Burt Likko:
Well, it’d be interesting to hear someone come up with an intellectually rigorous defense of a Trump policy or of Trump himself. Most of what I see out on teh Twitter — Trump’s favored medium of discourse — boils down to #HillaryIsWorse.
RE: Defending Trump
1) Throwing the rascals out periodically is good for democracy. For example if we're interested in holding the gov accountable for things like the IRS from suppressing free speech, this is the way to do it.
2) Trump-the-person is strikingly different (i.e. saner) than Trump-the-public-character. When you look at Trump's children, they're all seriously functional, sane, people.
3) Being President is mostly about management, delegation, and communicating with the public, those are Trump's strengths.
4) A reputation as a loose cannon isn't an entirely bad thing when it come to international relations.
5) Presidential Style and Presidential dignity aren't important when you get to the nitty gritty on any issue.
6) The GOP will keep both the House and Senate, and Trump probably doesn't care about what bills are passed as long as he gets credit, meaning breaking the log-jam would be a really good thing.
7) Trump as a businessman presumably has some idea on how to grow the economy.
8) Trump is very clearly not a social warrior, it'd be a good thing to end the GOP's attempts to police people's bedrooms and also end efforts to move God into the government.
9) Hillary is worse.
10) He's overweight, old, he'll be in a lot of stress... and his VP is solid. There's a joke making the rounds that his VP will be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
The problem is his 'act' makes him strikingly difficult to evaluate. Maybe he dumps the anti-free-trade (anti-immigration) parts of his leadership and the various other things which train-wreck the economy, maybe he doubles down on them.
Hillary is a corrupt state-power enhancer, and that, for it's flaws, is a known thing.
In a country that has democratic elections, that’s a recipe for someone running who says “we (and when I say ‘we’, I include myself) should not FREAKING HAVE TO LIVE WITH TERRORISM.”
Well put. And the next question to be asked in a Democracy is "who needs to die so I don't need to live with terrorism".
Which will always play a hell of a lot better than “if you look at the numbers dispassionately, you’d see that we still have a lot fewer bombings than we were willing to put up with in 1973.”
It's part of the human condition to pay a LOT of attention to people killing people-who-are-potentially-me. Husbands killing wives gets a pass, but murdering-potentially-me could be 'war'.
These are instincts, supposedly we've had periods of time (long before history) when the lifetime murder rate (from tribal war) was 20%-50%.
Yes, agreed with all that. The problem with "claw backs" is most people spend the money when they have it.
As far as Rieves goes... that contract is interesting. It's built to prevent the 2+ year vets from leaving, so they want to train people and then have them work at that store, but it's a highly paid/priced convenience store. I wouldn't think retention/recruitment would be a big deal if you're the highest paid employer on the block.
Which speaks to the idea that she is more valuable to them in the white house, rather than Trump.
That was exactly my feelings a week ago... but assume Trump is on course to weaken Europe via isolationism and Russia gets another country or two.
What could they possibly blackmail her into which would be better than that? Further she has had multiple scandals before, if she's in office then she probably won't care that much.
The article said a third of her pay was subject to claw back... and that other article suggests that company pays a lot more than average. So... what if those two balance?
Now maybe there are better ways to structure that, yearly bonus checks for example.
Jaybird:
But that does not mean that I will therefore vote for the person responsible for having the unsecured email server that was and is at the root of the embarrassment that we’re talking about here.
Russia is really good at this, and she was a high value target who was weakly defended.
My expectation is that they got everything.
My expectation is that people died because they trusted us and gave us sensitive info.
My expectation is that Hillary's emails also detail her getting money from people she shouldn't in exchange for doing things she shouldn't.
And as bad as all that is, rather than have her in office so they can blackmail her, they want Trump in office because it's in their interests.
In terms of voting, that last thing should give everyone pause, because I seriously doubt Russia's interests are aligned with our own.
