Matt Taibbi on legacy media's new rules; Joe Lonsdale on policy for homelessness; Scott Locklin on management consultants; Lionel Shriver on prestige diagnoses; Freddie deBoer on Jordan Neely
John McWhorter wrote about the subway and mental illness.
While of course attacking the Marine (I didn't see the video but I assume he was trying to do his best to make the situation better) John basically says this idea that people in the city have to surrender to violent mental patients is absurd and its time to stop with that nonsense.
I'll make my own stance pretty straightforward. I just don't have any empathy for people who engage in violence and harassment over and over. I don't care if they are mentally ill. If you've got a rap sheet that long you've stopped deserving human sympathy. I favor flogging to try to straighten these types out and if they either can't or won't respond to that either incarceration/commitment or execution. I'm fine with telling the 1% worst of our citizens that they can shape up or stop having "human rights". The rest of us have a right not to be victimized.
It's amazing to me that we had a national freak out over a violent black criminal getting chocked to death and here we are three years later with the same thing happening, but most seem to acknowledge that its the only way to handle violent people who won't comply if you don't want to surrender to them (with a bunch of "somehow somewhere we need some government programs" thrown in for moral cover).
I guess the marine doesn't carry pepper spray with him everywhere. He's just like a regular person who saw people in trouble and tried to protect them, because he's you know a decent human being. But his attempt to restrain a violent criminal didn't go exactly according to your checklist, so I guess we need to destroy his life. That'll show him for giving a damn about others.
Why do you even care that the guy is dead? Aren't we all better off? Isn't this something the state should already have done to him long before this incident?
(sarcastically) "I guess we need to destroy his life..." then followed by (non-sarcastically) "why do you even care that the guy is dead?" sort of cancels out the positive fellow-feeling vibes. You giveth, and you taketh away.
I find both of your positions a little too extreme for me but it would seem the pendulum has swung too far from putting them all in mental hospitals. It seems reasonable that people who can't leave others alone (with or without treatment) shouldn't be on the street.
Had the laptop belonged to Eric Trump and not Hunter Biden, it would have been front page news every day for the last 3 weeks of the campaign in 2020, and everyone with an ounce of honesty in their hearts knows this to be true.
The news media has always been partisan- it used to be that newspapers themselves were explicitly aligned with one of the two major parties, often identified in the paper's name. Broadcast media news was supposed to be different because the government had explicit power to regulate who got to use the limited radio spectrum, so you ended up with the "Fairness Doctrine", and maybe it worked for a while in the early years, but by the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, it was obvious that that the people running the major networks were mostly Democrats, as was radio at the time. I can remember watching the election coverage of 1980 as the returns came in showing Reagan was going to win a landslide victory- the dourness of the news journalists that night was hilarious to see.
A good part of this is probably due to the migration of Republicans out of the cities that occurred after WWII- all major newspapers, radio stations, and television stations are centered in the large cities of every state- the cities themselves became deeply blue and concentrated, and Republican newspapers died, and the Democrat ones started dropping the explicit connections to the party and pretended to be non-partisan for political advantage. What we are seeing with the internet platforms is what it would have looked like in the 1920s if pulp paper producers and ink companies had banded together in a cartel to not sell paper and to Republican publishers.
> In many cases, homeless “charities” are politically involved activist organizations that bully leaders so they can mop up money via contracts. In extreme cases, they use money intended to help the homeless to fund protests against new legislative approaches
What's so objectionable about this dynamic to me is not that it exists – I don't see how it could be otherwise, on some level – but that it's impossible to talk about because no-one understands that you can't stigmatize arguments about the political economy of a situation just because they seem instrumentally useful to hypothetical people with bad motives. Or they do understand that in principle but they get around it with enormous, conspiracy theories that ascribe massively implausible hidden motives to people (you secretly hate the poor and wish them to suffer) in place of obvious and innocent ones (you dislike paying taxes and see the city doesn't work very well or have trustworthy people in charge.)
So the instant anyone starts to say, like, the anti-homeless coalition in this town is a self-absorbed racket of contemptible HR drones pretending to be activist heroes, it's understood as an attack on homeless people as such, or the idea of helping or caring about people. And as a statistical matter, in fact, this will very roughly predict how people line up on the matter, in just a loose sociological way. But it becomes impossible to have a serious intellectual discussion because modern academia is largely devoted to inventing reasons why the conventional, obviously necessary tools of rationality are actually secret plots by malign actors to deprive folks of justice.
