Open Mic for the week of 11/20/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
I found this surprising: In 2022, the Bronx had 131 homicides. With a population of about 1.5 million, that gives it a homicide rate of less than 9 per 100k. The same year, Portland had 101 homicides, with a population of about 640k, giving it a homicide rate of more than 15 per 100k.
Portland’s homicide rate is 2/3 higher than the Bronx!Report
No fair bringing data to the “Urban Dystopia” fairytale.Report
The surprising part is that both of these are fairly extreme outliers given their demographics, so it’s inappropriate to generalize. A city with Portland’s demographics has no business having a homicide rate even half as high as city with the Bronx’s demographics, yet somehow they manage, due to the Bronx greatly outperforming its demographics and Portland spectacularly underperforming.
Note that many large cities, like New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Washington DC, Chicago, Memphis, and Philadelphia really do have homicide rates that are multiples of the national average. As I pointed out before, large cities actually are overrepresented among cities with the highest homicide rates, when you account for the fact that they are greatly outnumbered by small cities.Report
This is true, but it also isn’t that surprising when you note that most crime is committed by a very small number of people. Periodically some study comes out that shows the homicides numbers in Baltimore or DC are really driven by two to three hundred young males.Report
Ah the soft expectations of priors . . .Report
I think you went to the Dave Barry school of debate.Report
As a fan of his for years, I appreciate the compliment!Report
It would be freakish if cities didn’t have higher rates of crime, because they always have, since the dawn of humanity.
The things criminals want- money, power, influence, status- are found in a city, not a hayseed town in the hinterlands.
Cities, again since the founding or Babylon, attract ambitious, talented strivers looking to make their mark on the world.
None of this is mysterious. What is mysterious is the conservative fixation on cities and obsession of their faults.
Like, Jaybird posts what, once or twice a week about San Francisco or New York, and I think it was Breitbart that had a regular “Chicago Crime” sidebar, and Fox News can always be relied upon to air anything negative about cities.
Yet in none of this is there ever a coherent assertion about what it all means.
I know they want the meaning to be “Vote Republican!” but they can’t come right out and say it since that would require an actual coherent thought instead of insinuation.
We know that cities are filled with wealth and poverty, success and dysfunction, high achievers and gutter dwellers.
So what does conservatism offer, what meaningful contribution does it propose?Report
And that finger pointing is largely done by people choosing to reside and work in those same large cities.Report
I’ve never understood the “conservative fixation on cities and obsession of their faults.” But hey, I don’t like big cities. Seattle in the 90s was “big” enough for me, and that was 500K. NYC? No frickin way I’d live there. I’ve been there half a dozen times, and have no real interest to ever go back. YMMV.
That being said, while there is always going to be “bad folks” and crime, I see no reason why the city gov’t should not work hard to minimize that group’s impact on the rest of the residents and to have strong “diversionary” programs to try and steer kids from choosing a life of crime.Report
Why do you believe cities don’t already have these?Report
“Why do you believe cities don’t already have these?”
Are they working? Based upon a recent multi hour long show focusing on this exact thing, in my nearest metropolis, those programs MAY exit, but aren’t working.Report
I know they want the meaning to be “Vote Republican!” but they can’t come right out and say it since that would require an actual coherent thought instead of insinuation.
You misinterpret.
It’s merely a pointer to Democratic Supermajority (without possibility of Republican).
You can’t say “this is because of Republicans undercutting us at every turn!” when there might be *ONE* Republican on the council. When the mayor gives away the store, you can’t blame that on anybody.
It’s not “Vote Republican”.
So what does conservatism offer, what meaningful contribution does it propose?
Well, there are two answers to this.
The first is something about differences in governance theory that conservatives hold in opposition to the progressives in charge of Utopia.
The second is to say “Good point. What have Establishment Conservatives actually conserved?” and demonstrate that Establishment Conservatives haven’t conserved much. That second conversation can go some weird places, though.Report
I don’t think this criticism is without merit but I also think Chip has more of a point than you’re giving him credit for. Why is it that conservatives have seemingly lost interest in governing cities? Now, there are a bunch of reasons I think it’s unrealistic that there is a plausible alternative world where Democrats don’t have a natural edge in cities but Republicans used to at least compete and occasionally win in major urban areas.
We talk a lot here about the embrace of various unpopular cultural positions by Democrats (or at least the difficulty they have at not letting themselves be defined by those things) that has killed them in a lot of middle America where they used to be strong. I think there’s something going on with this with Republicans as well. I mean, even where people may sympathize with certain messages on crime or education how can they vote for a party that at least on paper believes in complete dismantlement of functioning public services cities rely on?Report
Why is it that conservatives have seemingly lost interest in governing cities?
To be quite honest, I think it’s because of repeated demonstrated failure when it comes to getting elected.
And the whole Iron Law of Institutions that has resulted in gatekeepers for the party saying that the Republican running in (whatever big city) needs to have Mississippi attitudes toward abortion, gay marriage, and Lia Thomas.Report
It’s that second paragraph though that interests me. I still think, to the extent we’re going to ever have any kind of realignment, it’s really a race to see who has the balls to say f-you to those gatekeepers. IMO that cowardice is driving our crisis of democracy more than any other single factor, including the orange man.Report
Conservatives have been screaming about crime since 1972.
And after all this time, the best you can do is mumble “something about differences in governance theory”??
Or wait, don’t tell me, let me guess…that “something” is GIT TUFF ON CRIME!!”
GTOC is the rightwing version of “Socialism- No really it will work this time!”
We talked about this before- there is no successful version of “conservative approach to crime”. Not anywhere, ever. But who knows, maybe like True Socialism, True Conservatism has never been tried.
Crime has been steadily declining for a generation now, and while no one really knows why, conservatives are still denying it and pretending like its 1975. And still insisting that they know the answer, even though they can’t actually demonstrate it.
The demographic groups most affected by crime, are ironically, the ones who most emphatically reject the conservative message. And again just like socialists, instead of asking themselves why the dog won’t eat the food, conservatives just scream louder.Report
Like, remember this story from April?
“Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Businesses say they have little defense.”
Conservative Law Enforcement/Justice theory would argue “throw these 327 people in prison for a decade or so and enjoy cutting shoplifting by a third.”
The progressive argument for more social services providing these folks more social programs has not yet been demonstrated to work particularly well.
Double down, I guess.
Perhaps ask “What would conservatives do?” as if there were not an answer to the question.Report
Unfortunately for you, we do have concrete answers to this question. And they don’t generally work statistically better then the alternatives their backers decry.Report
OK first, notice how in response to a very large question (What is the conservative approach to crime?) you respond with a micro-point about one type of crime in one city.
Is this intended to be an example which will prove the larger point? How so?
Second, even by your own terms, this is not a coherent argument in favor of conservatism as just yet another “Look how bad things are!” exclamation.
Can you show why these 327 people have not been prosecuted, and demonstrate a conservative solution?
Again, this is YOUR point, YOUR argument, you need to do some work here.
And you’ve had 50 years to work on it.Report
Eh, there’s plenty of examples out there. Here’s DC and murder.
Can you show why these 327 people have not been prosecuted, and demonstrate a conservative solution?
Nope. I cannot show why these 327 people have not been prosecuted.
But it’s probably due to what CJ points out below. It’s just a misdemeanor. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
And the “conservative” solution would be to say “go away for a decade”.
“But that’s unjust!”, some might say.
Is the status quo “justice”, then?Report
Not “unjust;” flat out illegal. If you want to make the case for decade-long sentences for petty larceny, even repeated petty larceny, please proceed.Report
Um, sure. “These 327 people are responsible for one third of the shoplifting crime in NYC. We could resolve one third of the shoplifting crime in NYC by putting these people behind bars for a decade.”
Something like that, I think.Report
So rewrite the petty larceny statute to do that in a way that makes sense.Report
Maybe a “12 Strikes” law.Report
Presumably that’s 12 convictions, not just arrests. How many of the 327 arrestees have been convicted multiple times?Report
That’s a great question!
I don’t know.
If none of them have ever been convicted even once, I think I may have found another of the failure points.Report
You think so? What do you actually know about whether the cases against them were any good? Or do you think that getting arrested is prima facie evidence of guilt?Report
Well, I’ll grant that I am assuming that the story is in the ballpark of accurate and that the police are not lying.
But if they are telling the truth, then nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved just 327 people.
But perhaps the cops are lying and it’s a variant of the old SNL skit. “A man in New York is arrested for shoplifting every 11 seconds. His name is Jesse Donnally.”Report
There’s something like 3k shoplifting offenses per 100k people in DC per year. 700k people, so that’s 21k offenses.
Divide that by 300 and we’re 70 per person per year.
It won’t be that many arrests because a lot of these don’t result in someone being arrested.Report
The cops don’t have to be lying. There are all sorts of legitimate reasons that an arrest might not lead to a conviction. And all sorts of legitimate reasons that a disproportionate number of arrests (not shoplifting, but arrests for shoplifting) involve a relatively small number of people. Given the nature of the crime, the number of arrests for shoplifting is probably tiny and unrepresentative compared to the universe of offenses. (See Dark Matter’s comment above.) Caging these 327 people for a long time, assuming you could write a rational statute that would accomplish it, probably will have little impact on total shoplifting offenses.Report
According to the story, those 327 people are responsible for one-third of the shoplifting arrests, though.
Is the argument that arrests and offenses are *THAT* disjoint?Report
When you link to something, read it. There were about 64,000 complaints of shoplifting. These guys, collectively, were arrested 6,000 times. That’s less than 10% of reported shoplifting, which, for all sorts of reasons, is probably a relatively small slice of shoplifting offenses.Report
These guys, collectively, were arrested 6,000 times.
Yeah, I think I’m back to a 12 strike law.
Heck, we could eliminate the perps behind 10% of the reported incidents.
Not bad for the city that never sleeps.Report
If you get 12 convictions. How likely is that? Either with old-school hard-ass DAs or Jewish Space DAs? How many of these guys got multiple convictions?Report
Sounds like we’re wandering back into one of the points of failure.
Jeez, Jaybird! We don’t even know if the people who are, collectively, responsible for 10% of reported shoplifting incidents have a single conviction!
Yeah.
That strikes me as part of the problem, CJ.
Maybe they don’t have a single conviction among them.Report
Your not knowing something is not “part of the problem.” And it sure as hell isn’t part of any solution.Report
Assuming that the story is somewhere in the ballpark of accurate, the not knowing something is indicative of the rottenness of the problem given that the thing that we don’t know is whether or not these multiple-arrestees could get convicted.
If they can’t get convicted… we’ve got a problem.
If they can… well, we’ve got a different problem.
Both would be resolved through sequestering them.
Assuming that the article is in the ballpark of accurate, of course.Report
Sequestering unconvicted people?Report
I think that refusing to convict them is creating an unstable solution.
It’ll achieve equilibrium sooner or later, of course.
I think that more people would be better off if we, somehow, figured out a way to convict the 300ish folks responsible for 10% of reported shoplifting events in NYC.
And if you can’t convict them… that seems to be an institutional failure.
That strikes me as something that will, eventually, get corrected.Report
So, Sequestering unconvicted people?Report
No, if the people cannot be convicted, I’d say we’ve unearthed the root of the problem.
We have a system where the people who are responsible for 10% of reported shoplifting cannot be convicted.
At that point, we have a problem with the DA’s office that requires being addressed first. Once we have a DA capable of convicting these 327 people, *THEN* we will be able to sequester them.
(How in the heck did NYC get to a point where the DA is unable to convict someone responsible for a measurable percentage of the crime in a city of 8 million?)Report
OK, just to be clear, which is not your strong point: You do not advocate sequestering people who have not been convicted? If so, that’s a relief.
But there’s a huge difference between a bunch of suspects, who may or may not have done anything, not being convicted and “people who are responsible for 10% of reported shoplifting cannot be convicted.” You specifically want DAs to be able to convict “these 327 people.” Presumably without the actual bother of proving that they are “responsible for a measurable percentage of the crime.”Report
Did I forget to put “Assuming that the story is somewhere in the ballpark of accurate” in there again?
Darn it, I did!Report
If we have people who have been arrested dozens and dozens of times, then we’re past the point where nothing is wrong.
The issue is now “who is doing what” and “what is wrong”.Report
Note that this entire discussion is about one specific type of crime in one city and even then the entire point is resting on…“Assuming that the story is somewhere in the ballpark of accurate.”Report
“Assuming crime exists everywhere, we should look to see if there is a pareto distribution everywhere like there is here. If so, sequester.”Report
Yes, thus the “if”. But there’s a lack of definition here. Is this…
1) The mentally ill / homeless committing crimes because they exist?
2) Crime as a lifestyle types who stay just under what the system will charge?
3) Soft on crime DAs who think criminals are victims?
4) Lack of resources by the system so these “crimes” are effectively legal because they don’t have the man hours to treat them differently?
5) Police arresting people who they know are innocent and will be released just to mess with them?
Something else? Some combo?
All 5 of those have been suggested and they’re all vastly different issues with different root problems and solutions.Report
If it’s possible to know which one it is, it’s interesting to see that, under a progressive government, we still don’t know which it is.
Perhaps, under a progressive government, we *CAN’T* know which it is.
Which is a weird policy choice to have made.Report
Indeed. And I am eager to hear from someone who knows something about this–and can read his own links.Report
We know what the problem(s) with DA’s office is. How much more are you willing to spend on processing, prosecution, defense, the courts, and possibly the jails?Report
What problem are we trying to solve?
If we all agree that shoplifting doesn’t matter, well… who cares? These 327 people are responsible for 10% of all reported shoplifting in NYC.
If that doesn’t matter, then that doesn’t matter.
At that point, we might have to discuss whether vigilantism matters.
I suspect that if I am asked to not care about shoplifting, I will find it exceptionally easy to not care about a shoplifter experiencing a percussive incident at the agency of someone who is not badged law enforcement.
“But don’t you *CARE* about law and order?” might be something I am asked by the person who, moments before, asked me to not care about shoplifting.
Will they notice? I’d bet “no”… but I’d be willing to be proven wrong.Report
We, again, have literally no evidence that the problem is the DA’s office. Even if the problem truly is that people can’t be convicted (Which we do not know, I am still leaning towards the ‘All of them are near-perfect escape artists that cannot be contained by any known technology’, because that is equally possible with the facts we have been given.), it is possible it is nothing to do with the DA, that they cannot be convicted because retail is penny-pinching every dime and doesn’t want to pay employees to pull footage and testify. (Spoiler: It is this thing, which is why the police don’t say what it is.)
Aka, what is commonly known as ‘the victim is choosing to dropping charges’. DAs do not, technically, have to respect that, but it’s damn hard to convict someone if the victim and only eyewitness is not participating.Report
Spoiler: It is this thing
I haven’t seen any evidence that it is this thing.
Do you have any to offer?Report
We can guess it’s this because we can ask ourselves ‘What reasons would the police _want_ to say?’, and then exclude all of them, because the police did not say that reason.
So we know it’s not a DA who refuses to charge anyone, the police are perfectly willing to call that out when it’s true.
We know it’s not the laws not being harsh enough, the police are perfectly willing to call that out and in fact will often demand penalties are higher. (I mean, they _do_ demand that, but if these people were not in jail because of that specifically, they would have said that specifically.)
I think we can presume that, while courts sometimes come to the wrong conclusion, they don’t _constantly_, hundreds of times, come to the wrong conclusions and let guilt people walk. And if they are, there’s probably some sort of deliberate jury nullification going on there, so…interesting if true, but I think we’d know if that was going on. Also, the police would be willing to say something.
Are judges dismissing cases for no reason? I don’t know that’s a thing that happens, but I feel if it did, the police would also be complaining about it.
In fact, we probably should just short-circuit this entire thing and say ‘What is a part of this system that the police would _not_ complain about?’. And while it is funny to invent drunken cops or escape artists, it is much more likely the people the cops are failing to call out are Capital.
Who…we already have tons of examples of Not Actually Trying To Stop Shoplifting, so much so that people regularly complain about it.
But, hey, maybe I’m wrong. But by default, we probably should assume the only people who have data that could tell us what is going on, and did not give us that data, withheld it because that data does not support their narrative of ‘harsher laws and more enforcement’, and so we should automatically assume it’s _not_ those possibilities, not jump to them.Report
This reminds me a lot of Eric Garner. So… is the way to deal with low level petty professional criminals prison?Report
Eric Garner was meeting an unmet need. Dude sold loosies.
This is the definition of de minimis.Report
I’d think we’re in professional criminal territory.
That doesn’t mean DavidTC’s comment about mental illness is wrong, you can be both.
In addition, my averages don’t tend to play out in real life. The way to bet is some of these people have found a loophole in the system and do it all of the time, like every day.Report
It’s very likely true that organized, professional shoplifting is on the rise. The “loophole” is that cases are hard to make. It’s hard to turn the Artful Dodgers against the Fagins, which is how you would make the case, if all you actually have on the Dodgers is petty larceny.Report
Why exactly are you following the police narrative (Which is exactly the Republican narrative) that we need harsher penalties as a conclusion _because the police have failed to release information_?
They could very easily tell us what’s going on. People who have been convicted of a crime, even a misdemeanor, are public record, as it’s certainly fine to say something like ‘We arrested them but there was not enough evidence to charge them’ or ‘We arrested them but allowed the stores to not press charges’. or ‘We arrested them but the stores would not allow the people off work to testify’.
The police could explain this, and _don’t_, and the immediate assumption, by literally everyone who reads that article, should be: They do not explain this because they like the inference people are drawing instead of the actual truth.
I specifically have a question about those ‘driven by addiction or mental illness’, and wonder if the police are just repeatedly arresting hundreds of homeless people who do are not particularly about to function in society and like to wander into stores and start eating food off the shelves because they are hungry.
Which…really should result in an entirely different conversation from ‘We need to get tough on crime’ if _that’s_ what happening, but we have no idea, thanks to the police themselves not bothering to explain _why_ those 327 people can’t seem to be kept in jail.Report
This goes back to the whole “What is the point of Imprisonment?” thing that comes up from time to time.
The answers that I came up with were:
1. Punishment
2. Deterrence
3. Sequestration
4. Rehabilitation
Now, I am arguing that a hefty dose of #3 would solve a third of shoplifting (assuming, of course, that the story is accurate).
Asking me about the efficacy of #1 is fine, of course… but my goal is not #1. I don’t care about #1. I care about #3.
BUT WHAT ABOUT #4?!?
Okay. If you care about #4 so much, get the progressives in NYC to rehabilitate them.
“IF YOU THINK IT’S SO EASY, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?!?”
“#3.”
“What about the efficacy of #1?”Report
No, it doesn’t.
The exact opposite. The police already _arrested_ those people (and the other two thirds of the people), they said so clearly. We’re already talking about the people arrested here.
So the crime is, presumably, already ‘solved’, unless the police are wrong. (And if the police are _wrongly arresting_ the same 327 people over and over, I think we would agree that problem is the police.)
The question is why those same people are able to keep committing crimes _after_ being arrested.Report
Because they have not been sequestered?Report
And the police have refused to explain why they have not been sequestered why?Report
With respect to petty larceny I think the practical calculation is being made in economic terms i.e., whether it is cheaper to perpetually deal with problem shoplifters on the loose or investing in incarcerating them for some significant period of time, regardless of purpose. I’m not going to say I know which one is obviously right but that’s the ugly trade off. In a certain way it is a symptom of the wealth of our society, in that we are so flooded in consumer goods and they are widely available it’s legitimately hard to prevent people grabbing stuff in a sort of defection of social duty. At the same time the problems with order this creates, the perception of chaos and lack of rules, does its own sort of damage to peoples ability to benefit from being part of a wealthy society. And that’s not even getting into what I think really upsets people, which is the principle of the thing.Report
Have these 327 folks committed a crime with a sentence of a decade or so? Most shoplifting is petty larceny, a misdemeanor in most states. Any jail time if convicted would be nominal. If any of these guys have ripped off enough stuff in some organized manner — not 23 random petty larcenies — to indict on a serious crime, they should be indicted and prosecuted accordingly. If that isn’t happening, maybe you can tell us why.Report
This entire exchange illustrates perfectly why I call the conservative approach to crime “incoherent”. It doesn’t have any logical sequence of thoughts leading to a conclusion.
First, I asked for a “conservative” approach.
We didn’t get it.
