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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Personal anecdote time: I ride Toronto public transit frequently. The TTC has not been in a good place for a while. Violent, mentally ill homeless have had free reign. Last year a woman was set on fire (she died), another was stabbed to death with an ice pick, and a close friend of mine is currently going through the trial of someone who tried to push her onto the subway tracks. A foreign student who had come to Canada a few months prior was shot to death completely at random at my subway exit (this will give you a very good idea of where I live if you know how to use google).

But things got noticeably worse in December when a number of the city's emergency homeless shelters they had set up for the duration of COVID shut down without replacements. Twice I had to intervene to stop a homeless man harassing women late at night. Just about every trip you'd take you saw at least one obviously deranged person. Things were really ugly.

So how did the mods at /r/toronto react, given that they control the information source on the city for many people? (Canadians I believe use reddit the most of any nationality) Why, No-Crime January! For the month of January all posts on crimes committed in the city would be removed, unless the mods specially approved them, with the not-so-subtle implication that this was to counter "conservative narratives" on violence in the city. This got immediate backlash, but it got even worse when January saw another big wave of transit attacks. This was enough to get foreign press attention, and city politicians approved for a one month (!) deployment of police patrols onto the TTC, with the predictable types kvetching about the harm this would do to "racialized people" (as if they would prefer the violent mentally ill to the presence of police). Of course the /r/toronto mods declared their "temporary experiment" to have been a huge success, and that the new no-crime policy would become a permanent rule.

I'm a big believer in public transit. I'm a big believer in walkable cities. I do not believe those visions are compatible with a philosophy of policing and mental health which leaves mentally ill people unchecked to ruin public spaces. I talk to a lot of people and the number of outwardly progressive people who have conceded (in secret) to me that they're thinking we need a return of insane asylums is notable. The problem, at least in the Canadian political environment, is who is going to do it? The Conservatives don't want to spend the money. The Liberals and NDP would face rebellion from their activist/NGO base. At present the inevitable situation seems that the problem will get worse and worse until the public reaction is so bad it demands a crackdown. People are itching for a return of order.

Even at the most compassionate, how the fuck is letting mentally ill people scream, shit, shoot up and otherwise behave in a feral manner in public spaces like this any benefit at all to them? The violent do need to be locked up (and that means put in appropriate but secure treatment and not just stick 'em in a cell and forget 'em) because they are actively dangerous, and the others are a threat to themselves and need something as basic as shelter, hygiene, and medical treatment where appropriate.

Treating them like urban foxes is not good enough.

Yeah, I can't fathom how somebody thinks that letting them loose on the street is the more compassionate alternative to an asylum. I used to do some volunteering with homeless outreach and it was awful the kind of situations these guys would end up in. Not only were they often simply incapable of meaningfully taking care of themselves, they of course had to deal with other violent mentally ill homeless, as well as the more lucid and crueler homeless who would simply steal off of them or beat them up.

I've mentioned it before but it does seem emblematic of a neoliberal society that many people find state violence as unconscionable but are plenty willing to "outsource" that to the streets, or to prison gangs, etc.

until the public reaction is so bad it demands a crackdown

Do you think this is realistic? Why hasn't a crackdown been demanded in L.A., even though it's apparently much worse than the TTC already?

PPC-style actual law-and-order conservatism is still completely verboten amongst all of my Canadian friends and colleagues.

Why hasn't a crackdown been demanded in L.A., even though it's apparently much worse than the TTC already?

Because no-one with the political power to do so takes metro, or even really remembers that it exists. Seriously, the only reason I know that LA even has a subway (as a native Angeleno) is because my best friend from law school is a train nerd and public transit enthusiast.

I think the double whammy of deinstitutionalization of mental patients and white flight from cities with their soaring crime rates in the mid-20th century dealt a nearly fatal wound to American urban life. Had only one of these changes occurred, then perhaps city governments could have responded adequately and maintained standards of public order, but at this point the very concept of a city in the American consciousness is thoroughly entangled with crime, homelessness, and filth-ridden streets.

I have been to both Oakland and West Africa (including some of the bad parts) and many neighborhoods in the former are worse. Even in the poorest countries on Earth people keep their homes remarkably clean, as it is a point of dignity and pride for them. Only in America have I seen homeless people asleep on a pile of garbage, with both cops and citizens walking by without giving them a moment's consideration.

These same people take vacations to European or East Asian cities and then wax poetic about the cleanliness of the streets, the beauty of the architecture, and the ease and safety of getting around, as though they exist in some fairytale, instead of being real places built by flesh and blood human beings with less wealth per capita than we have, and whose best practices we are more than capable of emulating.

vastly poorer, shittier, more corrupt, more violent countries don't have the problems that the above article notes exist in the Los Angeles metro.

Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"

Los Angeles is the second city of the richest country on earth. The median income in Los Angeles is $70,000 a year.

Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.

As a related anecdote, I visited LA on business a few years ago. One of my counterparties suggested I go for a morning jog at the Santa Monica beach. My enthusiasm for an early morning beach run was quickly snuffed out by the litter, the homeless guys bunked on the dunes, and the cops sweeping the beach for needles.

That's a new take on "counterparty risk".

With counterparties like those, who needs enemies?

If they’re my client who offered such “advice,” I guess I’ll just keep my crimethink to myself and pretend everything’s okay.

If I’m their client and they offered such “advice,” I’d be immediately on the market for a new widget-provider or whatever.

Why the asymmetry? Whether you're the one paying money or the one taking it, presumably if you were otherwise going to engage in business you value what you're getting more than what you're giving and the counterparty values what you're giving more than what you're getting. In either case, a boycott is hurting yourself to punish someone else.

(I guess there could be an asymmetry in terms of legal liability?)

I may or may not have increased our cost estimates by 2% in response.

It’s a myth that the rich don’t care, local government meetings are full of rich people protesting this.

With respect, no it's not. I live in LA, and have a job that involves me pretty deeply in local administrative politics and land-use. Not as deeply as some, sure, but enough.

Those meetings are window dressing (which is why most rich people don't actually show up to protest at them). The real work happens behind the scenes, with lobbying groups working with police and quasi-governmental organizations like "business improvement districts" to bring administrative nuisance abatement proceedings against any business which provides low-cost services or becomes a known transient hangout, CEQA lawsuits blocking new housing developments (which will have to include some low-income units by law), and intermediate administrative groups like "neighborhood councils" slow-walking any and everything they can. But that's nothing compared to the ability of the activists to mobilize support for all the "nice"-sounding luxury belief positions that all the rich people espouse in public - even the ones that hypocritically fight hard behind the scenes against it all. Meanwhile, the median rich person just forts up their home (have you seen the walls and cameras on all of those Santa Monica/Venice Beach houses?) or hires private security.

isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"

This makes a lot of sense, but I know a number of residents of SF, Oakland and other places like that, who aren't in any way rich enough to avoid the effects of the luxury beliefs, and they still largely support the policies that led to them. I mean, they're certainly not happy about people pooping on the streets or open drug markets, not to mention unending car breakins and other criminality, but somehow they never make the conclusion the policies they support are responsible for it. They just think it's "wrong Socialism" and as soon as they figure out how to make "true Socialism, that has never been tried" - which is right around the corner, we only need to tweak a couple of things and spend a couple of billions more - and it all will be fixed.

I guess my question is where do these magical beliefs come from? They seem to be ubiquitous among Reddit users but also white collar progressives in general. I'd like to blame midwit tier intelligence, but I don't think that's it. In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated.

Why is socialist worldview so appealing, even when (or especially when) it fails time and time again? And why is the more practical worldview (that people respond to incentives) so looked down upon?

It's because luxury beliefs are also aspirational beliefs for people who want to see themselves as being in the luxury belief class.

