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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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So when you hear about a high profile case, does it matter if the person was specifically set up as a test case, and if it matters, why?

Because the rest of your framing is wrong.

Rosa Parks may have been one person but her case ended up helping the many not-so-sympathetic individuals who were also victims of the unjust system.

Rosa Parks was one person but her case ended up helping the many not-sympathetic individuals who were kept in check by broad rules. If you want to assert that the system that produced order was "unjust" you also have to own what Detroit and Newark and Camden and Gary look like without that "injustice".

That's the problem with test cases - they present an implicitly false case intentionally designed to confuse people and play on sympathies. The legal principles would have been the same if the case was about Corner Man and it would have been much less deceptive.

Regardless of segregation’s general effect on crime, Rosa park’s case was about segregation of buses, and the rule of ‘blacks sit in the back of the bus’ has nothing to do with the crime rate except creating an additional crime that could be committed.

The connection is there, but it's a lot less direct than our local George Wallace fan is making it out. Once anti-discrimination became one of the core principles of the Federal government and any actions with disparate impact on blacks became suspect or verboten, crime was allowed to thrive; this crime was instrumental in driving whites out of Northern cities (and thus turning their rule over to Democrats), a phenomenon usually called "white flight".

Well yes, but you can easily imagine a scenario where governments don’t carry out explicit racial discrimination, but laws still get enforced. Notably this policy is what drove down crime rates in the 90’s.

But no, you can't because then you have a dispute between progressives who say "the law is so unfair because mostly blacks get arrested" and a pathetic side who says "the law is even handed" - which concedes the frame that if the law was somehow unfairly applied, they'd concede and just allow the progressive pro-crime position. Of course, progressives are able to find some case that they convince themselves is unfair and GOPe types cuck on it as is their job.

On the other hand, if a society has an attitude of "we don't care if you find some specific unfairness, things happen and massive amounts of crime are way way more unfair" then the progressive gets shut down.

You'll note that crime did get driven down in the 90s and this low crime drove progressives into a frenzy and they desperately reversed it as soon as they were able.

You can totally have Michael Bloomberg policies and Michael Bloomberg policies totally work. The fact that progressives are often retarded is not specifically about race.

Except that progressives hated that Bloomberg's policies worked and only Bloomberg's persistence in the face of progressive opposition (rare) and the level of power he was able to exercise as mayor (also rare) allowed them to continue. Bloomberg would even point out when asked about stop and frisk "disproportionally" targeting blacks that blacks weren't stopped and frisked disproportionally compared to the population of felons.

Yes, progressives are retarded about crime(and likely many other issues). This does not mean you can't tell them to pound sand without reintroducing Jim Crow, which we know because Michael Bloomberg did that.

That's the entire point of my post.

Micheal Bloomberg demonstrates that you cannot allow progs any power or voice because they actually hate good governance because it's good governance.

Here's the cycle:

Traditional methods controlled crime pretty well

Progs wanted to undermine traditional methods and had a broad spectrum attack on them - legal about "rights" mainly (case clearance rates drop precipitously after the Warren court inventions)

As a way to head off a reaction to their attack, they create nonsense social science where they claim that crime cannot be solved without addressing "root causes" - the root causes being lack of programs. You see echos of this with the modern "trained deescalation personnel instead of police"

Progs win, crime skyrockets throughout the 60s and 70s, plateaus in the 80s and jumps in the 90s

Over time progs come to believe their own lies about "root causes" - that's what they're taught in universities and what trickles down from there

Giuliani / Bratton introduce the idea of addressing crime by addressing crime - Giuliani won in NYC due to support from more blue collar whites and progressives didn't go full out against him because they knew addressing crime by addressing crime couldn't work - it didn't solve the "root causes"

It did work, gets copied in lots of places - progressives are horrified by the decline in crime and pretend that concern over racial injustice is the reason they object to doing things that actually do lower crime - these objections escalate over time

Bloomberg is able to hold out against these objections because he's more entrenched but progressives elect the next mayor who basically undoes it all

Ultimately the problem is that their objection to enforcing the law isn't based on anything that they say it is - the racial unfairness angle falls apart under inspection - their objection is to anything effective. That's the only way to make sense of their behavior because every single thing done was done still under the framework they set out as being within the rules. No executions, no speedy trials, no executive authority vested in cops, no approval of men defending themselves, etc. - just very PMC style "dispatch the cops who follow proper procedure and protocols that follow every explicit progressive rule". There are no crime control measures that are effective that they will support and if they support it and it turns out to be effective, they'll withdraw support when it's shown to be effective.

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