Urban Segregation; Ed West on the advantages of strict order in cities; Jonathan Haidt on boys in retreat; Tyler Cowen on University Presidents on free speech
I worked at Syracuse University for about 20 years (I am currently retired) Here is a letter from our Chancellor.
Office of the Chancellor
MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023
Dear Members of the Syracuse University Community:
Over the weekend, I received formal letters from several elected officials, including members of Congress and Gov. Kathy Hochul, asking me to consider, and in some cases respond to this question: Would advocating for the genocide of Jews violate Syracuse University’s codes of conduct? The answer is yes.
To our whole Orange community—our students, faculty, staff, alumni, families, and friends—I want to explain why.
If anyone advocates for the genocide of Israelis or Jews, or any other group—including Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims—the targeted group has good reason to question whether that individual can faithfully meet their responsibility to all members of our community. That responsibility includes caring about the safety and well-being of all who are Orange.
Advocacy for the genocide of a group based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, or race requires Syracuse University to investigate and impose appropriate accountability. The University has disciplinary processes to address such violations of our standards. Those processes and outcomes comply with federal and state law.
But this is much more than a matter of law. It is a moral issue. As Chancellor, I have a fundamental obligation to the well-being of all our students, faculty, and staff. Regardless of what the First Amendment might permit in terms of hateful speech and conduct, as a private institution we should sometimes expect more of the members of our university community. We should expect that our community members will refuse to advocate for the death of a group of people based on their identity.
I wish the answers to all questions raised by recent events were this clear to me. During this stressful time, many are gravely concerned about the war. And I am acutely aware there remain concerns for free speech and academic freedom, including a fear that events in the world and at universities will lead administrators to regulate a broad range of speech in the name of student safety. I believe these are valid concerns, which we need to continue to work through as a community. In particular, I believe the time is here for our university to articulate a shared statement on free speech and academic freedom.
Honoring our responsibilities as citizens of this University has been stressful for so many of you since Oct. 7. Almost to a person, our community has been remarkably responsible and compassionate toward others. Thank you. I ask that we do our best to continue this, extending respect, empathy, and grace to each other in the time ahead.
How much public money and tax benefit does Syracuse get? How """private""" are they, really? I think this is one of the "things they don't like to talk about" for the Libertarians, that it isn't always so easy to draw bright lines between state and private when the government is paying so many of the bills.
If Syracuse is willing to give up on public funding they can make it against the code of conduct to play Christmas music on campus radio for more than twelve days prior to the 25th for all I care, and I would probably send them a small donation for doing so!
I worked as a substitute teacher recently. One glaring feature of the classrooms I taught in: the difficulty that boys have sitting and listening for 6 hours per day, 5 days per week.
Schedule for 3rd -5th grade
8am: Arrive at school after sitting in car.
Sit at desk, listen and participate.
12pm: Sit for 20 min at lunch, eat and talk.
12:20pm: Recess for 20 minutes.
One PE session for 25 minutes each day - time varies throughout the week.
Sit at desk, listen and participate.
3pm: Commute home, sitting in car or go to extended care.
5pm: Sit in desk for most of extended care except for 20 minute recess and 5 minute snack break.
1st and 2nd graders receive an additional 10 minute of recess.
6th-8th grade receive an additional 5 minutes of PE.
What do kids do when they get home? Not sure, but it doesn’t seem like they’re playing outside in the neighborhood. I think many sit inside.
Many of the teachers are overweight. Almost all teachers are women. The PE teacher is usually male. Rough play at recess is controlled by women.
For boys, there’s a big problem here. Too much sitting in a very controlled environment.
This is a huge problem. Boys need more exercise and more freedom to play rough.
At the high school level, there’s a similar but different problem. There’s too much emphasis on varsity sports and too little exercise for most students. Varsity sports seem to be the centerpiece of high school culture. Academic culture is off to the side. Those not able to make the team, become spectators, rebels or something else. It doesn’t seem like healthy environment.
Another way of looking at it is that "academic culture" shouldn't be a thing in High School except for maybe the top 10 or 20 percent of the students, and so actually the problem is not that there is too little but 5 times too much of it already.
The nerdy kids, the brainy kids, were easy to spot in my old (elite, in both sports and academics) school district. The requirement was one year of PE, and they met it by taking a PE class in summer school. Hopefully some of the activities were fun, or field trips; often I would see them troop down my street, chatting animatedly, not looking at all gloomy - they were going to the mall. I guess that was the exercise, walking, maybe to eat lunch at the food court.
A lot of leftist Jews have written about how they are divorcing from the SJW left recently. It seems to be the hip new thing.