Management consultants are hire in large part to show a board of directors that senior managers have taken clear unbiased look at the business. Having been involved in any number of corporate restructurings I can tell you that McKinsey exits largely for that purpose, and at times to provide some justification for third party investors looking to put new money in to a company. The consultants too often are to big picture, and really do not provide much value added.
The policy idea behind much of the contemporary approach is that the severely mentally ill are supposed to be mainstreamed as much as possible into society. I think this policy has been achieved, because mainstream society is insane and moral insanity is mainstream.
Many critics of "deinstitutionalization" miss that our prisons and jails are mental hospitals. Every single jail and prison in the US has the same medication line that mental hospitals have. Most jails and prisons has separate wings for people based on their threat level, similar to what the hospitals have. Many prisoners are subject to various coercive treatment regimes from the mental health complex. No matter how small, rural, and isolated, every corrections facility in the US has psychiatrists and social workers on staff. If a prisoner wants "counseling," they will get it in spades, and submitting to counseling is often a good way to get a lighter sentence. While it may be more challenging to get someone committed unless they commit crimes, imprisoning someone increasingly resembles involuntary commitment to a mental hospital and coercion into long-term psychiatric treatment.
Does it work? For the system, absolutely: it creates a pipeline for permanent clients and drug customers for the "helping" state, in which vast numbers of adults are reduced to poor health on a permanent basis so that they are utterly dependent on state assistance from cradle to grave. The way that liberals view this class of people is not unlike the way that the most sentimental and doting plantation slave-masters saw their human chattels: "we're not doing this for ourselves, but to save their sou- I mean, mental health and overall wellbeing..."
"I am leaning toward a model in which there exists a p factor, which is a propensity for mental disorders, which gets expressed in different ways depending on social trends.“
I sympathize with your viewpoint but in a long argument with a liberal friend I learned about many trip wires besides just homophobia.
1 DSM has deemed it not an illness. It is part of the "normal" spectrum. It's hard to get someone who disagrees with you past that one.
2 There is illness, disorder, dysfunction, abnormal and normal. I'm not sure which is the best term but here's the issue. Illness and disorder imply the person is suffering from the condition. Most LBGT would surely say they only suffer due to discrimination, not their condition, though this is likely most true for B and least for T with LG somewhere in between.
3 I suggested that not being attracted to the opposite sex was a dysfunction and my friend asked about those who chose not to have kids, or not have any sex. Not sure I follow that but he asked me if being left handed was dysfunctional. I didn't follow that either until I heard that left handed is correlated with homosexuality and ambidexterity with trans. So are they mental illnesses?
4 We don't really know what is going on in the brain of any LGBT so I'd argue most strongly of all that any opinion on this, including mine, is almost completely subjective.
While it is true that the high cultural status of LGBT among today's affluent youngsters is basically arbitrary, I think it is fair to say that it originates from a genuine pattern of unusual accomplishment among LGBT people. Plausibly, this pattern could stem from both biological determinants of LGBT identification being correlated with socially useful traits like ingenuity or flexibility of mind, and also from the "scene"-like dynamics of gay enclaves turning them into, in effect, startup accelerators.
Of course the signal is long gone by the time you get to, like, a kid born in affluent Northern Virginia suburbs during the Obama administration.
"Our approach" to homelessness seems helpful as far as it goes, but it deserves to have some things added to it.
(1) The state should entertain proposals that public housing projects be built, with the required voter approval. If voters turn one down, the state should consider alternative sites, including state lands. This should be done not only to help people currently homeless, but also to replace existing repurposed hotels, campsites, etc. so that they can resume normal operations.
(2) The law should provide that parks, plazas and similar facilities may be sold to private groups for the purpose of allowing the new owners to operate them as parks again and exclude homeless persons. The new owners will be allowed to build fences or walls and/or employ guards for the purpose.
(3) Cities should be allowed to establish supervised safe drug use sites as a means of abating the dangerous nuisances created when people consume drugs out on the streets and sidewalks.
(4) Paying residents should have the right to enforcement action against theft, stalking, and property damage crimes, and to make citizens' arrests for those crimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/09/opinion/jordan-neely-subway-death.html
John McWhorter wrote about the subway and mental illness.
