What happened to Newark?
When I was a child, I had elderly relatives who lived in Newark, New Jersey. We’d visit them now and then. They lived in an old apartment building that had a European quality (as did their furnishings), with very high ceilings and fancy moldings. They weren’t rich, but they were solidly middle-class, and the city was safe.
Some time later they moved to the suburbs, nearer their children. The last time I visited Newark was probably in the late 60s, and it already wasn’t a place where you would want to be. Recently I did some genealogical research and found out that a bunch of my relatives going way way back are buried in Newark as well. But then I discovered that you can only visit these cemeteries nowadays with a police escort, and that they’d been quite thoroughly vandalized anyway.
In a way, that’s the story of Newark, about which I became more curious – in particular, in light of the recent rioting across America.
The story of Newark is actually more complicated than one might think. And more familiar. By the 1800s the place was already thriving:
Newark has long been the largest city in New Jersey. Founded in 1666, it greatly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, becoming the commercial and cultural hub of the region. Its population grew with various waves of migration in the mid 20th century, peaking in 1950.
That would be when I knew it – at its peak.
Newark was founded by Puritans (now, that was a surprise to me) and named “New Ark” for “New Ark of the covenant.” The Puritans were in tight control till the mid-1700s, and then in the early 1800s the city grew tremendously because of the rise of the leather business there (patent leather was invented in Newark):
The middle 19th century saw continued growth and diversification of Newark’s industrial base. The first commercially successful plastic — Celluloid — was produced in a factory on Mechanic Street by John Wesley Hyatt. Hyatt’s Celluloid found its way into Newark-made carriages, billiard balls, and dentures. Dr. Edward Weston perfected a process for zinc electroplating, as well as a superior arc lamp in Newark. Newark’s Military Park had the first public electric lamps anywhere in the United States. Before moving to Menlo Park, Thomas Edison himself made Newark home in the early 1870s. He invented the stock ticker in the Brick City.
Innovation and manufacturing. The insurance business was added, and the city continued to boom:
As Newark’s population approached a half million in the 1920s, the city’s potential seemed limitless. It was said in 1927: “Great is Newark’s vitality. It is the red blood in its veins – this basic strength that is going to carry it over whatever hurdles it may encounter, enable it to recover from whatever losses it may suffer and battle its way to still higher achievement industrially and financially, making it eventually perhaps the greatest industrial center in the world”.
Post-WWII, however, the city became depleted because of many financial incentives favoring the suburbs, plus a highway system that did the same. The inner city became the refuge of the poor, and of more and more of the black inhabitants who had flocked to Newark as part of the Great Migration when the city was still coasting on its reputation as a city of opportunity [my emphasis]:
The city made serious mistakes with public housing and urban renewal, although these were not the sole causes of Newark’s tragedy. Across several administrations, the city leaders of Newark considered the federal government’s offer to pay for 100% of the costs of housing projects as a blessing. The decline in industrial jobs meant that more poor people needed housing, whereas in prewar years, public housing was for working-class families. While other cities were skeptical about putting so many poor families together and were cautious in building housing projects, Newark pursued federal funds. Eventually, Newark had a higher percentage of its residents in public housing than any other American city…
From 1950 to 1960, while Newark’s overall population dropped from 438,000 to 408,000, it gained 65,000 non-whites. By 1966, Newark had a black majority, a faster turnover than most other northern cities had experienced. Evaluating the riots of 1967, Newark educator Nathan Wright, Jr. said, “No typical American city has as yet experienced such a precipitous change from a white to a black majority.” The misfortune of the Great Migration and Puerto Rican migration was that Southern blacks and Puerto Ricans were moving to Newark to be industrial workers just as the industrial jobs were decreasing sharply.
The changes accelerated, with what used to be known as “white flight,” and redlining:
During the 1950s alone, Newark’s white population decreased by more than 25 percent from 363,000 to 266,000. From 1960 to 1967, its white population fell further to 46,000. Although in-migration of new ethnic groups combined with white flight markedly affected the demographics of Newark, the racial composition of city workers did not change as rapidly.
At the point, the stage was set for the riots of 1967. A black population frustrated by the fact that they had come to the city just as the city’s jobs were dying, and a police force that remained predominantly white, because the turnover there was understandably not as fast. The riots were sparked by the now-familiar scenario of a police action that was resented:
Despite being one of the first cities in the country to hire black police officers, the department’s demographics remained at odds with the city’s population, leading to poor relations between black people and the police department. Only 145 of the 1,322 police officers in the city were black (11%), mirroring national demographics, while the city grew to be over 50% black…
This unrest and social change came to a head when two white Newark police officers, John DeSimone and Vito Pontrelli, arrested a black cab driver, John William Smith, on the evening of July 12. After signaling, Smith passed the double parked police car, after which he was pursued and pulled over by the officers. He was arrested, beaten by the officers and taken to the 4th Police Precinct, where he was charged with assaulting the officers and making insulting remarks.
Residents of Hayes Homes, a large public housing project, saw an incapacitated Smith being dragged into the precinct, and a rumor was started that he had been beaten to death while in police custody. The rumor spread quickly, and a large crowd soon formed outside the precinct. At this point, accounts vary, with some saying that the crowd threw rocks through the precinct windows and police then rushed outside wearing hard hats and carrying clubs. Others say that police rushed out of their station first to confront the crowd, and then they began to throw bricks, bottles, and rocks.
There’s a great deal more at the link. Of course, this happened in the days before there were police videocams, and before every single person on the street carried a handy video recording device, so we really don’t know what happened to Smith at the hands of the police and/or vice versa. But, as we’ve learned so many times, rumors fly and then the riots begin. In the case of Newark in 1967, by the time the smoke had cleared:
…riots, looting, violence, and destruction left a total of 16 civilians, 8 suspects, a police officer, and a firefighter dead; 353 civilians, 214 suspects, 67 police officers, 55 firefighters, and 38 military personnel injured; and 689 civilians and 811 suspects arrested and property damage is expected to have exceeded $10 million.
That was over fifty years ago. Newark has never recovered, but as you can see it was in bad straits even before the riots and would almost certainly have had trouble recovering even without them. The riots exacerbated the situation, however.
