"What I’m saying is very limited and strikes me as so obvious as to be almost a truism, almost definitional of a social concept of mental illness: that the act of opening fire on innocent with intent to kill is evidence of mental illness."
Most members of ISIS. Members of our own military who blow up wedding parties. Any bomber who did a bombing raid in WW2.
Our society has massive carve outs for the military, presumably on both sides. Some gangs are ruthless enough to want the rep of being ruthless enough to open fire on innocents.
Now take that a step further and assume you actually believe the country is in danger, just like various high level people have claimed at various times. Various Western govs (think of the Irish "troubles") have had problems removing the gun from politics.
What I expect is, the truly toxic haters will get exposed and pay a price for being terrible.
What will also happen is this tool will instantly be used for power rather than justice. The definition of "truly toxic" will be dumbed down so it can be used more often.
And yes, it will be used against lots of people just because it's hard to defend against and they're in the way or because the mob needs something to do.
Seriously, I can list hundreds of them. So instead I ask you to find a company. Any company. One with high executive compensation, let’s say over $10 million dollars, that actually racketed down the pay in a meaningful way when the company did badly.
Bad CEOs should be fired, not have their pay reduced. A 1% loss on a $100B company is a Billion dollars loss. Even if the CEO is "free" that's a shockingly bad bargain.
The math suggests if we could tell the rock stars from the awful, then pay should be measured in hundreds of millions if not billions. The risk and/or lack of information you're pointing to (does a bad year indicate a bad CEO or just that it was a bad year) is why pay is as low as it is.
As for all your examples, I'm pretty sure I've seen a bad movie or two where the people involved were overpaid. The market is brutal on poor company performance, that's strong motivation to fix things. And yes, granted, fixing things so the CEO is properly evaluated and incentivized is an ongoing issue in society.
The actual reasons that CEOs get paid as well as they do...
In less politically charged situations where it's clear we're looking at market forces, we see the same phenomenon.
The ideology of the Left includes expanding the gov without limit. That they don't when they're in power is because they normally don't have a super majority and the Right, when they're out of power, follows their own ideology. Of course you're correct, the Right has been much more concerned with that sort of thing when they're out of power than when they're in power. Many of the gov expansions have been the GOP betraying their principles or making "compromises" when they are in power.
Which is one of the big reasons why the Tea Party exists, to keep the GOP from betraying their promises the moment they get power.
What you’re talking about is the difference between 2.6% growth and 2.7% growth. If that.
The HC system has hundreds of thousands (millions?) of "coders", i.e. people smart enough to understand a hard symbolic system employed to fight with each other (it also has other bureaucrats). The tax system has tax lawyers, programmers, etc, and purely lost time by individuals.
So that's millions of smart people with good paying jobs working as bureaucrats who only exist to fight with other bureaucrats. Notice your "increasing productivity" issue comes into play because their productivity currently is zero. Filling out tax forms or billing papers doesn't add value to the economy. As far as I can tell, the amount of overhead is into multiple percentage points of GDP right there.
That doesn't include economic distortions from the tax code which, judging from the amount of money stranded overseas, also comes to multiple percentage points of the GDP.
At a handwave, we're taking low double digits of the GDP out every year and setting it on fire. We're also incurring massive lost opportunity costs from having many of our best and brightest engaged in non-productive work. I.e. the people who should be inventing the next LCD are currently filling out bureaucratic forms.
This is without consideration to what a 17th place for worldwide economic freedom indicates, and without any consideration to the various other bureaucrats whose job is only to deal with rival bureaucrats.
IMHO it would be shocking if our hit to growth from this mess were only 0.1%, so we're going to have to agree to disagree.
One is based on facts, evidence and argument, albeit with a progressive bent that often over-reaches, and the other is based on a denial of facts, evidence and argument and relies on cynical emotions. In fact, the right’s views are based on a fundamental rejection that evidence and rational argument are at all relevant to a political discussion. Which is fucking bizarre to me.
I understand the stipulation that these are the dynamics in play, but I don’t understand the equation of the two, or the attempts to justify one as having equal merit as the other.