For example, I have a friend who works in NYC. He doesn't make much money but his partner and many of his friends and family are rich. Many of them espouse anti cop beliefs so he tends to espouse these beliefs as well, even though they live in much more expensive parts of NYC than he does. He doesn't want to have to lose face by admitting that the cops protect him in his high crime neighborhood so he acts like he dislikes them, like his richer peers who are more shielded from the consequences do. That's just one mechanism for where these "magical beliefs" come from. He doesn't want to engage with the reality that he should be afraid of criminals rather than the police because it would mean engaging with the reality that he's of a lower economic status than his peers.

And why is the more practical worldview (that people respond to incentives) so looked down upon?

It's irritating and low class to admit that you have material practical concerns. We like to imagine the rich just walk around life unbothered by consequences, and that all we have to do is imitate that lifestyle and we too can live that way. To give away the fact that we have to wash laundry and be protected by cops and face consequences for our actions feels degrading to many people.

In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated. Why is socialist worldview so appealing

The idea that society should be scientifically managed is very appealing to those who believe themselves to be very intelligent but yet find themselves not managing society.

It's the class of people who see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed central planners".

Possibly because socialism is extremely common and extremely successful on the very small scale. As a general rule, this is how families work, and sometimes extremely tight-knit groups with very high in-group loyalty, like cults. The problem is that it doesn't scale up, and this is a massive problem when you're talking about organizing a society.

The insight of incentives, free markets, etc. is that you can have net-positive interactions without the reinforcement of high in-group loyalty to control defection. The "problem" is that this type of interaction doesn't scale down--it would be a bit ridiculous to run a family on a barter system: infants don't have anything of value to trade for food and diapers beyond weaponized cuteness. This is an illusory problem, though, when you're applying a system to the matching scale of its competence--socialism for family structures, markets for societies.

socialism for family structures, markets for societies.

Yes, and western culture seems to be trying to force the exact opposite on people at the moment: socialism at the society level and individualism at the family level.

This is wicked and can only end badly.

This is a great point. Also love the phrasing. Bravo.

Possibly because socialism is extremely common and extremely successful on the very small scale. As a general rule, this is how families work, and sometimes extremely tight-knit groups with very high in-group loyalty, like cults. The problem is that it doesn't scale up, and this is a massive problem when you're talking about organizing a society.

I'd call that communism rather than socialism, but that's a definitional quibble.

The bit that seems interesting to me is that this could plausibly boil down to evo-psych. Maybe we're communists at heart because we're evolved for communism? Large societies are pretty recent, after all...

I don't think you need evo-psych, so much as just recognizing patterns. For the most part, people grow up in families, and they are used to socializing gains and losses across the family unit. But you can't socialize gains and losses across too large a structure without destroying the individual incentive to succeed (barring extremely high in-group loyalty). Extending this outward, you get clan/extended family structures, and this is where you start to see the failure to scale.

John is in a poor society, but has managed to scrape together enough capital to start a small food stand. If John's society has a cultural expectation of "family member has food, therefore I have food," then enough cousins come out of the woodwork, eat all of John's food for free, and ruin his potential small business. The only way John's business can survive is if he's got the cultural backing to set boundaries and refuse to socialize his gains to his cousins. (Alternatively, John tries, fails, says "fuck this" and moves to America to get away from his cousins, but more importantly, to get away from the cultural expectation that the cousins have a right to his profits.) This is a very common pattern in poor societies, and I'd say, adequately explains why they stay poor.

So, these people in poor societies look pretty dumb for not figuring out the dynamic that keeps them poor, yes? I'd say yes, but actually no. How does a potential reformer present the message "you need to not automatically share with your cousins" without coming across as a selfish defect-bot? If he's saying we shouldn't automatically share with our cousins, does that mean we also shouldn't share with our children?

This is where Ayn Rand points out that this was her core insight: "greed is good." I think she's directionally correct in many instances, but no, charity is still a virtue. It's not about whether John shares his food with his cousins or does not. It's about whether he has the right to choose to share or not--whether his society permits him to make that choice without penalty. It's a culture where a cousin may ask, but--on average--will accept a "no" without trashing John's reputation, and will himself be seen as greedy if he insists on a right to John's assets. Charity cannot exist without choice. There are various arguments for differing levels of socialism, but "creating a charitable society" is flatly wrong.

This is where Ayn Rand points out that this was her core insight: "greed is good." I think she's directionally correct in many instances, but no, charity is still a virtue.

I happen to be re-reading Atlas Shrugged through audiobook on x1.5 speed mostly out of spite for its anti-fans. I appreciate her depiction of a communist dystopia which is, if anything, less dystopic than the real thing. But it's driving me insane how much her "greed is good" pitch relies on her putting pro-charity arguments in the mouths of the most snivelling hypocritical wretches you ever met, while having callipygian I-invented-calculus-at-age-twelve gigachads tell you how they only work for money.

It would be so much the better book if she left it as "yeah, communism sounds nice but everything falls apart."

The bit that seems interesting to me is that this could plausibly boil down to evo-psych. Maybe we're communists at heart because we're evolved for communism? Large societies are pretty recent, after all...

Below Dunbar's number, we're all communists, and it works. Your family is a commune.

The higher you go above Dunbar's number, the harder it becomes to detect and handle defectbots.

Then, at scale, sub-dunbar units within the society themselves become defectbots. You can see the collapse of communism by looking at societies as they scale in size, from bands to tribes to chiefdoms and then states.

Whose family is a commune? Traditionally they were patriarchies or sometimes matriarchies. Nowadays they may be more equal partnerships, but little Billy doesn't own the house in common, neither legally nor in reality.

Little Billy does in fact refer to it as "his house," and he is correct to do so. No, he cannot sell it, but there is a meaningful sense in which it is "his." "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need" is a good approximation of how families are run. If you point to a patriarch in charge of a family, I can point to any communist regime ever with an obvious patriarch at the top of society.

but little Billy doesn't own the house in common, neither legally nor in reality.

"Own" is a contract with the larger society. Billy gets to live in it and use it and the things in it in accordance to his needs. Dad pays the mortgage and does 80% of the yardwork in accordance with his abilities. If Billy shatters his spine and becomes paraplegic, he can do 0% of the work and not only will his claim to the resources of the house not be threatened, it will increase and Stacey will be expected to pick up the slack and forgo things she used to get that the house can no longer afford.

I'm not sure that it's the socialist worldview that is so appealing as much as the fact that the people looking at alternatives are demonized as evil Nazis. Go look at imgur nowadays and you'll see the hivemind in action. 100% of non-progressive ideas are presented as evil with "the cruelty is the point" NPC comments updooting each other. Lefty tweets are presented as indisputable facts. To people in that bubble, it must look like only the progressive left is even trying to be compassionate and solve the problem and that everyone who isn't on the progressive left just loves oppressing black and brown bodies for fun and profit. Because of that, I'm not even sure that the people you're describing would even call their own thinking a "socialist worldview." From their perspective in the bubble, it's just the reality of caring people trying their best to fight against the forces of evil. Consider the recent tweets trying to use the barter system to defend "socialism". To the extent they would label their worldview "socialism", it's not related to the political system debated for a century and is instead just a mishmash of the hivemind on the current thing. It's not easy to break out of that mindset when everyone you know agrees with it.

I'm curious about the "'retvrn to barter' as socialism" thing. My impression is that that sort of thing did actually happen in the Soviet Union between citizens.

This will not be a great post because I'm exhausted today, but I remember reading an author who coined the (awkward) term "indiscriminateness" to describe the fundamental principle that led to the disconnect you describe. This principle has become a cardinal virtue in our society.

The idea is that judging someone is about the worst thing you can do. You can't disparage train shitters and train masturbators as "scum" or "bad people" or "degenerate" or even "a public nuisance" because that would be cast judgement on their actions or character. And you know who does that? The hated and reviled Outgroup! Not only are you an ignorant person for negatively judging someone, but you even sound like one of The Bad Guys. And so you will do increasing complex mental gymnastics to explain Why Some People Are Like That, continue to invent ever more complex epicycles to explain social decay.

The idea is that judging someone is about the worst thing you can do.

This can't be how they operate. They are very eager to judge racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or even just people who are insufficiently zealous about combating the aforementioned groups. They have no problem judging the character of people they consider to be their outgroup.