In recent years, Newark has been struggling to come back. But it’s been slow going (the link is from last November):
…[The plan for a new multi-business development] comes at a pivotal moment for Newark, a city that has long exemplified the struggles of America’s fading manufacturing hubs.
The proposal for the stadium site is just one of several residential and commercial projects with the potential to accelerate the slow but steady transformation Newark has experienced in recent years.
With the city’s star on the rise, local officials find themselves at a crossroads: They must manage the development Newark has long needed while avoiding the kind of gentrification that could push out its poorer and largely African-American residents.
…Elected officials and activists have vowed to prevent Newark from becoming, as the mayor often puts it, “the next Brooklyn” by making sure the city remains affordable.
Interesting. Initially, white people were blamed for “white flight” because they left a city that was obviously fading economically, and now they are not wanted – at least, not in large numbers – when the city is trying to revitalize itself. Newark’s selling point was that it was only a 20-minute train ride from New York City, and now that NY has fallen – or pushed itself – onto very hard times and an uncertain future, I’m not sure that there’s much hope on the horizon for Newark, either (although fortunately it has managed not to rip itself apart, post-Floyd).
“We’re trying to get that development to happen and get people investing in the city, while at the same time creating opportunities for the residents who live here in the city,” the mayor, Ras Baraka, said in an interview. “It’s not easy. There’s no city in America who’s actually figured it out. Everybody has been attempting to do this, including New York, and it’s been very and extremely difficult.”
I wrote about Mayor Ras Baraka (son of Amiri Baraka, aka Leroi Jones) in this post from 2014, when he was first elected. Baraka is a leftist, and in the past he’s spoken very disparagingly of the police, but he’s not as far gone as some of the mayors we’ve heard this summer:
“I think there needs to be significant reforms … [but] to get rid of the police department — who would respond to calls for service for violence and domestic abuse?”
And yet Baraka himself has been spearheading “significant reform” of the police for much of the time since he’s become mayor. Who would want to be a police officer in a city with the problems of Newark? And here, Baraka invokes the all-purpose phrase “structural racism”:
Stripping the department of its funding wouldn’t address underlying problems of structural racism and poverty, said Baraka, adding that “all of America’s institutions have the same problems the police department has.”
“The police just have guns.”
This post is already very long, much longer than I had originally intended or planned (that happens an awful lot here). And I’ve just scratched the surface; someone could write a book about it, and that someone isn’t me. But Newark is not atypical of a lot of cities these days – cities that lost their industrial bases long ago, and have been in grave trouble ever since. The problems take a visibly racial form, and the leftists in charge make the situation worse (IMHO), but the problems are also economic, cultural, real, and entrenched, and they aren’t easy to solve.
Newark deserves what it has elected. Just because the electorate is stupid does not excuse what it has done to itself. I’ll never live there and I will never visit it again.
The last republican mayor of Newark, NJ left office in 1941,
Not that this fact is important, but it sure is one hell of a coincidence that so many of the worst cities in the USA have been governed by demokrats for many years.
This might as easily be a history of Chicago’s south side.
With New York now mortally wounded, Newark will have a hard time improving.
Born and raised in New Jersey, I am. My grandmother told stories of the days when she enjoyed nighttime window shopping in Newark but that was a long time ago. There is a section of Newark called Ironbound. Some of the most delicious Paella I’ve ever had!
It is true that NYC is only a 20 minute train ride to Manhattan. If I remember correctly, back in the early 80s I could ride one-way from Newark to the World Trade Center for 50 cents. It was quite a deal and much faster than taking a bus and cheaper than driving.
I wasn’t in Newark for the riots but I watched it on T.V. from 20 miles away. I was pretty young. I don’t remember much except fire. Lot’s of it. Sort of like today.
It’s been a while since I’ve been back there but my recollection is that there is access to a good highway system (the New Jersey Turnpike going North-South, and I-80 and I-287 going East-West.) Also there are nearby ports where goods can be shipped. With some luck, if America continues its path of economically decoupling from China then there is hope that manufacturing jobs could return, or if Biden is elected they can all learn to code (/sarc). C’mon Man, get real!
If they had any brains, they would be thrilled with Trump’s policy of building up manufacturing in the US, whether by new starts or getting companies to bring it back from overseas (China!). If I were the mayor, I’d be sucking up to him day and night and doing what was needed to get the city’s residents on board too, so that Trump would push industry their way. But Orangeman bad, so they won’t.
Black happened to Newark.
Hispanics didn’t help, but Blacks #$@#ed the joint.
That is what happened. The rest is is just evading reality and wanting to feel like a Good White ™.
When I was a small child, my family would go to a Sears store and I would get a big root beer lollipop. Then the ’67 Newark riots happened, and my family never went to that Sears in Newark again. My parents were raised there, but after the riots, they stopped shopping there. The current riots will likely have a similar effects; shoppers will now avoid those downtowns and the local citizens will suffer.
I have many Newark stories. My grandfather was raised in the aforementioned Ironbound section. He left after when he was in his mid-seventies, he was violently mugged. Whenever I hear people talking badly about white-flight, I instead think of people who don’t like seeing senior citizens mugged.
Thanks for explaining the city’s name. New Ark… it would not have occurred to me. I’ve never been there, just through the airport once or twice and tangentially close on my way to a couple of Red Bulls games in Harrison.
I hope the city leadership can make some improvement there. It would be nice to put some spring in the Tri-State area’s step, I think. Are the old big housing projects and the factories still there? Might be able to use the latter still and cut down the former to a more human scale.
Brian, I like paella very much. I must tell you, though, that it’s unlikely that I’m going to drive all the way down there just for that. 🙂
Also did my own genealogical research.
And the same sad and infuriating story of the many generations of arduous and sustained effort, sustained over centuries, it took to build up the cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia from their beginnings, in the lonely and howling wilderness–Indian country–into centers of rising population, commerce, and industry and, then, their gradual and, then, over the last several decades, their accelerating destruction and decline under Democrat Administrations, could also be told.
Not a mention of Cory Booker, who is at least more articulate and grammatically correct than Baraka, but a Stanford man, otherwise cut from the same cloth.
The only thing I know of Newark is its airport, which is major. Before the virus, it likely employed more than 30,000, maybe 50,000. I can’t find the data easily.
