for example) even if your sociological fact set is different. It's just too big of a gap.
While this is prominent on the left now, I wouldn’t say it’s exclusive. The tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good is also what has pushed the GOP into nominating ever more ideologically pure candidates, or doing things like playing Russian roulette with the debt ceiling.
It’s a fundamental problem -- maybe caused by decades of Boomer material plenty-- that we no longer think of choices in terms of trade offs -- accept *this* negative thing (taxes, white people adopting brown babies) -- and get *this* good thing (schools, babies with parents).
It’s the illusion of nonscarcity, of every choice being a moral one instead of a pragmatic one.
Not to mention the insanity of holding out on any incremental entitlement reform in favor of "all or nothing" approaches that do zero to help the multiple looming financial crises on the horizon.
The flip side of that is that the country needs to be willing to engage in discussions about reducing spending (no, raising taxes alone will be insufficient--taxes must rise and expenditures must also fall). The refusal to discuss that simple fact strikes me as being very reminiscent of Freddie's anecdote about verbal de-escalation.
If one side refuses to negotiate is it justifiable to try to force them by threatening them with a big stick (the debt ceiling)?
Definitely, the idea that cutting any amount of spending (or even the rate of growth of spending) will lead to societal catastrophe is the mirror image of the same problem.
I’m going to say “reducing spending” is another conservative culture war meme. Humans aren’t really good at understanding numerical orders of magnitude like millions and billions.
When I read statistics like Musk and two other top billionaires own half of the wealth in the US, I wonder how much better everyone would be doing if the wealth and productivity gains had been equitably distributed instead of hoovered up to the top by the wonders of finance capitalism skimming.
So, no we don’t have to cut spending. We need the wealthy to pay their fair share of the society through which now they alone profit.
The national debt is so enormous right now that confiscating the wealth of guys like Musk is literally just a drop in the bucket.
If your goal is debt/deficit reduction taxes on the middle class and the working poor has to rise in addition to broad cuts across all categories of spending.
With respect, I really don’t think we “know” that by looking at two static numbers and comparing them. What I take from modern monetary theory is that all of these mechanisms are poorly understood and we could probably afford things like basic income payments and a welfare state but the limitations are political, not fiscal.
Also that were the middle classes able to accumulate capital through labor, overall GNP and productivity would soar, compared to the current situation. Just look at the railroads. All those train wrecks and strikes because Warren Buffett and two other guys want two engineers on a two mile long train rather than three and they can’t have freakin sick days. Just one example.
I don't think MMT ever had a very large following among mainstream economists. In terms of professional acceptance I think it's in a much worse place now--by which I mean "thoroughly discredited"--because of the rise of inflation in the aftermath of massive public spending during the pandemic.
I don't know what "strikes" you're talking about wrt the rail industry because there was never a strike--ever. The Biden administration has the authority to force rail workers to work and it exercised that privilege.
Finally, the debt isn't static. It grows at a substantial pace. And if your argument is that the economy is dynamic and multivariate and that therefore any attempt at human influence is futile then what's the point of any theory--including MMT?
The national debt is so enormous that it's defies being reduced in any realistic manner without simultaneously raising taxes dramatically across the board and deep cuts on spending across the board in such a way to be economically catastrophic all in the name of paying off the Federal debt.
Congressional GOP show their true position on the national debt when they cannot reasonably put forth and stand behind what specifically would be cut to meet their undefined goal. The typical reply has been 'cut entitlements' but that is both unserious and unpopular.
What also is never agreed upon is an exact number we could call the floor of acceptable Federal debt. Is it 0% of GDP, 10%, 50%? I mean we focus on the 'National' debt and ignore the fact that private debt is double that.
My solution: cut everything, entitlements and defense. Every single category of government spending should take a 10% hair cut.
After that we'll raise taxes by 10% on everyone.
For whatever reason one year's worth of GDP to debt ratio is the threshold for concerns about a country's economic health. As for private debt letting private citizens (mis)manage their personal finances is probably the least of all evils.
Well, I use the debt ceiling as an example because I think it represents the kind of absolutist, rules-be-damned thinking we are talking about. To wit:
If you want to reduce spending, vote for smaller budgets. Once you’ve lost that vote, democracy say you shake your dust off and come back to fight another day, not torpedo the country because you’re -really, really sure- you’re right. Democracy requires the ability to be right and lose within the rules.
Sabotaging the debt ceiling is the budgeting equivalent of the Sovereign Citizens who make their own license plates because they -truly believe- they are not subject to the rules. It’s a sort of secession-in-place.
On the other hand I would argue that the last time the debt ceiling approval was held up the end result was a very positive one from a fiscal responsibility standpoint--negotiations produced the closest thing to an across the board spending cut in years. Given the positive outcome why not go for round 2?
One more question: why doesn't the debt ceiling just automatically go up on its own?
I would argue it's because the entire intent of the debt ceiling mechanism is to disallow such automatic increases. The intent is to force Congress to review on a periodic basis the growth of the national debt. Given that it seems a little strange to me that there is an argument that there should be no discussion/negotiation over increases when that conversation is precisely the point.
I wish there was a way to privately message this, but I can't find a way so I'll be circumspect... Are you the Randolph Carter who used to post on a certain small Web forum that spun off of the Reason comments section?
It's been a couple years since I posted last but I understand that it's still going. Same url if you ever wanted to say hi. This is DM btw. Good to see you.
A profound point. We are operating under an increasingly moralistic epistemology for "solving our problems" instead of one based in reality that accepts tradeoffs as a part of life.
It’s also a fundamental rejection of the liberal, democratic project. Democracy works not because everyone will eventually agree; on the contrary -- democracy has as its fundamental premise that honest men of good faith will still -inevitably- disagree, and liberal democracy seeks to avoid recourse to violence, the only alternative.
This absolutist thinking is at its root authoritarian.
It's a paradox. We are on the one hand more technocratic and "expert-driven" as a society, but also very moralistic and absolutist in our preferred solutions.
Right, which is why one party becoming fundamentally weak is bad for both parties. When one side can’t compete for massive swaths of voters, the other isn’t incentivized to do anything but exist and kill time, maybe watch a movie, get a Slurpee ...
I feel exactly like you do, but from a different perspective. The right talks tough, the left talks sweetly. The policies of either are ineffective at best, destructive at worst. Regardless of his disclaimer, many of Freddie’s points are deeply conservative. That doesn’t mean they are politically so.
I think you're onto something by associating it with material plenty. I'd also add technological progress, and especially the discourse of advertising.
When I began reading conservative intellectuals back in college, one of the big things that attracted me to them was their tragic perspective. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, Wendell Berry (though he wouldn't call himself conservative), etc. had a deep sense that there are no perfect solutions, no costless choices, no painless progress.
Of course, this limit-conscious perspective has basically been erased from the American right entirely -- not just recently by Trumpist resentment, but progressively over a considerably longer period by right-coded techno-optimism going back at least through Reagan.
I really liked this piece. Bit of a tangent, but I read Little Fires Everywhere recently and I was stunned by how juvenile a perspective on adoption it had.
When it comes to students with serious behavior problems, I think people need to realize that the number one priority for a school is student safety, and that the vast majority of the time that there are any concerns for a student’s safety during the school day, they will come from other students. That story you shared about the denialism about the need to restrain students is maddening, I hope that kind of denialism isn’t very common.
Yes, I enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere when I read it at the time, but I also felt upon reflection that the adoptive family was unfairly portrayed. I think there was room to feel sympathetic to both sides in that novel and write something complex about adoption, but it was more focused on capitalizing on the "gotcha!" zeitgeist of this moment rather than starting a real conversation.
This is a sheltered and infantile world view. It's the philosophy of a child that has never been forced to grow up. Compounding the problem is the weird American fetishishization of youth, the strange idea that kids are somehow wise in a manner that adults have lost.
This was published recently on Bari Weiss' Substack. I think it's highly relevant. Somehow a subset of the country has come to believe that suffering is unnatural and must be dispensed with.
Been waiting for this very issue to get seriously addressed: Our culture is juvenile now. I don’t mean that as an insult, per se, it’s just that our movies, our discourse, our journalism, they’re all driven by this sort of kid-ult Marvel movie Zeitgeist.
I was just talking to my husband about this w/r to the nashville shooter. When I saw photos of their art I was struck at how childish it was. There is something deeply unsettling about adults who refuse to let go of childish pursuits and hobbies.
If what you’ve seen is the turtle, yeah that’s childlike, but some of the other stuff (the Shining/Nicholson portrait, the “Audrey the Artist” self-portrait with the black cat) show a fair amount of skill. (MFA speaking here)
It is very unsettling to many when people refuse to become conformist and engage in pointless virtue signaling/status games. Letting go of any pursuit and hobby that brings you joy is stupid, full stop. If an adult gives up something that brings them joy because they feel it makes them look immature, they are behaving foolishly and care more about looking mature than being mature. Giving up the kind of pursuits that children engage in does not actually make you mature, it's just virtue-signaling the virtue of "maturity."
In general people who worry about "childishness" like that remind me of cargo cultists. They think some ephemeral markers of adulthood make you mature and don't understand true maturity, the same way that cargo cultists thought building runways would get stuff delivered to them and didn't understand industrial society.
On this front, it seems like the main narrative that modern media uses is "young person who is better than everyone at everything discovers that they're REALLY special and even better at everything than they thought, usually brought about through a training montage or not-particularly-taxing pilgrimage of some sort". It's so shallow but that sums up the new Rings of Power, Willow, almost everything Marvel makes...
