Fair—it wasn’t right of me to say that the “we’re being silence” intellectual-dark-web McKinsey-is-too-woke types are annoyed solely over their inability to state certain racial views publicly.

They’re also annoyed they can’t dehumanize trans ppl openly too.

https://twitter.com/tx_pros/status/1657384396163366912

But it is fair, and not cynical at all, to point out that a HUGE chunk of what the “forbidden knowledge” types complain about boils down to not being able to openly dehumanize certain marginalized groups.

Thus their need for safe-space echo-chambers in which to do so.

I’d add, without sarcasm: I think I see a way to push for SCOTUS retirement.

Congress surely CAN pass a law saying that justices can receive $0.00 in royalties, honoraria, etc while in office. Prob can limit above-market returns on housing sales, etc.

Wanna cash in? Retire.

https://twitter.com/johnfpfaff/status/1654196374060126212

It’s clear that outside payments—whether direct cash payments or cozy “teaching” gigs overseas or sudden land sales—are a non-trivial form of SCOTUS compensation.

A chunk unprotected by Art III.

Cut that off, maybe lifetime employment is less appealing.

If this is the best The Daily Wire can come up with, then it looks like the liberal justices are pretty clean.

How did the DW learn abt the $3M?

From Sotomayor DECLARING IT ON HER DISCLOSURE FORMS.

https://twitter.com/rwpusa/status/1654108438056632323

Sotomayor was in full compliance w the Court’s (pathetically-nonexistent) recusal rules.

Thomas and Gorsuch were out of compliance with the Court’s (anemic) disclosure rules.

These are … not remotely the same thing.

I’m not saying that the causal story here isn’t true, but I feel like at this point we should basically just ignore studies that are purely correlational with—AFAICT here—absolutely NO identification strategy beyond “we control for confounders.”

https://twitter.com/benryanwriter/status/1654138816394035210

Like, this is an issue where reverse causation is really, really plausible—the vulnerability to schizophrenia CAUSES the self-medicating use of marijuana. Which makes correlational-only so so risky.

And that it may align w other such studies tells us nothing, if all are biased.

Thread, on the murder--it was a murder--of a homeless man on the F train this week: on how we have consistently failed to provide adequate services, disrupted effective self-support the homeless have devised in their absence, and thru it all dehumanized them.

To lethal effect.

https://twitter.com/taliaotg/status/1653740935778320384

The coverage of this, from every source, has made the consistent, deadly, dehumanizing error of equating disorder with danger.

The claims of "threatening behavior" are simply asserted, although nothing I've read suggests he *actually threatened* anyone.

This is why I always disliked those allegedly heart-warming stories abt how the justices were all chummy across the aisle.

Why would you want to go to the opera with someone so openly racist as this? (And no: this isn’t funny, or sarcastic, or anything. It’s just racist.)

https://twitter.com/jdmortenson/status/1653581264841060356

Moreover, by going to the opera w Scalia rather than shaming him, those who went w him failed to impose any costs for this racist behavior, despite being among the few anywhere who could. Which only likely encouraged him more.

(This applies to his takes on homosexuality too.)

An absolute surrender to the Willie Horton Effect.

Note, tho: there’s little to no empirical evidence about just how real the effect actually is.

In fact, political scientists now think the Horton ad itself likely didn’t affect the 1988 election at all.

https://twitter.com/petersterne/status/1651741989203738624

Can you point to Horton-like outcomes, the One Bad Case that sank a candidate? Probably.

But that’s selecting on the dependent variable. You need to be able to count all the POSSIBLE Horton events, and then see how many matter. That’s… daunting.

FL’s governor’s office can now rewrite city budgets (w/out appeal) if they cut police spending.

AZ state law defines who can serve on local civilian police oversight boards (must be 67% to 100% police).

GA is suddenly creating a DA Oversight Board (to clearly target reformers).

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1641198699895193602

IA’s governor has proposed restructuring all sorts of local powers (clearly to target one bee reform DA).

TX is considering multiple bills to strip away local control over enforcement, having already passed one targeting budget control.

And this is clearly just the start.

So, about that "guns are the leading cause of death among those aged 1-19."

It's the sort of stat that turns a LOT on how we choose to define things.

For example: what is the now-second group? Accidents? Or SPECIFIC accidents? If you look at top-15 causes of death for kids/adolescents, by major categories, "accidents" exceed "assaults" + "death by suicide," and the latter two include more than just gun deaths.

But if you break up accidents, but not gun deaths, into TYPES, you get the switch... sorta.

It's been years since I've thought about this issue (crim pro 3 being the last time), but isn't this an *easy* case for the "harmless error" rule? Not only was the brother virtually there, but won't the new hearing produce the EXACT SAME OUTCOME?

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1640781252021059584

Is the argument that not having someone there in person is the thing that is not the same, not the substantive outcome of the case?

I guess that's... something. But, man, feels more like the harmless error rule only applies when it supports severity.*

"It's not just the absence of crime, it's the presence of well-being."