This sounds pretty self serving to me. "My arguments are reasonable but yours are emotional...". The strength of someone's arguments can vary wildly from situation to situation. There's no reason a birther can't also have 30 years of experience is whatever the current subject is.
Both sides have their blind spots, both sides have their areas where they're more rational than the other. Both sides misuse science and use emotion as a club. And both sides are coalitions with some ugly members and/or outcomes.
Google: "Economic Ignorance and the Left" if you want a partial list of what I view as the Left's problems with irrationality.
I’d be happy if the multiplier between lowest and highest paid worker in a corporation was 50x, instead of the 250x we often see. 50x is a lot of wiggle room. It spans from 50K/year to 2.5m/year. Somehow that isn’t enough?
No, it's not "enough". When we start looking at real world examples where we know what's going on rather than fictional ones where we don't, the idea falls apart.
Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak could demand more than $30 million dollars a movie (I'm tempted to round that to $50 million because of his other potential upsides but whatever), that's for probably 4 months worth of work. So that means every janitor on the set is worth $200k a month?
Fortune 500 companies can have assets of hundreds of Billions of dollars and incomes of dozens of Billions.
A point of growth for a $100 Billion dollar company is worth $1 Billion. A bad CEO can destroy a company, a good CEO can create extra points of growth, at the extreme even numbers like +10% are reasonable.
You start crunching numbers, ask what's reasonable compensation for Billions of dollars of growth, and CEOs start to look underpaid, not overpaid.
And the reason for that is we have difficulty separating out the Steve Jobs rockstar level CEOs from the merely lucky, or even the lucky from the bad.
However the central point is "what someone is worth" has nothing to do with "what someone else is worth". Issuing laws in defiance of economic realities will have easily predictable (and bad) outcomes. For Schwarzenegger that would probably mean his movie(s) needed to be made in other countries. For CEOs, the guy making the decision on whether to move the company overseas might also get a 10x pay increase if he does.
Pushing economic activities/people outside the US because they make too much money is probably a bad thing.
the only thing that will create wealth/jobs is a breakthrough on the level of the $999 home computer that can connect to AOL.
Our tax code costs us growth via its economic distortions. Ditto our healthcare system, the total lack of competition and lack of price comparison implies there's a lot of waste.
Our economic freedom ranking was lowered to 17th as of 2017, lower growth is presumably part of that package.
So the way to bet is we could do a lot better where it comes to growth.
Aside from remembering that for all their noise, they’re still extremists, and by definition are a minority.
The big parties are collections of extremists. Often they're core members of the party with big payrolls and are owed lots of political favors. Often they've managed to appoint their true believers into positions of power. Much worse, since the big parties are by definition a subset of society, often that "minority" is magnified inside the party.
Starting with the GOP, actually outlawing abortion would probably make the party unelectable. Declaring war on hispanic immigrants in California actually did.
Bernie Sanders, whose solution to every problem is to ask "what would Venezuelan do", almost became the Dem nominee.
My expectation is Obama doesn't think he's extreme on gun control, it's just the rest of the country. We could have a large discussion on what "extremist" means on this issue with everyone trying to brand the other side as unreasonable... and everyone taking part would probably be an extremist for one side or the other.
My Issue is the most important, everything must be interpreted as how it effects my issue, every other issue is subordinate to my issue, every other issue must advocate for my issue or they're evil.
If it works, then it works well (witness abortion). Thing is there's only room for a few "top" priorities and there are going to be resource conflicts or worse, ideological ones (looking for new antiques).
Which is how everything becomes more important than job creation and economic growth.
Abortion isn’t a matter of taste, it is a matter of morality.
Everything is a matter of "morality" to someone. It's a strong way to say "you must do what I think you should do".
If memory serves abortion used to be a matter of taste, or religion, or whatever on both sides.
If the question is whether they'd be stronger as a party if they allowed "taste" on abortion, then imho the answer is "yes"... and the party in charge can arrange for "special" votes to provide cover for such members which do much signal and have no effect.
