I got a degree in criminology about 25 years ago and can confirm that there was no dispute in the science at that time that this was the way to reduce crime.
Everything else had been tried and tried again and proven not to work. It was around that time that my (then) field realized that the DARE program increased drug use.
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
When I studied, it was almost a joke to read new research coming out, because every serious study was just confirming what everyone knew. Guest lecturers would come in to talk about their latest theories in criminology. and, it was basically everyone just sitting around saying oh yeah that’s obvious. The field has peaked, and it was up to society then to catch up.
We looked at three strike’s laws, truth and sentencing laws, asset forfeiture laws, mandatory minimums, and every time we found that these policies increase violent crime. They further fracture communities and destroy families at the generational level.
It may not be intuitive to think that, but would a little thought, a little reflection, it is hard to say that this would not be the obvious result.
The methods to reducing and ending recidivism have been well known to science. People who talk about harsh law enforcement and punitive corrections are either ignorant, emotional blowhards, or not serious about reducing crime.
We have in America a well-established cat and mouse model of policing. And indeed it does Trace its history to slave patrols, a reactionary force of violence, dispatched into the community to capture offenders. The entire model does absolutely nothing to prevent future crimes from occurring.
Maybe they catch some guy who’s a serial offender, and get him off the streets. And they call that a win. But until the root causes of crime are addressed, all they’re doing is playing serial offender whack-a-mole; the next one is just going to pop right up. And maybe they’ll say, oh sure, that’s because we have a “catch and release” system.
Well, if we literally did nothing at all to stop crime, and totally abolished the concept of a police force, the science is absolutely clear that most people are going to age out of crime by the time they turn 25, and the rest, save for a few people who are likely mentally disabled, will age out by the time they hit 35. But instead, we’re kicking down doors and locking people out in cage for decades on end, making sure that their families are broken and locked in a cycle of poverty and trauma, and we end up sometimes with three generations of men sharing a prison together.
And while we’re on the subject of prison, the science is also absolutely clear that the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment. When I got my degree, the field was shifting to a program evaluation approach, because we had figured out what programs we needed to have, and the only thing left to do was to fine-tune those programs to get the most out of them.
But then 4 years would go by, or 8 years would go by, and some new tough-on-crime politician would come and wonder why we’re spending so much money to hold people in a cage, and they’d start cutting the programs.
And despite that, and despite the emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime, virtually every type of crime is the lowest it’s ever been in my lifetime.
This is why we say “the cruelty is the point”. As you note, these are not serious people trying to reduce crime. They are straight up lying about their goals, possibly even to themselves. The whole mindset is against the idea that crime is something that even can be reduced; rather, “bad people” will always do “bad things”, and it’s up to “powerful men” to protect the rest of society from them. It is rooted in a deeply authoritarian mindset that puts them as one of the “powerful men”. If you were to reduce crime, how can they prove that they’re one of the “powerful men”?
well, the powerful man probably think that covering people’s basic necessities wouldn’t reduce crime. After all, they have those covered in spades, and yet steal billions of dollars each year
This is a spectacular post
Trump mandated that lead piping won’t be replaced. That stuff correlates with crime rates, far as location goes. Brilliant. 🤦♂️
First, thanks for taking the time to do that writeup!
Second - do you happen to have links to any likely sources that would present that info in a digestible manner? I’m not asking this to challenge you, I’m asking so I have linkable references in future discussion.
Thanks!
Someone else asked for this too and I’m really having a hard time coming up with anything.
All good, no worries, still a great writeup!
To add to that, it’s the same with homelessness. Every 1-4 years, architecture students and urban planning students are asked to do projects on helping to house the homeless or something similar. Every time, they come up with innovative and unique ways to handle it. People forget about and/or realize that no one will try any of them. Repeat.
I remember reading that a study showed that giving homeless people (without drug problems) a steady source of money, and not even that much money, helped almost all of them get back on their feet.
Thank you for this great insight and information.
emotional reactionaries who just want to see bad guys be treated badly to make themselves feel better about crime
I keep thinking about Dukakis. They asked if he would change his mind/support the death penalty if his wife was murdered. He said no - and folks flipped their shit.