Which, you basically acknowledge at much. But you have to take the next obvious implication of that, which is that "judging someone is the worst thing you can do" can't be an accurate model of their psychology.

Yes, you're right. The common thread in your examples though is that the Xphobes and Xists are all deficient in the virtue of indiscriminateness. They are guilty of some form of judgment against groups that are deemed "oppressed," and (the thinking goes) those groups wouldn't be oppressed if only the Xists and Xphobes would embrace indiscriminateness. Maybe it's better to use one of their own slogans to sum up their beliefs. I've heard some of them say that they will "tolerate anything except for intolerance." So I should qualify my above comment by saying that violations of the principle of indiscriminateness are permissible only in order to further spread the principle itself.

That's definitely a justification used a lot, but I think you were right in your first post and those people are just lying to themselves and othering their outgroup so hard they no longer register as 'people'. They were perfectly happy to judge right wingers who don't 'hate' minorities - Kavanaugh, Romney, Rogan and so on.

I had indiscriminateness beaten into me as a child by my father, who was a devout Christian - None may judge but God and all that. I think I was about 12 or 13 when I noticed how many people we knew who claimed to be non-judgemental but actually judged the shit out of people all the time. I brought this up with my dad, who smirked that I was now judging them, so who was I to talk? To which I replied, almost in despair, that that was exactly my point. Nobody is non judgemental, only God could be, because only God can know things without evaluating them first. He actually listened, thank goodness.

It actually rings true to me, because I guess it's how I thought for a bit. And it rears its head even in interpersonal affairs. Somewhere during my youth it got instilled in me that being judgmental was an inherently negative trait - a sentiment I attribute entirely to the pop dissemination of therapy talk.

I remember expressing to a friend my concern over some obviously bad and harmful decisions they were making, and was defensively accused of being judgmental with a real finger-wagging tone. A couple other instances of things like that eventually broke the spell, but god knows why I didn't see the absurdity of that thinking earlier.

I believe it may have been Evan Sayet, whose lecture on the “liberal” (progressive) mindset introduced the idea of indiscriminateness to many conservatives as a sort of revelation.

His channel has his three other main lectures.

I think this is a critical point regardless of worldview and also a common trap people fall into.

It is self-satisfying, comforting, safe, and easy to write off one's opponents as immoral or somehow irredeemable. It saves the trouble of having to engage with their point of view and/or arguments. One's in-group affiliation also strengthens ("Totally clapped back today, sis!" / "Owned this lib at the gas station!"). Eventually, however, you end up as an inmate in the echo chamber.

The (admittedly incomplete) method I try to use is trying to think through a different prioritization of values by the other party, leaving moralism out of it as long as possible (exceptions apply, see below). Trying to see past someone's surface level political / ideological / social arguments to identify their personal value system keeps them human (objects / boogeymen can't really be said to have values), punches through midwit argumentation (akhtually, crime went down when xyz happened), and helps you steelman without requiring a ton of intellectual calisthenics.

"This person has a MASSIVE investment into personal emotional comfort. This leads them to advocate for a lot of "outreach" style community services instead of traditional policing. Their relative value of community stability and common welfare is lower." Far more useful as a thinking aid and mental model than the more emotionally satisfying "These m-f'er wants to give free hotel rooms to crackheads?!"

Two caveats. First, this is not koom-bay-ah common-ground finding. That's one of the most bullshit concepts in all of politics / culture war. I'm not trying to find where you and I overlap, I'm trying to figure out why you and I have intractable disagreements. I don't really think I can change your value system, but I might be able to articulate something that shows you the cost and imbalance of your value system. I use business analogies and metaphors a lot because my life is a horrible series of nested spreadsheets but w/e I like it. If you have a stock portfolio that is 100% Tesla, you're taking on concentrated risk and there's a (potential or realized) massive downside. You really believe in Tesla? Ok, that's fine on its face, but you have to realize you're overinvested in a single thing. Applied to our culture war framework, Greta Thunberg (leaving aside the likely weird parental coaching) is 100% in on environmental issues and seems to actively ignore related economic, political, technological, stability impacts. There's not a moral argument there, just an examination of her value system.

Second caveat is that this does break down when you get to the real extremes. Obviously when someone's value system explicitly allows for physical violence in any case but self-defense (let's leave just war theory etc to the side for now) ... it's hard to really deal with them in good faith. The trickier part is when the other person stops short of endorsing physical violence but advocates for such a massive change to existing political order than the immediate second order effects seem to be violence. My favorite example (from right here in Motte-land!) is this post on the lunacy of Ibram Kendi. Obviously, he "values" whatever "anti-racism" is but he also clear values state-level coercion and illiberal and anti-democratic practices in support of that goal. I don't have a good workaround for that.

Your average laptop-class do-gooder millennial progressive, however, isn't anywhere near that. Yes, they will call themselves "anti-racists" to enjoy some in-groping (intentional typo) and mood-affiliation, but, by doing that, they're showing off their value system - pop culture virtue signalling, hipness with the times (so, social perception ability), and (ironically, imho) respect for conformity to prevailing ideas.

Again, this is, I think, a good means of understanding people better and doing some high-return thinking for yourself. As a tool of persuasion, I think this has close to zero value. I'm laughing thinking about that conversation - "You know, I think I understand your entire personal value system and can say confidently that you don't value community safety as highly as individual expression, regardless of long term social cost." You'd probably be better off with some nice Forer statements. "You're a creative soul who loves people, but sometimes find it difficult to fit in."

but also white collar progressives in general

This is interesting to me. I’d always assumed redditors were mostly students and NEET’s, like 4chan, and that their political views were a consequence of that. Most blue collar people, even fairly progressive ones who are big supporters of eg marijuana legalization and think police brutality is a major issue, see that worldview as obviously stupid, and it’s astounding to me that it has a hold outside of college kids that have no experience with the real world and some wealthy people insulated enough from it to think ‘yoga teacher’ is a real job.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

I guess my question is where do these magical beliefs come from?

The denial of HBD.

Being cynical, part of the reason might be that in Ethiopia, if someone tried graffiti or the rest of it, there wouldn't be anyone claiming "This is racism! You are persecuting our poor underserved inner city demographics!" about responses to prevent it, it would be "this is unacceptable criminal behaviour" because everyone is the same colour.

Also, it may well be cheaper to employ people to clean the trains, wash off any graffiti, etc. and if the social attitude is "everyone can, or does, take the train" that means local government is motivated to make sure the ride is acceptable. If, however, the social attitude is only losers take the bus then let it be a shitty (literal) experience, I'm not using public transport nor does anyone I know do so, it's only the working poor and fuck them, if they were any good for society they'd be rich enough to have their own car.

And then graffiti gets turned into an art form, which is fucking crazy. Scrawling on walls or trains or other spaces is not art, and if there are people using it for genuine artistic expression, then give them the opportunities to learn and to work in art (from commercial to fine art) and not in the Jean Basquiat way where he managed to scam being black and gay into "ah yes these scrawls are art, pay $$$$ for them".

because everyone is the same colour.

They're not the same ethnicity, though. And they hate rather harder than even we do in the U.S., given that there was a genocide going on until last year.

I often wonder just how deep and widespread the second-order effects of this situation are.

My job as a software engineer occupies a lot of my cognitive capacity even outside of work hours. This includes time spent walking outside in the park, commuting on the subway, etc. Any time I encounter a violent or deranged person in the park or on the subway, fight or flight immediately kicks in and I lose my train of thought for 15 minutes minimum and it probably results in diminished cognitive capacity for a lot longer because I’m now on edge and scanning my surroundings even subconsciously.

Multiply this across every white collar worker in NYC and the drag on research and innovation is probably unfathomably large. It would probably horrify most people how much further along we could be on the road to curing cancer if our public transport was like Singapore or Tokyo.

Hold on.

