Short but sweet, thank you very much for this, Matt.
I also like this short essay format for holidays. It's fine if you still want to use the purpose for a holiday in taking a day off and unpaywalling an old article, but a format like this could continue to work out well in the future when you're up to it.
Whatever King said, colorblind enforcement of the law is the right thing to do, and equality of results is a foolish thing to force. With that said, this Republican flies his flags today (a special sacrifice because I had to switch out the Mardi Gras ones) because MLK represented another small step on Western Civilization’s (and thus the world’s) march from the darkness of barbarism towards individual rights.
What good is equality before the law if it doesn’t yield results? We did that in 1865 and we just created a time bomb for lawyers to think of new ways to codify second class citizenship. Absent an active ethic to bring everyone into real material equality people will find creative ways to keep people Down.
"What good is equality before the law if it doesn’t yield results?"
Should we do something about Indian-origin people making twice as much money as White people? (for the record, I say we should not do something).
What group inequalities in particular are you upset about, and what differentiates them from the group inequalities you do care about?
As another quick example, - white people kill themselves at much higher rates than other census categories, and until covid were dying at higher rates from drug overdoses, too.
Is that something the law or some ethic should have responded to?
Indian-Americans making more than white Americans is the result of a selective immigration system that only lets high-income Indians in, not because Indians conquered or enslaved white people. We could “solve” that “problem” in a day by allowing open immigration.
I think both of these are appropriate points of concern. I'm not going to sit here and say I know what the answer is to either of them but if one group is doing extraordinarily well then the things that that group is doing very well should be seamlessly integrated into what everyone else is doing through incentives and information spreading. I used to like the idea of cultural pathology but it was only applied to urban blacks in a way that really left a bad taste in my mouth here. But we should be constantly adopting best practices as people and paternalistically encouraged to spread them and supported in doing so.
And yes the problems of white overdoses should be a notable problem that people should be trying to address. The way the drug problems among whites were ignored while with blacks the source of a racial panic was bad on both sides.
I guess my disagreement or at least concern with your approach is "why does race / identity need to be a key factor" in any of this? If you want to identify disadvantaged children you can figure them out accurately by using just a half a dozen variables or so, and it's unlikely that race or ethnicity needs to be one of them.
Fwiw I'm drawing in part on my experience building a re-arrest model using data from Florida. In that data set Black people were more likely to be rearrested, but the model was not improved (actually worsened a bit) by adding race as a variable. Prior arrest record, age, gender, etc... already told you everything you needed to know to get a good prediction.
I don't see why the same wouldn't be the case with the above. If Indian-Americans are doing very well then the underlying cause is almost certainly the professions and businesses they are in, or other such factors. And so we should ask ourselves "are we doing enough for children who are not born to doctors, engineers and upper management business execs?" Not, "are we doing enough for non-Indians"?
“ I'm not going to sit here and say I know what the answer is to either of them”
Neither does the government know. If you give the government that kind of power you will end with an authoritarian government that limits free speech and immiserates everyone except their friends and family. It has happened every single time, but the far left keeps wanting to try it again.
But it does yield results - just not the ones your philosophy expects. People achieve in proportion to their ambition, their self-discipline and their talent. You can get rid of these differences in achievement but not without killing the drive to achieve. That’s why the USSR had wheat fields with only the outside rows producing much wheat. The laborers only cultivated the rows that could be seen by the inspectors who were too lazy to walk the fields. THAT’s the world you will force us all into.
So if we run a race and I start 100 meters behind you the only distinction is the amount of ambition and talent? It's like genuinely hard to believe you believe this. I don't believe in getting rid of differences in achievement but a kid born to no account parents who attends no account schools, who at best attends middling post secondary education for trades or practical skills when does he or she get a chance to rise to the level of someone born to exceptional parents with exceptional resources?
This is a reconstruction playbook by suitable for television means. No violent spectacle but keeping people down all the same. Even to the extent that they succeed and beat the odds the gap between what they would have achieved if everyone had an equal footing at 18 is hard to imagine forgiving.
I'd be surprised if Ryan or anyone said that your parents and material circumstances have nothing to do with your future trajectory.
But the more important questions are #1) if you have terrible parents, what can the government realistically do to change that? #2) why does it matter if the distribution of bad parents and circumstances differ by census category? Why, for example, does a disproportionate number of Black people living in relative poverty require action, while a disproportionate number of West Virginians or New Mexicans doesn't?
Bingo! And why does LeBron James's children get special treatment over some poor West Virginia kid?
There are so many factors involved in determining advantage and disadvantage that it is a fool's errand, and thus it always boils down to just make every outcome equal. And we know that will result in brutal dictatorship.
Lebron James' kid should get offsets for the effects of his race while also getting substantial countervailing offsets for the effects of his wealth, athleticism, etc. while the poor West Virginian should get probably stronger offsets for his poverty and comparably weaker negative points for his whiteness.
But none of these should be like well let's just pretend everything is equal and their grades and test scores came out of thin air as purely objective measures of the value of Bronnie and your imaginary kid. Literally everything should be known and accounted for as often as possible.
I really want to focus on #2 because I don't think it should. I think we should know everything about as many possible sources of unfair advantage or disadvantage and have them modeled and scored appropriately relative to their weight.
We should be weighting those equally and weighting down children of generations long elites and similar privileged backgrounds an amount such that it builds a kind of individualism of systemic issues. Race should be a factor not the factor to use an old standard.
For #1 we should have a pretty strong system to prioritize building the kind of impulse control, time horizons, mental health supports etc. so that people aren't raising their children with ineffective values. Where like 20th percentile parent have the ability to provide these things for their kids because it's actually the easy thing to do instead of making it a straight and narrow that only 60th percentile parents can provide.
I like your explicit use of the words "weighting down", because in practice that is _much_ easier than "lifting up".... the problem is that the end result of policies like that is things like Harrison Bergeron.
Put another way: why should "privileged background" be weighted down but "privileged genes" (athleticism, high IQ, genetic determinants of "grit", etc) not be? Or should it be? What counts as "unfair" advantage, exactly?
Basically what you’re saying is that anything short of social justice perfection is no better than the fascist-adjacent kleptocracy we’re currently headed for. (Note—I don’t think the situation is hopeless, unless people of good will are paralyzed by aforesaid perfectionism)
I don't think that's what I'm saying. But we tried a big we're gonna pass some laws and then walk away and well we tried that. We got decades of segregation as a result. Then we tried a kind of muddling through of fighting out active measures and now people want to go back to the first framework.
My mixed race kid just had a playdate with another mixed race kid who lives across the street. The government did a great job of breaking down de jure segregation, which is why our marriages are legal and our kids can play together and that's fantastic.
What's left of segregation is that sometimes people want to marry and live within their own community, and sometimes people don't, and in a free country we can very reasonably accommodate both of those preferences. We don't need to force Ultra-Orthodox Jews to live among Gentiles, or the Amish to move to Manhattan. We also don't need to pretend that Kenyan and Ghanaian and Jamaican immigrants are part of some monolithic "black" community, and that admitting them to Harvard somehow advances the interests of poor black kids in Baltimore.
This argument always sounds perfectionistic to me. When it comes to law and politics the aim is to move towards improvement and prevent backsliding. Or sometimes even to slow the velocity of the backsliding. Perfectionism in politics tends to lead towards pessimism and despair.
Let's be clear that in the USSR and the PRC there was not just "killing the drive to achieve" but also a lot of actual killing, focused on peasants insufficiently loyal to the state, ethnic minorities, the petite bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and the aristocratic elite.
And you think it would be different here? Far left ideologies can only be forced on the people. If the people elect them they will soon revolt in disgust, as the productive get increasingly pissed off that they are supporting the steadily increasing number of freeloaders. That’s when the killings start.
I don't agree entirely, but I suspect you have me confused with someone else. The problem for both the USSR and the PRC was that their ideology required them to create certain structures that effectively crippled the productive economy. In response, they looked for scapegoats to sacrifice as opposed to changing their ideology, and they found them, in large numbers. It's not about "freeloaders" vs. the "productive", which is a bizarrely Ayn Randian view of life. It's about whether the political ideology of a state will allow economic life to continue and improve. The Axis powers of WW2 also had lousy economies that failed to function effectively, particularly in comparison to the massive productivity of the US.
I think you are completely missing an understanding of human nature. People screw off if the fruits of their labor go to others instead of themselves. THAT was the fundamental problem with the PRC and the USSR…and Sweden and the UK in the 1980s, and everywhere that communism and socialism are tried…EVERYWHERE.
I was in Havana in 2013ish. I ate at a number of restaurants. Most were family owned according to the relatively new policy of the communists, who were trying to introduce just enough capitalism to get people to work again. The budding entrepreneurs were making an impressive effort, but they still had to by from communist commissaries. One of the perverse results was that on a tropical island, I could not get fresh fruit in a restaurant!
The mansions along the waterfront were deteriorating badly because no one owned them. Who is going to maintain a house that belongs to five families? Let the other guy do it. All of the infrastructure in Cuba was deteriorating. It’s the same story everywhere.
I don’t say you owe me a thing but no one has ever earned a god damned thing in tbis world. If humans got what we deserved the Earth would have the population of Mars.
Everything I have, I worked for. At times, other people have also worked on my behalf or in my support, because that's what family and good friends and professional mentors do. But you are the one indispensable ingredient to your own success. It boggles my mind how there are people in the world who think differently.
They work for them, but smart ones get them by genes and environment that they didn't create. Just like I work really hard but with genes and talent and habits that weren't crafted whole cloth by me. They earn them in a very hollow sense. The students who deserve the best rewards (highest effort to achievement ratio) never get celebrated beyond a card and an end of year award (everyone gets both of these but some I put more time and effort into selecting).
The ones who get straight As often have terrible effort-output ratios. I wouldn't really say they earned it as much as they received a larger allotment of grace.
Well, what are we trying to accomplish here? I agree effort should matter (and it does!), but sorting by ability is critical to identifying those most capable of performing various functions in society.
A simple version of this argument is that your brains, looks, etc., are either to due nature (in which case you don't "merit" them) or nurture (in which case you don't "merit" them).
Hang in there, Andrew, people are really being assholes to you today.
Funny thing is my question of the week for mailbag was if it's best to walk the dog or something instead of doing this. If I weren't off today I'd never have had enough time to feel stressed about it. Did go for a 5 mile run about 330 when it was making me scream.
I think the social game people play in which one side asserts that there was no social progress circa 1865 and another asserts that there have been no problems since is a really unhelpful one, not to mention a historically ill informed one.
He never said there was no progress, you strawmanned him. He's just making the usual claim that putting equal treatment on the books isn't enough to right historical inequities, which judging from the replies to his original comment a lot of people here disagree with
It’s what there is. Trying to legislate material equality has not delivered it but has worsened race relations and led to a white identity politics backlash. (And also caused a lot of immoral racial discrimination). Equality under the law may not be “enough” but it’s what the government can offer. And as Matt said here, it’s not nothing!
The left destroyed the black family, so of course black people have remained in relative poverty. One day history will judge social liberals the same way it currently judges people who defended Jim Crow.
This is a graph of the change of marriage rates over the 20th century.
Let's talk about the type of fraud committed in the autism cases in Minnesota.
It's not just that some individual Somalians are committing fraud - it requires that parents bring their kids in to get fraudulently diagnosed with autism so that the doctors can overbill and the parents can get kickbacks. How are the parents finding out about this opportunity? Presumably they hear about it from other people in their community -- it's not like that can be advertised to the general public. If they are hearing about it from the community, there's a level of acceptance of the fraud in the community that should be totally unacceptable.
Does that mean that every single Somalian is guilty? Obviously not. But there's a level of community culpability that goes way beyond the level of fraud in your typical American or immigrant community, and sorry, it's reasonable to not want to increase the size of immigrant communities that allow stuff like this.
Ok, sure. That point is reasonable. Does it justify turning Minnesota into a police state, dragging American citizens off to detention centers, and tear gassing 6 month olds?
And do we typically send large numbers of armed personnel to arrest people for...welfare fraud? If you commit Medicare fraud, is an armored vehicle going to roll up in front of your house? The pretzels people on the right have twisted themselves into to make this ludicrously out of proportion use of force seem justified. Can we all agree that organized welfare fraud is bad, that the administration is really using that as a fig leaf for a nutty invasion of an American city, and that Donald Trump is a horrible person?
Yes we do. If there is an indication that evidence may be destroyed prior to, or during, the execution of a warrant, law enforcement may conduct a very aggressive, dynamic action with overwhelming force in order to secure the evidence and persons in question. The EPA and the IRS have tactical teams for this reason.
I don't agree with your characterization of what's going on in Minnesota, but bracketing that for a second, yes, the presence of a large community of people that completely reject American values and norms is a huge problem that requires a forceful response.
My preferences in order would be:
1. A sane immigration policy that doesn't let this situation develop in the first place
2. A common recognition among citizens and local governments that immigration enforcement is legitimate and you shouldn't interfere with their operations in the same way you wouldn't interfere with the FBI
3. Failing 1 and 2, you still need to enforce immigration law -- that's a hard problem especially when local governments aren't cooperating and you are going to have some impositions on citizens. Immigration enforcement still easily passes a cost benefit because (in my view) the problem of a hostile and non-assimilating population is severe.
> 1. A sane immigration policy that doesn't let this situation develop in the first place
How would this work in practice?
I'm in Australia, which has the immigration system many Americans dream of. (Or at the very least closer in that direction.)
I'm most familiar with the Vietnamese immigrant community here and the same kind of widespread acceptance of fraud is pervasive here as well. From what I understand of the Vietnamese community in America from acquaintances there it is only slightly better there -- and then only because America's weaker safety net provides fewer opportunities.
So what would a "sane immigration policy" be that accomplishes the goals you want? No Vietnamese allowed in Australia/America?
For that matter how is this fraud "completely rejecting American values and norms" but the common American/Australian practices of defrauding the government via working under the table, lying about small business expenses, pandemic loan fraud, and so on okay? Which frauds are American versus unAmerican?
Wait a minute, is fraud now evidence of rejecting American values and norms?
What about all those white rural Americans on disability who are cooperating with their white rural doctors to bilk the government?
What about all the rich people hiring accountants to do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes?
I see no evidence that Somalian refugees committing fraud is a rejection of American values. If anything, Americans tend to think you're a sucker if you don't do everything you can to take advantage of the government's money.
This is a claim from Joe Heinrich's work - I don't think it's overly controversial. He says that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people are more likely to treat strangers similarly to kin in economic and moral interactions, follow abstract rules rather than relationship-based norms, engage in impersonal trust, etc.
All things that make you less OK with defrauding an impersonal government. Not saying there's no fraud in the US, just that norms are different.
> A Minneapolis couple said that ICE agents deployed tear gas and stun grenades around them and their six children — the youngest only 6 months old — as they tried to maneuver their car out of a tense protest on Wednesday night.
Your standard pose of incredulous rhetorical questions is annoying even when the world isn't going to shit, but at this point, it's downright psychotic.
There aren't simple, legal, morally defensible or commonly used levers to increase or decrease the size of communities of US citizens in the way there is for immigrant communities.
If there was a way to get rid of rural white Americans I wouldn't be surprised if it had a lot of support among SB commenters.
1. There are no white communities where being addicted to oxy is viewed as a good thing; even poor communities have a strong norm against welfare fraud.
2. An addict scamming pills, while bad, is not the same thing as a parent of a healthy child saying they have autism to make money from the government. The addict is out of control and not living up to his own norms and values, the parent is someone who doesn't believe that stealing from the government is bad. I'm not saying one is more or less morally culpable, but it should be obvious that you can't have a country full of people who think it's fine to steal from the government.
How many Somalis do you know that you are confident the whole Somali community thinks fraud is a good thing?
Or, alternatively: there are so many white oxy addicts that obviously it is viewed as a good thing in some white communities, because how else did they wind up with so many oxy addicts all telling each other which doctors and pharmacies are dispensing the good stuff. And if you think otherwise, that's because you're in a bubble and/or people are lying to you about their preferences.
(I don't actually believe that second paragraph fwiw but I'm guessing you know about as much about Somalis as I do about poor white people, which is to say basically just crude stereotypes you developed based on stuff you see on TV.)
That doesn't seem to be under debate? I don't want to answer for Andrew Trollope, but his previous comments imply yes? The differences seem to be #1 that the community standards may be different, ie it's possible there's more welfare fraud in the Somali community and #2 because a larger proportion of somalis are undocumented immigrants or would-be immigrants (current citizens of Somalia who would like to immigrate) there are many more levers to control in the latter case. We can't just deport communities of US citizens.
Side tangent - but I study fraud in a different industry as part of my real job, and to the extent that I've noticed regional patterns it seems like Southern California, South Florida and urban New York are the worst, at least in the type of fraud I look at. Outside of cities the rural southern half of the country and the west are much worse than the rural north and northeast. My guess is that the patterns of other types of fraud would probably track the same broad contours. In other words, it doesn't the patterns don't really track any of the usual demographic groups we usually look at, like Black, White, rural, etc... But it does seem like areas with a lot of immigrants are well over-represented.
There should be some punishment. I of course believe the US government is supposed to mainly prioritize the interests of its citizens so the approach to citizens who commit welfare fraud shouldn't be the same as for non-citizens...
People looking to score recreational drugs from a cooperative doctor, and bill their insurance for it, are culpable for their behavior. Even if, later, they get hooked.
Sorry, but “Sorry, but it’s reasonable to not want (insert thing some online lefty wants)” is the whiniest line of argument out there. Just say what you think. There’s no need to “apologize”for it, especially on Slow Boring…. You’re not being controversial, or even interesting.
I would like to know more about how widespread the autism fraud was and how people were finding out about it before making presumptions and making policy based on those presumptions.
A viable alternative theory is that in a population of >100,000 it was possible for scammers to identify several hundred families for their scheme, with some portion of those families likely being scammed themselves (i.e. had a valid ASD diagnosis and thought their kids were getting legitimate therapy). That this instance of fraud tells us very little about the broader Somali community or the costs and benefits of a hypothetical group-based immigration policy. Finally, that aggressively inserting ICE into a situation where the DOJ was already making progress identifying fraud will almost certainly be a net loss, as we are already seeing from last week's resignation of the Attorney General that uncovered the fraud to begin with (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resignation-ice-shooting.html).
Your claim was that the autism fraud is so pervasive as to be evidence of community culpability. This is clearly untrue even if we assume that every family involved was part of the scam. Everything else is just playing with made up numbers. Sorry, but that's not good enough to throw out the core principle of this nation's founding -- that all men are created equal.
Let's be precise - when you say "all men are created equal" are you saying:
A) Somalis couldn't possibly commit fraud more often than other groups because all men are created equal
B) If they do commit more fraud you're fine with that and wouldn't bother to account for it in immigration policy so that you can stick to the principle
I don't have an alternate theory but I don't think I need one to be skeptical of the "all Somalis want to defraud the government so we should kick them out" theory.
I'm not sure why this is so implausible? The default throughout human history has been that only your close social relations / tribe had any moral value at all, so of course it would be OK to steal from an impersonal government. I'm not trying to say that Somalis are uniquely bad or something, just that many groups, throughout history and now, lack a strong norm about fairness to distant strangers.
simple, but worth stating. as a 60ish liberal academic, nothing saddened me more over the past decade or so than the decisive rejection of King's vision by American liberalism. Hope this moment has passed for good.
Yeah, I definitely did see it pass from "King said more than just that one line, you're reading him reductively" (true!) to "not judging people by the color of their skin isn't a good goal even in the long-term." I remember it was on this very site where I pointed out that King did sincerely believe in race-blind values, and someone responded, "And how did that work out for him?"
Despite being born in SF, most of my growing up happened in a small town instead, one of those places where common local professions were "farmer" or "handyman", there's still no movie theatre, and the chromatographic spectrum is heavily centred around two shades only. It wasn't a question of I Have Black Friends, it was I'm Friends With Literally The Only Black Guy. Or like my family was The Asians. (What do you mean there are different kinds, they all look the same and are really smart in school, everyone knows that? Yeah, positive discrimination isn't fun to live through either.)
I hated that small and small-minded place, was ecstatic to get the hell out via college, go live in Real Civilization. But the sad thing about only ever appreciating diversity as an abstract concept is that it's something of a shock to actually end up living it. Certainly it's easy to pick and choose the neat parts, the wages of arm's-length rootless cosmopolitanism: dinner a few hours ago was kisoji ontake soba boiled in drunken chicken marinade, while listening to Andalusian music. There are actual people tied to cultural artifacts though - they aren't separable from your poor, your tired, your huddled masses at the gate! I can try and try and try again to only ever judge individuals by the content of their character, discard all the metadata of stereotypes and heuristics formed by past negative interactions. It's certainly virtuous to at least try.
It's so hard to truly believe in though. It's hard to be raised on proprietous Middle Class Values(tm) and then end up being roommates and coworkers and neighbors with...people who have vastly different standards on cleanliness, on noise, on respecting the commons, on the boundaries of personal space, on public decency, on professionalism, on crime and disorder, on respect for laws and norms. I'd love to believe the leftist intuition that such things fundamentally stem from material conditions, and if we got a transformative economic reform like King envisioned, people of all stripes really could peacefully coexist. In many ways this is *easy* - we have multiple viable roadmaps for Number Go Up, and just need to pick one consistently, instead of playing footsie with retroactive wealth taxes or whatever.
The fear is that culture isn't actually a superstructure though. That people will mostly continue to self-segregate even once you remove the economic barriers to it. That gaps in outcomes will stubbornly persist nevertheless, even with surface-level economic parity. That I'll still only be able to mealy-mouth the catechisms of valuing all peoples equally highly, while continuing to gravitate towards neoliberals and rationalists, both of which are whiter than the rice I eat daily. Obviously this is preferable to being outwardly racist, and that's not nothing! But going through the motions without the heart being into it, while the opposing party is free to wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the armbands...that's just not a good battlefield to fight on. It's a Good shooting, sir. Does anyone even remember Heather Heyer? Hence the impulse to deflect to Medicare and ACA subsidies, no matter how inauthentic and coldhearted that seems. You've got to give the people hope, and all too often that takes the form of self-interest rather than high-minded principles.
There's a lot in here. Thank you for this comment. +1 for "culture isn't ....a superstructure..." Yeah, everyone will continue to self-segregate once you remove the economic barriers. BUT....if those barriers ARE removed, the levels of: jealousy / squabbling / outright violent fighting & other insanity will simmer down, simmer back down to the best we can do — a dull roar, instead of the current rabid raccoon fang slashing we're having lately. It sorta / kinda usta function like that, leastwise in my small experience in a relatively integrated, assimilated time and place, small pockets in Brooklyn in the early 70s. Hard to think at the time that I'd ever look back and see that as a time when "integration", and not just racial integration, but social & economic, actually kinda functioned at a peak. I thought that was finally the beginning. That's the best it ever was in my lifetime, and FFS, what happened? (well I know what happened, too tiresome to repeat here)
Pundits like Matt keep telling me we've never been richer though. Look at that GDP go, real wages are up, especially for the bottom quintile, inequality is trending down a bit, we bent the cost curve on college, you can barely spot even monumental shocks like GFC and covid in several long-term measures...so then there's two possible conclusions. The optimistic one is that there's very particular types of economic barriers which are extra super salient, and aren't well-reflected in headline numbers. This is Housing Theory of Everything, for example, or pronatalist sentiment around "affording kids" (like, not that you literally can't while poorer - we all got born somehow! - but the opportunity cost for doing so keeps going up).
