> What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far less frequently and lead to far less destruction.
> The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected)
No, it's not normal, and the protests have been very small and sparsely attended, but they've been massively amplified by the media [6]. As of May 7th, 68% of Americans (10957 people surveyed) were more worried about restrictions being lifted too early vs 31% that were worried about the lifting too late. And saying you're more worried about the economic harms than the virus is way more normal than actually going into public and gathering in a group with other people who are all intentionally rejecting safety recommendations.
> For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities.
Yeah, it's not possible to change a conspiracy theorist's mind with facts, because any inconvenient fact can just be interpreted as another part of the conspiracy. To those susceptible to conspiracy theories, there is no known cure to the infection. The only way to avoid outbreaks is to stop transmission.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/K9IJKHr
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
[4] https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stop-...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
[6] https://www.vox.com/2020/5/10/21252583/coronavirus-lockdown-...
[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/07/americans-r...