Do we doubt that Russia has already tried to do exactly what Trump encouraged them to do this morning and break into the much-less-secure email that Secretary Clinton improperly used? No, of course they already have tried, and maybe succeeded, and that’s not the point.
The point is that a man who aspires to be President of the United States openly encouraged an adversarial foreign power to search for American diplomatic secrets using methods that violate American laws.
If you assume they *already* *have* all of those emails then no, he's not encouraging them to search for them illegally, they can just search their own computers. That goose is already cooked.
The more interesting question is *when* will Russia release Hillary's emails? My guess is October, when it will do the most damage.
The other questions would be "why" would they do this, and the answer would be something like "dominate Europe". I.e. Trump is an isolationist and wants our European allies to pay their own way, which effectively would leave individual countries on their own and they could be bullied/invaded by Russia.
Are you sure that’s true? Progress on drug legalization, sentencing reform, etc., is slow, but where’s the evidence that BLM is slowing it down?
Go to Google and type in "Hillary Clinton on the issues". The closest we get to "drug" is "crime" and we have the following:
Everyone in America should respect the law and be respected by the law. We need to end mass incarceration, use strategies like police body cameras to improve accountability, increase substance abuse treatment, and aim resources at criminals who pose the greatest threat. And we need to invest in education and job training—the foundations of success.
Do you see anything in there that can be interpreted as "ending the war on drugs"? BLM is, as far as I can tell, dealing with this as though it is entirely a "racist" thing. They're the voice of the black community saying "enough is enough"... but getting racism out of the war on drugs isn't, imho, going to actually do much. What is the non-racist thing we should do about drug dealers killing drug dealers?
I'd call it a cultural response to our dysfunctional gov policy, and yes, I fully agree it's rooted in WoD.
But "getting rid of racism" from policing simply isn't going to end mass incarceration as long as our policy is WoD.
The core policy is dysfunctional, trying to pretend we can make it "fair" is, imho, simply not going to work. Drug dealers are killing each other over street corners. What is the "non-racist" thing to do about that? Let them? Stop them? Something else?
You're arguing that high rates of success aren't unusual because there are things like TBills and others which can do that. This is correct. It is certainly possible to have very high rates of success on conservative investments.
You're also arguing that it's possible to take spectacular risks and get outlandish rates of return. This is also correct.
However Hillary had both of those things. 6000% return in combination with 80% success in trades.
And she also had the whole 'consistently trade on the best price of the day' for which there's no possible legit answer.
And she's did all of this with someone who benefited financially from her husband's office.
And she very clearly got "preferential treatment".
And that office has a history (during that time period) of assigning good trades to certain customers.
And the amount of luck needed for 80% success leading to 6000% returns seems like it'd be outlandish, serious people who publish in serious journals who have calculated the odds claim it's at best 10,000x less likely than winning the lottery. Notice they could be off by 1,000,000 fold and it'd only make the odds 30 million to one.
So... your conclusion from all this is she ran scary risks and made that money legitimately.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one.
My conclusion is that "misuse of the levers of power" is the more reasonable answer, and I'll add that imho it's destructive to a democracy for this sort of thing to happen more or less openly.
If all it took was “not dealing with police brutality” to get crime under control, crime would have been under control a long time ago.
The big, massive discussion about control over the police consumes all the oxygen we have to talk about social policies. Ergo we're NOT talking about what's fueling crime. Get rid of the war on drugs and the violence associated with it goes away, the economic damage associated with it goes away, the militarization of the police goes away, etc.
So we're going to reform the police and live with the war for another 30 years. Do you think this is a fair trade?
1) Wonder if it’s possible that some of the 1186 deaths last year that we don’t have video of might not have been entirely justified, even if the report says they were.
I expect this is true.
1) Officers make mistakes and lie a certain constant percentage of the time and we’re sampling it with increased frequency.
I expect this is also true.
What we saw on camera may or may not have been the worst thing that happened that day. It’s just the worst thing with witnesses and video.