The “left” as it exists in the US is so cowed by the idea of a Willie Horton scenario that it has to lean into that same evil vindictiveness. The 1994 Clinton crime bill which devastated Black communities was Dems trying to show off how “tough on crime” they could be.
Criminals are a safe “other” to hate.
yeah. i thought this was common knowledge myself (as a layman) but then i realized i lived in an intellectual bubble, and that most conservatives would reject the idea even when presented with evidence because cruelty is the point.
that’s when i realized that the only solution was to get rid of conservatives.
seriously. none of this will ever change until the vast majority of abrahamic religious minded, protestant work ethic devoted people are gone.
and for those that say, “if you just educate them”, well… they stand in the way of education reforms, so…
the answer remains: [redacted]
Yeah. There was a time that I wanted to believe conservatives were merely misguided. Now I know: they are straight up evil. As dehumanizing and unkind as it is, I have started to mentally replacing them with orcs, goblins, and dragons.
A small part of me is sad about the death of my naivety. Then my brain reminds me what price society has paid for hosting these malicious turds. If there is a Reconstruction 2.0, these words must be followed: “Rip and tear, until it is done.”
Do you have some beginner friendly references I could look at? I live in a MAGA heavy state and although logic doesn’t always work the more tools in my belt the better!
What I keep getting held up on is that if the science keeps pointing toward the same conclusion, how do you actually apply those to society? How to you convince the voting masses to institute these changes? Because the average person won’t accept repealing things like three strikes and minimum sentencing, they just assume that a “tough on crime” attitude is the way to go. If a politician comes along offering justice system reform, he’d never make it into office because people would assume he’d be letting criminals run rampant unpunished.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
Honestly, I think it would require being raised in a society where social welfare is the norm before it can be considered ordinary.
It would take a revolution with people of vision in order to create a social welfare society. Similar to the Founding Fathers of America, where people of intelligence, character, and spine agreed that a change must be made. We will need people who can fight like hell to lead us into battle, and coolheaded types who will spend a great deal of midnight oil on drafting and workshopping a new way of living.
It won’t be easy nor intuitive, but the crisis caused by Yarvin’s Cabal might be the kindling we need for people to give up on the way we have lived. After all, the old ways are dying with the Constitution. When cowardice offers no shelter, all that is left is to fight.
Related, I’ve heard people argue against UBI by saying that it would just make people lazy and not want to work at all.
I mean, it’s completely unrealistic to think that this would not be the case for some X% of the population. It’s already the case now, with the welfare programs we already have, after all. What number that X is, is what’s unclear. People saying “nobody will work” are definitely wrong, though, lol.
I think you could address that by using what I call “Universal Ranked Income”. The idea is that there are floors and ceilings on income, wealth, and so forth. The floor is basically a minimum wage, while the ceiling of the highest income bracket is absolute - people simply do not get any more income at that level, regardless of their job or investments.
In addition to this, job classes should be assigned a rank based on the effort, risk, and knowledge required to perform the task. The job class has a fixed income, that employers can’t alter. They cannot manipulate the number of workdays, the income of a job is fixed, with each month delivering a set wage. Workhours and days are also fixed, to prevent employer manipulation.
Next, is a small pool of income archetypes, from lowest to highest. By keeping the diversity in job ranks to a dozen at most, employees can say “My boss isn’t supposed to get that much money, they are only X. Something smells!”. By creating a framework of obvious rules, it would be easier for society to nip potential oligarchs in the bud.
Here are some ranks from my notes as a baseline sample:
Rank 0: $10,000 per year, 05% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$1,500. Has no work obligations.
Rank 1: $10,000-20,000 per year, 10% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in up to -$4,000. For students, who receive a level of income based on grades.
Rank 2: $40,000 per year, 15% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$10,000. Waiters, clerks, curbside hawkers, daycare staff.
Rank 3: $60,000 per year, 20% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$18,000. Crop pickers, athletes, sex workers, couriers, nurses, police, teachers, journalists, soldiers in cold zones.