We didn’t get a reference to the Republican platform, or a white paper by the Heritage Institute or maybe a reference to the novel crime policies of some small Republican jurisdiction, not even to ideas put forward by conservative candidates.
We didn’t hear a word about the other crimes like armed robbery rape or murder.
Nope, none of that. What we got instead was a list of Jaybirds Pet Peeves And Personal Idiosyncrasies.
Shoplifting? Lock ’em up!
Selling loosies? Eh, y’know, a de minimis thing.
Not only are these ideas not shared by conservatives widely, they aren’t connected by a coherent tissue of thought.
The statements about shoplifting imply a “Broken Windows” theory that petty de minimis crimes like shoplifting a 2 dollar bag of chips or selling loosies are actually serious threats to perceived order.
Yet these two things are treated vastly differently in Jaybird world. One comment sounds like Joe Arpaio and the other could have come straight out of Chesa Boudin’s twitter account.
And again, this is the product of 50 years of political thought.
For longer than most of the conservatives here have even been alive, conservatives from Mayor Daley to Richard Nixon to Ed Meese to Rudy Guiliani have been swearing up and down if only they were allowed to do things, well then by Gawd crime would be solved.
And yet now, when asked point blank what they would do, the conservatives hem and haw and mumble.
For this reason, I don’t think all their obsession over blue cities has anything to do with concerns about crime.Report
We didn’t get a reference to the Republican platform, or a white paper by the Heritage Institute or maybe a reference to the novel crime policies of some small Republican jurisdiction, not even to ideas put forward by conservative candidates.
We didn’t hear a word about the other crimes like armed robbery rape or murder.
“Sequester criminals away from society.”
The fact that you do not see why it might work to end, for example, 10% of reported shoplifting incidents by merely imprisoning 327 people in a city of 8.4 million is something that I’m not sure can be simplified more.
And yet now, when asked point blank what they would do, the conservatives hem and haw and mumble.
“Imprison lawbreakers.”
“See? They’re just not saying *ANYTHING*.”Report
Yes, I know this is Jaybirds Pet Peeve And Personal Idiosyncrasy.
I’m not even arguing for or against it.
I’m saying that this isn’t what conservatives are saying or doing or even proposing.
So let me just say it a third time:
There is no coherent conservative idea of how to combat crime any differently than it is currently being done.
Even here, shouting “JUST LOCK PEOPLE UP SOMEHOW!” isn’t a coherent idea. Its an irritable armwaving gesture without any serious thought behind it.
You can’t explain how you know these people are guilty, other than just someone said so.
You can’t explain why, if they are so obviously guilty, they can’t be convicted.
But you are demanding they be locked up for long prison sentences. I mean, Jesus, Emmet Till got more due process than this.
It is very very obvious that conservatives, and you, don’t actually spend much time at all thinking about criminology. Crime, they are obsessed over.
But criminology, criminal justice policy, penal reform, sentencing reform, carceral reform?
Nope- they just get deer in the headlights look when somebody mentions them, like its the first time they’ve ever heard of things like that.
Because they aren’t really shouting about crime at all.Report
This is the left hand/right hand game.
When you say “conservatives”, you can mean either someone on the board here or someone in real life out there.
If there’s a comment that says “I think this”, you can say “Well, does Heritage think that?” and if there’s a comment that says “Here’s what Heritage says”, you can pull the old “That’s what Heritage says… What do *YOU* think?”
And it doesn’t matter that I was asked to write a policy. Not provide one from Heritage… *I* was asked to provide one.
And I provided one.
Allowing you to pull the “But what does Heritage say?” trick.
But criminology, criminal justice policy, penal reform, sentencing reform, carceral reform?
Because, in this case, I am not trying to solve the problem of criminal justice policy, penal reform, sentencing reform, or carceral reform.
I am trying to get rid of 10% of the shoplifting in a city of 8 million people.
Nope- they just get deer in the headlights look when somebody mentions them, like its the first time they’ve ever heard of things like that.
I’ve talked about “What is the point of prison?” before and, wouldn’t you know it, wrote a bunch of essays in the various comment threads.
Would linking to them demonstrate anything to you?
I could, instead, link to comments where you didn’t remember stuff that happened before, if you like. I honestly think that the latter would do a better job of proving this particular point.Report
Go back and read my comment directed at Brandon, which started this entire subthread.
Nowhere did I ask “What is Jaybird’s idea for crime?”
I have consistently made all my comment about conservatives/Republicans.
You took it upon yourself to speak in response to a question directed at conservatives/ Republicans.Report
CJ told me “so rewrite the statute”.
You can scroll up and read that or I can link to it if you’d like.
Your criticism that I answered CJ’s question to me rather than your question to Brandon is silly.Report
We’re looking at the same people being arrested for the same crimes scores of times.
That is strongly suggestive of system problems or even a system breakdown.
It’s possible the police are arresting the same innocent people for the same crimes scores of times but if that’s not the case then we have guilty people being arrested for the same crimes scores of times.Report
Jaybird, as far as you know, those 327 people are expert escape artists and the reason they are not in prison is that they escape within ten minutes of being arrested.
Or, the police are permanently drunk and every time they attempt to arrest the shoplifters they don’t even manage to make it into the police car.
The police have refused to give us any facts, and you are immediately deciding this must be some liberal reason those people keep committing the same crime over and over, unable to be locked up, which is exactly the conclusion the police want you to come to.
What is the _actual_ reason? Why won’t the police tell us? It should be pretty simple to say, right?
The actual reason, for the record, is almost certainly ‘The store do not want to spend the time and effort to pay their employees to testify’, which not only puts a rather different spin on the problem, as it is completely unsolvable by laws, but also means it can’t be anywhere near as serious as retail is pretending.Report
The granularity of the data is a problem but is typical for this level.
It’s likely that the police records are public knowledge but no one has gone through the tens of thousands of records to gather more detail.
These questions could be answered but require someone to do a lot of leg work to create a study.Report
How could it be possible that “no one has gone through the tens of thousands of records to gather more detail”?
Conservatives have vast financial resources, enormous and well staffed think tanks that churn out thousands of books, essays, white papers and articles with deeply researched and well documented arguments in favor of tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and other causes.
How is it possible that we aren’t being offered references to the vast trove of conservative literature on how to reduce crime, supported by rigorous data and field tested examples?
Because they are not serious about the issue except as using it as a weapon to bash their hated outgroups.
They have no ideas, no proposals no vision of how to solve the problem.Report
You’re linking something you don’t like, i.e. a lack of data resolution, to something else you don’t like, i.e. conservatives.
The root cause of this is the gov doesn’t have data in a electronic, easily searchable/manipulatable, form. “Conservatives” haven’t run Washington DC’s local gov since before the idea of electronic records.
That’s over and above whether there are any privacy issues which we probably should consider. The gov making these records trivial to use is also the gov giving employers the ability to hold a single shoplifting offense against someone forever.Report
Please.
Criminology is an actual field of study, where people spend lifetimes doing research on crime, and is very well funded as part of the half century War On Crime.
Your very own comments indicate a knowledge of the “Broken Windows” theory. Where did you think that came from? It came from an influential book by that name, one of millions written on the subject.
There is in fact a vast library of information on crime statistics, theories of what causes crime, and studies on how to reduce crime. American government at the federal, state and local levels spend enormous sums of money every year on crime research.
Conservatives have chosen not to engage with the subject, except to obsessively post lurid stories about urban disorder.Report
If we already know which of those 5 ideas is the issue, or if they’re all wrong and it’s a 6th, by all means put up a link to clarify.
But “lock them up” is a fine solution for some of the more likely possibilities and that would qualify as “engaging with the subject”.
Hundreds of people committing the same crime over and over might be a result of “progressive” ideals having dysfunctional outcomes. That doesn’t have to be involved but it’s within the margin of error.Report
First lets step back and examine one of the underlying premises here.
One of the premises is that blue cities have progressive cops, district attorneys, prosecutors and judges and therefore crime is a result of liberal policies.
Is this true?
If you compare the criminal justice system in say, Mobile Alabama and Portland Oregon, can you describe one as being conservative and the other liberal?
Like, what policies towards shoplifting do the police in one city have, that the others don’t; Or what is the district attorneys approach in one city versus another; and so on.
I think if you look, you’ll notice that there isn’t really much difference; Aside from guys whose name rhyme with “Besa Choudin”, how many liberal district attorneys are there? How many liberal police departments are there?Report
New York City’s DA is famously awful. We’ve talked about him before in comments.Report
That “we’ve” talked in comments about Manhattan’s DA (NYC doesn’t have one DA; each borough has its own. Seems someone ought to know at least that much before opining on a borough DA’s performance.) doesn’t make him “famously awful.” All that means is people have opinions.Report
Or maybe they don’t remember that we’ve spoken about Alvin Bragg before. Maybe they make a habit out of not remembering stuff. Are there DAs who are bad? Who knows! It doesn’t matter if we’ve discussed DAs before! Name them!
The little plastic castle can be a surprise every time!Report
Do you make it a point to miss the point?Report
I see it more as wandering back to the point.Report
Which is exactly how someone missing, or avoiding, the point would claim to see it.Report
I think the point is about the bad DAs, not about whether Alvin Bragg awfulness qualifies as “famous”.Report
Let me make this simple, and do it step-by-step:
1. You said the Manhattan (well NYC actually, but we’ll let that pass) DA is “famously bad.”
2. You said “we’ve” talked about this in comments.
3. I said that some subset of us having talked about him doesn’t support the assertion that he is “famously bad.”
4. You did what you do.Report
In response to someone being incredulous that there might be a bad DA that is not Chesa.
Which strikes me as being the point rather than whether I use colloquialisms in my comments.
That said, if I’d rather not talk about bad DAs, I’d probably talk about my interlocutor instead.
Perhaps I’d even argue that my interlocutor’s colloquialism was “the point” and not “the bad DAs”.Report
RE: crime is a result of liberal policies. Is this true?
No.
IMHO crime in blue cities is a combo of the scale of the city and it’s culture (which is also affected by scale).
Beyond a certain scale we see professional criminals and their support networks form. Most conservative cities lack the scale for that to be a problem so it’s not a problem.
However that Progressives aren’t creating this problem doesn’t change that their policies need to address it, and the solution for professional criminals is probably to lock them up.
There are other solutions but they depend on the scale of the problem. Hawaii and Chicago are both progressive. Hawaii can intervene for every at risk kid and prevent various dark paths while Chicago can’t because there are too many.
This leads to Progressives needing to lock up vast numbers of minorities who they want to pander to, thus criminals as victims ideology.
It’s not Progressives fault that they need to juggle more eggs, but it is their fault if they drop them. They didn’t create Chicago’s violent subculture but pretending it’s not a thing will have predictable outcomes.Report
Without even arguing your point (much of which I agree with) this is a great time to pause and take a measure of how far we have moved since this discussion began.
I started by saying that conservatives don’t have a coherent vision of crime other than to scream about how crime is outtacontrol in cities due to liberal policies.
We’ve established a few things here:
1. So far as criminal justice policies are concerned here really isn’t much daylight between red states and blue states, between big cities and small towns. A prosecutor in Portland isn’t really much different than her counterpart in Des Moines or Houston or Biloxi. This is why people like Chesa Boudin make headlines- they are the man that bites the dog, an aberration among DAs.
2. Per our previous discussions, we’ve established that crime is resuming its long term trend downward.
Meaning that, in blue cities and red towns, the criminal justice system seems to be doing a fairly effective job. Not that things can’t be improved; but we seem to be doing something right.
3. The sort of petty crimes Jaybird is always talking about appear to be due to many factors, but liberal district attorneys who refuse to prosecute people doesn’t seem like the cause.Report
RE: Chesa Boudin
Boudin was a Soros backed DA. There were 90+ like him. They got his backing for the policies we’re questioning here; refusing to do anything about these low level crimes, even by repeat offenders.
If memory serves this covered about 20% of the nation. That 20% can expected to be heavy blue. He and that type of reasoning should be on the list of potential causal factors because it’s not man-bites-dog rare.
He’s certainly not the origin of crime in general, but it’s real easy to envision that kind of reasoning creating a loophole and organized crime (or just lifestyle low level criminals) filling that vacuum.
The cat food I leave outside in a bowl doesn’t create cats, squirrels, or birds, but they figure out the opportunity is there pretty quick.Report
Name some of the 90.
Tell us what those liberal policies are.
Did all 90 for example REALLY “refuse to do anything about low level crimes”?
Can you support this allegation?Report
Is that the measuring stick? We have to provide examples from each of the 90 DAs?
If, like, we only provide five examples of them doing stuff like “reducing more than half of all felony charges to misdemeanors”, will we still be expected to provide examples from the other 85?
As if the goalposts hadn’t moved from “is there a single bad one who isn’t Chesa?” to “ALL 90 MUST BE DEMONSTRATED TO BE BAD”?Report
I’m going to answer this at the bottom to get a larger box.
RE: Name some of the 90.
Tell us what those liberal policies are.Report
Maybe yes maybe no, but in any case it’s barking up the wrong tree. Being a lib, especially a criminal justice lib, is much worse than the particular policies the lib advocates for, or the DA candidates he supports. Those are merely one facet of the problem.
A much bigger deal is lib advocacy for crime itself, typically in the most noxious racial terms as well. To be more precise or pedantic or whatever, you could say it’s strong advocacy against accountability for crime.
But no matter what you call it, it’s a big and it’s real. And it is clearly has a lot of causal power for the increase in crime starting with the Ferguson, Missouri, aftermath, continuing through the George Floyd/BLM stuff. And we’ll probably see another episode of it with the Hamas/Palestine thing, unless somehow the issue just goes away in a relatively quick period of time (which certainly could happen).Report
I’m pleased you found a way to blame Progressive governance on Conservatives not doing enough research.Report
Somehow the police know 327 uniquely identified people and have calculated the number of the arrests they have made of those people, but doesn’t know why they aren’t in prison? Because it’s in _some other_ records?
What?
I’m pretty sure the police can put the name of ‘person who was arrested’ and find out why they are, in fact, not in prison. No charges filed, released on bail, found innocent, found guilty of only a misdemeanor, WHAT IS IT?
It’s only 327 names, they already had to look them up to find the percentage, it’s probably literally on the screen!Report
RE: It’s only 327 names, they already had to look them up to find the percentage, it’s probably literally on the screen!
Sounds like a really big screen.
At 60(?) arrests per person you’d need to look through almost 20 thousand reports to put this together. If we assume each set of details is a page then that’s 20k pages.
Unless there are categories which are tabulated as a running total going forward, this seems hard.
It’s possible all of the ways for an arrest to not move forward are grouped into categories which could be tabulated, but I’ve never heard of that.Report
Pretty sure you could just actually start reading the first dozen or so arrests of about 20 people selected randomly and get a pretty good understanding of what is going on.
But, wait, are you trying to argue the police don’t already know why these people keep getting arrested and do not end up in jail? That they are too incompetent to have actually figured this out, to have paid any attention to it, have a general idea what is going on?
I mean, that sounds like something I would say, not you, but even _I_ don’t think the police are _that_ incompetent. I like to think they at least generally know what legal outcomes happen to their behavior, as some sort of vague average! Were charges filed, what those charges were, roughly what convictions happen, etc.
It’s basically impossible for them to even be doing their job without already knowing that.
But maybe they don’t, and they literally should all be immediately fired, because that is a level of hyper-incompetence that I have never even imagined.Report
You’re arguing both that we can’t trust the police and also that they should look though a tiny amount of the data and you’d trust them to tell us what they think.
I would like to see a deep dive on the data, I don’t trust my (or our) intuition on this.Report
No, I’m arguing that the police must already know this and they could tell us, and _then_ we also could decide if they were lying because they could also provide the raw data. Who is _arrested_ in New York is, as far as I am aware, public information, and if there are some privacy concerns, fine, remove the names.
This is me pointing out “The police didn’t even _bother to lie_ to you people, they just trailed off and wiggled their eyebrows meaningfully and a lot of people here just _extrapolated_ what must being going on in a way that fit the ‘law and order’ narrative.”
Which is somehow even dumber than believing police lies.Report
I can’t even tell what’s being argued at this point, but I could find a few articles on Michelle McKelley, who apparently has been arrested more than 100 times, is released without bail (petit larceny), and doesn’t show up to court dates. I think she’s an example of whatever you guys started out discussing.Report
Okay, let’s look at that.
…and I just spent 20 minutes looking at that gibberish and cannot find a single source that is actually not biased and will actually explain details
Every article blames shoplifting laws, but then turn around and claim she *GASP* has failed to appear in court 27 times, which means the police should, uh, detain her for _that_.
Likewise, the police incomprehensibly have not charged her with trespassing, which either means the stores she has stolen from multiple times have not demanded she never enter them, or, alternately, means the police are complete gibbering morons.
Also, she has shown up and _plead guilty_ to a few of these charges, which…should put her in prison.
Petit larceny might not have _bail_ attached to it anymore, but it is still a class A misdemeanor and can put you jail for up to 364 days.
No one seems willing to report what she was actually sentenced to for these guilty pleas. Was she offered absurdly trivial plea deals? (Wouldn’t that be the actual problem then?)
Like, I literally cannot make sense of any of this, every single article about this is presented as ‘get OUTRAGED by THESE SOFT ON CRIME LAWS’ and not a single one actually asks any of the very obvious questions.Report
The stories could be more journalistic, that’s for sure. And like I said, I can’t really tell what point is being argued on this subthread. If it was that the police are lying about repeat offenders, then this story indicates that it’s not all fiction. You can certainly dispute the stories about her, but you should provide some evidence.Report
Oh, I guess that’s the confusion. I am not saying the police are lying, I am taking what they said at face value. And I am pointing out the police have utterly and completely failed to explain _why_ those 327 people are not in jail. Not even the vaguest generalization.
And I pointed out that a lot of people here starting jumping to reasons for this that a) had no evidence, and b) almost certainly would have been something the police would have mentioned because it fit their ‘tough on crime’ position.
So we should, in fact, be jumping to _any other_ reasons.
Googling Michelle McKelley does the same thing. All these articles mention the ”Bail cannot be required for shoplifting at this level’ law a few years ago, which, for those of us not paying attention, explains the problem, but pausing for a second and thinking about it…no it doesn’t, because the articles the list a bunch of other crimes _and_ the fact she pleased guilty to some of the shoplifting, which _can_ be time in jail.
Indeed, a very quick bit of googling shows me that ‘Persistent and willful failure to appear in court’ is explicitly a reason that judges can use to set bail even for misdemeanors. If she actually has a pattern on that, they don’t even need to charge her with failure to appear, they can just set bail for the shoplifting!
There’s all sorts of vary obvious questions the media should be asking here, and have not asked.Report
Your starting assumption is “the police” have read records whose total number makes the tax code look very small and aren’t giving us the answer because of politics?
Or are you assuming that all this data is easily manipulated, sorted, and so on so we can have computers do it?
My few encounters with police records suggests they use flat text fields for this sort of thing and with a few exceptions don’t have running totals.
I don’t see any evidence, or even hints of evidence, indicating cops’ IT backbones are a marvel of modern efficiency.
I’ve never seen reports which suggest they have this ability. It’s not that these reports only show up when they favor the police, it’s that reports of that level of detail never show up.
The evaluations you’re suggesting should be trivially available don’t seem to exist.Report
My starting assumption is the literal factual knowledge they have presented to us about 327 people, where they have managed to tally up _all_ shoplifting arrests and then run that number across the entire database and figure out those people are 10% of all shoplifting arrests.
This is inherent in the premise of our discussion.
You keep pretending I’m asking for them to dive into records to find things…they _already_ did that! There is no additional finding needed. They could literally hand over the public arrest records! Or just the names and let _us_ get the arrest records. Those arrest records have charges and disposition of cases attached! That is literally how the entire system works, so they know when to release people!
If they’re too lazy to skim them and summarize, that’s what the media is for.Report
RE: You keep pretending I’m asking for them to dive into records to find things…they _already_ did that!
The ability to find the largest field in one table (the “people” table has a tally of crimes committed of various types) doesn’t imply the list of arrest records (which is an entirely different table and MUCH larger) is easily searchable.
For example the case table could literally be on paper with only the person table being electronic.
RE: If they’re too lazy to skim them and summarize, that’s what the media is for.
So you support letting the public search these sorts of databases?
327 people times 70 records per person, call it 23k arrest records. Either they’d need to print them all out or they’d need to give the general public access… which might or might not be possible but I doubt it’s set up for that.