Didn’t we try “tough on crime” over and over again? Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, all spearheading different approaches to shooting the dealers and locking up the addicts. Okay, Nixon had a really confusing stance on remediation, but his admin popularized the “war on drugs!” So what were these guys doing wrong?

@JarJarJedi and @FarNearEverywhere posit that progressive idpol is holding us back from implementing harsh solutions. This train wreck of a wiki article suggests the same…but most of its examples are post 2010. There were massive race riots before Clinton was elected, yet the 1994 crime bill saw huge bipartisan support. Reagan wasn’t deferring to victim narratives. It’s plausible that today, progressives are unwilling to accept the trade off, but that doesn’t explain what happened in the 80s and 90s.

I’m sympathetic to the argument below: America is so damn rich that our drug-addled homeless don’t mind it too much. That demand curve makes it hard to suppress the supply of drugs. Maybe reinstitutionalizing would help make up the difference. I just have little confidence that it would succeed where two generations have failed.

Yes, we did try "tough on crime" and it worked. The U.S. murder rate fell by large amounts and reached a minimum in the 2010s a few years after the peak in the prison population. The fall in murder rates was perhaps most visible in New York where it fell from about a peak of 30.7 in 1990 to just 3.4 in 2018.

Unfortunately, we've done a complete 180 and now are extremely permissive. In today's news in my hometown of Seattle, a person was arrested after committing a violent assault against a tourist while spewing racial slurs. (The story was mysteriously short on other details). The particular offender had been arrested 47 previous times.

https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/11tqdik/man_arrested_for_committing_racial_hate_crime/

The "War on Drugs" was also largely successful. Drug overdoses per capita during the 1980s were less than 1/10th current rates. Yes, that's correct. Drug overdose rates have increased by more than 1000% since the 1980s.

As is typical, in an effort to reign in rare abuses, we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and now tolerate exceptional rates of drug use and violent crime.

Homicide rates and other forms of crime rates dropped in more places than the US during that timeframe. Surely not all of them concurrently decided to go hard on crime at that same exact time, there's probably something else at play here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_drop

Not saying the US's approach to reducing crime was strategically the wrong thing to do, but there is a confounder here.

What is the confounder specifically? Are criminals some form of a global hivemind, and if they decide to do less crime in one place that somehow affects every other place?

I don't have any explanation better than what the Wikipedia article says.

I phrased it wrong, there might or might not be a confounder, but the base rate of crime was reduced globally, and that fact itself raises the question of "did the US's tough-on-crime policy actually work?". Also worth noting is that crime went up in almost all countries that in any way shape or form facilitated the illicit drug trade, so the effect is starker than averages would imply.

Extremely wild ass uninformed guess, but what if crime was offshored via globalization and its resulting specialization? Instead of producing and distributing some drugs everywhere, why not let Colombia and Mexico do all of it?

and that fact itself raises the question of "did the US's tough-on-crime policy actually work.

The question is much bigger than that. You can ask it about literally anything in social sciences, and you'll never know the answer because you can't rerun an experiment under controlled conditions.

The question is much bigger than that. You can ask it about literally anything in social sciences, and you'll never know the answer because you can't rerun an experiment under controlled conditions.

If education counts as "social science", yes you can run trials and experiments according to most rigorous scientific standards, and you can also completely disregard the results and drop the whole thing into memory hole.

Official line for introduction

Twitter thread following the crumbs into rabbit hole, with links to further resources

Yes, we are in agreement. I even conceded that to reduce crime.. you must attempt to reduce crime.

But I am from the school of unintended consequences and not wanting to fall for base rate fallacies. So from my vantage point, its not too unfathomable that a confounder probably does exist, it seems to be the Occams Razor explanation for the Crime Drop.

It's more we stopped poisoning people with lead, everybody could track crime better due to computers, and frankly, entertainment like video games and the Internet became more prominent. I'm not going to say tough-on-crime proposals did nothing, but most crime is not some rational choice made.

So howcome there's a rise in crime since BLM, and the implementation of "easy on crime" policies?

The US has a steep drop in the 90s while Europe actually ends the decade higher than it started. South America is mostly flat during that time. I'm not seeing a global trend matching the US one during the 90s when we adopted tough on crime policies like 3 strikes laws.

In his Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post Scott posited an "uncanny valley of half measures" and I kind of feel like that's the situation a lot of cities are in now regarding a lot of issues surrounding mental health and substance abuse. A completely laissez faire approach would mean tolerating misbehavior but also tolerating the train driver telling the masturbator to get off their train if they don't want to have their skull stove in by a tanker's bar or coupling tool. A tough-on-crime approach would mean removing the masturbator from the train by having the police lock him/her up. Either of these options is arguably preferable in terms of transit ride quality to the current status quo where individuals are allowed to misbehave but are not allowed to be punished for that misbehavior.

More commonly called anarcho-tyranny. I also sometimes call it the government as dog-in-the-manger with respect to such problems; they won't solve the problems but they won't let anyone else do it either.

There's that classic Simpsons quote:

Marge: "I thought you said the law was powerless?"

Wiggum: "Powerless to help you, not to punish you."

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Honestly, the Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell post is one of my favorite ones that Scott has ever written, possibly my very favorite. He convinced me that reactionary philosophy is correct far more than his followup convinced me that it's incorrect. Which is damn impressive considering he doesn't even agree with it. I think at one point it kinda went off the rails because I don't really agree that the solution to our problems is to install a king back on the throne. But the entire analysis of society's issues where he goes "if you're in a hole, stop digging" over and over was dead on.

Didn’t we try “tough on crime” over and over again? Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, all spearheading different approaches to shooting the dealers and locking up the addicts. Okay, Nixon had a really confusing stance on remediation, but his admin popularized the “war on drugs!” So what were these guys doing wrong?

state vs. federal. War on drugs was in response to trafficking of cocaine and large scale stuff. Dealers who avoid federal laws can get much more lenient sentences, same for users . It does not cover local, smaller scale dealing of homegrown weed, homemade drugs, resale and abuse of prescribed opioids, etc .

And, perhaps relevantly, local prosecutors have no incentive to seek long sentences but every incentive to get convictions, so they offer really good plea bargains which result in dangerous criminals getting short sentences. The rest of local court systems usually don’t have the resources to actually process all of these cases, either. The plea bargain system makes ‘just throw the book at ‘‘em’ difficult to implement as a solution even when large parts of the system aren’t actively conspiring against punishing criminals because reasons.

If the sentiment was strong enough to get wild bipartisan support, I’d expect some of the same policies to show up. California was red until ‘92, the same year of the LA riots. It can’t have always matched up with today’s politics.

Did states generally break from the feds on this one issue? That seems really odd.

California was red until ‘92,

No, it wasn't. From 1960-1992, it had two Republican Senators for about 4 years. Governors largely alternated party. The State Assembly was majority Democratic from 1971 to 1995 [Note that the sift to R happened after your 1992 cutoff] and the State Senate has not been majority Republican since 1970. Republican candidates have gotten a lower pct of the vote in CA than in the country as a whole in every election since 1984. The Briggs Initiative lost overwhelmingly in 1978.

Moreover, re crime, the Three Strikes initiative was adopted after 1992, as were other initiatives to increase penalties for certain crimes. See here and here

Huh. That's what I get for just looking at the presidential vote.

Everything else is fine if arguable, but as far as the Briggs Initiative goes, it was opposed by...Ronald Reagan, as he was about to become the standard bearer of conservatism only two years later.

Nevertheless, a red state would not have such a lopsided vote. Compare that with the 69-31 vote in 1979 to repeal Miami-Dade County's ordinance oulawing anti-gay discrimination.

And, was Ronald Reagan the standard -bearer, or the Moral Majority?

That's not what I'm saying. Harshness of the solution is not the issue. We don't need public executions of weed smokers. At least it won't fix public space decay problems. What is likely to fix it is consistent enforcement of quality-of-life crimes. It won't fix the drug abuse - but it would prevent it from messing up the lives of ordinary citizens not participating in it. However, the society took the conscious decision that the welfare of drug addicts is more important than the quality of life of the rest of the society.