The pessimistic conclusion is that you can't buy your way out of the narcissism of small differences, nevermind large ones. There's some missing piece, a part of the social fabric that can't be repaired with money or keeping up with the Jones Act. Maybe this too is extrinsic, and moving away from the politics of paranoia and Malthusian fearmongering would bring back comity and live-and-let-live. Or maybe that's the drunk polisci nerd looking for the cultural car keys under the policy streetlight. I'm not sure where else to start looking, is the big fear. (inb4 "it's religion and phones, obviously")
A lot of these differences do stem from “fundamentally stem from material conditions” though? When I meet people through work (who are all materially comfortable), I’m pretty confident they’ll have reasonably similar standards regarding professionalism, public decency, crime and disorder, laws and norms, etc., regardless of what race they are or even what country they are from or currently in. Some people individually have betrayed that trust but it isn’t one identity group more likely to do it and it’s rare enough that “trust everyone” is still a default.
Other things like cleanliness are more personal preference, people have disputes over that with their own spouses, I think that’s variation that should just be tolerated.
Exactly. Make the access to just moderate wealth building possible again (ooops....make access to wealth building great again?) / all the other stuff, "cultural stuff" falls away, and really who cares? Sure some neighborhood-ish grumbling, but if everyone has relatively enough, and NOT ON CREDIT, which was the 30 year headfake....we'd be fine. Instead...rapaciousness was valorized and institutionalized, and what's the way out (surprise, it isn't "college for everyone" which was yet another way to tear money out of the commons; nor is it FanDuel, bet on sports, or Kalshi, bet on everything. The old cliche, it's not a democracy, it's an auction....it's a cliche for a reason. But why did that become an aspiration instead of a warning? Politicians, you have a lot to answer for. Not unlike, well never mind)
> I'd love to believe the leftist intuition that such things fundamentally stem from material conditions
I don't think it is just intuition? It's the actual lived history. Ha-Joon Chang's book Bad Samaritans is chock full of evidence of this: see Chapter 9: Lazy Japanese and Thieving Germans.
British travellers to Germany in the 19th century found they were universally dishonest scammers. Germans were also seen as indolent, slow-witted, and unable to cooperate with one another. Oh and overly emotional.
"the tradesman and the shopkeeper take advantage of you wherever they can, and to the smallest imaginable amount rather than not take advantage of you at all. . . This knavery is universal"
Japanese were seen as lazy, easygoing, emotional, free from all anxiety about the future. A British socialist bemoaned that they were too independent minded.
Koreans were dirty and filthy "who slouch about in dirty white garments of the most inept kind and who live in filthy mudhuts". They just culturally didn't care about cleanliness.
The entire chapter is Ha-Joon Chang's attempt to grapple with:
"These characterizations are puzzling for two reasons. First, if the Japanese and the Germans had such ‘bad’ cultures, how have they become so rich? Second, why were the Japanese and the Germans then so different from their descendants today? How could they have so completely changed their ‘habits of national heritage’?"
On the stop and frisk comment, I agree mostly. but is there a line you'd be willing cross. If a certain group (race, age, sex, religion etc) committed twice as many murders as others, should we stop and frisk? From your piece i would say you would think it a bad policy. But what if they were ten times, 100 times, 1000 times more likely. Isn't there some number at which it becomes ludicrously pc not to treat that group differently?
Let's say there are 10 terrorist attacks per year.
Let's say every single one of them was committed by a person professing a particular faith F.
We have: probability of belonging to faith F given that the person committed a terrorist attack = 1
Let's say there are 2 billion people who profess faith F. Or 1 billion. Or 500 million.
We have: probability of committing a terrorist attack given the person professes faith F = 10/2 billion or 10/1 billion or 10/500 million, etc. i.e. 0.0000005% which is close to the odds of winning the powerball jackpot.
This logic leads to Germany imprisoning women who speak out against rape longer than rapists. Islam is fundamentally illiberal. Secular “cultural Muslims” can assimilate to the west but not devout Muslims.
Edit: and why is speaking out against rape an offense that leads to imprisonment? Leftists, as opposed to left-liberals, have always hated free speech. Cancel culture is just Marcuse’s liberalizing tolerance.
Yes, the paradox of liberalism is that the openness of society will ultimately invite in people who are not tolerate or open to others. This isn't some gotcha, it goes all the way back to Locke's Treatise on Toleration.
So the question is how do you have an open and inviting society when inevitably some of the groups within the society do not want a liberal society? It is not easy.
I think it's pretty interesting though that you single out very observant muslims who are 1% of the population and have essentially no political power (someone like Mamdani I would consider quite secular, I also do not see Rashida Tlaib, Keith Ellison, and Ilhan Omar as illiberal even though they are devout muslims).
> "So the question is how do you have an open and inviting society when inevitably some of the groups within the society do not want a liberal society? It is not easy."
That's a very thoughtful response so I appreciate your tone and insight. But we've already had a couple test cases of what ignoring illiberal cultures does. The first was Lebanon, which was a liberal and tolerant nation until Muslims became the majority. The second is the ongoing process of poor assimilation of Muslims in Europe. The assumption that Muslims from fundamentalist nations would assimilate into the dominant secular culture has proven false.
So I would start by not allowing immigration from fundamentalist Islamic nations and removing temporary protective status for Somalians.
Legal immigration from Latin America, Asia, and non-Muslim Africa? Sure.
Maybe those Muslims attempting to immigrate from fundamentalist Islamic nations are doing so because they hate living in a fundamentalist Islamic nation. Probably lots of Iranians fit this category.
Yes, that's true. We could in theory disaggregate reasons for immigrating and pick the genuine refugees. I'd be perfectly fine with that. one of my favorite public intellectuals, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fits that category. She is of Somalian ethnicity, victim of FGM and migrated to England to escape a forced marriage at, I think, 13.
Those were just 4 Muslims in politics I could think of off the top of my head. I am not a fan of Tlaib's politics necessarily but it seems like a real stretch to think they are a threat to religious tolerance...
Oh, I don't think any of them pose any such threat, but I have immense intellectual, professional, small-r republican respect for Keith Ellison. In contrast, every day that I am not embarrassed by Ilhan Omar is a special, lucky day.
I do not know much about this particular controversy and will just say I do not think Democrats are perfect on all aspects on religious tolerance.
But Democrats are attempting to grapple with the paradox of toleration. Republicans are not and are trying to create a Christian country.
There is a strain of sort of "conservative liberalism" that you seem to be advocating that suggests the best way to have an open society is to have a fairly strong hand of an establishment religion, like Christianity, to keep less tolerant religions in check. But I have two issues with this perspective:
(1) The Right as it exists in society has NOT shown any interest in this perspective of like a liberal Christian hegemony. J.D. Vance, etc. are very opposed to pluralism.
(2) The conception of Christianity as an open and tolerant faith owes a lot to small l Liberal Republicans/Conservatives like George HW Bush, Reagan, etc. There is now a pretty long and established tradition of mainline Protestants facilitating a religiously plural society. While a lot of the members of this tradition are Christians, most political Christians today reject the key tenets of tolerance that mainline Protestants have traditionally espoused. While the tradition of political toleration started with mainline Protestants in the USA, obviously Romney's political approach to faith is similar, and there are many Catholics with a similar approach.
I think if you throw in with contemporary Conservatives on issues of religious freedom/toleration, you aren't getting a political approach to religion that respects pluralism. You are getting a government that will be run by Christians in a way that is increasingly intolerant to minority faiths.
Looking at Mr. Machete's comment record throughout the section on this fine Monday, choosing to engage with a single fig leaf of it--well, I guess it's certainly a choice.
I would simply not allow explicitly illiberal ideologies to gain prominence in a liberal society.
Democrats are not really trying to grapple with the paradox of tolerance. They're more trying to ignore it, like say the standard views of most Muslims on LGBT issues clash with progressive standards.
I'm trying to avoid the US becoming like the UK.
I have zero interest in the US becoming a theocracy.
(It's a wee bit funny to be worried about Christian theocracy when Trump himself is very much not a religious man and has in fact made the evangelicals chill on their usual crusade to restrict abortion. And Vance, love him or hate him, is married to a Hindu.)
He spent half a year working for the Israeli Embassy's public diplomacy section, which I don't think he bothered to mention in his indignant revelation.
I might regret engaging here but your first sentence seems like a total non-sequitur. In what way does Neeraj's Bayesian analysis "lead to Germany imprisoning women who speak out against rape longer than rapists"? I don't think any part of the second thing follows from Bayesian logic.
Saying "the base rate of problems by group X is so small we should ignore their illiberal tendencies" has led to the problems like widespread rape, coerced marriage, ongoing FGM and so on in Europe.
That point actually makes sense conceptually (though I'm sure we would disagree about details in practice), but it doesn't follow that women speaking out against rape be imprisoned at all, let alone longer than people convicted of rape (once someone is convicted, base rates no longer apply). I just think you're bringing multiple things you're mad about into a context when they don't apply (the supposed left-wing defenses of Iran also have no relevance here).
Thank you for providing a link. It has to be said though, that person was imprisoned for 'defamation', not for 'speaking out against rape'. I think reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether sending a stranger a message calling them a 'pig' should be a punishable or imprisonable offence, but let's describe it accurately.
I live in Europe. I am very aware that Europe does not have the same history or tradition of free speech absolutism as the USA. I don't have a problem with this, I'm not a free speech absolutist.
> I think reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether sending a stranger a message calling them a 'pig' should be a punishable or imprisonable offence, but let's describe it accurately.
He's a just-convicted rapist. It's wild to me that in Germany statements of fact can still be considered defamatory, and no, I don't think reasonable people can disagree on this point.
[Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.]
You can't let people duck out on court hearings because they think it's unfair, so I guess they were obligated to put her in jail for that.
I think you should be able to send someone a mean message on WhatsApp and not have the government intervene, but that's because I'm an American and believe in free speech. If the government is going to say you can't send mean messages on WhatsApp, then they definitely shouldn't be in the "we're going to ignore it because this guy had it coming" business. It sounds a lot like if she had bothered to attend the hearing and said, "Oh yeah sorry I shouldn't have done that," there would have been no jail time.
Not all ideologies and worldviews are compatible with Enlightenment liberalism. Two examples in current times are secular leftism (Rousseau --> Marx --> Marcuse + Foucault) and fundamentalist Islam.
The left's cultural relativism is (1) empirically false, and (2) puts them in the position of defending oppression. History will judge them.
> "In the Framers' time, people thought Catholicism was incompatible with liberal democracy. How's that holding up?"
In the Framers' time, Catholicism *was* incompatible with liberal democracy.
Catholics fought against every movement towards republican (small r) government starting with the Spanish waging war against the Dutch in 1581 running through the English in both the Interregnum and the Glorious Revolution, and continuing their opposition to secular democracies during the French Revolution and onward.
Catholic nations did not have stable liberal democracies until *after* WW2.
First of all, we can't expel citizens. Second, the Amish aren't raping anyone or committing welfare fraud while refusing to work. Are they insular? Sure. But even in a Rawlsian sense, being insular is perfect compatible with liberalism.
I think this is an ignorant and very “present-minded” perspective. Others have already addressed the obvious points but I’ll note beyond that, that as someone who is of Islamic descent (but is not Muslim) that I don’t think of Islam as fundamentally illiberal.
Islam has had many interpretations throughout history and not all interpretations are illiberal in their nature. Arguably, the current iteration of Islam that is predominant in the Middle East and South Asia is a pretty direct result of European imperialism (hence, why it’s funny Europeans complain about it).
Islam in Andalusia, in some periods of the Ottoman Empire, under the reign of the Mughals prior to Aurangzeb was fairly liberal at least by the standards of the time.
It’s unfortunate of course that illiberal strains of Islam have as much currency as they do today but that’s just a product of our current historical circumstance. It doesn’t have to be that way and I think it’s a little gross to treat a historical tradition that’s been around for centuries as something that must be rejected whole cloth.
Whether or not Islam is "fundamentally illiberal" is not relevant to this discussion. What matters is whether Muslims in nations like Somalia are liberal.
You’re just modifying your own argument, at least stay consistent. My point stands regardless, humans are not a monolith. How can you know at an individual level if any of these Somalis speak of belong to the illiberal strains or the liberal ones? As I’ve said before, there are many interpretations and there’s a long history associated with this tradition.
Again, I am simply arguing that we should not judge people just by the fact that they are Muslim.
First, I do believe that the Quran, properly understood, is fundamentally illiberal. But that's a different debate, usually between Christians and Muslims.
Second, it is the nature of debates to sharpen and narrow the points of disagreement. That's actually good-faith behavior, but you are presenting it as bad-faith.
Third, yes, Somalia is fundamentally illiberal in its current culture. I do think that a more confident and homogenous Christian culture could essentially force Somalians to assimilate. A more confident and homogeneous secular culture could too, but current secular culture is bogged in relativism.
Edit: by force I don't mean by the sword/barrel of a gun, but by having enough mojo that immigrants would assimilate to the dominant culture.
It has no concept of the secular. It does not make men and women equal. It does not have an emphasis on individual rights superseding religious authority. There's a goddamn death penalty for apostasy.
"... was fairly liberal at least by the standards of the time."
BY THE STANDARDS OF THE TIME is not "liberal."
Some Muslims embrace liberal concepts, but of all the Islamic countries out there, there's not a great track record of liberalism. (Especially if one has strong progressive views.)
You can support Muslims jettisoning the more problematic aspects of the theology (as many Christians have done for theirs), but pretending Islam is not fundamentally illiberal is just nonsense.
Of course, that's part of the two step that is rampant in Europe.
1. Islam is compatible with Western culture/liberalism.
2. Anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in hate speech and will prosecuted.
I mostly agree with you except that much of current Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalism derives from the Wahhabi movement in what would become Saudi Arabia which was just about the area most insulated from European imperialism there was. The Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) was more arguably related to British imperialism in Egypt, I'll grant you.
What if we are talking about carrying an illegal firearm? At what threshold would we be ok with stop and frisk? 1% chance of getting it right? 5%? I think personally at 20% I would probably start to be more ok with it.
If it were 20%, maybe. Although you'd want the following caveats:
1) You still do stop-and-frisk people not in that group sometimes, so if they start trending up to their own 20% you know.
2) You stop when it drops down low enough again (and use point 1 to catch it again)
Really, the key here is I'd expect this to rapidly change behavior, and keeping the policy going evenly at #1 should help keep it lower. It might still stay higher (3% for a group instead of 0.5% or something), but this incentive effect would also change behavior to make it short-lived.
I'd worry about the police abusing it with bad statistics, so I'd also want good watch dog agencies to check on it.
I'm not sure how I'd feel in that actual hypothetical case. I think at best it would be the "lesser of two evils", but having the supporters/police acknowledge the negative effects might help.
I think we (myself included) are confusing all sorts of different concepts in this thread. Wasn't the issue with stop-and-frisk the legal nature of the stop itself, and only secondarily that it was targeted at certain neighborhoods (not at certain skin colors)?
Also - this is probably blasphemous given all the lawyers here, but I'm less worried about bad statistics in police profiling than I am about bad statistics from lawyers second-guessing them.
If you can imagine an ideal, hypothetical, "good cop", the one we'd all like to see more of, then that person is going to be very experienced in using their judgement and intuition to spot when "something isn't right". He/she is going to be going off subtle changes in the way a person walks, where they put their hands, the way they dress, etc.. to form an opinion on whether or not a particular person is carrying an illegal weapon.
How much this ideal exists, I don't know, but this is exactly the way many experienced LEOs who take a lot of pride in their work talk about themselves and the way undercover LEOs like Donnie Brasco or undercover DEAs talk about themselves.
And I don't imagine "bad cops" using looking at a spreadsheet of statistics to become racists and prejudiced. But I do imagine a government lawyer looking at the "good cop" stop-and-frisk record and second guessing their stop statistics.
I think a real danger in the way our civilian-police interaction has evolved is that, at least by the social-media-video eyeball metric*, the frequency of irreversible outcomes has gone up. If you frisk a guy who didn't need to be frisked, okay. And maybe you even found some weed, and his lawyer can argue that the stop was illegitimate, and there will be a process to adjudicate that. But bullets don't get un-fired, no matter how badly all parties might want to.
* It is obviously the case that this is a broken metric. God knows how many white deputies "saw a black guy going for a gun" in the deep rural south in the 1950s and no further question was asked.
I think you run into a "speed cameras" situation here where being stopped and frisked is so intrusive that if you were required to do it to it to everyone, rather than an unpopular minority, they would stop doing it.
(I think speed cameras are fine; if they weren't proven to actually increase safety I would be against them but they do increase safety.)
Speed cameras also only get you if you're actually speeding. The intrusiveness for non-speeders is at most that they are a camera.
I previously kind of opposed them on a privacy (are they photographing you even when not speeding) basis but the seeming decline in people obeying traffic laws has changed my weighting to value their deterrence more than the limited privacy change.
For the most part I agree, but I think there is a complex interplay with the consent of the government when fines can be issued truly en masse.
I bet many of us can think of a particular chokepoint or stretch of road in our region or metro that "everyone" agrees is unreasonably restrictive. Right now, there's not much disincentive for a blue-city mayor to point to pedestrian death rate vs. vehicle speed, knock a major thoroughfare from 40 down to 30, and then throw out their shoulder patting themselves on the back for "making [CITY] safer for all". They know everybody, cops included, will just keep doing 40. Different story, I suspect, when you introduce a traffic camera to this situation.
I'm all for speed cameras, especially if they result in people slowing down, and I give serious side eye to people that are against them because they are basically admitting they think they have the right to go far above posted speed limits.
Going 10+ over posted speed limits in a residential area can easily become lethal and you should absolutely be issued a ticket if you do it. Same with running red lights.
Also, it's not just about who is frisked, but how often. Terry stops are practiced by police all over the US, and black men are overrepresented in them all over the US too.
But NYC under Bloomberg ramped them to a crazy high level. I don't think there was necessarily more racial disproportionality in NYC's Terry stops than most other cities, but because there were so many more of them, they had a much bigger impact on young black men in high-crime neighborhoods compared to other cities, eventually leading to a backlash and a court case stopping them (which the city, at that point run by Bill de Blasio, did not appeal).
The demographics of NYC was rapidly changing over this same period. High crime populations were moving out and being replaced by much lower crime immigrant populations and gentrifiers. But because the replacements were mostly of the same census demographic groups, no one noticed the change.
That is pretty close to what courts have said (in practice; they don't put a number on it)
Note that in the NYC stop and frisk a few years back, "52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found." Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 (SD NY 2013)
So, police were clearly frisking far too many people -- i.e., they did not have probable cause. It is harder to determine whether there were too many stops, though 12% of stops led to either an arrest of a summons, so they might actually have been conducting stops based in reasonable cause. (Note that a stop requires only reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity, while a frisk requires reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed).
??? The Warren Court held in 1968 that probable cause is not needed for a stop. Only reasonable suspicion is needed, a lower standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio
And frisks for weapons can be done with reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed.
Well, it isn't the same thing. Knowing the difference is important for understanding whether police are complying with the law.
And framing the issue as whether or not police can stop someone simply for walking down the street looking urban is not helpful. Essentially no one thinks that is ok. The issue is whether that or similar attributes can ever be a contributing factor at all.
right, and the numbers are even worse if you define the group as Nobel prize winners. Selection bias is a real thing. Anyway, i knew as soon as i posted it i would get a statistics lesson and wanted to change it to percentage as in if x percent of nobel prize winners were murderers, but i was too lazy so took the stats lesson instead.
The argument doesn't work even with percentages! Lets say 100% of terrorist attacks or 100% of homicides are committed by people of a certain characteristic. If terrorist attacks or homicides are a low probability event to begin with (as they are) the prior probability of that event happening is already low. And if the characteristic is somewhat widely shared in the population, the conditional probability will be low too.
I think we can look at current immigration law as a guide. There are a bunch of screening questions, for eg:
"Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?"
"Do you have a communicable disease of public health significance?"
"Did you participate in Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945?"
And you had to undergo screening for HIV (this has been discontinued).
In each case the test is still individual. i.e. not are you from a country where 80% of the people are communists. (Or if a lot of people there have tuberculosis, or were in the Nazi party.) But whether you as an individual are. After all, you may be seeking to flee communism!
Of course, when it comes to letting in foreigners one does not have any obligation of "fairness". Everyone may be excluded, or any random group may be excluded. The current debate is whether the executive may do so unilaterally or require a law that prohibits certain nationalities.
Yes. And there are some widely accepted cases of profiling. Eg: young males pay higher auto insurance premiums, smokers are charged higher price for life insurance, etc. Gary Becker used these as examples where a rational agent, with limited resources, maximizes utility. But even in his utilitarian calculation he offsets the social cost if the profiled group withdraws from society or feels humiliated.
I don't know if "young males" or "smokers" feel part of a community with other young males or smokers in society, but people of an ethnicity or religious group seem to. So one may not take offense due to higher premiums from belonging to the group of young males, but do from belonging to an ethnicity.
A question: why does everyone accept higher auto (and life) insurance premiums for young males than young females, but higher health insurance premiums for young females (who use health care at higher rates than young males) are explicitly illegal?
Fundamentally, we as a society are _very_ inconsistent in terms of when we are OK with statistical profiling of this sort.
As for the "feels part of a community" bit: I certainly know young males who feel the insurance situation is deeply unfair and take offense... Anecdotes are not data, of course.
1. Women are charged higher for long term care insurance, women receive smaller annuity payouts, women pay higher disability insurance premiums
2. If young men take offense at auto premium disparity one recourse is to move to California, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina where this practice is outlawed. It is by no means universally accepted.
The problem with this argument is that even if people with, say, blue eyes were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder than people with brown eyes, the overall likelihood that a particular individual with blue eyes is a murderer would still be extremely low because murder is so rare.
Right but there are other correlations that are much higher. For example about 75% of ex prisoners go on to get arrested again within three years of being released. So yes it works with some groups and not others.
Prisoner isn’t an in-born characteristic. I think most people are fine with stereotyping someone for their own past conduct, just not for what group they were born into.
Again, you lack a strong grasp of the statistics you attempt to use. The association between genetics and personality traits and personality traits and specific illegal actions is so weak that it is screened out by conventional forensic and witness evidence of a crime. If police focused on weak demographic correlations they would waste most of their time harassing productive citizens with bad parents and actual crime rates would increase for lack of sensible investigation practices.
And maybe i wasn't clear but i wasn't making a distinction between inborn characteristics and acquired or chosen characteristics (age or religion in my hypothetical, or more concrete things like gang tattoos or something). The triggering group isn't important for me, it's just do people feel stop and frisk is out of bounds regardless of the circumstances.
You're missing another category here: characteristics that are neither inborn nor chosen, but are placed upon you by society--hence, social constructs. That's the category that's been troubling me in the hypothetical you're positing here.
The relevant data point is not the percent of ex-prisoners who eventually get arrested. It is the percent of ex-prisoners who are committing a crime or carrying evidence of a crime at the time of the stop and/or search. That is still going to be very low.
I have no problem profiling people based on their own past conduct. But that’s very different than profiling people based a physical characteristic they were born with.
As it happens the US murder rate is 5/100,000, so if blue eyed people were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder, fully half of them would be murderers and I would, even as a blue eyed person, be okay with us being watched closely, because I don't want to be a victim of blue-on-blue crime.
It isn't mass shootings, which make up a trivial percent of total murders. The Brady Center says one percent of all gun-related deaths, so maybe three percent of homicides, based on the rest of their data. https://www.bradyunited.org/resources/statistics
But it is true that one cannot assume that one murder = one murderer. One murder could = 2+ murders (eg gang murders), and one or two people can commit murders on separate occasions (again, eg gang murders) https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03x.php
Right. I wasn’t really thinking of Columbine type shootings. More like a guy kills his wife and kids or robs a liquor store and kills the cashier and a cop, etc.