Fantastic line by @misterjayjordan, and a great reminder that we so often emphasize just one statistics (crime rates) to exclusion at--at the EXPENSE OF--all sorts of other ones.

https://twitter.com/TheProblem/status/1639311110452002818

Of course, to those who do not live in the communities impacted by crime, it really is just about the absence of crime, since they feel the (usually-overstated-for-them) fear of crime, but likely feel none of the benefits of others' well-being.

This is a really interesting result, but I also think that mayoral elections, unlike DA ones, are a lot harder to unpack.

DAs control one thing, but mayors several, and many are correlated: a tough-on-crime mayor is also likely to be a tough-on-teachers mayor.*

https://twitter.com/soit_goes/status/1639088593158258690

So while I'm generally not surprised Vallas's support is strongest where crime is the least, I think it could also be the case that for mayors there is still room for a "Locking Up Our Own" candidate: someone like Johnson on a lot of issues, but also pushing for more policing.

Worth pointing out that the claim that the way to defeat bad speech is with more good speech is, in fact, without any real empirical support, and faces some empirical red flags.

The “marketplace of ideas” is actually a fairly pernicious metaphor. As Jeff Stake has argued, it’s more a primordial swamp than an efficient market, and truthfulness need not be an evolutionary asset.

See also the work by the cultural cognitionists, Jennifer Eberhardt and racism, etc. etc.

Stanford students, by being unruly, disrupted the PROCEDURAL norms of liberal democracy rudely, and have faced condemnation.

Duncan, in his policies, violates the SUBSTANTIVE norms of liberal democracy, but (relatively) politely, and thus is painted as the victim. We all prefer to fight over procedural violations of “liberal democracy” bc they are far less normatively contested.

Arguing that “liberal democracy” includes some norms of SUBSTANTIVE tolerance is much messier, but … if it does it does.

Just taught conventional hypothesis testing to my Data for Lawyers students, and each time I do I get more outraged at what a total sham it is, how we treat it as a game to play more than a serious (social) scientific endeavor.

Some issues: 1. We aren't even rejecting the hypothesis we believe in! Effect size = 0? No one thinks that! But, making that worse:

2. WE TEST THE SAME HYPOTHESIS EVERY TIME.

This is literally the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Popper called for. Test, reject, move on. Not test, reject, test.

Remember—the people who tend to prefer less punitiveness are often those MOST exposed to crime, and thus enforcement. They are the ones who live the costs of the severity—the harm it does to those who inevitability return, the costs to ppl they know who don’t deserve it.

https://twitter.com/equalityalec/status/1633096328258494465

Those who live in the safest areas tend to be those who make the “severity is safety” argument the most, bc it feels intuitively correct, and they often lack the sort of extensive lived experience with that intuition being wrong/far less accurate than they think.

The grant is $100M a year to take police out of traffic stops.

Nationally, police spending is ~$100B per year. That’s a 0.1% incentive grant.

Police view traffic stops as affirmatively good policing. They WANT them. I can’t imagine 0.1% savings will change much.

https://twitter.com/blaw/status/1623489346094395394

This is the history of Fed grant programs, like the 94 Crime Bill (70% of grant funds went untouched and only 4 states said the grants mattered) or SORNA (majority of states took the small cut rather than change their sex registry laws).

Too little $ thrown at huge budgets.

"The current rate of 1.2 violent crimes for every one million rides is roughly equal to the chance of getting injured in a crash if one drives a car two miles."

Thank you, NY Times, for a genuinely level-headed piece putting crime into perspective.

nytimes.com/2022/11/04/nyr… And always important to point out: a rise in per rider crime at a time of significant declines in total riders is really hard to interpret: it could be that the risk per rider doesn't change... bc the decline in ridership is not random!

It’s amazing how many times the police say “this will make our jobs impossible” and then … their jobs remain absolutely possible … and then the next time they say that everyone bites again.

Boy. Wolf. It’s a well-known fable! I mean, I hope the legislators read the bill before the next vote.

But this is also the end of a years-long process—they didn’t write it in a basement overnight.

Law enforcement ALWAYS say ANY change will be “impossible,” and they say it bc it works.

Since 1999, ~200 children have died in school shootings.

There are ~3,000,000 K-12 teachers in the US.

If we armed all the teachers, and if 0.007% of those guns killed a child (accident, etc.), that would kill more kids per year than all school shootings in 20 yrs.

https://twitter.com/NY1/status/1587263196871671809

Assume we armed only 10% of all teachers. We'd need the promise that 99.93% of those guns would never kill a child to make sure that the costs of arming the teachers < costs of not.

Zeldin is, again--again and again and again and again--not REMOTELY serious abt making us safe.

I saw another Zeldin ad attacking bail reform, so in its honor I will tweet this again: the share of those released without bail did rise from Jan-to-Covid, but has fallen ever since.

For any arrest, the rate is surely BELOW 2019 (pre-reform levels). Likely for violence too. Also worth noting that the share of ppl released without bail DID NOT CHANGE MUCH, bc judges already released most misdemeanors (the bulk of the cases impacted by the reform) without bail IN 2019 (see C here).