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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   40473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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"Root causes" are excuses to do nothing

I've written before about the problems facing the TTC, Toronto's public transit system (examples from here: 1 and less directly 2). I'm a big transit advocate, think cities built around the automobile are awful, and car dependency is a big cause in western social malaise. Yada yada yada, you can fill in the rest. The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.

Last week a 16 year-old boy was stabbed to death in a random, unprovoked attack. The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling. You can imagine the response: various flavours of outraged, upset, sad, conciliatory, exhausted, in all their various permutations as they slithered through the filter of ideology.

The next day a mass shooting happened in the US, which has been picked over for its culture war nuggets already. But in the periods both before and after the killer's atypical identity was revealed, it reminded me very much of the reaction to the stabbing the day before. There is a certain type of person, who when confronted with an incident that they (consciously or not) are intelligent enough to realize might clash with their worldview, employs a kind of motte-and-bailey to defend it. They cannot outwardly exclaim that "This changes nothing!" in the aftermath of a tragedy, because it would appear cruel, heartless, or at the very least tonedeaf. Instead they insist that the real root of the problem is some vast, society-wide, rooted-in-the-depths issue that has to be tackled first. An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes. Now in general I'm actually very receptive to this line of argument; I think it is mostly a social/mental health problem. Again this has all been re-litigated a thousand times, but these kind of mass shootings are mainly a product of the last 25 years, and countries other than the US seem to have little issue mixing widespread gun ownership with low rates of gun crime.

But obviously this argument is an excuse to do nothing. These people care not one whit about mental health all the other days of the year, and if they were so serious about the problem in the first place maybe there would be a means to achieve some kind of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that would, if not prevent mass shootings, at least stop them from being so damn easy.

Likewise, I've seen dozens of similar sentiments in the past week explaining the deep-seated causes of why a mentally ill homeless man randomly killed a teen: it's due to the federal government no longer funding social housing, it's due to a lack of compassion for the dehoused, it's about a lack of community, and of course We All Know it's really about capitalism itself. OK, great. But these all feel like excuses to do nothing. This kind of random violence on the subway wasn't an issue before COVID. Do we have to wait for ten years of elevated federal housing funds to act? Do we have to rebuild social trust first? Do we have to dismantle the corporations of the Laurentian Elite into worker co-ops before we do a goddamn thing? I like the sound of all these ideas, but I think there are more direct and immediate ways to prevent kids from getting murdered, so how about we do those first!

But of course the people voicing these sentiments don't actually want those actions taken. Or perhaps really, they perceive that those actions being taken might vaguely benefit the social and political capital of groups they don't like, and so construct an excuse to oppose them.

The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Sagan

All arguments in this vein are fallacious, insomuch that every problem can be obfuscated into higher-order abstractions. It's a favorite argument of progressive liberals because it dovetails nicely into an intersectional viewpoint of the world. This is how every conceivable problem is the fault of the current structure of society and why a revolution is necessary before a single iota of progress can be done. Yes, we're hard at work at the revolution. We can't solve the murder problem until Every. Last. White. Male. is brought to account. But until then you'll have to deal with the scent of urine in the cities and the free-range drug addicts.

...but to be more serious, I don't believe anyone who says this. I don't believe that people who can't solve the murder problem to be capable of solving the societal inequity problem. Anyone who tells you that society needs to do better before the incredibly basic functions of a state can be resolved thinks you are a credulous moron to be exorted of social capital. They are the same people who will tell you, with the same logic, that you can't solve the lunch problem until you solve world hunger.

No thank you, I will go to the fast food court and buy a meal while the great minds slowly starve to death: perhaps when all of the social reformers have passed away we can solve our own problems.

But obviously this argument is an excuse to do nothing. These people care not one whit about mental health all the other days of the year, and if they were so serious about the problem in the first place maybe there would be a means to achieve some kind of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that would, if not prevent mass shootings, at least stop them from being so damn easy.

Republicans in general seem to care about mental health, which is why they are so strongly against abortion. After all the freedom to abort is deeply connected to the freedom to fornicate, and the freedom to fornicate is deeply connected to the amount of single mothers.

Another thing Republicans are more strongly against than the other side? Welfare.

Welfare allows more single mothers as well.

Single mothers are connected to crime, especially gun crimes within the 13/60 population.

Make abortion illegal and you discourage fornication, and you also get more risky abortions, leading to more single mother death. Fornication = death is a pretty good message to send if you want more social stability.

Gun crimes are crimes, and the Ds currently have a very poor record of addressing them.

Democrats/progressives are more concerned about getting anal sex propaganda in the hands of schoolchildren than protecting them from the social ills they generate by promoting sensuality over family formation.

Teach the schoolchildren to use guns (like they used to) and they won't have to cower in fear when Mrs PenisEnvy comes knocking for the Trans Day of Revenge.

Another angle against mass shootings that come more from the fringe libertarian / schizo (or as we know them since the covid psy-op : correct) is to abolish shadowy entities like the FBI, CIA and ATF that are deeply involved in the set up of these events. For example Operation Fast and Furious or the Benghazi fiasco. Government actors would have a little more credibility crying about [domestic] terrorism if they stopped involving themselves so often and deeply into [domestic] terrorism.

Why should little Timmy not bring guns to school to deal with his bullies, after seeing what the US government allegedly did to Osama Bin Laden?

Considering the current official eastern European foreign policy, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a sudden trend in rich American kids paying poor kids to fight to the death, in the ring, no in real life.

This is silly, you've simply framed the argument to make your preferred outcome the most obvious.

The focus on school shootings gives it away. A tiny minority of a tiny minority of "gun deaths", the solutions proposed will do absolutely nothing to solve the issue, and you criticize those who point their attention at lower-hanging fruit? Sounds like you've got a root cause you're trying to dress up a bit.

Is there a reason you put scare quotes around “gun deaths”?

While I'm not him I can guess why. Suicides are sometimes mixed in with gang violence and other gun related deaths to shore up the numbers when trying to eke out a reason for gungrabbing.