The level of IT sophistication required to do the later is non-trivially high.Report
That is an insane premise.
Who was arrested and what charges were filed is already public information., barring it being sealed by the court, which seems unlikely here.
The state of New York charges $95 dollars to look up someone’s entire criminal history, and that is nowhere near the actual cost of providing those records, which is probably cost to $20, and most of that is probably locating the person.
https://ww2.nycourts.gov/APPS/chrs/onlinedirectaccess.shtml
The results are provided, because this is 2023 and not 1973, electronically.Report
A “twelve strikes law” would change incentives. If not for the sticky-fingered, for the employers of the employees.Report
Crime will never go away for the same reason that garbage will never go away. However, also like garbage, if you refuse to pick it up then the problem will get a lot worse.
If petty crime isn’t worth the time of law enforcement and the efforts of society to prevent then we’re inviting organized crime to step in.
Those 300 people are part of that, but highly likely they’re organized by someone who is higher up the food chain.
Leaving garbage on streets doesn’t create disease and vermin, but it does invite them and after they’re there you have additional problems.Report
Agreed in full.
It is also true that a large portion of the petty crime and disorder in cities is caused by the mentally ill and addicts. These are people for whom the normal tools of coercion don’t work.
One interesting new tool is Gavin Newsom’s program care “CARE Courts” which allows the state to forcibly confine mentally ill and addicts into treatment and confinement.
It is in a sense, a “LOCK THEM UP” approach but given sensible safeguards and targeted at helping the community, not just terrorizing it with arbitrary brutality.
Los Angeles has also created teams of private security patrols which have teams of people monitoring and intervening in low level petty offenses like tagging, fights or shoplifting.
https://clerk.lacity.gov/clerk-services/bids/bids-general-information/bids-101
They are effective at curbing petty offenses which don’t rise to the level of a 911 call.
These aren’t panaceas and there is still much more to be done.
But they are serious attempts to deal with crime rather than ignorant armwaving and screaming.Report
I am in favor of the minimum amount of punishment needed to get the job done. If that means handing out sanity pills or even forcing people to take them then that’d be great.
I think addiction requires a technological fix, i.e. a new “sanity” pill. It’s not my field but my impression is our current treatments are expensive and don’t work well.
However we’re going to find out some people can’t be helped because there’s nothing wrong with them. Crime-as-a-lifestyle and organized crime are things.
I have no clue how much of low level crime is the mentally ill and how much is lifestyle.Report
That really only seems to apply to theft and extortion and stuff, where the crime is ‘taking things from people’.
It doesn’t apply to more social stuff like littering and tagging, or even just vandalism in general. (Who is making money from vandalism? Unless it’s part of extortion, see above.)
And it almost applies in the _opposite_ direction for crimes like prostitution and drugs, in that it is the laws, and enforcement of those laws, that causes organized crime to operate those industries. If you, in some semi-official way, stop ‘enforcing’ the laws, even if still on the books, organized crime loses their grip because people involved will start reporting other related crimes to police. (I.e, the prostitute will go to the police about the mafia trying to force her to cut them in, if prostitution is legal.)Report
Actually this is not true, at least by stereotype. It is true in the United States, but here we have widespread incidence of private gun ownership, especially rural gun ownership.
In places without private gun ownership, eg the UK, rural areas are thought to be very very vulnerable to crime.
Well Jaybird can be a bit roundabout at times, so I won’t try to speak for him, but for me I’ll say the most socially valuable thing a lib in America can change isn’t so much to vote Republican as _be_ Republican.
As a practical matter, the best expression of being Republican is vote Republican and be publically associated with voting Republican. But that’s not necessarily a comprehensive thing. A lot of times, eg, now, we’re not really voting for anybody or close to it. But the _intention_ to support Repubicans, now, is the raw material which creates the possibility of solidarity for America and Americans, long before anybody walks into a voting booth.
As conservatives and Republicans, we carry with us the possibility of good will among each other that your team doesn’t have.Report
It’s interesting you used the word ‘thought’ there, because that’s actually not true.
Rural areas generally have somewhere between half and two-thirds of the crime of urban area as an extreme rough average, which can change from year to year (And urban spiked during covid as rural fell) but that ratio is not notable different between the US and UK.
In the US, in 2021, urban areas had a rate of 24.5 out of 1000 victims of violent crime, and 11.1 in rural areas. (Note I’m using 2021, because it is what I have identical stats for.)
The UK, rural was 24.7 and urban was 37.3…and note the UK and US have actual different definition of violence crime, and indeed rural vs. urban (And the US has a middle category), the UK does not really have almost twice as much violent crime, and it’s actually pretty hard to compare stats.
The point is that the ratio of rural crime to urban crime is not vastly different…it’s always somewhere around a half to two thirds. Gun laws make no difference on the ratio.Report
That could be, but I’m thinking back to the Tony Blair era in the UK, and at that time the urban legend (or rural legend if you prefer) was the countryside was full of bandits and highwaymen, and the decent people had no way to defend themselves.
And even if you thought that the part about the highwaymen and bandits was fiction, the part about the decent people being unable to defend themselves was true.
Which means, at least in this case, that Chip’s idea of being irrationally motivated by the depravity of the big city is not true.
Of course, the essential wrongness of Chip’s theory is not limited to that.
We have, more or less, the same cities we’ve always had. And we’ve also had, over a reasonably long enough time frame, good crime statistics, at least to the point of being able to see macro scale trends. Short-term crime stats can be ad hoc, controversial and subject to manipulation, but over years and decades you can see clear enough what’s going on.
And in this context, it’s clear that the problem is the libs. Not just for the DA’s they elect, but much more for the nearly explicit empowerment of crime and criminals.
It was true back in the day, from the Warren Court until the days of Giuliani and Broken Windows, and it’s true now, from Ferguson till now.
And if the libs have a point to say that whatever has happened since Ferguson, we haven’t regressed all the way back to the pre-Giuliani era. You also have to say that the lib cultural empowerment of crime is worse now than then, because back then it was really more about criminal justice policy and court decisions.Report
That is literally not a thing that was believed by anyone in the UK. In fact, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there are not bandits and highwaymen in the UK, and the British, oddly, know this, and knew it back under Tony Blair, too.
What the hell are you even talking about?
The UK had a large rise in crime until the mid-90s, same as elsewhere, and Tony Blair was probably elected because of it. And here is how he talked: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/jun/18/immigrationpolicy.ukcrime1
It sounds almost identical to the US, except the weird focus on ‘young people’ and how they have to keep them under control, because that’s their dogwhistle for ‘minorities’, instead of the ‘urban’ that the US uses.
You will notice absolutely nothing in that speech would even vague cut down on rural bandits, or highwaymen, or even witchcraft! And, perhaps most importantly, he’s not choosing to increase the budget to reinforce Hadrian’s Wall to keep out the dastardly Scots either. Probably because he is actually, and this is weird, living in the present and not hundreds of years in the past. (Fun fact: The entire planet is currently in the present, barring relativistic quibbling over nanoseconds. No country is actually 100s of years ago right now.)Report
Uh no.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)
I was reading UK newspapers fairly regularly at the time and I can tell you this was a medium-to-big cause celebre at the time.
As far as Tony Blair goes, I don’t know what that’s supposed to prove since at least by conventional wisdom Tony Blair was politically successful because he successfully repudiated the explicitly socialist tendencies of the prior Labour party. And in fact your link would tend to support that conventional wisdom.
Even there, I’m not sure exactly how relevant Tony Blair was. My understanding is that UK partisan politics is heavily concerned with socialism and immigration. I’m not sure if criminal justice issues are as important as they are here, especially over a decent interval, say 60-80 years.
And beyond all that it still has to be said, again apparently since you seemed to have missed it the first time, that Chip’s argument is trying to explain a variable with a constant, which in general doesn’t fly.
Ie, in America we have now basically the same cohort of cities that we did 1950 or whatever time. So right wing boogeyman fears about the vices of the big city can’t really explain why crime went up during this interval but went down in some other interval.Report
If anyone was concerned that ‘rural crime’ WRT Tony Martin, it was entirely over the utter failure of the police to actually respond in any time span or do anything about repeated thieves, not the unavailability of firearms, mostly because of the very obvious point that firearms were not unavailable! He had bought one!
You can have a shotgun in the UK. You have to get a license, a ‘Section 2 Shotgun Certificate’, but it’s not particularly hard, and Tony Martin had one…and then he lost it, because he shot at someone’s car years earlier.
So the entire premise you have built this on of the ‘decent people had no way to defend themselves.’ is utter nonsense. Decent rural people could _buy shotguns_! In fact, they still can! Everyone talking about that case knew it.Report
David, the various facts you are asserting in this line of comments aren’t necessarily wrong, but you are misunderstanding the implications in the context of this thread eight ways to Sunday, for my comments and your comments both.
First of all, whatever the legality of gun ownership in the UK is, the incidence of it is much lower there, especially in rural or rural-ish low-pop-density areas.
Criminals are deterred by the incidence of guns, not the legality of them.
Second, the root assertion of this line of comments has to do with urban vs rural crime, in perception and reality. Guns are a factor in that, but it’s an ancillary point nonetheless.
Maybe rural people are afraid of crime because the police are too far away for a meaningful response time. Maybe they are afraid because they are disarmed. Maybe they are afraid because of some other reason.
In any event the conclusion is the same which I helpfully mentioned some comment ago. At least in some circumstances, it’s possible to be afraid of rural crime, or the victim of rural crime as much as it is for city crime.
Finally, for I dunno, the fifth or sixth time, in the USA we basically have the same cities now that we had in 1960 or some relevant date. Those cities have more or less the same opportunities and the same vices they had then. Therefore, the ups and downs of urban crime in America have to attributable to something other than the fundamental nature of cities.Report
Tell us oh wise sage – what do you make of act that GOP run medium and small cities fair no better in crime statistics then medium and small liberal run cities?Report
Source?Report
People routinely overestimate the relative unsafety off NYC because NYC is huge, so you get high absolute numbers of homicides, and is also the city where a lot of the national media finds its home, ensuring those homicides are disproportionately well-publicized.Report
Soooo… the whole OpenAI thing.
The leading contenders for explanatory power that I’ve seen so far:
1. Material: Altman was building a for-profit empire of secondary industries to support OAI.
2. Greed: Alignment issues with regards the commercial interests of, well, the globe.
3. Technology: Recent breakthroughs point at possible Singularity pathways.
Board in any of the above is compelled to act in the best interests of the charter.
Result? TBD.
But, it appears that MSFT has basically just scooped up OpenAI team without the OpenAI platform… not sure if this sticks or what it means. But one simple takeaway is that Non-Profit was never going to survive the encounter with world changing wealth potential.Report
Yeah only thing I could say with any confidence is it’s fabulous news for Microsoft.Report
I’m not sure that’s good news for us or the industry.
I’d like to see the board (or a good insider take) on what the real issue(s) was/were but having this emerging tech under a non-profit board who’s primary charter was alignment is better than abandoning any (theoretical) notion of alignment … and putting it in the hands of a hyperscaler? That’s like 101 Supervillain plot twist.
Now, I’ll admit that I was skeptical that functioning LLM’s were going to survive contact with commerce, but if the board was indeed worried about #2 and (heaven forefend) #3 — then losing those concerns to MSFT seems a bad play for the rest of us.
My other purely pragmatic question is this: what’s the level of effort to replace the estimated 1.7 trillion parameters in ChatGPT 4? Just having the people who got you the working models with those parameters doesn’t mean you’ve got a working system; and, in the ‘rush’ to recreate what was lost… what shortcuts on alignment are we taking? Finally, what if ‘Alignment’ itself is simply a lie.
Disclosure, I work on enabling tech that makes deploying AI possible within companies — this is not an advanced space with people who know what they are doing. Not since Y2K have I seen board-level involvement in IT decisions being driven by a fear of being left behind and simply mandating that the CIO get the company an AI strategy. It’s crazy out there…Report
Card on the table, I lean techno-optimist and I’m also a cynic so I am not profoundly worried about #3. I’m also, however, not a tech person professionally or by study so I also recognize that I mostly just don’t know much about this stuff.
Looking at what this crew of people developed with ChatGPT, though, and now seeing that Microsoft functionally “acquired” them at a very cheap cost I’m quite confident in theorizing it’s fantastic news for Microsoft. For the world? I just don’t know.Report
The main thing that we have to worry about when creating a superintelligence is that we have spent a lot of time denying that it exists and, even if it does, that it’s measurable.
Having people on the board who don’t believe that intelligence is measurable is the absolute worst thing you can possibly do to a board for a freakin’ artificial intelligence company.
Seriously, if I wanted to ruin AI, that’s exactly how I’d do it.
See if I couldn’t get them to fire their head visionary engineer.Report
I remain pretty skeptical that OpenAI has actually gotten close to making an intelligence, let alone a super one.Report
Dude, I absolutely agree. (I wrote some essays about it!)
HOWEVER. In the debate over whether AI is a horizon (always visible, always unreachable) or whether it’s a logarithmic cliff that is right over there is one that has me see-sawing. I mean… maybe? I could see it go either way.
But within a decade of creating an intelligence, we’ll have a super-intelligence.
And, this week, I think I’m in a place where I’m saying “if it’s possible, it’s something we should go for.”
And the bullshit “alignment” people are apparently more concerned with trivia and clout than with what someone with actual intelligence would be concerned with.
I’d rather a dozen Yuds on the alignment team than a single person who wants to prevent the AI from writing Trump poetry.
If AI is possible, it’s being prevented by people who are preventing it inadvertently.
And that’s irritating AF, as the kids say.Report
I feel and fear, but don’t know, that in this world where fusion and self driving cars remain ten years away that actual AI is also going to fall into that same category.Report
Especially since we know all the parts that go into it. Nonlinear functions with millions of variables, structure of the functions restricted to those where back-propagation works, an error function to be minimized, and stochastic gradient descent optimization. As someone over at LG&M and I discussed very briefly the other day, all the math was known (and had generally been put together) by the early 1970s. What was lacking was hardware cheap and fast enough to run billions or trillions of iterations to do the optimization (“training”).
I’m sure than a simulation of intelligence is more complicated than that.Report
Yeah you have put it in far more clear technical language than I ever could but I think our sentiments are the same.Report
I should have added that I am in no way denigrating the efforts of the people who put 50-year-old math together with contemporary hardware in useful ways. I did it myself on more than one occasion in my technical career.Report
I sure as heck am not!Report
They lost Altman and they lost all of the engineers who believed in Altman.
So… who’s left at OpenAI?
Really bad and prejudiced people believe that the “good” engineers are the ones that Altman took with him. But good people believe that those are really the “bad” engineers. And now OpenAI can build an AI much slower and safer than their competitors.Report
Oof-da. I just read a rumor that OpenAI is losing 700 of its 770 employees.
M$ just made one hell of an acquisition for merely the price of payroll.Report
I stand by my comment.Report
If you want a good chuckle, check this out.
Ilya Sutskever tweeted: “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”Report
Yeah the flop sweat is just dripping off that tweet.Report
I am old, so remember back in the mid-1990s when video was the new hot thing and there were literally dozens of small companies building video compression algorithms. MS routinely bought them up, made sure they had the IP nailed down so the math/programming people couldn’t go recreate it, then fired ’em.Report
Would that trick still work in 2023?
Depends on the pricetag, I guess. You just have to hope that the people you buy off stay bought.Report
Yep. Alphabet (Google) bought Deepmind. Meta (Facebook) has bought several AI startups. IBM has reportedly very quietly purchased several. Now Microsoft has “acquired” OpenAI.
One of the interesting questions about the OpenAI thing is that MS hired a bunch of people, but didn’t buy the company. I’m sure we’ll find out how much of the people’s knowledge is covered by patent apps and/or classified as trade secrets that they can’t use elsewhere.Report
classified as trade secrets that they can’t use elsewhere
I’m not certain that this works anymore. There are now players whose attitudes toward IP are far more cavalier and some of them are out of reach.
I mean, if I were in charge of one of a couple of places, I’d assign 2-3 people to hammering down where Altman is, where Altman is going, and make sure that I know his itinerary to the minute whenever he buys a plane ticket.
A lab that has a sufficient budget and less oversight might not tempt 99% of the planet but that 1% that would be tempted contains every single person working on ChatGPT.Report
This morning — literally — a jury found that Tata Group had illegally acquired DXC Technology software trade secrets and found Tata liable for $210M in damages.
I’m quite sure that the OpenAI board has lawyers that have already sent the letter to Microsoft telling them to keep very good records of where all those new employees work and what they work on, because the trade secret lawsuit is coming.Report
I suppose I was also thinking of China.
But it’s probably more difficult to bribe someone to go there with promises like “Oh, yeah… you won’t have to worry about too much oversight!” Credibly, anyway. But maybe the AI guys haven’t read anything related to world history written before 2003 or so…Report
MS has lawyers. Lots of lawyers. Some of which know enough to tell MS management that the safe thing is to keep these particular new hires away from any generative AI projects for their first six months.
Although it seems more likely that MS will just buy up the remaining OpenAI shell.Report
Microsoft can’t, OpenAI has an incredibly odd corporate structure. From what I understand, basically, they’re a non-profit organization that (mostly) owns a for-profit (Along with a few other investors who are only allowed to make a cut of the profits, not have any control). And because of how non-profits work, they can’t just…sell the for-profit, their purpose is running it.
They did this so they could sell stock (in the for-profit) while still having it controlled entirely by the non-profit.
Incidentally, this is kind of corporate structure I’ve though of before, although not to create, but…what if some one of those billionaires claiming to try to make the world better just…handed over full ownership of a for-profit corporation to a non-profit, entirely. Like a bank, say. Yes, I know credit unions exist, but that’s a different thing. Just a straight, completely normal bank, operates as a bank…but owned by a non-profit, all profits go to the non-profit which then get fed back into charity having to do with the bank, like helping low-income homebuyers or something.
I couldn’t quite figure out any reason this couldn’t happen (After all, non-profits own public stock all the time, there’s nothing stopping them from owning _all_ of it.), and it’s kinda weird to see it here as something deliberately built.Report
Thank you, that’s interesting.Report
Bad News:
Report
“To heck with me? How’s this for a counter-offer? To heck with *YOU*.”
Report
From what I have read this morning, I expect a reorganization to be announced soon. Some of the reporting suggests that the underlying disagreement between Altman and the previous board was that Altman wanted to focus on OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary and the rest of the board — as the board of a 501(c)3 corporation — thought that put them on shaky legal ground.Report
I hope that that’s the explanation because I find that legible.
I was worrying yesterday that the situation had moved from “I would understand this if I had more information” to “only young people would understand this situation”.Report
I don’t think it was _legal_ shaky ground. The only thing that would put them on legal shaky ground would be attempting to move money from the non-profit owner into the for-profit subsidiary.
I’m pretty sure they were worried about ‘ethical concerns of AI’.
By ‘ethical concerns’, to be clear I mean insane stupid things like ‘A computer taking over the world by somehow knowing enough information to convince people to do that’, and not the _actual_ AI stuff we should be worried about, like ‘Entire internet flooded with plausible-sounding nonsense consisting of strung-together words, thus destroying the greatest repository of human knowledge that has ever exist’ and ‘Literally no one can ever trust any recording ever made again, thus undoing one of the greatest advances use to take down authoritarian forces and document evil’, and more unethical stuff, like ‘stealing art’ and ‘running over pedestrians’…those things are just fine for AI to be doing, in case anyone is confused.Report
One of the weirdest corporate firings occurred because people took the Terminator movies seriously:
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/look-at-scientology-to-understandReport
The IDF has released this video of the tunnel down at al-Shif. And, um, I mean…watch the video, see if you notice any, uh, disconnect:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/idf-releases-video-of-tunnel-used-by-hamas-at-al-shifa-hospital-w92knxhlw
Just watching that video, there’s not even some obstruction in the tunnel that the drone might be having trouble getting past, not some mysterious darkness with stuff in the way. The drone just looks down, looks up, looks back down to a place that is clearly a concrete wall, and then cuts to another concrete wall that looks mostly the same.
What exactly is the IDF even trying to pretend happened there? Did someone go down there, clear things out of the way of the drone? Why don’t we have _their_ footage, or, now that the tunnel is clear, a new unbroken drone video? Why can’t the drone have run the video all the time?
At minimum, couldn’t the drone, once it was in the tunnel, have _turned around_?