I've seen people refer to modern American discourse as the Redditor Cinematic Universe. It's absolutely juvenile and Marvelized, 100%. It's good guys and bad guys and morality plays and happily ever afters. It touches every aspect of our culture but in my opinion the most damaging and bathetic is in foreign policy, Ukraine specifically: people saying brave grandmothers could throw water balloons filled with paint to render tanks useless, the "Ghost of Kiev" thing... millions of people view a tragic global conflict, a meat grinder, as a campy romp like Batman.
Why is it that public perception of superhero narratives is stuck in the Sixties? Batman hasn't been campy for a long, long time, most Batman comics and movies are dark, brooding stories where Batman constantly worries that he is doing the wrong thing and has become as bad as the villains he fights. Similarly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe does not actually have "good guys and bad guys and morality plays and happily ever afters." Many of its bad guys have understandable and sympathetic motivations, many of its heroes are flawed and make serious mistakes, characters spend a lot of time second-guessing themselves about if what they are doing is right. Things usually are not wrapped up neatly and characters don't get perfectly happy endings, if only because the serialized nature means that nothing ever really "ends."
It probably seems like I'm nitpicking, but if you are going to use pop culture as a bellwether of widespread social attitudes it's a little concerning that you get so much wrong about it.
When Ukraine's official accounts are tweeting out Marvel memes, it's not because they are offering complex character studies and a world of gray areas - it's because they knew they will resonate immediately with their Western audience as a very simple indicator of what is good and right. If the writing in Marvel movies is multi-layered and ambiguous, that's great, I'm glad to hear it - but that's not how it's deployed in the service of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, leaving my slander of Marvel aside, here's NATO: "We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos." What are they going for here, do you reckon? Ambiguity?
I don't know to what extent our culture is juvenile and to what extent it is more that things we used to use to signal juvenality are not being used that way any more. Like, looking at the aforementioned Marvel movies as an example, they are colorful adventure films about super-people, which sounds like something for kids. But most of them deal with fairly serious adult themes, "Captain America 2" is about government surveillance and privacy, "Guardians 2" is about fatherhood and abuse, "Doctor Strange 2" is about grief and regret, "Black Panther" is about nonviolent vs violent political change.
If you read the comics they are based on it's the same, most of them examine fairly adult themes and issues, it's just that the people going through those issues happen to be superstrong people wearing silly costumes. I think what actually happened is that people used to think that in order to examine serious issues in fiction you had to give up being fun, colorful, and larger than life, but at some point in recent history we realized that wasn't true.
I think the reason people don't take those stories seriously is that they're within the context of an "everything turns out ok" universe where you can be pretty sure that the tentpole characters won't die (unless they're advertised as dying), the bad guys will be punished or redeemed/converted, and continuity and stasis reign. I think that narrative core is why people like Alan Moore say that modern superhero media is infantile and "pre-fascist" (which I don't really agree with, because I think that word is overused).
The "out of the mouths of babes" thing is fascinating. In the space of two generations we went from "won't somebody please think of the children?" (a cry of maternalist hysteria) to Elizabeth Warren saying she would seek the permission of a literal child when appointing a Secretary of Education.
I think it's less the fetishization of youth and more the increased blurring of lines between childhood and adulthood, with fewer children and adolescents hitting traditional milestones such as driving or having relationships. Socially, and economically, failure to launch seems far more prevalent now than in the past. As you say, never forced to grow up - but more than that, encouraged not to grow up.
It's interesting that as a leftist-socialist you feel like you have to emphasize the fact that you support all of the issues regarding criminal justice system reform before pointing out that sometimes it's necessary to call a cop to solve a problem.
I find that as a libertarian kinda conservative, I have to do it in reverse order - I have to emphasize the fact that not all cops are bad, that we need the police, that we need the rule of law, etc., before I can point out the the criminal justice system in this country is broken and needs to be fixed.
My experience is that if I can have a rational conversation with anyone on this topic (left, right, or in between), we tend to agree on both points. But, just like your experience at the seminar, too many times this conversation isn't rational and people end up talking past each other (or more likely shouting past each other) because no one wants to freakin' listen anymore.
The criminal justice system has issues, but the far more pressing issues are that society has decided that cops will be the country's primary caretakers of the mentally ill and will in addition be scapegoated for racial disparities in areas like income, education and incarceration. Fixing the cops does almost nothing to address those underlying problems.
As a, I guess, progressive-libertarian-anarcho-mutualist, I use different strategies when talking to people on the left vs. the right. Some words make some people just tune out. For instance, I wouldn't try talking to a conservative about intersectional feminism, but I would talk about fairness and equal opportunity. There's more common ground than we think, sometimes.
This piece of Freddie's, like a number of his other writings, made me profoundly sad. Not because he's wrong--on the contrary!--but because he reminds me of what I miss so much, which is intelligent, mature, informed discussion of complex topics. I listen to the general discourse in our society and I hear cacophony, repetitive screaming, folks with fingers in their ears chanting la-la-la. To suddenly encounter a grown-up sane voice saying comprehensible things is both a pleasure and a grief-inducing thing. What happened to everyone else? Where did *they* go? Anyway, nevertheless, thank you, Freddie.
Respectfully disagree. The multiple counts: this is like a cashier stealing from the cash register. If he does it at the end of one shift, it's one count, not a count for each penny. But if he does it every day for a month, it's thirty counts of larceny, because it's thirty different occasions.
And if the cashier steals from the cash register thirty times, and then also steals from the bank deposit bag each night thirty times, that's another thirty counts, for a total of sixty.
In the Trump case, there were eleven separate falsified invoices on eleven separate dates, eleven separate falsified checks on eleven separate dates, and twelve separate falsified ledger entries on twelve separate dates. This is not one act involving thirty-four items. This is thirty-four separate illegal acts.
Secondly, if you had actually read the analysis I posted in the NY Times op-ed, you would note that the bump-up to felony here is not at all "inventive" but actually quite common in New York practice. Please give that piece a read.
I like this! Argument based on ideas conducted in words!
Multiple counts: this is about false records, so let's continue with the cash register analogy. It's a cashier at Tiffany's jewelry store who sells a $15,000 necklace for cash and pockets the customer's payment. The cashier falsifies the end-of-day-cash-receipts report to hide the stolen loot--one count of false records. The cashier makes a deposit in his bank and writes a note on the slip to indicate that it is gambling winnings in the hopes of not triggering a suspicion of money laundering look by the bank's operations staff. Finally, the cashier omits any mention of this money in his tax return, since there will be no 1099 from the bank to contradict him. I've just enumerated three separate falsified records. Three counts.
Re "inventiveness": Bragg bumps up to felony due to both state and federal crimes: state taxes, state campaign law, and federal campaign law. So, it's a stool with three legs. But, just on the "state actor enforcing law for a federal election" point, I quote from the NY Times op-ed, I previously cited:
"But court after court across the country has recognized that state authorities can enforce state law in cases relating to federal candidates. Those courts have allowed state cases concerning federal campaign contributions under widely varied circumstances, including for fraudulently diverting funds from political action committees founded to support federal presidential campaigns, violating state law limits on corporate contributions to federal campaigns and transgressing state laws concerning donations to PACs that funded federal campaigns. Some of the examples involve criminal enforcement by state authorities, some civil, but the point is the same: They can act.
"So Mr. Bragg’s bringing a state case concerning a federal campaign is hardly novel. In an abundance of caution, he not only alleges violations of state campaign finance law but also alleges federal violations. We believe that is permitted, given that the fraudulent books and records and other relevant statutes refer simply to covering up “another crime” or using “unlawful means” and do not specify whether they need be federal or state."
I think the only way to restore such voices in the public discourse is for people who hold -- and can articulate -- nuanced opinions to get out there IRL/offline and speak up without the underlying need to curry favor, raise money, etc. not even running for office, necessarily, but STANDING for generative community health and dialogue.
We need new mechanisms for this to happen to seed the ground for better discussions about inherently complex issues. We will not solve the crisis of dialogue by arguing through the lens of an inflammatory disagreement.
It’s like trickle down vs trickle up. We know what works and what doesn’t.
Attaching to one party or another boils away the nuance until you’re left with the burned residue on the bottom of the pot. Running for office, for example: to state the obvious, normal people who agree with common sense ideas do not pound the pavement and donate. They stay at home and talk sensibly with sensible friends and family. There are many many many of them/us, but they do not lend themselves to memes and clickbait.
I’m leaning more and more towards an old fashioned, real-life public square being the only way forward. A place and a mechanism by which “normal” people (those illustrated through Freddie’s stories) can gather and recognize one another and influence the wider conversation.
Ha! That's perfect and spot on. :) But the thing is that's still a mediated experience. I obviously don't know exactly how it would play out to scale, but as someone who has knocked on hundreds and hundreds of doors (taking a much more unusual "listening" approach to actually having a dialogue, as opposed to the ubiquitous elevator pitch + recycling-bin fodder), I can attest to the fact that individual humans are actually much more able to hold/interested in holding nuanced conversations when they are not downstream of boardroom nonsense skewered by the Onion. There's just a fundamental difference between human-human and human-message.
I've seen it firsthand so many times I am convinced of it. As I say/write all the time, this (wildly life-affirming) tendency was always so often on display in conversations with people who fundamentally disagree with me that I know it's possible.
Obviously, though, it takes a certain kind of person (with a certain set of motives - ie not just winning an argument/election) to initiate such a conversation, and a certain kind of person to respond in kind. But most people, I think, are sick of being reduced to monkey behavior.
Lots of people *are* sick of monkey behavior, of being lumped into binary tribes, Coke - Pepsi, Team R - Team D.