While of course attacking the Marine (I didn't see the video but I assume he was trying to do his best to make the situation better) John basically says this idea that people in the city have to surrender to violent mental patients is absurd and its time to stop with that nonsense.
I'll make my own stance pretty straightforward. I just don't have any empathy for people who engage in violence and harassment over and over. I don't care if they are mentally ill. If you've got a rap sheet that long you've stopped deserving human sympathy. I favor flogging to try to straighten these types out and if they either can't or won't respond to that either incarceration/commitment or execution. I'm fine with telling the 1% worst of our citizens that they can shape up or stop having "human rights". The rest of us have a right not to be victimized.
It's amazing to me that we had a national freak out over a violent black criminal getting chocked to death and here we are three years later with the same thing happening, but most seem to acknowledge that its the only way to handle violent people who won't comply if you don't want to surrender to them (with a bunch of "somehow somewhere we need some government programs" thrown in for moral cover).
I guess the marine doesn't carry pepper spray with him everywhere. He's just like a regular person who saw people in trouble and tried to protect them, because he's you know a decent human being. But his attempt to restrain a violent criminal didn't go exactly according to your checklist, so I guess we need to destroy his life. That'll show him for giving a damn about others.
Why do you even care that the guy is dead? Aren't we all better off? Isn't this something the state should already have done to him long before this incident?
(sarcastically) "I guess we need to destroy his life..." then followed by (non-sarcastically) "why do you even care that the guy is dead?" sort of cancels out the positive fellow-feeling vibes. You giveth, and you taketh away.
I have sympathy for people that deserve it and don’t for those that don’t deserve it.
What’s on display here appears to be an inversion. Sympathy for those that don’t deserve it and antipathy for those that don’t deserve it.
I find both of your positions a little too extreme for me but it would seem the pendulum has swung too far from putting them all in mental hospitals. It seems reasonable that people who can't leave others alone (with or without treatment) shouldn't be on the street.
Had the laptop belonged to Eric Trump and not Hunter Biden, it would have been front page news every day for the last 3 weeks of the campaign in 2020, and everyone with an ounce of honesty in their hearts knows this to be true.
The news media has always been partisan- it used to be that newspapers themselves were explicitly aligned with one of the two major parties, often identified in the paper's name. Broadcast media news was supposed to be different because the government had explicit power to regulate who got to use the limited radio spectrum, so you ended up with the "Fairness Doctrine", and maybe it worked for a while in the early years, but by the time I was a teenager in the 1980s, it was obvious that that the people running the major networks were mostly Democrats, as was radio at the time. I can remember watching the election coverage of 1980 as the returns came in showing Reagan was going to win a landslide victory- the dourness of the news journalists that night was hilarious to see.
A good part of this is probably due to the migration of Republicans out of the cities that occurred after WWII- all major newspapers, radio stations, and television stations are centered in the large cities of every state- the cities themselves became deeply blue and concentrated, and Republican newspapers died, and the Democrat ones started dropping the explicit connections to the party and pretended to be non-partisan for political advantage. What we are seeing with the internet platforms is what it would have looked like in the 1920s if pulp paper producers and ink companies had banded together in a cartel to not sell paper and to Republican publishers.
Homeless "charities" are the squeegie guys of philanthropy.
> In many cases, homeless “charities” are politically involved activist organizations that bully leaders so they can mop up money via contracts. In extreme cases, they use money intended to help the homeless to fund protests against new legislative approaches
What's so objectionable about this dynamic to me is not that it exists – I don't see how it could be otherwise, on some level – but that it's impossible to talk about because no-one understands that you can't stigmatize arguments about the political economy of a situation just because they seem instrumentally useful to hypothetical people with bad motives. Or they do understand that in principle but they get around it with enormous, conspiracy theories that ascribe massively implausible hidden motives to people (you secretly hate the poor and wish them to suffer) in place of obvious and innocent ones (you dislike paying taxes and see the city doesn't work very well or have trustworthy people in charge.)
So the instant anyone starts to say, like, the anti-homeless coalition in this town is a self-absorbed racket of contemptible HR drones pretending to be activist heroes, it's understood as an attack on homeless people as such, or the idea of helping or caring about people. And as a statistical matter, in fact, this will very roughly predict how people line up on the matter, in just a loose sociological way. But it becomes impossible to have a serious intellectual discussion because modern academia is largely devoted to inventing reasons why the conventional, obviously necessary tools of rationality are actually secret plots by malign actors to deprive folks of justice.