If the question is how to make red states blue for the sake of things like committee chairmanships (which do things like control policy) then absolutely the Dems should be allowing pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-gay, and whatever else is needed.
That's just tactical advice. None of that would get my vote (I'm pro-Choice), what I'd prefer is if they dropped their socialism and became a party of economic growth but that's probably a bridge too far.
The Dems, and Obama, oversaw a historic recovery from a massive recession both in terms of jobs and the market and they still didn’t get any credit for it.
Historic? The growth rate was technically positive (average annual of 1.48%), but not ever getting above 3% invites comparisons to Hoover.
What growth enhancing policies did the Dems roll out? New entitlement(s)? New taxes? New regulations? Attempts to raise energy prices in the name of "Green"? Higher minimum wage and other efforts to fight "inequality"? The only serious effort I can think of is tax reform, which may have fallen apart because Obama didn't want it to be neutral.
If the Dems had returned growth to 4% all this economic anxiety would be manageable, and so would our entitlement funding problems. And yes, I know 4% would be Hard, and to do it you'd need to make growth a priority... or at the very least not be so openly hostile to the concept.
"Credit" for the "recovery" is a big reason why HRC lost the election.
The only things that conservatives agree they want right now is things that liberals/Democratic Party supporters hate. So that makes the Dems the “Party of no” for not signing on with that?
Tax reform is something the Dems came close to signing onto before. Other economic growth enabling items. Some aspects of medical reform would make Obamacare actually look like it's working.
What the Dems are concerned about is "what happens if the GOP's policies work and create wealth/jobs".
I'd love for either party to learn to love their moderates... but you get power in Congress by being there forever, and the Blue Dogs aren't. Giving Blue Dogs seats is giving power to Nancy Pelosi (or whoever), and she's going to use that power like she wants and has big clubs to make the Dogs fall into line.
I don't see any mechanism for either party to say "no" to it's own extremists.
...the Republican Party is way, way, way more broken. That isn’t because Democratic voters are smarter, nicer, or even just snappier dressers. It’s that Democratic Party leadership, while it sucks and is disorganized and myopic and generally garbage, at least tries to do its job sometimes.
Going back to the whole "the GOP is the party of God! Guns! Moats! & Money!" thing... for the most part, simply preventing any "progress" from the "Progressives" is actually fine.
For Guns! it means preventing the Gun grabbers from doing anything and absolutely preventing any "compromises" which the Progressives would pocket and then scream for "more". Ditto Money!, compromises always mean "increase taxes just part way" before the Progressive cry of "more" rings out, it never means "shrink the gov". Moats! is fine with the current law, they just "want it enforced". God! is mostly waiting for enough members of the Supreme Court to step down so they can replace them.
I'm not trying to bring up any of these points and I certainly don't believe in all of them, but in terms of "doing their job", for the most part the GOP does a decent job where it's possible.
We get good policy by figuring out where one side is right and where the other side is right and fusing those sides into workable policy. That process has essentially broken down.
Yes and no. Yes, we're not doing much. No, mostly that's because there's not much to do. The low hanging "the gov must do this and is good at it" fruit has already been picked. Mostly what's left is "someone has a need, open your wallet".
Or to put it differently, we have a lack of consensus on what to do for most remaining issues. Where we do have consensus (think after 911), the gov acts decently fast and well.
These outbursts were clearly ham-fisted attempts at self-preservation once the conversation about Russia turned decidedly against him — an investigation which has now totally eclipsed any chance he had at a “normal” presidency or maintaining the illusion of legitimacy.
Eh? Trump is legitimately the President. He won the election, no one serious is claiming Russia hacked the voting booths. Even if Russia was behind HRC's leaked emails... Trump still won the election based on what US voters did in the ballot box.
As for him having a "normal" presidency, he's never wanted one. Everyone, including his supporters, openly admit he's not a conventional politician.
When an online news outlet like AlterNet reports that the libertarian daydream of privatization has ended in disaster everywhere it’s been attempted...
