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wanye Profile picture
@wanyeburkett
Sep 26, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
People have just kind of gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s actually insane that it’s possible to get 15 convictions. Like that literally shouldn’t even be possible.
You really cannot overstate how completely our national conversation about crime has disconnected from reality. In no country that actually mass incarcerated its citizens would it be possible for someone to have 15 convictions and still be free on the street. Therefore, the United States quite plainly does not have a mass incarceration problem. You can’t have a reasonable conversation about this with normal people, because they all take for granted that we do. So basically everybody except me and like five other people on the Internet are wrong about the most basic facts of the case. It is my burden in life to know this thing nobody else knows and to be completely incapable therefore of having normal conversations with my neighbors.
We of course do have a lot of people in prison, because we have a crime problem. Not a mass incarceration problem. A crime problem. But we are not in fact quick to put people in jail, which is how you have people with 15 convictions walking into peoples houses in the middle of the day and stabbing them 40 something times with their own kitchen knife.

That’s a crime problem, not a mass incarceration problem.
Even the mistakes our criminal justice makes I conceive of as downstream of our incredible crime problem. The fact is that the system is stretched way beyond its capacity, because we have so much crime. We get into these debates about whether there was more crime in 2024 or 2020 and how that relates to the peak crime rates in the 1990s, but the fact of the matter is that our crime rates were very high by the standards of our peers around the world in every single one of those years.

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More from @wanyeburkett

wanye Profile picture
Jan 11
I really don’t think you can underestimate the impact of the mass incarceration narrative on political polarization. Imagine how different a country that busts people’s doors down and throws them in prison for decades because they’re smoking a joint is from one that doesn’t. Those are two completely different societies.
There are lots of normal, otherwise well adjusted, successful people walking around you who think there are people in prison who have been there for years and years and years for smoking a joint. That’s what they think. They think that’s a thing that happens in this country. They think the nature of the criminal justice system is that you get caught with a joint, then it goes all the way to a criminal trial, after which you will be sentenced to prison for many years.

Anybody who believes this is completely fucking insane and out of touch with the actual reality of criminal justice in the United States. This isn’t a small difference. That’s an insane belief.

And it might be the modal belief.
We have a large prison population in the United States because we have a lot of violent crime. And there are racial disparities in the criminal justice system because there are also racial disparities in offending.

That’s the truth. Everything else you’ve been told about criminal justice, about mass incarceration, is a lie. It’s not complicated or close — the average American has been sold a complete fabrication.
Read 5 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Jan 8
I think there’s a way in which the phrase, “what do people even DO in suburbs and small towns” is kind of telling on yourself, as though the whole point of life is to consume restaurant food and attend street fairs (at which you consume restaurant food from a cart).
“What do people even do in the suburbs” is it a question with a shelf life. It’s supposed to be uttered by teenagers who are in their peak socializing years during which they are supposed to be finding a mate to have children with.

You aren’t meant to still be asking that question in your 30s.
Socializing is fine. We have friends. We attend events. We do things. It’s just that those things are not central features of my life, anymore, having been replaced by the day-to-day maintenance of a family with children. We don’t need to optimize our life for proximity to socializing opportunities.

If there’s a social event, we can drive 20 or 30 minutes to get to it.
Read 6 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Dec 26, 2024
To the extent that allowing millions and millions of Ellis Islanders to come here guaranteed for at least the next century that the average American would now think of the country as defined by that immigration — that the immigration wasn’t just something that happened, but rather core to what it means to be an American — I think that’s a perfectly good argument against doing new rounds of mass immigration. Certainly you have to acknowledge and admit that this totally changed the average person’s conception of America. People literally think of the country as something else, now.

Obviously, you can prefer what came before or you can prefer what came after, but I don’t see how it’s possible to deny that there’s a difference.
Again, I would just insist that you don’t get to talk about this like it’s no big deal. A thing happened that completely changed the ordinary American’s understanding of what it means to be an American. That’s a really big deal! That’s always going to be a big deal. There’s always going to be a fight about it. It’s always going to be contentious. No, it isn’t just the most obvious thing in the world that you should do it again.
I understand that a lot of you find that kind of thing exciting and see very few downsides, but unfortunately you share the country with people who don’t think of it the same way. So it’s just always going to be a fight.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Dec 4, 2024
This image going around purporting to explain two-lane roundabout usage nicely demonstrates why these intersections are confusing and dangerous.

The image says that the right lane is for turning right and the left lane is for turning left, but that *either* lane can go straight, suggesting that the blue car is allowed to t-bone the red car when it turns across its lane.Image
In fact, it's much more typical that the right lane *must* turn right, as can be seen in the markings on this real-life two-lane rotary in Warwick, RI.

This obviously makes way more sense and the image is just simply confused about that which it is attempting to explain. Image
The problem with this is that you'd have to be a maniac to turn right across that outer lane so long as there's a car there, because as we've just demonstrated, people have no idea how to use these things, and even if they did, you'd always have to worry that somebody not paying attention would run right into you.

So it's just a dumb construction.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Oct 30, 2024
The messaging around hiding your vote from your husband is of a kind with arguments against home schooling, because it can conceal abuse, or arguments about having parents leave the room when kids are at the doctor, so that the doctor can find cases of abuse, and so on and so on.

In each of these cases progressives want to rudely insert themselves into an existing relationship -- a primary relationship, the kinds of relationships on which you build a society.

This is extremely rude and presumptuous and insulting and also, yes, it will catch some predators, but at the cost of inserting yourself where you don't belong millions of times for every serious case of abuse you uncover.

Liberals are of course *entirely* aware of this dynamic and *accept my point of view uncritically* when it comes to defending the rights of criminal suspects in literally every other context.

It's just marriages and parent/child relationships that they're willing to subvert in order to get tough on crime and abuse.
Amongst my worst critics are a handful of cretins and liars who seem to simultaneously hold the view that it's critical to defend the rights of somebody who almost certainly committed a serious violent crime, but also that they just can't understand why anybody would be against routine intrusions into the lives of parents against whom no credible evidence of abuse even exists and that my doing so implies something nefarious about me.
They are *only* ever passionate about eliminating due process to stop crime when it involves damaging marriages or parent/child relationships. There's basically no other context in which they insist on preventative violations of privacy.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Oct 18, 2024
The deeper point revealed by this obvious truth is that we're all individuals, not avatars for our group identities. "You can't have that job, because people who look like you have dominated in that role for the last 100 years and it's time to give somebody else a chance" is basically incoherent, because I'm just a singular individual and either I get the job or I don't. Whether people like me did or didn't get the job in the past and whether people who look like you did or didn't get the job in the past collapses into a single point where one of us gets the job and one of us doesn't.
American individuality is fundamentally at odds with social justice. It's zero sum. They make opposing, incompatible claims about the world. Either you and I are individuals who should be treated as such or we're pawns in a bigger game. You can't have both.
In the individualist model you address past wrongs by eliminating unfair rules and practices and treating everybody as equals to the best of your ability going forward. This is maximally respectful of the individual, but obviously, since past wrongs can have lingering effects, it won't immediately generate equal outcomes.

In the social justice model you address past wrongs by adjusting the rules of the system to generate equal outcomes, even if that means treating individuals differently on the basis of their position in hierarchies created by those past wrongs.

These two models of the world are in opposition to one another.
Read 4 tweets

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