Rank 4: $80,000 per year, 25% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$28,000. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, researchers, hot zone troops.
Rank 5: $100,000 per year, 30% / 10% cultural & social taxes, resulting in -$40,000. Astronauts, Firemen, ambulance staff, hot battlefield leaders, surgeons, diplomats, lumberjacks, lead researchers.
If you look at the example, notice that education has become a job. It delivers a variable income based on performance, but is still less valuable than being a waiter, who has a fixed $40k income. Education is a pathway to a career, and people can focus on the path, since education offers an income for being studious. The current method of education sucks, because a person has to balance their survival, wellbeing, and education against each other. This is extremely inefficient and punishes people.
Further, I think the URI can potentially negate inflation. This is because the value of money has to be judged against the fixed incomes of society. Remember, jobs lost value, largely because employers keep the fruits of productivity to themselves. By enforcing fixed incomes for everyone and placing heavy restrictions on organizations, we can mitigate that siphoning of wealth. Price controls are much easier when you don’t have a huge variety of income factors to confuse the calculation.
Thank you for typing that out!
Thanks for sharing your experience
Fantastic reply. Thanks for taking the time to write it out and thanks again for the insight into the very important work you do.
Wow, all very insightful, thanks for taking the time write this!
Do you have any recommended sources to read more about this topic / research? I’d love to learn more!
It was almost 25 years after the St. Louis (maybe wrong city, it’s been a while) Crime and Control study proved that flooding the streets with more police officers only pushed crime into other neighborhoods.
Small point about this in particular, but isn’t the above evidence that this is effective at removing crime from an area? Why not do the same in the “other neighborhoods”, too, then?
Especially if you combine the above with what you described later to reduce recidivism:
the way to reduce recidivism to almost nothing is to provide good health care, good mental health care, and to teach people marketable skills, all in a safe environment.
Seems like a solid plan to me, and police forces would naturally/gradually shrink over time, to suit the overall crime rate as it goes down.
I can almost picture the classroom I was sitting when I first learned about the study and having the exact same reaction you did.
Part of the study controlled for that, in the context of practical limitations. They divided the city into sectors and absolutely flooded certain sectors with cops while doing minimal patrols in the others, or in some cases none at all. The crime just moved in the opposite way. When the police presence increased in one sector, the crime rate went down there, but went up in the others. And then when they switch the sectors, the crime switched back. So practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants. I see towns get into it over a budget allocation to hire one additional officer, let alone the number they would need to sustain to keep up the sort of levels needed to push crime out everywhere. And maybe some places would be able to do it, but the crime would just push to other areas, foisting the problem onto other communities. Further, I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
practically speaking, cities and towns would have to be able to sustain that high level of policing, which hardly anyone wants.
But it’d be temporary for it to be that high, no? Am I misremembering, or is this basically the way that NYC stopped being so infamously crime-ridden? I was under the impression that it’s not as aggressive now as it was then.
Hastily-googled, but this seems to confirm at least some of what I remember reading a while back: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan03/what-reduced-crime-new-york-city
I think there’s very little appetite in America to actually put a police officer on every corner. Nobody would like living in that world.
Yeah, probably. Was just wondering about it hypothetically.
After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?
Here’s some further reading in the problem I was describing.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment
I can’t find the podcast. Maybe someone else can post an article about this:
Several years ago, I listened to a podcast that interviewed a man in Chicago who was conducting a study. His team found people with a criminal history(I think maybe drug dealers?) and tell them they’ll get $1000 a month. No strings attached.
There were a few who didn’t use the money well, but most quit crime/dealing drugs entirely. They found steady work and some went back to school.
All they needed was an opportunity to feel financially safe, feed their kids, and pay rent.
Edit: I think I found it? Here’s an article on it. Some of my facts were wrong, but the idea was right overall.
The article also mentions another called the Stock Economic Empowerment Demonstration.
I’m not sure which I heard about but I suspect the interview was with Richard Wallace who is mentioned in the article. Some of his talking points sounded familiar.