Everywhere? Poland. Much of East Europe. China. Even Russia is arguably much better off than in the old Soviet days where the store shelves were bare.
Honduras is trying privatization because it's a failing state. It's not failing because it's trying privatization. Nor is it clear that this is even a bad thing to try. Right now the police are horrible and horribly corrupt. Even assuming the critics of the plan are correct on what will happen, it's Still not clear this is worse than what currently is happening.
Yeah, that, and he *just* won an unwinnable election.
The GOP controls Congress, their voters elected Trump to be Trump, telling the voters to (something) off is a bad thing in general and poorly timed for right now.
Trump apparently didn't cross the line into "illegal" territory (at least according to NPR), he probably crossed the line of "Congress could throw him out if they wanted to" but they don't.
Then we just all up and decided to quit killing each other. The change was rather abrupt.
*That*. The question is, what happened? I expect "decided to quit killing each other" isn't the root answer.
Did the State open up economic progress and all of a sudden, there was another way to impress the girls? Did the economic value of life go up high enough that risking dying was all of a sudden a bad deal?
It's like... cars. If your income is a dollar a day, then you can't afford a car. But as income increases there's a tipping point where affording a car becomes possible and useful, so as economic development in a country increases, there's a point where the market for cars just explodes.
That looks like (and is) a huge cultural change, but culture is being massively shaped by something else.
Which we don’t do when we start sentences with “Blacks/Hispanics/Whites are…”
:Shrug: It wasn't my sentence, but with the (lack of) granularity of data that most people throw around, it's easy to end up with statements like that. It's a mistake to get hung up on that point.
IMHO policy built around treating "all Blacks" (or "all Muslims", or "all Whites") as one group is going to result in bad policy, because they're multiple groups.
One implication is the murder problem is a lot worse than the numbers suggest. The Black middle class and upper class isn't killing each other every weekend. Focus on the right zip codes or whatever and the murder rate is going to be insane.
Since the nation's murder rate is largely driven by a handful of inner cities, rounding up guns in the typical suburb won't change it. Most of these inner cities already have gun control much higher than the rest of the country so that's probably a dead horse.
Because I always look for dysfunctional government policy in a dysfunctional situation...
The war on drugs plays a role, ditto the war on crime. Various social/welfare policies which encourage out of wedlock children play a role. I can't tell if these areas are over policed, under policed, badly policed, all three of those but there's probably something.
And while we're on the subject of not treating very large groups as uniform; Intuitively expanding opportunity would probably be a really good thing. However as currently structured, Affirmative Action's benefits are largely captured by the Black middle and upper class.
Similarly, my expectation is that there are White groups which have similarly crazy murder rates, it's just that they're lost in the noise because they get lumped in as "White" and not "whatever the relevant stat should be".
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: Society {2017.06.14.W}”
How many Nazis do we have in the US? 300 or so?
Whatever you want the rules to be set at in terms of what is acceptable, it's going to affect a lot more gays than Nazis.
"
"What I’m saying is very limited and strikes me as so obvious as to be almost a truism, almost definitional of a social concept of mental illness: that the act of opening fire on innocent with intent to kill is evidence of mental illness."
Most members of ISIS. Members of our own military who blow up wedding parties. Any bomber who did a bombing raid in WW2.
Our society has massive carve outs for the military, presumably on both sides. Some gangs are ruthless enough to want the rep of being ruthless enough to open fire on innocents.
Now take that a step further and assume you actually believe the country is in danger, just like various high level people have claimed at various times. Various Western govs (think of the Irish "troubles") have had problems removing the gun from politics.
"
What will also happen is this tool will instantly be used for power rather than justice. The definition of "truly toxic" will be dumbed down so it can be used more often.
And yes, it will be used against lots of people just because it's hard to defend against and they're in the way or because the mob needs something to do.
On “Morning Ed: Money {2017.06.13.T}”
Bad CEOs should be fired, not have their pay reduced. A 1% loss on a $100B company is a Billion dollars loss. Even if the CEO is "free" that's a shockingly bad bargain.
