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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths.

Ironically, in our rush to deem police as morally bad in 2020, traffic deaths rose from 10.99/100k in 2019 to 12.89 in 2021, around 8000 additional deaths, with no appreciable change in total miles traveled. It's pretty clear to me (and anecdotally, comes up in conversation occasionally as generally accepted) that they basically stopped enforcing traffic laws at the time, which has lead to more deaths than if police killings dropped to zero. And the number of murders went up quite a bit too. I'm fairly confident that, overall, Black Lives Matter has a negative count of (Black) lives saved, but I'm glad (/s) they feel good about their advocacy.

IMO one of these cases where systems are more complicated than they seem. Something about Chesterton and fences, even though I think there's substantial room for improvement in how we do policing and criminal justice overall.