Agreed, although but we may be looking at the worst (on camera) for a week or month considering how many news cycles I expect it to stick.
You appear to be arguing against the notion that police violence is worse than cancer and heart disease and war. I’m totally with you on the idea that it’s not. Consider that point fully conceded.
Let's go back in time to the 1950's: The number one reason blacks couldn't advance was racism.
Because of mass media, society got a good look at what 'typical' meant and exposed those brutal facts to everyone, everywhere. The weight of society was brought to bear. Racism, while not totally eliminated, was vastly reduced to the point where Obama's race was probably a net positive for his advancement.
These are all good things.
So then, what is keeping blacks back now? I'd argue the top three are crime, education, and culture. We could and probably should break those into sub categories (the war on drugs imho should be #1, single parent households would be in the top 5, etc) but whatever. Police Brutality/Racism would be... where? Number 10? Further down the list? The media attention driving this is the same thing which fuels lottery ticket sales, by making the rare look typical.
Right now, arguably the #1 problem is crime, and the gov agency which is most devoted to making black lives matter is the police. There are strong arguments that the police should do a better job, there are various suggestions for doing so, some hit the radar as pretty good, some less so.
The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of upper management. These reforms may be what we do for the black community for the next 30 years. And we're going to spend that energy on their number #10 problem. Further, if we handle their #10 problem poorly, we might be making #1 worse.
Imagine if the 1960's had dealt with cigarettes and had ignored racism.
Imagine if today, instead of police reform, we just ended the war on drugs.
Forgive me for not being all that enthusiastic about all this but imho we could do so much better and at best we're not going to do much.
I would assume the Russians want Hillary in the White House. Presumably they have all the emails from her server and can blackmail her with whatever she wanted to hide from the public.
More than a decade ago I got a call from them claiming they had my resume and wanted me down for an "interview". I went, and it was a ra-ra-sell-our-products thing. That right there made it a total waste of my time, but the marketing techniques were this large series of non sequitur statements, and I also realized that half the people in the room (the half who were really into this) were 'plants'.
pillsy: ...mean there can’t possibly be bad outcomes due to reduced community trust in the police.
We are going to have "bad outcomes" no matter what we do. All we can do is trade one set of problems/risks for a different set, which is where trying to get a cost-benefit analysis is a good thing... which ideally means trying reforms in individual cities to see what works.
pillsy: Also, it’s hardly like all of the violence is due to the drug war. Indeed, it’s unclear how any of the recent high profile, gratuitous shootings have anything to do with it.
That's actually my point. These high profile exceptions are something like 0.1% of the drug war's shootings.
So if "reform" makes the drug war worse, then we could easily end up hurting the people we're trying to help. If it makes the drug war much worse then later generations won't be thinking well of us and our 'reform'.
That doesn't mean I'm against reform, but we need to keep in mind the bigger picture. And yes, we absolutely need to worry about unintended consequences and keep in mind that good intentions don't buy a cup of coffee.
Stillwater: It seems to me that someone with such a reflexively cynical view of gummint wouldn’t permit themselves to believe that a law was passed on the basis of “good intentions”. It seems too convenient, actually.
If memory serves, President Clinton expanded the war on drugs with the support and approval of the black sections of Congress and the black community in general. The "racist" parts of the war and it's expansion have mostly been (as far as I can tell) that the blacks are being hurt worse by drugs and so need more "help", which means harsher laws to "save" them.
Taking race totally out of the picture and looking at "helping" pregnant women and children (which narrows the scope so we're entirely looking at good intentions)... over the decades three of my female relatives have each decided to not get married to the father of their unborn child, so they could get more aid from the government. Each was open to the family as to what they were doing and why, eventually two of them did get married (mostly because of social pressure).
Good intentions can easily lead to bad outcomes when dealing with social issues and complex interactions.
Can your cynicism about government account for why you think allowing those riots to potentially continue is a better outcome?