It is true that the proposed gun control solutions will do nothing about mass shootings, but it is equally true that ‘mental health’ and ‘lack of community’ are not lower hanging fruit.

2/3rds of gun deaths are suicide, 1/3 are homicide - of which 1/2 is gang related. Spree shootings are a rounding error.

"Mental health" and "lack of community" seem pretty relevant to 5/6ths of gun deaths.

Whether relevant or not, it’s not exactly lower-hanging fruit because no one knows how to address them.

I don't understand what you're trying to get at. What's my "preferred outcome"?

No the OP, but he may refer to this:

An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.

I think that 2nd amendment types becoming concerned with mental health is the issue here. The 2nd amendment types are concerned with attack on 2nd amendment and may just want to point out that guns are not the problems here. And heck, there may even be some overlap here. Having better communities so people feel more safe and that they have less need to buy guns is something many 2nd amendment types as well as anti 2nd amendment types can share as a goal.

An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.

"It's not the thing you are using as a scapegoat" inherently means blaming something else, but it's wrong to describe that as "suddenly concerned about".

If plagues were blamed on Jews poisoning the wells, and Jews said "wait a minute, bad sanitation by Christians is a better explanation", you wouldn't ask "why are Jews suddenly very concerned about Christian sanitation?"

The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)

If someone's blaming you for something, the fact that you are pointing to the actual cause doesn't mean you're "suddenly concerned" about that cause, even if you haven't done much about it before. Jews aren't "suddenly concerned" about non-Jewish plague causes when accused of starting plagues, even if they have steered clear of the subject before for 98% of the time.

By your reasoning, if a mob tries to lynch a black person, and the black person says "I didn't kill anyone, the white guy down the street did", he's "suddenly concerned" about murders by white people. This is nonsense.

I imagine they aren’t too concerned because their solutions to mental health are largely outside the acceptable purview of policy. If enforcing people make culturally Christian choices to live a wholesome mentally stable life free of vice is intolerable to the secular Center left, to a conservative politician their hands are tied.

“Don’t make me pay for your sex drugs and rock and roll if you want them so bad” essentially.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US. And virtually unheard of in vastly more secular Western Europe. And also that even in the US, advancing state-enforced Christianity as a remedy to mental health problems is an incredibly fringe position, even on the right.

I think a more likely explanation is that the intellectual paradigm of mainstream American conservatism simply isn't equipped to provide solutions to that kind of problem. It's like asking a progressive to come up with a scheme for regulatory reform.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US.

Do you have a good source for that? I would love to see the data used and how they define 'more religious, more conservative south'.

That's my analysis, based on the Washington Post's database of school shootings and Census Bureau's regional divisions and population data. I do not entirely agree with the CB's regional divisions in a modern context, e.g. I don't agree with putting MD or DE in 'the South' (and I'll be dead before I accept the Dakotas as Midwestern), but it doesn't substantially affect the outcomes - moving them from South to Northeast makes the South look very slightly better and the NE look very slightly worse, but the South still ends up with ~66% more shootings relative to its population compared to the Northeast - and it's the external standard I decided to use beforehand.

Based on census regions and the aforementioned WaPo database, the number of mass shootings from 1999-2023 per 100k population as of 2023* (incidents, not deaths) by region are:

  1. South: 0.135

  2. Midwest: 0.111

  3. West: 0.111

  4. Pacific (meaning AK and HI): 0.093

  5. Northeast: 0.061

The assessment of the South as more conservative and more religious isn't based on any one source, just general knowledge of political outcomes and surveys of American religiosity. (I also want to be clear - my thesis is not that conservatism/religiosity cause mass shootings, merely that there is very little reason to think it is a preventative factor). I can dig up some sources if you like, but the South is consistently found to be more religious than the rest of the country.

*I did not try to adjust incident rate by population at year of incident because that was a lot more work and I doubt it will significantly alter the conclusions.

The problem with these databases of school/mass shootings is that they don't map onto what people think of as the sort of mass shootings we're discussing in this thread. A school resource officer accidentally firing his weapon, or a gang dispute that leads to one student shooting a few of his rivals, or a drug deal gone awry, or an 8 year old accidentally shooting a classmate when showing the cool gun he took from home, etc., - those all make it onto these lists. There's value in that, but it's important to recognize the broad scope of the dataset and not act as if these are lists of people who intended to kill as many people as possible, which is what our culture is almost always talking about when discussing mass shootings.

Yeah, if that data includes gang shootouts, then of course the South is going to be more represented. Are there no datasets of "mass shootings" or school shootings that include only what the layman would think of when they hear those terms?

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It seems like ‘more common in the south’ is really easy to measure.

Maybe that's because school shootings are aimed at devout Christians? No potetnial victims, no problem.

They're clearly not, though. If they were, we'd expect to see evidence that school shooters were actively targeting Christians. We'd also probably expect to see more shooting at churches and fewer at public schools.

This isn't that, though.

The analogy is to a clear easy solution (remove gun = less perforated children) that conservatives find embarrassing to reject due to 'fuck them kids', so they rapidly become extremally worried about something that they also have no intention to solve but is more complicated (mental health, alienation, whatever).

Your analogy only works if jews actually were poisoning wells.

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The analogy is to a clear easy solution (remove gun = less perforated children) that conservatives find embarrassing to reject due to 'fuck them kids'

Don't engage in this kind of weakmanning. You are expected to characterize your opponents' position in a way that they would themselves recognize. That doesn't mean you have to agree with it, or even assume they are arguing in good faith (though if you are going to claim they're not, you really need to justify that), but it does mean not representing them as taking a position they clearly do not, such as "fuck them kids."

Normally this would just be a warning, but since it's becoming a pattern with you and we are getting tired of having to crack down on a low effort sneers, you're banned for another week, and if you intend to come back and repeat this, please don't bother.