Indeed local government is currently involved in a fight with the metro because the metro makes homeless people get off its trains at the end of the line, annoying residents of Long Beach and Santa Monica who want to force them to let the homeless stay on the trains overnight(!) so they don't enter the wider city. That the homeless problem could be solved rather than forced upon someone else is seemingly uninteresting.

I have never been to Addis-Abeba, but I have a suspicion that if a homeless person tries to camp in metro there, the police would come, take him out immediately, and if he persists, would apply some kinetic persuasion to convince him it's not a good idea. What they wouldn't do is to have a wokefest about "safe spaces" and "holistic solutions" and have 25 NGOs with billion-sized budgets write white papers about the problem, while prohibiting the police from addressing it on the ground. I am not advocating that AA approach is better - and it's certainly less humane towards the homeless - but it is certainly different. It's not that the solution is a total mystery - it's that LA (and others) decided, as a society, that they don't like that solution, and so far they were unable to find any other one. Obviously, the money is not the barrier here - if you don't know what to do, no amount of money would help you.

Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem

I have an idea. We should have some catchy name to this approach. I propose "War on Drugs". If we could pull off something like that, I imagine in a couple of years we'd be done. If only somebody would have such an idea sometime earlier, let's say about 1971... We'd never even know such a problem existed at all. Too bad we only got to this now.

The Philippines have had a rather successful war on drugs for the last few years.

Somehow I doubt that Adis Ababa has the ability to mass imprison drug users, despite plausibly having much greater political will to do so. There are probably just fewer drug addicted homeless people there than in LA, and that's entirely plausible- it could be that people are too poor to buy drugs, or that robust extended family networks mean that no one is homeless(neither of these factors are at all incompatible with being a wartorn shithole). It's also possible that the lack of civil rights protections in Ethiopia mean that violators of the subway's code of conduct are simply beaten by police, and homeless crackheads respond rationally to incentives by not shitting on subway seats, without this actually resulting in fewer homeless crackheads.

It's also possible that the lack of civil rights protections in Ethiopia mean that violators of the subway's code of conduct are simply beaten by police,

No doubt this is true in most poor countries. And in fact, a system of brutalizing criminals is better than the U.S. system in all of these attributes:

  1. Lower crime rate

  2. Lower incidence of false conviction

  3. Lower incidence of police brutality

But how can 3) be true if we are intentionally beating criminals? The reason is simple. Although the rates of brutality per criminal act would increase, the absolute number would be lower as crime would fall so low that there would be few criminals to beat.

On the other hand, a highly permissive society such as the United States will always have large absolute numbers of false convictions and police brutality because there are so many serious crimes committed every day.

Prediction: In the year 2025, if El Salvador maintains its current anti-crime policy, murder rates will be > 90% below peak levels, and police shooting rates will be > 50% below peak levels.

Most things respond best to negative reinforcement when it occurs temporally close to the action being punished and when it's consistent. The entire system of punishment in the US is biased against that: any negative repercussions will happen weeks or months after the transgression, and even then it's highly uncertain that a punishment will even be levied. (And if you're an individual defending yourself against a crime, the legal system has the potential to damage your life much worse than it will the criminal. Better to let him take out a dozen boxes of shoplifted goods than put yourself at risk of violence from either him or the state.)

Cops are better than prison guards, and for small crimes we should give them the latitude to be judge and jury.

I don't think third world countries are exactly known for being safe places. Places that rely on police brutality as a primary means of enforcement generally have higher crime rates, not lower. If El Salvador meets your predictions of 90% reduction in crime rate, it will still have nearly twice the murder rate of Los Angeles, the city that prompted this discussion.

Yes, but I think you're flipping the causality. Countries with low crime rates have relaxed police enforcement because they can. Low crime rates cause low police brutality, not the other way around.

For example, the U.S. had a temporary reduction in crime following mass incarceration in the 1990s. The prison population peaked in 2008, and has now fallen by large amounts per capita. This fall is accelerating now, particularly in places like Seattle, Portland, or Los Angeles where police and prosecutors have abdicated much of their authority. It's no surprise that murder rates bottomed shortly after the prison maximum and are now increasing rapidly. And this is despite mitigating factors such as better emergency care and a much higher average age. I haven't done the math, but it's possible that adjusted for median age, the U.S. murder rate is at all-time highs.

By the way, I don't think police brutality is a good solution for a country like the US, but it works for Ethiopia because they lack the state capacity to investigate and punish crimes. In those situations it is better than the alternative which is anarchy.

Edit: One more thing. Your L.A. murder numbers are way out of date. Los Angeles had 382 murders in 2022. While 2022 population numbers are not out yet, this puts the murder rate near 10 per 100,000 which would be an increase of 56% since 2018. Ugh.

both the wealthier taxpayers who largely fund the city's metro system and the urban working poor who comprise practically all who would use it.

Those are not the constituencies of LA. You have to worry about Democrats, not wealthy taxpayers or working poor, and Democrats love to fund homelessness through NGOs, nonprofits, outreach, and other similar grafts. I have no great insight into LA, but if its anything like Seattle, the powers that be would rather declare that secondhand fentanyl smoke is not dangerous than to stop addicts from smoking fentanyl on public transit. Some people actually prefer that they smoke opioids in public so they can be saved from an overdose

"It's important to note when you see fentanyl reporting that you take a really take a critical eye because there is a lot of misinformation out there," said Thea Oliphant-Wells, a social worker for Seattle & King County Public Health. "We're not seeing folks developing second hand exposure, this is just not happening. Not to say that it could never happen, but we're not seeing it."

Oliphant-Wells told Metro workers and riders that it is not a bad thing for drug users to do drugs in public.

"We don't want people to be using in private spaces alone, we want people to be using in a place where if they overdose they can be discovered and helped through that overdose," she said.

I assume LA has an equivalent social worker in an equivalent public health department making equivalent statements, because Democrats seem to be relatively consistent from Bellingham to San Diego.

Then there's the Ninth Circus which said you can't tow people's cars if they're living out of them, which is a whole 'nother problem (Martin v Boise).

Then there's the Ninth Circus which said you can't tow people's cars if they're living out of them, which is a whole 'nother problem (Martin v Boise).

You seem to have linked to the wrong case; that case was re an ordinance making it illegal to camp overnight on public property.

That ruling is the basis for further expansions.

the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the federal district court’s ruling that the City of Grants Pass, Oregon, could not, consistent with the Eighth Amendment, enforce its anti-camping ordinances against homeless persons for the mere act of sleeping outside with rudimentary protection from the elements, or for sleeping in their car at night, when there was no lawful place in the city for them to go.

I was mistaking the 9th circuit Martin v Boise for the WA Supreme Court Seattle v Long, which specifically deemed cars a homestead. More here, here. That one was specifically about towing and impounding an inoperable vehicle.

Different rulings with similar effects.

I see. But neither case is authority for your statement that "you can't tow people's cars if they're living out of them." That sounds like a claim that, if I am living out of my car, I can park wherever I want. Which would be very odd.

In the Washington case, the homeless person essentially lost his case: "the homestead act's protections do not apply because Seattle has not sought to collect on Long's debt." In fact, it appears that if the city simply impounded cars parked overnight but did not assess a fee, there would be no violation of Washington's homestead act, whch merely "protect[s] [homes] from attachment and execution or forced sale for the debts of the owner up to the amount specified in the statute." So, it seems that the city CAN tow his car; they just can't charge him for the costs of doing so.

The Johnson case also is not authority for the statement, "you can't tow people's cars if they're living out of them." It simply says that, the rule that the anti-camping ordinance cannot be used to cite those who are homeless when the city has not offered them space in homeless shelters applies to people who sleep in their cars as well as people who sleep out in the open. That should be evident from the quote you include, which is not about parking or towing at all.