If a school shooter in on the loose , and he happens to be an X guy in a red sweatshirt (insert whatever race you are for X) then virtually no one will complain when the police stop you for questioning. But if you're just looking for a generic murderer, then stopping and frisking every person of the highest murder-rate race really isn't effective by any stretch of the imagination.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the stop-and-frisk program was much less racially targeted then Matt is implying above. The police were stopping and frisking young men in **neighborhoods** that had experienced a lot of shooting. In early 2000s NYC, these were almost all Black and Latino neighborhoods, and you can get into arguing whether or not that made the targeting itself racist. But to me it sounds somewhat close to hotspots policing methods that smart liberals like Matt usually argue in favor of.
Which might be dumb! Or a good opportunity for a crime syndicate. Years ago, I lived in a city where an elderly woman in a quilted winter coat was holding up banks. It took a while to catch her because she caught everyone off guard. "She looked like my grandma!"
Fortunately, most crime is not that sophisticated. But truly organized crime does take advantage of profiling factors. Drug smugglers are one of the best examples.
My simple answer is the person who proposes this should volunteer for the treatment.
If YOU are willing to be stopped and frisked repeatedly, I will listen to your racist proposal. But if not, it's scummy to "volunteer" other innocent people for things you would find appalling.
I think it’s perfectly fair that as a young man I had higher insurance premiums, and would have no issues with other forms of enhanced monitoring or pricing that are similarly non-punitive.
I don’t think you should actually *punish* people though (like what is transparently occurring in MN), but I think stop and frisk and similar *investigatory* policies are usually fine
Of course no line is stark, and police/etc can use investigation as a pretext for harassment, but it’s just silly to ignore things like that ~every mass shooter is male, if you’re looking for a mass shooter.
Yeah but there's a huge difference between narrowing your search for males when you are looking for a specific person (and even then, you don't do it UNTIL there's some witness who said it was a male) and imposing oppression on tons of innocent people because they are "statistically more likely to be the one".
And believe me, if you were stopped and frisked for no reason as much as Black people are stopped by police for no reason, you wouldn't say it was OK.
There's another problem here that people never talk about enough. Which is, even if you are just tough on crime and not racist yourself, you don't actually want your cops to be racist (and yes, it is racist to presume people might be criminals because of statistical inferences about their race). Because people who apply these statistical inferences are more likely to dismiss evidence that doesn't fit their racist paradigms.
There's a very famous case that exemplifies this-- Amanda Knox. There's tons of evidence that she's either guilty of murder or was at least present at the scene and took actions to protect her boyfriend Rafaelle Sollecito from a murder charge. Seriously-- there's enough evidence to convict her of murder, and her lawyers won on some VERY questionable arguments to reverse her conviction.
She's also an upper-middle class media savvy white woman. The kind of person that many people, with their racist and sexist priors ("informed" by statistics) about who commits murders, thinks could have never done it.
And its one thing for media elites and stuff to buy into what someone like Amanda Knox is selling them, but you definitely DO NOT want your cops to think like that. You don't want your cops to think "only the Black guy could possibly be guilty of murder here" and not fully investigate all the leads.
But that's the flip side of all this aggressive racist policing against supposedly "statistically likely to commit crimes" Black people. It's going to lead to missing criminals who don't check the demographic boxes, and even possibly to some false convictions.
So no, racism is a terrible way to structure your criminal justice system.
I agree that it would be bad for cops to be racist in the sense of having racial animus toward any group. But you're simply trying to avoid noticing reality.
"and yes, it is racist to presume people might be criminals because of statistical inferences about their race"
Have you seen the stats on NYC shootings broken down by the shooter's and victim's races? You have a definition of "racist" that simply condemns statistical literacy and pattern matching. It's insane because we certainly don't have that standard for sexism (though you do try to criticize that too; very brave of you), and the well-established gap in crime between men and women (Obligatory: "What is a woman, anyway?").
In a liberal society, we should, as much as possible, judge individuals as individuals. But reasonable suspicion need not be blocked off from very useful, observable categories.
I don't think you're making a great case for yourself by bringing up Amanda Knox, and I don't advocate we try to mimic the Italian justice system.
Please also notice how you go from ~"it's racist to be statistically informed about probabilities" to the absolutist straw man of "only the black guy could possibly be guilty of murder here."
Please also notice that you completely sidestepped the issue of who the victims of crime are disproportionately.
I think my core claim here is just that you said "you shouldn't be able to call for more group-based policies unless you are okay sometimes being in a group that such a policy applies to". I think that:
1) I am okay with this in at least some contexts
2) It would be better if nobody was stopped and frisked. We should ideally find ways to enforce the law that do not require triaging resources like this. I believe that we can do so.
3) But because of crime disparities, we will necessarily have enforcement disparities *to some degree*, even with ~perfect policing (e.g. if I was investigating the Italian mafia, most of the people I investigate will be Italian, even if my policy isn't "investigate the Italians"). We should be prepared to grapple with that while trying our hardest to make the system provide a form of justice that people trust and feel is fair.
If you decide the problem is so bad that we need to use profiling as a tool, there are ways to make the interactions more humane and polite. Having masked thugs with guns doing racial profiling is a terrible combination.
Civil rights law does allow some permitted discrimination in cases where the accommodations required would not be "reasonable." Like a knowledgeable lawyer friend once explained to me that a school district with gay students could probably fire a teacher for belonging to Westboro baptist church. In that case you either have to discriminate on basis of religion or monitor the person's behavior and grading so closely that it's an unreasonable burden on you.
The kind of case you're imagining might verge into that territory. My one objection to Matt's piece is that I feel similarly about visas for eg low income Syrians. Such a high proportion of that demographic consists of people who reject liberal values, and it's so hard to individually test for that trait, that I would be fine with a blanket denial of visas to a group like that.
This is exactly the thing that Matt's piece kind of elides. There are circumstances, probably the vast majority of circumstances, where a color-blind principle is superior, not just morally but also in effectiveness.
But there are other circumstances, such as immigration rules and limits, where the calculus changes quite a bit. And in the case of immigration, our system is already vastly discriminatory to people of various nationalities. We have diversity visas that favor small population wealthier countries and targeted refugee programs, and special visas for North Americans, etc...
Yeah... an example I use sometimes to make the principles clear to progressive friends is, "What if a large number of white nationalist Afrikaaners wanted to all move to the same US state in the 80s?" Most people seem to understand that targeted measures to prevent that could be justified.
It’s one thing to discriminate when it comes to who you let in to the country, I don’t have much of a problem with it. We probably shouldn’t have let tens of thousands of Somalis in to form insular enclaves in a couple of American cities. I have a much worse problem with the government discriminating against one group vs another when they’re legal residents or citizens, but I’m not sure America can handle high-mindedness here either. Everything in our culture has devolved into identity politics and group competition. It’s not a good thing, but it’s the actual situation.
How do you “not let them” form enclaves without requiring employers across the board to hire them, fund the local schools adequately, provide subsidized job and language training, good transportation to jobs, etc
It might be possible to set up asylum guidelines for example, for women fleeing Iran because they were ID'd as lighting cigarettes and burning Khameni photos on social media and therefore at risk of arrest, torture, execution etc.
My impression of U.S. asylum rules (without doing research right now) is that they can be pretty flexible.
Another group could be women from Saudi Arabia who demonstrate confinement or kidnapping by their male relatives.
One problem we've had with asylum during Democratic administrations is opening it up to anyone who demonstrates they're a victim of domestic violence. So maybe in the the case of SA it would be state-sanctioned domestic violence.
You have to understand that the costs of profiling are not just the opportunity cost of using resources to do the profiling, or the inconvenience experienced by an innocent person who is profiled. The main cost is that profiling, in practice, erodes public trust in law enforcement and civic harmony generally--and undermines the ideals of individualism and equal justice under the law that unify Americans into a single national identity.
Hypothetically you can probably choose *some* threshold at which the benefits of the profiling outweigh even those costs. But I don't think there has ever been a scenario in America where this threshold has ever been reached (even Japanese internment in retrospect is thought to have done little or nothing to enhance the security of America during WW2).
"the costs of profiling are not just the opportunity cost of using resources to do the profiling"
As opposed to indiscriminate use of limited resources? Please.
"The main cost is that profiling, in practice, erodes public trust in law enforcement and civic harmony generally"
I'd argue what is a worse effect on public trust and civic harmony is high rates of crime by extremely predictable demographics.
"But I don't think there has ever been a scenario in America where this threshold has ever been reached"
Urban crime. Airport security. Bringing up the Japanese in WWII is preposterous because it was nothing like "profiling" being advocated for law enforcement. We simply took the ~whole population and imprisoned them in a time of war.
Anyone who has ever sought to live in a place with "good schools" has justified the use of profiling by law enforcement. Pretending otherwise is cope.
>I'd argue what is a worse effect on public trust and civic harmony is high rates of crime by extremely predictable demographics.
I think you'd have more of a point if profiling were the only way to effectively reduce crime, but it's not--you're offering a false choice. There are plenty of things police (and the government generally) can do to reduce crime effectively without the "help" of racial profiling.
I think profiling is somewhat of an inevitability no matter how many bias trainings and oversight mechanisms you implement, if we intend to actually fight crime at all. Police for America and bringing in better people to be cops is probably the only thing that would help, and it would only help at the margin
90% / 10%. And that's why stop-and-frisk policies were targeted at neighborhoods with high rates of shootings, and allowed police officers discretion in choosing whom to search.
Just about everyone is aware of this gender discrepancy and it permeates all aspects of the justice system. Only 20% of murder victims, for example, are female, but if you look at death row inmates over 50% of their victims were female, and only 1-2% of death row inmates are female themselves.
I've also looked at quite a few of the close to 200 death row convictions that have been exonerated, and among the minority where the exonerate was probably factually innocent (the majority were probably factually guilty of their crime, or a closely related one, despite being legally cleared) one of the most common scenarios was a female being the actual murderer but a nearby man getting the blame.
Going from "given a crime occurred, what's the observed likelihood that it's from a group F", to "given a person is in group F, what's the probability they committed a crime" is a bridge too far for most. But questioning this leap will resolve many questions.
The right standard is "probable cause". What statistical probability does that represent? Courts have refused to put a number on it officially, but the Supreme Court has clarified that it is less than "preponderance of the evidence", so less than 50%, and unofficial polls of judges put it at between 45 and 50%.
So, I'd say that if a given population commits enough crimes that a randomly selected member of that population is >45% likely to have committed a given type of crime, then it's reasonable to stop members of that population to check if they have based solely on group membership, *assuming* that's the only information about them. Other aspects of their appearance or behavior could, of course, alter the probability and would need to be taken into consideration.
So if a group commits 1000X as many murders as another group, it depends what the base rate of murder is. If the murder rate is 5/100,000, then this hypothetical population's murder rate is 5/1,000, so (absent additional information), the probability that a randomly-selected individual is a murderer is 0.5%. Too low.
To reach the probable cause threshold, the group would have to have a rate of 45,000/100,000, or 9,000 times as many murders as the population as a whole. With a lower base rate, the multiplier would have to be higher. With a higher base rate it could be lower.
Duh. Thinko. Still, you can pick a reasonable number for reasonable articulable suspicion and apply the same process, with roughly the same result: Unless the group is incredibly criminal, then no.
It's pretty straightforward. The question is: Supposing a sub-population (e.g. race) is objectively far more criminal than the general population, is there an objective way to determine when stopping and searching members of that population based only on their status as members of that sub-population can be justified.
My point is that yes, there is a simple statistical evaluation. If the criminality of the group is high enough that a randomly-selected member of that group has a probability of currently committing the relevant crime that meets the relevant legal standard for a stop-and-frisk, then it should be permissible to stop and frisk them.
According to a Duke University survey of judges, the median judge places "reasonable suspicion" at 42% probability (though with considerable variance). So, you can do the math.
I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that any racial group will ever meet this threshold for any crime. But if one did, racial profiling would be legally justifiable in that case.
Reasonable suspicion, legally, cannot be tied solely to race or ethnicity, but must be rooted in the “totality of circumstances.” Location, language, activity, occupation, etc. can be considered.
Sincere question: is (was?) stop and frisk effective? I haven't looked into it in depth. But if we're contemplating such an illiberal policy, at minimum we ought to know if it does any good.
My understanding is that it *helped* with the fall in crime in the Bloomberg/Giuliani years, but wasn't necessarily the main cause given the national decline in crime at the same time
But that's what i was saying about a blanket condemnation of stop and frisk as a method. As i said above, ca 75% of ex prisoners commit more crimes upon release. So is there a percentage of any group however defined where people are comfortable with the stop and frisk concept? Or is it just unacceptable as a policing practice regardless of its utility?
I think the definition of group matters a lot more than rate.
From a civil liberties perspective I'm ok with all sorts of intrusive tracking of ex prisoners (as parole actually does) and that's whether 10% or 75% commit more crimes.
But the rate I'm ok with is going to be vastly different if you change the group to age, sex or race.
It's also going to be very different if you change it to neighborhood. I might be ok with stop-and-frisk or other hotspot policing methods if the definition of group is "top 1% homicide neighborhoods".
So much of our existing legal practice already functions this way. Even before Trump, ICE and CBP agents could play by different rules within 200 miles of the border. So in those cases the group was anyone present within 200 miles of the border, who were presumably an order of magnitude more likely to be illegal immigrants.
That's a definitional situation when you're dealing with people that have actually established a history of committing crimes.
What troubles me is that you're positing a hypothetical that I have doubts on actually existing substantially. Maybe I'm wrong, so that's why I'm pondering what types of groups could meet this hypothetical.
I understand, but i'm not sure why you're excluding ex criminals as a possible group? i have no idea what the numbers are for other groups but maybe gang members drug addicts, i don't know but it was really meant to be an open ended question: is stop and frisk immoral at all costs, like many people feel about the death penalty or is it just the efficacy that makes people balk?
For murder the Black rate is about 10x the rest of the USA. Nationally, the Asian rates is about 1/4 the rest of the population, but in specific states or regions it's probably a full magnitude lower than other census categories.
When it comes to any of homicide, suicide, drug overdose, etc.., there are census category patterns but also very big regional patterns and the two interact in surprising ways:
Fwiw I also suspect there may be 10x differences among certain specific immigrant demographics when it comes to sexual abuse, but I don't have data-driven evidence. I mostly come about this opinion by manually glancing through publicly visible jail records.
I've said throughout these comments that this whole issue entirely depends on the circumstances. ie what is it exactly that we are trying to profile?
Say we're trying to profile for illegal guns, a la stop-and-frisk. Profiling on race or ethnicity would probably be ineffective compared to better alternatives, and also counter-productive based on moral or political ones.
A much better alternative would be to profile on a neighborhood basis, and depending on community buy-in, allow experienced LEOs to use their judgement in identifying who to stop-and-frisk so that we're not wasting time stopping every 90 year old grandma. But if the community hates the police you're probably stuck in a bad equilibrium that no aggressive profiling is really going to solve.
I'm kind of rambling, but even in states where the black homicide rate is greater than 10x the non-black rate, there are still much better cues for suspicion of potential weapons carrying than a person's skin color.
Fwiw - I've actually gone through an exercise like this using recidivism data from Broward county Florida. I used prior criminal history to predict who would be rearrested. The Black rearrest rate in that data was much higher than the non-Black rate, but despite that adding race as a variable did nothing to improve the model. The differing rates were already "baked in" to the other predictive variables like prior arrests, previous crime, age, etc...
FWIW, I don’t think stop and frisk is how murders are investigated. In general, however, the members of a victim’s family, neighborhood and general community will be the focus of an investigation, and this will often include members of a particular race or ethnic group. Maybe another example of starting with individuals.
Right, I think stop-and-frisk was a gun control strategy, with a hard-to-ignore side effect of arresting a fair few persons with outstanding warrants for any other sort of crime.
We live in a time when many basic principles we never thought would be tested are routinely violated. Many in the opposition end up sputtering in public debate because they are unpracticed at defending, from first principles, formerly uncontroversial views like "bribery is wrong", "due process should not be violated", "the US should not wage a war of imperial aggression against Denmark", etc.
Posts like this clearly and succinctly lay out these arguments we never thought anyone would have to make.--a great public service in these troubled times.
I agree with the sentiment in a general way, though I suppose I am one of the people who thinks immigration policy should be focused on, as MY put it, skills and human capital. In addition to disfavoring family reunification and refugees/low skill labor I would also give strong preference for ease of assimilation, which I understand may make some uncomfortable here, but I think the most stable and most obviously positive sum immigration to the voters is that which is noticed least.
Regarding racial profiling I think it's morally wrong, tends to undermine trust in the government by citizens, and often is just a lazy and not necessarily effective form of policing. The solution to that to me is an expectation of high standards and accountability from law enforcement. There's nothing stupid or bad going on with ICE that local and state law enforcement isn't fully capable of matching (and indeed it often has and does) when left without strong leadership and oversight.
Where I would maybe dissent a bit is towards the implicit idea that everyone is a blank slate, and even more so that all choices are equal. There's a lot of evidence out there that if you (i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married, your chances of poverty in America are statistically tiny. You can probably add a couple other things, including not being convicted of a felony. Further, the outcomes for children born and raised out of wedlock are statistically worse across numerous metrics most people would associate with a successful life. What really needs to be internalized is that, while the state can (and should!) do things like guarantee people have health insurance, a means of savings, and access to a basically functioning school system, it never can, and never will, create statistical parity (equity of you will) between those people and families that do things the right way and those that don't. We need to stop obsessing over the idea that it can. The question should be 'have we done right by this person as an individual?' That's all that matters.
Btw the original study that found that people who “(i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married” did find a fourth factor, and it was being black. And it’s all correlational, not causation—I’m sure most upper-middle-class women who decide to be single moms by surrogacy will do just fine. A more recent update finds that around 27% of white people who follow all 3 are low-income compared to 41% of black people: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/following-the-success-sequence-success-is-more-likely-if-youre-white/
A lot of this also depends on where exactly you set the poverty line, which is pretty arbitrary. No one in America is in absolute poverty while relative poverty is inherently relative so it makes no sense to say no one will be in it.
The data just doesn't back it up. Kids where a parent dies do just as well and when both parents remain alive and stay married. It's having the genes of someone who gets divorced (impulse control, deferred gratification etc.) that cause the bad outcomes.
The temptation of feel good nonsense is very strong. The numbers don't lie - it's all in the genes.
I assume genes are also important to a degree that sits uncomfortably with our meritocracy but I'm not the one peddling feel-good nonsense. The feel-good nonsense is the story that you can do whatever you want and not have any adverse consequences for yourself or the people you have a responsibility to.
“Further, the outcomes for children born and raised out of wedlock are statistically worse across numerous metrics most people would associate with a successful life.”
People that marry tend to be a different social class nowadays.
I hear you but I also think it's a bit galaxy brained. We try to talk ourselves into the idea that we're measuring a proxy for something else to avoid the obvious observation that two is usually better than one, and probably also that both sexes bring something important to the table that isn't always replicable in aggregate and scale when one (usually dad) is absent.
Now look I'm not all cromagnon about this. There are people doing their best in legitimately really hard circumstances outside of their control. There are people trying to help ameliorate a situation that isn't ideal and that they didn't necessarily create. There's also still forms subtle and not so subtle racial prejudice out there, even in spite of massive legal and determined, generation spanning cultural efforts against it.
But if you look at one population group with a 30% rate of out of wedlock births and one with 70%, the state is never, ever, going to create statistical parity in outcomes for those children as they age and grow into adulthood. I say it again for emphasis. Never. Ever. Calling the disparity simple racism in light of everything else and quite significant efforts to counter it is just not credible.
Any GOP policies ever? Seems a pretty tough standard, and precludes anyone from ever changing their mind. So if the GOP starts shooting Jews, no criticism is possible because of things said 30 years ago?
It wasn’t 30 years ago that the left was rejecting color-blindness though. It was at best only a few years ago! Each and every dem-appointed SCOTUS judge ruled in favor of continued racial discrimination in college admissions (they would probably dispute that characterization, but I am uninterested in euphemisms here). If the dems want to try to embrace color-blindness now, they frankly have an uphill battle to get anyone to believe them, regardless of anything the right does
Let's be clear about what we are talking about. Dispensing with the euphemisms, you are unhappy about the statistical discrimination of college admissions against Asians and poor whites (with demonstrated achievements) in favor of socially disadvantaged racial groups, legacies (overwhelmingly white and wealthy) and athletes?
For what its worth, I am! Was never high on my priority list but seemed bad. Don't mind the athletic ones, at least for sports that would help the college, but legacies are gross and affirmative action seems illegal, although I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the ethical impulse behind it.
If someone supported the equivalent of Numerus clausus until 2020, it is going to be very difficult for them to ever gain the moral highground on racial issues.
So you agree that the GOP policies are bad, and you just think the Democratic policies are worse? Or do you affirmatively agree with the GOP policies? I assume not the latter, otherwise why rely on the tu quoque? Just trying to get you to be more forthcoming.
I think its bad policy, but thinking its the worst policy in the last couple of decades is out of touch with reality. Not even sure it breaks the top 50. Feels similar to people thinking foreign aid is what's causing US government debt.
I don't know that it's the #1 worst policy (our policy on deficits is probably worse), but anything that erodes racial equality under the law in a multiracial democracy is in the top-tier of damage caused.
In a world where one party is able to prevent actual fairness under the law, it is fine for the other party to use tools that improve fairness even when they aren't perfect. That was affirmative action up through the 90s.
Most Democrats do not want identity based policy. But while identity based discrimination is rampant, it is necessary to use identity based policy to target the worst of it.
Wait, you think affirmative action on college admissions is *worse* than trying to revoke legal permissions for entry to the country on the basis of national origin?!
There are regulations on granting visas initially, but once you’re in the country and have a work visa or a green card, revoking in on the basis of national origin with no regards to the individual sounds pretty crazy!
Is a non government actor using race in part of its admission process worse than the government (ICE) directly arresting people based on their skin color?
Why? Like had we simply just removed segregation and nothing else in 1964 it doesn’t seem clear to me that we’d have given anyone much of anything.
It would have been reconstruction all over again and would have just created a race to find a new lawyerly way to say blacks should forever live in islands of poverty in a vast ocean of prosperity.
Legacies are not race neutral, especially since all of these universities had explicit rules against admitting black people and Jews for a long, long time.
Harvard never had rules against admitting Black people or Jews, it had Numersus Clausus for Jews for a brief period, which is rightly seen as a deeply shameful episode in its history and I suspect the Numersus Clausus against Asians will be viewed in a simar vain.
Because who goes to Harvard and similar elite schools is more about who runs the country than the elections are. They’re the farm team for the government and the business elite. It is a granting status.
Keeping Asians out would be bad but there were many Asians at these schools. And instead they want to push the top black students down to schools which will keep them from the elite positions set aside for only the top schools.
The line of thinking that we have enough of your co-ethnics already, so we don’t have to give you in particular a fair shot, is the whole problem. It’s not fixed by tweaking the value of “enough.”
The only halfway plausible justification for this I've heard is that if large segments of the population have almost no hope of entering the elite, then it destroys social cohesion over time and is ultimately unsustainable. Societies with strict social classes and very little to no social mobility tend to have destructive revolutions. However, this justification has really nothing to do with the universities' demonstrated preference for legacies and athletes, which the Republican party is overall totally fine with.
It's hard to defend actively discriminating against a minority group. Malaysia's use of bumiputra set-asides is not exactly a stirring success. Who is the "they" in the "they want to push the top black students" here? It seems hard to argue that it is Asian students applying for university positions.
I think this grants too much agency to the Ivies. If we should be seeking a more racially and otherwise diverse officials in government, we should be looking at places like Howard or wherever to find those people.