Other than that, from what you report, Neo, Newark might just be a city in the Congo. Ain’t no way up from there. It is absurd to think a black-majority police force would soothe the easily-inflamed, state-supported inhabitants of any largely black US city. It’s their cultcha.
“The disturbances began after Police Officers Vito M. Pontrelli and John DeSimone arrested John Smith, a cab driver.
DeSimone and Pontrelli testified on November 3, 1967 before the Governor’s Select Commission on Civil Disorder.
DeSimone was 30 years old, Pontrelli was 27, and they each lived in Newark and were police officers about three and a half years at the time of this encounter.
DeSimone and Pontrelli say a cab driver named John Smith passed then near the intersection of South Seventh Street and Fifteenth Avenue, going west in the eastbound lane at about 9:30 pm on July 12, 1967.
The cops say they pulled Smith over, but he became loud and verbally abusive, calling them motherfuckers’ and swinging his car door abruptly to strike the officers.
Smith had been in eight accidents the week of July 10th alone, and his driving license was recently revoked; however, being extremely low on funds he continued to transport passengers in the yellow taxi cab he rented for $16.50 a day.
They subdued the cab driver, who they say was “hollering, screaming, swinging” in a violent attempt to resist arrest, and they brought him to the police station.
Today, DeSimone is chairman of the Union County Board of Elections as well as the Clark Township Public Safety Director.
Smith described things differently. He said the police car was stopped at the intersection, he used his turn signal and went around the squad car. Smith that found himself unlawfully detained, being beaten in the back seat of a police car and tortured at headquarters.”
http://njtoday.net/2017/07/12/newark-riots-claimed-23-lives-not-enough-changed/
When I was a child, I had elderly relatives who lived in Newark, New Jersey. We’d visit them now and then. They lived in an old apartment building that had a European quality (as did their furnishings), with very high ceilings and fancy moldings. They weren’t rich, but they were solidly middle-class, and the city was safe.
If you say so.
My mother lived for seven years as a youngster in one of the 11 municipalities adjacent to Newark and her father had an office there from 1933 to 1937. She said it was a slum back then. My grandmother had a story of a man jumping on the running board of her car in 1926 and threatening to kidnap my aunt.
For a short time I flew for People Express Airlines based in Newark–that would have been around 1984.
One time while driving around I stumbled into downtown Newark. I could not believe what I saw. I guess I had led a sheltered life because I could not imagine an American city looking like downtown Newark.
I grew up in Jacksonville, Fl. About the time that I finished high school, Prudential Insurance opened a large regional headquarters in Jacksonville. I think the Prudential Building was the tallest in Jacksonville at the time. They hired girls from near and far, and sent them to Newark for training. I guess it wasn’t too bad in the mid ’50s. Quite a few Naval Aviators in Jax ended up marrying “Prudential Girls”.
When I saw it, the Prudential Building in downtown Newark was surrounded by a chain link fence.
Oh, and 1967, that would have been after four years of Camelot; and about three of LBJ.
Seems like Detroit has followed a similar path. I wonder if the current candidates for inner city decline are Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. I think the rioters and looters can’t see past the end of their noses and don’t seem to realize that when they loot and burn businesses, many of them will never return.
Everything I know about Newark I learned from Phillip Roth. You can’t read “American Pastoral” without an ache in your heart.
The city’s jobs weren’t ‘dying’. Labor markets were in 1968 were as tight as they’ve been during the post-war period. Unemployment rates were below 4% of the workforce. There was an incremental sectoral shift underway at the time wherein the distribution of employment between goods producing sectors and service sectors was changing in favor of the latter. Other sectors of the population adjusted to this and blacks were not strangers to sectoral shifts. As recently as 1920, about 35% of the black workforce was in the agricultural sector. About 20% was so employed in 1940 when that share began rapidly careening downhill to < 4% by 1970.
NB, there are 18 million people in the dense settlement which sprawls over 19 counties in Downstate New York and northern New Jersey. There are impecunious people in any community and there are troublesome people in any community. The dynamics of housing choices (among producers, consumers, and regulators) in metropolitan settlements does generate a certain amount of clustering where you find knots of impecunious people and (more saliently) knots of troublesome people. As it happened, Newark turned into a collecting pool of such people. Keep in mind that 5.6 million people live in the dense settlement of northern New Jersey. Right now, 277,000 live in the Newark municipality. Another 54,000 live in Irvington, which is also troubled.
It would have been possible to contain the damage to Newark and other areas if you'd had vigorous action to suppress crime, vigorous action to suppress anxiety-inducing vandalism (grafitti, broken windows, trash strewn lots), and action to counteract the incentives to abandon property. To do that, you needed to correct the disjunction between the utility of police forces and the tax base to pay for them, counteract the propensity of local governments to cut sweetheart deals with public employee unions, and cross subsidize counties, municipalities, and school districts to counteract the effect of social dynamics on the tax base in each jurisdiction. You didn't have the commitment from state, county, or municipal authorities to do these things. Instead, (and under federal tutelage), they promoted ill-advised measures like public housing and income-transfer programs so structured that they actively promoted social disorganization and anomie. You can do a great deal to repair Newark and places like it, but the political class just Does.Not.Feel.Like.It.
Again, there is one important reason for a riot: the police allow it either through their own deficit of manpower, through bad tactics, or through acceding to politicians insisting on bad tactics. The genesis of a riot is the work of a feral youth population which is always there. We have police forces because we have feral youth. Feral youth are part of the human condition. They’re not going away. You have to stomp on them when they begin to behave badly.
Art Deco;
If you say so.
Again, try to show some class. Or start your own blog.
Apropos of feral youth, one former member of this category posted an article on the City Journal website titled “Breaking Things.” He attributes his bad behavior to family breakdown: “We didn’t really believe that the adults in our lives cared about what we did. . . . Maybe if we got into enough trouble, or needed enough help, they would be more like the parents we wanted. On some level, we had stopped caring about ourselves in order to get them to care for us. When adults let their children down, kids learn to make choices that let themselves down. Our disappointment with adults led us to believe that rules weren’t actually legitimate. They were invented by adults to keep us from having fun. Why should we listen?”
https://www.city-journal.org/family-instability-fuels-violence-among-young-men
The author presently identifies himself as “a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge.” As one of the commenters notes, “It might be interesting and instructive to know how Mr. Henderson and his friend changed from nihilistic teenagers to responsible young adults.” Perhaps there will be a future follow-up article.