But there’s more wrong:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/20/what-israels-video-of-hamas-tunnel-under-al-shifa-tells-us
What has apparently been found is some sort of tunnel downward that was built using modern construction techniques, with clearly visible load-bearing column. They don’t guess that that is, but if I had to guess, I would guess it is some sort of access tunnel or even just ventilation to the now-sealed underground bunker (Remember, Israel had to bulldoze this building to find the tunnel.)…and Israel just spliced in an entirely different Hamas tunnel and is hoping we wouldn’t notice.
And anyone who says ‘the IDF wouldn’t do something as blatantly dumb as this’, I remind you that they tried to assert that a calendar that had words on it was ‘the names of terrorists who watched over hostages, and we will hunt them all down and kill them’, when in fact those Arabic words were the names of days, you know, like all calendars ever have on them.
IDF lies are like Trump lies…they aren’t there to convince anyone. The lies exist so that Western papers can sorta vaguely pretend the IDF claims about why they attack hospitals was proven true, and ‘There was a secret bunker under al-Shifa, we all saw the video’ can be repeated as true and make it into the public discourse.
Because, check that first link, and notice that somehow the fact the video is sheer nonsense that proves nothing is not mentioned.Report
Much worse than that. Israel is presenting this footage as raw as it can because it really believes this.
So that’s where their head is at, and (least we forget) they got there by their equiv of a dozen or so 911s.Report
And if you zoom in really closely on the image you can see the JPEG artifacts where they copy-pasted entries from a different birth certificate!Report
…did you watch that video?Report
Palestinian Authority Warns That Gaza Hospitals Running Dangerously Low On Ammunition
https://babylonbee.com/news/palestinian-authority-warns-that-gaza-hospitals-are-running-dangerously-low-on-ammunitionReport
Vox goes deep into whether it is problematic that Non-Jews play Jews and what this means in the broader society:
https://www.vox.com/23958988/bradley-cooper-maestro-jewish-nose-representation-hollywood-historyReport
Yeah, and they’re having Denzel play Hannibal. (The elephant one, I mean. Not the gourmand.)
Sometimes people will be playing other people who have different backgrounds.
There is no need to set fires in crowded theaters.
(I do kinda want to bite the prosthetic nose off, though. Spit it up into the air.)Report
As long as they don’t have Denzel attempt a British accent, all is good. I’m tired of the overuse of British accents in historical movies.
What Vox seems to be doing is trying to come up with a sort of consistent place for Jews in the current liberal cosmology.Report
For decades now I’ve been trying to figure out who Bradley Cooper reminds me of, and there it is.
Full credit to whoever cast him as Leonard Bernstein. Why would they bother with prosthetics?Report
How Argentine youth helped the self-described anarcho-capitalist Miel win the Argentine Presidency.
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/10/21/23925549/argentina-election-javier-milei-right-youthReport
Has the “Shake things up/ Burn it all down” strategy ever worked, like every anywhere?Report
‘
It depends on how you define work. They kind of worked in the Russian Revolution and the Communist Revolution in China. Even in Revolutionary France, they arguably worked because the old system never came back in pure form. Even after the Bourbons were restored to the throne, a lot of the changes made during the French Revolution stuck.Report
I mean “Works” as in “Led to a better outcome”.Report
I’m not sure if this is a “burn stuff down” moment or “throw the rascals out”. Corruption and mismanagement of the economy has been a thing there.Report
The two become indistinguishable if the chosen alternative is merely nihilistic destruction instead of construction.Report
I mean, it IS Argentina.Report
Argentinian inflation is about 8% per month. If the difference between “burn stuff down” and “throw the rascals out” is a legitimate national crisis, this sounds more like the latter.Report
Plague in London; Women of Color Hardest HitReport
Oh, apparently they didn’t use DNA evidence but macromorphoscopics. The people were designated to be black women based on the shape of their skulls.
The arc of science is long but it bends toward phrenology.Report
The history of non-Whites in Europe is a lot longer and more complicated than the White racists will have you believe but yes, the Left side of the aisle sometimes overcorrects for this.Report
I feel I should point out: You actually _can_ determine someone’s likely ‘race’ (Or at least, what part of the world some of their genes came from) from skull shape.
The exact shape of the skull, like the color of someone’s skin, cannot predict personality traits or criminality, but can, in some vague way, predict where their ancestors are from. At least statistically.
Again, the important word there is ‘statistically’.Report
You may remember Calla Walsh from that homework assignment that went viral a year and a half ago.
You may, instead, remember her being mentioned in the New York Times as being “representative of an influential new force in Democratic politics, activists who cut their teeth on the presidential campaigns of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren”.
Well, she just got arrested. The news story says that it is in connection with a protest held at an Israel-based defense company. Then the next paragraph talks about stuff like property damage and mentions an “incendiary device” found on the roof.
Fireworks aren’t free speech anymore?
Anyway, this is why politicians should never have their pictures taken with young people.Report
Bail has been set at $20,000.
Might be a hair low for “domestic terrorism” but if someone wanted to argue that she ain’t a flight risk, I’m not sure that I’d disagree. Kid’s 20. Just have her surrender her passport to the court and we’re good.Report
I’m utterly sick and tired of the inanities of Pro-Palestinian activists in the West. The entire lot of them are rotten. They go on and on about the Palestinians but can’t give one word to criticize the genocidally anti-Semitic Hamas, despite Hamas literally saying the only acceptable solution is when all the Jews in the Middle East are dead and acting on it, or mourn for any Jew killed or kidnapped by Hamas. In fact the idea that Israeli Jews could be victims and the Palestinians or their leaders aren’t pure spotless angels is so utterly confusing to them that the destroy any evidence of this. They are disgusting and need to be treated as such.Report
LeeEsq, you have produced at least a dozen of these rants about what _people who are not here_ are saying, and at this point you’re sorta even stopped talking about Israeli deaths, and you’re just ranting that people are talking about other things that those deaths…despite you not really talking about them at all either.
Not one single comment on what’s actually happening, just extremely simplistic ‘Hamas says they’re going to murder all Jews’, and more importantly, ‘why don’t Pro-Palestinian activists talk more about how Hamas says they are going to murder all Jews!’
Well, Pro-Palestinian activists don’t talk about that (Or talk about Hamas’s actual rhetoric, which is usually a little short of that, in fact, I can’t ever recall them threatening to kill Jews outside Israel/Palestine.) because Hamas’s rhetoric there is generally not much worse than Israel’s, and most ‘pro-Palestinian’ people know that. Both sides have been threatening to wipe each other for decades, and have political policy statement that extremely clearly state they are going to do so.
And make other statements. The previous Israeli Minister of the Interior Ayelet Shaked just threatened to turn a major Gaza city into a soccer field and forcibly deport all two million Palestinians from Gaza. That happened earlier today, I’m literally just randomly picking the newest genocidal statement coming out of Israel politicians, while we all pretend everything is normal there.
The best you can say about Israel is that Israel is, slightly more often, talking about forcibly deporting all Palestinians whereas Hamas is slightly more likely to talk about killing all Jews who remain in Israel, which is…not actually any different, except that Israel is offering to play for the airplanes to make the other people leave before they start murdering those who refuse to get on the planes, whereas Hamas is asking for ‘self-deportation’ before the murders start, I guess.
Same with their _actions_. Both sides have have kidnapped and killed civilians (The ceasefire is literally Israel trading 150 of those kidnapped civilians for 50 of Hamas’s, which is tilted like that because Israel has _way more_.) They have done almost the same thing to each other for decades, it’s just that Israel did it _with an official military force_ via ‘policing occupied territories’, and Hamas did it via ‘terrorism’, I guess. Except all those times that Israeli fanatics did terrorism too, I guess. Hey, how are those murders and general terrorism by Israel settlers in the West Bank going? Anyone get a ceasefire on that too?
But you refuse to even slightly participate in conversations, and instead have produced a bunch of rants about _activists_.Report
“[Y]ou refuse to even slightly participate in conversations, and instead have produced a bunch of rants about _activists_.”
So when, like, Chip or Phil H start yelling about CONSERVATIVES and posting links about some mom at a school-board meeting in Florida saying “I ain’t want none’a them Tee-Wurds in muh kid’s classroom”, you’re gonna roll in and tell them to shut up and stop talking about people who aren’t here?Report
There are Disney child actors who have gone on to commit murder(*).
I’m going to give a pass to any politicians who had their pictures taken with them.
(*) Because of math this is going to happen. Disney has a huge number of actors.Report
Note: I am not the one who is saying that she is “representative of an influential new force in Democratic politics”.
That’s a direct quotation, by the way.Report
Oof:
“I’m not a ‘leftist’ I’m a communist. And communism is the only force that can liberate LGBTQ+ people.”
Well, you know what they say. If you’re a socialist at 30, you don’t have a brain, and if you’re not a socialist at 20…you do.Report
She hasn’t tweeted since the arrest, which is smart, but her pinned is footage of her getting arrested last month. Doing the same GD thing.Report
And that has made me rethink the bail thing.
If someone wanted to argue “she should be released on bail! It’s not like she’s going to do this again!”, it would be very, very easy to argue against them.
LAWYER TYPES!!! Let’s say you release someone on bail and, instead of jumping bail, just commit (and get arrested for) more of the exact same freaking crimes. Does bail get refunded in that circumstance?Report
I believe some states may have started to vary a bit on this in the last couple years (or at least there have been discussions of that) but the purpose of bail is to secure appearance at trial, not as collateral to be held against commission of future crimes.Report
That completely answers my question. Thank you.Report
Is perceived likelihood of reoffending a factor in whether pretrial release is offered at all?Report
IIRC in Maryland ‘risk to society’ can factor in to a determination.Report
At this point in time, the state has not proven that she ‘did it’ in the first place, so it seems exceptionally odd we’d allow them to try to prove ‘she will do it _again_’.
Let’s stop trying to figure out ways to put people in jail _without_ trial, and start actually funding the system so it can handle the amount of people it arrests.Report
While it’s true that the state has not proven that she “did it” in the first place, it is true that this is at least the second time that she has been arrested for it and she appears to be bragging about doing it in her pinned tweet.
Note: I am not arguing that she is as guilty as she says she is. Merely that her recidivism rate seems to be higher than most arrestees to the point where I found myself wondering about the point of bail at all.
And, apparently, it’s merely about securing appearance at trial.Report
That’s mostly correct, though people have tried to turn it into something else, with some success.Report
Then it should be really REALLY easy to convict her of the crime, shouldn’t it? Sounds like two or three days of a trial, hardly enough time to commit another crime.
What’s that? Trials take months just to schedule, due to lack of funding?
I can’t believe that liberal disregard for law and order has caused them to defund the courts and public defender officers and whatnot, so we can’t hold criminal cases in a time manner, against the explicit and loud demands of law and order conservatives trying to fund the criminal justice system!
…I mean, I haven’t checked, but I assume that’s how the politics work. It sure would be stupid if conservatives were demanding more shoveling of money at the police to arrest people but not actually giving any money to the _next_ stage in that process, and then weirdly acting like that something that could be solved by ‘holding people in jail without having a trial’.Report
I can’t believe that liberal disregard for law and order has caused them to defund the courts and public defender officers and whatnot, so we can’t hold criminal cases in a time manner, against the explicit and loud demands of law and order conservatives trying to fund the criminal justice system!
This has me curious.
Are trial speedier in California or New York than they are in Wyoming or North Dakota?Report
I have just spent like thirty minutes trying to look this up, and have absolutely no idea.
I did find something that said basically no one is hitting the standards, but first, the standards: https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0032/18977/model-time-standards-for-state-trial-courts.pdf
Page 3 sorta seems to be the important one.
And that seems to be presented as the ‘bare minimum’, not ‘the average’. Meanwhile, the thing I found that clued me in that there were standards:
https://www.arnoldventures.org/stories/improving-timely-justice-in-americas-courts
So…everyone is bad at it. Are conservative states worse? No idea.
Incidentally, 75% of felonies within 90 days makes it seem pretty likely there should be some decided in a month or less. Like the things that are bragged about on social media.
The extremely damning thing about all this is IT INCLUDES PLEA DEALS, this isn’t just stuff that goes to trial. 98% of convictions are via plea deals. Now, that 98% includes misdemeanors, so it’s not 98% of all felonies, but it is reasonably high.
And I’m looking at that ‘average of 256 days’ and wondering what amount of that was plea deals dragging the average lower, and how long it takes on average to hold an actual trial!Report
Huh. Thanks for doing that work.
Looks like it’s bad everywhere and we’re not in a place where we can blame “democrats” or “republicans”.
Huh.Report
Which we liberals have been telling across threads for months. I guess its good that you have arrived where we are but man . . . .Report
Well, I’m now back to a deep cynical “it doesn’t matter who you vote for and so it’s okay to vote for non-Progressives”.
Like… the outcomes are pretty much identical. Why is voting for Team Good the moral issue, again?
It ain’t because of effectiveness!Report
Why is the data David presented “bad”, in your view?
The fact that petty offenders who can’t make bail are held for absurdly long periods awaiting trial seems exactly what you are asking for.Report
Oh, that seems to be exactly what I am asking for?
I thought I was asking for higher bail for people higher at risk of recidivism.
Like, let’s say Joe Schmoe (a white guy, but to make this diverse, he’s in a wheelchair) kills someone. A stranger. Also a white guy. Maybe gay. Haven’t thought about it. But not, you know, a hate crime. Just the guy happened to be gay. Then he put it on Instagram. And he has bail set and he makes bail and then he goes out and shoots, I dunno, a Native American. Puts that on Instagram too.
Is there a reason to say something like “maybe we shouldn’t let this guy out a third time, even though we haven’t had a trial”?
There is an argument for “what about justice? You haven’t proven that he did it! MAYBE IT WAS A BLACK GUY!!!!”
But there’s also the whole “he put it on Instagram?” thing.Report
Joe Schmoe probably wouldn’t get bail the first time. If he did, and it would likely be prohibitively high, then the second time would violate his conditions of bail and he’d be remanded. No third killing, unless he kills a fellow inmate.Report
Mutatis mutandis, let’s change it to “assault”.
Let’s change it to “burglary”.
Let’s change it to “arson”.
Where does it tip?Report
You might try talking sense in the first place, not blathering and then back-pedaling.Report
The accusation was “The fact that petty offenders who can’t make bail are held for absurdly long periods awaiting trial seems exactly what you are asking for” and, seriously, that’s *NOT* what I was asking for.
Or, at least, I don’t think it was.
“Blathering”.
Oh, you might not know what “Mutatis mutandis” means. It’s Latin. It means “the things that need to be changed, having been changed”.
Like, in my original example, it was murder but we could use the same example by just changing “murder” to “assault”.
We can change it to burglary or arson by having it be the victim’s property instead of just the victim.
The argument about how we need to prove that they did it to detain them unjustly seems to not be relevant when there’s a dead body, per your comment.
I’m wondering when we flip back to “justice is more important!” when it comes to the various acts perpetrated.Report
I thought you wanted to lock up accused shoplifters. Was I wrong?Report
I wanted them tried and a 12 strikes law.
This particular thread was inspired by a political protestor who documented her political protesting that included, sadly, things that are *TECHNICALLY* illegal. Twice. And documented it on the internet.
And my question was whether there’s a point of recidivism past which people can reasonably make bail higher.Report
Oh so like when petty criminals are arrested you want them released pending trial?
Or held?Report
I think that recidivism could reasonably be considered when setting bail.Report
So in the data David presented, your objection was, what?Report
I had no objection to David’s data.
Indeed, I thought that there was stuff that followed from David’s data.Report
I took Latin many years ago and am familiar with the phrase. (Despite rumors to the contrary, it was not the language of instruction in my day.) And I was responding not to what Chip said, but to what you said. You chose a silly example and then, when called on it, backed off. That sort of thing doesn’t encourage people to want to play with you. Of course, that’s talking about you rather than the substance of the issues, but you can’t complain when you make it about you.Report
Well, the original example at the root was Calla Walsh.
She engaged in an alleged crime and posted it to the internet and then, before her trial date, engaged in the same dang alleged crime and posted it to the internet *AGAIN*.
This strikes me as egregious.
Given that recidivism comes up a lot, I was wondering if there was a way to limit pre-trial recidivism and it struck me that bail might be such a mechanism.Report
See how simple that was? In fact, it was so simple that you actually had a reasonable discussion of the point you now say you were trying to make well up-thread. It fizzled out, possibly precisely because it was a reasonable discussion with no shenanigans, but there’s the proof that it can be done.Report
Do you have an opinion on the topic or just some light hall monitoring?Report
Yes, I do. Maybe someday when I have the time to do a deep dive and say something substantive enough to engage with — though why should I be different? — I’ll share it. Until then, I won’t bother folks with substance-free hand-waving.Report
Well, in the meantime, I’m willing to run with the whole issue over whether recidivism could reasonably be considered when setting bail.
Personally, I think that it shouldn’t necessarily be considered in every single case… but in egregious cases such as those mentioned above (or even a good chunk of the 327 serial shoplifters!) should have it considered.Report
Who’s stopping you? You already did it once with one approach and got the response you got. If you think doing it again with a different approach will get more interesting results, knock yourself out.Report
But you’re not even disagreeing. You’re just saying I should phrase it more succinctly and then, when I finally meet your high standards, say something like I have a truly marvelous demonstration of my own opinion on this topic that this margin is too narrow to contain.
Anyway. I’ll go back to talking about Calla.Report
Who said we were disagreeing? And about what?Report
“Until then, I won’t bother folks with substance-free hand-waving.”
you sure do post a lot for someone who’s too cool to be wasting their time taking this discussion seriouslyReport
Nobody has to read what I post, indeed, some folks refuse to. As for being cool, I can’t help that.Report
Oh, Jaybird, that’s so sweet. You think that’s why politicians get nervous when they hear about pictures they took with young people?Report
Young Democrats will eat it up, though, while old people mostly won’t even notice.Report
Perhaps I’m reading a hair much into this, but it seems like she’s realizing that she’s going to need more than merely an affordable lawyer.
Report
There is a tentative ceasefire or pause in the Israel-Hamas war for four days. Hamas gets an additional day of ceasefire for every 10 captives they release. Of course, it seems that some captives are already dead, others have been “misplaced”, and others “loaned” to other Islamist terrorist organizations. Hamas could say that all the Jewish babies and children they kidnapped were given to Muslim couples to raise as good Muslims and the people wailing and wailing about the Palestinians won’t give a damn.Report
You just knew there was going to be an article, didn’t you?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/17/israel-gaza-war-babies-families/Report
Some of the captives were killed in the original raid and have always been corpses.Report
I’m no math whiz, but this gives them incentive to take more hostages next time, right?Report
I think the incentive is built into the conflict regardless of what happens here.Report
If there’s no ceasefire this time, there’s limited incentive for next time. Better yet, if there are no tunnels after this time, there’s limited capability for next time.Report
I don’t think that’s true. Hamas’ only way to fight Israel is asymmetrically. The tactic succeeded in provoking Israel into taking actions which, fairly or unfairly, have painted Israel in a negative light and worse which will force Isrsel to make a very difficult decision about whether it should have a perpetual military presence in Gaza. This is how al-Qaeda then insurgents got the better of us in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The hard lesson is that the only way to win these kinds of conflicts is not to play them on their terms.Report
The difference is that Hamas wants Jews out of what is considered Israel proper, not just Gaza which they controlled at the time of the Simchat Torah massacre. The other Palestinians want independence but have a hard time coming up with a concrete expression of what they want if you give them maps, pens, and pencils to say this is what they want exactly. The issue of Diaspora Palestinians always remains a big tough sticking point in negotiations. Plus there isn’t thousands of miles of distance to separate Israel from the WB and Gaza.
So either the Palestinians grow a bit more realistic in their expectations, Israel learns to live with perpetual terrorist attacks because even though Palestine might be free it isn’t free from the River to the Sea, or something unprecedented happens and the world swoops in and forces over seven million Jews to relocate elsewhere and destroys Israel and replaces it with an Arab Muslim Palestine.Report
It’s odd you leave the Israeli’s behavior in the West Bank out of this analysis, Lee, and avoid answering questions regarding it whenever it’s brought up.Report
I consider the West Bank and Gaza to be separate. Even if Israel did everything the world wanted it to, Hamas would be Hamas and would still act accordingly. What large parts of the chattering class in the West seem to want is for Israel basically to give in fully to what they determine to be just without basically an agreement and wait for the Palestinians to get better. If the Palestinians decide to misuse their independence and attack Israel, Israel is to just take it on the chin and ignore it.