Management consultants are hire in large part to show a board of directors that senior managers have taken clear unbiased look at the business. Having been involved in any number of corporate restructurings I can tell you that McKinsey exits largely for that purpose, and at times to provide some justification for third party investors looking to put new money in to a company. The consultants too often are to big picture, and really do not provide much value added.
The policy idea behind much of the contemporary approach is that the severely mentally ill are supposed to be mainstreamed as much as possible into society. I think this policy has been achieved, because mainstream society is insane and moral insanity is mainstream.
Many critics of "deinstitutionalization" miss that our prisons and jails are mental hospitals. Every single jail and prison in the US has the same medication line that mental hospitals have. Most jails and prisons has separate wings for people based on their threat level, similar to what the hospitals have. Many prisoners are subject to various coercive treatment regimes from the mental health complex. No matter how small, rural, and isolated, every corrections facility in the US has psychiatrists and social workers on staff. If a prisoner wants "counseling," they will get it in spades, and submitting to counseling is often a good way to get a lighter sentence. While it may be more challenging to get someone committed unless they commit crimes, imprisoning someone increasingly resembles involuntary commitment to a mental hospital and coercion into long-term psychiatric treatment.
Does it work? For the system, absolutely: it creates a pipeline for permanent clients and drug customers for the "helping" state, in which vast numbers of adults are reduced to poor health on a permanent basis so that they are utterly dependent on state assistance from cradle to grave. The way that liberals view this class of people is not unlike the way that the most sentimental and doting plantation slave-masters saw their human chattels: "we're not doing this for ourselves, but to save their sou- I mean, mental health and overall wellbeing..."
"I am leaning toward a model in which there exists a p factor, which is a propensity for mental disorders, which gets expressed in different ways depending on social trends.“
I sympathize with your viewpoint but in a long argument with a liberal friend I learned about many trip wires besides just homophobia.
1 DSM has deemed it not an illness. It is part of the "normal" spectrum. It's hard to get someone who disagrees with you past that one.
2 There is illness, disorder, dysfunction, abnormal and normal. I'm not sure which is the best term but here's the issue. Illness and disorder imply the person is suffering from the condition. Most LBGT would surely say they only suffer due to discrimination, not their condition, though this is likely most true for B and least for T with LG somewhere in between.
3 I suggested that not being attracted to the opposite sex was a dysfunction and my friend asked about those who chose not to have kids, or not have any sex. Not sure I follow that but he asked me if being left handed was dysfunctional. I didn't follow that either until I heard that left handed is correlated with homosexuality and ambidexterity with trans. So are they mental illnesses?
4 We don't really know what is going on in the brain of any LGBT so I'd argue most strongly of all that any opinion on this, including mine, is almost completely subjective.
While it is true that the high cultural status of LGBT among today's affluent youngsters is basically arbitrary, I think it is fair to say that it originates from a genuine pattern of unusual accomplishment among LGBT people. Plausibly, this pattern could stem from both biological determinants of LGBT identification being correlated with socially useful traits like ingenuity or flexibility of mind, and also from the "scene"-like dynamics of gay enclaves turning them into, in effect, startup accelerators.
Of course the signal is long gone by the time you get to, like, a kid born in affluent Northern Virginia suburbs during the Obama administration.
"Our approach" to homelessness seems helpful as far as it goes, but it deserves to have some things added to it.
(1) The state should entertain proposals that public housing projects be built, with the required voter approval. If voters turn one down, the state should consider alternative sites, including state lands. This should be done not only to help people currently homeless, but also to replace existing repurposed hotels, campsites, etc. so that they can resume normal operations.
(2) The law should provide that parks, plazas and similar facilities may be sold to private groups for the purpose of allowing the new owners to operate them as parks again and exclude homeless persons. The new owners will be allowed to build fences or walls and/or employ guards for the purpose.
(3) Cities should be allowed to establish supervised safe drug use sites as a means of abating the dangerous nuisances created when people consume drugs out on the streets and sidewalks.
(4) Paying residents should have the right to enforcement action against theft, stalking, and property damage crimes, and to make citizens' arrests for those crimes.