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If you truly believe that will happen, I can only say I don't think you've been paying enough attention to politics the past decade. Nobody has ever changed their behavior for the better when their opponents smash the "defect" button, it simply galvanizes them to do the same thing in return. The last 10-20 years of US politics has just been a cycle of parties playing dirty with each other every chance they can, and it has only spiraled into worse and worse offenses. There's zero reason to believe that this time it'll have a positive impact because it'll send a message about incentives.
Trump did not lock up Hillary. There were no show trials with extreme penalties for Floyd rioters. The both-sidesism is wrong; the Democrats have been dishing it out a lot more than they've been taking it.
This is a total myth that was fabricated by the Right to excuse the absolutely inexcusable behavior of Trump supporters. If you spent the summer of 2020 watching Fox News point to a few high-profile incidences of police cowardice or listening to NPR's defund the police nonsense then it's understandable how you would get that impression. But if you watched local news or actually paid attention to what was happening you'd have seen that there was no shortage of people who were arrested and charged. Hell, here in Pittsburgh there were news reports on an almost weekly basis that consisted of a grainy photograph of people the police were looking for in connection to spray painting buildings, or throwing rocks at police, or some other minor crime that wouldn't even merit a mention in the newspaper let alone a media-assisted manhunt. I can't speak to this happening in every city, but I know the same was true for Los Angeles and Atlanta, and the Feds were looking for a ton of people as well, which is interesting considering that they only had jurisdiction over a small percentage of the total rioters.
The reason you didn't see many high-profile convictions is because the BLM protestors were at least smart enough to commit their crimes at night and make some attempt at concealing their identities. For all the effort police put into tracking these people down, if there's no evidence there's no evidence. To the contrary, the Capitol rioters decided to commit their crimes during the day, in one large group, in an area surrounded by video cameras. Then they posed for pictures and videos and posted it on social media. Were these people trying to get caught? Which brings me to the dismissals. Yes, a lot of the George Floyd riot cases were dismissed, and conservatives like to point to this as evidence of them being treated with kid gloves. But the prosecutors often had no choice. The tactics of the Pittsburgh Police (under the administration of Bill Peduto, no one's idea of a conservative) were to simply arrest everyone in the immediate vicinity the moment a demonstration started to get out of hand. Never mind that they didn't have any evidence that most of these people committed a crime. If a crowd throws water bottles at the police and they arrest everyone they can get their hands on, good like proving that a particular person threw something. Unless you have video or a cop who is able to testify, you're entirely out of luck. So they'd arrest a bunch of people and ten the DA "(Steven Zappala, no one's idea of a progressive) would drop the charges against the 90% against which they had no evidence. In any event, I didn't hear about Biden or any liberal governor offering to pardon any of these people.
Seriously. The Capitol rioters were morons operating under the assumption that their sugar daddy Trump would bail them out because he agreed with their politics. If he wanted to give clemency to people who got swept up in the crowd and trespasses where they shouldn't have, I could understand that. But by pardoning people who assaulted police officers, broke windows, and the like, he shows a complete disrespect for law enforcement and the rule of law. And all of it coming from a guy who is supposedly about law and order. It's absolutely disgraceful.
My man, the J6 investigation is the most expensive in DOJ history. They tracked down people's cell phones just for being geolocated somewhere in the general area and then combed through more video evidence than they would for 1000 murder trials just to pick people up. They then presented cases to DC juries that the person was geolocated in the area, so they must have committed a crime (the restricted area they have claimed is much larger than the building itself, and there is evidence that there were no guards at the doors of the building turning people away for most of the protest).
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This thread seems relevant, as does my post responding to it.
That is certainly part of it. But then, there's this:
Here's what it comes down to: Reds believe that our justice system is politically compromised, and it seems to me that they believe that because there is a very large stack of evidence that it is, in fact, politically compromised. You can disagree if you like, but their belief has grown sufficiently strong to allow them to coordinate the winning of elections and the exercise of bedrock power based on that belief. At some point, you and people like you are probably going to need to start taking those arguments seriously, simply out of simple pragmatism if nothing else.
Or to put it more succinctly, "no justice, no peace." Or what did you think that slogan meant?
What are the arguments that it is compromised? I don't know that I have seen a well laid argument. I have seen many piecemeal or specific cases that people bring up, but I have seen that from both sides, where evidence is cherry picked. In fact, it might be fair to say that in terms of public opinion, the justice system is pretty bad. No one is satisfied. Both sides can be correct even if they disagree on the problems (just as ADHD can be both over diagnosed and under diagnosed, to use an ACX example). I haven't seen a non-partisan (or even close to non-partisan) take, outside of Scott's recent post on prisons, which only scratches the surface of one part of the justoce system.