The nature of polarization and radicalization are such that there isn't much we can do about it. For most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people we can trust to have our back.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
That's definitely true, and definitely evolutionary to a certain degree. But I disagree that there's nothing we can do. For one, we can engage people who help us to recognize/realize that there are other forces — beyond the "them" — that are profiting on the backs of these divisions, that are intentionally lighting up those brain centers.
People are usually radicalized because they get something out of it that they desperately need. For example, I remember reading this article a long time ago about the documentary "Jihad - A British Story". As the filmmaker put it:
“If they were just monsters – they eventually become monsters – but if they were just monsters from day one, then there are limited options that we can have,” she says. “But all the underlying reasons (for going) are very human reasons, basic psychological reasons.” Some of these were “not finding a sense of belonging or a sense of family, struggling with how they fit into the world, what do I want to do with my life? Why am I here? What can I do? How can I be helpful?” These are questions these guys are asking themselves and they are going for the super macho, the gun-toting, super masculine expression of it,” she says. “They just don’t know that there are many more options than that….We have to do a better job in responding to it,” she says.
(That's just one example. People are also radicalized b/c they need basic resources, to protect themselves and their families, a billion other reasons I certainly can't claim to have personal experience with and therefore do not feel qualified to judge.)
I say "forces" instead of "people" because I really do ultimately believe that even the worst of the worst of the worst of us are, at this point, downwind of such forces and operating according to their logic (the only logic that they can see/hear and thus perpetuate the game).
As long as we continue this us/them escalating tennis match (to use a terrible and rushed metaphor), we'll fail to notice who is getting rich off of the tickets
"As long as we continue this us/them escalating tennis match (to use a terrible and rushed metaphor), we'll fail to notice who is getting rich off of the tickets."
I have long maintained that this is entirely intentional. Note how culture war issues do not address the way the pie is sliced or how decisions are made. Rather, they demand more diverse oppressors.
I think most people out there in the real world and off line are much more likely to hold more nuanced opinions. When a person is on-line they can act like a jackass with impunity.
"MY TRIBE! MY TRIBE! MY TRIBE!" is mostly what I read.
I can get more reasoned discourse from sports fans explaining their support for their preferred team to fans of a rival ballclub, three light beers and a shot in, or opposing colonies of monkeys screeching and exposing their buttocks to one another.
One of the greatest myths of our time is that everyone is "fixable" or "reformable". Unfortunately, that is not the case, and the denial of this fact leads to tremendous suffering.
I would also not be surprised if many of the people advocating never restraining a child are themselves childless.
I think it's more than that - the actual idea is that without the structures of society as it's currently constituted, everyone would be a genius superman/superwoman. They don't just think everything is salvageable, they think everything is perfectible.
I had the same experience a few years ago, living above a man who was a violent abuser. You'd hear him shouting horrible stuff at his wife constantly - more than once she ran out of the flat in the middle of the night and there was stuff smashing etc.
Another time a traffic warden was ticketing his car and he opened the window and unleashed a volley of racist and sexually violent abuse that was p much the worst stuff I've ever heard anyone say to a person. He was a person of colour, but I guess that happens. Similarly, I came back from Christmas holiday at some point and he was gone, and there were a lot of relatives in the house with the wife etc and people coming and going.
I assume he did something further and was sent to jail. Every single person that lived there was better off. Even a traffic warden doing her job who was crying because this dude shouted sexual obscenities about her father, who had recently died. I reported that incident to the police but not sure they did anything about it.
People's conception of these issues are so often theoretical. I live a majorly privileged existence so I'm sure I've only seen the tip of the iceberg, and even then it wasn't directly affecting me, but the reality of what people will do is cruel and nasty and poisonous sometimes - that's just life.
If I spoke to this person about anything he would have just called me a homophobic slur or whatever - there's no negotiation happening.
Sure, of course they aren't. In this case it was just a sort of racism that I hadn't really encountered before quite specifically based on the two countries those involved were from. It didn't surprise me it existed but it played out in a way I was unfamiliar with I guess.
I find the phrase "person of color" to be very peculiar. I wouldn't use it for the same reason I wouldn't use a phrase "colored person", as it is infantilizing. But for some reason, arbiters of truth exalted one and barred the other.
My cousin's daughter was adopted at the age of 5? maybe 6. My cousin was and might still be a heroine addict, idk. My aunt had custody of her, my aunt is a severe alcoholic and walked out of her job when she crashed a forklift, presumably she left because she was drunk. She was taken out of the 1 bedroom apartment she shared with her grandmother and put into foster care. She had her own bedroom in a house with a yard, they bough her her first ever bike, quickly they adopted her as soon as the state made it possible. Now is it better that she was taken away from her family of origin? If her mother was healthy it would be a tragedy but its undeniable that she now has a better life than she would've had she stayed where she was. She is probably about 13 now, I hope she is doing good.
It isn't just that certain strains of political thought make the perfect the enemy of the good, it's that certain strains of political thought put disproportionate amounts of care into identifying the harm caused by casual and innocuous social interactions while (seemingly willfully) marginalizing the harm done by actual crimes.
The last part on calling the cops reminds me of the "why would you need to call the cops on property crimes, it's just property" discourse, because there was something darkly comical (albeit depressing) about people who could see the obvious aspects of feeling unsafe in manspreading on the subway or catcalling on the street but not the fact that being mugged, burglarized, or held up in a store is extremely fucking terrifying and traumatizing even if the perp ends up never touching a hair on their head, and being mugged on the street or coming home to find your windows smashed would definitely rate at least an 8/10 on the "I feel unsafe to a degree where this could interfere with my daily life and give me anxiety and depression" scale.
If there are any defenders out there who argue that catcalling and "Washington Redskins" makes people unsafe but punishing property crime is just unjust, punching down, and a capitalist conspiracy that puts property above human beings' mental health, please share how you developed this philosophy that property crime doesn't hurt people because I would love to hear it.
More to the point: property and wealth isn't *just* a bunch of land, jewelry, and coins. Property, wealth, and "stuff" are literally what enable people to take care of ourselves and our loved ones and not starve. It's a little rich to claim that poverty and lack of wealth causes so many social ills and is a root cause of violence and crime and then say "why are you complaining when someone stole your stuff and made you poor? it's just stuff."
Yeah, it's easy to say that "human life is worth more than property and money", but in our society, most of us actually have to work and put in unrecoverable time and labor to get that property, which lets us stay housed, clothed, and fed (something I'm sure people who hate capitalism should appreciate.)
Making someone's ability to provide for themselves and their loved ones worse off, and destroying the value of the labor they put their time (which they can't get back) into, is damaging their life. Period. Even if you completely skipped over everything I wrote in the first comment about physical safety and are arguing in favor of nonviolent hackers peacefully turning other people's bank accounts into zeroes.
I saw the same thing about "the economy" during the pandemic. People would say, "it's not worth people dying just to prop up the economy!," and it was obvious that, to them, "the economy" meant the stock portfolios of a bunch of hedge fund investors and nothing more. I don't want people to die so that some Goldman executive can buy his third yacht, certainly, but "the economy" is also, like, the way we organize who grows wheat and bakes bread and fixes your toilet. There's a huge interconnected system of supply and demand that gets your pizza to your door, and no matter how much stimulus money you put out there eventually nothing happens if *everyone* is locked up inside.
One of the things that will lead to this whole "house of cards" belief system to come tumbling down is the extreme impracticability of most of these ideas - as you suggest. The extreme left is having their moment. But, reality remains reality and at some point, people have to come back down to earth and get on with the actual business of living lives.
It leads me to believe that advocates of these extremely impractical views must come from privilege to be so disconnected from the real world. As someone upboard suggested, they have no skin in the game, and therefore, no perspective.
The longer this goes on the more convinced I am that it's not a failure to misunderstand and instead it's a full understanding that Leftist aims can be better achieved in an unsafe, atomized society. I don't think for one second that radical DAs actually think they're going to reduce crime; what they think, correctly, is that they can punish their political enemies by letting crime take place.
using higher crime rates to own the republicans, the party of people soft on crime and who have positive feelings towards low-income minority neighborhoods, and who definitely do not benefit in any way from leftist radical DAs being perceived as being incompetent at their jobs
Radical DAs aren't getting elected in bellwether areas. They're getting elected in Democratic strongholds - mostly diverse urban areas, but also a few highly-educated suburbs. Sure, it's possible this will one day result in some kind of electoral blowback, but it doesn't seem likely. For at least eight years now - maybe more, but eight years ago is when I started paying attention - Dem strongholds have been soft on crime, and in places like San Jose and Portland they tolerate what are basically Leftist paramilitaries. It doesn't seem to have done the local Democratic parties any particular harm. It doesn't seem to have dented their electoral prospects, either locally or nationally. The calculus they count on is that there's enough of a threat of crime to demoralize any resistance, but not enough that there's going to be meaningful unrest from the voter base (and tax base.)
It's like saying that Republicans can't cut social programs because it'll encourage people to vote Democrat. OK, yeah. But it's what their base wants and what their ideology demands - it's just about doing it by a thousand cuts, or just enough to make a difference.
fair point, but its not clear how republicans would be "punished" by those kinds of radical DAs getting elected if those places are democratic strongholds where there apparently wasnt ever much serious republican opposition that had a chance of succeeding in the first place
edit: i guess if by "punish" you mean "put in policies just to make people i hate get triggered and cry salty tears, even at the disproportionate cost of the communities i claim to champion" then point taken
I didn't say anything about Republicans in my original post. What I said was that leftist aims - and by this I mean total institutional control and top-down expertization of society - are better achieved in an atomized society. When I said "political enemies", this was not a partisan term, at least not entirely. The independent middle class/upper middle class is in fact tilting significantly towards the Democratic party, but they're enemies nonetheless. They're moderate Hutus, basically.