Smith described things differently.
Were there any independent witnesses: human, forensic, logical, rational?
Democrats, teachers’ unions, Johnson’s “war on poverty” happened to Newark and many of our major cities.
See Seattle and Portland for the growing pains of Newark, Baltimore, Detroit and now New York.
Broken Windows Matter (BWM).
Again, try to show some class.
It’s always funny when the moderatrix tells me to refrain from making personal remarks.
Art Deco:
If you say so.
After making a slam at our hostess.
You aren’t slow, just oblivious it seems.
the sopranos tv show said what happened to newark when it came out over 20 years ago in 1998. you have to be extremely thick or trying to virtue signal if you don’t know, neo
fatts:
Sock puppet warning.
“We’re trying to get that development to happen and get people investing in the city, while at the same time creating opportunities for the residents who live here in the city,” the mayor, Ras Baraka, said in an interview. “It’s not easy. There’s no city in America who’s actually figured it out. Everybody has been attempting to do this, including New York, and it’s been very and extremely difficult.”
No-one has figured it out, because it’s not possible.
To grow you need capital, either money or people with skills and ideas, preferably both. Since the locals have neither, how are they meant to start something useful? No-one is going to invest in the city at arm’s length, without being able to have people running the show who know what they are doing.
It’s one thing to love the poor. It’s another thing to hate the rich so much that you refuse to have anything to do with them, and thereby deprive the poor.
I get the impression Baraka would hate it if everyone gentrified and he had no poor to drive the revolution. The revolution he would be in control of, not them, of course.
A good book on the Sixties and the decline of cities like Newark is Amity Shlaes’ “Great Society.” She shows how the hubris of LBJ and other geniuses (not only but often) in government, combined with the culture to make a toxic brew.
I am going to try to restate my observation about systemic racism. What most people mean by racism has changed drastically during my lifetime. Take how Henry Wallace openly campaigned with African Americans and split the Democratic party in 1948. That is. nearly communist former FDR VP Henry Wallace, not segregationist George Wallace and in 1948 not 1964. Truman won over the heavily favored Republican Dewey despite the split. Very few were questioning segregations in 1948 – 20 years later LBJ had personally led the effort passing the Civil rights acts and put The Great Society legislation through. I believe he was a disciple of FDR and saw himself as completing the New Deal. And yes, Owen I would agree Amity Shlaes book critical of the reforms of that era is probably just the medicine we need to make the necessary corrections to what didn’t work. I would hazard that conditions have become so bad in Newark and similar places that Democrats are going to have to finally admit that new thinking is needed. I notice that even Ras Baraka says up front that nobody has figured it out. Good – that’s a start – which is very rare in the Democratic party right now. It looks to me that Trump got it right when he went for economic development over more FFA (Failed Federal Aid). So Kimberly Klacik is running in Baltimore with just that economic development approach which Trump instantly recognised. Again, Good. Maybe creating the jobs their great grandfathers moved to Newark for is the answer. Underneath all this is what I think is the most damaging form of systemic racism which I do not believe has diminished in my lifetime – that is, the assumption – as much colonialist as racist – that African Americans cannot succeed without White Intervention. Among other things the unconscious assumption involved leaves white folks feeling virtuous, self-satisfied, and worst of all, superior. That last bit is the toxically racist bit. Right now. as we can all see, the white liberals are falling all over themselves to exhibit this kind of self-destructive racial thinking, but other sorts of ‘better’ people – like country club Republicans – are pretty good at it too.
Then, there is Camden, New Jersey, right across the river from Philadelphia.
Then, there is Camden, New Jersey, right across the river from Philadelphia.
And in worse shape than Newark. Same policy solutions, though.
Similar situation in St. Louis along a similar timeline. Population peaked in 1965. Hundreds (thousands?) of abandoned residential properties that have been unoccupied for years. Commercial real estate occupancy is likely 60% or less. The city needs forward thinking politicians and urban planners who will bulldoze vast swaths and make park space, or other, inexpensive to maintain, open areas. Just as the not for profit Detroit Blight Authority led by Bill Pulte IV has been doing in Detroit.
https://www.hometowndemolitioncontractors.com/blog/demolishing-detroit-turning-blight-green
Civic leaders have tried shopping malls, loft apartments, sports stadiums, theater districts*… Throwing good money after bad.
It ain’t comin’ back.
*One thing that has actually seemed to work is luring IKEA to town. It’s amazing what that store has done to the pocket of the city it is in.
To grow you need capital, either money or people with skills and ideas, preferably both. Since the locals have neither, how are they meant to start something useful? No-one is going to invest in the city at arm’s length, without being able to have people running the show who know what they are doing.
In 2018, 58.5% of the population over the age of 16 were currently employed in Newark. The national mean at that time was around 60%. The mean household income in Newark is about 46% of the statewide average. The people living there (with some exceptions) have sufficient skill and discipline to work. Your challenge is to improve the quality of life for those residing there, to make it a passable place to live for impecunious people and agreeable enough for others to settle there in small knots and be willing to commute to shop and work there.
1. Delineate ~19 shires for the provision of local law enforcement in New Jersey. For the most part, the shires would be coterminous with extant counties. You could append Salem County with it’s small and dispersed population to Cumberland County and append Essex County (with it’s slums) to Union County.
2. Note you have eight dimensions of local law enforcement: civil orders, jail service, court security (of which dignitary protection and security at public buildings generally is an extension), school security, parole, misdemeanor probation and parole from local jails; child protective, adult protective, and foster care; and truancy containment. In a non-metropolitan shire, put six of them under the authority of the sheriff and the seventh and eighth under the authority of a social welfare inspector who has no other duties. In a metropolitan shire, put the patrol services for most or all of the shire under the authority of a police commissioner who has a different financing channel; the sheriff would retain a patrol division if the exurban portion of the county had a population which exceeded a critical mass (say, 85,000 people).
3. You begin the transition to such a system by placing any municipal departments responsible for any dimension of law enforcement under the command of the sheriff, police commissioner, or social welfare inspector of the shire in which the municipality is nestled. Densely settled municipalities in non-metropolitan counties and exurban zones would retain an option to set up a municipal police department for supplementary patrol services, but that would require a referendum to establish and periodic referenda to retain and the municipal police chief would still be subject to the command of the sheriff. Metropolitan municipalities like Newark and Camden would have no franchise to set up local police services. The jumble of services under the command of the sheriff or police commissioner would be merged step-by-step.