I know that your theory is that if Israel left the WB like Gaza, although Jerusalem would be the sticky point in doing a Gaza withdrawal, than the world wouldn’t really get as agitated if the Palestinians decided to misuse their independence and Israel responded in self-defense.
I am not seeing it. By all accounts Israel withdrew from Gaza but people still claim it is under occupation because of the blockade. Yet, people were out and about celebrating the death of Israeli “settlers” after the Simchat Torah massacre and are still treating it as a legitimate action by Hamas and an illegitimate response by Israel because it is “disproportionate”
So I think that even if Israel does all that the world claims what is good and right and the Palestinians decide to turn the WB into Gaza 2, the world would require that Israel it by and do nothing.Report
Under something like the normal rules, Israel letting Gaza have access to trade and pulling out of the WB and fixing their boarders results in Israel being a normal country.
I think that’s the reasoning, i.e. that the occupation of Gaza (ish) and the WB create the conflict.
Note “Israel fixing it’s boarders” puts an end to this slow motion ethnic cleansing that they’ve been doing and it also forces them to either absorb various Arab areas they don’t want (i.e. make a lot of Arabs citizens) or to remove various settler areas or to engage in outright ethnic exchanges.
Maybe they could pay large numbers of Arabs to leave and some country to take them.
And at that point we’re sort of over the edge of the universe. Does WB and Gaza become Jordan or Gaza?
We might end up with something like Lebanon, i.e. a terror org holding a lot of power inside the state. The advantage of that is holding a massive war with Israel shatters their own economic base.Report
Israel withdrew from Gaza, yes, but they A) kept it besieged and B) stayed in the West Bank and continued expropriating land there. Despite both of those things, though, the world basically yawned and shrugged at Israel’s treatment of Gaza right up until the conflict this year which is, itself, a -direct- result of Israel’s policy regarding the West Bank*.
Let’s be clear that Israel clearing out of the West Bank (realistically) wouldn’t be a negotiated arrangement but would simply be Israel withdrawing to sensible borders. They would, assuredly, keep Jerusalem and other large settlement blocks near the border and the world would likely let them so long as any Palestinians in those areas were, then, granted Israeli citizenship. The Israeli’s would get little credit for doing so, as they got little credit for pulling out of Gaza, but they would finally have closed the sucking chest wound that is the occupation of the West Bank.
And your misinterpretation of how the world treated the Gazan withdrawal seems colored by the identarian left. But it is what the larger world did that matters. The left never gave Israel credit for withdrawing from Gaza, but everyone else did. When Hamas turned Gaza into an armed camp the Palestinian Gazan cause was basically crippled.
I think it’s wildly overdetermined to assume that Hamas would take over the West Bank if Israel withdrew (the PA basically abandoned Gaza with the Israeli rights eager acquiescence. A Hamas attempt on the West Bank would mean the PA was fighting for their literal lives). If Hamas, or some movement like them, did take over the West Bank then their ability to actually threaten Israels’ survival would negligible. The Israeli’s defeated armies in their short national life- defeating a bunch of irregulars would be child’s play. The only thing the Israeli’s can’t defeat is their own short sightedness.
No, it is unambiguously the West Bank occupation that is the only serious danger to Israel’s survival long term:
-Every week the settlers are continuing their antics is another group of young people who form a negative impression of Israel and another group of pro Israeli elders who shuffle off this mortal coil.
-Every inch of ground the settlers expropriate makes the ultimate project of removing them that much harder.
-Every election where the settlements and settlers are a major force keeps pumping poison into the Israeli body politic.
At some point, somewhere in the future, the Israeli’s are going to have to choose what to do about the West Bank. If they keep putting that choice off then, in time, someone will choose for them. It’ll be either the illiberal Israeli right turning Israel into an actual apartheid state on one hand, or the Palestinians abandoning the two-state solution and forcing a Mandela one state resolution. And in a future world where Israel’s position in the hearts of the masses continues to slip there’s no end of additional trouble they could find themselves forced into**. The only way to avoid those outcomes is to either give up the land and the people that come with it or else accept the land and the people on it. Every other path leads to ruin and kicking the can down the road simply brings the day closer when the Israeli’s won’t be choosing what happens. Israel will always be a profoundly trade dependent state. She cannot survive without the good will of the developed world. Not forever.
*Not because Hamas used it as an excuse (they did but who cares) but because the Israeli’s had their pants down because of the Israeli right’s projects in the West Bank.
**Millions of descendants of the Palestinian refugees exist out there. An Israel that’s against the wall could be forcedReport
Beyond Israel, I think the world is growing tired of Jews in general. It seems to me that large swathes of the world have decided that the Jews had their century and or two of glory, along with a lot of pain, but must now retreat into the shadows and allow other people to come forth and shine. Jews don’t even register as a real people with a communal identity but as a bunch of atomistic individuals who happen to save the same culture while other groups are real communal cultures with real communal needs and institutions.Report
DEI, my man. Decolonization and Decentering Whiteness is going to happen, like it or not.
Perhaps it’s time to listen.Report
Even if the Liberal-Left side of the political aisle becomes completely unhospitable for Jews across the entire world, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Right will be welcoming. At least in Western world, you still have plenty of people on the Right who are completely anti-Semitic. What it could mean is that Jews are completely alone in a hostile world.Report
It’s worse than that. There will be part of the center-Right that will be *EXCEPTIONALLY* welcoming.
But they will be unfashionable AF. Like, you’ll cringe just talking to them.Report
I know you believe that everything is about aesthetics but it isn’t about fashionability. The Democratic Party is incredibly unfashionable to the Further Left. Its that we can’t trust the Center Right to get to chummy to the Further Right if it is politically expedient. While the Center Left can get way to chummy with the Further Left, the Further Left’s great natural disdain for the Center-Left and liberals sort of prevents this.Report
Not everything.
If the center-left and the liberal democrats are still good company, no problem.
Ride this out until demographics catch up.Report
The US Religious Right think Jesus-v2 will come to Israel (before killing or converting them all) ergo Israel needs to exist so that Jesus-v2 can exist.
(Or something like that).
The good news is they have your back until then. The bad news is what JB said.Report
I will say that if Jesus-v2 shows up, all bets are off.
But, if Jesus-v2 shows up, there will be a lot of priors that will be demonstrated to have been false.Report
“See those people over there? They’re the most pro-military people in the largest country in the world. They hate your enemies and 30% of them believe it’s G-d’s will that your country survive. Don’t trust them. 1% of them believe some sick stuff.
“Those other people, the ones who believe in open borders and are rioting in the streets waving Palestinian flags, you can trust them. What? ‘What are they chanting?’ Don’t worry about it. English is a colonizer language anyway.”Report
If Israel divests itself of the West Bank than the world will likely simply stop caring to Israel’s great benefit. But as long as that occupation continues… tick tick tick goes the bomb.Report
I don’t think this passes the smell test at all. Do you really think that if Israel withdrew from the WB but Hamas did the Simchat Torah massacre, that the world’s two billion Muslims and their governments would be fine with any Israeli action against Hamas? They would be crying bloody murder that the Jews are hurting a fellow Muslim people. Likewise, those screaming bloody murder in the West would still be crying bloody murder regardless of the WB.Report
The Muslims might but their useful idiots couldn’t claim that Israel doesn’t want peace, does want to steal land, and effectively has it coming.
If you’re going to cut the dog’s tail off an inch at a time then you need to expect to get bit.
End the occupation, give them a country, build high walls, and carpet bomb them every time they pull a terror attack.
Lebanon, not Gaza.
The really nasty part of this for Israel is it would need to set boarders. The nasty part for the Palestinians is “no peace” also means “Israel gets to pick what land they get”.Report
IMO, if Israel did this they would have to adhere to as close as the official borders as possible, with some fiddling in Jerusalem maybe. Walls would bring about endless complaints of open air prisons like Gaza. So basically Israel would have to exit and set up little in ways of defense. Re-entering under any reason would lead to howls of protest. Plus not dealing with the Diaspora Palestinians will also be continually used as a cudgel against Israel.Report
If you’re claiming you own the land where your own people live, then that’s understandable and calling it an “occupation” is a misuse of the language.
We’re in “war and time have shifted boarders” territory.
The problem comes from when your people aren’t on the land and you claim it, or if you don’t claim it, your people aren’t on it, and you’re claiming you will control it anyway.
I am not suggesting the boarders of 1967. The facts on the ground have changed. I’m suggesting Israel take the land it wants and the people who live on it, and stop trying to control everything else.
That would make it clear that the phrase “end the occupation” means “destroy Israel”.
Israel would still have nasty, brutal wars where it kills 100-1 and the Arabs squeak about it. But it would be a lot clearer that the wars are the choice of the Arabs and not the choice of Israel.
At the moment there are BSDI arguments, i.e. that the Israel Right has been train wrecking peace and doesn’t want a Palestinian state at all.Report
Sure, but the left wing fringe and the Muslim nations opinions wouldn’t matter a wit for the well being of Israel and everyone -else- would be generally ok or resigned to any Israeli retaliation. And, again, it bears noting that Israel’s settlement activity -directly- contributed to the lethalness of the Simchat Torah massacre.Report
A lot of libs and establishmentarians think this, here and internationally. I’m not sure about this myself, but for now at least I’m not buying it, and I think the people who do believe this are substantially overrating their own leverage in the situation.
I suspect in Israel things look a lot different. I know they look different here, as a generic non-Establishment American.
When you look at the history of Israel as a nation-state, it looks to me that they are stronger now than they have ever been: diplomatically, militarily, economically, demographically.
Libs say, “OMG what about the West Bank??!!?” but I’m not sure where the traction for that is supposed to come. In particular, it’s not clear to me why Israel is supposed to care about demonstrations in the UK (or elsewhere) when Israel is a thriving country and the UK isn’t.Report
Israel is a profoundly trade dependent nation and is, accordingly, profoundly dependent on good will from its developed peer nations. The eroding of Israel’s position is not particularity ambiguous if you look at its trajectory for the past couple of decades.
-The Israeli right, while politically dominant due to the collapse of the Israeli left (which is strongly attributable to Palestinian decisions), has gotten increasingly authoritarian and problematic. They range in their answer to the West Bank question either with traditional soft voice allusions to slow motion ethnic cleansing or openly advocate for an apartheid or an active ethnic cleansing outcome.
-The pattern of public opinion in Israels’ peer nations is not, at all, promising. While Israel garners significant support and sympathy; that support is rooted in middle aged and older voters who mostly remember Israel either as a plucky vulnerable young nation surviving against all odds or as a mature Democracy seeking a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian question and being stymied by Palestinian refusals. Most younger voters have come to know Israel as the unambiguously dominant and unthreatened regional power with an iron boot on the West Bank which they are slowly, but not at all subtly, ethnically cleansing through settler violence. Their opinions of the state reflect that.
Sure, Israel’s position at the moment is secure but the fissures are evident and widening. The Israeli right has been provoking a series of near constitutional crises and offers no realistic moral suggestion as to how the Palestinian question will be resolved. Their perpetual and obvious stance is they will somehow acquire the West Bank lands for Israel without incorporating the people who live in them. It’s not a stable equilibrium in the long run. I’m, personally, a long standing fan of the Israeli’s but, looking at it objectively, I only see two likely outcomes unless the Israelis change course: either Israel ceases to be a liberal state and ethnically cleanses the Palestinians (I cannot guess if Israel could survive such an outcome) or they continue to hemorrhage support internationally until at some point in the future the international community forces Israel to accept a one state outcome much like what South Africa experienced (I cannot guess how that outcome would turn out either but I fear- not well).Report
It’s really not, though. Nobody is doing Israel any special favors in trading with them. Other nations trade with Israel because they think it is in their best interest. Israel pays 100 cents on the dollar for whatever they buy, and they are the best alternative in the market for whatever they sell.
The whole peer nation thing doesn’t make any sense. Frankly I can’t think of who Israel peer nations are, maybe Switzerland, Singapore and Liechtenstein.
In any event, Israel is not dependent on the good graces of anybody except the USA, especially the EU nations who tend to get the most pissed off. And even there, it is probably less dependent on the USA now than at any other time in its history.
Suffice to say, the people who want to put the hammer down on Israel over the settlements have shown a lot less leverage over Israel than they have talked.Report
The UN would have a lot more moral authority on this issue if they didn’t consistently object to Israel existing.Report
Well yeah, but my guess is even that is ancillary.
What’s more important than that are actual authority and resources which can be brought to be bear on Israel’s behalf.
And what’s most important of all is the moral authority that Israel has or Israel represents. Though this is a different sort of thing than most people might imagine when they hear about Israel’s moral authority.
Ie, “Jews suffered so much in the Holocaust, they deserve their own homeland and whatever, and this was given to them in the Bible and the Balfour Declaration, etc blah blah.”
I don’t mean to denigrate such things and push comes to shove I probably believe them myself, at least a little bit. But what was talking about above is something different.
For example, one thing which I should have mentioned in reply to North a couple days ago but didn’t, the immediate context of the Hamas attack was a last-ditch attempt by Hamas to disrupt an agreement of mutual diplomatic recognition between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
For some time, Israel and Saudi Arabia (plus Jordan and Egypt) have had fairly effective working bilateral or multilateral relationships to address this or that. This latest treaty, though, goes well beyond that. Embassies, ambassadors, trade delegations, foreign direct investment, the whole bit. Haters can fcuk right off.
Even if Hamas successfully delays the ratification of the treaty, this is clearly the direction things are heading, and have been for a decade or so.
The Western Left and its fetish for “ZOMG what about the West Bank and Gaza!?!” haven’t stopped it, or even materially slowed it down.
Ie, in the context of _this kind_ of moral authority for Israel, for Saudi Arabia (and others) the association with Israel carries with it the possibility of technology, agriculture, entrepreneurship, energy and the prosperity and development that comes with those things. Or they could go the other way and be in solidarity with Rashida Tlaib and Jeremy Corbyn.
Don’t look for Israel to become the next South Africa.Report
Which is why I find it sadly amusing that the GOP thinks Biden has somehow botched this. And offensive that the legacy media seem to agree in the ways they are covering his response. But not being a “Real American” I suspect I’m missing something.
You misread the situation:
Israel is a net importer of basic foodstuffs and their components with the US as its largest source of wheat. There is in fact economic leverage to be had, though the US is not likely to use it.Report
We haven’t shut down food imports/exports for the Russians or even North Korea.
If someone wants to claim Israel should be starved, then they’re in “because they’re Jews” territory.Report
Right, which is why I find in very unlikely we would do it. Nonetheless, there is economic leverage for a net trade dependent country to influence its path, which is contra-Koz.Report
If we exclude tools that we refuse to use on nasty countries, then I’m not sure Koz is wrong.
If we treat Israel as a normal-but-nasty-repressive-country, I think our leverage goes down and nothing changes for the better.
We give them a lot of aid, but that aid is tiny compared to their GDP. We’re not willing to invade them.
We do push them, and we use our leverage in constructive ways. However our role is more akin to Jimmy Cricket than God.Report
That would never happen. The realistic leverage is really around technology as both imports and exports. Israel is a major exporter of technology services and high tech manufactured products, but that also makes them a major importer of the same and subject to the willingness of foreign states to buy those things from Israel.
There’s no plausible planet where the Israelis are starved over the Palestinians. There is a possible one where they drop out of the first world over the long term by virtue of losing favored status for purchase of tech and services, where the cost of doing business in those sectors gets way more expensive, and where there is a slow downward spiral of brain drain and lack of investment.Report
Israel would need to drop the ball pretty badly with their internal politics for this to happen.
If they go full-right-wing-theocracy then sure. Without that, if it’s just the rest of the world trying to meddle, then I don’t see it.
We’d be doing something that would be interpreted (maybe correctly) as anti-Semitism. Increasing Israeli brain-drain by cranking up anti-Semitism would be tough.Report
I think the anti-semitism card has been played and has already passed peak currency for the reasons North had laid out elsewhere. Israel isn’t the underdog and everyone knows it.
If Israel finds itself less able to trade and get the investment it wants from its favored partners the brain drain would presumably be to the West. It’s all a question of what kind of country Israel wants to be 40 or 50 years from now, and any degradation will be over decades. The point is that people in the places that matter globally are tired of dealing with this issue.Report
My point was how are Israelis going to view this?
“We can’t trade with you because you’re Jews and Jews can’t defend themselves against terrorism and shouldn’t have a country at all. Why don’t you move to our country?”
That might be a tough sell. Anti-Semitism has always been the rocket fuel that keeps Israel growing.
Without the brain drain, I don’t think this works.Report
So you are on the side that the actions of the secular Israeli government are inseparable from Jews as a people and a religion? Kinda makes critique of Israel tough doesn’t it?Report
RE: Kinda makes critique of Israel tough doesn’t it?
While the world ignores the vast civil rights problems in the Middle East (including Mass Murder), I find it hard to accept these critiques aren’t based in anti-Semitism.
Subtract that double standard and Israel looks really good on the subject of civil rights compared to all of the surrounding states.
There’s a disconnect between “if I had to pick a state to live in that area to live as a minority, I’d easily pick Israel” and “Israel’s behavior is so outrageous that it deserves special attention by the world, maybe even destruction”.Report
Much of the Left – myself included – has been quite vocal about the human rights violations committed in Saudi Arabia, or Egypt or Iran. We aren’t generally called islamophobes when we do so, though we re clearly ignored as well. But dare to criticize Israel – which is a secular allegedly democratic nation – and you are automatically anti-Semitic. And if every criticism of Israeli government action is going to be labeled anti-Semitic, it becomes impossible to level legitimate criticisms against it as a country.Report
How many protests have we seen against Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran in the last 5 years?
It’s not zero because of Jamal Khashoggi, although that was at Hamas’ level of brutality.
If we compare the number+size of protests against all three of those combined to the number against Israel, my expectation is Israel’s are about 1000x.
So 99.9% of those protests can be chalked up to Anti-Semitism.
In that context, the main problem isn’t that the 0.1% is hard to do.Report
None of the other Arab states in the region are in Israel’s position. They either don’t have developed economies or don’t have Israel’s particular territorial and Demographic structure.
Telling arab states to treat their people according to Western standards is something the identarian left is uncomfortable with and is something that was massively discredited by W and the GOP during the ruinous nation building adventures of the aughts so no one outside the far left would even consider it.
Israel is both a developed, modern, liberal state and also can be delivered a concrete and unambiguously moral policy ask: “treat the people who live within the territory you possess equally, humanely and as citizens”.
Israel has squared this circle for decades by saying “We’ll treat these extra people differently because we intend to spin them off on their own state with their own land.” But, after thirty or so years now of saying one thing and doing another their credibility is fading.
They are a few decades (or one gifted Palestinian leader) away from that excuse collapsing entirely and then they’ll be truly up the creek.Report
RE: one gifted Palestinian leader
At the moment he’d be killed by his own people.
RE: “treat the people who live within the territory you possess equally, humanely and as citizens”.
This issue is why I like the two state solution and why I’d like to see Israel set boarders.
The problem they have is less that their Right wing wants land (although that is a thing) and more that the people who chant “from the River to the sea” are serious and a majority.
You and I aren’t exactly disagreeing, but something to keep in mind is this plan has some really nasty potentials we need to accept.
Israel pulls out of the West Bank. When Hamas or some group like them turns it into a terror camp and goes to war, we need to be real good with Israel engaging in Syria level killings.
If we’re not cool with Israel doing Syria level killing to defend itself, then the alternative is something real similar to what they have in the West Bank right now.Report
He’d, obviously, have to be quite a gifted leader and likely would be a successor or protege of an assassinated leader such that the Israeli’s and Palestinian fanatics would be loathe to martyr him. That doesn’t change that there’s a non-zero chance that such a leader could arise at any time from among the Palestinians and the longer Israel hangs onto the territories the greater the probability that such a figure will arise. If he did he’d be almost impossible to deal with.
The context of this particular thread is whether Israel is at long term risk from their occupation of the West Bank and what that risk is. I submit it is and have defined what that risk is.
