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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30990 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.

(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.

(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.

I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -

(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.

(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.

Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit.

And this is the problem. You won't update; nobody ever does. No matter how many times it turns out the obvious problems those on the right claimed would occur actually did occur, no one who has bought into the leftist view will reject the premises which said they wouldn't. It's a trapdoor epistemology.

Hardly. YIMBYism is gaining steam and as doglatine points out, it sure seems like the pendulum is swinging back towards law and order among the left. Perhaps there's a lack of self-awareness in failing to say 'wait a minute, wasn't there a group of people telling us 20 years ago that restricting housing supply/being lax on crime was a bad idea?'

But the question in my mind is, what does updating look like to you? There are no more leftists as we come to Jesus and everyone updates to your narrow slice of the overton window? Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?

Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?

Shifting to the right would be an update. Setting aside failed policies while continuing to rely on the gestalt which implied they would work is not. Especially when those failed policies will come back as soon as people forget enough about the last time.

That conservatives frequently fill the role of Cassandra doesn't cause anyone to update because of their filter bubble, not because they're incapable of updating.

It's not just their filter bubble. They see the conservatives predict bad things, they see the bad things happen, and they lament that the bad things make it appear that the conservatives have a point. They have all the information and demonstrate their awareness of it but reject the conclusions.

"Conservatives Pounce"

Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?

Logic. If premise X implies things about policy A, policy A is implemented and those things are shown false, then premise X is also false. Now when premise X is used to claim things about policy B, one should not believe premise X actually provides evidence for those things.

Except eventually one would have to reject ideas like "all people are equal" in order to update, and that's a fundamental problem as it is the anchor of the overton window in western societies.

"all people are equal"

Not to beat a dead horse again but for that and just that belief alone (sufficient, not necessary), western society deserves to be replaced.

Equality does not square well with the human condition, no different to how communism does not square well with it.

The more people that reject such ideas and update, the more the Overton window shifts.

Hence the forever War on Noticing things like racial IQ gaps or crime statistics—spaces like Reddit banning wrong-think, chatbots getting hate facts reinforcement learning’d out of them, the UK policing supposed online hate crime, the FBI focusing on racial or involuntary celibate extremist terms like “based,” “red pilled,” “Chad,” “Stacy,” or “looksmaxxing”.

Only the overton window of elite discourse and opinion matters with regard to changing policies. Voters just don't matter and pretending, or even giving lip service or respect to the absurb and empty pretence that they do, requires mastering such cognitive dissonance that I just can't do it anymore. Sorry.

Nobody except a few extreme ivory-tower types acts like they believe "all people are equal". The idea is absurd and should be rejected. (note rejecting it doesn't require HBD; you can believe that all people are born exactly equal -- also absurd -- and still not believe "all people are equal")

Some do believe it, and for the others it may be a signal, a, not the, pilot light to enable distributed identification of friend/foe and spontaneous cooperation.

In a similar way to how noone really believes in speed limits. If it says 50, I know my car car physically exceed that and even a few mph over it won't necessarily result in a fine or stop, even if directly measured. It does, however, act as signal to enable spontaneous cooperation of a certain type and in a certain direction, in tbis analogies case to not go too much faster than 50 mph (perhaps even a 10% tolerance for measurement error, depending on country and jurisdiction).

Professing all.people to be equal is, I think, similar to this. Both a havels greengrocer flag in the window, and an anchor of the overton window, and it's ideological internal counterpart, to enable apontnaous cooperation of a certain type, to drive actions in a certain direction likely to give results with, use methods accepted or liked by, etc to those who might profess the, known false, belief in equality.

You are also correct about equality not necessarily requiring HBD or invalidating. One could can add "epicycles" galore and still have a self consistent model, contact with reality notwithstanding.

Policing is entangled with other issues. If you favor more policing in situations like this, you need to give up disparate impact, for instance, and that's used by the left in a lot of contexts outside policing.

I'm curious what you think "disparate impact" means in this context.

That policing is bad, because the criminals caught are disproportionately black.

I meant re the nonpolicing issues you mentioned.

That other things are bad because they disproportionately include or exclude black people. Surely you're aware of the idea as applied to schools, jobs, or even national parks.