4. Through redistribution of manpower and expanding manpower, establish intensive supervision of problem neighborhoods. If the homicide rate in a given neighborhood exceeds 15 per 100,000 per year, you need more boots on the ground or you need to get your boots out of the doughnut shop and on the street.
5. Set up day detention centers in each shire as a collecting pool for incorrigibles. Remand to the care of the sheriff (who would charge a capitation) would be the ultimate penalty for disciplinary infractions for any youth under the age of 14. (Expulsion would be the ultimate penalty for those over 14).
6. Dissolve the school district in a menu of problem municipalities (Newark being one). Turn plant and equipment over to incorporated philanthropies run by boards elected by stakeholders, which would operate them as tuition-free charter schools granted plenary discretion over who they admit and retain and who they do not. Grant each custodial parent a voucher for each child in their care, which voucher would be turned in to the school they attend. The school would then submit the voucher to a municipal education fund in return for cash. The municipal education fund would be financed by a state grant and municipal taxes.
The order-maintenance measures are Job One. There are other dimensions to this.
“public housing and income-transfer programs so structured that they actively promoted social disorganization and anomie”–That’s the nub of it for me. It’s a lot of “helping” that’s seemingly guaranteed not to help.
I also agree that no good comes of hating rich people so much that you chase them all out, then bemoan the effect on poor people, in terms of both jobs and the inevitable follow-on, increasing concentrations of feral young people. See: Middle East.
The Chinese Coronavirus, coupled with the mass discovery and utilization of the increasing ability to work and study from home via the Internet, may have been the final push.
A movement that will see a lot of cities whose former residents are now interested in getting out of crowded cities and their even more crowed centers and, instead, are interested in living in the suburbs or in smaller cities and towns, and in “spreading out.”
The violence against such city dwellers unleashed by ANTIFA and BLM has, I’d image, underlined how unsafe and dangerous such cities have become, accelerating this movement away from large, dense (and Liberal/ Democrat) cities.
“public housing and income-transfer programs so structured that they actively promoted social disorganization and anomie”–That’s the nub of it for me. It’s a lot of “helping” that’s seemingly guaranteed not to help.
The one thing the political class got right was the replacement of AFDC with TANF. The TANF census is about 1/3 of the old AFDC census, even though the country’s population is 20% higher. A comprehensive solution would replace all extant transfers (other than Social Security, SSI, unemployment compensation, and workman’s compensation) and all extant subsidies for mundane expenditures (e.g. groceries, housing and utilities) with an amended EITC program. An income floor for the elderly and disabled and matching funds for the earned income of the rest of the population is a way to qualify market outcomes. Save sectoral subsidies for problem markets (medical care, long-term care, schooling, legal services). Lower the minimum wage.
The violence against such city dwellers unleashed by ANTIFA and BLM has, I’d image, underlined how unsafe and dangerous such cities have become, accelerating this movement away from large, dense (and Liberal/ Democrat) cities.
Core cities have been for the better part of a generation quite a bit safer than they were in 1980. This is especially true in New York, wherein Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg presided over an 82% decline in the homicide rate. Note, in Baltimore they couldn’t be bothered to go to school with New York’s program. And, of course, the program is unacceptable to people like Bill diBlasio. Leftists are bad and destructive people.
Snow on Pine: what you said. The combination of Wu Flu, BLM/Antifa and Zoom/other technology to support remote working and learning, is a perfect storm that has flattened much of our invisible (economic, social) infrastructure and is driving a rapid and probably irreversible change in how and where we live and work and learn. And how and where we *want* to do so. Politicians take note.
It does not appear there is any reason for Newark to continue to exist. It is a piece of now largely irrelevant geography with a collection of buildings which an inert and unproductive population have inhabited.
Not much of interest there. The mode of its decline is well documented and repeated nationwide.
One commical aspect worthy of note, is half the rationale given by the leftist mayor for having a police department: domestic disputes. This is what the police are for?
How oblivious, are these progressives.
These people, i.e. leftists and their clients live in a psychological Hell which they generate themselves. And yet they, and their sympathizers, purport to find it mysterious that things never really improve no matter how they flail about and rage. “Somebody somewhere must be doing something to me or not doing something for me!”
Well, dear progressive, you can paint your world gold, you can dump buckets of cocaine dusted money on the floor, add flashing lights and buggery parties: but in the final analysis it is still just you, perpetually sticking that fork in your soulless, mindless, forehead; the result being, the hell-scape slum that emanates from the living-dead carcass housing the appetites of Cardi-B and kind.
Newark is merely the exterior manifestation of the values of its inhabitants.
It does not appear there is any reason for Newark to continue to exist. It is a piece of now largely irrelevant geography with a collection of buildings which an inert and unproductive population have inhabited.
Again, the employment-to-population ratio in Newark is just a shade lower than the national mean. The people who live there are impecunious and an abnormal number are ghastly neighbors. They certainly not unproductive.
Your problem is that there would be at this time an insufficient number of bourgeois necessary to compete for and staff elected offices in Newark (and any appointed office in which residency is a requirement).
Newark is merely the exterior manifestation of the values of its inhabitants.
Some of it’s inhabitants have lousy values. Others are just cash poor.
I’ve been to Newark several times in recent years. I worked there briefly in 2017, and the last time I set foot there was one year ago. Newark is home to the Prudential Center, a federal courthouse, a couple of university campuses, a large and lively train hub, the airport as mentioned. There’s a pretty large commercial area. Whole Foods, Starbucks, and a random assortment of stores and restaurants cater to the workers. It’s not “irrelevant” or “inert.” In broad daylight, many sections of Newark look quite normal. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was up-and-coming. Whether it actually is, I don’t know. The point about the decline of NYC and what that means for Newark is fair. But it’s very hard to judge a city from afar.
Similar situation in St. Louis along a similar timeline. Population peaked in 1965. Hundreds (thousands?) of abandoned residential properties that have been unoccupied for years. Commercial real estate occupancy is likely 60% or less.