However, in all these pieces I've yet to see a specific call to action (other than cutting of donations to colleges that won't punish anti-Jew protests). Some link it to DEI, but nobody seems to have a plan for getting rid of DEI. Most admit they are going to keep on voting Democrat. A lot of them accuse DeSantis of being just as bad/worse, even though that's the only example I can think of where DEI got shut down. It's not clear how they expect to change things then in the most immediate sense.
My answer to Sternstein's question would be "a group that reliably votes and donates Democrat started taking fire from the same mob that has been hounding Republicans for decades."
That isn't quite what he asked, and neither the "No enemies to the left, no friends to the right" phenomenon nor its analogue with position in the oppression-points hierarchy constitutes new information.
But it's also kind of the wrong question. While hearings pretend to be about "discovering new information" we don't have to play along with the pretense and we can ask about their other functions and purposes and whether any of those were accomplished and might be beneficial.
The main use of hearings like this is not so much "revelation" and to make people unable to ignore the evidence supporting a revelation that should have occurred to them a long time ago. That is, to make what those who were willing and able to see already knew but in public still "plausibly-but-fraudulently deniable", now undeniable, to everyone.
What these hearings did was provide plenty of footage of elite college leaders behaving in completely ridiculous and *undeniably* embarrassing ways. People go about their lives with certain suspicions that something is deeply awry, but they can't quite say what and aren't able to hold all the evidence or case why in their heads, so they tend to give the benefit of the doubt to high status people and institutions, no matter how unworthy they are of that benefit. And if you propose to such a person that all public funds be cut off from such places, they will balk and think such radical measures aren't justified.
But then they see these people unable to explain or justify anything and they *know* the rot is real. And now they're at least slightly more willing to listen about your "defund the rotten colleges" ideas without reflexing recoiling or thinking they are extreme.
Yeah, "They are just doing what their lawyers tell them to do" is true maybe a little bit of an excuse, but also, people know that going into "lawyer-told-me-to-talk-nonsense" is what happens when you can't give an honest explanation off the cuff without getting into trouble, because, you honestly deserve to get in trouble!
So, when these leaders seem to be responding in literal real life like the whole joke meme about them all being empty-headed video-game NPC robots incapable of carrying on an intelligent conversation and only able to repeat the same scripted lines over and over no matter how nonsensical it is for them to do so that helps provide the ordnance to change the whole political landscape, to the formerly unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
See, I saw it as evidence of their triumph - that they felt *so little* need to bother polishing up the words they put in the nonentities’ mouths. (Lawyers couldn’t BS better than that? Gotta be kidding.)
Their arrogance is total because they have won.
And they will not lose the folks who did the most as the architects of the underdogma. They know this.
A handful of sentimental old men will pull donations.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome against Jews grew out of Dem DS against Trump, which grew from DDS against Bush, labeled as Bush Derangement Syndrome.
But it is the Dems who are deranged, full of hate based on lies and half truths.
Like the NYT lie that Israel blew up a hospital and killed 500.
Arnold Kling has only a mild case, I’d guess far more of his Dem supporting synagogue believe NYT lies more strongly. Just as Kling can’t bear to believe the 2020 election was stolen, most Dem supporting Jews will rationalize continued support for Dems, or at least refuse to look rationally at Obama, Trump, and Biden actions and accept that Trump was better for Jews.
The NYT supplies that DDS market with rationalizations, lies but mostly half truths.
To attempt to answer Sternstein's question: I think people really were in some sense offended by the fact that representatives of these prestigious institutions couldn't come up with better lies or equivocations for public consumption. Either they're treating us with contempt, in that they're throwing in our faces that what the public thinks doesn't matter to them, or they're not really very bright people to begin with, in which case the prestige bestowed by these institutions is bunk. Either way, I think it was perfectly sensible to be disgusted.
Your last paragraph here is key. Darkly humorous that these presidents are being brought down by giving the factually correct answer to an idiot basically asking "If you kill somebody, is that first degree murder? Yes or no??"
Of course their hypocrisy about other forms of free expression has hurt their credibility. But while a perfect free speech record would have changed their reception with the Arnold Klings of the world, I doubt it would ultimately matter to a Bari Weiss, and I'm certain it wouldn't matter to a Mike Johnson (such a principled libertarian that he used to defend criminal penalties for consensual sex).
Agree with your comments on the secondary impacts of crime. But the causes of crime in the US are certainly not our lenient criminal-justice system. On the contrary, we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world and have harsher sentences than just about all of our European peers with less crime. Japan is a good model for other reasons: They build far more housing than us; they have far fewer guns; they have better social safety nets; and, as you note, they have more psychiatric beds. They also have a much older population, which is problematic in many ways but has a large positive impact on crime stats. Even the drug situation is misleading. Yes, Japan has fewer heavy drug users, but it has a huge number of problematic drinkers--at least once you adjust for their much more elderly population. Those alcoholics are more likely to be functional though, because they’re not homeless (housing is cheaper) and they’re not mentally ill (psych beds are available).
