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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32890 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Matthew Yglesias has a post about fare evasion. I especially love this part:

In theory, if you’re out on bail but you skipped your court date, you ought to be extra-cautious in your day-to-day behavior. In practice, a lot of people who commit crimes don’t make that decision. The police walking around the street aren’t clairvoyant; they don’t know which passersby have outstanding warrants. But if they catch someone jumping the turnstile, that’s a perfectly valid reason to run them through the system. Police can catch bail skippers or people who are already wanted for some other reason — they can also catch people carrying illegal guns.

I know he's moved away from Vox/Slate towards the center, but just this year, places like Philly and Oregon no longer allow the police to pull people over for broken lights because it is racist, and here is Mr Yglesias, literally advocating for more terry stops. I actually think it's a good thing: if both neolibs and neocons are trying to re-center and narrow down the Overton window, this thread might get slow and boring.

As with so many things like this, I do wind up with an involuntary "Dems are the Real Racists" response when I think about the notion that it's "racist" to stop people for things like jumping turnstiles. Whatever racial bias I may have, it's nowhere near strong enough to believe that it's unreasonable to expect people of all races to not go around acting like anti-social scumbags all the time. I would think decent black people would be thoroughly affronted by the idea that they can't really be expected to act like decent people.

The basis is not "let's lower these standards so the savages can get stay out of jail." It's "let's remove these opportunities for selective enforcement."

Proponents agree with you that jumping turnstiles or driving with broken taillights is bad, and that no one should be expected to do them. They disagree that the laws on the books are good at discouraging such, because they observe (or assume) that those laws are being exploited by racists.

Compare also the three-felonies-a-day canard which gets cited whenever someone wants to minimize a crime.

Proponents agree with you that jumping turnstiles [...] is bad

If even looting can be justified by outlets as mainstream as NPR, I doubt that free-riding the tube, which inflicts a lesser and a more abstract sort of harm, would be difficult to rationalize.

That looks more like a (sympathetic) author interview than any actual justification by NPR personnel.

Either way, I’m glad to see an example for your earlier post. It’s absolutely bizarre to see people defending looting outside of Twitter.

I was doubtful that free-riding would meet her standards for social impact, but...

So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.

That’s quite a blank check. If she’s willing to ignore how the shelves get stocked, she’d probably cheer for dismantling the M.T.A.

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