The math suggests if we could tell the rock stars from the awful, then pay should be measured in hundreds of millions if not billions. The risk and/or lack of information you're pointing to (does a bad year indicate a bad CEO or just that it was a bad year) is why pay is as low as it is.
As for all your examples, I'm pretty sure I've seen a bad movie or two where the people involved were overpaid. The market is brutal on poor company performance, that's strong motivation to fix things. And yes, granted, fixing things so the CEO is properly evaluated and incentivized is an ongoing issue in society.
In less politically charged situations where it's clear we're looking at market forces, we see the same phenomenon.
"
This kind of reverses cause and effect. The normal way the wealthy become wealthy is by living below, sometimes far below, their means.
Read "The Millionaire Next Door" for the mechanics and mindset of it.
On “For Democrats, Blue-Dogs are the way Forward”
The ideology of the Left includes expanding the gov without limit. That they don't when they're in power is because they normally don't have a super majority and the Right, when they're out of power, follows their own ideology. Of course you're correct, the Right has been much more concerned with that sort of thing when they're out of power than when they're in power. Many of the gov expansions have been the GOP betraying their principles or making "compromises" when they are in power.
Which is one of the big reasons why the Tea Party exists, to keep the GOP from betraying their promises the moment they get power.
"
The HC system has hundreds of thousands (millions?) of "coders", i.e. people smart enough to understand a hard symbolic system employed to fight with each other (it also has other bureaucrats). The tax system has tax lawyers, programmers, etc, and purely lost time by individuals.
So that's millions of smart people with good paying jobs working as bureaucrats who only exist to fight with other bureaucrats. Notice your "increasing productivity" issue comes into play because their productivity currently is zero. Filling out tax forms or billing papers doesn't add value to the economy. As far as I can tell, the amount of overhead is into multiple percentage points of GDP right there.
That doesn't include economic distortions from the tax code which, judging from the amount of money stranded overseas, also comes to multiple percentage points of the GDP.
At a handwave, we're taking low double digits of the GDP out every year and setting it on fire. We're also incurring massive lost opportunity costs from having many of our best and brightest engaged in non-productive work. I.e. the people who should be inventing the next LCD are currently filling out bureaucratic forms.
This is without consideration to what a 17th place for worldwide economic freedom indicates, and without any consideration to the various other bureaucrats whose job is only to deal with rival bureaucrats.
IMHO it would be shocking if our hit to growth from this mess were only 0.1%, so we're going to have to agree to disagree.
"
This sounds pretty self serving to me. "My arguments are reasonable but yours are emotional...". The strength of someone's arguments can vary wildly from situation to situation. There's no reason a birther can't also have 30 years of experience is whatever the current subject is.
Both sides have their blind spots, both sides have their areas where they're more rational than the other. Both sides misuse science and use emotion as a club. And both sides are coalitions with some ugly members and/or outcomes.
Google: "Economic Ignorance and the Left" if you want a partial list of what I view as the Left's problems with irrationality.
On “Morning Ed: Money {2017.06.13.T}”
Noted. But I think it deserves a serious answer.
No, it's not "enough". When we start looking at real world examples where we know what's going on rather than fictional ones where we don't, the idea falls apart.
Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak could demand more than $30 million dollars a movie (I'm tempted to round that to $50 million because of his other potential upsides but whatever), that's for probably 4 months worth of work. So that means every janitor on the set is worth $200k a month?
Fortune 500 companies can have assets of hundreds of Billions of dollars and incomes of dozens of Billions.
A point of growth for a $100 Billion dollar company is worth $1 Billion. A bad CEO can destroy a company, a good CEO can create extra points of growth, at the extreme even numbers like +10% are reasonable.
You start crunching numbers, ask what's reasonable compensation for Billions of dollars of growth, and CEOs start to look underpaid, not overpaid.
And the reason for that is we have difficulty separating out the Steve Jobs rockstar level CEOs from the merely lucky, or even the lucky from the bad.