The right incarceration rate has nothing to do with whatever levels are typical for other really different countries and instead should sit around the margin where another man-year of incarceration doesn't produce an appreciable rise in public order and safety because those are already at very high levels. Which, ahem, is not how anyone would describe many US urban areas, and lately, especially not retail store owners.
In El Salvador Bukele basically tripled their incarceration rate practically overnight - to over double the US rate (depending how you measure this stuff) - and, surprise, surprise, surprise, the murder rate fell by 60% and the people cheered.
I largely agree with this, but when it comes to deterring crime in the US it's important to keep in mind that our sentences are long but the odds of being caught and convicted are low. The latter is more important to deterrence. Generally speaking I think we should cut down the sentences (in many cases replacing them with e-carceration) while also putting a lot more energy and money into investigative policing and surveillance.
Definitely agree that clearance rates are FAR more important than severity of punishment when it comes to deterring crime. But I think law enforcement in general is overrated as an explanation for rising and falling crime rates. Changes in our criminal justice system don’t explain the HUGE drop in crime since the 1990s; they don’t explain the pandemic spike in crime across red and blue jurisdictions and across Europe; and they don’t explain the current drop in crime. To me, those things are more accurately explained by the factors in my post above.
Well the pandemic spike was almost certainly caused by the post-Floyd unrest, I don't love admitting that but the evidence is really strong. Probably one of the mediators was reduction in policing (or at least a perception of reduced policing). I don't think it's accurate to say that there was much of a pandemic spike in (violent) crime across Europe (see eg https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike).
But yeah for a variety of reasons that I don't pretend to fully understand, the US is uniquely violent for a rich country despite policing harder than most of the other ones. Some of it is cultural, some of it is about concentrated poverty, some of it is about guns, some of it is American exceptionalism that I'm not sure how to explain.
I’m not at all convinced that the protests caused the pandemic crime spike in every major US city regardless of whether they had significant protests. But even if we assume that’s the case, the far more significant change in crime is post-1990. That’s simply not explained by changes in our criminal-justice system. Nor is the difference between US and European or Japanese crime rates explained by policing.
Our diversity explains why we have a worse social safety net (we don’t like to help people who look different than us), more expensive housing (we zone to keep “others” out), harsher and less effective criminal-justice solutions (it’s easier to harshly punish “others”), and fewer psych beds. But it’s those mechanisms that explain the disorder--not diversity qua diversity, of course.
Sorry to keep questioning you, but viva la dialogue…
I believe safety nets in the US are in absolute levels larger than most developed nations. This doesn’t exactly contradict your point though that our nets could be even wider and cushier with less diversity. People are tribal and often wary of different cultures. I would argue though that smaller and smarter safety nets are one of the best things we could do to eliminate dependency and destructive incentives.
I don’t know how much of housing regulations are related to keeping "others" out, though it is surely a factor. I know that, for us, living in Red states has meant that since the politicians can’t be counted on to control derelicts, graffiti, crime and uncivil behavior that we specifically buy that via our neighborhood selection. I do not want "affordable" housing (multi family rentals) within a few miles of us in San Diego county. I certainly wouldn’t want my kids going to school with a "violent underclass" with dysfunctional cultural habits. The most important factor in school choice is the average caliber of student. Elite neighborhoods is an imperfect solution, but a solution just the same. That said, I would expect most areas wouldn’t be so stuffy as us, as most people simply can’t afford to be so.
I guess I agree that it is easier to punish "others" in ways that are unnecessarily harsh and ineffective, and that this is foolish. That said, I am for substantially stronger enforcement and much longer sentences for repeat offenders. The best solution to crime is to remove the criminals. We need to do more of this, not less, though with respect and compassion.
"This means that, contrary to expectations, residents of large cosmopolitan areas have less exposure to a socioeconomically diverse range of individuals."
"Too many influential people here like squalor and crime, or are unwilling to countenance the measures required to reduce it..."
Aren't these two things related to each other? Very influential people live in large cosmopolitan areas for the most part.
They are absolutely related. What this study says is, "Influential people are able to effectively segregate themselves from the consequences of their influence on policy." Try compelling judges and district attorneys to live with their families in the least safe neighborhood under their jurisdiction and see the revolution unfold before your eyes in about 10 minutes.
