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Classism is the issue. Opportunity is the issue. Greed of the wealthy reaping rents in a quest to squeeze out every last bit of blood money possible is the issue.
Even the choice to forego a proper security system for the cars is an example of greed, of cutting every corner possible and still charging a premium. Who pays? On both ends of this equation it is the poor.
>Classism is the issue.
Crime does correlate somewhat with income, but racial differences in rates of violent crime are poorly explained by income level. Page 93, Table 6:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/9...
And here, see "Analysis of the Combined Data" and the conclusion section:
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe...
The author claims a large amount of the difference is explained by family structure. I'm inclined to agree, and I wish our leaders touched on this more often. You can't welfare or police your way out of a failed subculture where kids aren't raised to respect life and property, or themselves for that matter.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be addressing the issue head on and talking about it openly, but it’s definitely more complex than the genetic argument that tends to emerge.
1. Forbid people from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures/religions (slavery)
2. Relocate children to schools of the subjugating culture or prevent them from being educated (happened during slavery)
3. Make drugs and intoxicants widely available (CIA bringing drugs into black neighborhoods)
4. Enslave people
5. Post-slavery, give them fewer rights and a caste-stratified society (Dread Scott)
6. When/where these cultures build wealth, destroy it (Tulsa massacre)
Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, both very poor parts of the world on average, have a higher ratio of married couples with children to single parents than do the United States and Canada:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/286433/women-worldwide-single-m...
David Drummond, former head of legal at Google and recipient of $47M in total comp in 2019, had a child with a woman who he abandoned and abruptly cut off:
https://www.businessinsider.com/david-drummond-earned-47-mil...
I can provide more anecdotes and data if you like, but my strong sense is that family formation isn't as nearly as tied to class as you think. If anything, low-income people save relatively more money by co-habitating.
I also specifically argued against the notion of seeing class as determined by income.
The U.S. should owe its citizens access to opportunity. With access, everyone can pursue economic opportunity.
"Greed of the wealthy reaping rents"
This is rarely the case. IIRC, most landlords own 1-2 units. Only a minority can be described with your words.
Much like farm size the meaningful number is the reverse. What percentage of units are owned by someone with 1-2 units vs 100’s.
Farming is merely "income derived from ownership of an asset". Web servers, auto rentals, text books, and skii/beach resorts are too.
If you're a landlord and you outsource the working of the land to a peasant tenant farmer (as was the norm in many places for thousands of years), your cut is 100% rent, as it is only derived from your (violence-enforced) exclusive ownership rights to the land.
Is it? Farming is (historically) an optimized form of gathering that's transformed alongside crop consolidation and other efficiency gains.
Without land, farming cannot occur. Without laborers or equipment, farming can occur, but in a less efficient form.
Also, all monetizable "things" represent assets because they hold/produce value.
Duh. But that's not what you're saying, you're saying "without privatised land, farming cannot occur", which is a trivially false assertion.
>Also, all monetizable "things" represent assets because they hold/produce value.
Yes, that is indeed the definition of asset: an ownable and tradable "thing". I fail to see the point.
The world's land is privatized. What ought to be has no relevance.
Farming is asset-driven for that reason.
I'm not debating what could be; only what is.
Crime is a meme (in the Dawkins sense). You see your peers memeing and you start to repeat the same meme yourself. The more you're surrounded by the meme, the more it becomes part of you and how you operate. It's how our brains operate as pattern recognizers and pattern repeaters.
The spread of school shootings is a meme - it didn't happen in the pre-internet era, yet the uptick in news about it has led to a proliferation. It's become a part of the public consciousness, including amongst those that feel disaffected and likely to fall into destructive patterns of thought. It's easy to find online communities that reinforce these feelings and dispositions.
"Incel behavior". Meme.
Anti-trans politics. From out of nowhere, it's suddenly everywhere. Also a meme.
Through this lens, gang behavior amongst disaffected youth is no different than shitposting on Twitter in how it latches on to people and spreads.
If you transplanted the seeds of Atlanta crime into Pickens County, Georgia, I've no doubt the same behavior would take root there. It's independent of skin color or genes. It's a brain modality.
Behavior spreads as a meme. If there are pockets that support or reinforce a particular behavior, then the fire can't and won't die out.
That might not be the case:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...
I think the things that cause this are:
* References to some supposed collective discourse ("so many refuse to discuss this.").
* Statements about what "we" do (who is "we"? Americans? Anglos? English speakers? The world?).
* Heavily political topic central to the USA Culture War.
* Use of (USA) identity group divisions ("white", "black").
I think this is a really unproductive line of discourse and a particularly bad way of approaching that line, focusing on consensus building and a call to action (in this case, a change of discourse). I think this post is unsuitable for hackernews.
However, what do you think is a productive line of discourse on this problem, that makes light and not heat?
It seems a quandry to me.
Indeed, I wish one day we backtrack on this stupidity. Name and shame regardless of colour and stop this imposed self censorship.
The problem is that black kids get publicly shamed and cracked down on when they haven't done anything, making that ineffective, and nobody bothers with the third part of actual programs to help them.
Sorry but that's wrong. If you try to fix an issue by doing useless things, such as attacking TikTok, and then conclude that the problem is not solved because it is "overdetermined and multicausal", you just confused yourself into impotence.
I would rather start with things that provably work...
