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wanye Profile picture
@wanyeburkett
Sep 26 • 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
Oct 18
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
wanye Profile picture
Oct 12
The country literally devolved into riots and practically every institution, from your local PTA to the largest corporations and government agencies, remade itself in response to the lie that police hunt minorities for sport
I’m sorry, but that happened. That all happened. It just happened. Not a long time ago. It just happened. Yes it’s also true that some people recently said some things that are untrue about FEMA. To what end? What were the consequences? What burned down? What was looted? What institution that you are part of completely remade itself in the image of this lie? How many television ads were premised on this line? How many moments of silence at sporting events asked you to reflect on this lie?
What this obviously demonstrates is that if you get laws that limit speech there will be some lies that you can still tell and some lies that you can’t. You won’t solve misinformation. That’s ridiculous. It’s just that the big, popular lies, the lies the elite either agree with or are too afraid for various reasons to oppose will still be allowed. And other lies won’t be.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Oct 5
One of my most strongly-held is that beliefs are developed primarily from emotion and that if you felt the same immediate, knee-jerk, emotional responses that your opponents feel on any given issue, then you would believe as they do. You happen to feel different emotional responses, so you’ve developed commensurate beliefs.

Conservatives aren’t particularly good at this, either, but it’s particularly funny that the “veil of ignorance” understanders, who spend 75% of their time on this website talking about how empathetic they are, seem completely unable or unwilling to grant this.
A good exercise to go through is to create a table with three columns labeled, “issue,” ,”my position,” “my emotional response to that issue” and see if you can come up with even one thing for which your emotions do not match up with your preferred policy.
You probably won’t, which is strong evidence that emotions are driving your beliefs, not reason, not data. I think exposure to enough new information, new facts, new data can in the long run change your emotional affect. But the key is getting over that tipping point with the emotional response. That’s when you’ll fully accept the new position. You won’t accept the new position so long as you’re still feeling the old emotional response. You’ve got to get over that hump.
Read 5 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Oct 5
Libertarians were wrong about this. Prohibition decreased alcohol deaths. This is obvious and straightforward and really shouldn’t be controversial. We legalized marijuana and usage went up. We made opiates more available, more people died. When alcohol was prohibited, fewer people drank it and we had fewer alcohol related deaths.

This is very simple stuff.
Obviously you can still oppose prohibition for other reasons. But this is right. There’s a lot of dishonesty about some very basic aspects of drug and alcohol prohibition.
I don’t know how anybody can still hold onto those old libertarian ideas about drug legalization in the wake of the opioid crisis. Here we’re talking about drugs that are literally prescribed by a doctor, in many cases, drugs that are manufactured and sold by large pharmaceutical companies with stringent quality control processes.

And what happened? Total disaster. An explosion of overdoses. People graduating to harder drugs like heroin. Life expectancy gains literally reversed.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Oct 4
I remember once being at a bar with a good friend, a good, kind person, and telling her that I had to leave because I was conducting some technical interviews at work the next morning and wanted to be sure I was well rested. She was asking a bit about it, and as I described the process, which by tech standards wasn’t all that rigorous, but which did involve more than one technical round, you could see her face kind of scrunch up. The whole thing clearly sounded elitist and snobby distasteful to her; and after all, “you’re just my buddy who hangs at the bar where we’re all equals, who do you even think you are that you can gatekeep a job in this way?”

The feeling was unmistakable, like that feeling you get when you’re on a date and you know you’re not impressing.

This is the emotion on a broader scale that is underlying a lot of liberal thinking about immigration. When you start talking about vetting, about standards, about earning potential, even about criminality, their faces start to crunch up like, “who do you think you are, anyway? Who are you to judge other human beings? To put a measure on their worth?”

They feel this way about job interviews, about college admissions, about immigration policy. This is why you get into these weird debates where they try to beat you on a technicality with the language of legality. None of that is real, or at least it’s not primary. What’s primary is that feeling they get when you start talking like this. They are extremely emotional about it and the policy follows from the emotion. It’s primary, immediate, reflexive. It’s all in the way their face scrunches up when you mention it.
The idea that they’ve arrived at that position because they understand the contours of the debate better than you, because they know the law, because they have looked at all the data, because they’re just simply moron, gosh darn it, couldn’t be more absurd. Their face scrunches up when you start talking aboutstandards in admissions. It’s involuntary, reflexive. Every single piece of data they’ve ever learned about immigration is marshaled in defense of that initial lowering of the eyes and raising of the corners of their mouth.
I think the most charitable thing you can say about this is that if you felt that feeling, then you would be equally suspicious of anybody who didn’t. It would feel to you internally like an expression of basic kindness and openness to humanity and an absence of it would present as a form of casual sociopathy.

It would take a unique kind of person who was both pretty smart and very good at decoupling their own immediate emotional reactions from policy to feel as they do and not draw that conclusion about the other side. So of course almost none of them are able to avoid it.
Read 4 tweets
wanye Profile picture
Oct 4
What's going on here is that we used to have two categories that our discourse is anchored to:

1. Illegal (crossed the border illegally)
2. Legal (came through as part of an orderly, planned process)

And now we have a third category: the migrant. They often *come* illegally (or quasi-legally, given that all asylum claims, no matter how spurious, have to be taken seriously) and then are granted temporary legal status once here.

This is breaking the distinction we're accustomed to assuming in our discourse.
I would submit that this isn't all that difficult to understand, but there are obvious incentives to obscure it.
Deliberate or not, we used to have a category called "legal" that was pretty straightforward and that referred to one specific thing: an immigrant who came as part of a planned, orderly, limited process.

Now we have a new category called "legal" that includes both those immigrants and also migrants.

This can of course be ignored to great effect.

x.com/mikeymayers/st…
Read 5 tweets

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