I think both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky nailed the problem. Nietzsche was in favor (sortof) and Dostoyevsky against of the overwhelming impact of Nilhilism. This slice from forward to Eugene Rose’s “Nihilism - the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age”.
“Nihilism—the belief that there is no Absolute Truth, that all truth is relative—is, Eugene affirmed, the basic philosophy of the 20th century: “It has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any ‘front’ on which it may be fought.”
This rejection of ‘truth’ now so widespread, it doesn’t seem a philosophical idea, just ‘the way things are’, just truth.
“The heart of this philosophy, he said, was “expressed most clearly by Nietzsche and by a character of Dostoyevsky in the phrase: ‘God is dead, therefore man becomes God and everything is possible.’”
These are world famous thinkers. They foresaw the result of the acceptance of nihilism and rejection of Bibical ideas.
Why are current thinkers, present analysts so . . . so . . . surprised, shocked?
Almost no one affirmatively says that truth is relative. Quite the opposite. Feminists believe that it is absolutely 100% true that women are oppressed by a patriarchy. Woke people believe it is absolutely 100% true that black people do poorly in the United States because of pervasive racism and white privilege. Many people on "the right" believe it is absolutely 100% true that "the left" hates America.
The universities are not supposed to be allowed to do a lot of the things that they regularly do, and the federal government really does have the right to strip away their
advantaged tax status privileges (not to mention the vast subsidies from loans, grants, etc.), but the government including the courts has been very reluctant to apply the law as written in any circumstance other than in when the university engages in active racial discrimination (See Bob Jones University v. United States).
However, under Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, 481 U.S. 615, (1987) and some other cases like it, Jews can bring civil rights cases for discrimination as long as they fulfill all the elements of the claim. A lot of the strongest possible claims involve more than just arguing that there was an uncomfortable environment. The federal government issued a lot of guidance letters etc. recently putting universities on notice. I don't know a lot about these kinds of civil rights claims, but my thought is that the whole system only really can survive if the majority "thinks" like the old white majority that the law was designed to equalize all the minorities to as far as their substantive rights. The regime's success at diminishing that majority also makes the mechanism used to achieve that far less workable.
“... their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.”
Yet they seem to have no qualms about sending in SWAT teams when someone uses the wrong pronoun. The university presidents lied to Congress when they said that their schools are dedicated to free speech and open inquiry. They are not.
Schools should either readopt such policies or they should consistently enforce their hate speech rules. The current selective enforcement smacks of indoctrination and intimidation.
The demands to “gas the Jews” and the like now heard on too many of our college campuses have given the game away. One can hardly claim that students need to be able to retreat to safe spaces with puppies and hot chocolate whenever they hear a discouraging word while, at the same time, cheering the tender little dears on as they call for genocide and verbally and physically attack anyone wearing a yarmulke.
The real problem in universities is now and long has been their illegal discrimination against hiring Republican professors. With almost no successful lawsuits fighting against this illegal, anti-diverse, anti-inclusive college behavior. Tough to prove. So tough Republicans should fight in court while expecting to lose.
And they should require tax exempt edu orgs to have at least 30% Republican hires, to deserve their huge loophole reduction in tax. Those who won’t include Republicans should pay their fair share like normal businesses. Also 30% Des should be hired, but at the 90% level or so today, no new Dems would be needed.
Very related to the higher SES segregation of big cities, which makes it so easy for Birds of a Feather to Flock Together. Many colleges are allowing segregation, and even having race based segregated graduations. While their methodology of visual contact for mixing is better than other data dependent mass studies, the data is still not good enough. Upper class on the NY subway is only barely exposed to the poor, tho perhaps more than in a middle class church, and far more than on an expensive golf course. Most folk do not trust, nor want any more than the minimum contact, with most fellow strangers.
Nice places are high trust places, which are always low crime places. As in the Ed West quote.
I worked at Syracuse University for about 20 years (I am currently retired) Here is a letter from our Chancellor.
Office of the Chancellor
MONDAY, DEC. 11, 2023
Dear Members of the Syracuse University Community:
Over the weekend, I received formal letters from several elected officials, including members of Congress and Gov. Kathy Hochul, asking me to consider, and in some cases respond to this question: Would advocating for the genocide of Jews violate Syracuse University’s codes of conduct? The answer is yes.
To our whole Orange community—our students, faculty, staff, alumni, families, and friends—I want to explain why.
If anyone advocates for the genocide of Israelis or Jews, or any other group—including Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims—the targeted group has good reason to question whether that individual can faithfully meet their responsibility to all members of our community. That responsibility includes caring about the safety and well-being of all who are Orange.
