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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Now, to be fair, it's true that we can't actually prove that the attempted deconstruction of our entire street-level law enforcement apparatus has anything to do with the historically novel murder rate. After all, the NYT hasn't declared it so, and if the NYT doesn't say it, it isn't true. One can merely point out that this exact consequence was predicted from the beginning of the intervention and before, because similar interventions at smaller scale had similar effects.

If a progressive had claimed 'large-scale black leftist resistance will lead to a racist backlash by cops and society, which will lead to more dead black people' before BLM, that doesn't make them correct, even though there were protests and there were more dead blacks. Similarly, the right making a claim, and then the outcome happening, doesn't make their claim about how true.

To the extent that you or others think that the evidence for this linkage is insufficient, I think it bears examining why, and whether such skepticism applies to claims more amenable to one's tribe.

We all get the 'ur biased towards ur team' thing, that doesn't make it unimportant to establish causation! It's not implausible, just not proven at all.

What would proof actually look like? A detailed look at the experience of the criminals/victims/observers whom the homicide rate increased dramatically, establishing the ways in which cop pullback - maybe - led to less fear of starting fights openly, or in places with more people, leading to more homicides.

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