1. You have four jurisdictions: St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County, and Jefferson County. Identify within them all Census block groups with a population density of > 1,000 persons per square mile. You should be able to delineate an urban blob within which all Census block groups have a population of > 1,000 persons per square mile, or are surrounded by such block groups, or are adjacent to such block groups and otherwise adjacent to parkland or water.
2. Remark the total population of your urban blob.
3. Rank order your block groups (lowest to highest) by personal income per capita.
4. Calculate a running balance of the population of your rank-ordered block groups. When the running balance reaches 15% of the whole, remark. Resume your running balance calculation. When you reach a population that’s 20% of the whole, remark again. The first set of block groups you delineate make up metropolitan Zone A. The second would be Zone B. The rest of the urban blob is Zone C.
5. Require that any municipality, school district, or other special district authority structure their levy rate on assessed valuation thus: x% on property in Zone C, 0.5x % on property in Zone B, and 0% on property in Zone A.
6. Adjust the boundaries of your zones decennially. If the re-delineation moves a property from Zone C to A or B, or from Zone B to A, apply the dispensation immediately. If, however, a property is moved from Zone A to B or C or from Zone B to C, delay the imposition of higher levy rates for 10 years.
7. Given that these are metropolitan counties, deny to the county governments a franchise to lay and collect property taxes anywhere within the metropolitan boundary. Outside the metropolitan boundary, such would be permitted, but only levies which are placed in a dedicated fund which finances county agencies which operate only outside the metropolitan boundary. Require metropolitan counties rely on sales taxes as their default revenue source. (Since St. Louis City combines municipal and county government, they’d retain a franchise to levy both property and sales taxes).
8. Eliminate nearly all of the special-purpose grants from the state to the local governments. Instead, have the legislature make an unresitricted grant to county governments, with the global sum discretionary but the distribution formula incorporated within the state constitution. The formula would have two arguments: per capita income and total population. A more complicated three argument formula could be used to determine distributions to local school districts. The purpose of the general grant is to provide a riser for more impecunious jurisdictions to stand on (these in Missouri are non-metropolitan counties, by and large).
9. Institute a similar general grant scheme to provide a riser for municipal governments. Contiguous unincorporated sections of the county would be conceptualized as municipalities for these purposes and the distribution accorded to them would then repair to the county treasury.
10. Grant municipalities and school districts with territory in Zone A and Zone B a franchise to levy sales taxes. The franchise would limit such levies to a capped rate with the cap a function of the sum of the share of assessed valuation in Zone A and 1/2 the share of assessed valuation in Zone B.
11. Vest tax assessment in each county in the office of an autonomous assessor. The assessor would have to be someone with a minimum of four years as a real estate profession in their background and be at least 55 years of age and be expected to serve until retirement unless [s]he elected to leave earlier. The appointment could be made by the state auditor with the advice and consent of the county board. Have all town property assessed biennially and all country property once every six years.
12. Impose the obligation to remit property tax payments to the levying government on all parties. If the property holder is a government, the payments due other government would be incorporated into it’s general services budget; if the holder is a government corporation, the payments would be a cost paid out of its toll and fare income; if the property holder is a philanthropy, the payments would be made out of a line of credit, after which the corporation would apply to the state government for full re-imbursement. If the holder is a household or business, the payments would be made out of their coffers. No piece of property would be ‘off the rolls’ bar public thoroughfares and property the levying government owns itself.
13. Auction off all real estate held by the government that isn’t being used for public thoroughfares, or as the grounds for public buildings, or for parkland, or for incipient public works projects. That means every public housing project goes on the auction bloc.
14. Again, abolish rent control through methods delineated above and dismantle all ‘affordable housing’ schemes.
15. Again, streamline your eviction procedures.
16. At the municipal level, send supplementary sanitation patrols through Zone B and Zone A neighborhoods. Photograph all graffiti, broken windows, and trash strewn lots. Issue then citations to property holders, informing them it gets cleaned up or the municipal government does it and bills them. Move in with the sandblasters if the don’t comply and bill away.
17. Set up metropolitan police services in and around St. Louis, Kansas City, & smaller cities; wail on the criminal class.
18. Turn the feral youth over to day detention centers run by local sheriffs. No more tolerance of school disorder. Replace core city school systems with voucher-funded charter-school networks. .
Art Deco — much simpler solution for NJ: cede everything east of the Garden State Parkway north of I-78 to New York; level Camden.
I wrote:
A commenter rejoined:
” It’s not “irrelevant” or “inert.”
The trouble with discussing issues with posters who do not quote honestly, is that even when certain points of contention involve evaluations with a subjective aspect … they still do not quote those assertions honestly.
Now, purporting to quote terms and their implied uses while excluding adjectival modifiers, may be a response we expect to see when someone is emotionally chaffed, but it is bad practice on their part nonetheless. And it does not constitute the rebuttal they pretend.
Newark is a town which has declined in population to under three-hundred thousand people. It still lays claim to, according to the Wiki article which Neo cited, a thousand law firms, several university or college campi, and various financial institutions. Light industry is mentioned in an apparently wan hope that readers will infer some non-institutional and organic social dynamism is bubbling away just beneath the surface.
Wiki also notes that in addition to placing “show” in the insurance industry sweepstakes, the Newark area is a transshipment hub. Well a rail yard is a transshipment hub of sorts too; and no one need even live there.
Other notable facts include the little item that 100,000 people commute to Newark to work every day. But far from proving that Newark’s residential population is dynamically engaged in the business of business and not inert in productive terms, when matched up with the fact that “The Brick City topped the ranking of those with the highest percentage of households on welfare. ” (NJ.com) one would be justified in concluding that this population is not particularly dynamic nor relevant to the economic engines within the city’s limits.
The buildings to which the productive presently commute in order to do their business, could be almost anywhere. The population which resides in the city partakes of none of the relevance which the essential commuters impart to the businesses, which, as stated before, don’t really need to be in Newark.
A brief Internet search reinforces this surmise:
NJ.com 2017
There is no sine qua non relationship between a large portion of the residential population of the city and what major economic productivity does occur there. The people who work there apparently don’t live there for the most part. Of the people who do live there, some live 30% below the poverty line.
And any insurance company that can be in Newark and staffed with a commuting work-force could just as well be in Charlotte, NC, or some other somewhat less dysfunctional town. It’s not as if container ships need to dock at the Prudential wharves, or the Whole Foods grist mills are run by water power.