PS: Note that these cases are part of a well established line of cases holding that status offenses are unconstitutional, esp where the status is one which is involuntary. Compare Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, 667, 82 S.Ct. 1417, 8 L.Ed.2d 758 (1962) [Statute criminalizing being addicted to narcotics is unconstitutional because addiction "is apparently an illness which may be contracted innocently or** involuntarily**"] with Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514, 88 S.Ct. 2145, 20 L.Ed.2d 1254 (1968) [statute criminalizing being drunk in public is A-OK]. Hence, in Martin v. Boise, "Our holding is a narrow one. Like the Jones panel, "we in no way dictate to the City that it must provide sufficient shelter for the homeless, or allow anyone who wishes to sit, lie, or sleep on the streets... at any time and at any place." Id. at 1138. We hold only that "so long as there is a greater number of homeless individuals in [a jurisdiction] than the number of available beds [in shelters]," the jurisdiction cannot prosecute homeless individuals for "involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public." Id. That is, as long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter."

So, it seems that the city CAN tow his car; they just can't charge him for the costs of doing so.

So... they can tow it, but then they have to give it back for free and let him drive away with it as soon as it reaches the impound lot? What would be the point of that? Couldn't he just drive it right back to where they towed it from?

The point is to prevent him from sleeping in it overnight. And who says they have to let him drive away with it as soon as it reaches the impound lot? Hours during which one can retrieve a towed vehicle are generally limited.

Surely it's less of a failure than starting a few failed trillion-dollar wars, having active war zone homicide rates in certain places, and potentially starting a pandemic through funding gof research. I don't question the fact that the problem is bad but do question framing that it's literally the worst civilizational failure, that framing betrays a certain kind myopia.

I don't think Americans are capable of ever getting themselves to impose the kind of social order that would fix the problems with the bottom of their society. Nor that they should. In my short experience in America, America has both the smartest and dumbest, the laziest and most hardworking, all in one place. It's a type of programming that produces high variance. I'm alluding to the fact that I think fixing this might just be a coup complete problem.

I grew up in LA, spending nearly 20 years there. I only learned there was a metro/subway/non-freight train 7 years after leaving.

The Hollywood->Union Station chunk of the Red Line was operational (though probably with fewer stations) at least by the late 90s.

I think the reason that American subways end up as shitholes is the confluence of a lack of rules enforcement, and the relative cheapness of a ticket. In most large American cities, there’s no bouncers on the train. If you’re blatantly shooting up, causing a disturbance, committing a crime, etc., nobody’s going to throw you off the train.

Part of this does fall on the left which has a weird sort of allergy to rules, no matter how well meaning. They often work against rules to keep decorum in public places, even when those rules would make those places more useful and accessible to people who want to be there. The idea of throwing a violent drug user off a metro for harassment is abhorrent to a certain subset of the liberal left. So the trains get filled with thieves, drug users, and mentally disturbed people. Nobody else wants to use the trains because they don’t want to be attacked, robbed or harassed.

You could also sort of fix the problem by raising prices. If a ticket (assuming enforcement of having a ticket) were $10 or more, then paying $10 to ride from one end of town to the other over and over becomes a lot less possible for people who have no jobs or regular income. At $2 a three-hour ride, you can basically move onto the train as a home for the day for $16. At $10, it’s $80, and thus isn’t that much cheaper than a hotel. Make it $20 and you’re now too expensive to be an ad-hoc cheap home for people.

Part of this does fall on the left which has a weird sort of allergy to rules, no matter how well meaning.

They do? The same people who write humongous lists of micro-agressions, lengthy manuals about how to ask somebody for their gender without offending them, institute Rules of Conduct, Diversity Statements and Bias Incident Reporting Policies? The same that regularly rewrite books and change old TV shows to remove anything not matching the current directives of the Party? I think they are plenty fine with rules - as long as it is their rules, that they have developed and have all the power of enforcement over them. Replace violent smelly drug addict on a train with a clean-shaven white supremacist calling other people n-word, and see how fast the rules enforcement will be called in. They are just fine with you being harassed by a violent druggie because you are the oppressor and the druggie is the oppressed, so you get what you deserve.

If a ticket (assuming enforcement of having a ticket) were $10 or more,

Who cares, they'd jump the gate or just break it. If there's no police around, who'd stop them?

I think a decent fraction of America's troubles in this regard happen because our rules enforcement mechanisms target the middle class. There is an entire class of people (including those disturbing your train ride) who are functionally judgement proof. They aren't afraid of a fine because they can't pay it anyway, and so aren't dissuaded from all sorts of anti-social behavior.

There is also a very middle-class sensibility that instinctively opposes criminal punishment for things that can mostly be enforces with fines.

At $2 a three-hour ride, you can basically move onto the train as a home for the day for $16. At $10, it’s $80, and thus isn’t that much cheaper than a hotel. Make it $20 and you’re now too expensive to be an ad-hoc cheap home for people.

Yeah, but the problem is that this penalises the honest but poor people who need to use public transport to get to their jobs. Make it expensive enough to be a deterrent, and you deter people for whom $10 is a chunk out of their day's wages, so they don't travel anymore. While the criminals and homeless and druggies just learn how to fare-dodge etc. and public transport is abandoned to them, and goes even further downhill.

Give a discount to those who pass a drug test.

That doesn't explain whay this is a problem in America. Seoul Subways are cheaper (1/40000 median income for a one way ride) and also lack bouncers (police enter the train 5 stops after an incident). We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.

We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.

Is this not just a case of geographic determinism though? America's hard drugs problem exists because it has a border with Mexico, not because it has any particular social structure / public transportation pricing. Ain't no smugglers bringing coke and coke sellers across the Korean DMZ.

America’s hard drugs problem probably does exist because of its issues with its social structure, though, and the badly run and impoverished war zone to our south is just what happens to be able to take advantage.

Does every country with a large uncontrolled land border have a drug problem? It's possible.

I think the issue there is that theoretically you are doing this for the sake of the people using the system, and I don't know if most of them would be willing to pay 5x to 10x the current cost of the ticket.

Might be a work around where single tickets are much more expensive but an annual pass or something can be bought at a more reasonable rate. Could also do some kind of partnership with hotels and/or airlines to provide discounted tickets so that tourists could still utilize the system.

Though the biggest practical obstacle would still be that

(assuming enforcement of having a ticket)

Is a big assumption. I think if you could get policy in place to enforce that, you could probably just take the next step and get policy in place to get the people causing problems off the public transportation and not need to bother with too many pricing adjustments.

Might be a work around where single tickets are much more expensive but an annual pass or something can be bought at a more reasonable rate.

I'm not seeing how having annual passes fulfils MaiqTheTrue's intended goal of preventing homeless people using the train as a home. They would, if anything, benefit more from the discount than commuters would.

In theory yes, since they could just buy the one pass and have it cheaper on the per ride basis.

Practically, I don't think that would be the case. Homeless drug addicts are not known for their ability for long-term planning of finances and so would have a hard time getting the lump sum together (well, getting the lump sum and not then using that money for drugs), while having a few bucks leftover on a daily basis is easier for them.

Edit: My thoughts go to the "boots theory" of poverty, taken up to 11.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

I think other countries subsidize transit tickets heavily and don't see those issues, or at least not nearly to the same extent. I've even been to some places where the transit is free to use, and don't have those problems, because there aren't homeless thugs wandering around (admittedly these places have some unique advantages, but still--actually doing something about homelessness and crime seems like a better idea to me). Unless you actually enforce rules against skipping a fare, it wouldn't even accomplish anything (it would probably be counterproductive, since you would have fewer regular passengers, and therefore a higher rate of the indigent). And in that case, why not just enforce existing statutes?

Vagrants don't pay for tickets, they hop the turnstile or otherwise evade the fares.

I feel like you might need to walk this one back. The metros in other countries are often shockingly cheap (for example, 25 cents in Mexico City) and vagrants don't pay anyway. Cost is not the issue here and in fact raising the cost will make things worse as it will provide even more incentive for normal people to stay away.

to the great benefit of the city's working poor

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it? One would expect to see community groups spring up to deal with the issue, much like they did for the last 100 years of American history, but now there's nothing. Heck, I'd even expect it in the ballot box and candidates.