My cynicism says giving out blank checks in the name of "reform" is a bad idea. That is NOT the same as saying "no reform". However I expect some reforms are good, some necessary, some won't work but will be harmless...
...some can make bad social issues (which hurt lots more people and are actually bigger problems), worse.
Now, with people of your ideological bent, it’s hard to tell if a criticism of an institutional structure can be equated with a desire to revise it, but it sure appears you’re saying dismantling the cop union would be a net positive (unintended consequences included in the calculus, obvs).
Oh, I wouldn't stop there. I'm seriously not a fan of gov unions across the board. (Thanks for asking directly though).
I think we've had them long enough to see the problems...
1) Tax increases and increasing gov power are always in their interest, gov reform is not.
2) They have the ability to negotiate with themselves by electing their boss, and then hand any bills to the taxpayers.
And I could go on but this thread isn't about that.
So, yes, I'm in favor of dismantling the police union. What's more, if we want any reforms to stick, we probably should.
Thank you, that was probably the best post I've read in terms of overcoming the numbers in making the case for reform. It's very convincing.
Things to point out:
1) After reform, within the margin of error, the number of killed-by-police probably won't go down (mental illness and the drug war are the big movers there).
2) If reform is a stand in for "my life sucks, fix it", that's probably not going to work.
3) Police work intrinsically deals with ugly, sometimes unusual, situations. If reform tries to pretend it doesn't and it's poorly handled, we could make other situations worse. What "poorly handled" means may not be clear until after the fact.
4) We're still going to have incidents like Ferguson's "Mike Brown" where minorities die, the press presents it as racism, his family presents him as a saint, and in the real world he got himself killed. Worse, I fully expect the number of these to *increase*, just because the number of cameras out there is increasing.
None of this should be read as disagreeing with the case for reform, but expectations should be realistic and I'm not sure they are.
EVERYONE should have the protection of a union lawyer and lots of teenytiny fine print to protect them from being fired.
When I see a dysfunctional local gov institution (which in this conversation is the police) there's often an overly strong union which has put it's interests above that of the consumers. In the free market, very long term (say 50-70 years), that results in the bankruptcy of the host company.
Yes, clearly we only need to worry about the unintended consequences of preventing cops from needlessly inflicting violence on black people; surely there are no possible unintended consequences of continuing with the status quo. Well, beyond the direct effects of the needless violence.
Where is the bulk of that "needless violence" coming from? Oh, yes, the drug war. The one we fired up to 'help' people, based on good intentions.
Pity about the unintended consequences, but hey, good intentions excuse all sorts of bad outcomes because things can't possibly get any worse.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “NYT: Donald Trump Encourages Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails”
RE: Defending Trump
1) Throwing the rascals out periodically is good for democracy. For example if we're interested in holding the gov accountable for things like the IRS from suppressing free speech, this is the way to do it.
2) Trump-the-person is strikingly different (i.e. saner) than Trump-the-public-character. When you look at Trump's children, they're all seriously functional, sane, people.
3) Being President is mostly about management, delegation, and communicating with the public, those are Trump's strengths.
4) A reputation as a loose cannon isn't an entirely bad thing when it come to international relations.
5) Presidential Style and Presidential dignity aren't important when you get to the nitty gritty on any issue.
6) The GOP will keep both the House and Senate, and Trump probably doesn't care about what bills are passed as long as he gets credit, meaning breaking the log-jam would be a really good thing.
7) Trump as a businessman presumably has some idea on how to grow the economy.
8) Trump is very clearly not a social warrior, it'd be a good thing to end the GOP's attempts to police people's bedrooms and also end efforts to move God into the government.
9) Hillary is worse.
10) He's overweight, old, he'll be in a lot of stress... and his VP is solid. There's a joke making the rounds that his VP will be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.
The problem is his 'act' makes him strikingly difficult to evaluate. Maybe he dumps the anti-free-trade (anti-immigration) parts of his leadership and the various other things which train-wreck the economy, maybe he doubles down on them.