That's where your argument breaks down. I know many people who are left of center who are skeptical of hiring processes that disproportionately affect black people for, arguably, no good reason (eg: jobs that require a college degree for no apparent reason) or spending on state parks in the wilderness instead of local parks, etc, but who have little problem with enforcing criminal law, because there is good reason. (And of course there is a distinction between enforcing criminal law and particular practices of the criminal justice, some of which might have disparate impact [possible example: the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity]).

So, yes, it is perfectly possible to update re criminal enforcement without updating re schools, jobs, parks, etc.

The world had social democrats before anyone had dreamt up disparate impact, and it will have social democrats once people forget about such a concept too.

You won't update; nobody ever does.

I don't know, I think my political views have changed somewhat in recent years. Less than a decade ago (I am relatively young) I would describe myself not dissimilar to OP, as a social democrat, albeit I never was 'woke'.

However, I find myself nowdays identifying far more with Catholic social teaching and political theory (e.g. Chesterton and distributionism, at least as ideals). I guess means I have become more conservative, though it's a very specific kind of conservative that's heterodox in modern political discourse.

Nybbler is, as often the case, correct. Understanding the crime problem requires understanding and accepting that the progressive project failed, and cannot be redeemed. As is prominently mentioned in the OP, he still believes the state can provide, "high quality education, healthcare, and public transit" to all its citizens. These thoughts are at odds with the goal of fixing crime, or reality, or both.

  1. High quality education is just middling education given to talented students. Students make the school, teachers barely do anything.

  2. High quality healthcare is state of the art healthcare, this is always expensive, being state of the art. Thus it cannot be free. Nor does it matter much. Reliable plumbing is 10x+ as important for life expectancy. Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.

  3. Public transit cannot be for all and be good. This is the progressive crime problem remade. Everything good in society must exclude the bad people forcefully. Over and over.

Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.

Increasingly this is the issue of the modern healthcare system, though. Massive expenditure to keep somebody going for an extra 3-4 years with minimal Quality of Life, without which the whole system would be eminently more practical.

stupidpol/anti-idpol is a thing. Freddie deBoer's huge readership consists of a lot of disaffected liberals and leftists who reject the identity politics of the far-left, while still supporting social safety nets and so on consistent with the social democrat position

Communism didn't have a great track record before idpol either. As bad as they are I would rather leave the DEI brigade in charge than give Freddie the chance to try Real Socialism.

in fairness I think a lot of these people are not actual communist and just want to turn the dial back to the 90s or so. Social democrats are not the same as democratic socialists. but communism/socialism has a bad track record overall but there are some exceptions such as China's hybridized system.

Freddie deBoer calls himself a Marxist and the stupidpol subreddit has "A Marxist Critique of Essentialism" as it's header. I guess there could be liberals against DEI but the thought leaders of the movement are old school communists.

The group of people who want to turn the dial back to the 90s are called Republicans.

What would you call someone like Andrew Sullivan who is obviously not a republican but opposes the woke? Also consider the fact that almost reddit communities that used to be far right-wing are almost all gone, so this has led to many on the moderate or even far right adapting by appropriating more left-wing themes not because they necessarily want Marxism but to prevent being banned.

If the threat of being banned is enough to adopt themes incompatible with their principles, good riddance to them then.

There are plenty of real-world countries that successfully implement the kind of social system I’m endorsing, from Singapore to Denmark to Germany to Japan. What these countries have in common is either (a) a high degree of social conformity, and/or (b), a state willing to get authoritarian on people who don’t toe the line (plus wealth etc., but that's something the US has in spades). Where I’m shifting my priors, especially in relation to the US, is on the critical importance of (b).

And in a lot of those places nonconformism is either inconceivable or banned even for people who aren’t making anything worse.

I think health care is very fraught when subject to comparison. For example, the US regime is highly influenced and controlled by the government (be it for the actual regulations on medical practices, indirectly by prioritizing expensive insurance via the tax code, directly by imposing a lot of rules under Medicare). It is also true that other countries manage a “public” system like Singapore but those countries have a lot of actually free market like principles. Then it is all confounding that you have different populations.

Long story short, it might be difficult to tease out what is a good system.

I had a longer post I was going to write, but I don't have the energy or the morale.

I'm just going to say you're wrong in several respects. People do update, but turning into a rightist is not the only practical reaction to failures of liberal policy. Rightism has some pretty serious failure modes as well.