Advocacy for the genocide of a group based on religion, nationality, ethnicity, or race requires Syracuse University to investigate and impose appropriate accountability. The University has disciplinary processes to address such violations of our standards. Those processes and outcomes comply with federal and state law.
But this is much more than a matter of law. It is a moral issue. As Chancellor, I have a fundamental obligation to the well-being of all our students, faculty, and staff. Regardless of what the First Amendment might permit in terms of hateful speech and conduct, as a private institution we should sometimes expect more of the members of our university community. We should expect that our community members will refuse to advocate for the death of a group of people based on their identity.
I wish the answers to all questions raised by recent events were this clear to me. During this stressful time, many are gravely concerned about the war. And I am acutely aware there remain concerns for free speech and academic freedom, including a fear that events in the world and at universities will lead administrators to regulate a broad range of speech in the name of student safety. I believe these are valid concerns, which we need to continue to work through as a community. In particular, I believe the time is here for our university to articulate a shared statement on free speech and academic freedom.
Honoring our responsibilities as citizens of this University has been stressful for so many of you since Oct. 7. Almost to a person, our community has been remarkably responsible and compassionate toward others. Thank you. I ask that we do our best to continue this, extending respect, empathy, and grace to each other in the time ahead.
Sincerely,
Chancellor Kent Syverud
Office of the Chancellor
Crouse-Hinds Hall, Suite 600
900 South Crouse Ave.
Syracuse, NY 13244
If Syracuse enforces this, they will lose a First Amendment suit.
Edit: Oops, no they won't, I thought they were public but they're actually private.
How much public money and tax benefit does Syracuse get? How """private""" are they, really? I think this is one of the "things they don't like to talk about" for the Libertarians, that it isn't always so easy to draw bright lines between state and private when the government is paying so many of the bills.
If Syracuse is willing to give up on public funding they can make it against the code of conduct to play Christmas music on campus radio for more than twelve days prior to the 25th for all I care, and I would probably send them a small donation for doing so!
I'm sympathetic to your general line of thought but the difference does matter to the purely legal question.
But yeah I don't like it when the "private" ones do something re speech that would be unconstitutional if a public one did it.
I worked as a substitute teacher recently. One glaring feature of the classrooms I taught in: the difficulty that boys have sitting and listening for 6 hours per day, 5 days per week.
Schedule for 3rd -5th grade
8am: Arrive at school after sitting in car.
Sit at desk, listen and participate.
12pm: Sit for 20 min at lunch, eat and talk.
12:20pm: Recess for 20 minutes.
One PE session for 25 minutes each day - time varies throughout the week.
Sit at desk, listen and participate.
3pm: Commute home, sitting in car or go to extended care.
5pm: Sit in desk for most of extended care except for 20 minute recess and 5 minute snack break.
1st and 2nd graders receive an additional 10 minute of recess.
6th-8th grade receive an additional 5 minutes of PE.
What do kids do when they get home? Not sure, but it doesn’t seem like they’re playing outside in the neighborhood. I think many sit inside.
Many of the teachers are overweight. Almost all teachers are women. The PE teacher is usually male. Rough play at recess is controlled by women.
For boys, there’s a big problem here. Too much sitting in a very controlled environment.
This is a huge problem. Boys need more exercise and more freedom to play rough.
I'm amazed how little recess kids get at school these days.
If they made half the day recess I think it would be a huge improvement.
At the high school level, there’s a similar but different problem. There’s too much emphasis on varsity sports and too little exercise for most students. Varsity sports seem to be the centerpiece of high school culture. Academic culture is off to the side. Those not able to make the team, become spectators, rebels or something else. It doesn’t seem like healthy environment.
Another way of looking at it is that "academic culture" shouldn't be a thing in High School except for maybe the top 10 or 20 percent of the students, and so actually the problem is not that there is too little but 5 times too much of it already.
It’s obvious that it should be voluntary after fourteen.
I agree. What would you replace the academics with?
"How to speak Chinese." The way things are going the answer doesn't matter so long as all the discussion is conducted in Mandarin.
The nerdy kids, the brainy kids, were easy to spot in my old (elite, in both sports and academics) school district. The requirement was one year of PE, and they met it by taking a PE class in summer school. Hopefully some of the activities were fun, or field trips; often I would see them troop down my street, chatting animatedly, not looking at all gloomy - they were going to the mall. I guess that was the exercise, walking, maybe to eat lunch at the food court.
And yet, I suspect the screenwriter’s fondness for the “bullying in gym class or on the playground” trope will live forever.
A lot of leftist Jews have written about how they are divorcing from the SJW left recently. It seems to be the hip new thing.
