A great read with lots of stats ( I wouldn't expect anything less from you, lol) But it wasnt the Soros funded attack itself, but the narrative it created, that supersedes any data (dazzling as your data always is) that did the real damage. The narrative- Police Bad- George FLoyd good, and the ensuing crime and destruction wave that we are still dealing with today-when we al know he really died of a fentanyl overdose. What say ye?
(1) The results do begin to impose some structure on the question of what we mean by "Soros DA." Do we mean that Soros DA's have been going light on dangerous criminals; these criminals are therefore still circulating in public and doing bad stuff; that bad stuff should show up in the data?
Or, closer to your suggestion...:
(2) A shift in the zeitgeist is where the action is; "Soros DA's" are more messengers than active agents. And these shifts are really dangerous, because we might fall into a bad equilibrium where it becomes common knowledge that one can get away with bad stuff because (a) the system was never really well equipped to deal with it, anyway and (b) the system might now be overwhelmed if there's simply more bad stuff going on.
In any case, it's hard to get a grip on changes in crime. Homicides remain way, way below where they were during the peak of the "Crack Wars" (about 1990). "Violent crime" then receded to early-1960's levels by 2000, and no one then or now has a good rationalization for that.
One of the authors of "Freakonomics" did advance a politically-correct idea: The decline in violent crime was the consequence of the rise of abortion post-Roe-v-Wade; there were fewer "unwanted" children floating around, who would have been just the kind of people to become violent criminals in the 1990's.
My own sense is that that thesis has not held up well. Others have dug into it. It seems to me that studying crime is difficult, because the underlying processes are elaborate, and we don't have much good data to work with. We can /describe/ changes in volumes of crime, but we don't have much data that would enable to dig into tricky questions about the mechanisms that drive crime. One complication, for example, is that perpetrators of violent crime tend to also be victims of such crime. So, they get taken out of circulation. Other things equal, we end up with fewer bad guys. But, there is evidently important cohort replacement: We get a new set of bad guys. But sometimes the number of bad guys goes down. And sometimes it goes up. Hmm ... It's a tricky phenomenon to get a grip on.
Whilst Ill sound very "woo woo" I would posture that all of these " wars" were created by the powers that be, as there is always, always, always , money to be made off of them. I could tell you who actually funds them, but thats not the best thing to do in a public forum. For sure :P
Hi Dean,
A great read with lots of stats ( I wouldn't expect anything less from you, lol) But it wasnt the Soros funded attack itself, but the narrative it created, that supersedes any data (dazzling as your data always is) that did the real damage. The narrative- Police Bad- George FLoyd good, and the ensuing crime and destruction wave that we are still dealing with today-when we al know he really died of a fentanyl overdose. What say ye?
Many thanks!
A few ideas:
(1) The results do begin to impose some structure on the question of what we mean by "Soros DA." Do we mean that Soros DA's have been going light on dangerous criminals; these criminals are therefore still circulating in public and doing bad stuff; that bad stuff should show up in the data?
Or, closer to your suggestion...:
(2) A shift in the zeitgeist is where the action is; "Soros DA's" are more messengers than active agents. And these shifts are really dangerous, because we might fall into a bad equilibrium where it becomes common knowledge that one can get away with bad stuff because (a) the system was never really well equipped to deal with it, anyway and (b) the system might now be overwhelmed if there's simply more bad stuff going on.
In any case, it's hard to get a grip on changes in crime. Homicides remain way, way below where they were during the peak of the "Crack Wars" (about 1990). "Violent crime" then receded to early-1960's levels by 2000, and no one then or now has a good rationalization for that.
One of the authors of "Freakonomics" did advance a politically-correct idea: The decline in violent crime was the consequence of the rise of abortion post-Roe-v-Wade; there were fewer "unwanted" children floating around, who would have been just the kind of people to become violent criminals in the 1990's.
My own sense is that that thesis has not held up well. Others have dug into it. It seems to me that studying crime is difficult, because the underlying processes are elaborate, and we don't have much good data to work with. We can /describe/ changes in volumes of crime, but we don't have much data that would enable to dig into tricky questions about the mechanisms that drive crime. One complication, for example, is that perpetrators of violent crime tend to also be victims of such crime. So, they get taken out of circulation. Other things equal, we end up with fewer bad guys. But, there is evidently important cohort replacement: We get a new set of bad guys. But sometimes the number of bad guys goes down. And sometimes it goes up. Hmm ... It's a tricky phenomenon to get a grip on.
1. Yes
2. Yes
Whilst Ill sound very "woo woo" I would posture that all of these " wars" were created by the powers that be, as there is always, always, always , money to be made off of them. I could tell you who actually funds them, but thats not the best thing to do in a public forum. For sure :P