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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.

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.

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