Was this actually weakmanning? It seemed flippant, but accurate. And that's with me being very on the supposedly weakmanned side here.

I don't know whether I'm maybe being overly charitable, but to me it sounded not like "this is the actual solution" and "that is what conservatives actually think" but decidedly like "this is how this measure is presented" and "this is the look conservatives wish to avoid".

Well, rereading, I see it could be taken either way - "conservatives think fuck them kids" or "conservatives are embarrassed about being accused of thinking fuck them kids."

Without lack of clarification from the OP, and given his history, I'm disinclined to give benefit of the doubt. The comment in general was still pretty boo outgroup.

The clear solution seems more like locking up crazy people that disarming non-crazy people. That really is my sincere position on the matter, it's not a deflection.

And almost entirely not because of mass shootings: let's reopen the insane asylums. But this time not equal parts neglect and abuse.

The third equal part, which necessitated closing the asylums in the first place: gathering in also those people other people wish to put away for being convenient.

I’ll go one step further with a radical idea I’d like to discuss, which I don’t actually know is a good idea: a free mental health screening every year while they are ages 20 through 25. This should catch most of the schizophrenics before they become homeless druggies.

Build a real functional society inside the asylums, where each participant has 90% of the rights they have outside of the asylums, but they have the best medication’s, the best monitoring, and the best mental health outcomes.

I mean, by extension your framing also means you have to concede that Christian sanitary practices are causing the plague rather than rats.

The root cause of the Black Plague was multi-factor, to my understanding: the Y. Pestis pathogen was carried by fleas, which hitched rides on rats, which were probably drawn to urban areas due to "sanitary practices" like chamberpots and "thunder buckets."

I mean it also hit China and the Islamic world, but in any case this was an extended metaphor for something or other, wasn’t it?

You're simply privileging a solution which is simple and obvious, without considering that it might also be wrong. Conservatives also have simple and obvious solutions to "perforated children", ranging from "lock up nutcases" to "no trans hormones" to "arm teachers". Why privilege "remove guns" above those?

Because removing guns is proven to be effective.

With the high percentages of mass “message shootings” which occur in gun free zones, removing guns makes everyone else a soft target for mass shootings, stabbings, and rammings.

Has it really? I mean even if discount the incredibly likely possibility that the USA lacks the state capacity to enact EU style gun control, it hasn’t actually seemed to stop mass shootings in countries that actually had a problem with them.

I guess the conservative argument would be sure the Jews put things in the well but on net those items improve health outcomes. Yet occasionally Christian sanitary practices clash and result in deaths.

The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.

Did this have any actual impact on the total suicide numbers or did some people just get a less scenic last few moments? This is why root cause analysis is important, because you very much may have just ended with uglier bridges and uglier suicides for all your effort and expenditures.

But see how you're performing root cause analysis here? You really don't do this any other way. Op's argument is not against root cause analysis or an effective critique of it. It's just against wrong root cause analysis which... is hardly a unique or interesting position.

I'm not kneejerk against any introspection of root causes. I think that's a very important thing to do when designing long-term policy. My point is that this discussion of root causes in the wake of some tragedy is, in my mind, often not sincere; they don't actually care about the problem, and the talk of root causes is simply a pretext to do nothing.

Some roots are deeper than others, you have to actually pick which ones to address and to do this you have to identify them. Surely the very first thought you had to hearing about suicides on the bridge was not "we should put up nets". You must have considered other remedies. That nets went up was because the governing body did root analysis, found a cheap and easy way to mitigate the problem and implemented it. This is good of course, but it's not analysis paralysis that keeps us from addressing school shootings, it's that no matter how much analysis we do we cannot come to consensus. So what no? What does the advice of not letting root analysis get in the way of acting actually cash out to?

If you’re trying to reduce school shootings, you’d want to work with gun nuts to erect barriers which are trivial to them while also presenting a major obstacle to mentally ill neets.

I suggest requiring only cash for gun sales- the mass shooters are obviously putting everything on a credit card they don’t intend to pay off because they don’t have the money and they’ll be dead by then, while genuine gun nuts use layaway(where they don’t pick up the gun until after the last payment) if they can’t front the money for the gun.

only hire combat vets as teachers

That would probably have mostly non-safety related benefits.

We have extremely practical and highly intuitive solutions to deal with both - simply throw violators of historical social norms into large containment facilities sealed off from the rest of society, and then forget about them. We chose to ignore these solutions because policymakers and commentators are unhappy with the guaranteed increase in black incarceration that follows any sort of law enforcement whatsoever, and we now extend that unhappiness to other politically protected demographics.

What else could the nets be? I don't know, let's get wild and only hire combat vets as teachers. Go full Kindergarten Cop.

That you're only really coming up with unworkable suggestions is kind of my point.

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OP's post isn't against wrong root-cause analysis -- they even use an example of one they agree with

Now in general I'm actually very receptive to this line of argument; I think it is mostly a social/mental health problem.

It's against using root-cause analysis as an excuse to do nothing.

Sometimes doing nothing is the right answer if not socially desirable answer.

Let’s just say on net guns end up saves ann order of magnitude more innocent lives compared to the cost of innocent lives (I’m not making a positive claim but a hypothetical one).

Banning guns therefore would end up costing innocent lives. However, people might feel it is gauche to say while the dead bodies of innocent kids aren’t cold yet the above utilitarian answer. So they say the problem isn’t guns; we can stop these attacks by XYZ.

But their only example of cutting through this is just something that's root cause analysis is so simple that doing the most obvious thing actually solves the problem and/or doesn't lead to other problems. What, precisely, actually is the simple solution to school shootings that we're not doing? And if it's something that one party is totally unwilling to do for other reasons what else can be done but examine the root cause for other solutions that do not have this problem?

What, precisely, actually is the simple solution to school shootings that we're not doing?

There is more than one answer to this question. Some of them point towards not treating boys like defective girls, some would suggest education reforms towards the "abolish the concept of public education" end of the spectrum, some say "stop giving any coverage to school shootings," the list probably goes on and on.