I like this as a point and it's worth saying. The scary part of the whole thing is that the centers of power in the United States only recruit from the top 20 or so institutions which are mostly Ivies plus a small handful of other schools.
There's an interview of Antonin Scalia laughing off the idea of getting clerks from American University in a Q&A. Things like Congressional staff and Judicial clerks, the tested bureaucracy like foreign service the corps of how the non-military government works along with the large banks and tech firms draw overwhelmingly from a small set of institutions and basically run the country.
But like having bureaucratic college admissions function as the HR department for the American elite seems more plausible than telling Congress and Courts and President who they're allowed to hire.
Well, the Supreme Court has ruled out what you think is most plausible, so I guess we have no choice but to work harder on not getting people to overemphasize the Ivies.
I wonder if it's true that affirmative action was actually effective in the 60s and 70s. It could have been true, but it's before my time.
My sense is that in the current era it was lifting approximately no one out of poverty. Black admits to Harvard were mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants, or the sons and daughters of already middle-class-or-higher non-immigrant Black people. At less prestigious schools practicing AA the Black admits ended up far more likely to not finish and leave with useless debt.
The weird thing is that AA in college admissions is basically just a PMC obsession. Some lady raising her kids in subsidized housing in Baltimore is probably not spending a lot of time worrying about whether her super clever kid goes to Harvard rather than University of Maryland. It's the black doctors and lawyers and engineer and such that care about that, just as it's the white doctors and lawyers and engineers and such that are mad that their kid's chance at going to Harvard might be taken by the black lawyer couple's kid.
Totally agree, but most activists come from a middle or upper-middle class background, even if they are in an ethnicity that is disproportionately less likely to be from that background, so organizations that claim to speak for minorities but are run and staffed by minority members of the PMC are always going to be heavily invested in affirmative action.
Did Matt make this one free just to remind us that there are a *lot* of racists out there and they *really* like to talk about it? People are saying.....
"I agree with King’s view that we should judge people based on their individual attributes rather than statistical inferences based on their skin color."
Conservatives like to think of themselves as bold truth-tellers when they identify race-based statistical trends, but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist, nor even whether these statistical trends are based on qualities that are somehow inherent to the races, but rather, how society may or should treat individuals in response to those statistical trends even if they do exist.
(Of course, if you go far enough to the right, you'll find conservatives who want to get rid of Indian-Americans or whatever, even though they statistically perform better than white Americans on basically every metric. Because at its root it isn't really about crime or intelligence or anything else, it's just tribalism.)
"but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist"
Necessary preamble: "Conservativism" these days has overwhelmingly degenerated into an utter sewer of racism.
That said, I would simultaneously suggest that a substantial part of the problem of the past 20 or so years, and which in my view has contributed to the aforementioned sewer of racism situation, has been that there has been a major (not sure how one would define "core") disagreement over whether these statistical trends exist.
This is what I'm getting at with "core" disagreement. I personally believe that *some* of those statistical trends exist. But I also feel comfortable voting for liberals because I think my views are fully compatible with 95% of liberal policies, and the reason why is that I don't think those statistical trends justify discrimination against individuals. Presumably, you think the opposite on that underlying philosophical question, so that's the core disagreement, not the factual issue.
I'm not sure what you're presuming, but you're likely presuming too much. I only wanted to say that in recent years liberal spaces have heavily tone-policed discussions of certain types of disparities, such that ignorance of said statistical differences are widespread on the left. And that's additionally backfired such that the right often believes statistical differences are much worse than they actually are!
If you're curious about the actual statistical realities I've put together a page showing what they look like. You can view homicide, suicide, drug overdose, alcohol deaths and traffic fatalities by census category AND state or region. The interactions between the race and region are particularly interesting and probably different in many ways from what you might imagine. Whatever your political views on disparities, I feel like we'd all be better off by having a solid handle on what they actually are! https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/regional_gaps
Fwiw I've discussed my own philosophy a few times in the comment section today, the tl;dr; is you need to be very specific with the kind of thing you intend to detect before one can even have a debate about what sort of profiling is legitimate.
All those shootings that occur in Chicago every weekend, are not HS Band members going to band camp.
Being a member of a criminal gang kind of says it all. Most Islamic Terrorists are, in fact, adherents of Islam.
Guys with Nazi tats, bald heads, profess fealty to white supremacy, are, in fact, White Supremacists.
Matt, IMHO, you are conflating policing with social justice. Not every person of color is a criminal, but everyone who belongs to a drug gang is likely involved with criminal behavior.
If you cannot distinguish that difference, it makes policy very difficult.
NYC teens, who were stopped and frisked because they wore clothes that echoed prison, were a style that teens emulated. A cultural thing, which NWA captured. Not every teen who dressed like a prisoner was a drug gang member.
That is a big difference. Policing gang members, good. Random stop and frisks because they were black and dressed like hoods living in the hood was wrong.
Now here is another big difference. The confiscation of guns found in half a million stop-and-frisk stops? About 1.5%. Minuscule. I’ll bet, however, if you targeted gang members for stop and frisk, you’d find more guns. It is the application of targeting that matters. Oh, and by the way, I’d keep a watch on those guys with Nazi tats and resentment of Jews and Blacks....Just sayin'
Most urban police have gang units; their job is to identify members. Did you never see the HBO series called The Wire?
If you are asking me how to identify gang members? Sometimes it is as easy as having a gang tat, like MS 13. Behavior, driving around, and visiting kids on street corners selling dope. It really isn’t that hard. In fact, my solution is for the US Attorney in Chicago to Rico the various gangs. Through observation, it shouldn't be too hard to prove a conspiracy.
This is why the left can’t cheer for Iran. They’ve chosen the most misogynistic ideology/religion (NOT race) ever invented over liberal democracy. They’ve chosen FGM. They’ve chosen coerced marriage. They’ve chosen not educating girls. They’ve chosen legal rape and honor killings.
We’ve already seen this script in Europe where people who criticize rape go to jail longer than Muslim rapists.
The desire to score short-term points by calling conservatives racist will doom leftists in history.
Sorry, I worded that poorly. The left isn't protesting the Iranian government the way they protested in favor of Hamas, even though Iranians never raped and murdered civilians the way Hamas did.
I do think there’s a lot of misallocation of protest resources, and waaaaay too much of it is devoted to protests for and against Israel. But you’re just trying to make yourself mad at people if you think they are supporting Hamas or the Iranian government. (Though I admit there is a weird fringe that does support Hamas - just not anywhere near the number of people involved in Gaza protests).
I agree with most of this post, except that the speeding cameras in DC are abhorrent. The posted speed limits are often ridiculous--clearly meant only for revenue generation-- and allow for no discretion, such as traffic conditions on early Sunday morning.
The idea of Vision Zero and 20 is plenty is that cars should be driving so slow that if they run into a pedestrian, that pedestrian will probably survive, which is about 20 mph. It's an aggressive stance to take on speed limits, and reasonable people can disagree about the tradeoffs. But it's not a revenue generation scheme, and it's backed by safety data.
There are specific cameras in DC that are unambiguously there for revenue generation.
Specifically, the highest-revenue camera in the city (on K St under Washington Circle, I think) is at the bottom of the slope into an underground bypass where there are no sidewalks, pedestrians and no intersections. If you go the speed limit at ground level and coast down the slope, you will end up getting a $100 speeding ticket from the camera.
You'd think that at least regulars would know after a ticket or two that this is a place that's easy to speed, and accordingly slow down before they get there.
That is what I do, after getting the $100 ticket. But there are 6 million people in the area (not to mention tourists, etc.) and that is a lot of $100 first-offense tickets. Which is why that camera prints money for the city.
Sure, in theory. In practice, the camera generates several million a year every year. Population churn, out of town drivers, plain old forgetfulness, etc.
I'm generally in favor of traffic cameras, but having gotten ticketed by that stupid ass camera I get why Republicans who have also gotten ticketed by it would think the traffic cameras are a revenue-generation scheme. DC could easily fix this problem by not having scammy cameras, but that would cost them that sweet sweet ticket revenue.
If someone running for city council said "I will put speed cameras on every block, since they decrease speeding and increase safety, but to balance out the need for people to get around, we'll raise all speed limits in the city by 5 MPH" I would elect that person in a heartbeat.
I'm not going to assert this of any specific Slow Borer here, but the general complaints of "The road made me speed!" and "It's a money grab!" have grown to strike me as cope for "I'm pissed I can't speed without consequence anymore!".
Welcome to the complex world that doesn't resolve down to a simple morality tale. Both dangerous speeding and speed traps exist. Some speed cameras have the goal of increasing safety for drivers and pedestrians and any revenue raised is a bonus, some have the goal of raising revenue and any lives saved are a bonus.
I think it is entirely reasonable to try to set laws/policies so that local governments find it easy to use speed cameras to increase safety and hard to use them to raise revenue. (Though I'd prefer to just have all traffic fines go to the federal treasury so nobody had an incentive to police for a profit.)
Similarly, some speed limits are set too high for local conditions, and some are set too low for local conditions. Sometimes the speed limit is 30 and like 95% of drivers are going 45. If you go 30 on that road, you make yourself and others unsafe.
It is very straightforwardly a money grab on K Street under Washington Circle. That might be a totally reasonable thing to do. Cities need revenue. But you can't then say it's about safety, when it is obviously about money. And this thread started with Matt S saying "it's not a revenue generation scheme" when in some cases it plainly is.
You keep saying that this is straightforward, obvious and plain, and I still haven't read anything about anyone coming out or discovering that this is the case. I'm not ruling it out--you can see upthread in talking to Dilan Esper that I think there could be circumstances in which this is the case. I just want to see it demonstrated here.
No, it is an argument that there's no safety reason to put a camera there: the camera is at the bottom of a hill and you have to back up another hill before you get to the next crosswalk / sidewalk / intersection. It's a big moneymaker for the city, which is fine, but that's all it is -- a moneymaker, not a safety measure. People should be honest about that.
The speed limit is universally understood by drivers (i.e., most American adults) to be a general suggestion, not a hard upper limit. When conditions are good and traffic is smooth, you might well go faster. If conditions are bad, or traffic is backed up, you should go slower. You might drive for an hour on a road with a 35 mph speed limit, and your speed might range from 0 mph to 50 mph all while driving safely.
This was, historically, enforced mostly by cops watching out for actual dangerous driving. The cops are out in the same traffic as you, on the same stretch of road, and are supposed to be using their judgement as fellow drivers to determine if you're over the line.
The glaring exceptions to that -- cops trying to meet quotas, and speed traps -- are understood to be violations of the driving social contract because the cops are trying to make money rather than trying to make the road safe.
This is why cameras generate so much pushback. They often seem a lot more like speed traps than safety measures.
That is all to say: your question is missing the point. Speeding is a normal part of driving, because despite the name speed limits are not actually limits, they're suggestions that when combined with actual driving conditions (such as whether you're on a downhill into an underpass with no crosswalks, sidewalks or intersections) determine the speed it is acceptable to drive.
I am sympathetic to the argument that speed limits in the middle of nowhere are too low and are just about revenue generation. But you should be driving slow in urban DC, at any time, day or night.
The strongest case for the argument are on rural, uncontrolled access highways that unwisely route straight through a small town that does not have much of an economy going on.
I think there's a strong argument that super-rural super-straight interstates are set too low too. A state trooper who pulls someone over on an empty interstate going 85 isn't protecting the public safety one bit-- they are just generating revenue.
Oh with controlled access freeways I definitely agree. The strongest I was specifically thinking of the rapidly changing limits on uncontrolled access highways in places with obscured vision that make it easier to nail someone. Those highways shouldn't even be going through towns to begin with, but often businesses want people to drive through and hopefully stop to do business with them.
Many years ago, the road between my hometown and the town where I went to college had a small town with a notorious speed trap. Locals all knew to slow way down on the highway where it went through the town; other travellers funded the small town's police department and general fund. At some point, the state widened the highway to four lanes, and moved it a couple miles so it no longer went through the town. The small town extended its borders to cross one mile of the highway, and the town cop liked to sit on that one mile stretch with a radar gun and hand out tickets.
That seems bad to me, you'd want some sort of separation of revenue usage, similar to how police departments shouldn't benefit from civil asset forfeiture.
But even then, I'm still asserting my three points above.
Well sure, but that is not the system we have. So you can hopefully understand why people think low speed limits + automated enforcement is a cash grab.
And again, even if I stipulate that that's actually the case, drivers still have agency to completely thwart that cash grab. This isn't a robbery where a weapon is aimed at you forcing you to speed.
Obviously - but people should also be able to drive in normal course at the pace that a road was designed for, without worrying that it might cost them a couple hundred bucks. Especially as cameras and/or speed limits are often not well marked.
If scaffolding was collapsing onto pedestrians walking under it on a regular basis, I doubt you’d say “well I know the risks and have agency to walk on the other side of the street.” You’d say “I expect to be able to walk normally without having to think about collapsing scaffolding.”
One a special interest bureaucratic regime is in place, it is very hard to generate enough general interest to dislodge it. I doubt anyone voted for Representatives based on their speed cameras views in the first place. If you gave people an up down vote on speed cameras I wonder what would happen, but in practice it would never happen.
It's rare that any one issue is going to be an overwhelmingly decisive factor in any election. But I think it's reasonable to assert that plenty of people see high speeds as dangerous, are willing to let those who are in charge of the roads hear about it, and sometimes those people in charge will listen and make changes, of which could include cameras.
I would like to see stats. My city introduced speed cameras in school zones last year, and people say the same thing. I admit I can find them annoying, especially around schools on roads that were obviously built for higher speeds. I have gotten a couple of tickets. However, the number of accidents, including pedestrian- vehicle accidents, have decreased.
For your tickets, did you feel it was easy to tell you're in a school zone but hard to mentally drive that slow or did you feel it was hard to tell you're in a school zone?
Despite what I've asserted in this subthread, I do agree that traffic cameras should be as transparent as possible about their existence. One idea I keep thinking about is to paint or light up the cameras in bright blue to make it real obvious that they're there, as blue isn't otherwise a color that's used much in transportation regulation.
Here they have a sign that says "photo enforcement ahead." Some of the cameras are permanent on red lights, others are in vans and move from place to place but they still put the sign out.
When they first implemented the cameras, there were big electronic signs and only warnings were issued, so that was easy. After that, there was signage, but a couple of the schools are on roads I travel a lot, and they are at the edge of the city where the speed limit will increase shortly, so more my own fault/zoning out/keeping up with the rest of the traffic.
There is one school where it would be hard to notice if you are not familiar with the area because there are a lot of stores and double parking and pedestrians and side streets. But that is a place where people SHOULD be driving more slowly anyway. Sadly, several years ago, a grandmother and preschooler were hit in a crosswalk when walking to school, and the child died, so more than speed cameras are probably needed there.
Curious, do they issue tickets during non school hours? I would be a lot more supportive if so. Where I live the cameras in school zones give out tickets 24/7/365. At that point it’s clearly not a safety issue.
Shouldn’t the cameras give out tickets 24/7? If there are different speed limits during school hours, then they should give out tickets based on violations of the speed limit in effect. But there’s no reason to stop enforcing safety laws when you have the technology to do so just because the safety laws are at a higher speed.
The school zones here have beacons that flash when students are arriving and leaving, and that's the indication that lower speed limits only apply when they're flashing.
My only _minor_ concern is the edge case where the light starts flashing after you enter the zone so you couldn't have seen it, but this is easily solved with a 5 minute grace period.
Where I live, they are 7 am to 6 pm on school days. If, for some reason, you get a ticket outside those hours, the ticket will be voided if you complain.
There *shouldn’t* be revenue generation. Any revenue from fines beyond that needed to maintain the cameras should be rebated to the public who live in the area, since they are the ones putting up with speeders.
If true, I think it would be fine to (1) change certain specific speed limits on a case-by-case basis, and/or (2) substantially lower fines in exchange for having more cameras. But that's not what congressional Republicans are doing.
Once a special interest bureaucratic regime is in place, it is very hard to generate enough general interest to dislodge it. I doubt anyone voted for Representatives based on their speed cameras views in the first place. If you gave people an up down vote on speed cameras I wonder what would happen, but in practice it would never happen.
Another point I want to make about traffic cameras that this comment is a good place to put it under is that there can be a NIMBY aspect to it to. People might be amenable to the concept in general, and even especially support them near where they live, but oppose them in specific spots on their regular commute.
I think you're right. And it's weird to me. I hate having to enter that intersection so cautiously all the time. Even worse, one of my kids is a 20 something with autism. This makes it difficult for her to cross the street. One day, some driver will think "that person is looking right at me, so it's ok that I just go". And my kid will just step in front of a car going 40 mph. Ugh.
Short but sweet, thank you very much for this, Matt.
I also like this short essay format for holidays. It's fine if you still want to use the purpose for a holiday in taking a day off and unpaywalling an old article, but a format like this could continue to work out well in the future when you're up to it.
Whatever King said, colorblind enforcement of the law is the right thing to do, and equality of results is a foolish thing to force. With that said, this Republican flies his flags today (a special sacrifice because I had to switch out the Mardi Gras ones) because MLK represented another small step on Western Civilization’s (and thus the world’s) march from the darkness of barbarism towards individual rights.
What good is equality before the law if it doesn’t yield results? We did that in 1865 and we just created a time bomb for lawyers to think of new ways to codify second class citizenship. Absent an active ethic to bring everyone into real material equality people will find creative ways to keep people Down.
"What good is equality before the law if it doesn’t yield results?"
Should we do something about Indian-origin people making twice as much money as White people? (for the record, I say we should not do something).
What group inequalities in particular are you upset about, and what differentiates them from the group inequalities you do care about?
As another quick example, - white people kill themselves at much higher rates than other census categories, and until covid were dying at higher rates from drug overdoses, too.
Is that something the law or some ethic should have responded to?
Indian-Americans making more than white Americans is the result of a selective immigration system that only lets high-income Indians in, not because Indians conquered or enslaved white people. We could “solve” that “problem” in a day by allowing open immigration.
Now do French-, Russian-, and Italian-Americans.
I think both of these are appropriate points of concern. I'm not going to sit here and say I know what the answer is to either of them but if one group is doing extraordinarily well then the things that that group is doing very well should be seamlessly integrated into what everyone else is doing through incentives and information spreading. I used to like the idea of cultural pathology but it was only applied to urban blacks in a way that really left a bad taste in my mouth here. But we should be constantly adopting best practices as people and paternalistically encouraged to spread them and supported in doing so.
And yes the problems of white overdoses should be a notable problem that people should be trying to address. The way the drug problems among whites were ignored while with blacks the source of a racial panic was bad on both sides.
I guess my disagreement or at least concern with your approach is "why does race / identity need to be a key factor" in any of this? If you want to identify disadvantaged children you can figure them out accurately by using just a half a dozen variables or so, and it's unlikely that race or ethnicity needs to be one of them.
Fwiw I'm drawing in part on my experience building a re-arrest model using data from Florida. In that data set Black people were more likely to be rearrested, but the model was not improved (actually worsened a bit) by adding race as a variable. Prior arrest record, age, gender, etc... already told you everything you needed to know to get a good prediction.
I don't see why the same wouldn't be the case with the above. If Indian-Americans are doing very well then the underlying cause is almost certainly the professions and businesses they are in, or other such factors. And so we should ask ourselves "are we doing enough for children who are not born to doctors, engineers and upper management business execs?" Not, "are we doing enough for non-Indians"?
“ I'm not going to sit here and say I know what the answer is to either of them”
Neither does the government know. If you give the government that kind of power you will end with an authoritarian government that limits free speech and immiserates everyone except their friends and family. It has happened every single time, but the far left keeps wanting to try it again.
But it does yield results - just not the ones your philosophy expects. People achieve in proportion to their ambition, their self-discipline and their talent. You can get rid of these differences in achievement but not without killing the drive to achieve. That’s why the USSR had wheat fields with only the outside rows producing much wheat. The laborers only cultivated the rows that could be seen by the inspectors who were too lazy to walk the fields. THAT’s the world you will force us all into.
So if we run a race and I start 100 meters behind you the only distinction is the amount of ambition and talent? It's like genuinely hard to believe you believe this. I don't believe in getting rid of differences in achievement but a kid born to no account parents who attends no account schools, who at best attends middling post secondary education for trades or practical skills when does he or she get a chance to rise to the level of someone born to exceptional parents with exceptional resources?
This is a reconstruction playbook by suitable for television means. No violent spectacle but keeping people down all the same. Even to the extent that they succeed and beat the odds the gap between what they would have achieved if everyone had an equal footing at 18 is hard to imagine forgiving.
I'd be surprised if Ryan or anyone said that your parents and material circumstances have nothing to do with your future trajectory.
But the more important questions are #1) if you have terrible parents, what can the government realistically do to change that? #2) why does it matter if the distribution of bad parents and circumstances differ by census category? Why, for example, does a disproportionate number of Black people living in relative poverty require action, while a disproportionate number of West Virginians or New Mexicans doesn't?
Bingo! And why does LeBron James's children get special treatment over some poor West Virginia kid?
There are so many factors involved in determining advantage and disadvantage that it is a fool's errand, and thus it always boils down to just make every outcome equal. And we know that will result in brutal dictatorship.
Lebron James' kid should get offsets for the effects of his race while also getting substantial countervailing offsets for the effects of his wealth, athleticism, etc. while the poor West Virginian should get probably stronger offsets for his poverty and comparably weaker negative points for his whiteness.
But none of these should be like well let's just pretend everything is equal and their grades and test scores came out of thin air as purely objective measures of the value of Bronnie and your imaginary kid. Literally everything should be known and accounted for as often as possible.
I really want to focus on #2 because I don't think it should. I think we should know everything about as many possible sources of unfair advantage or disadvantage and have them modeled and scored appropriately relative to their weight.
We should be weighting those equally and weighting down children of generations long elites and similar privileged backgrounds an amount such that it builds a kind of individualism of systemic issues. Race should be a factor not the factor to use an old standard.
For #1 we should have a pretty strong system to prioritize building the kind of impulse control, time horizons, mental health supports etc. so that people aren't raising their children with ineffective values. Where like 20th percentile parent have the ability to provide these things for their kids because it's actually the easy thing to do instead of making it a straight and narrow that only 60th percentile parents can provide.
I like your explicit use of the words "weighting down", because in practice that is _much_ easier than "lifting up".... the problem is that the end result of policies like that is things like Harrison Bergeron.
Put another way: why should "privileged background" be weighted down but "privileged genes" (athleticism, high IQ, genetic determinants of "grit", etc) not be? Or should it be? What counts as "unfair" advantage, exactly?
Why is this viewed as a contest?
You have a zero- or even negative-sum vision of the world.
You can't have a free society and an engineered society.
Literally Harrison Bergeron. Weight down the able so that they may be the equal of the unable.
You're doing the meme! You read the cautionary tale and thought it was an instruction manual. Hilarious.
Basically what you’re saying is that anything short of social justice perfection is no better than the fascist-adjacent kleptocracy we’re currently headed for. (Note—I don’t think the situation is hopeless, unless people of good will are paralyzed by aforesaid perfectionism)
I don't think that's what I'm saying. But we tried a big we're gonna pass some laws and then walk away and well we tried that. We got decades of segregation as a result. Then we tried a kind of muddling through of fighting out active measures and now people want to go back to the first framework.
My mixed race kid just had a playdate with another mixed race kid who lives across the street. The government did a great job of breaking down de jure segregation, which is why our marriages are legal and our kids can play together and that's fantastic.
What's left of segregation is that sometimes people want to marry and live within their own community, and sometimes people don't, and in a free country we can very reasonably accommodate both of those preferences. We don't need to force Ultra-Orthodox Jews to live among Gentiles, or the Amish to move to Manhattan. We also don't need to pretend that Kenyan and Ghanaian and Jamaican immigrants are part of some monolithic "black" community, and that admitting them to Harvard somehow advances the interests of poor black kids in Baltimore.