They’ve been trying it across the world, it’s called Universal Basic Income. It’s been proven mostly successful every time.
Here’s an old article about the US: https://mashable.com/article/cities-with-universal-basic-income-guaranteed-income-programs
Yeah! I wanted to specifically call out the study on UBI with formerly incarcerated people.
I know a lot of pushback on UBI is that it will make people lazy, or emboldened criminals. It has the exact opposite effect.
I believe that’s manufactured pushback tbh. People who are overworked might think it would make themselves lazy. At first, maybe? To get your thoughts in order, it might look lazy. But most people who feel safe with a steady income want to be productive.
I was talking about it with my GF over breakfast. She’s being worked to the bone, waking up in pain etc. and thought about alternatives.
She had the idea of a cat-bookstore-library-café. Imagine being able to sit down with a nice [beverage of your choice], read a good book, have a curious kitten climb onto your lap… Sure, it wouldn’t be for everyone and probably too expensive to run at a profit, but it might be possible with UBI.
And she’d still want to work her other job part-time too, just not full time anymore. She’d still be contributing, just in a different way.
I hope she gets to do that. Japan has a lot of cat cafes that are successful.
It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone. Until then, it’s just another targeted welfare program, “offered to a select portion of a city’s population instead of all residents”, as your link says.
You can’t say UBI has been “proven mostly successful” without actually doing UBI, considering its main hurdles are related directly to giving out that much money to everyone. A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth (est. $4.5 trillion), assuming you could convert it straight across into cash 1:1 (which you can’t), and cutting defense spending (~$850 billion), the two most common ways I’ve seen people claim we can pay for UBI in the US, even if defense was cut to literal zero (also absurdly unrealistic), that still wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years.
Nationalize Corporations
There are alternatives that would have a similar effect, without the scary price tag. A negative income tax is an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
I’ve had this discussion before. You might want to do some more research and have sources. I would advise you to look at really good sources about the following points:
- “It’s not “universal” unless/until it’s given to everyone.”
- “…would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.”
- “Even seizing the entirety of every US billionaire’s net worth and cutting defense spending wouldn’t even cover the cost of this UBI for three years”
Your numbers and projected income is way wonky. I’ll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced.
I’m not the other person but I’ve had this discussion in work before and people have hit back with the following:
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
Now I’m in support of doing more for the average person and taking from corporations but I just don’t know how to argue against their, albeit lacking in actual data, arguments.
If sellers can fix prices so easily they’re a cartel. Your whole economy is way fucked in that case so you definately need radical reform of one type or another, UBI is the least of your worries. Paying monopoly prices for everything is your big problem, you do need to get on with effective anti-trust action - or other radical market reform.
Even if no prosecution due to regulatory capture and so on though, a cartel of enough oligopolists in inherently unstable and they have to work hard to keep up the cooperation, it becomes a complex situation but underying it, the first one to cut prices will sell way more units and eat the others market share . This doesn’t work all the time in all industries, but general competetive pressure does sometimes work to mediate excess profits in some circumstances.
Now, if you’d picked a broken market like rents and said landlords fix rental prices higher, yes - dysfunctional market, high barriers to entry, no real liquidity, rare transactions, powerful intermediators, weak ill informed buyers; yes such a market probably would benefit from price regulation or increasing social housing provision.
I’d love to see the evidence for the 1:1 happening in practice. I suspect it’s someone’s perverse-dream, very strong assumptions about universal sellers power and consumers total inability to substitute.
For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
You may choose to have a $2000 cost of living, but you would choose that too through a pay raise. You could be empowered to keep $1000 cost of living, and there would be more apartments like “yours” if everyone else is moving up in lifestyle.
UBI gives you more choices. If you think everyone else is passive, just paying what they are told, you can use the opportunity to build more affordable life options for people, including easy access to loans from all of the extra money getting spent.
So when I said cost of living I meant in general and not on an individual basis.
For example $1000 would cover all rent and bills, but then companies or landlords get greedy and raise prices so the cost of living is now $2000 making UBI futile. Rather than an individual increasing their own cost of living. If that makes sense.