Newark, is a joke. But not a very good one.
NJ.com updated 2019
Al Jazeera as linked to by Wiki.
My comment was objectively fair and justified, even if it did contain an element of subjective evaluative disdain.
As others have commented, this is a pattern repeated in many old industrial cities all over the country: Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, to name a few. There’s a tipping point where the middle class flees to the safety and better schools in the suburbs. Chicago and Philly have managed to keep lively downtown areas, but large swaths of those cities are gang-ridden no-go zones.
Neo, if you haven’t read it already, Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” has a sort of homage to the more thriving Newark of the 1950s. And, surprisingly, Roth also paints a not-so-rosy portrait of the radical left.
There is no sine qua non relationship between a large portion of the residential population of the city and what major economic productivity does occur there. The people who work there apparently don’t live there for the most part. Of the people who do live there, some live 30% below the poverty line.
1. The labor force surveys which the Census Bureau conducts on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics inquire of their interview subjects whether or not they are employed. Some of them work within the municipality in which they live, some of them commute to other municipalities. Guess what, residents of Newark cross jurisdictional lines and work elsewhere quite frequently. That’s true of any municipality in New Jersey, all 565 of ’em.
2. You have a population of 219,000 people living in Newark who are over the age of 16. When surveyed in 2018, 58.5% of them were employed. The average for the State of New Jersey at that time was 60.2%. I don’t know why it matters to you just where their workplace was located.
3. The ‘poverty line’ is humbug. What it translates into is a personal income per capita of about 15% of the national mean, or, in real terms, what a skilled worker or an entry level bourgeois salaried employee would have been living on a century ago. People have low incomes for the following reasons: (1) their earning potential is vitiated by age; (2) their earning potential is vitiated by disability; (3) their earning potential is vitiated by abiding personal properties which inhibit skill acquisition; (4) their earning potential is vitiated by problems in disposition and personal discipline; (5) a mix of the above.
4. There are always going to be people who are going to have to do the bad jobs in the economy, either because they cannot readily acquire the skill to do the better jobs or because the next guy over can acquire that skill more readily. They have to live somewhere. Where do you want them to live?
5. In exurbs, small towns, and rural areas, the impecunious people live in trailer parks, live in shabby houses outside of town, or live in shabby apartments adjacent to town, or live in small and shabby apartments in town. They’re not all that segregated spatially. You have that phenomenon in cities as well. You also have the social clustering which is a function of the dynamics of real estate markets. You have poor neighborhoods.
6. Which isn’t such a problem bar that in this country in poor neighborhoods you have intense levels of social disorganization in poor neighborhoods you don’t see in slums in Spain or Italy. The neighborhoods may be filled with working people who have desultory wage jobs, but you also have a critical mass of feral young men making everyone miserable.
7. The name of the game ought to be to use conventional policy tools to suppress social problems, that is to say to impose some passable degree of order in Newark so that it’s less of a latrine. You’re not going to make it look like the Upper East Side. It’s going to look like a place where real incomes are 54% below the statewide mean. Note though, that a real income at that level is similar to the national mean of 1970. That your neighborhood is filled with comparatively impecunious people doesn’t mean it has to be shot through with graffiti, broken windows, trash strewn lots, abandoned buildings, and hoodlums.
Art Deco — much simpler solution for NJ: cede everything east of the Garden State Parkway north of I-78 to New York; level Camden.
Ha ha. I’m going to be humorless and point out that the problems are the problems, whether you’re debating them in Trenton or debating them in Albany. The utility of altering jurisdictional boundaries is that you can distribute costs over a wider and or more affluent population. In aggregate, New York and New Jersey are not that different in their level of affluence.
In re Camden, the utility of leveling it would be that that would be a lower cost option than waiting for real estate developers to selectively level and build anew while renovating other buildings. I doubt you could make a business case for the proposition. You don’t need to level Camden. You do need to practice deterrence, punishment, and incapacitation vis a vis it’s ample population of feral young men. Lock up enough of them in one of New Jersey’s dozen or so state prisons and keep a close enough eye on the streets to intimidate the rest of them into leaving normal people alone. Get the homicide rate in Camden down to 15 per 100,000, and you might see a commercial revival.
Art Deco is uncharacteristically long-winded and detailed, and I have no reason to read it word for word, or support something which sounds like it came from Inside the Beltway.
DNW has a good response, which Art bypasses blithely.
I do not care that 58% of Newark adults are allegedly employed but are also impecunious. That means they are uneducated, unskilled, bottom-dwellers.
It is the tribal culture of these places, plus lots of liberal help programs, that put them in the sewer. I have no reason to believe Art’s thesis will make a difference if implemented.
The bell curve will always be with us, and after spending $20 trillion on the War on Poverty, the % of national poor is unchanged. Surprise!
I would prefer to give each of the “poor” a one-time handout of some thousands of dollars, and let them compete for Darwin Awards if they are so inclined, versus spending on something of value to better themselves. But that’s all they would get. Ever.
After all, they gave us George Floyd, now the new St. George, who never did anything useful, much less slay a dragon.
I just read Art Deco’s last post. Commercial development does not depend in its initiation on a declining homicide rate.
Feral young men need to be shot, not housed at our expense until they become possibly non-feral at the age of 55!
In pondering the cross-currents in the comments, it occurred to me that, if the chart put out by the Smithsonian recently is an example of what Newark residents are being taught, then economic prosperity and community development are probably going to be difficult to achieve.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/07/the-smithsonian-has-lost-its-mind.php
You have to take the slum out of the people before they can take themselves out of the slums.
I was at a Jimi Hendrix concert in Newark the evening of the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. The concert lasted about ten minutes, Hendricks left the stage, and my room mate and I spent the rest of the night walking around Greenwich village and going out to Long Island to watch the sun rise with a girl we picked up in the village. She was from Newark. Anyway, Newark was already going in the toilet. Last time I was there hookers were on the street corners looking for business. They waved at me 🙂
DNW has a good response, which Art bypasses blithely.
I bypassed it because it was a misconceived parry, not a response.
I do not care that 58% of Newark adults are allegedly employed but are also impecunious. That means they are uneducated, unskilled, bottom-dwellers.