> But no, most persistent behaviors, not even problems specifically, are multicausal and overdetermined. Behaviors that are not this way are fragile and rarely persist long enough to even be labeled as “a behavior”.
Salvador seemingly proved that its very high murder rate had a single major cause: gang activity [1]. Some "social" problems have simple solutions. Some don't.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/el-salvador-murders-p...
El Salvador proved what was already known. You can rapidly eliminate crime by just imprisoning anyone suspected of crime. Now tell me... why doesn't every country on the planet do this? Why does the United States have such strong restrictions against this, by design (e.g. "Blackstone's Ratio" to let 10 guilty men go free rather than imprisoning a single innocent one)?
Could it be that this behavior tends to scoop up innocent people, delegitimize the state, and yield more violence and more chaos?
This is exactly the type of simplistic thinking I'm cautioning against. Maybe it'll work out for El Salvador, but in general throughout history this has not yielded good outcomes, which is why most of the prosperous countries on the planet do not behave this way despite its obvious near-term advantages.
> You can rapidly eliminate crime by just imprisoning anyone suspected of crime.
Overgeneralization from the get-go is how you end up confusing a situation and do nothing.
> why doesn't every country on the planet do this?
A first reason would be that they don't have gangs, so it would be useless to target them. Then, if they have large gangs and they can identify members of such gangs, then yes -- why don't they do this?
> Could it be that this behavior tends to scoop up innocent people, delegitimize the state, and yield more violence and more chaos?
This is changing the conversation. Those are not causes, but potential consequences. You said that problems are always multicausal and can't be solved by simple solutions, but isn't it more like you have strong moral standards that prevent you from considering such solutions? So this is not about a correct analysis of causes and such, this is about how to solve problems within your own framing.
To answer: if you outlaw being in a gang, then anyone identified as part of one is not innocent. Arguably a state is more delegitimized when it fails to prevent its peaceful members from being murdered or ran over by carjackers. Third is simply: no, I don't think so at all. Third, is a "theory of inverse": having more order, creates more disorder. It's never applied anytime in my life -- when I clean my place, it doesn't get dirtier, and it doesn't seem to me that this theory has worked on a societal level either.
> but in general throughout history this has not yielded good outcomes, which is why most of the prosperous countries on the planet do not behave this way despite its obvious near-term advantages.
Speaking of framing, the "most prosperous countries on the planet", by which I assume you mean the U.S. and various Euro countries, executed a large percentage of their population for centuries until the (late) second part of the 20th. If you look at the UK for example [1], the Bloody code (in the 19th) included 220 reasons for capital punishment (including many dismeanors).
It would be simplistic to conclude that extremely harsh legal systems lead to prosperity, but it seems that not only are there obvious short-term advantages, there might even be long-term advantages.
Finally, I will say that, amusingly, El Salvador doesn't have the death penalty, so instead of executing a few gang-members every year, and having the police control them on the road every day, they're just locking up a large number of them with huge short-term success.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
El Salvador is very likely committing extrajudicial killings and imprisoning people without anything resembling fair trials. Again, this will have the intended effect in the short term and will very likely not in the long term.
For example, why does MS-13 et al exist anyway? Well, as consequence of the Salvadoran Civil War which was kicked off in part due to extrajudicial killings that the government at that time was using to maintain control over a brittle society!
You’re just seeing a repeat of the same cycle that produced the violent gangs in the first place. The problem will re-emerge and I’m sure we’ll have another proposal to do “the simple thing” and just go imprison and execute a bunch of people extrajudicially. Maybe it’ll work that time.
In any case, I can't agree with anything you said. Obviously reducing murders by half will have very deep trickling positive effects on a society. And the Salvadoran Civil War was simply not due, even in part, to cracking down on gang crime.
I reiterate that, even though you may not like it, or may want to use softer methods, or may resent one for making this observation, repressive methods provably work at stopping violent crime. Unless you're a slippery slope afficionado, what this should tell you is not that you should declare martial law on Earth, but that violent crime is a provably solvable problem. Arguably, alongside with morals, it would be nice to also have the imagination and motivation to achieve such result.
I guess we'll see how stable El Salvador seems in a few years. I would bet that it will either be an authoritarian state rife with human rights abuses as a matter of daily operation or it will be once again overrun with crime bordering on civil war.
Would we? This is merely grand theft auto, not rape or murder, so why would we treat them worse than Brock Turner or Kyle Rittenhouse? If they were white, why not give them a book deal?
I'm sorry, but what? Brock Turner was convicted of sexual assault.
He served 3 months, and likely gave someone else a lifetime of hurt because he couldn't control his sexual urges to the point he was willing to have sex with an unconscious person.
He served 3 months. after being rich enough to post bail and hire decent lawyers.
But somehow, he doesn't deserve hate and this is less bad than grand theft auto?
This became national news and the judge involved was recalled:
https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-132/california-judge-...
We'll all know Brock Turner's name and his crime for the rest of our lives. I believe this is an exception that proves the rule.
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was toothless primarily because of its Jury trial clause, which guaranteed that no one violating civil rights would ever be convicted by a jury of their white peers.
It's not "self defense" when you arm yourself and drive yourself intentionally into an are trying to create and/or find trouble.
Not sure why you want make this a black and white issue.
So instead of stealing cars do you want them to destroy the economy and get bailouts or steal college seats from deserving candidates by just buying college admissions, you want them to do "respectable" crimes?