Your example cost of living can apply to many people close to poverty line. Whether that is “general” or you is the same.
UBI will cause some inflation. More demand for stuff, quickly, with supply needing to catch up, and better labour bargaining power meaning higher labour costs.
But it is completely unreasonable to say that UBI makes people no better off. None of the money that gets spent or paid in taxes is destroyed. Very significant economic growth occurs. China can keep up with supply if US can’t, and we are collectively better off, but the richest are especially better off, with cheaper options for stuff. If housing costs skyrocket, big incentive for builders. You can choose room mates that with UBI can afford to pay. If you don’t want/need to work you can move to boonies where costs are lower, also with room mates. UBI lets people afford buying homes, with necessarily good credit from UBI safety net. Group buying easier.
Your fearmongering is not just false, it is an argument for continued power imbalance slavery. Even if your fear was true, we would still be better off through more choices and more power.
This wouldn’t work because with all these people getting UBI would just mean companies would put prices up to levels making the UBI worthless. For example if the cost of living is $1000 and you give people who need it $1000 then before long the cost of living would rise to $2000.
It’s the guaranteed part that makes a difference. If they know they can at least buy toiletries or whatever with the money.
I don’t understand the cost of living part? Are they raising the prices randomly? Is it because more people are buying stuff, so there’s more demand? Then more jobs are created. It’s a very vague question.
Apologies for being vague, it’s been a while since I’ve had this discussion.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding UBI as being linked to the cost of living, in that the UBI would provide for people’s basic needs and if they wanted more than that then they could find a job to supplement their income or maybe it’s one or the other.
I think what they were getting at ok the raising prices is that because there is more spending power then that means corps would like to get their hands on this extra money by raising prices.
I’ll try and broach this topic again and get their objections and bring it up next time I see this discussion.
No worries, I’m guessing they won’t be able to respond either. It sounds like talking points they were given by a podcast or something, and they didn’t really look into it. Whenever people start spouting those kind of things, digging deeper into their thoughts will usually tell you pretty quickly how much they believe or are repeating.
You might want to do some more research and have sources.
I brought up a handful of VERY easily-verifiable, non-controversial data points, and just did some simple math. But, I guess, for the extremely lazy:
- $1000/mo x 12 months in a year = $12000/yr
- Number of working-age (16-64) Americans = ~210 million (I rounded down to 200 and counted working-age only (i.e. no elderly/retired), two things that make my argument WEAKER)
- $12 thousand x 200 million = $2.4 trillion
- Combined net worth of US billionaires is ~4.5 trillion. But hey, I found a much higher estimate that puts it a bit above 6 trillion. That gets you almost a whole extra year!
- Latest US defense spending budget is $850 billion
Assuming stripping defense down to zero (which again, is an absolutely absurd hypothetical made for the sake of argument, and making my argument AS WEAK AS POSSIBLE) and applying the entire $850 billion to the UBI price tag, you’re left with a yearly cost of $1.55 trillion. And even using the higher estimate of $6 trillion from the billionaires, 1.55 goes into 6 less than 4 times.
The only thing ‘wonky’ is your refusal to accept mathematical reality.
P.S. Telling me to “look at really good sources” for ‘it’s not universal if it’s not given to everyone’ made me laugh pretty hard.
I’ll discuss it when you come back with sources from the studies of UBI and why most experts think they worked being referenced
Where do you think the money goes when people get them? They don’t “dissappear”, so the “three years” you get from your billionairs in your example is you not understanding economy, even if you math is correct as you describe it.
The money people get would circulate and be taxable, so the government will get most of that money back to repeat giving out more the next month.
Also, your example I only using billionaires wealth instead if increasing taxes that more people are able to afford now that they have this UBI. The ones who have more than they need in income would be taxed harder, as they earn enough that they don’t need the UBI, but since it’s universal, they still receive.
The politics are easy, except that it needs a political champion who promises and delivers the redistribution of power that is UBI.
A UBI of $12000/year ($1000/month) for just all working-age people in the US (a bit over 200 million) would cost the government $2.4 TRILLION, yearly.