That's fair enough and I apologize for my glib analysis. It is a function of our polarized times that I associate those terms with partisan inflections.
I am confused about the meaning of the phrase "enough of a threat of crime to demoralize any resistance" though.
If you are a Republican and you want to be elected in a major metropolitan area just change your registration. It worked for Eric Adams. The fact that these cities will never vote for a Republican elides the very real ideological spectrum in the Democratic Party. Is it just me or is there a trend in mayoral races that boils down to a criminal reform Democrat versus a law and order policing Democrat? Again, look at Eric Adams or Chesa Boudin's replacement in San Francisco.
Are there electoral costs? The Republicans control the House right now probably because voters in New York were fed up about crime and voted for the law and order candidates.
I don't look to the Republican party for the cure to all ills, but if I did, I'd call it a real stretch to say that Eric Adams "switched" and then won the election. It was 20 years ago that he switched.
When was the last time that these cities had a Republican administration? In Minneapolis where that cop kneeled on that guy's neck the last Republican mayor served in the 1970's.
The real question is whether or not Adams would have bothered to switch parties if Democrats didn't hold a stranglehold on NY politics--most critically for Adams at the precinct level. Guys like Giuliani and Bloomberg had the name recognition to launch successful campaigns for mayor but Adams had to work his way up and that is simply far, far easier as a Democrat if you want to represent anyplace other than Staten Island. And it could be argued that NYC is itself an outlier in terms of big metropolitan areas in that it demonstrated an unusual willingness, until recently, to elect Republicans.
I have a very honest and controversial belief that isn't based on facts, but on emotion, but which I can't shake. It is that a great deal of current academic leftist thought is subconsciously developed to actively harm and punish the working class because academic leftists have never forgiven the working class for not putting them in charge and going along with them in the revolution during the 70s.
“Not a commie” responding.
Look at FBI recidivism statistics for your answer - I would hazard 60% from memory stay rehabilitated, depending on history of same. So, yes, sort of. Hope for good; not perfect…
I think this is the logical end point of "problematizing" and "deconstructing" everything. See that obviously necessary mechanism for maintaining safety (in the first example) or obviously necessary mechanism for people who are excited to care for orphaned children? Turns out it's oppression, and you should feel bad about everything you thought you should feel ok about.
And cynically I'd argue that McFarquar is just expressing the underlying idea that the state is a superior acculturating agent and that families are inherently suspicious.
Of course, when Romania took in a bunch of kids with special needs after encouraging people to have a ton of babies, the results of state parenting were tragic.
Apologies that I'm a bit fired up about this, my nephew is adopted and anyone who wants to talk shit about my sister and everything she went through to bring him here from an orphanage where the children did farm labor and were subjected to dogs-and-guns out searches from Chinese police, they can suck a fuck as Donnie Darko's sister suggested.
That article upset me too, Randolph. Couldn't get through the whole thing. Our now 20-year-old son (and our third child - the older kids are our biological children) was adopted from China in 2004 at the age of 15 months. An unlikely thing, a boy from China. His paperwork from China (most probably completely fabricated) indicated that he had been "abandoned" in a backwater area of Sichuan province. Somewhat rare in those days, as families mainly abandoned their girls in hope of better luck with a subsequent pregnancy. A few years ago I watched One Child Nation on Netflix (which completely broke my heart) and have since come to believe that he was more likely a second son who was taken from his parents by the state. He was a traumatized toddler, and it took many months for him to relax and settle in with our family. There was never going to be a future for him in China. He's now at the University of Delaware on an academic scholarship studying animal sciences with plans on becoming a veterinarian. A gentle, funny soul beloved by all who know him. And we're white, if anyone cares.
So happy for your son! I think people here have no idea what some of those kids go through - right after my nephew joined our family, we were watching the Super Bowl and an recruiting ad for the army came on, and he started crying - we tried to figure out why and he said that men with guns used to come to where he lived and he had to hide whenever they came. I haven't brought it up since because I don't want to make him relive that, but I get teary eyed thinking about it. Anyone who stands between those kids and happy, safe homes is a monster.
When a person decides to believe something, then ties their ego, self-esteem, and social status to it, and also receives financial reward for it - good luck undoing that.
There is a force that would get these people to change their mind. And that's skin in the game. If someone is high on idealism, there's nothing to sober them up like a little shot of experiencing the practical issue in their real, physical reality.
As long as your experience of a problem is mere paraexperience, it's easy to agree with your tribe. For pundits and politicians, it's even in their financial/political interests to simply follow the party line. You see a lot more nuance when you talk to folks who are living with a problem.
I’m not sure about that. There are a lot of homeless advocates who actively work with the homeless who are never dissuaded from their Pollyannaish views.
As we all know the profits in being a homeless advocate approach Wall Street Quant levels of profitability.
Quants get paid regardless of outcome as they simply present risk factors to final investment decision makers. The comparison to private prison industry is laughably callow considering rehabilitation doesn't exist in private prison industry. As I've yet to meet a homeless advocate that either prides themselves on having repeat customers or aims to have repeat customers. One doesn't become a homeless advocate to become rich.
San Francisco alone spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on homelessness. Given the astronomical amounts of money being spent on this issue asking "Cui bono?" is completely reasonable.
Years ago I worked in search marketing and I was talking to a guy who sold leads to rehab facilities and was willing to pay up to $200 for a click. I asked him how the economics worked, and he said, "The thing is, once someone signs up for rehab they're almost guaranteed to be a repeat customer."
The point is that there are very few people involved in the homelessness problem who will lose their job if the situation stays the same or worsens. Likewise, nobody who is working on the problem stands to achieve any direct economic benefit from fixing it. It's true that the magnitude of remuneration is often less in the social services space, but the fact that comp is not tied in any way to performance is also a valid observation.
FWIW I'm *not* saying that this means that homelessness advocates *want* people to stay homeless. Never! But I *am* saying that that means they are free to advocate policies that would not work without suffering personal consequences.
I do think it's also fair to observe that even if an advocate had exactly the right ideas that would avail them little because most homelessness advocates do not have the power to materially improve the situation. Like what can a social worker do to reduce the cost of construction and housing or prevent mental illness? But that again means that their ideas about what to do can be disconnected with what would actually work and they suffer no consequences from this.
Housing advocates don't build housing. They don't provide medical attention, psychiatric counseling or treatment. They help people try to placed in housing/shelters and facilitate in some manner a pathway for a homeless person to get into permanent supportive housing.
The notion that housing advocates are supposed to solve all of the intractable social problems that contribute to homelessness is beyond absurd. It's like expecting the sanitary sewer guy who cleans out the fatberg to be responsible for making sure all of the shit people flush down their toilets don't turn into a fatberg.
The issue I think, is expecting housing advocates to act as you/I would if you were a housing advocate. Most of the people who criticize the proffered solutions also have little understanding of what would actually work because they to are disconnected from the situation as well.
I really have no idea where you get the idea that housing advocates are disconnected from their performance having an impact on their income. Non-profits regularly have to provide impact statements or evaluations of their programs and poor performance can in fact result in less grant money (or if you prefer, the other org who shows better results is more likely to win future grants). Less clear about the incentives for government agencies but they do have mandates to pay attention to outcomes. Pure awareness or policy advocacy probably has more of this, but even there they won’t gain much traction unless they can point to plausible solutions, and as BGP2 states, you can’t exactly blame them if the political and economic structures around them aren’t responsive to their concerns. Of course, with all of this there’s the question of how do you know what works and what doesn’t, what’s feasible, etc. But that’s orthogonal to the idea that people in this area of work have misaligned incentives or no consequences.
Those homeless advocates don't have any skin in the game though. Homelessness can worsen and worsen and the NGOs and advocates just receive more money and power.
Putting suspicion on care workers and advocates in that way doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Not that there’s no effect at all of the kind you’re implying, but it seems to misunderstand both the clear motivations of the human factor involved and incentive structures of people in these positions. No doctor will be successful if they can’t make people feel better and keeping your patient sick gets you malpractice not more profit. No non-profit will get funding if they can’t show proof of impact; any sizable grant comes with some strings attached to report on outcomes and that does have an impact on your average charitable donor too even if they aren’t digging in any depth to verify themselves. No advocacy group will gain traction with a target population if they can’t show that they care about the needs and interests of that group. Of course, measuring impact is hard even if you’re doing it right and many don’t do it that well, knowing “what works” can be contextual, etc. And of course people have opinions on how to solve a problem that are influenced by all sorts of moral and aesthetic assumptions, personal experience, etc. that go beyond just the evidence. But that’s all a very different problem than the misaligned economic and political incentives you’re assuming for key actors (I guess I’d grant some of that in the realm of pure politics mostly the electoral kind, but not much else). The economic incentives don’t even add up, unless you believe no new healthy person ever gets sick or no housed person ever becomes homeless. You kind of have to believe that these problems would be easy to solve and they continue because care workers and advocates know on some level if they work too hard they’ll solve themselves out of a job. That ain’t how this works, we can alleviate but the sick and poor will always be with us. And more importantly, you have to believe that a large number of people committed to alleviating a social or material problem secretly want to perpetuate it or are actually indifferent. What, do you think Act Out was ambivalent to the AIDS crisis and just wanted to make some noise? Being cynical in this way might give you points online but it’s BS in the real world.
Right its like childless adults talking about what parents should be concerned about with respect to their children's safety, education etc. I'm sorry but I honestly dgaf about your opinion, parenthood, especially motherhood is a deeply changing process and quite frankly you won't know until your experience it.