However, in all these pieces I've yet to see a specific call to action (other than cutting of donations to colleges that won't punish anti-Jew protests). Some link it to DEI, but nobody seems to have a plan for getting rid of DEI. Most admit they are going to keep on voting Democrat. A lot of them accuse DeSantis of being just as bad/worse, even though that's the only example I can think of where DEI got shut down. It's not clear how they expect to change things then in the most immediate sense.
Agree.
My answer to Sternstein's question would be "a group that reliably votes and donates Democrat started taking fire from the same mob that has been hounding Republicans for decades."
That isn't quite what he asked, and neither the "No enemies to the left, no friends to the right" phenomenon nor its analogue with position in the oppression-points hierarchy constitutes new information.
But it's also kind of the wrong question. While hearings pretend to be about "discovering new information" we don't have to play along with the pretense and we can ask about their other functions and purposes and whether any of those were accomplished and might be beneficial.
The main use of hearings like this is not so much "revelation" and to make people unable to ignore the evidence supporting a revelation that should have occurred to them a long time ago. That is, to make what those who were willing and able to see already knew but in public still "plausibly-but-fraudulently deniable", now undeniable, to everyone.
What these hearings did was provide plenty of footage of elite college leaders behaving in completely ridiculous and *undeniably* embarrassing ways. People go about their lives with certain suspicions that something is deeply awry, but they can't quite say what and aren't able to hold all the evidence or case why in their heads, so they tend to give the benefit of the doubt to high status people and institutions, no matter how unworthy they are of that benefit. And if you propose to such a person that all public funds be cut off from such places, they will balk and think such radical measures aren't justified.
But then they see these people unable to explain or justify anything and they *know* the rot is real. And now they're at least slightly more willing to listen about your "defund the rotten colleges" ideas without reflexing recoiling or thinking they are extreme.
Yeah, "They are just doing what their lawyers tell them to do" is true maybe a little bit of an excuse, but also, people know that going into "lawyer-told-me-to-talk-nonsense" is what happens when you can't give an honest explanation off the cuff without getting into trouble, because, you honestly deserve to get in trouble!
So, when these leaders seem to be responding in literal real life like the whole joke meme about them all being empty-headed video-game NPC robots incapable of carrying on an intelligent conversation and only able to repeat the same scripted lines over and over no matter how nonsensical it is for them to do so that helps provide the ordnance to change the whole political landscape, to the formerly unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
See, I saw it as evidence of their triumph - that they felt *so little* need to bother polishing up the words they put in the nonentities’ mouths. (Lawyers couldn’t BS better than that? Gotta be kidding.)
Their arrogance is total because they have won.
And they will not lose the folks who did the most as the architects of the underdogma. They know this.
A handful of sentimental old men will pull donations.
This chapter is over.
Democrat Derangement Syndrome against Jews grew out of Dem DS against Trump, which grew from DDS against Bush, labeled as Bush Derangement Syndrome.
But it is the Dems who are deranged, full of hate based on lies and half truths.
Like the NYT lie that Israel blew up a hospital and killed 500.
Arnold Kling has only a mild case, I’d guess far more of his Dem supporting synagogue believe NYT lies more strongly. Just as Kling can’t bear to believe the 2020 election was stolen, most Dem supporting Jews will rationalize continued support for Dems, or at least refuse to look rationally at Obama, Trump, and Biden actions and accept that Trump was better for Jews.
The NYT supplies that DDS market with rationalizations, lies but mostly half truths.
To attempt to answer Sternstein's question: I think people really were in some sense offended by the fact that representatives of these prestigious institutions couldn't come up with better lies or equivocations for public consumption. Either they're treating us with contempt, in that they're throwing in our faces that what the public thinks doesn't matter to them, or they're not really very bright people to begin with, in which case the prestige bestowed by these institutions is bunk. Either way, I think it was perfectly sensible to be disgusted.
Your last paragraph here is key. Darkly humorous that these presidents are being brought down by giving the factually correct answer to an idiot basically asking "If you kill somebody, is that first degree murder? Yes or no??"
Of course their hypocrisy about other forms of free expression has hurt their credibility. But while a perfect free speech record would have changed their reception with the Arnold Klings of the world, I doubt it would ultimately matter to a Bari Weiss, and I'm certain it wouldn't matter to a Mike Johnson (such a principled libertarian that he used to defend criminal penalties for consensual sex).
Agree with your comments on the secondary impacts of crime. But the causes of crime in the US are certainly not our lenient criminal-justice system. On the contrary, we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world and have harsher sentences than just about all of our European peers with less crime. Japan is a good model for other reasons: They build far more housing than us; they have far fewer guns; they have better social safety nets; and, as you note, they have more psychiatric beds. They also have a much older population, which is problematic in many ways but has a large positive impact on crime stats. Even the drug situation is misleading. Yes, Japan has fewer heavy drug users, but it has a huge number of problematic drinkers--at least once you adjust for their much more elderly population. Those alcoholics are more likely to be functional though, because they’re not homeless (housing is cheaper) and they’re not mentally ill (psych beds are available).
