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https://twitter.com/PatrickFIanagan/status/1745850252098261073

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

May 5

Yes, but just to be clear, almost nobody in middle class America actually dislikes poor people for being poor. We don't live in Downton Abbey, or whatever, where you're supposed to know your station in life and people demand that you remain in your class without reference to what you're like as a person. The simple fact is that poverty is associated with increased rates of crime and disorder. It's that simple.

Poverty is associated with crime likely not because poverty causes crime, but because crime causes poverty or, more directly, because the set of behaviors, habits, and personalty traits that lead to a life of criminality lead also to a life of poverty.

Think of it like this: you can bust out in poker because you bet a good hand and got unlucky, or you can go broke because you're a reckless idiot who made lots of stupid decisions. It sucks for the first kind of person that they have to stand next to the latter fella in the group photo, but there's no way around the fact that this cohort is going to be full of the second kind of person.

That's just sort of logically how things pretty much have to shake out.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

May 3

Is it really, though? I mean, yes, people want the immediate, proximate problem solved — i.e. the homeless people near me are a nuisance and a net negative on my quality of life — but how does that actually prevent governments from solving the broader issue of homelessness? What about that fact prevents them from building adequate shelters? What about that fact stops us from developing longer-term interventions?

I feel like people want to set these two positions up in opposition to each other, when one does not actually have anything to do with the other. The truth is that solving homelessness is just really hard. We’re almost by definition talking about the most disordered and dysfunctional people in society. So it’s tempting to want to say that the guy who first wants you to get them off his block is somehow preventing you from solving what you’d otherwise have to admit is an intractable problem.

In fact, I think it would quite clearly be much easier to target and experiment with longer-term interventions on homeless people who have been already forcibly removed to shelters, as opposed to scattered around various unsanitary street camps.

Yes, the places with the worst homelessness problems are all liberal/Democrat strongholds. The people there probably want the city to get the homeless off their block, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that that’s where they stop thinking about it or the full extent of what they want to happen with the homeless.

Hell, it’s not even the full extent of what I want to happen, and I’m about as hard-core on the law and order/disorder aspect of this as you can get. I want the city to do draconian sweeps in which they grab up every homeless person on the street and force them into shelters or psychiatric hospitals.

But then, beyond that, I want those shelters and psychiatric hospitals to be well funded and fully staffed by competent, compassionate professionals.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Apr 27

I think ultimately what’s so boring about the Europe versus United States quality of life discourse, is that every quality of life issue in the US is downstream of high levels of crime and disorder in American cities, but that’s the one topic no expat acknowledges. They ridicule and denigrate their fellow citizens for traveling 8 miles to a suburb to avoid it, but then imagine themselves to be sophisticates while doing basically the same thing.

Every single one of these “I moved to Europe” articles dances around this topic. Every single one of them was written by someone who voted for and continues to support policies that go easy on the crime and disorder they’ve fled.

The articles are boring and tedious, because the people who write them are incurious about the actual causes of the differences they’re so excited about. I’ve never read a single one of those article articles that said anything interesting or insightful or shocking or new. They by necessity focus on only the superficial, the downstream outcomes, because every single one of them is written by somebody with politics that prevent them from telling the truth about their causes.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Apr 23

I don’t believe there’s any such thing as objective morality, yet I feel very strongly in my stomach that there must be something like right and wrong. And I act in my life as though I really do truly believe in right and wrong, even if intellectually I reject the premise. Once I realized that I could behave the same way with respect to all other aspects of religion, this issue resolved itself.

I may try to write more about this later.

I think almost all intellectuals already act as though they believe something that they reject, because I think that almost all serious intellectuals accept on some level that morality is fake. We are creatures produced by the process of evolution by natural selection. There is no such thing as right and wrong.

And yet those same intellectuals (most of them) feel very strongly about various issues of right and wrong — positions they arrive at for expedience, because of practicality, through argumentation, but mostly because they feel something painful in their stomach when they do wrong.

They are experts at keeping two sets of books. It used to be that the average intellectual felt as awful about rejecting religion as today’s intellectuals feel about the idea of rejecting right and wrong. They might arrive at the intellectual conclusion, but they feel as strongly in their stomach about the existence of right and wrong as they have ever felt about anything, and they live their lives as though right and wrong are meaningful concepts.

So what I’m saying is that, if you are an intellectual type, you probably already give yourself permission to believe something that isn’t true, to live your life as though it is true, and to believe in its importance as strongly as you feel about anything else in your life, even though if pressed you will be forced to admit that you don’t think it’s actually true.

But then when the question of God or religion comes up, you will bow your head and adopt a serious tone and say, “I just couldn’t possibly live my life be believing something that I know not to be true.”

Yes you can! You already do. If you’re a thoughtful intellectual, you probably already do.

And, again, the same way that intellectuals today can’t quite give up the idea of right and wrong, can’t quite help but feel like they would be truly wrong to do so, even though intellectually they reject the concept of right and wrong — intellectuals used to feel that way about religion!

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Apr 22

This is what the *entirety* of the history of “white flight” is like. “Sure, the way we teach this leads people to believe ridiculous caricatures, but it’s true that people used to be more racist than they are today, and this explanation neatly explains all persistent outcome disparities, so you can’t really expect us to teach kids that white people in the 1950s were multidimensional, rational human beings who acted out of anything but malice.”

And, of course, because this is how this always goes, the people who believe this extremely mainstream narrative think that they’ve been given access to secret wisdom that makes them more educated than everyone else they encounter. In fact, on their worldview, holding this exact set of beliefs is precisely what it *means* to be educated.

The world is divided into two kinds of people: people who have learned this history and accept it in the exact form it was taught to them; and mindless, racist, hillbilly chuds who haven’t yet been enlightened.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Feb 8

When I point out, as I sometimes do, that large shares of the public don't actually understand how modernity works, it's tempting, I'm sure, to dismiss this as elitist snark. But I think it's actually sad, in its way. People don't know how things work, but worse, they have no intuition for why things work the way they do, even once it's explained to them.

This is obvious when you see the arguments they bring to bear.

Courts and laws must seem totally insane to them, never addressing their needs, always coldly rejecting what must seem to them to be persuasive arguments about personal hardship that might have carried the day in more intimate societies.

The whole thing, the whole project of society must seem capricious and random and unfair. When they are asked to make arguments for themselves, they can produce only non sequiturs and appeals to emotion that might as well be in an alien language for how likely they are to have anything to do with the issue at hand.

It might be obvious to you in what ways the cable company is different from the police is different from a local hardware store is different from Lowe's is different from the Social Security Administration, both in their obligations to you and in the limits of thinking about them in terms of obligations at all.

I assure you, this is not true of all people equally.

And if you think, you know, well these people just need to be *educated* better, then you haven't heard what I'm saying. They don't think in contracts, in abstract moral systems, in legal structures. Their intuition is a tide pulling them out into a sea, no matter how many times you row them back in.

Modernity is great. We're not going back to small tribes. And this all just is what it is. But clearly we've moved into territory that some non-trivial share of the population is always going to find themselves out of sync with.

And that's not their fault. And it's genuinely sad.

I will add, despite the pessimism I expressed above, that we have definitely not maxed out the number of people who can be brought to overcome bad intuitions about how the world works. We should be doing a *lot* more propaganda in elementary and secondary schools -- about the rule of law, about markets, about capitalism, about contracts.

Even some people who won't ever fully understand those things could be made to feel less resentment about that fact, if they at least could be made to accept that they are concepts good societies aspire to.

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