I'll split the difference here---skin in the game definitely helps. My lefty friends who have become suspicious of the online left and wokeism are all, like me, people who directly interact with the conditions of material life in poor communities: teachers, social workers, even a buddy who's a real estate agent and landlord who voted for Bernie. The ones who've become the most committed to utopia are all remote workers who didn't spend almost any time with other humans in 2021, let alone 2020. Their perspective seems somewhat permanently damaged by being Inside.
Yep, some people are just absolutely convinced that their idealism will trump reality. I'm sure there's a lot of Game of Thrones fans here, and this reminds me of one of my favorite subplots: Quentyn Martell trying to tame the dragon.
"'Oh,' he thought. And then he began to scream."
This is true across the political spectrum. Unless you have experienced that 'something' your views are colored by priors and personal biases. Such priors & biases can be either utopian fantasy or callous disregard. I've come across a lot of people who haven't had many real world experiences that would afford them either a realistic view of the world or empathy for others' choices or conditions.
My gf believes that libertarians are disproportionately people who did indeed pull themselves up by their bootstraps and thus suffer from "If I can do it why can't everyone else?" bias.
Ha. Well this is factually true for many libertarians I know who fell into family money and then succeeded upwards.
Either way personal experience here is not going to make somebody more sympathetic to the idea that one's destiny is outside of one's own control.
A question implied by the article is why the tribe of the Left is so prone to either perfectionist thinking or a desire to wish away consequences, when it comes to things like adoption and crime. In other words, in certain social issues, the Left cannot reckon with a "limit to the possible."
I think it's the wrong question, personally. I think, absent a small number of Pollyannas (who I grant may have disproportionate influence), the Left actually understands the costs of perfectionism quite clearly. They know fine well the consequences of letting violent criminals roam free, for example. They would just rather have those costs than the costs of a law-and-order alternative. But because - and this is a recurring theme of this blog, and one of the reasons I subscribe - we can't have honest discussions about costs and benefits, there is no scope for saying that "by reframing criminal justice to be restorative, we acknowledge that there may be fewer times when criminals are incarcerated, which may lead to certain increases in crime." This is the honest statement that, again, I think the vast majority of Leftists know, but wouldn't articulate.
Because an overwhelming majority would reject that bargain.
The issue is that the hardcore left is a minority badly out of step with the rest of the country.
Backwards: the country is out of step with the people running it.
It depends on what your criteria are. In numerical terms it's definitely the left that's a minority.
I have to wonder if that's the real source of all of the hysteria over Trump.
90% of the time my primary criterion is this: who's showing up?
The natural cycle of the political system in the United States is control that oscillates between both parties. Part of the problem now I believe is that one side is trying to disrupt that pattern.
In the sense that both sides will get their two years in power turnout is kind of irrelevant. Where it will make a difference is in terms of who gets to set the agenda in the Democratic Party: the centrists or the radicals.
Your theory does not match my personal experience with leftists, or leftist rhetoric that I am familiar with. It isn't even that they don't know that consequences of letting violent criminals run free, it goes even deeper than that. They don't really think there is such a thing as a violent criminal. To them people do violent stuff and commit crimes because society has failed them. In their view, all society has to do is stop failing and there will no longer be violent criminals.
Similarly, they don't accept the costs over the costs of a law and order alternative because they don't think there is a law and order alternative. They think law-and-order policies fail to deliver on their promises. There definitely is some truth to this in my view, a lot of hardened criminals became hardened criminals by socializing with hardened criminals in prison. If they hadn't gone to prison they might have just been small-time crooks instead of hardened criminals.
In general I think the implied question is the right question. Human beings, for the most part, have the same values. They differ primarily in terms of what methods they think are most effective at achieving those values. The idea that there are tons of people out there with radically different values is an illusion created by most people having an underdeveloped theory of mind. They literally can't imagine people believe different sociological facts than they do, so they imagine other people must believe the same facts, but value very different things.
It's possible it can be both. I mean, there's definitely some truth in what you're saying, that where a right winger might see "a murderer" a leftist might see "a murderer with a heart of gold and a tragic backstory." (The left winger is probably a woman and the right winger is probably a man, for what it's worth.) But it doesn't follow that because they think the criminal is made and not born, and it's the responsibility of society to undo the criminal, that there is no crime and no consequence of the crime, and those are the two things I'm talking about here, rather than the genesis of the criminal person.
This thing about people coming into prison as wide-eyed innocents and leaving as hardened criminals... okay, I'm sure it's not literally *never* happened, but a far better explanation is that if you go to prison in the first place, you're already on the wrong track. Americans seem to think that prison is full of first offenders and non-violent criminals; it's really not. Your average prisoner has been arrested multiple times, and been sentenced more than once, before receiving a prison sentence. It's far more likely that they were on a bad track anyway and weren't somehow converted to armed robbery by being around other criminals. (You can definitely make the case that being around other criminals doesn't *help*, and that would be fair, but nor does being away from productive citizenry and having a prison record.) This would be one example of the two of us believing different facts (I don't believe prison to be a crime breeding ground but rather a place where the already-very-criminal tend to end up) rather than different values (although I do think we probably have those as well.)
That said, it is fair to say that many do believe there is no point in policing because it either doesn't do anything or the police are ackshully the real killers - these seem to be pretty standard (although not universal) views. This, however, I believe can be a reflection of values rather than just a clear-eyed, statistical study of police. You're well aware (presumably) that much of what we think is reasoned discourse is post-facto justification of our already-held views. That's what I think is happening here, and I do think it reflects a genuine difference of values, rather than just a different set of facts we're working off. For example, the phrase "defund the police", I simply don't believe you can arrive at with the same set of values as "society has the right to be free of violent crime" (for example) even if your sociological fact set is different. It's just too big of a gap.
While this is prominent on the left now, I wouldn’t say it’s exclusive. The tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good is also what has pushed the GOP into nominating ever more ideologically pure candidates, or doing things like playing Russian roulette with the debt ceiling.
It’s a fundamental problem -- maybe caused by decades of Boomer material plenty-- that we no longer think of choices in terms of trade offs -- accept *this* negative thing (taxes, white people adopting brown babies) -- and get *this* good thing (schools, babies with parents).
It’s the illusion of nonscarcity, of every choice being a moral one instead of a pragmatic one.
Not to mention the insanity of holding out on any incremental entitlement reform in favor of "all or nothing" approaches that do zero to help the multiple looming financial crises on the horizon.
The flip side of that is that the country needs to be willing to engage in discussions about reducing spending (no, raising taxes alone will be insufficient--taxes must rise and expenditures must also fall). The refusal to discuss that simple fact strikes me as being very reminiscent of Freddie's anecdote about verbal de-escalation.
If one side refuses to negotiate is it justifiable to try to force them by threatening them with a big stick (the debt ceiling)?
Definitely, the idea that cutting any amount of spending (or even the rate of growth of spending) will lead to societal catastrophe is the mirror image of the same problem.
I’m going to say “reducing spending” is another conservative culture war meme. Humans aren’t really good at understanding numerical orders of magnitude like millions and billions.
When I read statistics like Musk and two other top billionaires own half of the wealth in the US, I wonder how much better everyone would be doing if the wealth and productivity gains had been equitably distributed instead of hoovered up to the top by the wonders of finance capitalism skimming.
So, no we don’t have to cut spending. We need the wealthy to pay their fair share of the society through which now they alone profit.
The national debt is so enormous right now that confiscating the wealth of guys like Musk is literally just a drop in the bucket.
If your goal is debt/deficit reduction taxes on the middle class and the working poor has to rise in addition to broad cuts across all categories of spending.
With respect, I really don’t think we “know” that by looking at two static numbers and comparing them. What I take from modern monetary theory is that all of these mechanisms are poorly understood and we could probably afford things like basic income payments and a welfare state but the limitations are political, not fiscal.
Also that were the middle classes able to accumulate capital through labor, overall GNP and productivity would soar, compared to the current situation. Just look at the railroads. All those train wrecks and strikes because Warren Buffett and two other guys want two engineers on a two mile long train rather than three and they can’t have freakin sick days. Just one example.
I don't think MMT ever had a very large following among mainstream economists. In terms of professional acceptance I think it's in a much worse place now--by which I mean "thoroughly discredited"--because of the rise of inflation in the aftermath of massive public spending during the pandemic.
I don't know what "strikes" you're talking about wrt the rail industry because there was never a strike--ever. The Biden administration has the authority to force rail workers to work and it exercised that privilege.
Finally, the debt isn't static. It grows at a substantial pace. And if your argument is that the economy is dynamic and multivariate and that therefore any attempt at human influence is futile then what's the point of any theory--including MMT?
The national debt is so enormous that it's defies being reduced in any realistic manner without simultaneously raising taxes dramatically across the board and deep cuts on spending across the board in such a way to be economically catastrophic all in the name of paying off the Federal debt.
Congressional GOP show their true position on the national debt when they cannot reasonably put forth and stand behind what specifically would be cut to meet their undefined goal. The typical reply has been 'cut entitlements' but that is both unserious and unpopular.
What also is never agreed upon is an exact number we could call the floor of acceptable Federal debt. Is it 0% of GDP, 10%, 50%? I mean we focus on the 'National' debt and ignore the fact that private debt is double that.
My solution: cut everything, entitlements and defense. Every single category of government spending should take a 10% hair cut.
After that we'll raise taxes by 10% on everyone.
For whatever reason one year's worth of GDP to debt ratio is the threshold for concerns about a country's economic health. As for private debt letting private citizens (mis)manage their personal finances is probably the least of all evils.
Since most of the nation's wealth is held by a small fraction of its citizens, I'm not sure how that is supposed to work.
Higher taxes for decades.