We no longer have segregation, though?
This argument always sounds perfectionistic to me. When it comes to law and politics the aim is to move towards improvement and prevent backsliding. Or sometimes even to slow the velocity of the backsliding. Perfectionism in politics tends to lead towards pessimism and despair.
Let's be clear that in the USSR and the PRC there was not just "killing the drive to achieve" but also a lot of actual killing, focused on peasants insufficiently loyal to the state, ethnic minorities, the petite bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and the aristocratic elite.
And you think it would be different here? Far left ideologies can only be forced on the people. If the people elect them they will soon revolt in disgust, as the productive get increasingly pissed off that they are supporting the steadily increasing number of freeloaders. That’s when the killings start.
I don't agree entirely, but I suspect you have me confused with someone else. The problem for both the USSR and the PRC was that their ideology required them to create certain structures that effectively crippled the productive economy. In response, they looked for scapegoats to sacrifice as opposed to changing their ideology, and they found them, in large numbers. It's not about "freeloaders" vs. the "productive", which is a bizarrely Ayn Randian view of life. It's about whether the political ideology of a state will allow economic life to continue and improve. The Axis powers of WW2 also had lousy economies that failed to function effectively, particularly in comparison to the massive productivity of the US.
I think you are completely missing an understanding of human nature. People screw off if the fruits of their labor go to others instead of themselves. THAT was the fundamental problem with the PRC and the USSR…and Sweden and the UK in the 1980s, and everywhere that communism and socialism are tried…EVERYWHERE.
I was in Havana in 2013ish. I ate at a number of restaurants. Most were family owned according to the relatively new policy of the communists, who were trying to introduce just enough capitalism to get people to work again. The budding entrepreneurs were making an impressive effort, but they still had to by from communist commissaries. One of the perverse results was that on a tropical island, I could not get fresh fruit in a restaurant!
The mansions along the waterfront were deteriorating badly because no one owned them. Who is going to maintain a house that belongs to five families? Let the other guy do it. All of the infrastructure in Cuba was deteriorating. It’s the same story everywhere.
I do not want "an active ethic to bring everyone into real material equality" and I will oppose such until I exhale my dying breath.
You don't deserve anything more than what you work for, and once you have it, it's yours.
I don't owe you anything.
I don’t say you owe me a thing but no one has ever earned a god damned thing in tbis world. If humans got what we deserved the Earth would have the population of Mars.
Spoken like a true Reddit basement dead-ender.
I'm truly sorry you feel like you never earned anything. I pity folks like that.
Everything I have, I worked for. At times, other people have also worked on my behalf or in my support, because that's what family and good friends and professional mentors do. But you are the one indispensable ingredient to your own success. It boggles my mind how there are people in the world who think differently.
I can't tell you're a nihilist, a G-ddamn Communist, or both.
How do you decide who gets As, who gets Bs, and so forth in your classes if they don't earn them?
They work for them, but smart ones get them by genes and environment that they didn't create. Just like I work really hard but with genes and talent and habits that weren't crafted whole cloth by me. They earn them in a very hollow sense. The students who deserve the best rewards (highest effort to achievement ratio) never get celebrated beyond a card and an end of year award (everyone gets both of these but some I put more time and effort into selecting).
The ones who get straight As often have terrible effort-output ratios. I wouldn't really say they earned it as much as they received a larger allotment of grace.
Well, what are we trying to accomplish here? I agree effort should matter (and it does!), but sorting by ability is critical to identifying those most capable of performing various functions in society.
What makes you think he tries or cares?
Andrew has always come across as a good teacher, so I'm wondering where the disconnect is.
A simple version of this argument is that your brains, looks, etc., are either to due nature (in which case you don't "merit" them) or nurture (in which case you don't "merit" them).
Hang in there, Andrew, people are really being assholes to you today.
I can't imagine why I wouldn't want my hypothetical kid's teacher to espouse the belief that nobody ever earned anything in their lives.
I think the kid gloves deployed throughout these discussions are actually amazingly gentle.
"I can't imagine why I wouldn't want my hypothetical kid's teacher to espouse the belief that nobody ever earned anything in their lives."
Maybe because it would challenge them to think critically about nature and nurture, and determinism, and what the good society might look like.
But if you want them to believe all and only the things you believe, I recommend never letting them out of their rooms.
"I think the kid gloves deployed throughout these discussions are actually amazingly gentle."
You're mistaken.
Funny thing is my question of the week for mailbag was if it's best to walk the dog or something instead of doing this. If I weren't off today I'd never have had enough time to feel stressed about it. Did go for a 5 mile run about 330 when it was making me scream.
The 13th Amendment didn't yield results?
It was perfectly legal to kill a black person in America for another hundred years so I’d say it wasn’t an unqualified success.
I think the social game people play in which one side asserts that there was no social progress circa 1865 and another asserts that there have been no problems since is a really unhelpful one, not to mention a historically ill informed one.
He never said there was no progress, you strawmanned him. He's just making the usual claim that putting equal treatment on the books isn't enough to right historical inequities, which judging from the replies to his original comment a lot of people here disagree with
Nah, "I’d say it wasn’t an unqualified success" is responding to a claim I never made. It's good to find better ways to converse.
You do realize there is a wide middle between "no results" and "unqualified success" right?
Was it really?
Strange then that the racists left any black people alive isn't it.
Southern racists were not exterminationists, they only murdered people who did something that was perceived to violate the jim crow order.
So we agree the original statement was highly inaccurate at best?
This forum demands a higher quality of comment than this
It’s what there is. Trying to legislate material equality has not delivered it but has worsened race relations and led to a white identity politics backlash. (And also caused a lot of immoral racial discrimination). Equality under the law may not be “enough” but it’s what the government can offer. And as Matt said here, it’s not nothing!
The left destroyed the black family, so of course black people have remained in relative poverty. One day history will judge social liberals the same way it currently judges people who defended Jim Crow.
This is a graph of the change of marriage rates over the 20th century.
https://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/4family10.htm
There's a flag?
Well said!
Let's talk about the type of fraud committed in the autism cases in Minnesota.
It's not just that some individual Somalians are committing fraud - it requires that parents bring their kids in to get fraudulently diagnosed with autism so that the doctors can overbill and the parents can get kickbacks. How are the parents finding out about this opportunity? Presumably they hear about it from other people in their community -- it's not like that can be advertised to the general public. If they are hearing about it from the community, there's a level of acceptance of the fraud in the community that should be totally unacceptable.
Does that mean that every single Somalian is guilty? Obviously not. But there's a level of community culpability that goes way beyond the level of fraud in your typical American or immigrant community, and sorry, it's reasonable to not want to increase the size of immigrant communities that allow stuff like this.
Ok, sure. That point is reasonable. Does it justify turning Minnesota into a police state, dragging American citizens off to detention centers, and tear gassing 6 month olds?
And do we typically send large numbers of armed personnel to arrest people for...welfare fraud? If you commit Medicare fraud, is an armored vehicle going to roll up in front of your house? The pretzels people on the right have twisted themselves into to make this ludicrously out of proportion use of force seem justified. Can we all agree that organized welfare fraud is bad, that the administration is really using that as a fig leaf for a nutty invasion of an American city, and that Donald Trump is a horrible person?
Yes we do. If there is an indication that evidence may be destroyed prior to, or during, the execution of a warrant, law enforcement may conduct a very aggressive, dynamic action with overwhelming force in order to secure the evidence and persons in question. The EPA and the IRS have tactical teams for this reason.
I don't agree with your characterization of what's going on in Minnesota, but bracketing that for a second, yes, the presence of a large community of people that completely reject American values and norms is a huge problem that requires a forceful response.
My preferences in order would be:
1. A sane immigration policy that doesn't let this situation develop in the first place
2. A common recognition among citizens and local governments that immigration enforcement is legitimate and you shouldn't interfere with their operations in the same way you wouldn't interfere with the FBI
3. Failing 1 and 2, you still need to enforce immigration law -- that's a hard problem especially when local governments aren't cooperating and you are going to have some impositions on citizens. Immigration enforcement still easily passes a cost benefit because (in my view) the problem of a hostile and non-assimilating population is severe.
> 1. A sane immigration policy that doesn't let this situation develop in the first place
How would this work in practice?
I'm in Australia, which has the immigration system many Americans dream of. (Or at the very least closer in that direction.)
I'm most familiar with the Vietnamese immigrant community here and the same kind of widespread acceptance of fraud is pervasive here as well. From what I understand of the Vietnamese community in America from acquaintances there it is only slightly better there -- and then only because America's weaker safety net provides fewer opportunities.
So what would a "sane immigration policy" be that accomplishes the goals you want? No Vietnamese allowed in Australia/America?
For that matter how is this fraud "completely rejecting American values and norms" but the common American/Australian practices of defrauding the government via working under the table, lying about small business expenses, pandemic loan fraud, and so on okay? Which frauds are American versus unAmerican?
Wait a minute, is fraud now evidence of rejecting American values and norms?
What about all those white rural Americans on disability who are cooperating with their white rural doctors to bilk the government?
What about all the rich people hiring accountants to do whatever they can to avoid paying taxes?
I see no evidence that Somalian refugees committing fraud is a rejection of American values. If anything, Americans tend to think you're a sucker if you don't do everything you can to take advantage of the government's money.
This is a claim from Joe Heinrich's work - I don't think it's overly controversial. He says that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people are more likely to treat strangers similarly to kin in economic and moral interactions, follow abstract rules rather than relationship-based norms, engage in impersonal trust, etc.
All things that make you less OK with defrauding an impersonal government. Not saying there's no fraud in the US, just that norms are different.
“…turning Minnesota into a police state, dragging American citizens off to detention centers, and tear gassing 6 month olds?”
Where do you get your news?
The New York Times has reported all of those things happening.
I read the NYT and I have never seen them accuse anyone of tear gassing 6 month olds.
Well here you go https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/us/minneapolis-couple-ice-tear-gas-6-children.html
> A Minneapolis couple said that ICE agents deployed tear gas and stun grenades around them and their six children — the youngest only 6 months old — as they tried to maneuver their car out of a tense protest on Wednesday night.
Your standard pose of incredulous rhetorical questions is annoying even when the world isn't going to shit, but at this point, it's downright psychotic.
"...a clash between protesters and federal agents in North Minneapolis."
That's what happened.
Now write this same paragraph but about poor white people and Oxy pill mills.
There aren't simple, legal, morally defensible or commonly used levers to increase or decrease the size of communities of US citizens in the way there is for immigrant communities.
If there was a way to get rid of rural white Americans I wouldn't be surprised if it had a lot of support among SB commenters.
I firmly object to getting rid of rural whites while also leaving the other rurals in place!
1. There are no white communities where being addicted to oxy is viewed as a good thing; even poor communities have a strong norm against welfare fraud.
2. An addict scamming pills, while bad, is not the same thing as a parent of a healthy child saying they have autism to make money from the government. The addict is out of control and not living up to his own norms and values, the parent is someone who doesn't believe that stealing from the government is bad. I'm not saying one is more or less morally culpable, but it should be obvious that you can't have a country full of people who think it's fine to steal from the government.
How many Somalis do you know that you are confident the whole Somali community thinks fraud is a good thing?
Or, alternatively: there are so many white oxy addicts that obviously it is viewed as a good thing in some white communities, because how else did they wind up with so many oxy addicts all telling each other which doctors and pharmacies are dispensing the good stuff. And if you think otherwise, that's because you're in a bubble and/or people are lying to you about their preferences.
(I don't actually believe that second paragraph fwiw but I'm guessing you know about as much about Somalis as I do about poor white people, which is to say basically just crude stereotypes you developed based on stuff you see on TV.)
Do you support harsh measures against those engaging in welfare fraud, which are US citizens?
That doesn't seem to be under debate? I don't want to answer for Andrew Trollope, but his previous comments imply yes? The differences seem to be #1 that the community standards may be different, ie it's possible there's more welfare fraud in the Somali community and #2 because a larger proportion of somalis are undocumented immigrants or would-be immigrants (current citizens of Somalia who would like to immigrate) there are many more levers to control in the latter case. We can't just deport communities of US citizens.
Side tangent - but I study fraud in a different industry as part of my real job, and to the extent that I've noticed regional patterns it seems like Southern California, South Florida and urban New York are the worst, at least in the type of fraud I look at. Outside of cities the rural southern half of the country and the west are much worse than the rural north and northeast. My guess is that the patterns of other types of fraud would probably track the same broad contours. In other words, it doesn't the patterns don't really track any of the usual demographic groups we usually look at, like Black, White, rural, etc... But it does seem like areas with a lot of immigrants are well over-represented.
There should be some punishment. I of course believe the US government is supposed to mainly prioritize the interests of its citizens so the approach to citizens who commit welfare fraud shouldn't be the same as for non-citizens...
My sense is that the vast majority of welfare fraud is done by citizens.
Why, did they steal a bunch of tax money?
Depending on their health insurer, yes -- both for the doctor's appointment and the Oxy scripts.
I have no problem putting physicians on the hook for inappropriately prescribing drugs for profit. But not the addicts.
People looking to score recreational drugs from a cooperative doctor, and bill their insurance for it, are culpable for their behavior. Even if, later, they get hooked.
You assume too much.
Sorry, but “Sorry, but it’s reasonable to not want (insert thing some online lefty wants)” is the whiniest line of argument out there. Just say what you think. There’s no need to “apologize”for it, especially on Slow Boring…. You’re not being controversial, or even interesting.
I would like to know more about how widespread the autism fraud was and how people were finding out about it before making presumptions and making policy based on those presumptions.
What is your alternate theory that explains the facts (all the providers and patients were Somali)?
A viable alternative theory is that in a population of >100,000 it was possible for scammers to identify several hundred families for their scheme, with some portion of those families likely being scammed themselves (i.e. had a valid ASD diagnosis and thought their kids were getting legitimate therapy). That this instance of fraud tells us very little about the broader Somali community or the costs and benefits of a hypothetical group-based immigration policy. Finally, that aggressively inserting ICE into a situation where the DOJ was already making progress identifying fraud will almost certainly be a net loss, as we are already seeing from last week's resignation of the Attorney General that uncovered the fraud to begin with (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resignation-ice-shooting.html).
You say several hundred families implicated here. I think that is low but fine -- that is maybe 1 in 75 families.
What do you think the rate of welfare fraud is in the general US population? Claude has it at 1 in 1500 families.
So conservatively Somalis are 20 times more likely to commit welfare fraud? Surely that seems like it says something about their cultural to it?
Your claim was that the autism fraud is so pervasive as to be evidence of community culpability. This is clearly untrue even if we assume that every family involved was part of the scam. Everything else is just playing with made up numbers. Sorry, but that's not good enough to throw out the core principle of this nation's founding -- that all men are created equal.
Let's be precise - when you say "all men are created equal" are you saying:
A) Somalis couldn't possibly commit fraud more often than other groups because all men are created equal
B) If they do commit more fraud you're fine with that and wouldn't bother to account for it in immigration policy so that you can stick to the principle
I don't have an alternate theory but I don't think I need one to be skeptical of the "all Somalis want to defraud the government so we should kick them out" theory.
I'm not sure why this is so implausible? The default throughout human history has been that only your close social relations / tribe had any moral value at all, so of course it would be OK to steal from an impersonal government. I'm not trying to say that Somalis are uniquely bad or something, just that many groups, throughout history and now, lack a strong norm about fairness to distant strangers.
simple, but worth stating. as a 60ish liberal academic, nothing saddened me more over the past decade or so than the decisive rejection of King's vision by American liberalism. Hope this moment has passed for good.
Yeah, I definitely did see it pass from "King said more than just that one line, you're reading him reductively" (true!) to "not judging people by the color of their skin isn't a good goal even in the long-term." I remember it was on this very site where I pointed out that King did sincerely believe in race-blind values, and someone responded, "And how did that work out for him?"
Despite being born in SF, most of my growing up happened in a small town instead, one of those places where common local professions were "farmer" or "handyman", there's still no movie theatre, and the chromatographic spectrum is heavily centred around two shades only. It wasn't a question of I Have Black Friends, it was I'm Friends With Literally The Only Black Guy. Or like my family was The Asians. (What do you mean there are different kinds, they all look the same and are really smart in school, everyone knows that? Yeah, positive discrimination isn't fun to live through either.)
I hated that small and small-minded place, was ecstatic to get the hell out via college, go live in Real Civilization. But the sad thing about only ever appreciating diversity as an abstract concept is that it's something of a shock to actually end up living it. Certainly it's easy to pick and choose the neat parts, the wages of arm's-length rootless cosmopolitanism: dinner a few hours ago was kisoji ontake soba boiled in drunken chicken marinade, while listening to Andalusian music. There are actual people tied to cultural artifacts though - they aren't separable from your poor, your tired, your huddled masses at the gate! I can try and try and try again to only ever judge individuals by the content of their character, discard all the metadata of stereotypes and heuristics formed by past negative interactions. It's certainly virtuous to at least try.
It's so hard to truly believe in though. It's hard to be raised on proprietous Middle Class Values(tm) and then end up being roommates and coworkers and neighbors with...people who have vastly different standards on cleanliness, on noise, on respecting the commons, on the boundaries of personal space, on public decency, on professionalism, on crime and disorder, on respect for laws and norms. I'd love to believe the leftist intuition that such things fundamentally stem from material conditions, and if we got a transformative economic reform like King envisioned, people of all stripes really could peacefully coexist. In many ways this is *easy* - we have multiple viable roadmaps for Number Go Up, and just need to pick one consistently, instead of playing footsie with retroactive wealth taxes or whatever.
The fear is that culture isn't actually a superstructure though. That people will mostly continue to self-segregate even once you remove the economic barriers to it. That gaps in outcomes will stubbornly persist nevertheless, even with surface-level economic parity. That I'll still only be able to mealy-mouth the catechisms of valuing all peoples equally highly, while continuing to gravitate towards neoliberals and rationalists, both of which are whiter than the rice I eat daily. Obviously this is preferable to being outwardly racist, and that's not nothing! But going through the motions without the heart being into it, while the opposing party is free to wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the armbands...that's just not a good battlefield to fight on. It's a Good shooting, sir. Does anyone even remember Heather Heyer? Hence the impulse to deflect to Medicare and ACA subsidies, no matter how inauthentic and coldhearted that seems. You've got to give the people hope, and all too often that takes the form of self-interest rather than high-minded principles.
There's a lot in here. Thank you for this comment. +1 for "culture isn't ....a superstructure..." Yeah, everyone will continue to self-segregate once you remove the economic barriers. BUT....if those barriers ARE removed, the levels of: jealousy / squabbling / outright violent fighting & other insanity will simmer down, simmer back down to the best we can do — a dull roar, instead of the current rabid raccoon fang slashing we're having lately. It sorta / kinda usta function like that, leastwise in my small experience in a relatively integrated, assimilated time and place, small pockets in Brooklyn in the early 70s. Hard to think at the time that I'd ever look back and see that as a time when "integration", and not just racial integration, but social & economic, actually kinda functioned at a peak. I thought that was finally the beginning. That's the best it ever was in my lifetime, and FFS, what happened? (well I know what happened, too tiresome to repeat here)
Pundits like Matt keep telling me we've never been richer though. Look at that GDP go, real wages are up, especially for the bottom quintile, inequality is trending down a bit, we bent the cost curve on college, you can barely spot even monumental shocks like GFC and covid in several long-term measures...so then there's two possible conclusions. The optimistic one is that there's very particular types of economic barriers which are extra super salient, and aren't well-reflected in headline numbers. This is Housing Theory of Everything, for example, or pronatalist sentiment around "affording kids" (like, not that you literally can't while poorer - we all got born somehow! - but the opportunity cost for doing so keeps going up).
The pessimistic conclusion is that you can't buy your way out of the narcissism of small differences, nevermind large ones. There's some missing piece, a part of the social fabric that can't be repaired with money or keeping up with the Jones Act. Maybe this too is extrinsic, and moving away from the politics of paranoia and Malthusian fearmongering would bring back comity and live-and-let-live. Or maybe that's the drunk polisci nerd looking for the cultural car keys under the policy streetlight. I'm not sure where else to start looking, is the big fear. (inb4 "it's religion and phones, obviously")
A lot of these differences do stem from “fundamentally stem from material conditions” though? When I meet people through work (who are all materially comfortable), I’m pretty confident they’ll have reasonably similar standards regarding professionalism, public decency, crime and disorder, laws and norms, etc., regardless of what race they are or even what country they are from or currently in. Some people individually have betrayed that trust but it isn’t one identity group more likely to do it and it’s rare enough that “trust everyone” is still a default.
Other things like cleanliness are more personal preference, people have disputes over that with their own spouses, I think that’s variation that should just be tolerated.
Do they have those standards because of the paycheck or do they earn the paycheck by being the kind of people who have those standards?
I think the true radicals say it’s the latter, and that’s bad, and we’re going to change it.
Exactly. Make the access to just moderate wealth building possible again (ooops....make access to wealth building great again?) / all the other stuff, "cultural stuff" falls away, and really who cares? Sure some neighborhood-ish grumbling, but if everyone has relatively enough, and NOT ON CREDIT, which was the 30 year headfake....we'd be fine. Instead...rapaciousness was valorized and institutionalized, and what's the way out (surprise, it isn't "college for everyone" which was yet another way to tear money out of the commons; nor is it FanDuel, bet on sports, or Kalshi, bet on everything. The old cliche, it's not a democracy, it's an auction....it's a cliche for a reason. But why did that become an aspiration instead of a warning? Politicians, you have a lot to answer for. Not unlike, well never mind)
> I'd love to believe the leftist intuition that such things fundamentally stem from material conditions
I don't think it is just intuition? It's the actual lived history. Ha-Joon Chang's book Bad Samaritans is chock full of evidence of this: see Chapter 9: Lazy Japanese and Thieving Germans.
British travellers to Germany in the 19th century found they were universally dishonest scammers. Germans were also seen as indolent, slow-witted, and unable to cooperate with one another. Oh and overly emotional.
"the tradesman and the shopkeeper take advantage of you wherever they can, and to the smallest imaginable amount rather than not take advantage of you at all. . . This knavery is universal"
Japanese were seen as lazy, easygoing, emotional, free from all anxiety about the future. A British socialist bemoaned that they were too independent minded.
Koreans were dirty and filthy "who slouch about in dirty white garments of the most inept kind and who live in filthy mudhuts". They just culturally didn't care about cleanliness.
The entire chapter is Ha-Joon Chang's attempt to grapple with:
"These characterizations are puzzling for two reasons. First, if the Japanese and the Germans had such ‘bad’ cultures, how have they become so rich? Second, why were the Japanese and the Germans then so different from their descendants today? How could they have so completely changed their ‘habits of national heritage’?"
On the stop and frisk comment, I agree mostly. but is there a line you'd be willing cross. If a certain group (race, age, sex, religion etc) committed twice as many murders as others, should we stop and frisk? From your piece i would say you would think it a bad policy. But what if they were ten times, 100 times, 1000 times more likely. Isn't there some number at which it becomes ludicrously pc not to treat that group differently?
Let's say there are 10 terrorist attacks per year.
Let's say every single one of them was committed by a person professing a particular faith F.
We have: probability of belonging to faith F given that the person committed a terrorist attack = 1
Let's say there are 2 billion people who profess faith F. Or 1 billion. Or 500 million.
We have: probability of committing a terrorist attack given the person professes faith F = 10/2 billion or 10/1 billion or 10/500 million, etc. i.e. 0.0000005% which is close to the odds of winning the powerball jackpot.