Technically UBI saves government money. That $2.4T is just transfers from net tax payers to net receivers. Zero government discretion/power to stop it. But because programs can be cut at that UBI level, It costs somewhere around $1200B (all government levels) less to provide $2.4T. Once you look at military budget as something that could increase your own cash, even more.
A fair tax system that eliminates payroll taxes and pays for universal healthcare can be 33%. Or 25% for first $100k income, and surtaxes at higher income levels.
https://www.naturalfinance.net/2019/06/andrew-yang-and-democrat-tax-proposals.html
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Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.? It makes no sense for it to be “universal,” we should change the branding. Doesn’t make it the bad idea you are so eager to paint it.
Why the hell would we give the rich $12k/year.?
Because the administrative costs associated with making sure they don’t, will cost even more. That’s one of the main upsides of UBI–no means testing makes it have practically no ‘overhead’. If means testing were added, its price tag would be even higher.
Negative income tax solves the “rich people getting 12k/yr they don’t ‘need’” issue. Beaurocracy/overhead has already been mentioned as another reason.
Taxes on the rich go way up, and so UBI is just a refundable tax credit, but some people pay more than they receive = taxation, where others receive more than they pay = negative taxation.
That’s precisely it, there’s lots of evidence which shows that welfare programs are better for creating stable societies.
“Arrgh that would be communism, so we can’t allow that” - 🤡
I mean the first thing the federated mastadon did was ban the socialists to their own little corner. So even “on the left” what you said isn’t a joke, it’s deeply ingrained dogma.
They don’t want to lessen crime, not really anyway.
They want to increase prison labor capacity by arresting and charging more people
Americans maybe. There’s other countries that don’t have legal slavery.
Yes, we did (The Netherlands). It really works! But sadly policies are changing, heading more towards the American system with privatization, where the gap between the rich 1% and the rest is increasing rapidly. But at least we’re still far away from the current American collapse.
But if crime declined, the poor private prison corporations would lose money, and that’s not a good thing. They wouldn’t be able to give judges kickbacks to sentence lesser crimes! Please, think of the poor private prison corporations!
/s in case the sarcasm isn’t abundantly clear.
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They don’t want less crime they want more so they can exert force over the population
If people have nothing to lose, they’re gonna act like they have nothing to lose…
Like, it’s basic psychology. Resource scarcity changes how our brains work, it’s literally Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
I hit rock bottom. Was broke.
My thoughts on stealing changed entirely. I couldn’t care less. I had bigger concerns than other people’s property. Most people steal out of desperation and when you’re desperate, your moral compass disappears.
Society is perpetually 9 missed meals away from collapse.
A person can do anything when they lost everything.
I’m not saying that lizard people control the world and that they actively feed upon our misery and create the conditions that make us the least happy, without breaking us so much that we destroy the system imprisoning us in retribution…
But if there were what would they be doing differently?
SHOULD be obvious
Lessening crime was never thier objective, it’s just a double speak in support of the prison system.
Create conditions for “have nots” to be drawn to crime
Arrest them
Have a penal system that utilizes their labor
???
MAGA Paradise
What you people don’t understand is that this is the right wing plan to introduce neoslavery with extra steps. As they continue to gut the government and safeguards, they’re going to lean HARD into prison labor and detainment camp labor to replace migrant labor and working poor labor.
It’s based on their percept that they’re superior and the people that end up here are subhuman, so they deserve to be slaves to enhance their supremacy.
If they get the public to associate LGBT with Sexual Deviancy and Sexual Deviancy with Crimes against children, they can arrest anyone they want for being “Light in the Loafers”
Won’t happen in the United States. We’re headed hard in the opposite direction. And the changes taking place right now will effectively make it impossible going forward.
Buy a gun. Protect yourself. Things are about to get real dark. There are about to be a lot more desperate people in this society.
I think you’re right about where the US is headed, but only idiots think having guns will save them from thugs with more guns, let alone a squad of well trained soldiers.
Plenty of resistance movements caused problems for the nazis. You can’t fight them in an open battlefield but you can assassinate leaders. They didn’t manage to kill Hitler but some others were assassinated. Heydrich for example.