Now, I'm very willing to accept that the reason they aren't is propaganda and sabotage- and indeed, the entire reason why "muh oppression" continues is because it works- but I'm starting to suspect that even urban poor Americans are rich enough that their sense of apathy can take over (they're certainly much better off than any poor person anywhere else in terms of standard of living, and even some of the lower to middle class in other countries) and that the US crossed that point a generation ago.

So long as the poor don't feel themselves under threat and can afford the luxury belief of bike cucking accepting the occasional theft and confusing it for charity, I think it also releases citizens from the standard form of charitable obligations: the toleration of the underclass' behaviors is itself viewed as the charity.

The only place that really breaks this rule are West-aligned East Asian nations- but then again, they still have wireheaders all the same, and that's what hikikomori-dom is fundamentally caused by.

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it?

Cognitive dissonance. But probably not in the way you are thinking.

My in-laws have a violently mentally ill son. They are upper middle class PMC types. Their experiences with him have warped their entire world view. They view everything through the lens of "protecting" their son, as opposed to protecting people from him. The world, and themselves, are better off every time he finally does something that lands him in jail. But they despair every time that happens. Because I guess that's just what family does to you.

The working poor often have far more familial proximity to deranged violent criminals. If this impact them anything like it impacts my in-laws, when these tough on crime measures get proposed, they don't react with joy or relief that they no longer have to worry about being stabbed taking the subway to work. They react with terror and fear that their violent, deranged cousins, siblings, uncles or fathers are going to get locked up.

They want the deranged violent people that terrify them locked up. Just not any that are related to them, because they love them.

This is an important insight, and I have observed this same phenomenon even among people whose loved ones have far more minor mental health issues. My very good friend has a brother who is autistic and extremely-online; he has no criminal record that I’m aware of, and seems completely harmless - just spergy and aimless. My friend is always talking about how important it is to “protect and advocate for the mentally ill” and seems terrified that some authoritarian crackdown on violent schizophrenics would inevitably expand to targeting her brother for eugenic cleansing. I see the same thing with the families of people with Down’s Syndrome: the specter of Nazi death camps looms over their minds and appears to lurk behind every corner, hiding behind efforts to enforce literally any negative consequences on any mentally-ill person. This seems to be yet another sensible public-policy front which has been irreparably tainted for a century by a certain mid-century Austrian painter.

I see the same thing with the families of people with Down’s Syndrome: the specter of Nazi death camps looms over their minds and appears to lurk behind every corner, hiding behind efforts to enforce literally any negative consequences on any mentally-ill person.

To be fair to the Down's Syndrome families, the push towards elective abortion for this cause does induce a kind of paranoia, because it is demonstrated that society thinks it's not alone acceptable, but moving towards compulsory, to abort such children. There's resentment dressed up as compassion around "who will take care of them when they're adults and their parents are too old or even dead? that's an expense on society".

There's public intellectuals willing to spout off on your moral duty around that. Or doctors going "Well we don't judge in such cases, but we think it's paternalism to make women wait three days to get an abortion" when speaking in the context of "how many pregnancies are terminated in such cases?" That was around the campaign for a Constitutional amendment to permit (limited) abortion in my country; before it became legal, the reassurance was all "No, it won't include disability as a reason"; afterwards, we get a newspaper article talking about how it's not covered under "fatal foetal abnormality" so women have to go abroad for a termination. What makes that relevant here is that part of the campaign for abortion in Ireland over the years included "women have to go abroad for a termination, it is much safer if they could receive such medical treatment here". I don't think it's unreasonable to see that as a call for including Down's Syndrome as another permissible grounds. The switch between "no no no we don't want to abort the Downies/actually yeah it should be legal to abort the Downies", you see?

So it's not the failed landscape painter at fault here, it's the entire system of "well of course you'll want an abortion, when do we schedule it?" around diagnosis, and even the whole practice of having routine amniocentesis to detect such conditions. That's helpful to let families prepare, but the end result is "95% termination" not "preparation to have a child with this condition". Or that it's been legally upheld that Down's Syndrome is one case where you can have an abortion up until birth:

In a summary of the decision, by Lord Justice Underhill, Lady Justice Thirlwall and Lord Justice Peter Jackson, the judges said the Act does not interfere with the rights of the "living disabled".

They said: "The court recognises that many people with Down's syndrome and other disabilities will be upset and offended by the fact that a diagnosis of serious disability during pregnancy is treated by the law as a justification for termination, and that they may regard it as implying that their own lives are of lesser value.

"But it holds that a perception that that is what the law implies is not by itself enough to give rise to an interference with Article 8 rights (to private and family life, enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights)."

…In England, Wales and Scotland, there is a 24-week time limit on having an abortion. Laws allow terminations up until birth if there is "a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped", which includes Down's syndrome.

I can certainly see grounds for paranoia, even if it's unreasonable (as yet).

I mean, look, I’m basically in total agreement with the people strongly encouraging women to abort all Down’s Syndrome fetuses. Abortion is a very difficult issue when it comes to public policy, and I’m not willing to say that mandating the termination of such pregnancies would be the optimal legal approach.

However, this is a wholly separate issue from the removal of obviously-ill adults from public spaces. The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition; the reality at this time, though, is that they are two separate and unrelated - in fact, usually two diametrically opposed - political phenomena in every first-world country worth discussing.

I get what you're saying, but I'm saying I can also understand why people in that situation would be twitchy about anything that looks like cracking down on the visibly mentally ill.

Because all the promises about "of course we don't mean your baby" have turned out to be lies.

There should be a way to get laws about adults who need to be institutionalised can be taken off the streets even against their will because they are not competent to make decisions and they are not acting in their own good, but the way things work it's plausible that there would be a lot of vague language inserted for both those who don't want to 'stigmatise' and those who do want to be draconian, and that this kind of language could be interpreted in unintended ways when it comes to provision of services and legal cases. As well as a shit-ton of scaremongering - look how Aduhelm got approved even over FDA resistance, because of the canny use of patient's groups and families of sufferers who were whipped up to protest about "this would cure my mom but the cruel bureaucrats are wrapping it in red tape!"

I don't trust public policy motives because the entire topic is way too politicised. You would have idiots screeching about how this is throwing the mentally ill and the homeless into cages and hellholes.

The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition

To make sure I understand you - are you saying you would support coercing women to have abortions against their will in such cases? Because if so, do you really not understand why people would have "the spectre of Nazi death camps looming" when you're saying in effect "pass this legislation and then we can get on to the whole Lebensunwertes Leben bit"? Because while I'd support "if we need coercive laws to solve this problem for the good of all including the homeless/mentally ill, okay", I'd definitely oppose you on that last. And if you make one conditional on the other, then sorry, one set of principles over-rides the other for me, thus blanket refusal.

From my limited experience, it's that when it gets to the point of being violent, etc. that the working poor do want their violent relatives taken into care, be that hospital wards or even jail, but they can't get it done until it's too late (e.g. the person has committed some crime bad enough to be locked away). There is the natural tendency towards "my family and I love them" but they do tend to be more realistic about how things can go bad, because they have to live beside the consequences of the violent, criminal, and mentally ill:

As part of the mitigation by defence, the teenager’s grandmother read out a letter to the court, which she said she had written to give a glimpse into the child he was.

“I am not a mother who sees no wrong in a child. I never had anything to do with crime and I don’t condone criminal behaviour,” she said.

She said her grandson used to be sports mad, excelling at hurling and boxing. She said he changed when his birth mother introduced herself to him in the street and when she did not get what she wanted from him, his mother said she would harm herself. The witness said that her grandson never returned to boxing or GAA after that and began to get into trouble at school.

“His new friends were all involved in stealing bikes and using the money to buy drugs. I got many agencies involved but nothing worked. He would be awake at night crying and made three suicide attempts,” she said.

How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective? It wasn't effective at stopping the destruction of many poor neighborhoods to build roads through American cities back in the 60s (when the upper class, with more money and political capital, organized, they were able to stop it in their neighborhoods).