Hillary is a corrupt state-power enhancer, and that, for it's flaws, is a known thing.
On “Morning Ed: Crime {2016.07.28.Th}”
Well put. And the next question to be asked in a Democracy is "who needs to die so I don't need to live with terrorism".
It's part of the human condition to pay a LOT of attention to people killing people-who-are-potentially-me. Husbands killing wives gets a pass, but murdering-potentially-me could be 'war'.
These are instincts, supposedly we've had periods of time (long before history) when the lifetime murder rate (from tribal war) was 20%-50%.
And who was bombing whom in 1973?
On “Morning Ed: Labor {2016.07.27.W}”
Yes, agreed with all that. The problem with "claw backs" is most people spend the money when they have it.
As far as Rieves goes... that contract is interesting. It's built to prevent the 2+ year vets from leaving, so they want to train people and then have them work at that store, but it's a highly paid/priced convenience store. I wouldn't think retention/recruitment would be a big deal if you're the highest paid employer on the block.
On “NYT: Donald Trump Encourages Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails”
Assuming we don't have an October Surprise; Remind me of this in November and I'll be glad to say I was wrong. ;)
And to be clear, I'd be happy to be wrong. For that matter, if Trump wins and rules in a sane manner, I'd be happy to admit I was wrong about him too.
I base my opinion on the imperfect information I have in front of me, there are assumptions.
"
That was exactly my feelings a week ago... but assume Trump is on course to weaken Europe via isolationism and Russia gets another country or two.
What could they possibly blackmail her into which would be better than that? Further she has had multiple scandals before, if she's in office then she probably won't care that much.
On “Morning Ed: Labor {2016.07.27.W}”
The article said a third of her pay was subject to claw back... and that other article suggests that company pays a lot more than average. So... what if those two balance?
Now maybe there are better ways to structure that, yearly bonus checks for example.
On “NYT: Donald Trump Encourages Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails”
East Europe should be scared. It's probably their neck on the line here.
"
Russia is really good at this, and she was a high value target who was weakly defended.
My expectation is that they got everything.
My expectation is that people died because they trusted us and gave us sensitive info.
My expectation is that Hillary's emails also detail her getting money from people she shouldn't in exchange for doing things she shouldn't.
And as bad as all that is, rather than have her in office so they can blackmail her, they want Trump in office because it's in their interests.
In terms of voting, that last thing should give everyone pause, because I seriously doubt Russia's interests are aligned with our own.
"
If you assume they *already* *have* all of those emails then no, he's not encouraging them to search for them illegally, they can just search their own computers. That goose is already cooked.
The more interesting question is *when* will Russia release Hillary's emails? My guess is October, when it will do the most damage.
The other questions would be "why" would they do this, and the answer would be something like "dominate Europe". I.e. Trump is an isolationist and wants our European allies to pay their own way, which effectively would leave individual countries on their own and they could be bullied/invaded by Russia.
On “CNN: Man shot by cops while lying down with hands up, lawyer says [+Video]”
Go to Google and type in "Hillary Clinton on the issues". The closest we get to "drug" is "crime" and we have the following:
Everyone in America should respect the law and be respected by the law. We need to end mass incarceration, use strategies like police body cameras to improve accountability, increase substance abuse treatment, and aim resources at criminals who pose the greatest threat. And we need to invest in education and job training—the foundations of success.
Do you see anything in there that can be interpreted as "ending the war on drugs"? BLM is, as far as I can tell, dealing with this as though it is entirely a "racist" thing. They're the voice of the black community saying "enough is enough"... but getting racism out of the war on drugs isn't, imho, going to actually do much. What is the non-racist thing we should do about drug dealers killing drug dealers?
"
I'd call it a cultural response to our dysfunctional gov policy, and yes, I fully agree it's rooted in WoD.
But "getting rid of racism" from policing simply isn't going to end mass incarceration as long as our policy is WoD.