Probably a bigger point is that you can’t beat fascism with an individualistic approach to resistance.
Unfortunately most modern Americans couldn’t resistance-movement their way out of a Walmart, and would report anything they thought might be putting them in personal danger.
The trick is to be rich enough that you can hire security squads with helicopters and armored vehicles. The only reason to have a gun in that situation is to take pot shots at the plutocrats.
The reason why punishment does not deter crime is because people who commit crimes usually do so because they are out of options, or were not given other options to begin with. So if you increase the severity of the punishment, you are merely making it more stressful for the people to commit the crimes, rather than deterring them.
That’s my take. And I don’t have a damn criminology degree to come up with that. (Not to say it’s necessarily true, but it rings true to me.)
That’s my take. And I don’t have a damn criminology degree to come up with that. (Not to say it’s necessarily true, but it rings true to me.)
It’s good that you say that. There are occasions where what seems reasonable, really isn’t after investigating the issue.
Regarding crime and punishment: First, I also don’t specialize in criminology, but I have read a bunch of scientific papers regarding the effect of severity of punishment on crime rates. From what I’ve gathered, more severe punishments usually do not reduce crime rates. A prominent example are death sentences, which virtually do nothing to reduce crime rates. Instead, the danger of being caught seems to be more effective.
However, this does of course not encompass the causes of crime, which can be manifold. It’s not always stuff like the satifaction of basic needs. Take a look at big companies or rich individuals, who commit tax fraud for example. Or people who murder or harm others out of unstable emotions. Would you say they are out of options?
But I don’t know about numbers and associated causes for crime in an average populace. It could be enlightening to take a look at that.
Take a look at big companies or rich individuals, who commit tax fraud for example. Or people who murder or harm others out of unstable emotions. Would you say they are out of options?
Definitely not, that’s why I made sure to say “usually”, because the number of crimes that require a lot of resources to begin with, and murders who occur due to mental illness are surely outnumbered by crimes that happen out of necessity, I imagine. I’d also like to see statistics on this. (And have the energy to study it, of course.)
The Nordic countries.
we’re going through a massive organised crime wave at the moment.
coincidentally we’ve also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s and put a shitload of immigrants in the same poor neighbourhoods away from everyone else.
i’m sure it’s unrelated.
In Australia we created ghettos in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t great.
I’m sure someone will be along in a moment to remind us that these ghettos were just one link in the chain of shit things Europeans did to first Australians.
coincidentally we’ve also been dismantling our social systems since the 90s
80’s. Like, 1980.
I think that he’s saying that the Nordic countries have been dismantling their social systems. 1980 was when it really picked steam in the US. But conservative politicians had been trying to dismantle them even before FDR was dead.
Good point, sorry, just knee-jerk hating on Reagan. :)
As one should. Carry on.
There’s a reason that Toronto is labelled one of the top safest cities in the world as well.
Toronto is becoming unaffordable for the working class. High cost of living is what is breaking the US too. I don’t really know why people want to seek asylum in the west. I guess if you’re okay sharing the floor of a room with a few other people on sleeping pads then the rest of the world must be an event worse shithole. You have to work two hours just to afford lunch.
My daughter has a boyfriend who lives on the outskirts of London. He was shocked at the cost of things in fucking Cincinnati. Ohio is in the cheaper half of US states.
For people seeking asylum, the choices are usually “kinda shitty conditions in a nice city” vs “abject poverty and life threatening conditions back home”. It’s not really a question which one is better. Toronto has issues, but the tap water won’t give you cholera, nobody is going to stab you for your bag of rice, and that room you are sharing is not going to be bombed.
There’s a lot of work to be done to make it a city that’s livable for everyone, but please don’t fall for bullshit narratives.
I get it. I grew up with a best friend who lived with 9 people in a one bedroom apartment, I played marbles with him and his brothers so many times in the early '80s. It was better than their homeland.