What would non-cherry-picked evidence look like? What separates cherry-picking from representative sampling?
Would it be cherry-picking to look at the Rittenhouse case? I don't think so, because it seems to me that the Rittenhouse case was typical of how the Justice System handled Red defendents. Ideally, we could discuss whether or not his treatment by the Justice System was legitimate or acceptable; my position is that it was neither. If you agreed with me on that assessment, we could then ask whether there are examples of pro-BLM actors engaging in similar behavior, and then looking at how they were handled by the Justice System. If we found that their treatment was typically much gentler than that applied to Rittenhouse, that would support my thesis. If we found that their treatment was generally similar, that would undermine my thesis.
Above, I laid out an attempt to do that, using "prominent cases of BLM-riot-related shootings" as the category. I noted that the pro-BLM shooters had clearly worse facts and clearly better outcomes in general. Which Red Tribe protestors got caught red-handed committing federal destructive device felonies, and had their prosecutors recommend a sentence well below the floor of the applicable sentence? This generalizes; how many Progressives have been prosecuted under the Logan act? Did the FBI illegally spy on the Obama or Clinton or Biden or Harris campaigns? Confronted with a very large mass of data, what approach is better than starting with the outliers and working from there?
My argument would be that for the last several years, Red Tribe defendants have received unusually harsh treatment, and Blue Tribe defendants have received unusually lenient treatment. An obvious counter-argument would be to present cases of Blue Tribe defendants receiving unusually harsh treatment, given the available facts. Do you have any at all?
Things like general statistics, trends that can be gained from a large volume/scale of evidence, while being able to sort for other factors that are justice ajacent. I am not arguing a case for the "Blue Tribe". I am genuinely asking if you know of an overview that attempts to be non-partisan. The blue tribe talking points are systemic, but also clearly lop-sided and cherry picked.
Did you read the ACX article On Prison and Crime? (sorry, I would link it but I am a luddite and am on a phone). That is the sort of overview I find compelling, in part because the ground floor view of the justice system is absolute chaos. Alternatively, case studies might suffice, but non-partisanship is important to me because I am non-partisan myself and I don't follow news cycles.
I am also way less interested in politically big cases than what affects average people. What happens in my neighbourhood (and other neighbourhoods more generally) is way more important to me than a politically charged case, but unfortunately a lot less interesting to talk about. I am skeptical that the most newsworthy cases make good case studies because they are, by definition, exceptional. I am more interested in how crime and punishment impacts life more generally - economics, safety, etc. Questions like, "can the justice system be more efficient?" Or, "if we change x about the justice system, what are the pros and cons that will result?" In theory, those things are answerable, but the discussion is rarely about that.
Well then you should be particularly interested in the prosecution of people who the left tries to protect. If you are looking at preventable deaths, young black men are both the worst drivers and the most likely to commit homicide. If you are looking to protect your pocketbook, they are also the most likely to drive without insurance and commit burglary or theft.
If you are truly nonpartisan, you learn to hate the left organically because they just lie to you all the time. The right gets called various names for telling you the truth.
I tend not to hate anyone, especially people who take a different political stance because they think it is better for their community. I don't agree with them, but I see no reason to hate them.
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This seems to me to be a good-faith question, but do you think this sort of thing is possible to do, in some general sense?
From 2014 through 2020, Blue Tribe collectively made a large-scale push for reform of our criminal justice and policing systems. How should we assess that movement and its consequences?
This graph is probably my favorite single piece of data from the last decade or two. It seems obvious to me that "how many unarmed black men are shot by the Police per year" is a question of direct and very significant relevance to our recent politics, and that this question is a reasonable proxy for tribal views on law enforcement policy. It's also obvious to me, from looking at the statistics, that the correct answer is "about ten".
This graph is probably my second-favorite piece of of data. It shows a recent dramatic increase in violent crime, with a clear inflection point coinciding with Ferguson and the founding of the BLM movement and another massive inflection point coinciding with the Floyd riots (and with COVID and the attendant lockdowns, to be fair, but that doesn't really change the calculus much given the tribal salience of lockdown policy).