None of these sound very simple.

The obstacles to implementing any of these aren't really that people get stuck on root analysis though, are they? It's the political disagreements. If the Mets had a downside large enough that a large portion of the population strongly objected to them they might not have been implemented.

Maybe I'm just one of those people, but I feel the need to push back on your examples.

Your first case is a person who had repeated, severe interactions with the justice system, to seemingly no consequence what so ever until they murdered someone. To any layman's understanding of how things should work, there is no excuse for him being out to have committed that murder in the first place. Do you not have bail? Was someone asleep at the wheel? What the fuck happened?

Gun deaths in America are... well not what you think. Going purely off the numbers the most effective way to reduce gun deaths in America is keep them out of the hands of black male teens. Just not let them have guns. Period. But those aren't the gun deaths you hear about, and it would be "racist". Well, probably actually racist. No quotes needed. But still a good idea, were we willing to just be racist.

That being off the table, the second best thing you could do is keep guns out of the hands of people with suicidal ideations. But it's super important that medical records stay private, so that's off the table. Plus, it's not really suicides most people are upset about. It's threats to themselves. Despite that, red flag laws are only slowly becoming a thing... and many jurisdictions are enforcing them in such a way as to prove all the Cassandra's who cried about them right...

That being mostly off the table, yeah, I guess all we're left with is banning all guns. Because we apparently aren't allowed to keep them out of the hands of black male teens, and we can't trust the people who'd make the determination to not declare all their political opposition "mentally ill". Yet there are still more guns than people in America, and our own intelligence services have flooded criminal enterprises with guns because... profit?

So what's the average American concerned with their safety to do? The people with the highest statistical likelihood of hurting you can't or won't be stopped from owning guns. Might as well get a gun. It's a race to the bottom.

Gun deaths in America are... well not what you think. Going purely off the numbers the most effective way to reduce gun deaths in America is keep them out of the hands of black male teens. Just not let them have guns. Period. But those aren't the gun deaths you hear about, and it would be "racist". Well, probably actually racist. No quotes needed. But still a good idea, were we willing to just be racist.

That being off the table, the second best thing you could do is keep guns out of the hands of people with suicidal ideations. But it's super important that medical records stay private, so that's off the table. Plus, it's not really suicides most people are upset about. It's threats to themselves. Despite that, red flag laws are only slowly becoming a thing... and many jurisdictions are enforcing them in such a way as to prove all the Cassandra's who cried about them right...

Let's say I am a very conceited and self-absorbed suburban mom, I don't care about Black male teens killing each other over turf, I don't care about older White males blowing their brains out over loans. But I am very worried about that miniscule chance of someone going postal in the local mall, local movie theater or worse of all, in the school my children go to. I am a single-issue voter, and I will vote for anyone who shows his measures will reduce this one-in-a-million chance to one-in-a-billion.

Right now I want to vote for Mr. Gun Control. He says gun licenses that require everyone to undergo psych evaluation every year will be struck down by the SCOTUS as being against something called 2A. However, he thinks a digitized federal gun registry that is integrated with health and social services is feasible. As soon as a worried social worker or a doctor has a sliver of suspicion that someone might be not exactly stable, they can press a button, and the police will come and take every gun away from that person's domicile until they undergo rigorous psychological evaluation, and giving your gun to someone who can't show a green checkmark in their federal gun registry app is a crime.

Can you formulate a counterproposal that will keep me and my children as safe from gun-toting crazies as this one?

I think you just make the process for acquiring a gun very onerous while technically not restrictive. You make people go, in person, to county clerks offices, different ones, multiple times over the course of several months, to fill out forms. It is impossible to fill out these forms in such a way as to deny you a gun, and at no point in the process can your application be denied. A high functioning and responsible adult on average can complete the process in three months. This is the only way that a person can buy a gun. I think this stops more 'school shootings' than red flag laws will, and without the negative side effects of red flag laws. I think in general people underestimate the power of trivial inconveniences/annoyance to shape human behavior. All the traffic fatality information in the world pales in effectiveness compared with an annoying beeping sound. All social engineering attempts that don't reduce down to annoying beeping sounds, should not be tried until annoying beeping sound solutions have been tried.

A fairly noble idea, but many places in America have already tried the "headache-inducing super-duper-annoying beeping sound" equivalent of gun laws, and the results aren't as inspiring as you suggest. If anything, one could argue the implementation only achieves the effect of annoying the shit out of gun owners and giving them splitting headaches instead of actually trying to reduce fatalities.

You would expect to see little to no reduction in fatalities from this kind of proposal, the point is to stop the Uvalde, "kid goes to a store, legally buys a gun, kills a bunch of children." Which is the most inflammatory possible news story that provides the most ammunition for gun-control advocates, even if it is a rounding error in terms of total gun deaths.

First of all, there are plenty of problems with Red Flag laws.

First of all, they’d actually make people much less likely to seek help. If you knew that you’d lose an important right if you told anyone that you thought you were mentally unwell, more than likely you’d hide it. You definitely wouldn’t seek out help no matter what happened. And mental illness like most illnesses are much easier to treat if caught early.

Secondly, this kind of law is very likely to be abused. Someone you don’t like? Maybe an ex you’re mad at? You can red-flag them easily. Just call in a “tip” and the guns go away. And it could easily be months before they could prove their sanity.

Third, a check in an app can quite easily be given for expanded reasons that aren’t in the original version of the law. Maybe it starts with direct threats to individuals. Or threats of actual terrorism. But suppose that definition expands. Maybe you belong to a group “associated with terrorism.” Maybe a particular political or social opinion is “associated with violence”. Now the government can simply turn off your rights and take your guns.

My best solution is to make those targets as hard to attack as possible. You shouldn’t be able to just walk into a school. And I think having guards around malls and theaters makes sense. I’d consider arming teachers as well.

I am Karen, I don't own a gun and I don't care that someone loses access to their guns. Guns are black and scary anyway.

