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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.
Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]
Links:
About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)
Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)
Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)
The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)
Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)
Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)
Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)
Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25
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Notes -
Not-so-short addendum
I try to do some basic fact-checking in these episodes. I've asked participants in previous Bailey episodes to provide sources for claims, and if they can't do so I edit that portion out of the episode. Around the 1:13 mark here I asked @Hoffmeister25 why Japan/S.Korea/Singapore do not have the same levels of police on civilian violence and he attributed it to lower testosterone levels, saying "The average Japanese man does have lower testosterone than the average American or Canadian white man, and certainly far lower than the average black man" and after we recorded I asked him for sources on this claim.
I did some basic googling and found a 2013 study in US teenagers that found Mexican-American males had the highest T, while blacks and whites had about the same amount. I also found a world map with results that are all over the place. Japan is about the same as the US, Brazil, and Israel. Western Europe is higher than all of those, and Holland in particular is very high. Uzbekistan is higher still but neighboring Kazakhstan is some of the lowest in the world. The guy who runs that site put it together by trawling through various individual studies and extrapolating and he's honest about the limitations of his methodology, but it's probably the best we have.
Hoffmeister sent me this listing that claims that Japanese men apparently have very high levels of ambient T but very low levels of active/bioavailable T. The listing unhelpfully doesn't include links but the study referenced was written about here. Keep in mind that I haven't looked at the methodology of any of the studies referenced, so who knows if they have other problems. Overall I don't see any clear or reliable evidence that would allow us to rank nationalities based on testosterone levels. I decided against cutting that segment out though because I basically interpreted Hoffmeister to be speaking figuratively rather than literally, where "high testosterone" should really be interpreted as "high masculine culture" (he's of course free to contest my framing).
With that out of the way, it was really refreshing to have a discussion on the criminal justice system with Hoffmeister. It was one of the few instances I recall where strong disagreements on policy could be fairly attributed to a difference in values, rather than a disagreement over logic or reality. He also came prepared to put me in my place with scrutinizing questions over my positions, something I wish happened more often.
I was happy to have participated in this discussion. This was my first time recording a podcast, and I feel like I now have a better understanding of the challenges of the format - primarily the way that it forces you to concisely and efficiently express your positions in order to maximize how many topics and lines of questioning can be fit into the allotted time. This is something I know I need to improve on, both in my writing and in my future podcasting endeavors, so this was a very useful opportunity for some self-scouting and practice.
This is to say nothing of the discussion itself, which I found very stimulating and helpful for clarifying and refining my own thoughts on a complicated issue! Yassine and Kulak are incisive thinkers with a deep well of relevant knowledge, so going toe-to-toe with them forced me to be on my game and to bring some research to the table. I only wish I’d done a better job of explicitly referencing certain specific pieces of information which would have been useful in bolstering my credibility - again, something I am now even more acutely aware that I need to work on for the next time that I get a chance to do a podcast!
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