The core policy is dysfunctional, trying to pretend we can make it "fair" is, imho, simply not going to work. Drug dealers are killing each other over street corners. What is the "non-racist" thing to do about that? Let them? Stop them? Something else?
On “The Siberian Candidate: A Collection”
It took me a while to wrap my head around this.
Putin probably has Hillary's email server's full contents. I'd assumed he'd use it to blackmail her, but he timed this release to damage Hillary.
Ergo: We've got an October Surprise coming.
On “CNN: Man shot by cops while lying down with hands up, lawyer says [+Video]”
I don't understand what point you're trying to make.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2016.07.19.T}”
DavidTC,
You're arguing that high rates of success aren't unusual because there are things like TBills and others which can do that. This is correct. It is certainly possible to have very high rates of success on conservative investments.
You're also arguing that it's possible to take spectacular risks and get outlandish rates of return. This is also correct.
However Hillary had both of those things. 6000% return in combination with 80% success in trades.
And she also had the whole 'consistently trade on the best price of the day' for which there's no possible legit answer.
And she's did all of this with someone who benefited financially from her husband's office.
And she very clearly got "preferential treatment".
And that office has a history (during that time period) of assigning good trades to certain customers.
And the amount of luck needed for 80% success leading to 6000% returns seems like it'd be outlandish, serious people who publish in serious journals who have calculated the odds claim it's at best 10,000x less likely than winning the lottery. Notice they could be off by 1,000,000 fold and it'd only make the odds 30 million to one.
So... your conclusion from all this is she ran scary risks and made that money legitimately.
We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one.
My conclusion is that "misuse of the levers of power" is the more reasonable answer, and I'll add that imho it's destructive to a democracy for this sort of thing to happen more or less openly.
On “CNN: Man shot by cops while lying down with hands up, lawyer says [+Video]”
The big, massive discussion about control over the police consumes all the oxygen we have to talk about social policies. Ergo we're NOT talking about what's fueling crime. Get rid of the war on drugs and the violence associated with it goes away, the economic damage associated with it goes away, the militarization of the police goes away, etc.
So we're going to reform the police and live with the war for another 30 years. Do you think this is a fair trade?
"
I expect this is true.
I expect this is also true.
Agreed, although but we may be looking at the worst (on camera) for a week or month considering how many news cycles I expect it to stick.
Let's go back in time to the 1950's: The number one reason blacks couldn't advance was racism.
Because of mass media, society got a good look at what 'typical' meant and exposed those brutal facts to everyone, everywhere. The weight of society was brought to bear. Racism, while not totally eliminated, was vastly reduced to the point where Obama's race was probably a net positive for his advancement.
These are all good things.
So then, what is keeping blacks back now? I'd argue the top three are crime, education, and culture. We could and probably should break those into sub categories (the war on drugs imho should be #1, single parent households would be in the top 5, etc) but whatever. Police Brutality/Racism would be... where? Number 10? Further down the list? The media attention driving this is the same thing which fuels lottery ticket sales, by making the rare look typical.
Right now, arguably the #1 problem is crime, and the gov agency which is most devoted to making black lives matter is the police. There are strong arguments that the police should do a better job, there are various suggestions for doing so, some hit the radar as pretty good, some less so.
The rarest resource in the universe is the attention of upper management. These reforms may be what we do for the black community for the next 30 years. And we're going to spend that energy on their number #10 problem. Further, if we handle their #10 problem poorly, we might be making #1 worse.
Imagine if the 1960's had dealt with cigarettes and had ignored racism.
Imagine if today, instead of police reform, we just ended the war on drugs.
Forgive me for not being all that enthusiastic about all this but imho we could do so much better and at best we're not going to do much.
On “The DNC Email Leaks”
I would assume the Russians want Hillary in the White House. Presumably they have all the emails from her server and can blackmail her with whatever she wanted to hide from the public.