Going purely off the numbers the most effective way to reduce gun deaths in America is keep them out of the hands of black male teens. Just not let them have guns. Period.

We pretty much already do this. Most gun deaths are from handguns, and Federal law requires one to be at least 21 before purchasing a handgun from a Federally-licensed dealer. A lot of states, including most of those with major urban centers, require one to be 21 period. Even more states require one to be 21 to qualify for a carry permit. So unless the gun violence problem is primarily being driven by 18–20 year-olds who purchase their firearms legally through private sellers and shoot their victims in private, and is limited to states where such purchases are legal, then black teenagers are already banned from owning guns in any realistic sense of the term.

I feel like your response is a bit CW-brained, so to speak; that is to say it's rooted in a kind of contrarianism that is overriding your faculties. Yes, it's annoying and silly and perhaps unfair that the media does its best to overlook levels of violence among black Americans. That does not mean it alone is the secret ingredient that explains everything wrong with American society. If you removed all gun violence caused by black Americans from the picture tomorrow the US would still have a higher murder rate than most other western nations with significantly more gun deaths. And I would note that specifically I was addressing these kind of random mass shootings, which as far as I'm aware aren't disproportionately committed by blacks.

IIRC the random mass shootings are slightly disproportionately committed by blacks but they have a lower body count and happen in shitty neighborhoods the media doesn’t care about.

Banning all teens from owning guns seems like a viable solution that anti-gun people would be fine with that is not "ban all guns" (though iirc handguns cannot be sold to people under 21 already, so not clear this solution is that effective anyway).

The problem isn't having the law on the book; it's having the political will to enforce it and actually punish people who are found in violation of it. "Reform" DAs have largely decided that these crimes will not be seriously or systematically prosecuted. You can either end mass-incarceration, or you can have functional hand gun regulation in major urban centers with significant criminal populations. You can't have both.

Involving physicians is a soft-ban. Docs are overwhelmingly left/pro-gun control and afraid of getting sued.

If they can get sued for someone committing a crime (which they will be) then they'll hit NO on everyone they possible can (and will be rational to do so).

There is a difference between de jure and de facto. It’s one thing to ban all guns from people under 21. It is another thing for people under 21 o not have guns.

But those aren't the gun deaths you hear about, and it would be "racist". Well, probably actually racist. No quotes needed. But still a good idea, were we willing to just be racist.

What an odd claim, since the most vociferous opposition would certainly come from pro-gun people, who are very underrepresented among those who tend to make accusations of racism. It is the pro-gun people, after all, not the anti-racist types, who tend to point out that many gun control laws were enacted in response to Black Panthers openly carrying guns.

Don't care. Most gun deaths are young black men killing other young black men, and a smattering of others. If your chief objective was decreasing gun deaths, that's your #1 target. #2 target is suicides, if you are maximally going for "gun deaths" and not "gun murders". Somewhere, waaaaaaay down the list, lies the solution "ban guns for everyone because we can't have nice things". It's basically the gun control advocates passive aggressive way of going "Oh, you complained that the soup had too much salt? Well I'm never going to cook anything ever again! How do you like that?"

2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Almost the entirety of the remaining third are homidices, 52%(or whatever it is now) are committed by black men.

So it’s really more like a sixth.

An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.

I think both sides systematically overestimate the efficacy of mental health screening/intervention at preventing such incidents. Some dems blame mental health and guns, or argue that mental health is a major factor. Even if someone is possibly disturbed, the options are limited. It's not like you can just involuntary commit someone or deny his rights to own guns just for being 'off' a bit. According to an FBI study, only a quarter of shooters of a sample size of 63 had a history of mental illness https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/pre-attack-behaviors-of-active-shooters-in-us-2000-2013.pdf/view

Even 25% is pretty close to the general population level of diagnosed mental ilnesses.

If you didn't see the comment below, researchers speculate that the reporting about installing suicide nets on the bridge near me increased bridge suicides for the next few years, even as bridge suicides declined in general over the decade. They suggested that perhaps the proximate cause of spikes in bridge suicides was the reporting on them.

It's really hard to ignore the media element with respect to mass shootings. It's one of those things you'll wonder if people 1,000 years from now will shake their heads and think "fucking idiots!"

I agree and my thinking has changed a lot lately as a result. The way it’s come up for me is having people near to me who aren’t succeeding/hitting milestones/etc. and realizing how….completely useless a “root cause analysis” is for them.

There’s a place for it, but in practical terms if someone asks me for help with a problem, or I want to help someone, the answer never seems to pop out of having juuuuust the right analysis.

Turns out you usually have to actually do something to change your position and, right or wrong, clinging to “millennials are so screwed” is a cop out for someone trying to live a life.

Similarly it now occurs to me that the root cause analysis vs practical problem solving and the resulting failure modes awfully resemble those of traditional psychoanalysis vs CBT. Yes your parents were mean and that is bad, no you will not solve your social anxiety by talking at length with your therapist about how bad it was. Now go out and talk 10x with strangers for at least a minute until next week and report back on how it went, and depending on what you struggled with in particular we will try to develop strategies to make it easier for you.

I also get the impression that both psychoanalysis and root cause thinking for social problems are popular with the same crowd for the same reasons.

I also get the impression that both psychoanalysis and root cause thinking for social problems are popular with the same crowd for the same reasons.

I'm part of that "crowd", to an extent*, so I'd be curious to hear what your reasons are.

Psychoanalytic thinking is not opposed to taking action. It merely tries to get a holistic understanding of problems before making recommendations; it stresses that, when you decide to take action, it should be the right kind of action, taken for the right reasons.

A simple psychoanalytic case study I once came across in the literature: man comes to an analyst and says that he has trouble getting to work on time. Frequently he oversleeps, but even when he wakes up early enough, things seem to get in his way and he ends up being chronically late. Someone who's too deep into the "practical problem solving" mindset might say: set your alarm clock earlier, go to bed earlier, switch to taking a different train line closer to your house, keep a journal for two weeks about your habits and what time you arrive to work, then report back.