And, yes, implementing some form of the 2 state solution where they withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, even unilaterally, and wash their hands of it does involve risks, but those risks are day to day, nowhere near existential and, long term, would lead to a final resolution favorable to Israel.Report
Another thing I don’t like about it is that it basically places all the agency on good relationships between Jews and Muslims on the Jews even though there are 1.8 billion of them and only 16 million Jews. We have to go to the ecumenical events and say all the right things while they do not.Report
The agency rests where the preponderance of power rests. Israel has all the power within the borders of the territory it controls so it necessarily has the overwhelming preponderance of the agency and obligation as well. Jews can probably say what ever the heck they want. It’s their actions that’re presenting the problems.Report
At least some, but definitely not all, of the Identarian Left is at least comfortably criticizing among themselves. What they seem to believe is that any change needs to come within rather than opposed from above. The size of the task also seems daunting. Israel is one country with a population under 10 million rather than multiple controls with a population of well over a billion total.Report
In 40 years or so* how would the Israeli’s view it if the developed world said “You’re an apartheid nation now, there’s no longer any ambiguity. You need to issue citizenship and civil rights to the Palestinians that lie within the practical boundaries of Israel which, now, includes all the West Bank and you’re getting the South Africa treatment if you don’t.**”
In that scenario Isaelis would respond differently- the most cosmopolitan ones who’d also likely be the most liberal, the most wealthy and the most skilled would decamp for elsewhere. The right wingers and moderates would flip the world the bird. But that’d create a downward spiral for Israel in which it’d regress to the mean of its neighborhood.
This isn’t an immediate peril, this is a long term one but it is very real.
*Or LESS! If the Palestinians pop out a Ghandi or Mandela level leader who manages to morally control their own people and capture their worlds imagination I could see this scenario coming about far sooner.
**And if world opinion gets REALLY bad they could also insist on Israel repatriating descendants of Palestinian refugees in the camps which would really fish the whole situation for the Israelis.Report
Israel couldn’t regress to the neighborhood mean without lead in the water.Report
Jewish exceptionalism is almost as irrational as anti semitism. I assure you Israel could regress. They’ve nurtured entire communities within their nation who maintain the same attitudes and mentalities as the worst of their Arabs neighbors, merely with a yarmulke or a shtreimel on top of their heads.Report
The South African aspects of Israel could be resolved without absorbing the Palestinians.
Israel is currently about 20% Arab. They could absorb some of these micro-areas, refuse to absorb Gaza and most of the West Bank, and they’d get rid of a lot of the checkboard aspects of Israel without changing their overall mix that much.
That leaves Gaza as a genocidal terror camp/prison that could be a state but refuses to and the remaining West Bank as a failed state which both Israel and Jordan refuse to absorb.Report
That exact course of action is probably the only realistic move that prevents the bad long term outcome for Israel. However Israel has been under leadership for over a decade now dedicated to making that as hard as possible to do.Report
As we speak, Dark, Israel is on the verge of undoing Ariel Sharon’s project of separating Israel from Gaza. If they re-occupy the territory for any amount of time the peril of them being forced to take it on returns.
As for the West Bank you seem confused on the matter as the Israeli right has been quite slowly but steadily establishing facts on the ground in the West Bank that make “refusing to absorb” decisions increasingly difficult. If the Israeli’s continue on their current trajectory disentangling themselves from the West Bank becomes virtually impossible at which point they would be facing either becoming illiberal or going down the path that South Africa followed. Which was my core point.Report
Isn’t the current reaction regarding Gaza evidence against your thesis? Israel withdrew from Gaza and basically let Hamas govern it as they please. Most of the world still maintains that Gaza is under occupation because reason and there are lots of people screaming bloody murder because Israel met an act of war with war.Report
I’d say the exact opposite. The sequence of events was:
-Sharon dragged Israel out of Gaza in 2005.
-The Gazans responded with violence and rockets as well as destroying the infrastructure that the Israeli’s left behind. Eventually Hamas, with the Israeli rights tacit support, took over Gaza entirely in 2007.
-Since 2007 the world basically has left Israel with a blank check to in Gaza laying siege to it and periodically bombing and attacking it to “mow the lawn”.
-This year, 16 years later, Israel refocused military and intelligence resources on their unending and indefensible land grab in the West Bank. Hamas launched an attack that was spectacularly bloody and successful because the Israelis had left their pants down.
Had Sharon not been felled by that stroke and had dragged Israel out of the West Bank as well then the vulnerability that allowed Hamas to cause so much damage this year would not have existed. I’d also note that assumptions that Hamas would take over in the West Bank are badly over determined- the PA didn’t really care much about Gaza and relinquished it pretty easily. They’d have been fighting for their survival in the West Bank and wouldn’t so readily give up.
I’ll ask you, though, what do you think the resolution of the West Bank is going to be? You surely can’t deny that the settler violence and land seizures are occurring with the encouragement and support of the Israeli right? The growth of the settlements and the fragmentation of the West Bank is blatant. How do you honestly think this will end? That all those Palestinians will just vanish into vapor as the Israeli’s take their land?Report
I don’t think Biden has necessarily botched things as much as his political situation has substantially and materially deteriorated from where it was pre-October 7.
Biden’s reaction has been sort of meh, and not necessarily important.
But it’s pretty clear that Biden is losing votes from the flaky, young-ish Left over the situation.
It’s less clear but just as true that he’s losing votes among Right/Center/normies as well.
In particular he’s losing my vote. Now I was pretty late to the party for the cohort potential Biden voters that I belong to, so I could be the first one to leave, but it’s definitely a cohort that Biden needs.
If we’re in the same situation now by say March or April, Biden’s losing. Even to Trump, let alone anybody else if somehow the GOP nominee isn’t Trump.
The silver lining for Biden is the hope that this goes away in a month or so and something else takes it’s place, either by some sort of meaningful resolution, or even the lack of meaningful developments which are big enough to capture the US media cycle.Report
We’re not talking -now- Koz, we’re talking long term. Israel is quite secure -now- but if they don’t sort out the Palestinian question the peril is in the future.
As for trade, that same argument applied to South Africa but when apartheid got odious enough it simply… didn’t… apply. I’m not even talking about food or other essentials- Israel is a modern and very trade integral state. Even modest sanctions could cause a major exodus of their most high value add industries. Particularly if it’s coming because Israel goes far right.Report
Well North, even though we haven’t made this explicit I don’t think necessarily very far apart on at least most of the premises.
If I’m reading you right you’re not especially bothered by the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza. As far as Israeli human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank I care about that some but not very much.
Basically you care about Palestinians in the West Banks maybe two or three clicks more than I do. That’s an entirely respectable position as far as I’m concerned but I don’t think it will necessarily be vindicated.
Specifically, I think there’s a blind spot over the plain reality that the diplomatic standing of Israel has vastly improved over this recent period of expanding settlements.
That is, with the help of the United States (and whether we like it or not a lot of credit has to go to the Trump Administration and Jared Kushner), Israel is at peace with most of its neighbors in the region. And the ones it’s not at (diplomatic) peace with are the problem children for the whole world, not just Israel.
The commonplace theory from say 2000 to 2010 that the underlying cause of conflict in the Middle East is Israel and especially settlements is pretty much shown to be plain wrong.
So in this world where Israel is perfectly capable of getting along with its neighbors and even its adversaries, I don’t think it’s likely that Israel will go to hell in a handbasket over the West Bank. It’s much easier to simply conclude that the problem is the Palestinians, which IMO it is.
And somehow if, presumably the US or the US in coalition with other nations, tried to make Israel a pariah nation a la South Africa, it might not work even then.
South Africa then (and now) very much wants to be part of the Anglosphere, of the Commonwealth, of the first world. It definitely wants to be at peace with the black nations in Africa as well, but it feels deep kinship with Australia, the UK, Canada, etc and being cut off from them hurts a lot.
Israel, though a small country, is already the center of its own world. It is already a leader, or the leader of most of the things it cares about.
The countries who think they are in a position to sanction Israel, though much bigger, are much worse off demographically and financially. As it will become more clear soon enough, trying to sanction Israel will only accelerate the cultural decline and further downward spiral of those countries at least as much as it would impact Israel.
Circling back and very much related to that, to the extent I do care about Israeli human rights abuses in the West Bank (which I do think are widespread and bad), it is because of the adverse knock-on effects of Palestinian activism in the United States and other countries outside the Middle East. And to some extent we could, probably should, pressure Israel to improve its human rights record in the West Bank.
But for me at least, it’s quite obvious that it’s much more topical, much more useful, much more in our American interest to put the hammer down on the protestors here in America than anything having to do with what happens in the West Bank.Report
You don’t like free speech or petitioning the government or peaceable assembly do you?Report
Cards on the table, Koz, I have long had several Jewish friends and, on top of that, a number of warm long-distance acquaintances who live in Israel itself. Accordingly, the welfare of the Jewish state is not only something I am supportive of on an intellectual level but is also something I come to on a mild emotional/relational level. In contrast, while I have a few acquaintances of Muslim or Arabic background, I have no friends or even acquaintances who’re ethnically Palestinian so my interest in them is strictly on a matter of principle/human rights. I’ve always viewed the Palestinians with a resigned “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” mindset even as I acknowledge that they also come from a much more impoverished past than their Jewish neighbors who, I would expect, should know better.
My attitude towards Gaza has long been “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” so I have, up until recently, been pretty unruffled by the Israeli interactions there. Since Sharon withdrew from Gaza and dragged his right-wing settler loon compatriots out kicking and screaming with them I’ve considered Israel to be relatively even steven vis a vis the Gazans. Hamas uses imported materials to launch attacks on Israel so Israel blockades Gaza- fair enough. Hamas launches attacks on Israeli civilians so Israel launches attacks on Hamas and, since Hamas imbeds among Gazan civilians, that unfortunately results in Gazan civilian casualties. Bibi, in his characteristic incompetence, is actually managing to botch even that engagement and I remain aghast at how horribly the Israeli’s ability to manage PR and military intelligence seems to have degraded.
I, similarly, come towards the subject of the West Bank with a general level of human rights concern leavened by a strong concern for the long-term welfare of the Israeli state. Accordingly, Israel’s behavior there is indefensible both on an intellectual level (general human rights) and on the level of my care for the long-term welfare of the Israeli state (if anything will destroy or debilitate Israel, which I do not wish to see happen, it’ll be a downstream consequence of their behavior in the West Bank). True friends do not let their friends do self-destructive things without warning them.
To your specifics: Yes, I cannot deny that Israels “official” diplomatic position has improved notably over the last few years. This can be summarized by observing that they have developed formally better relationships with the dictatorial elites in the nations in their immediate neighborhood while their formal relationships with the first world have remained roughly the same and their relationships with the wider autocratic world has remained transactional. I would, however, point out that the informal opinion of Israel among the voting population of the first worlds shows serious degradation and alarmingly demographically sorted softness. I would further note that while the elites of those Arab states are willing to have formally better relations with Israel their reasons for doing so are transactional or American based. The populations in those states remain avidly anti-Israeli and we have no reason to think that the elites Israel has reached an accord with would stick their necks out for Israel in any way.
So, yes, Israel’s managed to make formal friends with some people who, we can expect, will be entirely transactional towards the Israeli state and who would, likely, not hesitate to backstab the Israeli’s if they viewed it in their interests to do so. In this same time period, the West Bank occupation and settlements have continued to profoundly sour the reputation of Israel among the younger generations of the voting populations of the first world nations that Israel actually depends on for its continued prosperity.
Consider this scenario: If, say, in twenty years an administration is elected in the US that views Israel with nothing but irritation and exasperation (and if the rest of the first worlds attitude adjusted accordingly) and they cease the US’s diplomatic cover for Israel in various venues, would those Arab states, assuming they remain as they are now, go to bat for Israel? I submit they would not and even in the unlikely event that they wanted to, they would not be able to economically or diplomatically.
I also agree with you that South Africa (specifically white South Africa) had a desire for global integration and relationships with the anglosphere that Israel doesn’t share. I don’t think this is dispositive. South Africa, unlike Israel, is a geographically vast and gifted in raw materials nation. Israel is, geographically speaking, a rectangle of desert on the Mediterranean. A large portion of South Africa’s economy was and is based on extractive industries that were not enormously vulnerable to economic sanctions. Israel’s powerful economy is profoundly dependent on frictionless economic trade with peer first world nations. While Israel might culturally care less about the worlds good will their economics are, if anything, even more dependent on the worlds good will than South Africa’s was. If anything, I’d say Israel is less capable, even if it might be more willing, to endure the denunciations of the world if such an unhappy circumstance were to occur. Moreover, while Israel over all might be more willing to be a pariah, their most productive, wealthy and capable citizens have both the dual citizenship, wealth and cosmopolitanism to decamp from Israel if economic circumstances made it advantageous and Israel, again, is profoundly dependent on such human resources for its prosperity.
The risk of this occurring seems significant and it bears asking what upside Israel gains in its’ occupation of the West Bank in exchange for the downside risk of poisoning its relationships with the populations it needs to thrive. The answer, as far as I have seen, is nothing. Israel gains no economic benefit from occupying the West Bank- indeed it’s an expensive proposition; Israel gains no security benefit- quite the opposite: catering to settler needs directly and causally contributed to the severity of Israels’ losses on October 7th ; Israel certainly derives no diplomatic benefit from their occupation of the territories- indeed their occupation has been a festering sore on their diplomatic body since virtually the day they first began settling it. Even if we completely ignore the objective question of the principle of human rights and focus strictly on the welfare of the Israeli state itself the occupation of the West Bank fails every rational test. Ariel Sharon knew this which is why the clever old man dragged his people, kicking and screaming, out of Gaza and was going to do the same in the territories when he was felled by the most terribly timed stroke in history.
Moreover, the occupation of the West Bank is not like a light switch the Israeli’s can flick on and off. Every day the occupation continues it becomes more difficult to unravel, it grows an internal voting constituency more opposed to reversing it and it pumps religious fanatic poison into the body politic of Israel. Because it’s so painful to remove the occupation Israel has long sought “payment” for acting in its own best interests as a way of making it easier to prosecute a withdrawal. That Israel’s enemies aren’t willing to help it unstrap the bomb from its own chest should not be surprising; they wish Israel ill and care, not a wit, for the welfare of the Palestinians. Those of us who wish Israel well, however, have no such excuse.Report
Overall, this was a very good comment, touching on a lot that I don’t know enough about to speak definitively on. Nonetheless, I’m still skeptical of a few things.
I’d be very interested to know the mentality of the Saudi royal family regarding its prospective treaty with Israel. And in general, I suspect you’re using the word “transactional” in a few places where it’s either wrong or doesn’t mean what you think it means.
As far as the residents of Saudi Arabia go, I’m sure a strong majority of them have negative thoughts against Israel, because of the settlements and a hundred other things more or less unrelated to the settlements.
But in terms of the Saudi national interest, it’s become pretty clear over the years that Saudi Arabia and Israel have very strong mutual interests. They have an interest in being at peace with each other, in favor of economic development, in maintaining good relationships with the United States and in solidarity against Iran.
And in addition to those things, Saudi Arabia is basically a billion square miles of sand on top of a resource curse. Such curse which, Israel uniquely among all nations is in a position to unwind.
How all this adds up in the minds of the Saudis as they do their do-si-do with Israel, like I said before frankly I have no idea. I would actually be very interested to know.
But, it does seem to me to be too dismissive to call the whole thing transactional when are there are very substantial strategic interests in play.
Same for the idea that the US diplomatically flips against Israel.
youtube.com/watch?v=4Sma7qpV1Sc
If that happens it means that these idiots have taken over America and if that happens we’ve got way bigger problems than anything that happens in Israel.
Finally, just to state my own intentions. I have no particular need or love for settlements and if Israel gave them up tomorrow I wouldn’t shed a tear. Though frankly I’m not anticipating that to happen.Report
I join you in the fact that I cannot read the Saudi’s minds but my core point remains. In a scenario where the developed world stops supporting Israel the Saudis and their regional peers would have a restive street that would not want them to bail the Israeli’s out and, moreover, they would likely lack the capacity to do so even if the house of Saud were so inclined.
As for the future, the opinions of younger generations on Israel are not, at all, muddled and the developed world is pretty solidly democratic. We have absolutely no reason to think that opinions on Israel are likely to evolve dramatically as a person ages (why on earth would they), especially not when they are based on cogent objections (the occupation of the West Bank). The boomers and older gen Xers formed their opinions of Israel when it was either a plucky young underdog nation fighting revanchist Arab dictatorships (the 70’s and earlier) or when it was a mature democracy seeking a peace settlement that was then rejected by the Palestinians (the early Aughts back to the early 80’s). People coming of age since the late aughts tend to view Israel as an unchallenged and dominant regional player grinding its boot relentlessly on the inept and hapless Palestinians with no end in sight and a relentlessly growing and increasingly unabashed group of right-wing loons in charge. If current trends continue then, eventually as our generations age out, the developed worlds attitudes towards Israel will continue to chill.
But really I’m mostly bouncing the rubble here because we don’t, truly, disagree on a lot vis a vis Israel.Report
I still don’t think that this is an issue Israel is simply going to be able to resolve by themselves by simply withdrawing from the West Bank. The unilateral withdrawl from Gaza didn’t result in any change among the Left. They are still screaming bloody murder that Gaza is under occupation because of the blockade and believe that the Simchat Torah Massacre and captive taking was a valid anti-colonial act.
If Israel withdraws from the West Bank as you suggests but takes a defensive position similar to Gaza to protect itself from any Palestinian irredentism from the WB, the Global Left will still be crying bloody murder and colonialism. You might think this is irrelevant politically but if they have enough people eventually to mobilize the electorate. Plus there still be the intractable issue if the “Right of Return” for the Palestinians and everybody on Israel to do something about that.
So this is an issue where Israel is expected to do everything to solve them problem itself. The Palestinian leadership is utterly useless because they will only be satisfied with “No Israel, No Jews” and says this openly or they don’t say this openly but believe it secretly or are too cowardly to change the course and start telling the truth the Palestinians and other Muslims.
I keep bringing this up and you keep dodging it. Why would a WB withdrawal work any better for Israel than the Gaza withdrawal? Why would the Global Left stop being very loud and very angry when they still argue that Gaza is under occupation despite no settlements? The Palestinians and their allies have decided on a strategy of total obstinance and basically says that everything Israel does is not and will never be good enough. I think they really do believe that the only just solution is that all the Jews in the Middle East go away. Many of them problem believe that all the 7.1 million Jews can move to the West with ease.
The world is growing increasingly apathetic towards the Jewish People even if not actively hostile. You have a sharp rise in anti-Semitism and Jews as evil revolutionaries against all traditions good and true on the Right. Meanwhile the loud clueless left declares that all Jews are wypipo even if they are clearly not wypipo and don’t see us as part of the “Sacred Circle of Oppression.” Meanwhile, at least some members of the LGBT community seem to think that really traditional Muslims are a better ally for them than the mainly liberal Jews in the Diaspora. The Center Left and the Center Right pass accusations that the either side are anti-Semites with little to no benefit for the Jews or actually doing something about the growing anti-Semitism. The attitude seems to be “you can’t do anything about it and shouldn’t really talk about it.”
So answer me this. Israel withdraws from the WB and the entire thing ends up like Gaza with the Palestinians doing utterly nothing productive and turning it into another launching pad against Israel because of Palestinian irredentism. Plus they are still screaming about the Diaspora Palestinians not having a right to return to Israel and destroy the demographic balance. Then what? Israel would have done everything it was supposed to do and the people are still saying that Palestine is under occupation and any violence they do agaisnt Israel is an anti-colonial act. Nobody is every going to say to the Palestinians that Israel did everything it is supposed to do and now it is your turn. They will never have any pressure to be productive or take charge of their own destiny in away that doesn’t involve lobbing rockets or attacking Israel until all the Jews are gone.Report
I think we’d have a lot more clarity if Israel set it’s boarders. The Palestinians make a lot of headway by obfuscating/mixing their legit demands with their genocidal ones. Israel looks really bad by constantly setting up settlements.
Set boarders and the Palestinians would still be genocidally opposed to Jews, but that issue would be a lot clearer.Report
Another thing I don’t like is the idea that it is perfectly acceptable for the Palestinians to have a completely Jew free Palestine and this is somehow not racist. The same goes for the other MENA countries. There were no Jews in Hebron from 1929 to 1967 because the Palestinians had a pogrom in 1929 and chased all the Jews out. The effective Jewish population of the rest of the Middle East is zero because those communities were forced or pressured out in the name of anti-Zionism and anti-colonialism but that is somehow not true ethnic cleansing in the minds of the world. Just something that is. What happened to the Palestinians? That is the most evil ethnic cleansing that ever happened rather than just one of the population conflicts at the end of WWII. Just fish that. It is freaking hypocritical in the extreme and another example how “Jews Don’t Count.”Report
Another thing I don’t like is the idea that it is perfectly acceptable for the Palestinians to have a completely Jew free Palestine and this is somehow not racist.