The right incarceration rate has nothing to do with whatever levels are typical for other really different countries and instead should sit around the margin where another man-year of incarceration doesn't produce an appreciable rise in public order and safety because those are already at very high levels. Which, ahem, is not how anyone would describe many US urban areas, and lately, especially not retail store owners.
In El Salvador Bukele basically tripled their incarceration rate practically overnight - to over double the US rate (depending how you measure this stuff) - and, surprise, surprise, surprise, the murder rate fell by 60% and the people cheered.
I largely agree with this, but when it comes to deterring crime in the US it's important to keep in mind that our sentences are long but the odds of being caught and convicted are low. The latter is more important to deterrence. Generally speaking I think we should cut down the sentences (in many cases replacing them with e-carceration) while also putting a lot more energy and money into investigative policing and surveillance.
Definitely agree that clearance rates are FAR more important than severity of punishment when it comes to deterring crime. But I think law enforcement in general is overrated as an explanation for rising and falling crime rates. Changes in our criminal justice system don’t explain the HUGE drop in crime since the 1990s; they don’t explain the pandemic spike in crime across red and blue jurisdictions and across Europe; and they don’t explain the current drop in crime. To me, those things are more accurately explained by the factors in my post above.
Well the pandemic spike was almost certainly caused by the post-Floyd unrest, I don't love admitting that but the evidence is really strong. Probably one of the mediators was reduction in policing (or at least a perception of reduced policing). I don't think it's accurate to say that there was much of a pandemic spike in (violent) crime across Europe (see eg https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike).
But yeah for a variety of reasons that I don't pretend to fully understand, the US is uniquely violent for a rich country despite policing harder than most of the other ones. Some of it is cultural, some of it is about concentrated poverty, some of it is about guns, some of it is American exceptionalism that I'm not sure how to explain.
I’m not at all convinced that the protests caused the pandemic crime spike in every major US city regardless of whether they had significant protests. But even if we assume that’s the case, the far more significant change in crime is post-1990. That’s simply not explained by changes in our criminal-justice system. Nor is the difference between US and European or Japanese crime rates explained by policing.
Definitely agree about the 90s and the US/international differences.
None of our "peers" have our vibrant levels of ethnic diversity.
Our diversity explains why we have a worse social safety net (we don’t like to help people who look different than us), more expensive housing (we zone to keep “others” out), harsher and less effective criminal-justice solutions (it’s easier to harshly punish “others”), and fewer psych beds. But it’s those mechanisms that explain the disorder--not diversity qua diversity, of course.
Sorry to keep questioning you, but viva la dialogue…
I believe safety nets in the US are in absolute levels larger than most developed nations. This doesn’t exactly contradict your point though that our nets could be even wider and cushier with less diversity. People are tribal and often wary of different cultures. I would argue though that smaller and smarter safety nets are one of the best things we could do to eliminate dependency and destructive incentives.
I don’t know how much of housing regulations are related to keeping "others" out, though it is surely a factor. I know that, for us, living in Red states has meant that since the politicians can’t be counted on to control derelicts, graffiti, crime and uncivil behavior that we specifically buy that via our neighborhood selection. I do not want "affordable" housing (multi family rentals) within a few miles of us in San Diego county. I certainly wouldn’t want my kids going to school with a "violent underclass" with dysfunctional cultural habits. The most important factor in school choice is the average caliber of student. Elite neighborhoods is an imperfect solution, but a solution just the same. That said, I would expect most areas wouldn’t be so stuffy as us, as most people simply can’t afford to be so.
I guess I agree that it is easier to punish "others" in ways that are unnecessarily harsh and ineffective, and that this is foolish. That said, I am for substantially stronger enforcement and much longer sentences for repeat offenders. The best solution to crime is to remove the criminals. We need to do more of this, not less, though with respect and compassion.
Are you sure Europe has less crime?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227353803_Crime_in_Europe_and_the_United_States_Dissecting_the_%27reversal_of_misfortunes%27
I certainly agree that housing affordability, psych beds and rehab centers would be helpful here.
I always understood --
Men : Women :: Guys : Gals
But that might be a regional dialect. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone from New Jersey say, “youse gals.”
"This means that, contrary to expectations, residents of large cosmopolitan areas have less exposure to a socioeconomically diverse range of individuals."