What I get from these two graphs is that Blue Tribe was catastrophically misinformed about at least one of the most salient details of the policing/criminal justice question, and that their efforts at revolutionary change of the criminal justice system resulted in a massive and incredibly destructive crime wave. I'll readily admit that other conclusions might be drawn, but it seems to me that to the extent that data drives discussion in any meaningful sense, this thesis ought to be, at a minimum, a major part of that discussion. I do not think it's possible to name a more significant intervention in the criminal justice system in living memory, and that intervention neatly coincided with the worst increase in violent crime rates ever recorded.
Instead, what I observe is that this thesis is entirely absent from most intertribal discussions on the topic, and attempts to introduce it are generally fruitless. And maybe this is reasonable; maybe the evidence really isn't strong enough. But if this evidence isn't strong enough, where's the stronger evidence that's supposed to be driving the discussion? These graphs are my favorites because they are unusually clear and unusually strong, and because they demonstrate a result I could and did predict in advance based on historical precedent. What does better evidence look like, and what precisely makes it "better"?
The question generalizes. For example, take the debate over racism generally: if we accept the Blue Tribe idea that racism causes bad outcomes for black people, then in a nation of 50 states and 300 million people and across, say, the last three decades, we ought to be able to detect a "racism gradient" in the outcomes of local Black populations. That is to say, heavily Progressive areas with strongly progressive policies ought to deliver superior outcomes for Blacks to strongly conservative policies in heavily conservative areas. The existence of such a gradient is an axiom in much Progressive discourse. Yet, near as I can tell, such a gradient does not exist to any significant extent, and this fact has no measurable impact on the national conversation.
Or take gun control. Between the 80s and now, we've seen massive changes in firearms policy nationwide, with plenty of local divergence for purposes of comparison. Over that time the average rifle changed from a bolt-action deer rifle to a high-capacity semi-auto AR15, and the average pistol went from a .38 revolver to a high-capacity 9mm semi-auto. Over that time, concealed carry went from vanishingly rare to legal in a majority of states with millions carrying daily. And over that time, violent crime dropped precipitously and then bottomed out at a level much, much lower than in the hieghts of the 70s and 80s, despite uniform progressive predictions that failure to implement stringent gun control would result in a massive increase in violent crime. Again, this split between predictions and observed results has no appreciable impact on the national conversation.
Nor are other fields better. I've more or less given up on the field of economics, given my experience with the predictions of the field. Ditto for environmentalism and Climate Change, ditto for educational policy, and so on and on. COVID was a recent example where, if data could drive a debate, the debate should have been driven by data. My assessment is that it was not.
I'm entirely open to being wrong, for what it's worth. Where do you see conversations being driven by data? What's the model we should be following?
Presumably [this article?](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-than-you
Yeah, that's the article I meant. I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks for the links. I agree that that is compelling evidence, and I wish there was more stuff like that at the centre of discussions from both sides. My impression is that the left tends to supply evidence of social problems but comes up with a lot of counterproductive solutions to make people feel better without much material change - dealing with the most outrageous problems instead of the ones that are at the root of the matter (which are much harder to address). And you are right, a lot of people are not willing to address evidence if it is not in their side's favour. But that kind of loses sight of the goal, which should be to figure out what works and what doesn't (or at least, I would think so).
Well, things like having a wide scope, multiple data points, being able to compare multiple sets of data, considering context (what policies changed? Funding? Cultural/demographic changes?). And going beyond that, making hypotheses about how changes in those factors and context would change outcomes, which allows for the development of constructive changes for the future. Of course, all of these things aren't always available, but I think considering how much information exists in the world now, we should be placing value on analysis and data collection to actually better social conditions (rather than data collection that furthers more selfish end games, or flyong blind). It's ironic to me that now that so much data is (potentially) available, people are more interested in the highest profile/heated things that divert attention from basic government functioning.
My government, for example, just stopped tracking the number of people who die while waiting for a medical procedure. That seems easy to collect, and also really useful when trying to gauge how successful your healthcare system is! This inspires a lot of cynisism in me, and very little confidence in what they are doing, even if they end up doing a good job - it's what a deceitful government would do if they wanted to cover up poor health care management.
The opposite is taking measures to promote transparency, which is exactly what people who are serving the public should do, in my opinion. Transparency is not a partisan issue, but when people, whether they are politicians or their supporters, act unscrupulously then it is clearly in their best interest to be as opaque as possible. The issue is that opacity is seen as a good thing when it is on the good side, and bad when it's on the other side. But there is no way to tell which side is good when they are both opaque.
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There is no justice system at the average-people level. Just a system that you insert people into and they get chewed up to various degrees mostly depending on how much they say the right words and/or keep their mouth shut at the right points. The only way not to lose is to not get involved. But this part of the system is not the part Red Tribe sees as politically compromised, and pointing to it as a response to Red Tribe complaints looks a lot like misdirection.