It’s because Jews are white now.
You can’t be racist against white people.
Maybe you can be bigoted, but there are a lot of historical injustices.
Seriously. Try to keep up.Report
I don’t think the distinction is racial. The distinction is that Jews got to be citizens of somewhere. That’s the same reason most post WW2 border and displacement disputes have stayed pretty cold, even as some post Soviet disputes have heated up. The people got to go somewhere and be citizens which is enough to say that going back to war over the question is wrong, period, end of story.
Probably the best justification for the state of Israel is that, in light of the history we all know, there needs to be some place where Jews are guaranteed the protection of citizenship. The problem is where it runs up against the rump group of Palestinians that don’t have citizenship of anywhere or any realistic prospect of attaining it.Report
Oh, I understand the justification for the argument for Israel.
I just also know why arguments that made sense in 1973 don’t make sense in the current year.
“Ethnostates” made sense in the 18th century.
It is now the 21st century.Report
I think there’s a pretty significant distinction between old world and new world regarding ethnostates. In the new world we just can’t have them, given the churn of immigration and history. However there’s an argument to be made for them in the old world, and that on balance they have been a force for peace and prosperity, so long as minorities within their territory have full rights and citizenship.Report
on balance they have been a force for peace and prosperity
If someone wanted to argue “that was then, this is now” and point at the Middle East, they’d be able to.
so long as minorities within their territory have full rights and citizenship.
And this brings us to the problem of Gaza. They aren’t a territory. They aren’t a country. They aren’t a colony.
They’re just there.Report
RE: ethnostates
There is a very long list of countries which are ethnostates, some openly and some pretend they’re not.
RE: minorities
About 20% of Israel are minorities and they’re fine.
RE: Gaza
Gaza is somewhere between a failed state and a terror camp. It’s populated by people whose grandparents were kicked out of Israel during the 1949 war.
As long as their first priority is making war on Israel they’re going to stay, at best, a failed state.
If we move to normal country evaluations… I don’t see how Israel could be forced to take that land and it’s people, nor do I see how Israel can be forced to trade with them nor supply them with jobs.
As DavidTC has pointed out, Israel shutting down the ports is an act of war. However if Israel hadn’t done that imho we’d have just gotten into the current brutal war sooner.
If the West Bank becomes a lot more functional and if there’s a path between the two of them then maybe immigration and a watered down RoR to the West Bank would be helpful.
For that matter, if it weren’t run as a terror camp then they’ve got ports they could use.Report
Another possible lesson is to kill and destroy so much that the enemy can’t respond for a generation, and repeat every generation as required.Report
There aren’t a lot of examples of that working post 1945.Report
The world doesn’t really have the stomach for this anymore, at least in part. In places where the West doesn’t care about you can probably still do this. Not in Israel/Palestine though.Report
Hypothetical: what would be the consequences if Isreal pushed all Muslims out and annexed what land they wanted? Would Iran or other Muslim countries go to war, invade, use nukes? Isreal would respond. It might loose funding support from the US. Could it survive without that funding? Anything the UN would do would be likely useless.
I’d suspect that these scenarios have been debated on all sides and folk don’t want to “go there” but what if they did. It’s one thing to speculate what countries will do, it’s another to actual TEST that resolve. Sometimes when the rubber hits the road, people fold.Report
I don’t think the threat is military or destruction of Israel by external forces. The thing I’d be concerned about is losing my trading and investment relationships with the west.
One of the odd things about the settlements is that the people most invested in them are non-productive religious extremists excused from military service. What makes Israel a rich, first world country on the other hand are secular tech entrepreneurs and highly educated knowledge workers whose children are subject to conscription. The question is whether they want to stay if it becomes a lot harder to maintain a high standard of living, especially if they can go be rich in America or Europe. The result of that isn’t Israel ceases to exist, but that over time it becomes a poor, isolated, and dysfunctional sectarian state instead of a wealthy democracy.Report
Israeli politics has long operated for the worst sort of far-right religious nationalism that in _any other country_ we’d have called ‘fascist-leaning’ a long time again. But Western politic has long given a pass to Israeli ultra-nationalism and even likes to _parrot_ it.
Oh, don’t worry, Israel will just do something else that makes _sure_ the only place Jews can be safe is Israel.
People have recently said October 7th was the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust, but does anyone know that’s technically not true? Any guesses where and when a larger amount of deaths than Oct 7 (if over a longer time) happened?
2000 Jewish political activists (The number might be as high as 3000, but I’ll go with 2000) disappeared in Argentina, aka, were kidnapped and killed in black sites, under the military junta that ruled it from 1976 and 1983. Which, if everyone remembers history, was actually full of escaped Na.zis. Jews were, in fact, 12% of the _entire victims_ of the regime, despite being less than 1% of the population.
The Israeli government went to them and officially set up an agreement where, instead of killing Jews, the Argentine government shipped them to Israel. That…is a…defensible agreement for Israel to have made. The Junta is a horrible government, and it’s weird to make formal agreements with them, but that at least saves Jewish lives, right?
The problem that Israel also sold them weapons: https://maki.org.il/en/?p=19937
We know for a fact they sold them guns in 1982, for use in the Falklands against the British. (And can I just say that arming actual previous Na.zis to fight the British is…uh…surreal for Israel.)
But…maybe by 1982 the junta was dying and…wasn’t killing as many Jews by then? But that link points out: “Testifying before Congress in 1981, the US deputy secretary of defense said that, in the three years since the US had begun its arms embargo on Argentina, Buenos Aires had bought some $2 billion in arms from Israel and European states.”
If you were a Jewish political activist in Argentine in 1980, you could get killed by a gun that Israel sold the people who were actively hunting you down, but, if you were really lucky, they’d just ship you to Israel instead. Or…you could preemptively move to the safe place of Israel instead, aren’t you lucky it exists?Report
How many Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails? How confident are we that they are guilty of the crimes they’ve been accused of? Israel is releasing 150 women and children, with the explicit acknowledgement that none of them were accused/convicted of murder. So what were they in jail for? How old are these children? Does any of that matter to you?Report
It doesn’t matter to me. I’m sure we have 150 Palestinian women and children in detainment for various crimes that aren’t murder. That doesn’t prove that there’s a problem in our judicial system. Bring forward evidence that there is a problem, and we’ll talk. Releasing prisoners when under coercion isn’t proof.Report
Most of them are accused of (and convicted of in a military court) of stone throwing.
They range in age from 12 to 17 (I assume the bulk are in the older ages).
Israel does this something like 500-700 times per year.
We can treat this pretty seriously and the non-serious ones likely don’t make the stats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_throwing#United_StatesReport
That’s not how we let anyone else work. Governments do not just get to assert criminality without even making a formal statement.
If Israel wants to pretend those kids did something, they need to formally charge them of a crime at the barest minimum. Like, actually file charges. And even then, they’d just be ‘accused’, but until that happens, they aren’t even _that_.Report
Welp, a car has blown up at the Canadian/US border at the Niagra Falls Rainbow Bridge. The FBI has, apparently confirmed that it was a car that blew up.
Maybe it was a Pinto?Report
Good news, I guess. Police are saying that the explosion was not due to an explosive device, but because the vehicle did a Dukes of Hazard and went airborne and hit an obstacle with enough gas in the tank to make the gas tank blow up.Report
I know from my Jewish friends on social media that there have been a lot of pro-Israel acts and protests over the past several weeks in addition to the pro-Palestinian protests. Now it is true that the pro-Palestinian protests are more frequent and louder but there have been more than a few declarations of support for Israel across the world and not just by old white people. For some reason, the media has been silent about this and are trying to show that the entire world is utterly outraged at Israel’s actions in Gaza when it isn’t.Report
A person I know in real life posted a meme that says “make music not war” and depicts a bomber dropping musical instruments down on the land. Why do people find these sorts of memes persuasive? Before the hippies nobody thought that making music and making war were in complete contradiction and opposition to each other. There is a lot of martial music in many different cultures and a lot of this martial music is really stirring and of high artistic quality or at least not bad musicianship. The 1812 Overture anybody?Report
Combat Vet Reacts: Al Shifa Tunnel Video Raises More Questions Than it Answers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNct-4CuQI4
CVR is reviewing the video of the tunnels under that hospital.Report
RE: Name some of the 90. Tell us what those liberal policies are.
Pamela Price—Alameda County, California.
Very soft plea deal to mass shooter because he was just 18 (and black). She’s a “defund the police” activist.
George Gascon—Los Angeles County, California
…gave 25-year-old “Hannah” Tubs, an adult male child molester, a light sentence in a juvenile women’s prison because Tubbs identified as a woman after his arrest and was just two weeks from turning 18 when he raped a 10-year-old girl in the bathroom of a Denny’s.
Kim Foxx—Cook County (Chicago), Illinois.
Dropped charges against Jussie Smollet. Also dropped charges against a lot more felonies than her predecessor.
Jason Williams—Orleans Parish, Louisiana
In the news for dropping lots of firearm charges.
Alvin Bragg—Manhattan, New York.
Bragg released a memo stating that his office would not be seeking prison sentences for crimes such as armed robbery, drug dealing, and burglary
John Creuzot—Dallas County, Texas
…decriminalizing theft under $750, criminal trespass, and drug possession.
José Garza—Travis County (Austin), Texas.
Garza has developed a reputation for letting violent offenders go free on little to no bail.
Steve Descano—Fairfax County, Virginia.
Descano has made it his office’s official policy not to prosecute more than 20 different crimes including shoplifting for goods under $1,000…
Ramin Fatehi—Norfolk County, Virginia.
Under his watch, Norfolk has abolished cash bail,
Stephanie Morales—Portsmouth County, Virginia
…after a spree of 12 shootings in just one week, the Portsmouth Police chief criticized Morales because all of the suspected shooters had been previously arrested and released.
John Chisholm—Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
awarding absurdly low cash-bail to mass-murderer Darrell Brooks just days before he carried out the 2021 Waukesha Christmas Parade attack,
https://capitalresearch.org/article/living-room-pundits-updated-guide-to-soros-district-attorneys/
To be fair, that link assumes a link between “DA gets job” and “crime spikes”… however there are also lots of examples of DAs behaving badly.Report
Thanks for the link,
First it is a highly partisan source, offering accusations without supporting evidence. But still sometimes partisan sources can be informative, so I’ll look at it.
So lets start by tossing out the “DA gets job/ crime spikes” particularly since the time period in question is the pandemic era crime surge which occurred under conservative and liberal areas alike.
And honestly, “DAs behaving badly” needs to form a pattern, not a couple one offs, especially if we are only hearing one side of things. And what we are really talking about here is whether DAs are ideologically motivated to be soft on crime, not inept.
So what we are left with is a handful of DAs who have implemented a series of reforms like eliminating cash bail or raising the limit to felony theft, or not recommending jail time before sentencing.
One which I found interesting is Steve Descano in Virginia.
He is accused of having a list of 20 crimes for which he “will not prosecute”. But the article doesn’t give any support for this, and a quick Google search didn’t turn up any statement from Descano that he refuses to prosecute categories of cases.
What it does turn yup is his policy of not seeking pre-trial detention:
For people accused of nonviolent felonies — which include minor theft cases and drug possession cases — Fairfax prosecutors recommended release 63% of the time in the last quarter of the year – a 12% increase from the previous quarter.
When the first round of data was released in October, the county’s lead public defender told the Washington Post that she was disappointed by the numbers on nonviolent misdemeanors. While the data showed Descano’s office was recommending release for the vast majority of nonviolent misdemeanors — 77% of them — it showed that prosecutors were still recommending detention 23% of the time. Meanwhile, judges opted to detain people only 18% of the time (though they also asked for cash bail in exchange for release in 9% of cases. It’s unclear for the available data how many of these people were able to pay and were released, and how many remained in jail because they couldn’t pay). “Our judges are more progressive than a progressive prosecutor’s office,” she told the outlet.
But the new data shows prosecutors are now more aligned with judges in terms of the percentage of these cases where they recommend detention: judges and prosecutors agree on who to release pretrial about 80% of the time. Ten percent of the time prosecutors recommend release for a person the judge wants to detain, and another 10% of the time prosecutors are still the stricter party, recommending detainment in cases where a judge decides to release.
https://dcist.com/story/23/01/31/steve-descano-fairfax-recommends-fewer-detentions/
I can see how reforms like fewer pretrial detentions, less forms of cash bail and raising the limit on felony theft are debatable. And if someone wants to make the case that these are unwise, I think that’s certainly a debate worth having.Report
Here’s what I found on Descano in 15 seconds from The Washington Post:
Report
Sounds reasonable to me. Police departments have likewise announced they will refuse to respond to petty crimes due to staffing shortage in order to conserve resources for serious matters.Report
I can easily see how a policeperson would decline to respond to a petty crime if s/he knew that the DA wouldn’t prosecute.
I’m pleased that we’ve moved from “Prove to me that this is happening!” to “That’s good, though”.Report
You misunderstand. I never said police were refusing to respond due to lack of prosecution.
But yes, we’ve proved that due to staffing shortages of both police and prosecutors, both have responded by prioritizing resources which s a good thing.
Even better would be to provide them with resources or find other ways to handle petty offenses.
But I’m glad to see we’ve moved on from “Its liberal policies!!1!” and clarified that it is an attempt to improve crime fighting outcomes, not ideology, that is causing it. So we can dispense with all that.
Basically what we are witnessing is a large scale real world experiment.
Are alternative methods of fighting crime like diversionary treatment, bail reform, and so on actually result in a different outcome?
What we can do is establish a baseline of to sets of DAs- One using traditional methods, and the other using new methods.
We can see if there develops a disparity of outcomes, with crime rising or falling in one and not the other and see if it is a pattern.Report
But I’m glad to see we’ve moved on from “Its liberal policies!!1!” and clarified that it is an attempt to improve crime fighting outcomes, not ideology, that is causing it.
Only if we agree that the prosecutor changing policies do not have downstream effects.
Is that your assertion?
Are alternative methods of fighting crime like diversionary treatment, bail reform, and so on actually result in a different outcome?
According to how people “feel” about it?
Or the stats that do not that “non-reported” crimes into account?
I mean… murder went up for a while there.
We can see if there develops a disparity of outcomes, with crime rising or falling in one and not the other and see if it is a pattern.
Also: Reported crimes going up or down.Report
That’s too much like work.Report
You mean like linking to FBI crime stats?
(Remember the 20 minutes where FBI crime stats weren’t considered reliable enough to use as a source to discuss crime?)Report
No, I mean the kind of work Chip was describing. I’ve often wondered about your reading comprehension issues. They seem to be getting worse.Report
Maybe we could measure efficacy by stuff like “crime over time”.
With a reasonable lag, of course.
Unless the argument is that there are too many variables so that we can’t really measure things at all… I’ve heard that in a handful of places. It strikes me as a better argument than “the FBI’s numbers can’t be trusted”, anyway. Easier to get people to run along with “What is causality, anyway?” than “I refuse to look at evidence”.Report
Yes, FBI statics are going to be one good measure, along with a few other metrics.
For example, you can start here: for the latest as of 2022
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-crime-rates-and-trends-analysis-fbi-crime-statistics
It appears that crime in all categories is resuming its long term downward trend.
Note that this aggregates data from all across the nation, so it doesn’t tell us anything about progressive versus conservative policies.
To do that, you need to lay out a progressive city like Los Angeles alongside another city with a traditional DA and see if a trend develops.
But here’s a start:
Violent crime in Los Angeles is down this year — and more than a little. Homicides are down 24%, from 269 in 2022 to 203 this year (through Aug. 26). Rapes are down 17%, robberies 12%. Those are significant drops, and they are not confined to Los Angeles. Violent crime is down in San Francisco and San Jose, too.
But that’s not the whole story.
At Rampart, to take just one example, the crush of property crimes is constant. Stolen vehicles, burglaries and thefts from autos top the division’s weekly list of crimes, and solving them is made more difficult by staffing shortages: Once a force of more than 10,000 officers, the LAPD’s ranks are now just more than 9,000 and dropping. Since violent crimes tend to get priority, the loss of personnel is especially felt in units assigned to defending property.
Huh. Staffing shortages lead to prioritizing violent crimes over shoplifting.Report
That’s the beginning of actual work, not 15 seconds on Google.Report
Is it true that LA failed to participate in last year’s FBI Crime Report?Report
RE: partisan
Yep, I noticed that too. Half or so of the various charges the author levels are “post hoc, ergo propter hoc”.
Of a lot more concern is to what degree ignoring low level crime is acceptable by DA standards (and thus not show up on my link or in general)… and to what degree does lifestyle-crime fill in that gap.
We don’t have anywhere near enough evidence to prove that it’s a factor, but IMHO it still deserves to be on our list of five because we do see pressure on DAs to do this and there’s some evidence it’s moving mainstream. If a DA deprioritized those crimes to the point where they’re almost never handled, the result would be close to a ban without making the news.
So it passes a certain level of smell test, which isn’t the same as being right. At the end of the day we still have 300 people doing a huge percentage of the crimes of that nature in one local area. Those kinds of numbers don’t have to be representative in other areas, but I can’t find anything saying that area is unusual.Report
An interesting tweet from someone who went to a “Know Your District Attorney” event.
Text follows:
Tonight I went to an event titled “Know Your District Attorney,” featuring the current embattled Alameda County District Attorney, Pamela Price. Price is currently facing a formal recall by the citizens of Alameda county.
The event was held at the Huey P. Newton Center in Oakland, California. Pam Price of course was the main attraction. The event was not well publicized and was sparsely attended (maybe 50 people?).
Although the event promised “meaningful dialogue” none was to be had.
The event started out with a cultural dance presentation and then a prayer to our ancestors where for some reason a Poinsettia plant was watered in front of the crowd while we bowed our heads in prayer.
I was looking forward to hearing Pam answer some hard hitting questions about her upcoming recall, but all questions were required to be submitted in writing ahead of time and we were told that there would be no questions taken from the audience — and if anyone from the audience interrupted with a question they would escorted out of the building. Of course the recall did not come up.
Instead of “meaningful dialogue” Pam took three softball prescreened questions mostly complementing her and asking her how she planned to address the over incarceration problem as district attorney.
After this we got to see a video that seemed to be about going back and resentencing people already in prison and letting them out early.
Then we got a panel lecture from some of the non-profits advocating for her brand of progressiveness while complaining about more moderate district attorney’s in the past. One of the panelists gave his reason for supporting Price.
“The DAs over prosecute us and get a successful sentence and just send us away. When you have a progressive DA who understands what their job really is, because that’s not what your job is, your job is supposed to be equality, your job is supposed to be justice, the scales of justice, just because you are a person of color doesn’t need to be excessively sentenced. Having a more moderate or conservative DA is really an attack on black and brown communities.”
Crime is out of control in Oakland, but this did not seem to matter to Pam or her friends who were rolled out to support her tonight, nor was our crime problem really addressed in any meaningful way. I came away from the event believing more than ever that Price needs to be recalled.
The evening would not be complete, of course, without walking out of the event and seeing a car that had just had it’s window smashed in, fortunately this time it wasn’t mine.
I put an album of photos up of tonight’s event on Flickr here: https://flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/albums/72177720312929640
Thanks to
@RecallPPrice
for the heads up tonight about the event.Report
“Crime is OUTTA CONTROL!!”
I wonder if this person would accept FBI statistics?Report
Would they be okay with data from the City of Oakland itself?
Look! Residential burlary is down 16%! Arson is down by a quarter! Strong arm robbery down 47%! Nobody is talking about that!Report
When you have statistics on your side, pound the statistics.
When you don’t, post tweets of “people are saying”.Report
Por que no los dos?
There are people who actually live in Oakland who have a problem with the crime. I am more than happy enough to say “it’s an anecdote”. As is your story about crime not bothering you in particular in your part of town since the end of the mostly peaceful protests.Report
Are you willing to accept that there is an objective reality which can be measured, and that this reality is true, regardless of people’s perceptions?
Not that perceptions aren’t important, but that there is an objective reality upon which we can agree.Report
Sure!
Do you think that there’s any reason at all that an objective person could look at those Oakland numbers and be troubled by crime despite arson going down 25%?
Click and look! That’s the objective reality.