The analyst, instead of immediately recommending a course of action, takes a step back and asks: how are you feeling about work, in general? Are you happy at work? Are you chronically late to other things, or is it just your job? You're never late to your kid's softball practice, but you are late to work? Why do you think that is? What is the difference?

Eventually it comes out after multiple sessions that the man never really wanted to be in the career he was in in the first place; he felt forced into it because he wanted to live up to his father's expectations (yes yes, stereotypical I know; it doesn't always have to be your parents when it comes to psychoanalysis, but, given the central importance of the relationship with one's parents in one's early formative years, it often is). After psychoanalysis, the man got the courage to quit his job and transition into a career that was more aligned with his own personal goals and values, rather than the goals that his father wanted to project onto him.

So you can see that there was no aversion to action here. The man actually ended up taking a much more radical action than what the naive bulldog "git 'er done" approach would have suggested: quitting his job and pursuing a new career, rather than making superficial adjustments to his daily routine. But he was only able to understand that that was the appropriate course of action after he took a minute to breathe and analyze, well, the root causes.

Even with "obvious" deficiencies like social anxiety, I think there can be much to question and analyze. You say you experience fear and anxiety - can you articulate what you're afraid of, exactly? Why do you want to talk to more people? What is it that you really want to get from being more social, what is it that you hope to gain? Maybe you're just not meant to be a social butterfly, in the same way that not everyone is meant to be a pro athlete - it's worth exploring. Perhaps your anxiety actually benefits you in some way? Fear does serve an evolutionary purpose after all. I don't think the answer to any of these questions is obvious; they will vary on a case by case basis.

** (I won't make any strong claims about the clinical efficacy of psychoanalytic methods vs conventional methods; I have no technical expertise here. I can say that I find the concepts of psychoanalysis to be fascinating though, and I enjoy reading the writings of psychoanalysts. Whether any of it is "real" or not is up for debate, but if I were God and I could mold human psychology in whatever way I wanted, I would make it like that.)

Oh I also love hearing stories from psychoanalysts. I also like talking and speculating about the motives and reasons of both me and other people in a similar manner to psychoanalysts/dynamics. My wife studied psychology and originally planned to become a therapist, and her sister is currently almost finished with her education for becoming a systemic family therapist. We all love talking about this stuff. But that's the thing: Psychoanalytics/-dynamics is maximized for interesting-ness and/or pleasantry and very easily degenerates into a stagnant pattern were the patient just likes talking to the therapist (usually complaining about their parents or partners, we all love complaining about our parents or partners) and doesn't really want to change anything. The housewife who has been going to the same therapist for 30 years is not a meme without a reason.

Using more practical approaches (systemic family therapy is another more practical approach for example) doesn't forbid thinking about the bigger scope (calling career choices into question is an all-time favorite in all therapy styles), but actually asking the patient to "do stuff" makes the therapy less pleasant, tends to rock the patient(s) out of complacency and in general doesn't devolve into this particular failure mode. As you mention Psychoanalytics isn't opposed to action, but it also doesn't require it, which is important. Some high-motivation low-introspection people really do only need someone to force them to introspect and re-consider their live choices and then will go on to make the needed radical choices themselves, but many people not only need some practical directions on "what to do now" on top, they also need a push to actually do it.

And there is also the other direction. A push can not only help you achieve something, it can also trigger the opposite reaction. You may even go as far as saying that good therapy needs a certain baseline of hostility, basically amounting something like this: "You claim you want X? Well then, here are simple steps on how to get X. Now go out and DO IT. If you don't, we can devise a new strategy next week or we will talk whether this is really what you want". This forces the patient to put some skin in the game, which in turn makes it easier to realize what you really want. It's easy to claim that you always wanted to become an author, but if someone manages to get you 1 extra free hour per day through re-organization and prioritizing, asks you to actually start and even gives you some practical hints, you may realize that you have been fooling yourself. Or you may become an author. Either way you're better off.

Furthermore, the incremental changes favoured by practical approaches tend to give patients more breathing room. For the example of soxial anxiety, having appropriate coping strategies will expand your capabilities and make you more functional. In general, CBT favors making the patient more functional first. You can still decide afterwards that you're introverted and want to minimize social contact, but you can't entirely avoid it and need to handle the situations you can't avoid. This then makes bigger changes more easy and less likely to fail completely. An appropriate CBT can be the difference between a programmer working in home office most days and a totally dysfunctional unemployed shut-in. I have much less confidence in Psychoanalytics here, since shut-ins usually are poster boys for "need clear directions and lots of pushing" to get them out of their comfort zone.

For your chronically late example, it is the same: If you're already struggling at your current work, preparing for a career switch is a lot harder. I can tell you that from experience. But if you first are helped so that you struggle less at your current work, you then have more time you can dedicate to prepare for the switch. If you are more functional, you will have more spare time, you will have an easier time prioritizing, and so on. You can then use that extra slack as you please. Note how your example basically assumes a functional & decently motivated person; Someone who can just switch jobs and do fine, someone who needs no practical step-by-step guides, no pushes nor nudges.

Again, to be clear, I'm not opposed to thinking about the bigger scope or calling fundamentals into question. A good therapist will always do that. But since most people come to therapy mildly to severely dysfunctional, it is best to first start making them more functional, and then they can make bigger changes. And even once you're not (as) dysfunctional anymore, you will still profit from viewing everything in practical incremental steps, no matter how radical your goal is. And traditional psychoanalytics/dynamics often massively fails on these two accounts in practice, either talking endlessly about things in the past you can't change anymore or proposing radical changes that are almost guaranteed to fail if you can't get your shit together first.

The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.

I've noticed this attitude too. One of the usual responses always seems to be to point out that, statistically, cars kill more people, so like you should just take transit anyway. This ignores aspects like the feeling of control you have in a car and that humans aren't perfectly rational who abide by statistics all the time (otherwise we would all have been signed up for cryonics by now), but also, pointing out something is worse doesn't make that thing better (whataboutism).