On “Herbalife Revisited”
More than a decade ago I got a call from them claiming they had my resume and wanted me down for an "interview". I went, and it was a ra-ra-sell-our-products thing. That right there made it a total waste of my time, but the marketing techniques were this large series of non sequitur statements, and I also realized that half the people in the room (the half who were really into this) were 'plants'.
The whole setup seemed really really slimy.
On “CNN: Man shot by cops while lying down with hands up, lawyer says [+Video]”
We are going to have "bad outcomes" no matter what we do. All we can do is trade one set of problems/risks for a different set, which is where trying to get a cost-benefit analysis is a good thing... which ideally means trying reforms in individual cities to see what works.
That's actually my point. These high profile exceptions are something like 0.1% of the drug war's shootings.
So if "reform" makes the drug war worse, then we could easily end up hurting the people we're trying to help. If it makes the drug war much worse then later generations won't be thinking well of us and our 'reform'.
That doesn't mean I'm against reform, but we need to keep in mind the bigger picture. And yes, we absolutely need to worry about unintended consequences and keep in mind that good intentions don't buy a cup of coffee.
"
If memory serves, President Clinton expanded the war on drugs with the support and approval of the black sections of Congress and the black community in general. The "racist" parts of the war and it's expansion have mostly been (as far as I can tell) that the blacks are being hurt worse by drugs and so need more "help", which means harsher laws to "save" them.
Taking race totally out of the picture and looking at "helping" pregnant women and children (which narrows the scope so we're entirely looking at good intentions)... over the decades three of my female relatives have each decided to not get married to the father of their unborn child, so they could get more aid from the government. Each was open to the family as to what they were doing and why, eventually two of them did get married (mostly because of social pressure).
Good intentions can easily lead to bad outcomes when dealing with social issues and complex interactions.
My cynicism says giving out blank checks in the name of "reform" is a bad idea. That is NOT the same as saying "no reform". However I expect some reforms are good, some necessary, some won't work but will be harmless...
...some can make bad social issues (which hurt lots more people and are actually bigger problems), worse.
"
Oh, I wouldn't stop there. I'm seriously not a fan of gov unions across the board. (Thanks for asking directly though).
I think we've had them long enough to see the problems...
1) Tax increases and increasing gov power are always in their interest, gov reform is not.
2) They have the ability to negotiate with themselves by electing their boss, and then hand any bills to the taxpayers.
And I could go on but this thread isn't about that.
So, yes, I'm in favor of dismantling the police union. What's more, if we want any reforms to stick, we probably should.
"
I'd be shocked if they weren't.
Very, very thought provoking analogy.
And the rest of your post was very well written and the points are well taken.
"
Thank you, that was probably the best post I've read in terms of overcoming the numbers in making the case for reform. It's very convincing.
Things to point out:
1) After reform, within the margin of error, the number of killed-by-police probably won't go down (mental illness and the drug war are the big movers there).
2) If reform is a stand in for "my life sucks, fix it", that's probably not going to work.
3) Police work intrinsically deals with ugly, sometimes unusual, situations. If reform tries to pretend it doesn't and it's poorly handled, we could make other situations worse. What "poorly handled" means may not be clear until after the fact.
4) We're still going to have incidents like Ferguson's "Mike Brown" where minorities die, the press presents it as racism, his family presents him as a saint, and in the real world he got himself killed. Worse, I fully expect the number of these to *increase*, just because the number of cameras out there is increasing.
None of this should be read as disagreeing with the case for reform, but expectations should be realistic and I'm not sure they are.
"
When I see a dysfunctional local gov institution (which in this conversation is the police) there's often an overly strong union which has put it's interests above that of the consumers. In the free market, very long term (say 50-70 years), that results in the bankruptcy of the host company.
"
Where is the bulk of that "needless violence" coming from? Oh, yes, the drug war. The one we fired up to 'help' people, based on good intentions.
Pity about the unintended consequences, but hey, good intentions excuse all sorts of bad outcomes because things can't possibly get any worse.
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