However the central point is "what someone is worth" has nothing to do with "what someone else is worth". Issuing laws in defiance of economic realities will have easily predictable (and bad) outcomes. For Schwarzenegger that would probably mean his movie(s) needed to be made in other countries. For CEOs, the guy making the decision on whether to move the company overseas might also get a 10x pay increase if he does.
Pushing economic activities/people outside the US because they make too much money is probably a bad thing.
On “For Democrats, Blue-Dogs are the way Forward”
Our tax code costs us growth via its economic distortions. Ditto our healthcare system, the total lack of competition and lack of price comparison implies there's a lot of waste.
Our economic freedom ranking was lowered to 17th as of 2017, lower growth is presumably part of that package.
So the way to bet is we could do a lot better where it comes to growth.
"
The big parties are collections of extremists. Often they're core members of the party with big payrolls and are owed lots of political favors. Often they've managed to appoint their true believers into positions of power. Much worse, since the big parties are by definition a subset of society, often that "minority" is magnified inside the party.
Starting with the GOP, actually outlawing abortion would probably make the party unelectable. Declaring war on hispanic immigrants in California actually did.
Bernie Sanders, whose solution to every problem is to ask "what would Venezuelan do", almost became the Dem nominee.
My expectation is Obama doesn't think he's extreme on gun control, it's just the rest of the country. We could have a large discussion on what "extremist" means on this issue with everyone trying to brand the other side as unreasonable... and everyone taking part would probably be an extremist for one side or the other.
"
What does this mean?
"
My Issue is the most important, everything must be interpreted as how it effects my issue, every other issue is subordinate to my issue, every other issue must advocate for my issue or they're evil.
If it works, then it works well (witness abortion). Thing is there's only room for a few "top" priorities and there are going to be resource conflicts or worse, ideological ones (looking for new antiques).
Which is how everything becomes more important than job creation and economic growth.
"
Everything is a matter of "morality" to someone. It's a strong way to say "you must do what I think you should do".
If memory serves abortion used to be a matter of taste, or religion, or whatever on both sides.
If the question is whether they'd be stronger as a party if they allowed "taste" on abortion, then imho the answer is "yes"... and the party in charge can arrange for "special" votes to provide cover for such members which do much signal and have no effect.
If the question is how to make red states blue for the sake of things like committee chairmanships (which do things like control policy) then absolutely the Dems should be allowing pro-life, pro-gun, and anti-gay, and whatever else is needed.
That's just tactical advice. None of that would get my vote (I'm pro-Choice), what I'd prefer is if they dropped their socialism and became a party of economic growth but that's probably a bridge too far.
"
Historic? The growth rate was technically positive (average annual of 1.48%), but not ever getting above 3% invites comparisons to Hoover.
What growth enhancing policies did the Dems roll out? New entitlement(s)? New taxes? New regulations? Attempts to raise energy prices in the name of "Green"? Higher minimum wage and other efforts to fight "inequality"? The only serious effort I can think of is tax reform, which may have fallen apart because Obama didn't want it to be neutral.
If the Dems had returned growth to 4% all this economic anxiety would be manageable, and so would our entitlement funding problems. And yes, I know 4% would be Hard, and to do it you'd need to make growth a priority... or at the very least not be so openly hostile to the concept.
"Credit" for the "recovery" is a big reason why HRC lost the election.
"
Tax reform is something the Dems came close to signing onto before. Other economic growth enabling items. Some aspects of medical reform would make Obamacare actually look like it's working.
What the Dems are concerned about is "what happens if the GOP's policies work and create wealth/jobs".
"
I'd love for either party to learn to love their moderates... but you get power in Congress by being there forever, and the Blue Dogs aren't. Giving Blue Dogs seats is giving power to Nancy Pelosi (or whoever), and she's going to use that power like she wants and has big clubs to make the Dogs fall into line.
I don't see any mechanism for either party to say "no" to it's own extremists.
On “Opinion: “Fake News” Claims, Debunked”
Going back to the whole "the GOP is the party of God! Guns! Moats! & Money!" thing... for the most part, simply preventing any "progress" from the "Progressives" is actually fine.