"Too many influential people here like squalor and crime, or are unwilling to countenance the measures required to reduce it..."
Aren't these two things related to each other? Very influential people live in large cosmopolitan areas for the most part.
They are absolutely related. What this study says is, "Influential people are able to effectively segregate themselves from the consequences of their influence on policy." Try compelling judges and district attorneys to live with their families in the least safe neighborhood under their jurisdiction and see the revolution unfold before your eyes in about 10 minutes.
Well . . .
I think both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky nailed the problem. Nietzsche was in favor (sortof) and Dostoyevsky against of the overwhelming impact of Nilhilism. This slice from forward to Eugene Rose’s “Nihilism - the Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age”.
“Nihilism—the belief that there is no Absolute Truth, that all truth is relative—is, Eugene affirmed, the basic philosophy of the 20th century: “It has become, in our time, so widespread and pervasive, has entered so thoroughly and so deeply into the minds and hearts of all men living today, that there is no longer any ‘front’ on which it may be fought.”
This rejection of ‘truth’ now so widespread, it doesn’t seem a philosophical idea, just ‘the way things are’, just truth.
“The heart of this philosophy, he said, was “expressed most clearly by Nietzsche and by a character of Dostoyevsky in the phrase: ‘God is dead, therefore man becomes God and everything is possible.’”
These are world famous thinkers. They foresaw the result of the acceptance of nihilism and rejection of Bibical ideas.
Why are current thinkers, present analysts so . . . so . . . surprised, shocked?
Thanks
Clay
Almost no one affirmatively says that truth is relative. Quite the opposite. Feminists believe that it is absolutely 100% true that women are oppressed by a patriarchy. Woke people believe it is absolutely 100% true that black people do poorly in the United States because of pervasive racism and white privilege. Many people on "the right" believe it is absolutely 100% true that "the left" hates America.
Roger
Thanks for the reply.
I’ll ponder . . .
Clay
The universities are not supposed to be allowed to do a lot of the things that they regularly do, and the federal government really does have the right to strip away their
advantaged tax status privileges (not to mention the vast subsidies from loans, grants, etc.), but the government including the courts has been very reluctant to apply the law as written in any circumstance other than in when the university engages in active racial discrimination (See Bob Jones University v. United States).
However, under Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, 481 U.S. 615, (1987) and some other cases like it, Jews can bring civil rights cases for discrimination as long as they fulfill all the elements of the claim. A lot of the strongest possible claims involve more than just arguing that there was an uncomfortable environment. The federal government issued a lot of guidance letters etc. recently putting universities on notice. I don't know a lot about these kinds of civil rights claims, but my thought is that the whole system only really can survive if the majority "thinks" like the old white majority that the law was designed to equalize all the minorities to as far as their substantive rights. The regime's success at diminishing that majority also makes the mechanism used to achieve that far less workable.
I challenge you to prove your theory of causation, Jeremy.
“... their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.”
Yet they seem to have no qualms about sending in SWAT teams when someone uses the wrong pronoun. The university presidents lied to Congress when they said that their schools are dedicated to free speech and open inquiry. They are not.
Schools should either readopt such policies or they should consistently enforce their hate speech rules. The current selective enforcement smacks of indoctrination and intimidation.
The demands to “gas the Jews” and the like now heard on too many of our college campuses have given the game away. One can hardly claim that students need to be able to retreat to safe spaces with puppies and hot chocolate whenever they hear a discouraging word while, at the same time, cheering the tender little dears on as they call for genocide and verbally and physically attack anyone wearing a yarmulke.
The real problem in universities is now and long has been their illegal discrimination against hiring Republican professors. With almost no successful lawsuits fighting against this illegal, anti-diverse, anti-inclusive college behavior. Tough to prove. So tough Republicans should fight in court while expecting to lose.
And they should require tax exempt edu orgs to have at least 30% Republican hires, to deserve their huge loophole reduction in tax. Those who won’t include Republicans should pay their fair share like normal businesses. Also 30% Des should be hired, but at the 90% level or so today, no new Dems would be needed.
Very related to the higher SES segregation of big cities, which makes it so easy for Birds of a Feather to Flock Together. Many colleges are allowing segregation, and even having race based segregated graduations. While their methodology of visual contact for mixing is better than other data dependent mass studies, the data is still not good enough. Upper class on the NY subway is only barely exposed to the poor, tho perhaps more than in a middle class church, and far more than on an expensive golf course. Most folk do not trust, nor want any more than the minimum contact, with most fellow strangers.
Nice places are high trust places, which are always low crime places. As in the Ed West quote.
Jonathan Haidt posted his essay on his own After Babel site too: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/boy-crisis/comments