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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
Jun 9
“The average American crime rate, isn't the crime rate of the average American” succinctly explains the disconnect on the debate about whether immigrants commit more crime than natives. You don’t even have to focus on the racial aspect of this, if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s enough just to notice that crime rates differ quite a lot on an important dimension and that our society is largely segregated by the same dimension. That means that you’ve got two distinct, largely non-overlapping rates for which it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to take the average.
This may be hard for people to see, but you can have immigration that consists largely of people who have a lower crime rate than the current average, but who will raise the average crime rate in the medium to long-term, so long as you assume that demographic disparities persist. This is precisely because there are already large disparities in offending and unequal group population sizes.
I said that this may be hard for people to see, but I think actually people intuit it.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
May 28
On Noah Smith’s podcast he’s talking with Matthew Yglesias about how conservatives “lost their shit” over the, “if I had a son he would look like Trayvon” line.

Noah says he doesn’t get it. Why did they care about that line? Matt responds coyly (paraphrasing), “I mean, it’s unproductive to call people names, but…”

And then they both agree that it’s just because they’re racist.

Noah doubles down (paraphrasing, again): “ok sure, they’re racist, but why this one line? I don’t get it.”

I don’t think this is a particularly difficult case!
It’s not that obscure: the belief is that Trayvon was not a great kid and was probably up to no good when he was killed and white people do not as a general rule immediately identify with shitty white people purely on racial grounds. For most white folks it’s very strange to jump straight to, “that could have been my kid” when some shithead teenager gets himself killed in a pointless fight.

All you have to grant is that conservatives mostly believe Trayvon to be the architect of his own demise and then the rest follows quite easily from there.

Crucially, you do not have to personally subscribe to this understanding of the facts in order to comprehend the controversy about the line.
It’s just kind of a weird thing to say, something that indicated to a lot of people that the president of the United States was not going to be capable of objectively evaluating the facts of the case, because of his own racial priors.
Read 5 tweets
wanye Profile picture
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.
Read 5 tweets
wanye Profile picture
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.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
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.
Read 7 tweets
wanye Profile picture
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!
Read 4 tweets

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