For Guns! it means preventing the Gun grabbers from doing anything and absolutely preventing any "compromises" which the Progressives would pocket and then scream for "more". Ditto Money!, compromises always mean "increase taxes just part way" before the Progressive cry of "more" rings out, it never means "shrink the gov". Moats! is fine with the current law, they just "want it enforced". God! is mostly waiting for enough members of the Supreme Court to step down so they can replace them.
I'm not trying to bring up any of these points and I certainly don't believe in all of them, but in terms of "doing their job", for the most part the GOP does a decent job where it's possible.
"
Yes and no. Yes, we're not doing much. No, mostly that's because there's not much to do. The low hanging "the gov must do this and is good at it" fruit has already been picked. Mostly what's left is "someone has a need, open your wallet".
Or to put it differently, we have a lack of consensus on what to do for most remaining issues. Where we do have consensus (think after 911), the gov acts decently fast and well.
"
Eh? Trump is legitimately the President. He won the election, no one serious is claiming Russia hacked the voting booths. Even if Russia was behind HRC's leaked emails... Trump still won the election based on what US voters did in the ballot box.
As for him having a "normal" presidency, he's never wanted one. Everyone, including his supporters, openly admit he's not a conventional politician.
Everywhere? Poland. Much of East Europe. China. Even Russia is arguably much better off than in the old Soviet days where the store shelves were bare.
Honduras is trying privatization because it's a failing state. It's not failing because it's trying privatization. Nor is it clear that this is even a bad thing to try. Right now the police are horrible and horribly corrupt. Even assuming the critics of the plan are correct on what will happen, it's Still not clear this is worse than what currently is happening.
On “James Comey Testifies: Open Thread”
This is not new information. Even to the people who voted for him, it's not new information.
He gets a pass on that if he can be reasonably viewed as making things better.
"
Yeah, that, and he *just* won an unwinnable election.
The GOP controls Congress, their voters elected Trump to be Trump, telling the voters to (something) off is a bad thing in general and poorly timed for right now.
Trump apparently didn't cross the line into "illegal" territory (at least according to NPR), he probably crossed the line of "Congress could throw him out if they wanted to" but they don't.
On “In Sadness and In Anger”
*That*. The question is, what happened? I expect "decided to quit killing each other" isn't the root answer.
Did the State open up economic progress and all of a sudden, there was another way to impress the girls? Did the economic value of life go up high enough that risking dying was all of a sudden a bad deal?
It's like... cars. If your income is a dollar a day, then you can't afford a car. But as income increases there's a tipping point where affording a car becomes possible and useful, so as economic development in a country increases, there's a point where the market for cars just explodes.
That looks like (and is) a huge cultural change, but culture is being massively shaped by something else.
"
Test
"
:Shrug: It wasn't my sentence, but with the (lack of) granularity of data that most people throw around, it's easy to end up with statements like that. It's a mistake to get hung up on that point.
IMHO policy built around treating "all Blacks" (or "all Muslims", or "all Whites") as one group is going to result in bad policy, because they're multiple groups.
One implication is the murder problem is a lot worse than the numbers suggest. The Black middle class and upper class isn't killing each other every weekend. Focus on the right zip codes or whatever and the murder rate is going to be insane.
Since the nation's murder rate is largely driven by a handful of inner cities, rounding up guns in the typical suburb won't change it. Most of these inner cities already have gun control much higher than the rest of the country so that's probably a dead horse.
Because I always look for dysfunctional government policy in a dysfunctional situation...
The war on drugs plays a role, ditto the war on crime. Various social/welfare policies which encourage out of wedlock children play a role. I can't tell if these areas are over policed, under policed, badly policed, all three of those but there's probably something.
And while we're on the subject of not treating very large groups as uniform; Intuitively expanding opportunity would probably be a really good thing. However as currently structured, Affirmative Action's benefits are largely captured by the Black middle and upper class.
Similarly, my expectation is that there are White groups which have similarly crazy murder rates, it's just that they're lost in the noise because they get lumped in as "White" and not "whatever the relevant stat should be".
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.