Well, I use the debt ceiling as an example because I think it represents the kind of absolutist, rules-be-damned thinking we are talking about. To wit:
If you want to reduce spending, vote for smaller budgets. Once you’ve lost that vote, democracy say you shake your dust off and come back to fight another day, not torpedo the country because you’re -really, really sure- you’re right. Democracy requires the ability to be right and lose within the rules.
Sabotaging the debt ceiling is the budgeting equivalent of the Sovereign Citizens who make their own license plates because they -truly believe- they are not subject to the rules. It’s a sort of secession-in-place.
On the other hand I would argue that the last time the debt ceiling approval was held up the end result was a very positive one from a fiscal responsibility standpoint--negotiations produced the closest thing to an across the board spending cut in years. Given the positive outcome why not go for round 2?
One more question: why doesn't the debt ceiling just automatically go up on its own?
I would argue it's because the entire intent of the debt ceiling mechanism is to disallow such automatic increases. The intent is to force Congress to review on a periodic basis the growth of the national debt. Given that it seems a little strange to me that there is an argument that there should be no discussion/negotiation over increases when that conversation is precisely the point.
I wish there was a way to privately message this, but I can't find a way so I'll be circumspect... Are you the Randolph Carter who used to post on a certain small Web forum that spun off of the Reason comments section?
I can neither confirm nor deny any involvement with any web forum starting with the letter G... Excellent circumspection! Is it still going/up?
It's been a couple years since I posted last but I understand that it's still going. Same url if you ever wanted to say hi. This is DM btw. Good to see you.
A profound point. We are operating under an increasingly moralistic epistemology for "solving our problems" instead of one based in reality that accepts tradeoffs as a part of life.
It’s also a fundamental rejection of the liberal, democratic project. Democracy works not because everyone will eventually agree; on the contrary -- democracy has as its fundamental premise that honest men of good faith will still -inevitably- disagree, and liberal democracy seeks to avoid recourse to violence, the only alternative.
This absolutist thinking is at its root authoritarian.
This desire on the left was revealed during covid, but the process was well on its way about ten years before.
It's a paradox. We are on the one hand more technocratic and "expert-driven" as a society, but also very moralistic and absolutist in our preferred solutions.
The phenomenon is not limited to the left.
The problem with tribalism is that it forces everyone to pick a side.
It's true. But it frustrates me more on the left because I don't really see an alternative perspective that I can humanely support on the other side.
Right, which is why one party becoming fundamentally weak is bad for both parties. When one side can’t compete for massive swaths of voters, the other isn’t incentivized to do anything but exist and kill time, maybe watch a movie, get a Slurpee ...
I feel exactly like you do, but from a different perspective. The right talks tough, the left talks sweetly. The policies of either are ineffective at best, destructive at worst. Regardless of his disclaimer, many of Freddie’s points are deeply conservative. That doesn’t mean they are politically so.
There is nothing in left THEORY or DOCTRINE that's contrary to what I'm saying, at all. There's just left fashion, left tribalism.
Not remotely. "People should do stuff they're good at and people who need things should get them" is also the meritocratic ideal.
Of course. I’m not saying there is and the same can be said for the right.
I think you're onto something by associating it with material plenty. I'd also add technological progress, and especially the discourse of advertising.
When I began reading conservative intellectuals back in college, one of the big things that attracted me to them was their tragic perspective. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, Wendell Berry (though he wouldn't call himself conservative), etc. had a deep sense that there are no perfect solutions, no costless choices, no painless progress.
Of course, this limit-conscious perspective has basically been erased from the American right entirely -- not just recently by Trumpist resentment, but progressively over a considerably longer period by right-coded techno-optimism going back at least through Reagan.
I really liked this piece. Bit of a tangent, but I read Little Fires Everywhere recently and I was stunned by how juvenile a perspective on adoption it had.
When it comes to students with serious behavior problems, I think people need to realize that the number one priority for a school is student safety, and that the vast majority of the time that there are any concerns for a student’s safety during the school day, they will come from other students. That story you shared about the denialism about the need to restrain students is maddening, I hope that kind of denialism isn’t very common.
Yes, I enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere when I read it at the time, but I also felt upon reflection that the adoptive family was unfairly portrayed. I think there was room to feel sympathetic to both sides in that novel and write something complex about adoption, but it was more focused on capitalizing on the "gotcha!" zeitgeist of this moment rather than starting a real conversation.
This is a sheltered and infantile world view. It's the philosophy of a child that has never been forced to grow up. Compounding the problem is the weird American fetishishization of youth, the strange idea that kids are somehow wise in a manner that adults have lost.
This was published recently on Bari Weiss' Substack. I think it's highly relevant. Somehow a subset of the country has come to believe that suffering is unnatural and must be dispensed with.
https://www.thefp.com/p/get-serious-about-suffering
How are you not in prison yet?
Been waiting for this very issue to get seriously addressed: Our culture is juvenile now. I don’t mean that as an insult, per se, it’s just that our movies, our discourse, our journalism, they’re all driven by this sort of kid-ult Marvel movie Zeitgeist.
I was just talking to my husband about this w/r to the nashville shooter. When I saw photos of their art I was struck at how childish it was. There is something deeply unsettling about adults who refuse to let go of childish pursuits and hobbies.
If what you’ve seen is the turtle, yeah that’s childlike, but some of the other stuff (the Shining/Nicholson portrait, the “Audrey the Artist” self-portrait with the black cat) show a fair amount of skill. (MFA speaking here)
@Julia
It is very unsettling to many when people refuse to become conformist and engage in pointless virtue signaling/status games. Letting go of any pursuit and hobby that brings you joy is stupid, full stop. If an adult gives up something that brings them joy because they feel it makes them look immature, they are behaving foolishly and care more about looking mature than being mature. Giving up the kind of pursuits that children engage in does not actually make you mature, it's just virtue-signaling the virtue of "maturity."
In general people who worry about "childishness" like that remind me of cargo cultists. They think some ephemeral markers of adulthood make you mature and don't understand true maturity, the same way that cargo cultists thought building runways would get stuff delivered to them and didn't understand industrial society.
On this front, it seems like the main narrative that modern media uses is "young person who is better than everyone at everything discovers that they're REALLY special and even better at everything than they thought, usually brought about through a training montage or not-particularly-taxing pilgrimage of some sort". It's so shallow but that sums up the new Rings of Power, Willow, almost everything Marvel makes...
I've seen people refer to modern American discourse as the Redditor Cinematic Universe. It's absolutely juvenile and Marvelized, 100%. It's good guys and bad guys and morality plays and happily ever afters. It touches every aspect of our culture but in my opinion the most damaging and bathetic is in foreign policy, Ukraine specifically: people saying brave grandmothers could throw water balloons filled with paint to render tanks useless, the "Ghost of Kiev" thing... millions of people view a tragic global conflict, a meat grinder, as a campy romp like Batman.
Why is it that public perception of superhero narratives is stuck in the Sixties? Batman hasn't been campy for a long, long time, most Batman comics and movies are dark, brooding stories where Batman constantly worries that he is doing the wrong thing and has become as bad as the villains he fights. Similarly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe does not actually have "good guys and bad guys and morality plays and happily ever afters." Many of its bad guys have understandable and sympathetic motivations, many of its heroes are flawed and make serious mistakes, characters spend a lot of time second-guessing themselves about if what they are doing is right. Things usually are not wrapped up neatly and characters don't get perfectly happy endings, if only because the serialized nature means that nothing ever really "ends."
It probably seems like I'm nitpicking, but if you are going to use pop culture as a bellwether of widespread social attitudes it's a little concerning that you get so much wrong about it.
When Ukraine's official accounts are tweeting out Marvel memes, it's not because they are offering complex character studies and a world of gray areas - it's because they knew they will resonate immediately with their Western audience as a very simple indicator of what is good and right. If the writing in Marvel movies is multi-layered and ambiguous, that's great, I'm glad to hear it - but that's not how it's deployed in the service of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, leaving my slander of Marvel aside, here's NATO: "We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos." What are they going for here, do you reckon? Ambiguity?
I don't know to what extent our culture is juvenile and to what extent it is more that things we used to use to signal juvenality are not being used that way any more. Like, looking at the aforementioned Marvel movies as an example, they are colorful adventure films about super-people, which sounds like something for kids. But most of them deal with fairly serious adult themes, "Captain America 2" is about government surveillance and privacy, "Guardians 2" is about fatherhood and abuse, "Doctor Strange 2" is about grief and regret, "Black Panther" is about nonviolent vs violent political change.
If you read the comics they are based on it's the same, most of them examine fairly adult themes and issues, it's just that the people going through those issues happen to be superstrong people wearing silly costumes. I think what actually happened is that people used to think that in order to examine serious issues in fiction you had to give up being fun, colorful, and larger than life, but at some point in recent history we realized that wasn't true.
I think the reason people don't take those stories seriously is that they're within the context of an "everything turns out ok" universe where you can be pretty sure that the tentpole characters won't die (unless they're advertised as dying), the bad guys will be punished or redeemed/converted, and continuity and stasis reign. I think that narrative core is why people like Alan Moore say that modern superhero media is infantile and "pre-fascist" (which I don't really agree with, because I think that word is overused).
The "out of the mouths of babes" thing is fascinating. In the space of two generations we went from "won't somebody please think of the children?" (a cry of maternalist hysteria) to Elizabeth Warren saying she would seek the permission of a literal child when appointing a Secretary of Education.
I think it's less the fetishization of youth and more the increased blurring of lines between childhood and adulthood, with fewer children and adolescents hitting traditional milestones such as driving or having relationships. Socially, and economically, failure to launch seems far more prevalent now than in the past. As you say, never forced to grow up - but more than that, encouraged not to grow up.