Can you look at those numbers and guess as to what Jaybird will say that other people are objectively looking at?Report
Not if they actually read the chart.
Even more if they also looked at this:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-crime-rates-and-trends-analysis-fbi-crime-statistics
A reasonable person would conclude that 2020 saw an unusual spike in some forms of crimes, and recent data show a return to the downward trend.Report
Really? You don’t see anything on there that would make people apprehensive “if they actually read the chart”?
I am actually going to read your link and go to the part that says “Recent Changes in Crime Rates in Selected Major Cities, 2020–2022”.
Next to “Los Angeles” under the “Change in Murder Rate” column, it says that the change is up 15.8%.Report
Oakland is not LA.Report
True, but Oakland wasn’t on his chart.
If only we could compare apples to oranges.Report
Can we include police killings as part of “crime”? Will it be convincing if I point to stats the next time we have a cop commit open murder on camera?
The whole thing is an emotional argument and our tolerance for crime, including police abuses, has gone down as the number of cameras in society has gone up.Report
FBI violent crime statistics include murder.
And they show that violent crime, in almost every place in America, has been steadily decreasing, with a short spike in 2021.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-crime-rates-and-trends-analysis-fbi-crime-statistics
And the trend is over decades, meaning that no one here at this blog can remember a time more peaceful than now, more law abiding and orderly.Report
Also too:
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/oakland/crime-rate-statisticsReport
Here’s the main thing that *I* noticed from your chart. The blue line is the line for Oakland. The dotted green line is the line for the US as a whole. The dotted orange line is the line for California.
Larceny did pretty well in 2005 and 2010.Report
Do you accept that the graph is an accurate picture of crime in America?Report
Sure! Accurate enough.
Do you see how someone might see those numbers and say “sure, Oakland isn’t five times as bad as the US as a whole like it was in 2012, but it’s still three times as bad as the US as a whole”?
Do you see how someone in Oakland might say “we’re three times as bad as the US as a whole!”?Report
Oh is that what we’re saying now, that Oakland is and has long been a violent city?
Sure. Lets agree on that.Report
Would you say that someone who is calling it a “violent city” should be mocked as if they were yelling “CRIME IS OUTTA CONTROL”?Report
If they asserted that a violent city which is steadily becoming safer and less violent represents “OUTTACONTROL” then yes, they should be mocked, mercilessly.
Because you and I agree that the data shows Oakland however violent it may be, is becoming less violent, right?Report
It’s only three times as violent as the rest of the country, on average.
“Out of control” should be reserved for… what? Four times as violent and up?Report
Glad you brought it up.
Lets set the goalposts for what constitutes “Out of control” crime.
I’ll start. My goalpost is that there be a persistent increase in crime over a period of a few years.
What is your goalpost?Report
RE: What is your goalpost?
Crime that interferes with my lifestyle or where I need to get involved.
I called 911 to deal with my out of control wife (who I am divorcing). They brought the situation under control, i.e. resolved the situation to my satisfaction.
That’s not the cops fault but dealing with her became their responsibility.
“Out of control” means exactly what it says. They’re not able to control the overall situation. “Fault” doesn’t enter into it, neither does method. For me they talked her into leaving.Report
I find it fascinating that you see a persistent decrease in crime – which tells me the cops are doing more right then wrong – as out of control simply because it MAY impact your lifestyle.Report
My personal zip-code remains crime free, ergo crime is under control.
I can dial 911 on my wife again and have four cops show up and drag her off (again).
If that changes then I’ll change my actions and/or expectations.
The problem with the numbers being down is since the big crime zips drive those numbers, “doing a better job” might mean “doing a better job somewhere else”. Your local experience can vary drastically.Report
Three times as violent as the average in the country.
Even if it’s coming down from five times as violent, it’s still “out of control”.
I appreciate the argument that they’re getting a handle on it and it’s going down from something downright horrific, though. “In the process of getting it back under control” is how I could see someone spinning it well.Report
There are zip codes where the murder rate is hundreds of times more than the average. These places also enjoy other, similar, problems.
If my zipcode is within driving range of that, I can reasonable say that crime is “out of control” there.Report
“There are zip codes where the murder rate is hundreds of times more than the average. ”
If a small town in Iowa has two thousand people and there’s one murder then the “murder rate” is “hundreds of times more than average”, but if you were in that Iowa town would you genuinely say “I feel hundreds of times less safe here than if I were in an Oakland back alley”?Report
The IRS reports that we have 5 zip codes which each have one person and about two dozen that each have 2. Not sure how many have zero but they exist.
Micro-zips are a statistical anomaly which don’t really matter nor move the overall averages. For that reason we normally exclude them.
Chicago has some heavily populated zips where the murder rate is so high everyone personally knows multiple people who have died or killed.Report
So if crime holds steady in Oakland but the national average of violent crime rises to match, will you say that crime in Oakland is now under control?
Something tells me this isn’t right, but I can’t put my finger on it.Report
I think that there is both an absolute level of crime that is “bad” and a relative level of crime that is “bad”.
I think that if the absolute level of crime in the US is, well, if not “good”, somewhere around “at an acceptable level”, then we can look at relative levels.
But I think that we’d agree that if the national average of violent crime rose to match Oakland, we’d agree that crime was “out of control”.
Which seems to make the point that Oakland’s crime is out of control, even if it’s merely Oakland rather than the whole country.Report
And yet Oakland’s rate of crimes – like the rest of the US – is declining annually. Go figure.Report
Ahem:
Report
Which just brings us back to the question:
What is your goalpost of saying that crime (in Oakland or anywhere else) is “Under Control”?Report
Are you asking for a quantitative answer or a qualitative one?
Because I’d say that crime in the US, as an average, is bad but it’s going down and it’s good that it’s going down. The average is going down because of places like Oakland, though… where “five times the national average” is becoming “three times the national average”.
I’d say that the big cities with the lowest crime rates demonstrate “what is theoretically possible” because, seriously, you can’t compare Detroit with Breckenridge.
I would say that if Breckenridge had a month of Detroit numbers that we could say that crime was “out of control” in Breckenridge.
Which leads me to think that crime is “out of control” in Detroit.
And someone who thinks that “crime is out of control” in Detroit has a point.
Even if Detroit is doing better than in 1983.Report
So, what is your goalpost of saying that crime (in Oakland or anywhere else) is “Under Control”?
Quantitatively, first, then qualitatively.Report
Let’s say “down to twice the national average” and let’s have the national average be somewhere around 10% of where it is now (either up or down).
So, qualitatively, Oakland is doing pretty good insofar as they are headed in the right direction.
Quantitatively, they are still out of control (but the first derivative is good).Report
OK 10% less, that’s a good metric.
According to the FBI, violent crime nationwide is about 370 crimes per 100K people. So if at some point that drops to 333, we can all declare that violent crime is now “Under Control”.
But you realize of course, that if you and I had had this discussion in 2010 when the rate was 411/100K, we would already be at the point where nationwide, violent crime is “Under Control”.
The reason I point this out, is that I suspect that for you and most people “Under Control” is a bit like “rich enough”, a metric which is always receding into the future no matter how close we get to it.
I mean, there’s nothing magic about 333/100K, right? Its not like the economists term of “Full Employment” which is 3% unemployment. Its not even your number, its just the function of your stated “10% less”.Report
I’d say it’s in the ballpark of 50% less to get something 3X the national average to somewhere around 2X the national average.Report
All these numbers ignore that we’ll see riots over “police hunting minorities down and killing them out of racism” the next time we have a white cop unjustly kill a black on video.
The whole thing is an emotional issue, lower the level of crime and we’ll lower the goal posts.
Crime will be out of control somewhere until every neighborhood is crime free.Report
Sure Oakland has a long ways to go to get to the “Under Control” threshold of 333K/100.
But this is a rational metric we can measure and assess.
But here’s the interesting thing:
This entire thread started with Brandon noting the shocking statistic that Portland Or. has a crime rate higher than Da Bronx.
Can you guess what the FBI violent crime rate is for Portland OR?
Yep, it has historically been below 333/100K, and below the national average, and after a pandemic era spike up to 350/100K, it looks like it is now dropping to its pre-pandemic rate of a little over 300/100K.
https://www.oregon.gov/cjc/CJC%20Document%20Library/2022%20FBI%20UCR%20Oregon%20Report.pdf
So we can conclude that violent crime in Portland Or. is “Under Control”, wouldn’t you agree?Report
Well, there’s quantitative and there’s qualitative.
If your town is used to only 2 murders a year, then gets 5 murders a year, suddenly you feel like there’s a lot of murders a year.
Lemme tell ya: 5 murders is a particularly feisty Chicago Saturday night.
And when people are using qualitative measures and you insist on using quantitative measures (or vice-versa), you’re pretty much communicating to them that you’re not speaking the same language even as you’re insisting, on the surface level, that you are.
Best of luck with that.Report
These are YOUR metrics!
Quantitatively, less than twice the national average (Portland has always qualified by this measure!)
It even looks like Portland will have 10% fewer violent crimes this year over last, again, YOUR metric.
So according to your own goalposts, Portland has crime under control.Report
This is the “inflation” argument all over again.
Inflation was *REALLY* *BAD*. At the time, people were saying “it’s transitory!” and, well, inflation is back down, I guess.
But prices are still up. And if prices even went down by 10% for the groceries that went up 20%, people saying something like “you should be happy!” are communicating something other than “I don’t buy my own groceries”.
I will say that crime is not “out of control” in Portland.
Not like it is in, say, Oakland.
But people are allowed to not like spikes. Even if they have a progressive District Attorney and some of their best friends are POCs.Report
Let me edit:
The spike is receding and crime, unlike prices, is returning to its prepandemic level.Report
Well, one thing that I’d look out for is conflating “crime” and “violent crime”. Because if, like, reported “crimes” that aren’t violent crime is going down at a rate greater than violent crime is going up, arguing that “crime” is going down can make it feel like you’re having a conversation that the other person isn’t having.Report
All the more reason to establish those goalposts and make sure no one tries to move them.Report
“I’m not talking about the number, I’m talking about the first derivative!”
“I’m talking about the number.”
“You’re moving the goalposts!”Report
When general inflation stops, known as disinflation, prices don’t go back down to pre-inflation levels, outside of a few volatile categories that go up and down more or less without regard to general price levels, such as gasoline. They stop going up. If they start going down, that isn’t disinflation, it is deflation. And almost nobody wants that, for excellent reasons. Which is why it almost never happens, and nobody tries to make it happen. That doesn’t mean that some folks, even many folks, who don’t know what they’re talking about won’t predictably moan about inflation long after it is over.Report
Yeah, if grocery prices went back to 2021 levels, the unintended consequences could be drastic.
Good news: Mortgage rates means that housing will become more affordable for people who previously had housing out of reach due to high prices.Report
I assume you know better and are just f*****g around, but maybe I’m wrong. Food prices, like energy prices, are excluded from core inflation calculations, and for the same reason; they’re volatile and move up and down without much relationship to underlying inflation trends. Maybe grocery prices will come back to 2021 levels some time in the near future — if, for example, the weather, fishery stocks, and water supplies cooperate — but there’s no policy to get them there. The Fed is looking to get to 2% inflation, which many economists think is too low. That is disinflation, which we have been experiencing for some time now. And we’ve been doing a better job of it here than in most of the rest of the world. Nobody of any consequence is pushing for actual deflation, nor should they.
If your point is that vast numbers of people don’t understand this stuff and whine when prices don’t go down, ignoring that their incomes have probably gone up roughly in line with prices, so they’re no worse off, we already knew that.Report
ignoring that their incomes have probably gone up roughly in line with prices
I imagine that there is an entire quartile of people whose incomes went up 8%.Report
Why imagine when you can look things up?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-inflation-us/Report
So just adding up the numbers from Jan 2020 to Mar 2021 gets us 34.1 (in the black).
Adding up the numbers from April 2021 to Jan 2023 gets us 38.8 (in the red).
And Feb 2023 to October gets us 14.9 (in the black).
Heck, that’s positive 10.2!
You’d think people would be happier (especially given recency bias).
Heck, they just need 3 years of 3.5% raises to beat that.Report
No, you wouldn’t think that. It is well known that people tend to have wildly inaccurate perceptions of their own economic situations. Sort of like their perceptions of their risk of becoming a crime victim.Report
Sort of like their perceptions of their risk of becoming a crime victim.
Oooooooh.
This might be where one of the disconnects is!
“I can’t believe that crime is so bad.”
“You live in the good part of the city in a good part of the state in the good part of the country. You’re not going to be a victim.”
“There are other people who are going to be victims?”
“Yeah, but they’re people in the crappy school districts.”Report
Another well-known fact: people who are at high risk of becoming crime victims have fairly realistic ideas about that while people at low risk have greatly exaggerated fears.Report
There was this weird reversal about it with “Defund the Police!” too. Like, the people who were at high risk of becoming crime victims did not want to defund while the people at low risk were calling for it.
Not that “Defund the Police” means “Defund the Police”, of course. It’s a subtle and nuanced position and people who take “Defund” to mean “Defund” are engaging in some linguistic trickery.Report
Amusement.
And for all that we still have anti-gun people claiming mass shootings justify serious rollbacks on guns (as our murder rate has been going down gun ownership has been going up) and BLM has been it’s own thing (police killings is also down).Report
I’m not sure that we are able to overcome the vibes feeling by either statistics or not allowing people to express their opinions about crime even if not based in reality. I generally agree with the progressive-liberal take on criminal justice but we aren’t doing a great job selling this argument to the masses. Instead the focus seems to be on just ignoring political feelings we find inconvenient.Report
The case for liberal criminal justice reform is contingent on there being low crime and a strong perception that things are orderly and under control. No normal person is going to be convinced by what sounds like apologia for bad behavior regardless of what the statidtical reality of crime happens to be at any given time.
One of the things people in the US don’t seem to grasp is just how hard social enforcement of orderliness is in countries with softer criminal justice systems.Report
The last sentence is key. There is a big social enforcement of norms in many other developed democracies that don’t exist in the United States or elsewhere. Americans debate on what should be done with people that play loud music, have big fights on their phones, or worse on transit with a small but influential chunk calling for allowing them to be and defending it. A lot of Americans love disorderly conduct. In other developed democracies, with a few exceptions mainly Anglophone, this type of anti-social behavior would be dealt with through social pressure.Report
Can anyone here point to a time in America in which crimes WASN”T outtacontrol, and things WEREN’T going to Helena Handbasket?
We’ve all seen those lists right, of op-eds and letters to the editor going back decades crying out about crime the decline in civic order?
I mean, the movies like Dirty Harry and Death Wish are older than most of the people commenting here. Chances are your parents were saying the same things as now.Report
I think the history is pretty clear that we have always been a much more disorderly place with a lot more per capita crime than other OECD countries, even if it also went through the roof from the 60s through the 90s. There was an Yglesias piece a few months ago suggesting that among the reasons for this may be that we are also comparably under-policed. It’s possible we could do better but our expectations of what’s possible should be adjusted somewhat.Report
I’m thinking more about the “Decline” narrative, that things are getting worse and more disorderly.
I’m thinking that this isn’t a result of a bad sales job by liberals, but is more a reflection of other concerns which are difficult to articulate.
Meaning that it isn’t a rational narrative and can’t be reasoned with. Its more like the Satanic Panic of the 80s or any of the horrific urban legends, where people start with a sense of distress at changes in society, then go shopping for an narrative that allows them to explain it without challenging their worldview.
Patiently explaining to people that no, drug dealers are not giving away free samples of drugs in Halloween candy doesn’t cause them to change their narrative because it doesn’t touch their deeper feels and vibes that somehow the world isn’t right, that Something Is Wrong.Report
The masses of American citizens might be entirely wrong but they still have the vote and can vote politicians they don’t like out of office. Your ideas require a bit of enlightened despotism where a softer criminal justice system is imposed from above.Report
I’m saying that the feeling of being unsafe is rooted in a rejection of the world as it is becoming.
I don’t have data so I can only use my own anecdotal perspective.
One data point- The people who are moving to the downtown cores are generally younger people who are more comfortable with the way the world is changing- more accepting of queer people and gender roles for instance.
An observation- I note the close tracking of the ones most hysterical about urban crime, and the worldview of conservatives such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that America is a depraved place, filled with sinful people whose behavior is out of control and the proper response is to use the fist of government power to control them.
When conservatives talk this way about America being a dark and depraved place, they are almost always talking about urban areas. They aren’t talking about West Virginia or the suburbs of Florida. When they talk about crime, they focus most often on petty street crime, not large scale organized crime or white collar crime.
And there is a close tracking of the opponents of trans and queer people, to hysteria about crime. Notice how they tried so very hard to gin up a hysteria about child molesters in schools again, using the image of America as a place being subverted from within by dark forces.
The focus on ‘disorder” is the key. It isn’t about lawbreaking, but disruption of the proper order of society.
I don’t have some magical plan to seduce them into accepting modernity any more than I have a magic plan to get Hamas or the Taliban to accept a secular society.
The reference to Hamas is deliberate. We as liberals don’t have to just accept reactionary intolerance as an equal to tolerance. We don’t have to take upon ourselves the burden of “proving” the equality and right to dignity of people, to constantly be searching for clever arguments as to “Why Jews and queer people should be allowed to exist.”Report
I believe you take transit to get around Los Angeles like I take transit in New York and in San Francisco for the most part. While people are generally behaved, there is a lot more minor a-hole behavior on transit in North America than elsewhere and major a-hole behavior occurs most frequently. Not all distaste for visible disorder is based on hysteria of social change. A lot of it is based on people unable to behave in public or private and act as an annoyance or worse to everybody else.Report
I agree there’s a psychological component to it. My wife and I are friends with a couple from the NE where I think the dynamics of crime are different from the lower mid atlantic/upper south. They’re in a constant panic about the uptick locally and regularly get themselves worked up about it to a level that is (at least IMO) not justified by the actual risks to them. At the same time we have had a string of high visibility incidents like a shooting one metro station over that bled into a massive police response at our stop which are legitimately frightening albeit unusual. Between that and the general disorder with drunks and other sketchy people around a run down shopping center nearby it can be pretty hard to talk them off the ledge.Report
The disorder narrative tracks quite closely to what I’ll call the Empowering decades – those recent historical periods where right for BIPOC, women, and the LGBTQ+ community grew. White men watche dthier politicla and economic power being dilued by others, and in public ways that could not be ignored or frowned upon. So the Mike Johnson’s of the world want to create a theocratic dictatorship to use the power of the state to stay in charge. This requires an electorate that will give in to them, and that requires a long-term narrative of decline no matter what actual data show.Report
That seems like an unfalsifiable hypothesis. And it also ignores that for whatever reason there really was a massive increase in crime in the second half of the 20th century, that while down, is not down to the levels prior to the spike, and that there has neen a documented uptick over the last few years, that may (hopefully) be subsiding. I think it’s fair to debate what the policy response should be to this, and also fair to observe that politicians and actors in the media use the fear of crime to their advantage. But I’m not sure there’s something inherently immoral about being concerned about an actual phenomena as I think you’re implying.Report
As InMD points out, there was an actual rise in crime between the late 1960s to the early 1990s. There are lots of arguments on why this happened on both sides of the aisle or whether the response was proper but very few people argue that it didn’t happen. Cities were a lot safer, cleaner, and more orderly from the late 1990s to the COVID pandemic than they were from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. People celebrated or moaned this change.Report
I’m not arguing about what did or didn’t happening. I’m describing a narrative, from a certain political constituency, that crosses that multi-decade set of rises and falls. That narrative is consistently negative. It also occurs at a time when roles in society – and thus political and economic power dynamics – were changing. White conservative men lost political and economic power over that entire time period. And they have been fighting those changes the whole time.
Take violent crime associated with drug sales in urban cores. That wasn’t a thing – or if it was it was controlled by white European Mafia families – until the 1960’s and 1970’s. Which is conveniently the beginning of the War on Drugs in the Nixon Administration where marijuana was criminalized and heavily policed to criminalize both the civil rights movement and the anti-war left. Acting like the patterns in crime in the US are not related to cultural change is the blind and foolish part.Report
If only we could CRACK whether there was some reason the narrative changed so suddenly. And note that the calls for stricter laws and enforcement weren’t coming from the insecure white conservative men.Report
Also – Italians weren’t white back then.Report
Interesting video on how Nike overcame Reebok despite the later being more popular during the 1980s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRJIgX7cJPwReport