This logic leads to Germany imprisoning women who speak out against rape longer than rapists. Islam is fundamentally illiberal. Secular “cultural Muslims” can assimilate to the west but not devout Muslims.
Edit: and why is speaking out against rape an offense that leads to imprisonment? Leftists, as opposed to left-liberals, have always hated free speech. Cancel culture is just Marcuse’s liberalizing tolerance.
Yes, the paradox of liberalism is that the openness of society will ultimately invite in people who are not tolerate or open to others. This isn't some gotcha, it goes all the way back to Locke's Treatise on Toleration.
So the question is how do you have an open and inviting society when inevitably some of the groups within the society do not want a liberal society? It is not easy.
I think it's pretty interesting though that you single out very observant muslims who are 1% of the population and have essentially no political power (someone like Mamdani I would consider quite secular, I also do not see Rashida Tlaib, Keith Ellison, and Ilhan Omar as illiberal even though they are devout muslims).
Meanwhile it seems like if there's ever a J.D. Vance administration there will be plenty of room for explicitly antisemitic people. https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/22/politics/jd-vance-nick-fuentes-antisemitism-analysis
> "So the question is how do you have an open and inviting society when inevitably some of the groups within the society do not want a liberal society? It is not easy."
That's a very thoughtful response so I appreciate your tone and insight. But we've already had a couple test cases of what ignoring illiberal cultures does. The first was Lebanon, which was a liberal and tolerant nation until Muslims became the majority. The second is the ongoing process of poor assimilation of Muslims in Europe. The assumption that Muslims from fundamentalist nations would assimilate into the dominant secular culture has proven false.
So I would start by not allowing immigration from fundamentalist Islamic nations and removing temporary protective status for Somalians.
Legal immigration from Latin America, Asia, and non-Muslim Africa? Sure.
Maybe those Muslims attempting to immigrate from fundamentalist Islamic nations are doing so because they hate living in a fundamentalist Islamic nation. Probably lots of Iranians fit this category.
Yes, that's true. We could in theory disaggregate reasons for immigrating and pick the genuine refugees. I'd be perfectly fine with that. one of my favorite public intellectuals, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, fits that category. She is of Somalian ethnicity, victim of FGM and migrated to England to escape a forced marriage at, I think, 13.
That's an interesting grouping you've chosen--I would not put Ellison and Omar in the same "bin" in 1000 years.
Tlaib is so incoherent I won't even try to figure it out.
Those were just 4 Muslims in politics I could think of off the top of my head. I am not a fan of Tlaib's politics necessarily but it seems like a real stretch to think they are a threat to religious tolerance...
Oh, I don't think any of them pose any such threat, but I have immense intellectual, professional, small-r republican respect for Keith Ellison. In contrast, every day that I am not embarrassed by Ilhan Omar is a special, lucky day.
Do you really want to bring up antisemitism on the Right after what's been revealed by Gov Shapiro about his vetting process for VP?
I do not know much about this particular controversy and will just say I do not think Democrats are perfect on all aspects on religious tolerance.
But Democrats are attempting to grapple with the paradox of toleration. Republicans are not and are trying to create a Christian country.
There is a strain of sort of "conservative liberalism" that you seem to be advocating that suggests the best way to have an open society is to have a fairly strong hand of an establishment religion, like Christianity, to keep less tolerant religions in check. But I have two issues with this perspective:
(1) The Right as it exists in society has NOT shown any interest in this perspective of like a liberal Christian hegemony. J.D. Vance, etc. are very opposed to pluralism.
(2) The conception of Christianity as an open and tolerant faith owes a lot to small l Liberal Republicans/Conservatives like George HW Bush, Reagan, etc. There is now a pretty long and established tradition of mainline Protestants facilitating a religiously plural society. While a lot of the members of this tradition are Christians, most political Christians today reject the key tenets of tolerance that mainline Protestants have traditionally espoused. While the tradition of political toleration started with mainline Protestants in the USA, obviously Romney's political approach to faith is similar, and there are many Catholics with a similar approach.
I think if you throw in with contemporary Conservatives on issues of religious freedom/toleration, you aren't getting a political approach to religion that respects pluralism. You are getting a government that will be run by Christians in a way that is increasingly intolerant to minority faiths.
Looking at Mr. Machete's comment record throughout the section on this fine Monday, choosing to engage with a single fig leaf of it--well, I guess it's certainly a choice.
I would simply not allow explicitly illiberal ideologies to gain prominence in a liberal society.
Democrats are not really trying to grapple with the paradox of tolerance. They're more trying to ignore it, like say the standard views of most Muslims on LGBT issues clash with progressive standards.
I'm trying to avoid the US becoming like the UK.
I have zero interest in the US becoming a theocracy.
(It's a wee bit funny to be worried about Christian theocracy when Trump himself is very much not a religious man and has in fact made the evangelicals chill on their usual crusade to restrict abortion. And Vance, love him or hate him, is married to a Hindu.)
There is nothing antisemitic about asking tough questions. I'm sure Biden's team asked Kamala some tough ones too.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
Well we know they didn't ask Walz very tough questions.
He spent half a year working for the Israeli Embassy's public diplomacy section, which I don't think he bothered to mention in his indignant revelation.
I might regret engaging here but your first sentence seems like a total non-sequitur. In what way does Neeraj's Bayesian analysis "lead to Germany imprisoning women who speak out against rape longer than rapists"? I don't think any part of the second thing follows from Bayesian logic.
Saying "the base rate of problems by group X is so small we should ignore their illiberal tendencies" has led to the problems like widespread rape, coerced marriage, ongoing FGM and so on in Europe.
That point actually makes sense conceptually (though I'm sure we would disagree about details in practice), but it doesn't follow that women speaking out against rape be imprisoned at all, let alone longer than people convicted of rape (once someone is convicted, base rates no longer apply). I just think you're bringing multiple things you're mad about into a context when they don't apply (the supposed left-wing defenses of Iran also have no relevance here).
'and why is speaking out against rape an offense that leads to imprisonment?'
Is it? Could you link to some examples of this (or at least one) so we can see what it's about?
I have a hard time believing 'speaking out against rape' is a crime under German law but if you prove it then fair enough.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-woman-given-harsher-sentence-155055252.html
You are aware of the fact that in Europe, people are routinely imprisoned for their social media posts?
Thank you for providing a link. It has to be said though, that person was imprisoned for 'defamation', not for 'speaking out against rape'. I think reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether sending a stranger a message calling them a 'pig' should be a punishable or imprisonable offence, but let's describe it accurately.
I live in Europe. I am very aware that Europe does not have the same history or tradition of free speech absolutism as the USA. I don't have a problem with this, I'm not a free speech absolutist.
> "let's describe it accurately."
First, the only moral way to describe this law is as an illiberal attack on free speech.
Second, and only second, should we get into the specifics. Defamation involves statements of fact, not opinions.
> I think reasonable people can agree to disagree about whether sending a stranger a message calling them a 'pig' should be a punishable or imprisonable offence, but let's describe it accurately.
He's a just-convicted rapist. It's wild to me that in Germany statements of fact can still be considered defamatory, and no, I don't think reasonable people can disagree on this point.
[Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case.]
You can't let people duck out on court hearings because they think it's unfair, so I guess they were obligated to put her in jail for that.
I think you should be able to send someone a mean message on WhatsApp and not have the government intervene, but that's because I'm an American and believe in free speech. If the government is going to say you can't send mean messages on WhatsApp, then they definitely shouldn't be in the "we're going to ignore it because this guy had it coming" business. It sounds a lot like if she had bothered to attend the hearing and said, "Oh yeah sorry I shouldn't have done that," there would have been no jail time.
Right. Muslims are fine. As long as they're not too Muslim. Mighty liberal of you.
Not all ideologies and worldviews are compatible with Enlightenment liberalism. Two examples in current times are secular leftism (Rousseau --> Marx --> Marcuse + Foucault) and fundamentalist Islam.
The left's cultural relativism is (1) empirically false, and (2) puts them in the position of defending oppression. History will judge them.
In the Framers' time, people thought Catholicism was incompatible with liberal democracy. How's that holding up?
> "In the Framers' time, people thought Catholicism was incompatible with liberal democracy. How's that holding up?"
In the Framers' time, Catholicism *was* incompatible with liberal democracy.
Catholics fought against every movement towards republican (small r) government starting with the Spanish waging war against the Dutch in 1581 running through the English in both the Interregnum and the Glorious Revolution, and continuing their opposition to secular democracies during the French Revolution and onward.
Catholic nations did not have stable liberal democracies until *after* WW2.
Better than one might have assumed until recently given the integralist movement, of which JD Vance is likely a proponent (or at least close to one).
So should we expel all the Satmar and Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox Jews?
And don't get me started on the Amish. . .
First of all, we can't expel citizens. Second, the Amish aren't raping anyone or committing welfare fraud while refusing to work. Are they insular? Sure. But even in a Rawlsian sense, being insular is perfect compatible with liberalism.
Because Germany doesn't have iron clad free speech protections. Consequently, the laws restricting speech can be leveraged to score political points.
I think Matt had noted this before, but it's time to go back to being a melting pot and not a salad bowl, and leftists aren't liberal.
I think this is an ignorant and very “present-minded” perspective. Others have already addressed the obvious points but I’ll note beyond that, that as someone who is of Islamic descent (but is not Muslim) that I don’t think of Islam as fundamentally illiberal.
Islam has had many interpretations throughout history and not all interpretations are illiberal in their nature. Arguably, the current iteration of Islam that is predominant in the Middle East and South Asia is a pretty direct result of European imperialism (hence, why it’s funny Europeans complain about it).
Islam in Andalusia, in some periods of the Ottoman Empire, under the reign of the Mughals prior to Aurangzeb was fairly liberal at least by the standards of the time.
It’s unfortunate of course that illiberal strains of Islam have as much currency as they do today but that’s just a product of our current historical circumstance. It doesn’t have to be that way and I think it’s a little gross to treat a historical tradition that’s been around for centuries as something that must be rejected whole cloth.
Whether or not Islam is "fundamentally illiberal" is not relevant to this discussion. What matters is whether Muslims in nations like Somalia are liberal.
You’re just modifying your own argument, at least stay consistent. My point stands regardless, humans are not a monolith. How can you know at an individual level if any of these Somalis speak of belong to the illiberal strains or the liberal ones? As I’ve said before, there are many interpretations and there’s a long history associated with this tradition.
Again, I am simply arguing that we should not judge people just by the fact that they are Muslim.
First, I do believe that the Quran, properly understood, is fundamentally illiberal. But that's a different debate, usually between Christians and Muslims.
Second, it is the nature of debates to sharpen and narrow the points of disagreement. That's actually good-faith behavior, but you are presenting it as bad-faith.
Third, yes, Somalia is fundamentally illiberal in its current culture. I do think that a more confident and homogenous Christian culture could essentially force Somalians to assimilate. A more confident and homogeneous secular culture could too, but current secular culture is bogged in relativism.
Edit: by force I don't mean by the sword/barrel of a gun, but by having enough mojo that immigrants would assimilate to the dominant culture.
Islam is fundamentally illiberal.
It has no concept of the secular. It does not make men and women equal. It does not have an emphasis on individual rights superseding religious authority. There's a goddamn death penalty for apostasy.
"... was fairly liberal at least by the standards of the time."
BY THE STANDARDS OF THE TIME is not "liberal."
Some Muslims embrace liberal concepts, but of all the Islamic countries out there, there's not a great track record of liberalism. (Especially if one has strong progressive views.)
You can support Muslims jettisoning the more problematic aspects of the theology (as many Christians have done for theirs), but pretending Islam is not fundamentally illiberal is just nonsense.
Of course, that's part of the two step that is rampant in Europe.
1. Islam is compatible with Western culture/liberalism.
2. Anyone arguing otherwise is engaging in hate speech and will prosecuted.
I mostly agree with you except that much of current Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalism derives from the Wahhabi movement in what would become Saudi Arabia which was just about the area most insulated from European imperialism there was. The Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) was more arguably related to British imperialism in Egypt, I'll grant you.
What if we are talking about carrying an illegal firearm? At what threshold would we be ok with stop and frisk? 1% chance of getting it right? 5%? I think personally at 20% I would probably start to be more ok with it.
If it were 20%, maybe. Although you'd want the following caveats:
1) You still do stop-and-frisk people not in that group sometimes, so if they start trending up to their own 20% you know.
2) You stop when it drops down low enough again (and use point 1 to catch it again)
Really, the key here is I'd expect this to rapidly change behavior, and keeping the policy going evenly at #1 should help keep it lower. It might still stay higher (3% for a group instead of 0.5% or something), but this incentive effect would also change behavior to make it short-lived.
I'd worry about the police abusing it with bad statistics, so I'd also want good watch dog agencies to check on it.
I'm not sure how I'd feel in that actual hypothetical case. I think at best it would be the "lesser of two evils", but having the supporters/police acknowledge the negative effects might help.
I think we (myself included) are confusing all sorts of different concepts in this thread. Wasn't the issue with stop-and-frisk the legal nature of the stop itself, and only secondarily that it was targeted at certain neighborhoods (not at certain skin colors)?
Also - this is probably blasphemous given all the lawyers here, but I'm less worried about bad statistics in police profiling than I am about bad statistics from lawyers second-guessing them.
If you can imagine an ideal, hypothetical, "good cop", the one we'd all like to see more of, then that person is going to be very experienced in using their judgement and intuition to spot when "something isn't right". He/she is going to be going off subtle changes in the way a person walks, where they put their hands, the way they dress, etc.. to form an opinion on whether or not a particular person is carrying an illegal weapon.
How much this ideal exists, I don't know, but this is exactly the way many experienced LEOs who take a lot of pride in their work talk about themselves and the way undercover LEOs like Donnie Brasco or undercover DEAs talk about themselves.
And I don't imagine "bad cops" using looking at a spreadsheet of statistics to become racists and prejudiced. But I do imagine a government lawyer looking at the "good cop" stop-and-frisk record and second guessing their stop statistics.
I think a real danger in the way our civilian-police interaction has evolved is that, at least by the social-media-video eyeball metric*, the frequency of irreversible outcomes has gone up. If you frisk a guy who didn't need to be frisked, okay. And maybe you even found some weed, and his lawyer can argue that the stop was illegitimate, and there will be a process to adjudicate that. But bullets don't get un-fired, no matter how badly all parties might want to.
* It is obviously the case that this is a broken metric. God knows how many white deputies "saw a black guy going for a gun" in the deep rural south in the 1950s and no further question was asked.
I think you run into a "speed cameras" situation here where being stopped and frisked is so intrusive that if you were required to do it to it to everyone, rather than an unpopular minority, they would stop doing it.
(I think speed cameras are fine; if they weren't proven to actually increase safety I would be against them but they do increase safety.)
Speed cameras also only get you if you're actually speeding. The intrusiveness for non-speeders is at most that they are a camera.
I previously kind of opposed them on a privacy (are they photographing you even when not speeding) basis but the seeming decline in people obeying traffic laws has changed my weighting to value their deterrence more than the limited privacy change.
This might be the take that Matt has changed my mind on the most.
For the most part I agree, but I think there is a complex interplay with the consent of the government when fines can be issued truly en masse.
I bet many of us can think of a particular chokepoint or stretch of road in our region or metro that "everyone" agrees is unreasonably restrictive. Right now, there's not much disincentive for a blue-city mayor to point to pedestrian death rate vs. vehicle speed, knock a major thoroughfare from 40 down to 30, and then throw out their shoulder patting themselves on the back for "making [CITY] safer for all". They know everybody, cops included, will just keep doing 40. Different story, I suspect, when you introduce a traffic camera to this situation.
I'm all for speed cameras, especially if they result in people slowing down, and I give serious side eye to people that are against them because they are basically admitting they think they have the right to go far above posted speed limits.
Going 10+ over posted speed limits in a residential area can easily become lethal and you should absolutely be issued a ticket if you do it. Same with running red lights.
Also, it's not just about who is frisked, but how often. Terry stops are practiced by police all over the US, and black men are overrepresented in them all over the US too.
But NYC under Bloomberg ramped them to a crazy high level. I don't think there was necessarily more racial disproportionality in NYC's Terry stops than most other cities, but because there were so many more of them, they had a much bigger impact on young black men in high-crime neighborhoods compared to other cities, eventually leading to a backlash and a court case stopping them (which the city, at that point run by Bill de Blasio, did not appeal).
The demographics of NYC was rapidly changing over this same period. High crime populations were moving out and being replaced by much lower crime immigrant populations and gentrifiers. But because the replacements were mostly of the same census demographic groups, no one noticed the change.
That is pretty close to what courts have said (in practice; they don't put a number on it)
Note that in the NYC stop and frisk a few years back, "52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found." Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540 (SD NY 2013)
So, police were clearly frisking far too many people -- i.e., they did not have probable cause. It is harder to determine whether there were too many stops, though 12% of stops led to either an arrest of a summons, so they might actually have been conducting stops based in reasonable cause. (Note that a stop requires only reasonable suspicion of any criminal activity, while a frisk requires reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed).
I think stop and frisk is the easier question. It's clearly unconstitutional, no matter what the percentage.
You can't stop somebody without probable cause.
??? The Warren Court held in 1968 that probable cause is not needed for a stop. Only reasonable suspicion is needed, a lower standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._Ohio
And frisks for weapons can be done with reasonable suspicion that the suspect is armed.
Same damn thing. Yeah, if you see someone crawling out of a broken window, stop them.
But just walking down the street, nope that's not reasonable suspicion of anything. Even if they happen to look and dress "urban"
Well, it isn't the same thing. Knowing the difference is important for understanding whether police are complying with the law.
And framing the issue as whether or not police can stop someone simply for walking down the street looking urban is not helpful. Essentially no one thinks that is ok. The issue is whether that or similar attributes can ever be a contributing factor at all.
right, and the numbers are even worse if you define the group as Nobel prize winners. Selection bias is a real thing. Anyway, i knew as soon as i posted it i would get a statistics lesson and wanted to change it to percentage as in if x percent of nobel prize winners were murderers, but i was too lazy so took the stats lesson instead.
The argument doesn't work even with percentages! Lets say 100% of terrorist attacks or 100% of homicides are committed by people of a certain characteristic. If terrorist attacks or homicides are a low probability event to begin with (as they are) the prior probability of that event happening is already low. And if the characteristic is somewhat widely shared in the population, the conditional probability will be low too.
Also extremely low: your chance of catching the one terrorist with the practice, which is another good argument against.
No, percentages applied to the group, not the offense. As per below, 75% of ex prisoners re offend. That's the percentage I'm talking about.
Ah, got it!
I think this is a fair point.
What if we're talking about immigration, though?In the percentages we're talking about is the percentage of people that are antisemitic?
Or should we bring in people that are say, eighty percent likely to be antisemitic
I think we can look at current immigration law as a guide. There are a bunch of screening questions, for eg:
"Have you ever been a member of, or in any way affiliated with, the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party?"
"Do you have a communicable disease of public health significance?"
"Did you participate in Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1945?"
And you had to undergo screening for HIV (this has been discontinued).
In each case the test is still individual. i.e. not are you from a country where 80% of the people are communists. (Or if a lot of people there have tuberculosis, or were in the Nazi party.) But whether you as an individual are. After all, you may be seeking to flee communism!
Of course, when it comes to letting in foreigners one does not have any obligation of "fairness". Everyone may be excluded, or any random group may be excluded. The current debate is whether the executive may do so unilaterally or require a law that prohibits certain nationalities.
yes, I totally agree you still need an individualized assessment. And today that would probably include an AI review of your social media.
This is an argument against randomly searching people but not against profiling per se.
Yes. And there are some widely accepted cases of profiling. Eg: young males pay higher auto insurance premiums, smokers are charged higher price for life insurance, etc. Gary Becker used these as examples where a rational agent, with limited resources, maximizes utility. But even in his utilitarian calculation he offsets the social cost if the profiled group withdraws from society or feels humiliated.
I don't know if "young males" or "smokers" feel part of a community with other young males or smokers in society, but people of an ethnicity or religious group seem to. So one may not take offense due to higher premiums from belonging to the group of young males, but do from belonging to an ethnicity.
A question: why does everyone accept higher auto (and life) insurance premiums for young males than young females, but higher health insurance premiums for young females (who use health care at higher rates than young males) are explicitly illegal?
Fundamentally, we as a society are _very_ inconsistent in terms of when we are OK with statistical profiling of this sort.
As for the "feels part of a community" bit: I certainly know young males who feel the insurance situation is deeply unfair and take offense... Anecdotes are not data, of course.
1. Women are charged higher for long term care insurance, women receive smaller annuity payouts, women pay higher disability insurance premiums
2. If young men take offense at auto premium disparity one recourse is to move to California, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, or North Carolina where this practice is outlawed. It is by no means universally accepted.
I think these examples just point to the inconsistencies Boris was pointing out.
The double standards around gender are kind of wild sometimes.
Think about it in relative terms and do it for the other ~6 billion people.
Now the comparison seems informative a bit.
This is a moronic way to do the math when we're talking about airport security and it's about how much scrutiny to apply to any given individual.
The problem with this argument is that even if people with, say, blue eyes were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder than people with brown eyes, the overall likelihood that a particular individual with blue eyes is a murderer would still be extremely low because murder is so rare.
Right but there are other correlations that are much higher. For example about 75% of ex prisoners go on to get arrested again within three years of being released. So yes it works with some groups and not others.
And that’s fine if there’s a standard monitoring or follow up on ex-prisoners. But not skin color or tattoos or dress.
Boy what if certain tattoos had certain meanings and some correlated to gangs?
Wouldn't that be wild?
Or certain articles of clothing?
Still not ok to violate people’s rights over.
That's a very stupid way to live.
You do not have a right to avoid discrimination based on voluntary decisions for crying out loud.
Prisoner isn’t an in-born characteristic. I think most people are fine with stereotyping someone for their own past conduct, just not for what group they were born into.
Criminality is heritable.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25936380/
Again, you lack a strong grasp of the statistics you attempt to use. The association between genetics and personality traits and personality traits and specific illegal actions is so weak that it is screened out by conventional forensic and witness evidence of a crime. If police focused on weak demographic correlations they would waste most of their time harassing productive citizens with bad parents and actual crime rates would increase for lack of sensible investigation practices.
Do you know what a "straw man" is?
Do you know the lifetime statistics on becoming a felon by race?
Do you understand how to integrate probability into a holistic decision-making process for a particular context?
Do you know what "profiling," "proactive policing," and "broken windows theory" are?
And maybe i wasn't clear but i wasn't making a distinction between inborn characteristics and acquired or chosen characteristics (age or religion in my hypothetical, or more concrete things like gang tattoos or something). The triggering group isn't important for me, it's just do people feel stop and frisk is out of bounds regardless of the circumstances.
You're missing another category here: characteristics that are neither inborn nor chosen, but are placed upon you by society--hence, social constructs. That's the category that's been troubling me in the hypothetical you're positing here.
What kinds of characteristics are placed on you by society?
The relevant data point is not the percent of ex-prisoners who eventually get arrested. It is the percent of ex-prisoners who are committing a crime or carrying evidence of a crime at the time of the stop and/or search. That is still going to be very low.
I have no problem profiling people based on their own past conduct. But that’s very different than profiling people based a physical characteristic they were born with.
How much of Matt's examples fall into the former vs latter categories? I'm not so sure they fall as cleanly into the latter as Matt's piece assumes.
As it happens the US murder rate is 5/100,000, so if blue eyed people were 10,000 times more likely to commit murder, fully half of them would be murderers and I would, even as a blue eyed person, be okay with us being watched closely, because I don't want to be a victim of blue-on-blue crime.
Ok. Let’s say 1000. Also, the murder rate doesn’t closely track the number of murderers because of mass shootings.