Great article.
It's interesting that as a leftist-socialist you feel like you have to emphasize the fact that you support all of the issues regarding criminal justice system reform before pointing out that sometimes it's necessary to call a cop to solve a problem.
I find that as a libertarian kinda conservative, I have to do it in reverse order - I have to emphasize the fact that not all cops are bad, that we need the police, that we need the rule of law, etc., before I can point out the the criminal justice system in this country is broken and needs to be fixed.
My experience is that if I can have a rational conversation with anyone on this topic (left, right, or in between), we tend to agree on both points. But, just like your experience at the seminar, too many times this conversation isn't rational and people end up talking past each other (or more likely shouting past each other) because no one wants to freakin' listen anymore.
The criminal justice system has issues, but the far more pressing issues are that society has decided that cops will be the country's primary caretakers of the mentally ill and will in addition be scapegoated for racial disparities in areas like income, education and incarceration. Fixing the cops does almost nothing to address those underlying problems.
As a, I guess, progressive-libertarian-anarcho-mutualist, I use different strategies when talking to people on the left vs. the right. Some words make some people just tune out. For instance, I wouldn't try talking to a conservative about intersectional feminism, but I would talk about fairness and equal opportunity. There's more common ground than we think, sometimes.
This piece of Freddie's, like a number of his other writings, made me profoundly sad. Not because he's wrong--on the contrary!--but because he reminds me of what I miss so much, which is intelligent, mature, informed discussion of complex topics. I listen to the general discourse in our society and I hear cacophony, repetitive screaming, folks with fingers in their ears chanting la-la-la. To suddenly encounter a grown-up sane voice saying comprehensible things is both a pleasure and a grief-inducing thing. What happened to everyone else? Where did *they* go? Anyway, nevertheless, thank you, Freddie.
Actually, Trump has been indicted for 34 felony counts. Here is a very good analysis of the prosecution's predicate: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/opinion/donald-trump-alvin-bragg-indictment-charges.html
Respectfully disagree. The multiple counts: this is like a cashier stealing from the cash register. If he does it at the end of one shift, it's one count, not a count for each penny. But if he does it every day for a month, it's thirty counts of larceny, because it's thirty different occasions.
And if the cashier steals from the cash register thirty times, and then also steals from the bank deposit bag each night thirty times, that's another thirty counts, for a total of sixty.
In the Trump case, there were eleven separate falsified invoices on eleven separate dates, eleven separate falsified checks on eleven separate dates, and twelve separate falsified ledger entries on twelve separate dates. This is not one act involving thirty-four items. This is thirty-four separate illegal acts.
Secondly, if you had actually read the analysis I posted in the NY Times op-ed, you would note that the bump-up to felony here is not at all "inventive" but actually quite common in New York practice. Please give that piece a read.
I like this! Argument based on ideas conducted in words!
Multiple counts: this is about false records, so let's continue with the cash register analogy. It's a cashier at Tiffany's jewelry store who sells a $15,000 necklace for cash and pockets the customer's payment. The cashier falsifies the end-of-day-cash-receipts report to hide the stolen loot--one count of false records. The cashier makes a deposit in his bank and writes a note on the slip to indicate that it is gambling winnings in the hopes of not triggering a suspicion of money laundering look by the bank's operations staff. Finally, the cashier omits any mention of this money in his tax return, since there will be no 1099 from the bank to contradict him. I've just enumerated three separate falsified records. Three counts.
Re "inventiveness": Bragg bumps up to felony due to both state and federal crimes: state taxes, state campaign law, and federal campaign law. So, it's a stool with three legs. But, just on the "state actor enforcing law for a federal election" point, I quote from the NY Times op-ed, I previously cited:
"But court after court across the country has recognized that state authorities can enforce state law in cases relating to federal candidates. Those courts have allowed state cases concerning federal campaign contributions under widely varied circumstances, including for fraudulently diverting funds from political action committees founded to support federal presidential campaigns, violating state law limits on corporate contributions to federal campaigns and transgressing state laws concerning donations to PACs that funded federal campaigns. Some of the examples involve criminal enforcement by state authorities, some civil, but the point is the same: They can act.
"So Mr. Bragg’s bringing a state case concerning a federal campaign is hardly novel. In an abundance of caution, he not only alleges violations of state campaign finance law but also alleges federal violations. We believe that is permitted, given that the fraudulent books and records and other relevant statutes refer simply to covering up “another crime” or using “unlawful means” and do not specify whether they need be federal or state."
Citation needed
I think the only way to restore such voices in the public discourse is for people who hold -- and can articulate -- nuanced opinions to get out there IRL/offline and speak up without the underlying need to curry favor, raise money, etc. not even running for office, necessarily, but STANDING for generative community health and dialogue.
We need new mechanisms for this to happen to seed the ground for better discussions about inherently complex issues. We will not solve the crisis of dialogue by arguing through the lens of an inflammatory disagreement.
It’s like trickle down vs trickle up. We know what works and what doesn’t.
Attaching to one party or another boils away the nuance until you’re left with the burned residue on the bottom of the pot. Running for office, for example: to state the obvious, normal people who agree with common sense ideas do not pound the pavement and donate. They stay at home and talk sensibly with sensible friends and family. There are many many many of them/us, but they do not lend themselves to memes and clickbait.
I’m leaning more and more towards an old fashioned, real-life public square being the only way forward. A place and a mechanism by which “normal” people (those illustrated through Freddie’s stories) can gather and recognize one another and influence the wider conversation.
Good luck with that, as the monkeys just shout them down.
Not 100% on point, but still....
https://www.theonion.com/actual-expert-too-boring-for-tv-1819567833
Back when the Onion didn't suck.
Or there's that one "Idiocracy" documentary that I saw.
I've been meaning to watch that forever!
It's a documentary about the future. Or rather, it was about the future at the time it was made, but it seems to already be happening right now.
Ha! That's perfect and spot on. :) But the thing is that's still a mediated experience. I obviously don't know exactly how it would play out to scale, but as someone who has knocked on hundreds and hundreds of doors (taking a much more unusual "listening" approach to actually having a dialogue, as opposed to the ubiquitous elevator pitch + recycling-bin fodder), I can attest to the fact that individual humans are actually much more able to hold/interested in holding nuanced conversations when they are not downstream of boardroom nonsense skewered by the Onion. There's just a fundamental difference between human-human and human-message.
I've seen it firsthand so many times I am convinced of it. As I say/write all the time, this (wildly life-affirming) tendency was always so often on display in conversations with people who fundamentally disagree with me that I know it's possible.
Obviously, though, it takes a certain kind of person (with a certain set of motives - ie not just winning an argument/election) to initiate such a conversation, and a certain kind of person to respond in kind. But most people, I think, are sick of being reduced to monkey behavior.
Lots of people *are* sick of monkey behavior, of being lumped into binary tribes, Coke - Pepsi, Team R - Team D.
The nature of polarization and radicalization are such that there isn't much we can do about it. For most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people we can trust to have our back.
Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!
That's definitely true, and definitely evolutionary to a certain degree. But I disagree that there's nothing we can do. For one, we can engage people who help us to recognize/realize that there are other forces — beyond the "them" — that are profiting on the backs of these divisions, that are intentionally lighting up those brain centers.
People are usually radicalized because they get something out of it that they desperately need. For example, I remember reading this article a long time ago about the documentary "Jihad - A British Story". As the filmmaker put it:
“If they were just monsters – they eventually become monsters – but if they were just monsters from day one, then there are limited options that we can have,” she says. “But all the underlying reasons (for going) are very human reasons, basic psychological reasons.” Some of these were “not finding a sense of belonging or a sense of family, struggling with how they fit into the world, what do I want to do with my life? Why am I here? What can I do? How can I be helpful?” These are questions these guys are asking themselves and they are going for the super macho, the gun-toting, super masculine expression of it,” she says. “They just don’t know that there are many more options than that….We have to do a better job in responding to it,” she says.
(That's just one example. People are also radicalized b/c they need basic resources, to protect themselves and their families, a billion other reasons I certainly can't claim to have personal experience with and therefore do not feel qualified to judge.)
I say "forces" instead of "people" because I really do ultimately believe that even the worst of the worst of the worst of us are, at this point, downwind of such forces and operating according to their logic (the only logic that they can see/hear and thus perpetuate the game).
As long as we continue this us/them escalating tennis match (to use a terrible and rushed metaphor), we'll fail to notice who is getting rich off of the tickets
"As long as we continue this us/them escalating tennis match (to use a terrible and rushed metaphor), we'll fail to notice who is getting rich off of the tickets."
I have long maintained that this is entirely intentional. Note how culture war issues do not address the way the pie is sliced or how decisions are made. Rather, they demand more diverse oppressors.
I think most people out there in the real world and off line are much more likely to hold more nuanced opinions. When a person is on-line they can act like a jackass with impunity.
yup! that pretty much sums it up!
"MY TRIBE! MY TRIBE! MY TRIBE!" is mostly what I read.
I can get more reasoned discourse from sports fans explaining their support for their preferred team to fans of a rival ballclub, three light beers and a shot in, or opposing colonies of monkeys screeching and exposing their buttocks to one another.
One of the greatest myths of our time is that everyone is "fixable" or "reformable". Unfortunately, that is not the case, and the denial of this fact leads to tremendous suffering.
I would also not be surprised if many of the people advocating never restraining a child are themselves childless.
I think it's more than that - the actual idea is that without the structures of society as it's currently constituted, everyone would be a genius superman/superwoman. They don't just think everything is salvageable, they think everything is perfectible.
Rousseau's spirit lives on...