The US is predatory in the healthcare industry, the housing industry, the food industry and the education industry, but that is a generalization. If there’s a narrative, it’s that the American dream is anything but a lottery at this point. At least it is safer than much of the world, for now. Outside of a dozen or so gang riddled cities, the murder rates are pretty low.
Iceland be much like this…
The only reason some people don’t like the Nordic model is because it has the word Nordic in it. If instead it was the Marxist model, I am sure they’d say it sprung forth from gods own asshole
Edit again, downvote brigade of Marxists butthurt on being called out, lol
well and they also don’t like that the nordic countries are profiteers of neocolonialism. but still worlds better than the Anglophone model of profiteering from neocolonialism and the home country gets no benefit, just a small handful of rich people.
wait, _neo_colonialism? we did do some minor superpower stuff in the 1700s together with the rest of europe, but what have we been doing recently?
The “Global North” is largely de-industrialized and mainly functions by exporting industrial Capital to the “Global South.” The US is chief among these Global North countries as world Hegemon, but the Nordics do it too, especially with regards to predatory debt traps through IMF loans. Hudson’s Super-Imperialism goes over this, but is US-focused.
the nordics are heavily industrialized though. our economies are mostly based on exporting metals, minerals and wood, as well as products made thereof, including heavy machinery, medical-grade steel, oil, and so on. yes the IMF sucks for having a destabilizing effect but that’s not really something an area with half the population of canada can do much about. we don’t have that much influence on the global stage.
I think you should read these articles by The Guardian and Al Jazeera respectively. Norway, for example, has one of the largest Sovereign Wealth Funds. At a country-level, the Nordics heavily financially invest in and profit off of countries in the Global South, like investment bankers. This in turn expropriates large amounts of money, which are used to fund safety nets. The welfare in the Nordics is funded by the Global South.
yes, norway is an insanely rich oil nation. the fund is called “oljefondet”. it comes from oil sales.
as for SDI, since it’s normalised and based on development, the nordic countries falling is only natural, since emerging economies are doing the stuff we did in the 70s. it doesn’t mean we’re getting worse, it means they’re rapidly getting better. ideally, SDI regresses to the mean.
also none of those articles mention that third point?
Countries have been dicks to each other for fucking ever. Get over it. Many other counties did and are now doing just fine. Look at India or China or Brazil. The fact is that many countries which cry about colonialism still use it to distract their poor people from the corruption of their governments and leaders. There’s near overlap between being most corrupt on a corruption index and receiving the most aid from other countries
you need to read some history books about how those corrupt governments got into place. what you are describing is the shift in overt fuckery (Leopold chopping off hands) to covert fuckery (interfering in foreign elections to get favorable corrupt officials installed) associated with neocolonialism. the solution isn’t to “get over it” which… wow what a fuckin’ insensitive thing to say about slavery and the deaths of thousands or millions. it’s to pay reparations and build a workable future instead of burning the world to the ground
I am not being insensitive, I am saying that there are nations who suffered and are doing well now because their leaders know how to govern.
A lot of the cry bully stuff Marxists do is to create guilt and make people in democratic nations hate their governments. They know that their corrupt leaders are not going to fix anything. If the leaders cared about their people, they’d figure out a way to work with the rest of the world, like the leaders in China, India, Brazil etc
Why you are coming at Marxists and praising China in the same breath? You know Marxists want what China has? A government that responds to the interests of the working class instead of the capitalists, where rent can be as low as 300/mo for a 2bd, and new homes averaging ~50K/2bd in cities the size of NYC? And occasionally jails or executes a few of them just to keep them on their toes?
I am intellectually honest about what China has achieved
praising india? wildly corrupt government and worse monpolys than anywhere else
i noticed that too. none of those three countries have a good long standing record for doing right by their citizens or the earth at large
One reason to downvote is actually that Marxism doesn’t have huge marketing buzz in favour of it. It’s not a label that would increase popularity.
Look, on the one hand I know they don’t have popular support. To me it’s less about supporting some hipster culture simply because it’s small, but more about getting annoyed by an idea being posited as inherently correct or morally superior
There is absolutely a direct correlation between crime and poverty.
It’s just here in America we don’t care about that because crime is business.