Political movements are almost always drawn largely from the middle class, often being more educated than average. As far as I'm aware, this is true of groups from Occupy Wall Street to Islamist terrorists to the Bolsheviks to the far more milquetoast political parties of modern developed countries. You could probably make a political organization called "more stuff for poor people now" and it would be 90% college-educated middle-class or richer (99% in leadership).

How often do the working poor ever organize politically, and when they try, is it ever effective?

Unions. Seriously, in their heyday they were the most effective grassroots political organisations ever.

Also the big-city political machines - although the leaders tended to be from respectable working class or lower middle class backgrounds (Boss Tweed was the son of a cabinet maker, and worked in various skilled trade jobs and as a bookkeeper before getting into politics via volunteer fire brigades), the middle-rank members of the machine who actually delivered the votes tended to be working poor. In western Europe where there wasn't the ethnic vote, the distinction between big-city political machines and unions was generally one without a difference.

Unions. Seriously, in their heyday they were the most effective grassroots political organisations ever.

Unions are the only way you'll get anything done on your behalf, if you're working class/working poor. But unions have become ossified as 'get plum jobs for our members/fat sinecures for our officials', which means cutting deals with city government (and that would be Democrats in LA, and the whole Democratic Party middle-class membership reacting with horror to the notions of cops on trains, crackdowns on drugs, etc.) and they have been weakened by the interests of employers who saw them as too powerful, and the taking for granted of the blue collar workers by the Democratic party:

https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/labor-unions-hillary-clinton-mobilization-231223

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22307891/democrats-unions-pro-act-policy-feedback

https://www.lawcha.org/2016/11/23/bill-clinton-remade-democratic-party-abandoning-unions-working-class-whites/

Unions have always been quickly captured by moneyed interests in the US.

Have you met the working poor? One of the biggest culture shocks for professional class Americans from the working poor is just how little sympathy they have for the underclass immediately below them. Letting people steal as charity is foreign to them; it’s an upper class luxury belief.

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it?

People don't necessarily advocate for what would benefit them. For one thing, if they are rational, working poor Los Angelians will take into account the dispersed benefits of a better city and the concentrated opportunity costs of using their precious time to advocate for something that might not be politically possible anyway.

Note: I am against draconian drug policies.

But if the city's working poor would benefit the most from this, why aren't they agitating for it?

How do you know they're not, but they get shouted down by the advocacy groups going on about "consensual substances"? Take the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is she representing her constituency's views on cracking down on subway crime? Or is this something the local working poor, if any of them are in her constituency, know would get them tagged as making fascism look benign so they don't even bother raising it with her?

You can go to her constituency office website and fill out something for FY24 community project funding around transportation, but that seems like a lot of paperwork and hoops to jump through for ordinary people in low-wage jobs to try and organise around.

Now, she has announced funding for these amongst other projects:

New York City Department of Transportation - Astoria Boulevard Safety Improvements

$1,000,000

55 Water Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10041

The New York City Department of Transportation is eligible to receive $1,000,000 to make Astoria Boulevard safer and more accessible for pedestrians by expanding sidewalk space, shortening crossing distances, adding crossings, and adding bus stop improvements, including bus bulbs. Specifically, this project will enhance pedestrian safety and improve pedestrian circulation by constructing curb extensions and median tip extensions along, as well as create left turn bays and crosswalks.

New York City Department of Transportation - Westchester Square Plaza

$1,000,000

55 Water Street, 9th Floor New York, NY 10041

The New York City Department of Transportation is eligible to receive $1,000,000 towards safety improvements in an area that is in the top 10% of dangerous crashes (severe injuries and fatalities) in The Bronx. The irregular street geometry at the intersection of Westchester Ave and East Tremont Ave significantly contributes to this area seeing a high number of pedestrian and motor-vehicle accidents, injuries, and fatalities. This project seeks to ameliorate these issues by removing a right turn slip lane and building out Westchester Square Plaza. This solution will create approximately 4,000 SF of quality public space in the area, providing public amenities and landscaping.

Those are great, but is there anything there about "and this is how we'll keep the junkies, criminals and violent homeless out of the new public amenities"?

No other problem is so universally visible, and yet (unlike, say, obesity) apparently so unsolveable only in the United States

America tolerates stuff that a lot of of countries would not . Threat of lawsuits for cracking down on people's civil liberties, or it going viral and people losing their jobs. People live in fear of being fired, assaulted, or sued for doing their jobs or enforcing some modicum of public decency.

but it's bad in the UK though, too https://metro.co.uk/2019/04/27/cleaners-reveal-most-soiled-london-underground-lines-9326006/

Regarding train quality, this new train though looks nice L.A. Metro celebrates Friday opening of new K Line with free rides, festival in Leimert Park

I think a lot of this depends where you look, such as this , which does not agree with the HBD angle of Asian superior IQ or impulse control. https://www.barstoolsports.com/blog/347906/chinese-kid-takes-a-dump-in-the-middle-of-airplane-aisle-because-the-bathroom-was-too-small

I think Germany has among the cleanest transportation and cities.

You'd have to compare many countries to see their laws and infrastructure.

It is possible that Chinese people are, generally, smart yet you have an example of one stupid Chinese person.

What a strange notion, could this be true?

The pictures in that article were cherrypicked from a group of trains at a depot which had been taken out of service for cleaning. I use the tube 2-3 times a week and I have never been on a train that bad - unsurprisingly, because a train that did get that bad would be taken out of service for cleaning.

Reading the article text, the vast majority of the trains that get that dirty are on the lines which run 24 hours on Friday/Saturday nights - in other words the mess is being made by drunks coming home from nightclubs. On the small number of times I have used the night tube, the trains were clean.

By Continental European or 1st-world Asian standards, the London Underground is a bit on the grubby side - comparable to Naples (although part of that is that a lot of European systems ban eating and drinking on the train - I hated this when I was in Berlin). The NYC subway is filthy. OP's link is suggesting that the LA subway is even worse than NYC.

although part of that is that a lot of European systems ban eating and drinking on the train - I hated this when I was in Berlin

This is another part of the general social relaxation around rules of how to behave in public, which I think has contributed to the whole problem. When I was a kid (and I'm working-class/lower middle-class in origin) my mother would not let us eat or drink in the street. That was bad manners. It was low class behaviour. And I'm talking about "we passed by men pissing on walls in the daytime" so while I'm not saying "drinking a soda on a hot day because you're thirsty while walking down the street is one step away from public indecency", it was treated as all part of the same set of behaviours: there was low class carry-on like all that, and there were good manners, where you knew how to behave in a public space. We all had to share it and get along, we couldn't treat it as our own private bubble.

So I do think that relaxation of mores over time does lead to tolerance of lax behaviour, and then the people at the very bottom just behave worse and worse because why not? We all have had experiences of people playing music in public where the earphones don't block it out, or people who have entire conversations on their phones and you learn intimate details of a stranger's life. If you're at home, you can take off your shoes, sprawl over the seats, eat and drink while on your phone and not sitting at the kitchen table, all the rest of it - because you're at home, it's your private space.

Treating public spaces as private spaces blurs the distinction, and eating on public transport is just one step up from talking on your phone to sprawling over the seats to... so on and so forth. And then, as I said, the worst inclined because they're violent or just crazy take it all the way: assault others, shit on the floor, do what they like. Because hey, you are not the boss of them, and they don't owe anything to anyone, we're all individuals with our rights!

The NYC subway is filthy

I ride the NYC subway every day, and this simply isn't true. The trains are clean, and the stations are clean, though some are a bit old and dingy. There are of course exceptions -- late night revelers are wont to litter, as are kids coming home from school -- but that is what they are: exceptions.

Germany is clean but they have a lot of graffiti

When I visited NYC a few years ago, I used the trains and the subway extensively to travel around, and did not encounter any major problems while doing this or see anything that would have been expectionally different from doing the same in Helsinki (well, apart from the greater general diversity, of course). Is NYC different from the other major American cities?