It isn't mass shootings, which make up a trivial percent of total murders. The Brady Center says one percent of all gun-related deaths, so maybe three percent of homicides, based on the rest of their data. https://www.bradyunited.org/resources/statistics
But it is true that one cannot assume that one murder = one murderer. One murder could = 2+ murders (eg gang murders), and one or two people can commit murders on separate occasions (again, eg gang murders) https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03x.php
Right. I wasn’t really thinking of Columbine type shootings. More like a guy kills his wife and kids or robs a liquor store and kills the cashier and a cop, etc.
I am pretty sure they define "mass murder" as 3 or more dead. Or maybe 3 or more shot. The definition seems to vary a lot.
At the incident level, FBI data for 2019 has almost 90% of homicide incidents involving a single victim. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-4.xls
But, again, we don't know how many were by the same offender or group of offenders.
Still, the average murders/murderer in a given year is probably below 1.1 or so.
I'm still going to arrest the Night King if I see him on the street, unconstitutional profiling be damned.
It's more about circumstances then rates.
If a school shooter in on the loose , and he happens to be an X guy in a red sweatshirt (insert whatever race you are for X) then virtually no one will complain when the police stop you for questioning. But if you're just looking for a generic murderer, then stopping and frisking every person of the highest murder-rate race really isn't effective by any stretch of the imagination.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the stop-and-frisk program was much less racially targeted then Matt is implying above. The police were stopping and frisking young men in **neighborhoods** that had experienced a lot of shooting. In early 2000s NYC, these were almost all Black and Latino neighborhoods, and you can get into arguing whether or not that made the targeting itself racist. But to me it sounds somewhat close to hotspots policing methods that smart liberals like Matt usually argue in favor of.
I do think it is just an insincerely held view, no one is advocating stopping and searching elderly women for guns.
Which might be dumb! Or a good opportunity for a crime syndicate. Years ago, I lived in a city where an elderly woman in a quilted winter coat was holding up banks. It took a while to catch her because she caught everyone off guard. "She looked like my grandma!"
Fortunately, most crime is not that sophisticated. But truly organized crime does take advantage of profiling factors. Drug smugglers are one of the best examples.
European drug smugglers once realised Hasidic Jews are unlikely to be seen as criminals so tried to recruit them as drug mules.
My simple answer is the person who proposes this should volunteer for the treatment.
If YOU are willing to be stopped and frisked repeatedly, I will listen to your racist proposal. But if not, it's scummy to "volunteer" other innocent people for things you would find appalling.
I think it’s perfectly fair that as a young man I had higher insurance premiums, and would have no issues with other forms of enhanced monitoring or pricing that are similarly non-punitive.
I don’t think you should actually *punish* people though (like what is transparently occurring in MN), but I think stop and frisk and similar *investigatory* policies are usually fine
Of course no line is stark, and police/etc can use investigation as a pretext for harassment, but it’s just silly to ignore things like that ~every mass shooter is male, if you’re looking for a mass shooter.
Yeah but there's a huge difference between narrowing your search for males when you are looking for a specific person (and even then, you don't do it UNTIL there's some witness who said it was a male) and imposing oppression on tons of innocent people because they are "statistically more likely to be the one".
And believe me, if you were stopped and frisked for no reason as much as Black people are stopped by police for no reason, you wouldn't say it was OK.
Given how much black people are harmed by other black people, no one is helped more for being tough on crime than black people.
Proactive policing saves lives, with the tradeoff of inconvenience for the law abiding.
There's another problem here that people never talk about enough. Which is, even if you are just tough on crime and not racist yourself, you don't actually want your cops to be racist (and yes, it is racist to presume people might be criminals because of statistical inferences about their race). Because people who apply these statistical inferences are more likely to dismiss evidence that doesn't fit their racist paradigms.
There's a very famous case that exemplifies this-- Amanda Knox. There's tons of evidence that she's either guilty of murder or was at least present at the scene and took actions to protect her boyfriend Rafaelle Sollecito from a murder charge. Seriously-- there's enough evidence to convict her of murder, and her lawyers won on some VERY questionable arguments to reverse her conviction.
She's also an upper-middle class media savvy white woman. The kind of person that many people, with their racist and sexist priors ("informed" by statistics) about who commits murders, thinks could have never done it.
And its one thing for media elites and stuff to buy into what someone like Amanda Knox is selling them, but you definitely DO NOT want your cops to think like that. You don't want your cops to think "only the Black guy could possibly be guilty of murder here" and not fully investigate all the leads.
But that's the flip side of all this aggressive racist policing against supposedly "statistically likely to commit crimes" Black people. It's going to lead to missing criminals who don't check the demographic boxes, and even possibly to some false convictions.
So no, racism is a terrible way to structure your criminal justice system.
I agree that it would be bad for cops to be racist in the sense of having racial animus toward any group. But you're simply trying to avoid noticing reality.
"and yes, it is racist to presume people might be criminals because of statistical inferences about their race"
Have you seen the stats on NYC shootings broken down by the shooter's and victim's races? You have a definition of "racist" that simply condemns statistical literacy and pattern matching. It's insane because we certainly don't have that standard for sexism (though you do try to criticize that too; very brave of you), and the well-established gap in crime between men and women (Obligatory: "What is a woman, anyway?").
In a liberal society, we should, as much as possible, judge individuals as individuals. But reasonable suspicion need not be blocked off from very useful, observable categories.
I don't think you're making a great case for yourself by bringing up Amanda Knox, and I don't advocate we try to mimic the Italian justice system.
Please also notice how you go from ~"it's racist to be statistically informed about probabilities" to the absolutist straw man of "only the black guy could possibly be guilty of murder here."
Please also notice that you completely sidestepped the issue of who the victims of crime are disproportionately.
I think my core claim here is just that you said "you shouldn't be able to call for more group-based policies unless you are okay sometimes being in a group that such a policy applies to". I think that:
1) I am okay with this in at least some contexts
2) It would be better if nobody was stopped and frisked. We should ideally find ways to enforce the law that do not require triaging resources like this. I believe that we can do so.
3) But because of crime disparities, we will necessarily have enforcement disparities *to some degree*, even with ~perfect policing (e.g. if I was investigating the Italian mafia, most of the people I investigate will be Italian, even if my policy isn't "investigate the Italians"). We should be prepared to grapple with that while trying our hardest to make the system provide a form of justice that people trust and feel is fair.
If you decide the problem is so bad that we need to use profiling as a tool, there are ways to make the interactions more humane and polite. Having masked thugs with guns doing racial profiling is a terrible combination.
Civil rights law does allow some permitted discrimination in cases where the accommodations required would not be "reasonable." Like a knowledgeable lawyer friend once explained to me that a school district with gay students could probably fire a teacher for belonging to Westboro baptist church. In that case you either have to discriminate on basis of religion or monitor the person's behavior and grading so closely that it's an unreasonable burden on you.
The kind of case you're imagining might verge into that territory. My one objection to Matt's piece is that I feel similarly about visas for eg low income Syrians. Such a high proportion of that demographic consists of people who reject liberal values, and it's so hard to individually test for that trait, that I would be fine with a blanket denial of visas to a group like that.
This is exactly the thing that Matt's piece kind of elides. There are circumstances, probably the vast majority of circumstances, where a color-blind principle is superior, not just morally but also in effectiveness.
But there are other circumstances, such as immigration rules and limits, where the calculus changes quite a bit. And in the case of immigration, our system is already vastly discriminatory to people of various nationalities. We have diversity visas that favor small population wealthier countries and targeted refugee programs, and special visas for North Americans, etc...
Yeah... an example I use sometimes to make the principles clear to progressive friends is, "What if a large number of white nationalist Afrikaaners wanted to all move to the same US state in the 80s?" Most people seem to understand that targeted measures to prevent that could be justified.
It’s one thing to discriminate when it comes to who you let in to the country, I don’t have much of a problem with it. We probably shouldn’t have let tens of thousands of Somalis in to form insular enclaves in a couple of American cities. I have a much worse problem with the government discriminating against one group vs another when they’re legal residents or citizens, but I’m not sure America can handle high-mindedness here either. Everything in our culture has devolved into identity politics and group competition. It’s not a good thing, but it’s the actual situation.
How do you “not let them” form enclaves without requiring employers across the board to hire them, fund the local schools adequately, provide subsidized job and language training, good transportation to jobs, etc
I was thinking we just shouldn’t have let them in at all, because yeah, it is hard to force a backward culture to assimilate.
It might be possible to set up asylum guidelines for example, for women fleeing Iran because they were ID'd as lighting cigarettes and burning Khameni photos on social media and therefore at risk of arrest, torture, execution etc.
My impression of U.S. asylum rules (without doing research right now) is that they can be pretty flexible.
Another group could be women from Saudi Arabia who demonstrate confinement or kidnapping by their male relatives.
One problem we've had with asylum during Democratic administrations is opening it up to anyone who demonstrates they're a victim of domestic violence. So maybe in the the case of SA it would be state-sanctioned domestic violence.
I’m almost fine with opening the borders up to all women and very rarely men, given differential crime statistics
I assume some amount of restriction on where they can live as they are admitted to the US, which is reasonably common worldwide but not in the US.
We might call that a ghetto. We do have neighborhoods called that, but anyone who can get out is free to leave.
It'd be kind of a "reverse ghetto."
"Welcome to America, Somali person! There are 49 states you can move to. Have your pick, and good luck"
You have to understand that the costs of profiling are not just the opportunity cost of using resources to do the profiling, or the inconvenience experienced by an innocent person who is profiled. The main cost is that profiling, in practice, erodes public trust in law enforcement and civic harmony generally--and undermines the ideals of individualism and equal justice under the law that unify Americans into a single national identity.
Hypothetically you can probably choose *some* threshold at which the benefits of the profiling outweigh even those costs. But I don't think there has ever been a scenario in America where this threshold has ever been reached (even Japanese internment in retrospect is thought to have done little or nothing to enhance the security of America during WW2).
"the costs of profiling are not just the opportunity cost of using resources to do the profiling"
As opposed to indiscriminate use of limited resources? Please.
"The main cost is that profiling, in practice, erodes public trust in law enforcement and civic harmony generally"
I'd argue what is a worse effect on public trust and civic harmony is high rates of crime by extremely predictable demographics.
"But I don't think there has ever been a scenario in America where this threshold has ever been reached"
Urban crime. Airport security. Bringing up the Japanese in WWII is preposterous because it was nothing like "profiling" being advocated for law enforcement. We simply took the ~whole population and imprisoned them in a time of war.
Anyone who has ever sought to live in a place with "good schools" has justified the use of profiling by law enforcement. Pretending otherwise is cope.
>I'd argue what is a worse effect on public trust and civic harmony is high rates of crime by extremely predictable demographics.
I think you'd have more of a point if profiling were the only way to effectively reduce crime, but it's not--you're offering a false choice. There are plenty of things police (and the government generally) can do to reduce crime effectively without the "help" of racial profiling.
Did I advocate profiling as the "only way to effectively reduce crime."
I really don't think I did and so you should probably not try to argue against me be falsely claiming I am "offering a false choice."
I think profiling is somewhat of an inevitability no matter how many bias trainings and oversight mechanisms you implement, if we intend to actually fight crime at all. Police for America and bringing in better people to be cops is probably the only thing that would help, and it would only help at the margin
What percentage of murders are committed by men in comparison to women
90% / 10%. And that's why stop-and-frisk policies were targeted at neighborhoods with high rates of shootings, and allowed police officers discretion in choosing whom to search.
Just about everyone is aware of this gender discrepancy and it permeates all aspects of the justice system. Only 20% of murder victims, for example, are female, but if you look at death row inmates over 50% of their victims were female, and only 1-2% of death row inmates are female themselves.
I've also looked at quite a few of the close to 200 death row convictions that have been exonerated, and among the minority where the exonerate was probably factually innocent (the majority were probably factually guilty of their crime, or a closely related one, despite being legally cleared) one of the most common scenarios was a female being the actual murderer but a nearby man getting the blame.
Bayesian probability. The prior matters.
Going from "given a crime occurred, what's the observed likelihood that it's from a group F", to "given a person is in group F, what's the probability they committed a crime" is a bridge too far for most. But questioning this leap will resolve many questions.
The right standard is "probable cause". What statistical probability does that represent? Courts have refused to put a number on it officially, but the Supreme Court has clarified that it is less than "preponderance of the evidence", so less than 50%, and unofficial polls of judges put it at between 45 and 50%.
So, I'd say that if a given population commits enough crimes that a randomly selected member of that population is >45% likely to have committed a given type of crime, then it's reasonable to stop members of that population to check if they have based solely on group membership, *assuming* that's the only information about them. Other aspects of their appearance or behavior could, of course, alter the probability and would need to be taken into consideration.
So if a group commits 1000X as many murders as another group, it depends what the base rate of murder is. If the murder rate is 5/100,000, then this hypothetical population's murder rate is 5/1,000, so (absent additional information), the probability that a randomly-selected individual is a murderer is 0.5%. Too low.
To reach the probable cause threshold, the group would have to have a rate of 45,000/100,000, or 9,000 times as many murders as the population as a whole. With a lower base rate, the multiplier would have to be higher. With a higher base rate it could be lower.
The standard for stop & frisk is reasonable suspicion, not probable cause.
Duh. Thinko. Still, you can pick a reasonable number for reasonable articulable suspicion and apply the same process, with roughly the same result: Unless the group is incredibly criminal, then no.
I have no idea idea what this comment means. I was merely pointing out the legal standard.
It's pretty straightforward. The question is: Supposing a sub-population (e.g. race) is objectively far more criminal than the general population, is there an objective way to determine when stopping and searching members of that population based only on their status as members of that sub-population can be justified.
My point is that yes, there is a simple statistical evaluation. If the criminality of the group is high enough that a randomly-selected member of that group has a probability of currently committing the relevant crime that meets the relevant legal standard for a stop-and-frisk, then it should be permissible to stop and frisk them.
According to a Duke University survey of judges, the median judge places "reasonable suspicion" at 42% probability (though with considerable variance). So, you can do the math.
I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that any racial group will ever meet this threshold for any crime. But if one did, racial profiling would be legally justifiable in that case.
Reasonable suspicion, legally, cannot be tied solely to race or ethnicity, but must be rooted in the “totality of circumstances.” Location, language, activity, occupation, etc. can be considered.
Well, sure, if they were 1000x more likely. Yes. Are you happy now?
Sincere question: is (was?) stop and frisk effective? I haven't looked into it in depth. But if we're contemplating such an illiberal policy, at minimum we ought to know if it does any good.
There were thousands of illegal guns confiscated during the Bloomberg years, so, yeah, pretty effective.
I’m the other hand, the hit rates were low single digits, so only one gun for every 50 - 100 innocent men who were frisked.
"The literature is all over the map"
https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-does-broken-windows-policing
My understanding is that it *helped* with the fall in crime in the Bloomberg/Giuliani years, but wasn't necessarily the main cause given the national decline in crime at the same time
Are there any identity groups out there that are examples of being many orders of magnitude greater of committing really bad acts?
Men and young people (18-25) are an order of magnitude more violent than women or old people (55+).
Sure, these are biological traits that we have a handful of policies on. Let's amend this to focus on social constructs.
But that's what i was saying about a blanket condemnation of stop and frisk as a method. As i said above, ca 75% of ex prisoners commit more crimes upon release. So is there a percentage of any group however defined where people are comfortable with the stop and frisk concept? Or is it just unacceptable as a policing practice regardless of its utility?
I think the definition of group matters a lot more than rate.
From a civil liberties perspective I'm ok with all sorts of intrusive tracking of ex prisoners (as parole actually does) and that's whether 10% or 75% commit more crimes.
But the rate I'm ok with is going to be vastly different if you change the group to age, sex or race.
It's also going to be very different if you change it to neighborhood. I might be ok with stop-and-frisk or other hotspot policing methods if the definition of group is "top 1% homicide neighborhoods".
So much of our existing legal practice already functions this way. Even before Trump, ICE and CBP agents could play by different rules within 200 miles of the border. So in those cases the group was anyone present within 200 miles of the border, who were presumably an order of magnitude more likely to be illegal immigrants.
That's a definitional situation when you're dealing with people that have actually established a history of committing crimes.
What troubles me is that you're positing a hypothetical that I have doubts on actually existing substantially. Maybe I'm wrong, so that's why I'm pondering what types of groups could meet this hypothetical.
I understand, but i'm not sure why you're excluding ex criminals as a possible group? i have no idea what the numbers are for other groups but maybe gang members drug addicts, i don't know but it was really meant to be an open ended question: is stop and frisk immoral at all costs, like many people feel about the death penalty or is it just the efficacy that makes people balk?
For murder the Black rate is about 10x the rest of the USA. Nationally, the Asian rates is about 1/4 the rest of the population, but in specific states or regions it's probably a full magnitude lower than other census categories.
When it comes to any of homicide, suicide, drug overdose, etc.., there are census category patterns but also very big regional patterns and the two interact in surprising ways:
https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/regional_gaps
Fwiw I also suspect there may be 10x differences among certain specific immigrant demographics when it comes to sexual abuse, but I don't have data-driven evidence. I mostly come about this opinion by manually glancing through publicly visible jail records.
OK, so is this enough of a magnitude for anyone here to make an argument for profiling on race or nationality?
I've said throughout these comments that this whole issue entirely depends on the circumstances. ie what is it exactly that we are trying to profile?
Say we're trying to profile for illegal guns, a la stop-and-frisk. Profiling on race or ethnicity would probably be ineffective compared to better alternatives, and also counter-productive based on moral or political ones.
A much better alternative would be to profile on a neighborhood basis, and depending on community buy-in, allow experienced LEOs to use their judgement in identifying who to stop-and-frisk so that we're not wasting time stopping every 90 year old grandma. But if the community hates the police you're probably stuck in a bad equilibrium that no aggressive profiling is really going to solve.
I'm kind of rambling, but even in states where the black homicide rate is greater than 10x the non-black rate, there are still much better cues for suspicion of potential weapons carrying than a person's skin color.
Fwiw - I've actually gone through an exercise like this using recidivism data from Broward county Florida. I used prior criminal history to predict who would be rearrested. The Black rearrest rate in that data was much higher than the non-Black rate, but despite that adding race as a variable did nothing to improve the model. The differing rates were already "baked in" to the other predictive variables like prior arrests, previous crime, age, etc...
Neighborhood based profiling seems sound to me, as long as the emphasis is on the neighborhood itself and not subsets of people within.
Pit bull owners?
Men.
Also addressed downthread in reply to Oliver.
I see that now, thank you. Quick fingers, slow eyes.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5996985/#:~:text=We%20estimate%20that%203%20%25%20of,African%20American%20adult%20male%20population.
I addressed prior history of committed crimes downthread.
There has to be a source of “reasonable suspicion” other than race.
FWIW, I don’t think stop and frisk is how murders are investigated. In general, however, the members of a victim’s family, neighborhood and general community will be the focus of an investigation, and this will often include members of a particular race or ethnic group. Maybe another example of starting with individuals.
Right, I think stop-and-frisk was a gun control strategy, with a hard-to-ignore side effect of arresting a fair few persons with outstanding warrants for any other sort of crime.
We live in a time when many basic principles we never thought would be tested are routinely violated. Many in the opposition end up sputtering in public debate because they are unpracticed at defending, from first principles, formerly uncontroversial views like "bribery is wrong", "due process should not be violated", "the US should not wage a war of imperial aggression against Denmark", etc.
Posts like this clearly and succinctly lay out these arguments we never thought anyone would have to make.--a great public service in these troubled times.
Thanks, and have a happy MLK day everyone
I agree with the sentiment in a general way, though I suppose I am one of the people who thinks immigration policy should be focused on, as MY put it, skills and human capital. In addition to disfavoring family reunification and refugees/low skill labor I would also give strong preference for ease of assimilation, which I understand may make some uncomfortable here, but I think the most stable and most obviously positive sum immigration to the voters is that which is noticed least.
Regarding racial profiling I think it's morally wrong, tends to undermine trust in the government by citizens, and often is just a lazy and not necessarily effective form of policing. The solution to that to me is an expectation of high standards and accountability from law enforcement. There's nothing stupid or bad going on with ICE that local and state law enforcement isn't fully capable of matching (and indeed it often has and does) when left without strong leadership and oversight.
Where I would maybe dissent a bit is towards the implicit idea that everyone is a blank slate, and even more so that all choices are equal. There's a lot of evidence out there that if you (i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married, your chances of poverty in America are statistically tiny. You can probably add a couple other things, including not being convicted of a felony. Further, the outcomes for children born and raised out of wedlock are statistically worse across numerous metrics most people would associate with a successful life. What really needs to be internalized is that, while the state can (and should!) do things like guarantee people have health insurance, a means of savings, and access to a basically functioning school system, it never can, and never will, create statistical parity (equity of you will) between those people and families that do things the right way and those that don't. We need to stop obsessing over the idea that it can. The question should be 'have we done right by this person as an individual?' That's all that matters.
Btw the original study that found that people who “(i) graduate high school, (ii) are willing to work any job, and (iii) do not have children until you are married” did find a fourth factor, and it was being black. And it’s all correlational, not causation—I’m sure most upper-middle-class women who decide to be single moms by surrogacy will do just fine. A more recent update finds that around 27% of white people who follow all 3 are low-income compared to 41% of black people: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/following-the-success-sequence-success-is-more-likely-if-youre-white/
A lot of this also depends on where exactly you set the poverty line, which is pretty arbitrary. No one in America is in absolute poverty while relative poverty is inherently relative so it makes no sense to say no one will be in it.
There are exceptions. There are nuances. And then there is the idea that nothing anyone does has any impact on their outcomes in life.
The data just doesn't back it up. Kids where a parent dies do just as well and when both parents remain alive and stay married. It's having the genes of someone who gets divorced (impulse control, deferred gratification etc.) that cause the bad outcomes.
The temptation of feel good nonsense is very strong. The numbers don't lie - it's all in the genes.
I assume genes are also important to a degree that sits uncomfortably with our meritocracy but I'm not the one peddling feel-good nonsense. The feel-good nonsense is the story that you can do whatever you want and not have any adverse consequences for yourself or the people you have a responsibility to.
“Further, the outcomes for children born and raised out of wedlock are statistically worse across numerous metrics most people would associate with a successful life.”
People that marry tend to be a different social class nowadays.
I hear you but I also think it's a bit galaxy brained. We try to talk ourselves into the idea that we're measuring a proxy for something else to avoid the obvious observation that two is usually better than one, and probably also that both sexes bring something important to the table that isn't always replicable in aggregate and scale when one (usually dad) is absent.
Now look I'm not all cromagnon about this. There are people doing their best in legitimately really hard circumstances outside of their control. There are people trying to help ameliorate a situation that isn't ideal and that they didn't necessarily create. There's also still forms subtle and not so subtle racial prejudice out there, even in spite of massive legal and determined, generation spanning cultural efforts against it.
But if you look at one population group with a 30% rate of out of wedlock births and one with 70%, the state is never, ever, going to create statistical parity in outcomes for those children as they age and grow into adulthood. I say it again for emphasis. Never. Ever. Calling the disparity simple racism in light of everything else and quite significant efforts to counter it is just not credible.
Democrats who ever supported Affirmative Action don't have a leg to stand when criticising GOP policies.
Any GOP policies ever? Seems a pretty tough standard, and precludes anyone from ever changing their mind. So if the GOP starts shooting Jews, no criticism is possible because of things said 30 years ago?