Please, assume I know nothing about what the red tribe thinks. I do not live in the USA, and I do not really know what the red tribe complaints are, I suppose. I thought it was something like tough vs lenient on crime. I wandered into this post because I used to participate on the old motte subreddit (I still post in the wellness thread here), and the inaugaration events got me thinking.
I assume most people who are affected by the justice system are everyday people. They are the people who shoplift, or have something stolen, or have to deal with drug addicts, or speak to police officers, or feel that their neighbourhood is generally safe (or not).
I guess you are referring exclusively to political crimes or crimes that are comitted for the purpose of affecting politics, which is a fair thing to focus on. But again, there are arguments from both sides, and I don't really know how to gauge or weigh things outside of everyone being extremely dissatisfied, which isn't a good sign. It's tough for me to take evidence or arguments without a lot of skepticism because they are so one sided and seem to just go back and forth, further and further into ancestral feuds. Or that's what it feels like. The actual time frame is just a few years.
That's not really your problem nor should you be obliged to dig up information. I find a lot of political discussions disheartening because there is very little discussion of what works, and a lot of discussion about how bad the other guys are, which is not what I care about (and personally I think is extremely counter productive to finding a viable solution, which is maybe what you sense in my initial comment). I think the discussion culture here has changed quite a lot, in general and here.
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It's a myth that Trump didn't lock up Hillary? It's a myth that there were no show trials with extreme penalties for Floyd rioters? No, neither of those are myths. Not even rioters in Washington D.C. ended up facing long times in prison based on novel legal theories. Not even the Kavanaugh protestors who buttonholed Jeff Flake got charged with disrupting an official proceeding.
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I'll just say that this is blatant historical revisionism and leave it at that. The usual flip between "it's a glorious uprising for racial justice" (and they always used the word "uprising"), to "it never happened, Republicans made it all up, it was a cop riot"
Anyone have that screenshot of Robert Evans bragging about burning down that police station? He was mad the media were excusing it as an accident when he wanted credit for the "successful operation." I'll care about "norms" when he and the CHAZ murderers are rotting in prison. Until then my only concern is getting a better class of shock troop to fight the next corporate-sponsored "uprising" in my town
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Nah, you’re operating under a myth here
https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-sentences-second-new-york-lawyer-molotov-cocktail-case-2023-01-27/
One year sentence, for attempting to burn police officers to death.
J6 trespassing grannies get decades long sentences by comparison
There is no argument here, the double standards are incredibly obvious
Nah, but we had liberal mayors ordering police to stand down. Kind of hard to make arrests when you’re not even allowed to do so, crazy how that works
Oh, who was raising funds for their bail by the way?
Just to point out the police car they molotoved was empty as your own link states in the first paragraph. Still bad but not murdering police officers bad.
Did they know it was empty?
Presumably, it had already been vandalized with the windows smashed out as mentioned in the linked article. Seems unlikely from the facts described they wouldn't know it was empty.
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Can you link me any non-violent Jan 6er, granny or otherwise, who got one decade or more?
Edit: I'm asking this in good faith, and I will preemptively agree that anyone getting 10 years for walking around the capital on Jan6 is completely tucked and a travesty.
Jason Barnett was a 60 year old who got 4 years for being photographed with his feet on Nancy pelosis desk
Thomas J Patterson was a cop in off duty who got 7 years for basically the same thing as Barnett, being photographed in the capitol, ie trespassing
Possibly excessive. Definitely not a "decade". Not sure why you think exaggeration helps your point. I was genuinely sitting here thinking "Holy shit, they gave J6ers 10 years for trespassing? That's insane. Wtf." Now I'm left thinking "Don't believe the **** J6 supporters say."
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Echoes of the beginning of the end for republican Rome.
The Optimates believed that by pulling out all the stops to strike down Gracchus they could silence the movement he represented and return to the status quo ante.
Instead they got a new Gracchus who was both angrier and less restrained.
Tiberius and the senate both had blood on their hands; this was a pissing match between two factions breaking the mos maiorum. Particularly Tiberius’ deposition of a fellow tribune.
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Very much so. I can only hope that people will learn from history and stop repeating it, but I don't have a lot of hope. People are blinded by hatred.
The first lesson of history is that nobody ever learns any lessons from history.
And the second lesson should be that you can learn as many contradictory lessons from history as you care to look for, which no one ever bothers to after the first lesson they want.
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