And it's just frustrating to me, because one of the reasons why transit is so much better in, say, Japan, is that anti-social behavior isn't tolerated on it. The worst they have is women being groped when people are packed tightly together, and that only happens because other people can't see who's doing the groping. Meanwhile in North America you have, well, murders taking place on it (despite all the "eyes on the street"). I've never really seen urbanists acknowledge this point.

Edit: It looks like Not Just Bikes acknowledges crime enough to the point where he acknowledges that he deliberately doesn't acknowledge it. Oh well.

The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling.

This seems to be a common theme. All the police bodycam footage I watch nowadays has descriptions like "...the suspect had 5 warrants out for him after being released on $500 bond". All that has to be done here is to simply keep the guy in jail until he's convicted (or exonerated; this country abides by innocent until proven guilty), but there's been a wave of soft-on-crime policies that make people think it's too harsh to keep the guy incarcerated. Of course, prisons being near max capacity hasn't helped matters either.

My interpretation is that he's saying the solution to all this crime has nothing to do with public transport. His take on why the crime is happening is a bit simplistic, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with offering solutions that rely on upstream problems already being solved by someone else i.e "given that you guys can sort out your massive crime problem, I'm going to talk about all the cool things you can do".

He is right about that, but that really undercuts the majority of the produced content, which suggests that there are no good reasons not to be implementing his proposals under the status quo.

No. His take on crime is too complex. The simple answer is there is a criminal underclass. It relates to low IQ (ie stupid people have low self control / lack long term planning). But that’s politically untoward to say.

TBH broken families caused in large part by eligibility tests for American social programs are a big part of the crime problem, and hollowing out good jobs for low IQ people is also a factor. Admittedly that’s not what that guy is talking about, though.

I'm confused at your response. The quoted claim isn't that crime doesn't matter; it's that crime matters both for people using public transit and for people not using public transit, so it's off-topic for a discussion of transit.

I think that's a good counter-argument to the claim: in short, crime affects everyone in the city, but people traveling by foot / public transit have a lot more opportunities to be affected by it. The amount of walking done by people driving (i.e. between their parking space and their destination(s)) is so much smaller that their exposure to possible crime constitutes a qualitative difference from riding public transit.

And to note, the working poor who actually take the bus and are strongly affected by crime on public transport aren’t represented by either party- Mano dura policies to deal with it are within the realm of things republicans support, but they’d only actually do it as a power grab to ban abortion because they don’t want to use their political capital on protecting the working poor, and democrats prefer to stick their fingers in their ears and sing loudly about the entirety of the problem.

Working poor who rely on public transit don't like crime but also have other priorities (including the continued operation of public transit, which local Republicans often want to gut) and often don't trust law enforcement (or Republicans).

Mano dura policies to deal with it are within the realm of things republicans support, but they’d only actually do it as a power grab to ban abortion because they don’t want to use their political capital

Bullshit. The reason you don't see Republicans actually try such things is that they have effectively zero political representation, let alone capital, in the jurisdictions that need them.

But this wasn't always the case, and there are (presumably) parts of America where this still isn't the case. I don't know how you decisively debunk the "the cruelty is the point" viewpoint when it comes to what Republicans have managed to get implemented when they had the opportunity.

The last time Republicans had such support in New York City, they DID in fact implement such policies, and they DID at least coincide with a drop in crime. So are there a significant number of places where

  1. These problems exist

  2. Republicans have significant representation

  3. They aren't pushing for these sorts of policies?

If not -- and I think there are not -- then blaming Republicans is ludicrous. Certainly it is ludicrous where Republicans don't have significant representation.

Republicans could burn political capital to take over cities like Dallas or Atlanta(or at least the relevant aspects thereof), but they won’t do it except for abortion-related reasons.

If some are abstaining from public transport due to fear of being a victim of crime, the existence of a population which overcame such a fear, doesn't render the crime off-topic.

It could be that some solutions proposed by current non-bus riders are ineffective (such as actually enforcing laws on the books), and that the most effective way is NJB's (censor reporting on crime), but if a phenomenon affects ridership statistics, it is relevant.

I think the claim, while perhaps not accurate, is that people avoid the city due to crime and public transit is just part of the city as opposed to people avoiding specifically just public transit.

I think he just doesn't know how bad it is in a big city today. From my understanding, he's lived in many places around the world including Houston and Los Angeles, but permanently moved to Amsterdam several years ago due to how horrific and car-dependent North America was. (Well, not only that, but because everywhere else was bad too, and the Netherlands was the best - or rather, the least worst, since he still says it's not perfect but better than everything else.) And he's only visited places to either film videos or visit his family back in Ontario, Canada.

Maybe a decade or so ago, the crime was somewhat bad, but he got out of North America then and in the intervening years the crime has only gotten worse. So yeah, he's probably never seen muzzle flashes in the park across the street from his front window. In fact, I think there's a pretty big disconnect between him and the average person in America. From his employment history, he seems to have only ever had jobs being some sort of product management or consultant for tech companies, and never had to, say, work a trade where he needed his own private vehicle. He could easily do his job from home, so even if he moved back to a hotspot of crime in North America, he wouldn't have had to go outside to commute to work and thus potentially risk being shot.

In fact, I think there's a pretty big disconnect between him and the average person in America.

There are a lot of people like this, that have never worked a front line job servicing the general public. Things like gas (service) station attendant, counter staff at McDonalds etc. Working in these positions gives you skin in the game in society and provides real lived experience with the poor and working class. Most people who work these jobs want to move on from them as quickly as they can, because they are horrible. To be fair they want to move on, not just because of working with the general public, but having dealing with management (personalities that made these service jobs their 'careers') and general conditions (hours standing in public view, shift work etc).