It wasn’t 30 years ago that the left was rejecting color-blindness though. It was at best only a few years ago! Each and every dem-appointed SCOTUS judge ruled in favor of continued racial discrimination in college admissions (they would probably dispute that characterization, but I am uninterested in euphemisms here). If the dems want to try to embrace color-blindness now, they frankly have an uphill battle to get anyone to believe them, regardless of anything the right does
Let's be clear about what we are talking about. Dispensing with the euphemisms, you are unhappy about the statistical discrimination of college admissions against Asians and poor whites (with demonstrated achievements) in favor of socially disadvantaged racial groups, legacies (overwhelmingly white and wealthy) and athletes?
For what its worth, I am! Was never high on my priority list but seemed bad. Don't mind the athletic ones, at least for sports that would help the college, but legacies are gross and affirmative action seems illegal, although I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the ethical impulse behind it.
If someone supported the equivalent of Numerus clausus until 2020, it is going to be very difficult for them to ever gain the moral highground on racial issues.
I think it's pretty easy to have the moral highground relative to people who want to put disfavored minority groups in camps and brutalize them.
So you agree that the GOP policies are bad, and you just think the Democratic policies are worse? Or do you affirmatively agree with the GOP policies? I assume not the latter, otherwise why rely on the tu quoque? Just trying to get you to be more forthcoming.
It depends which policies, but none are comparable to Affirmative Action.
Wait, what? You think affirmative action was the worst policy in the last x number of decades?
Yes.
I think its bad policy, but thinking its the worst policy in the last couple of decades is out of touch with reality. Not even sure it breaks the top 50. Feels similar to people thinking foreign aid is what's causing US government debt.
I don't know that it's the #1 worst policy (our policy on deficits is probably worse), but anything that erodes racial equality under the law in a multiracial democracy is in the top-tier of damage caused.
In a world where one party is able to prevent actual fairness under the law, it is fine for the other party to use tools that improve fairness even when they aren't perfect. That was affirmative action up through the 90s.
Most Democrats do not want identity based policy. But while identity based discrimination is rampant, it is necessary to use identity based policy to target the worst of it.
Wait, you think affirmative action on college admissions is *worse* than trying to revoke legal permissions for entry to the country on the basis of national origin?!
Don't we do that latter quite commonly, and have for a long time?
There are regulations on granting visas initially, but once you’re in the country and have a work visa or a green card, revoking in on the basis of national origin with no regards to the individual sounds pretty crazy!
Yes and it isn't close.
That is a very strange and alien position to have that I just can’t understand!
Is a non government actor using race in part of its admission process worse than the government (ICE) directly arresting people based on their skin color?
Why?
Why? Like had we simply just removed segregation and nothing else in 1964 it doesn’t seem clear to me that we’d have given anyone much of anything.
It would have been reconstruction all over again and would have just created a race to find a new lawyerly way to say blacks should forever live in islands of poverty in a vast ocean of prosperity.
How does making Harvard reject Asians on racial grounds help reduce poverty?
How does making Harvard reject Asians so white legacies and unqualified athletes can attend help reduce poverty?
It doesn’t but that is only mentioned as a distraction. Legacies are race neutral and still bad.
Legacies are not race neutral, especially since all of these universities had explicit rules against admitting black people and Jews for a long, long time.
Harvard never had rules against admitting Black people or Jews, it had Numersus Clausus for Jews for a brief period, which is rightly seen as a deeply shameful episode in its history and I suspect the Numersus Clausus against Asians will be viewed in a simar vain.
Because who goes to Harvard and similar elite schools is more about who runs the country than the elections are. They’re the farm team for the government and the business elite. It is a granting status.
Keeping Asians out would be bad but there were many Asians at these schools. And instead they want to push the top black students down to schools which will keep them from the elite positions set aside for only the top schools.
The line of thinking that we have enough of your co-ethnics already, so we don’t have to give you in particular a fair shot, is the whole problem. It’s not fixed by tweaking the value of “enough.”
The only halfway plausible justification for this I've heard is that if large segments of the population have almost no hope of entering the elite, then it destroys social cohesion over time and is ultimately unsustainable. Societies with strict social classes and very little to no social mobility tend to have destructive revolutions. However, this justification has really nothing to do with the universities' demonstrated preference for legacies and athletes, which the Republican party is overall totally fine with.
It's hard to defend actively discriminating against a minority group. Malaysia's use of bumiputra set-asides is not exactly a stirring success. Who is the "they" in the "they want to push the top black students" here? It seems hard to argue that it is Asian students applying for university positions.
I think this grants too much agency to the Ivies. If we should be seeking a more racially and otherwise diverse officials in government, we should be looking at places like Howard or wherever to find those people.
I like this as a point and it's worth saying. The scary part of the whole thing is that the centers of power in the United States only recruit from the top 20 or so institutions which are mostly Ivies plus a small handful of other schools.
There's an interview of Antonin Scalia laughing off the idea of getting clerks from American University in a Q&A. Things like Congressional staff and Judicial clerks, the tested bureaucracy like foreign service the corps of how the non-military government works along with the large banks and tech firms draw overwhelmingly from a small set of institutions and basically run the country.
But like having bureaucratic college admissions function as the HR department for the American elite seems more plausible than telling Congress and Courts and President who they're allowed to hire.
Well, the Supreme Court has ruled out what you think is most plausible, so I guess we have no choice but to work harder on not getting people to overemphasize the Ivies.
I wonder if it's true that affirmative action was actually effective in the 60s and 70s. It could have been true, but it's before my time.
My sense is that in the current era it was lifting approximately no one out of poverty. Black admits to Harvard were mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants, or the sons and daughters of already middle-class-or-higher non-immigrant Black people. At less prestigious schools practicing AA the Black admits ended up far more likely to not finish and leave with useless debt.
The weird thing is that AA in college admissions is basically just a PMC obsession. Some lady raising her kids in subsidized housing in Baltimore is probably not spending a lot of time worrying about whether her super clever kid goes to Harvard rather than University of Maryland. It's the black doctors and lawyers and engineer and such that care about that, just as it's the white doctors and lawyers and engineers and such that are mad that their kid's chance at going to Harvard might be taken by the black lawyer couple's kid.
Totally agree, but most activists come from a middle or upper-middle class background, even if they are in an ethnicity that is disproportionately less likely to be from that background, so organizations that claim to speak for minorities but are run and staffed by minority members of the PMC are always going to be heavily invested in affirmative action.
After scrolling through the comments today, oof, Happy MLK Day... I guess
Apparently celebrating MLK Day is a great time to *checks notes* rant about affirmative action and defend racial profiling.
Did Matt make this one free just to remind us that there are a *lot* of racists out there and they *really* like to talk about it? People are saying.....
Holidays sure do provide an opening to get some poasting in.
Remember when Kendi was all "it's not enough to be 'not racist,' one must be actively 'anti-racist?'"
I had a lot of thoughts about that, but one of them was "are you sure we're good on 'not racist?' I don't think everybody's there yet."
Kendi certainly wasn't.
He literally used to believe white people were devils and we were all supposed to treat that like it was trivia lol
"I agree with King’s view that we should judge people based on their individual attributes rather than statistical inferences based on their skin color."
Conservatives like to think of themselves as bold truth-tellers when they identify race-based statistical trends, but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist, nor even whether these statistical trends are based on qualities that are somehow inherent to the races, but rather, how society may or should treat individuals in response to those statistical trends even if they do exist.
(Of course, if you go far enough to the right, you'll find conservatives who want to get rid of Indian-Americans or whatever, even though they statistically perform better than white Americans on basically every metric. Because at its root it isn't really about crime or intelligence or anything else, it's just tribalism.)
"but the core disagreement isn't over whether these statistical trends exist"
Necessary preamble: "Conservativism" these days has overwhelmingly degenerated into an utter sewer of racism.
That said, I would simultaneously suggest that a substantial part of the problem of the past 20 or so years, and which in my view has contributed to the aforementioned sewer of racism situation, has been that there has been a major (not sure how one would define "core") disagreement over whether these statistical trends exist.
I think the broader left has been pretty good at pretending the statistical trends don't exist.
This is what I'm getting at with "core" disagreement. I personally believe that *some* of those statistical trends exist. But I also feel comfortable voting for liberals because I think my views are fully compatible with 95% of liberal policies, and the reason why is that I don't think those statistical trends justify discrimination against individuals. Presumably, you think the opposite on that underlying philosophical question, so that's the core disagreement, not the factual issue.
I'm not sure what you're presuming, but you're likely presuming too much. I only wanted to say that in recent years liberal spaces have heavily tone-policed discussions of certain types of disparities, such that ignorance of said statistical differences are widespread on the left. And that's additionally backfired such that the right often believes statistical differences are much worse than they actually are!
If you're curious about the actual statistical realities I've put together a page showing what they look like. You can view homicide, suicide, drug overdose, alcohol deaths and traffic fatalities by census category AND state or region. The interactions between the race and region are particularly interesting and probably different in many ways from what you might imagine. Whatever your political views on disparities, I feel like we'd all be better off by having a solid handle on what they actually are! https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/regional_gaps
Fwiw I've discussed my own philosophy a few times in the comment section today, the tl;dr; is you need to be very specific with the kind of thing you intend to detect before one can even have a debate about what sort of profiling is legitimate.
It sure seems like there is a lot of disagreement in practice about whether some disparities exist or are important, too.
All those shootings that occur in Chicago every weekend, are not HS Band members going to band camp.
Being a member of a criminal gang kind of says it all. Most Islamic Terrorists are, in fact, adherents of Islam.
Guys with Nazi tats, bald heads, profess fealty to white supremacy, are, in fact, White Supremacists.
Matt, IMHO, you are conflating policing with social justice. Not every person of color is a criminal, but everyone who belongs to a drug gang is likely involved with criminal behavior.
If you cannot distinguish that difference, it makes policy very difficult.
NYC teens, who were stopped and frisked because they wore clothes that echoed prison, were a style that teens emulated. A cultural thing, which NWA captured. Not every teen who dressed like a prisoner was a drug gang member.
That is a big difference. Policing gang members, good. Random stop and frisks because they were black and dressed like hoods living in the hood was wrong.
Now here is another big difference. The confiscation of guns found in half a million stop-and-frisk stops? About 1.5%. Minuscule. I’ll bet, however, if you targeted gang members for stop and frisk, you’d find more guns. It is the application of targeting that matters. Oh, and by the way, I’d keep a watch on those guys with Nazi tats and resentment of Jews and Blacks....Just sayin'
Just to be clear, the people with Nazi tats and resentment of Jews and Blacks are currently being hired by ICE to do kavanaugh stops in Minneapolis.
Well, they are a perfect fit, aren't they?
Exactly how do you target gang members and only gang members for stop and frisk?
In Chicago they still literally wear their colors and the Latin Kings still add a lion or a crown face tattoo during initiation.
Well that's certainly convenient
Most urban police have gang units; their job is to identify members. Did you never see the HBO series called The Wire?
If you are asking me how to identify gang members? Sometimes it is as easy as having a gang tat, like MS 13. Behavior, driving around, and visiting kids on street corners selling dope. It really isn’t that hard. In fact, my solution is for the US Attorney in Chicago to Rico the various gangs. Through observation, it shouldn't be too hard to prove a conspiracy.
The Wire was not exactly an advertisement for the unerring effectiveness of gang units
This is why the left can’t cheer for Iran. They’ve chosen the most misogynistic ideology/religion (NOT race) ever invented over liberal democracy. They’ve chosen FGM. They’ve chosen coerced marriage. They’ve chosen not educating girls. They’ve chosen legal rape and honor killings.
We’ve already seen this script in Europe where people who criticize rape go to jail longer than Muslim rapists.
The desire to score short-term points by calling conservatives racist will doom leftists in history.
Who are you talking about? Who is cheering for the Iranian government? We are cheering for liberal democracy in Iran.
Sorry, I worded that poorly. The left isn't protesting the Iranian government the way they protested in favor of Hamas, even though Iranians never raped and murdered civilians the way Hamas did.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/why-american-students-dont-protest-the-iranian-government
Not many people protested in favor of Hamas.
I do think there’s a lot of misallocation of protest resources, and waaaaay too much of it is devoted to protests for and against Israel. But you’re just trying to make yourself mad at people if you think they are supporting Hamas or the Iranian government. (Though I admit there is a weird fringe that does support Hamas - just not anywhere near the number of people involved in Gaza protests).
I agree with most of this post, except that the speeding cameras in DC are abhorrent. The posted speed limits are often ridiculous--clearly meant only for revenue generation-- and allow for no discretion, such as traffic conditions on early Sunday morning.
The idea of Vision Zero and 20 is plenty is that cars should be driving so slow that if they run into a pedestrian, that pedestrian will probably survive, which is about 20 mph. It's an aggressive stance to take on speed limits, and reasonable people can disagree about the tradeoffs. But it's not a revenue generation scheme, and it's backed by safety data.
https://www.cityofmadison.com/transportation/initiatives/vision-zero/vision-zero-projects/20-is-plenty
There are specific cameras in DC that are unambiguously there for revenue generation.
Specifically, the highest-revenue camera in the city (on K St under Washington Circle, I think) is at the bottom of the slope into an underground bypass where there are no sidewalks, pedestrians and no intersections. If you go the speed limit at ground level and coast down the slope, you will end up getting a $100 speeding ticket from the camera.
EDIT: Greater Greater Washington has specifically complained about this camera being stupid. If David Alpert thinks your traffic camera is bad, it is definitely bad. https://ggwash.org/view/40292/dcs-traffic-cameras-could-reduce-deaths-if-they-were-more-swift-certain-and-fair
You'd think that at least regulars would know after a ticket or two that this is a place that's easy to speed, and accordingly slow down before they get there.
That is what I do, after getting the $100 ticket. But there are 6 million people in the area (not to mention tourists, etc.) and that is a lot of $100 first-offense tickets. Which is why that camera prints money for the city.
Seems like the upper bound on that money printing should go down as more people learn they're going to have to pay a price for speeding in that spot.
Sure, in theory. In practice, the camera generates several million a year every year. Population churn, out of town drivers, plain old forgetfulness, etc.
I'm generally in favor of traffic cameras, but having gotten ticketed by that stupid ass camera I get why Republicans who have also gotten ticketed by it would think the traffic cameras are a revenue-generation scheme. DC could easily fix this problem by not having scammy cameras, but that would cost them that sweet sweet ticket revenue.
If someone running for city council said "I will put speed cameras on every block, since they decrease speeding and increase safety, but to balance out the need for people to get around, we'll raise all speed limits in the city by 5 MPH" I would elect that person in a heartbeat.
This seems like argument that you should get to go as fast as you want down a hill, which doesn't strike me as a good idea.
I'm not going to assert this of any specific Slow Borer here, but the general complaints of "The road made me speed!" and "It's a money grab!" have grown to strike me as cope for "I'm pissed I can't speed without consequence anymore!".
Welcome to the complex world that doesn't resolve down to a simple morality tale. Both dangerous speeding and speed traps exist. Some speed cameras have the goal of increasing safety for drivers and pedestrians and any revenue raised is a bonus, some have the goal of raising revenue and any lives saved are a bonus.
I think it is entirely reasonable to try to set laws/policies so that local governments find it easy to use speed cameras to increase safety and hard to use them to raise revenue. (Though I'd prefer to just have all traffic fines go to the federal treasury so nobody had an incentive to police for a profit.)
Similarly, some speed limits are set too high for local conditions, and some are set too low for local conditions. Sometimes the speed limit is 30 and like 95% of drivers are going 45. If you go 30 on that road, you make yourself and others unsafe.
It is very straightforwardly a money grab on K Street under Washington Circle. That might be a totally reasonable thing to do. Cities need revenue. But you can't then say it's about safety, when it is obviously about money. And this thread started with Matt S saying "it's not a revenue generation scheme" when in some cases it plainly is.
You keep saying that this is straightforward, obvious and plain, and I still haven't read anything about anyone coming out or discovering that this is the case. I'm not ruling it out--you can see upthread in talking to Dilan Esper that I think there could be circumstances in which this is the case. I just want to see it demonstrated here.
No, it is an argument that there's no safety reason to put a camera there: the camera is at the bottom of a hill and you have to back up another hill before you get to the next crosswalk / sidewalk / intersection. It's a big moneymaker for the city, which is fine, but that's all it is -- a moneymaker, not a safety measure. People should be honest about that.
You're arguing that you should get to speed there, no?
The speed limit is universally understood by drivers (i.e., most American adults) to be a general suggestion, not a hard upper limit. When conditions are good and traffic is smooth, you might well go faster. If conditions are bad, or traffic is backed up, you should go slower. You might drive for an hour on a road with a 35 mph speed limit, and your speed might range from 0 mph to 50 mph all while driving safely.
This was, historically, enforced mostly by cops watching out for actual dangerous driving. The cops are out in the same traffic as you, on the same stretch of road, and are supposed to be using their judgement as fellow drivers to determine if you're over the line.
The glaring exceptions to that -- cops trying to meet quotas, and speed traps -- are understood to be violations of the driving social contract because the cops are trying to make money rather than trying to make the road safe.
This is why cameras generate so much pushback. They often seem a lot more like speed traps than safety measures.
That is all to say: your question is missing the point. Speeding is a normal part of driving, because despite the name speed limits are not actually limits, they're suggestions that when combined with actual driving conditions (such as whether you're on a downhill into an underpass with no crosswalks, sidewalks or intersections) determine the speed it is acceptable to drive.
I stand corrected
Just slow down in the city.
I am sympathetic to the argument that speed limits in the middle of nowhere are too low and are just about revenue generation. But you should be driving slow in urban DC, at any time, day or night.
The strongest case for the argument are on rural, uncontrolled access highways that unwisely route straight through a small town that does not have much of an economy going on.
I think there's a strong argument that super-rural super-straight interstates are set too low too. A state trooper who pulls someone over on an empty interstate going 85 isn't protecting the public safety one bit-- they are just generating revenue.
Oh with controlled access freeways I definitely agree. The strongest I was specifically thinking of the rapidly changing limits on uncontrolled access highways in places with obscured vision that make it easier to nail someone. Those highways shouldn't even be going through towns to begin with, but often businesses want people to drive through and hopefully stop to do business with them.
Many years ago, the road between my hometown and the town where I went to college had a small town with a notorious speed trap. Locals all knew to slow way down on the highway where it went through the town; other travellers funded the small town's police department and general fund. At some point, the state widened the highway to four lanes, and moved it a couple miles so it no longer went through the town. The small town extended its borders to cross one mile of the highway, and the town cop liked to sit on that one mile stretch with a radar gun and hand out tickets.
Are there credible reports out there that make it clear that they're meant only for revenue generation?
And even if that is what they're meant for, there is a pedal in the car that can be used to completely thwart that revenue generation scheme.
And if the posted speed limit is ridiculous in any given location, then we should lobby the road authority to raise the limit.
And what if the road authority that sets the speed limit is the same authority that benefits from the revenue generation scheme?
That seems bad to me, you'd want some sort of separation of revenue usage, similar to how police departments shouldn't benefit from civil asset forfeiture.
But even then, I'm still asserting my three points above.
Well sure, but that is not the system we have. So you can hopefully understand why people think low speed limits + automated enforcement is a cash grab.
And again, even if I stipulate that that's actually the case, drivers still have agency to completely thwart that cash grab. This isn't a robbery where a weapon is aimed at you forcing you to speed.
Obviously - but people should also be able to drive in normal course at the pace that a road was designed for, without worrying that it might cost them a couple hundred bucks. Especially as cameras and/or speed limits are often not well marked.
If scaffolding was collapsing onto pedestrians walking under it on a regular basis, I doubt you’d say “well I know the risks and have agency to walk on the other side of the street.” You’d say “I expect to be able to walk normally without having to think about collapsing scaffolding.”
One a special interest bureaucratic regime is in place, it is very hard to generate enough general interest to dislodge it. I doubt anyone voted for Representatives based on their speed cameras views in the first place. If you gave people an up down vote on speed cameras I wonder what would happen, but in practice it would never happen.
It's rare that any one issue is going to be an overwhelmingly decisive factor in any election. But I think it's reasonable to assert that plenty of people see high speeds as dangerous, are willing to let those who are in charge of the roads hear about it, and sometimes those people in charge will listen and make changes, of which could include cameras.
I would like to see stats. My city introduced speed cameras in school zones last year, and people say the same thing. I admit I can find them annoying, especially around schools on roads that were obviously built for higher speeds. I have gotten a couple of tickets. However, the number of accidents, including pedestrian- vehicle accidents, have decreased.
For your tickets, did you feel it was easy to tell you're in a school zone but hard to mentally drive that slow or did you feel it was hard to tell you're in a school zone?
Despite what I've asserted in this subthread, I do agree that traffic cameras should be as transparent as possible about their existence. One idea I keep thinking about is to paint or light up the cameras in bright blue to make it real obvious that they're there, as blue isn't otherwise a color that's used much in transportation regulation.
Here they have a sign that says "photo enforcement ahead." Some of the cameras are permanent on red lights, others are in vans and move from place to place but they still put the sign out.
I don't know how I feel about mobile traffic cameras. I would *definitely* want those to be super visible and obvious.
When they first implemented the cameras, there were big electronic signs and only warnings were issued, so that was easy. After that, there was signage, but a couple of the schools are on roads I travel a lot, and they are at the edge of the city where the speed limit will increase shortly, so more my own fault/zoning out/keeping up with the rest of the traffic.
There is one school where it would be hard to notice if you are not familiar with the area because there are a lot of stores and double parking and pedestrians and side streets. But that is a place where people SHOULD be driving more slowly anyway. Sadly, several years ago, a grandmother and preschooler were hit in a crosswalk when walking to school, and the child died, so more than speed cameras are probably needed there.
Curious, do they issue tickets during non school hours? I would be a lot more supportive if so. Where I live the cameras in school zones give out tickets 24/7/365. At that point it’s clearly not a safety issue.
Shouldn’t the cameras give out tickets 24/7? If there are different speed limits during school hours, then they should give out tickets based on violations of the speed limit in effect. But there’s no reason to stop enforcing safety laws when you have the technology to do so just because the safety laws are at a higher speed.
Sure I agree, but near me they don’t have “school hour” speed limits, they just lower the speed limits permanently.
The school zones here have beacons that flash when students are arriving and leaving, and that's the indication that lower speed limits only apply when they're flashing.
My only _minor_ concern is the edge case where the light starts flashing after you enter the zone so you couldn't have seen it, but this is easily solved with a 5 minute grace period.
Where I live, they are 7 am to 6 pm on school days. If, for some reason, you get a ticket outside those hours, the ticket will be voided if you complain.
Did the posted speed limits change when they added the speed cameras? Are people you hit less injured on Sunday mornings?
There *shouldn’t* be revenue generation. Any revenue from fines beyond that needed to maintain the cameras should be rebated to the public who live in the area, since they are the ones putting up with speeders.
Running the police department for revenue is a cancer, and we should stamp it out entirely.
If true, I think it would be fine to (1) change certain specific speed limits on a case-by-case basis, and/or (2) substantially lower fines in exchange for having more cameras. But that's not what congressional Republicans are doing.
Once a special interest bureaucratic regime is in place, it is very hard to generate enough general interest to dislodge it. I doubt anyone voted for Representatives based on their speed cameras views in the first place. If you gave people an up down vote on speed cameras I wonder what would happen, but in practice it would never happen.
I begged for a red light camera near my house. People fly through Cold reds all the time. It sucks.
Another point I want to make about traffic cameras that this comment is a good place to put it under is that there can be a NIMBY aspect to it to. People might be amenable to the concept in general, and even especially support them near where they live, but oppose them in specific spots on their regular commute.
I think you're right. And it's weird to me. I hate having to enter that intersection so cautiously all the time. Even worse, one of my kids is a 20 something with autism. This makes it difficult for her to cross the street. One day, some driver will think "that person is looking right at me, so it's ok that I just go". And my kid will just step in front of a car going 40 mph. Ugh.