I'm more of a "From such crooked timber as humankind is made of nothing entirely straight can be made" guy...
"Gene Roddenberry believed in the perfectability of man; I do not. There is no evidence for it in all our history."
–Nicholas Meyer, writer/director of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Thanks again for your excellent insights. I honestly feel like a lot of people are just taking ‘stupid lesson’ to set up a narrative of victimhood.
Somewhat disappointed to learn that I am not the only one rocking a big, fake gold G-Unit medallion.
I had the same experience a few years ago, living above a man who was a violent abuser. You'd hear him shouting horrible stuff at his wife constantly - more than once she ran out of the flat in the middle of the night and there was stuff smashing etc.
Another time a traffic warden was ticketing his car and he opened the window and unleashed a volley of racist and sexually violent abuse that was p much the worst stuff I've ever heard anyone say to a person. He was a person of colour, but I guess that happens. Similarly, I came back from Christmas holiday at some point and he was gone, and there were a lot of relatives in the house with the wife etc and people coming and going.
I assume he did something further and was sent to jail. Every single person that lived there was better off. Even a traffic warden doing her job who was crying because this dude shouted sexual obscenities about her father, who had recently died. I reported that incident to the police but not sure they did anything about it.
People's conception of these issues are so often theoretical. I live a majorly privileged existence so I'm sure I've only seen the tip of the iceberg, and even then it wasn't directly affecting me, but the reality of what people will do is cruel and nasty and poisonous sometimes - that's just life.
If I spoke to this person about anything he would have just called me a homophobic slur or whatever - there's no negotiation happening.
It's a curious idea that racial minorities are somehow immune to racism/sexism/bigotry/etc.
Sure, of course they aren't. In this case it was just a sort of racism that I hadn't really encountered before quite specifically based on the two countries those involved were from. It didn't surprise me it existed but it played out in a way I was unfamiliar with I guess.
I find the phrase "person of color" to be very peculiar. I wouldn't use it for the same reason I wouldn't use a phrase "colored person", as it is infantilizing. But for some reason, arbiters of truth exalted one and barred the other.
I think I've mentioned this before but try tutoring foreign students in English and explaining to them why one is okay and the other isn't.
They were here and wanted to be able to order at McDonald's.
Every word.
My cousin's daughter was adopted at the age of 5? maybe 6. My cousin was and might still be a heroine addict, idk. My aunt had custody of her, my aunt is a severe alcoholic and walked out of her job when she crashed a forklift, presumably she left because she was drunk. She was taken out of the 1 bedroom apartment she shared with her grandmother and put into foster care. She had her own bedroom in a house with a yard, they bough her her first ever bike, quickly they adopted her as soon as the state made it possible. Now is it better that she was taken away from her family of origin? If her mother was healthy it would be a tragedy but its undeniable that she now has a better life than she would've had she stayed where she was. She is probably about 13 now, I hope she is doing good.
It isn't just that certain strains of political thought make the perfect the enemy of the good, it's that certain strains of political thought put disproportionate amounts of care into identifying the harm caused by casual and innocuous social interactions while (seemingly willfully) marginalizing the harm done by actual crimes.
The last part on calling the cops reminds me of the "why would you need to call the cops on property crimes, it's just property" discourse, because there was something darkly comical (albeit depressing) about people who could see the obvious aspects of feeling unsafe in manspreading on the subway or catcalling on the street but not the fact that being mugged, burglarized, or held up in a store is extremely fucking terrifying and traumatizing even if the perp ends up never touching a hair on their head, and being mugged on the street or coming home to find your windows smashed would definitely rate at least an 8/10 on the "I feel unsafe to a degree where this could interfere with my daily life and give me anxiety and depression" scale.
If there are any defenders out there who argue that catcalling and "Washington Redskins" makes people unsafe but punishing property crime is just unjust, punching down, and a capitalist conspiracy that puts property above human beings' mental health, please share how you developed this philosophy that property crime doesn't hurt people because I would love to hear it.
More to the point: property and wealth isn't *just* a bunch of land, jewelry, and coins. Property, wealth, and "stuff" are literally what enable people to take care of ourselves and our loved ones and not starve. It's a little rich to claim that poverty and lack of wealth causes so many social ills and is a root cause of violence and crime and then say "why are you complaining when someone stole your stuff and made you poor? it's just stuff."
Yeah, it's easy to say that "human life is worth more than property and money", but in our society, most of us actually have to work and put in unrecoverable time and labor to get that property, which lets us stay housed, clothed, and fed (something I'm sure people who hate capitalism should appreciate.)
Making someone's ability to provide for themselves and their loved ones worse off, and destroying the value of the labor they put their time (which they can't get back) into, is damaging their life. Period. Even if you completely skipped over everything I wrote in the first comment about physical safety and are arguing in favor of nonviolent hackers peacefully turning other people's bank accounts into zeroes.
I saw the same thing about "the economy" during the pandemic. People would say, "it's not worth people dying just to prop up the economy!," and it was obvious that, to them, "the economy" meant the stock portfolios of a bunch of hedge fund investors and nothing more. I don't want people to die so that some Goldman executive can buy his third yacht, certainly, but "the economy" is also, like, the way we organize who grows wheat and bakes bread and fixes your toilet. There's a huge interconnected system of supply and demand that gets your pizza to your door, and no matter how much stimulus money you put out there eventually nothing happens if *everyone* is locked up inside.
One of the things that will lead to this whole "house of cards" belief system to come tumbling down is the extreme impracticability of most of these ideas - as you suggest. The extreme left is having their moment. But, reality remains reality and at some point, people have to come back down to earth and get on with the actual business of living lives.
It leads me to believe that advocates of these extremely impractical views must come from privilege to be so disconnected from the real world. As someone upboard suggested, they have no skin in the game, and therefore, no perspective.
I concede that it's easy to think of property and wealth as unimportant if you have never been in want of it
The longer this goes on the more convinced I am that it's not a failure to misunderstand and instead it's a full understanding that Leftist aims can be better achieved in an unsafe, atomized society. I don't think for one second that radical DAs actually think they're going to reduce crime; what they think, correctly, is that they can punish their political enemies by letting crime take place.
using higher crime rates to own the republicans, the party of people soft on crime and who have positive feelings towards low-income minority neighborhoods, and who definitely do not benefit in any way from leftist radical DAs being perceived as being incompetent at their jobs
Radical DAs aren't getting elected in bellwether areas. They're getting elected in Democratic strongholds - mostly diverse urban areas, but also a few highly-educated suburbs. Sure, it's possible this will one day result in some kind of electoral blowback, but it doesn't seem likely. For at least eight years now - maybe more, but eight years ago is when I started paying attention - Dem strongholds have been soft on crime, and in places like San Jose and Portland they tolerate what are basically Leftist paramilitaries. It doesn't seem to have done the local Democratic parties any particular harm. It doesn't seem to have dented their electoral prospects, either locally or nationally. The calculus they count on is that there's enough of a threat of crime to demoralize any resistance, but not enough that there's going to be meaningful unrest from the voter base (and tax base.)
It's like saying that Republicans can't cut social programs because it'll encourage people to vote Democrat. OK, yeah. But it's what their base wants and what their ideology demands - it's just about doing it by a thousand cuts, or just enough to make a difference.
fair point, but its not clear how republicans would be "punished" by those kinds of radical DAs getting elected if those places are democratic strongholds where there apparently wasnt ever much serious republican opposition that had a chance of succeeding in the first place
edit: i guess if by "punish" you mean "put in policies just to make people i hate get triggered and cry salty tears, even at the disproportionate cost of the communities i claim to champion" then point taken
I didn't say anything about Republicans in my original post. What I said was that leftist aims - and by this I mean total institutional control and top-down expertization of society - are better achieved in an atomized society. When I said "political enemies", this was not a partisan term, at least not entirely. The independent middle class/upper middle class is in fact tilting significantly towards the Democratic party, but they're enemies nonetheless. They're moderate Hutus, basically.
That's fair enough and I apologize for my glib analysis. It is a function of our polarized times that I associate those terms with partisan inflections.
I am confused about the meaning of the phrase "enough of a threat of crime to demoralize any resistance" though.
If you are a Republican and you want to be elected in a major metropolitan area just change your registration. It worked for Eric Adams. The fact that these cities will never vote for a Republican elides the very real ideological spectrum in the Democratic Party. Is it just me or is there a trend in mayoral races that boils down to a criminal reform Democrat versus a law and order policing Democrat? Again, look at Eric Adams or Chesa Boudin's replacement in San Francisco.
Are there electoral costs? The Republicans control the House right now probably because voters in New York were fed up about crime and voted for the law and order candidates.
I don't look to the Republican party for the cure to all ills, but if I did, I'd call it a real stretch to say that Eric Adams "switched" and then won the election. It was 20 years ago that he switched.
When was the last time that these cities had a Republican administration? In Minneapolis where that cop kneeled on that guy's neck the last Republican mayor served in the 1970's.
The real question is whether or not Adams would have bothered to switch parties if Democrats didn't hold a stranglehold on NY politics--most critically for Adams at the precinct level. Guys like Giuliani and Bloomberg had the name recognition to launch successful campaigns for mayor but Adams had to work his way up and that is simply far, far easier as a Democrat if you want to represent anyplace other than Staten Island. And it could be argued that NYC is itself an outlier in terms of big metropolitan areas in that it demonstrated an unusual willingness, until recently, to elect Republicans.
I have a very honest and controversial belief that isn't based on facts, but on emotion, but which I can't shake. It is that a great deal of current academic leftist thought is subconsciously developed to actively harm and punish the working class because academic leftists have never forgiven the working class for not putting them in charge and going along with them in the revolution during the 70s.