I worked as a video store attendant once (back when that was a thing), and I couldn't wait to graduate university. Working corporate with all it's pitfalls was a pleasure cruise compared to dealing with the general public, but I digress.

There is a big disconnect between privileged people being sheltered from the impacts of the policies they are proposing (such as homeless friendly policies in San Fransisco), and those that are exposed to them. People that have to walk to work through crime hot spots and take public transport. They can't wait around for far off utopian solutions to crime like standardising genetic selection for strong impulse control and high G in embryos. They need to use crude measures like policy which allows police to use their monopoly on the use of force, or weakening the monopoly on force to allow them to carry weapons for self defense.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of those front-line people will still vote for people who support the soft on crime policies.

For what it's worth I haven't used LA public transportation post-COVID. But supposedly it is shockingly bad. Ridership has crashed. Someone dies from fentanyl once every few days. Violent crime rates and deaths have spiked.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains

https://www.dailynews.com/2023/02/24/crime-skyrockets-on-la-metro-system-including-a-jump-in-drug-deaths/

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/abortion-pill-public-transit-moving-on-film-ny-phil/la-metro-crime-drugs

The responsible authorities have assured us that there is no evidence that second hand fentanyl smoke is bad for your health.

If you haven't been riding North American public transit post-COVID, you might genuinely just not know. It's gotten a lot worse these past few years. So if your reference point is Amsterdam your view is going to be pretty skewed.

Yet somehow, it doesn't seem to have affected his reach much. He's one of the biggest urbanist voices online, if not the biggest, with almost a million subscribers on YouTube. Maybe he got his reach in part precisely because he is so opinionated, and not necessarily correct on many things. Controversy and emotions draw clicks and views.

Meanwhile in North America you have, well, murders taking place on it (despite all the "eyes on the street"). I've never really seen urbanists acknowledge this point.

I mean, you could just read any of the countless articles in publications like City Journal and papers put out by the Manhattan Institute to see examples of right-wing urbanists that are obsessed with restoring law and order to cities.

I applaud them all the same and wish the best with their efforts to restore law and order to cities. Unfortunately, urbanism - while ostensibly being politically neutral - does have a left-wing bent to it. This is seen most clearly when people who are against public transit because it will bring crime are dismissed as saying a "racist dogwhistle" only said by thinly-veiled racists who just really want to say the n-word.

Why do you keep on switcherooing "violent homeless people" and "violent gang members"?

I don't even disagree that locking away the "scum" is a good idea, but the troublemakers in El Salvador are not the same troublemakers you've been grinding this axe about.

Also is there a possibility that The US PRODUCES more of those scum?

I hate that society has been gaslit, into thinking that there is some aspect of our mutual humanity that is served by cracking down on the police doing their job as the biggest gang in town.

Here’s the problem and here’s why it’s not “gasliting”: the second you give police free reign to “crack down” on “actual scum” is the second where the definition of “actual scum” evolves to mean anyone who is politically undesirable for those in power. In other words, straight up authoritarian tyranny. Dangerous path that.

I long ago saw a documentary on Brazil, and police dealing with criminal gangs in favelas. ((I don't remember the name, and I couldn't say how accurate it was, so take this with a grain of salt. It seems to me that the incentive structures are reasonable)).

At some point, crime got so out of hand that authorities decided that it might be worth a try closing an eye on the technicalities of law and justice procedures. Basically, police could kill undesirables based on their own discretion.

It turns out, police found out quite fast they could also not kill based on their own discretion. The net result were an unchanged level of crime, with skyrocketting levels of police corruption.

If there are targets, that makes sense. Thank you!

That may be true, but it's the path we're on if we can't reduce urban crime rates any other way. People can only tolerate so much violence before they demand an authoritarian leader clean up the streets, as has been happening in El Salvador.

It's clearly not the only path, since East Asian cities have all the amenities of a first world country without any of the street crime. The real question is how. Many are in countries generally considered democracies, so authoritarianism does not seem strictly necessary. If the answer is culture, then maybe we ought to start teaching the Analects to schoolchildren. If the answer is how their police forces operate, then maybe we ought to copy that. If the answer is strictly HBD, then I suppose we're shit out of luck unless we want to go full great replacement in our immigration policy.

Public order is strictly enforced, both by social norm and by state force. People in authority are abundant and there's much more of a culture of catching the small stuff. For example in Japan, there is a station attendant at every fare turnstile set. 95% of the time they are there to help with ticket issues and logistics (the trains are needlessly bureaucratic). But if you tried to fare jump they would totally shout at you and make a scene and likely detain you til the cops came.

You focus on occasion of order enforced by authority actually present, but there even when the natives are left unsupervised, they do not act as Americans do.

This is shown by isolated and unguarded vending machines: only a high trust society can rely that people won't smash and loot them, which is why they are common in Japan and are by Japanese considered a sign of a safe country. There absense in the US can considered indicative of larger social dysfunction.

There absense in the US can considered indicative of larger social dysfunction.

Uh.. they are not absent in the united states at all. Definitely not as prevalent as in Japan but they're really not a rare sight. My understanding is that it's less crime that makes the states have less of them and more cultural.

did the suicide nets lower suicides or did people just use another method? i would expect they did lower them somewhat because presumably it increases the cost of suicide at the margin. but i guess if there are good substitute options then it might not have much of an effect.

I wasn't able to pin down exact year-by-year numbers in Toronto. It appears that at least up to the pandemic suicide rates were down. Interestingly, there was a spike in suicides from bridges in the years immediately following the start of the project to install the nets, which caused researchers to wonder if the effort had been counter-productive. Over the next decade though bridge fatalities went down considerably (source) which then led researchers to muse if it was really media coverage of the bridge suicides which prompted spikes in the numbers.

At least in looking for the answer I confirmed my suspicion about people complaining about root causes, though.

I don't know about a specific study about the nets, but in general taking away popular options lowers the suicide rate. Suicide isn't rational, it's more compulsive. People don't like to change methods once they have a plan.

This is, itself, root cause analysis.

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