If the failures are in their face enough, they may oppose that particular policy temporarily. But they will draw no other conclusions about other policies based on the same premise. And, as soon as those failures are not in their face any more, they'll go right back to supporting the failed policies until they fail blatantly and obviously again.

The catchphrase to remember: "The worst thing about this incident is it makes it seem like the right has a point". Because the idea the right might actually have a point is anathema.

This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.

You're not wrong, you're just not describing anything more than unreflective tribalism. Leftists do it, rightists do it.

Of course I understand the point you are trying to make is "Yeah, but we're right. If we abandoned leftist policies and embraced rightist policies, things would be better."

Okay. Years of watching both fail does not convince me.

The right wing hasn't been failing on crime for years. We had left wing, soft on crime policies in the 70s and 80s, epitomized by Willie Horton, and crime was high. In the 90s we moved towards right wing policies like 3 Strikes laws and crime rates improved rapidly. Now left wing cities are going soft on crime by electing activist DAs and they are becoming unlivable and stores are closing. Right wing, harsh on crime policies demonstrably work in the United States and they do so consistently.

Both sides think they're right but both sides don't have the same track record.

Sure, my own views on crime are pretty "right wing." (And to be honest, they've only moved a little bit lately; I've never been a good liberal, really.)

I'm not a right-winger because I disagree with their views on many other things (economic, social, moral). I know the common right-wing rejoinder is "Well, it all goes hand in hand, if you don't buy into trad morality and right-wing economics, you must inevitably accept leftist social policy in all things." It's just a hair removed from Christians who claim that no moral government is possible without believing in Jesus.

This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.

It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side. Many people, noting their local (R) government isn't solving the problems it said it would and they're actually getting worse, will vote (D) next time (e.g. Jacksonville, FL). But the other side will never do that, short of crime as high as it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- and even then they'll go back.

It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side.

"Most of us are rational voters who will update our priors as necessary, but most of them are low-information NPCs."

Yes, I have been hearing this, from both sides, since I was old enough to vote.

If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes, at least not in a timespan of less than a generation, and a lot of shades of purple. If Democrats were never motivated by the perceived failures of Democratic leadership to vote Republican, Trump would not have won.

If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes

We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas. It might be very comforting to insist on symmetry, but it just isn't true. The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.

We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas.

Really? You think there is not a single Republican voter in Portland or San Francisco?

When polls indicate the population at large is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, it's impossible for Democrats to simultaneously have all blue areas locked down while no red areas are.

The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.

So I know that one of your ongoing themes is that the game is rigged, leftists have already won, and they're going to stomp on your face forever.

If Trump wins again (an event I consider unlikely but not impossible at this point), will that update your priors?

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There hasn't been a rightist government in Anglo countries in living memory as far as I am aware, so seeing right wing policies implimented and failing is a surprise. Can you outline where and when? - roughly, no need to detail specific if low on morale and energy, just gesture in the vague direction if posisble please :-)

I suspect this will devolve into "No true rightist..." ("True conservativism has never been tried?"). But Reagan and Thatcher, off the top of my head (and arguably both Bush administrations).

I know no true rightist blah blah, but those seem in hindsight to be incredibly liberal governments. As a rule of thumb I'd say moderate, center right, socially conservative positions would include E.g., reintroducing criminal penalties including imprisonment terms for buggery and related offences - said here not to spark debate about that issue, but to highlight just how far outside the realm of actual serious policy positions moderate right wing view is from "right wing" governments.

Economically sortof laissez faire, sometimes, does not make a right wing government and that's the core of my contention here.

Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right? Reagan, the guy who signed one of the largest illegal immigration amnesties in U.S. history? Bush, the guy who championed No Child Left Behind? These are your “failed right-wing governments*?

Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right?

Yes, I do know that. Hence my comment about "No true rightist." I know rightists also believe that Clinton and Obama were left-wing, despite many, many policies they executed which were not remotely leftist.

If you tell me no government to the left of Mussolini or Pinochet is actually right-wing, then of course you won't be able to find many "right-wing governments" in the Anglo-sphere in living memory.

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The worst thing about this incident is it makes it seem like the right has a point

Yes, but the actual worst thing is the prejudice that the incident causes:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cMyKGNy3CI4

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