Every place you’re going to live there are people employed in low skill service positions. They work in grocery stores, as retail clerks, as janitors, as home health aides, as parking lot attendants, as food service employees. There’s no reason to be hostile to them. Someone has to do that sort of work. Low-skill employees qua low-skill employees are not causing any trouble for anyone. It’s people proximate to them who are quite predatory who are causing trouble. Deal with the predation.
Commercial development does not depend in its initiation on a declining homicide rate.
Oh yes it does.
Feral young men need to be shot, not housed at our expense until they become possibly non-feral at the age of 55!
You’re just begging for one of them to take you out, no doubt to the delight of people who have to listen to you.
The New Yorker: Schooled.Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools.They Got an Education.
The Newark school district tried to trim staff, but the unions raised a lot of objections. The district employed a lot of people that needed those jobs. Of the $100 million that Zuckerberg spent, much went to consultants.
if the chart put out by the Smithsonian recently is an example of what Newark residents are being taught,
The museum in question produced an exhibition about Anita Hill while ignoring Clarence Thomas. Clearly, they hired bad curators. Then there was these comical incidents:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-latest-in-noose-news/
I suppose this dreck leaks down to ordinary wage-earners, but the whole shambolic business seems like fodder for social workers and school administrators with issues.
The New Yorker: Schooled.Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools.They Got an Education.”
The negligent parties are sitting in the New Jersey state legislature.
I have no reason to believe Art’s thesis will make a difference if implemented.
You don’t feel like pursuing improved policy because you hate the people in question.
DNW
Like it or not, a major part of the police role today is to be “social workers with guns.” I would add that in my HOA a fair number of the police calls are from people that are trying to use the police to get back at their neighbors. That helps explain why a low proportion of police visits to my HOA result in arrests. The cops spend their time talking to try to calm down some crazy people.
Like it or not, a major part of the police role today is to be “social workers with guns.”
That police officers break up domestic disputes and arrest one party or the other is not the least bit novel.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/53358NCJRS.pdf
Words, words, words, words.
Blacks trashed the joint. Why? Because they’re Blacks. Mean 85 IQ population with low impulse control cannot and should not govern itself. We all know this. Some of us work hard to pretend not to know it for various reasons, but the facts don’t care.
^^^Do I get to win a Turing Award for the best lossless compression algorithm of 2020?
Spare me the obligatory Thomas Sowell mention. Every population has admirable people out in the right tail. When reasoning about policy for populations, it’s what’s in the middle that counts.
Words… policies… what should have been done.. who is to blame for this or that policy decision in the 1960s.. yadda yadda. All meaningless in the Current Year. The only thing worth discussing is What is to be Done? Any brave takers?
Words… policies… what should have been done.. who is to blame for this or that policy decision in the 1960s.. yadda yadda. All meaningless in the Current Year. The only thing worth discussing is What is to be Done? Any brave takers?
You have nothing constructive to say, on this topic or any other.
Art Deco hasn’t noticed that the progressive “solution” to social dis function in many urban areas is to eliminate police (they carry guns!) and have more social workers.
“You been raped? Who do you want to respond a cop or a social worker?” Kieth Ellison Attorney General of MN.
Your house has been burgled, and you are upset? You must be white privileged. Ms Bozo of Minneapolis.
Come on Mr. Deco there must be some statistics you can enlighten us with.
Art Deco:
Showing class again.
The problem in inner cities has been evident for a long time. Prior to LBJ’s Great Society the black family was reasonably intact. The welfare for women with children and no husband or man in the house changed all that. It’s a culture of women on welfare having children with different men. The men are living a life of sex, drugs, and rap. Not having decent educations they have only menial jobs. There are two ways up for the men:
Become pro athletes or drug dealers. A few will make it that way. Most won’t.
The solutions are clear:
1. Make marriage more attractive than welfare.
2. Improve the schools.
3. Make the neighborhoods safe enough (lower the crime rate dramatically) that businesses will locate there, providing jobs and shopping opportunities.
4. Maintain that for a generation or two.
Those solutions are not easy. They are dependent on changing an imbedded culture that, while a dead end for most, is the only thing they have known for two generations. It is hard to change.
The secret of becoming an independent citizen in the U.S is fairly simple:
1. Finish high school.
2. Get a job that has some future to it.
3. Don’t get a police record.
4. Don’t get married and have children before the first three are accomplished.
I didn’t say it was EASY.
Why doesn’t Hollywood make movies showing young black people doing just that? Why don’t successful blacks go back into the black neighborhoods and preach that gospel? (Probably because they will be called Uncle Toms or Coons.) Most blacks in the inner cities have decided that white men are oppressors or worse. Nothing we can say or do would convince them to change. I’m not saying it’s hopeless, but the odds against solving the problem are quite high unless the impetus comes from within the community. It’s a very sad thing.
Prior to LBJ’s Great Society the black family was reasonably intact.
So was the white family, which is a wreck as we speak. It’s less of a wreck than the black family, but family relations among whites were in 1958 tidier and more conventional than they were among blacks; different starting points, changes of similar magnitude. For all that incentives were perverse, you don’t have a trebling of divorce rates in this country over a period of 12 years (1967-79) because of AFDC; only an odd minority of the people who busted up their marriages were the sort who ever collected AFDC. Sixty years ago, about 2% of the white children in the United States were born out of wedlock; nowadays, it’s around 30% (and higher for hispanics). Illegitimacy rates among blacks hit a plateau around about 25 years ago. Among whites, they continued increasing for another 15 years. They might have increased more rapidly absent the 1996 welfare reform; NB, they didn’t decline in response to that reform, even though the stock of people collecting TANF is 1/3 of the AFDC rolls ca. 1995.
1. Finish high school.
2. Get a job that has some future to it.
3. Don’t get a police record.
4. Don’t get married and have children before the first three are accomplished.
The last two are reasonable pieces of advice no matter what your situation is. As for the first two, there’s considerable variation over time in the properties of available work but there’s one constant: a demand for low-skill labor. Someone’s going to be on the bottom. People can stay in school longer, but what that gets you is more people on the bottom with high school diplomas.
Art Deco hasn’t noticed
I’ve noticed. I’m against it.
Showing class again.
You have one person here suggesting we should execute 600,000 people a year in this country and another who goes on a rant about how irredeemably stupid the niggaz are, and you’re staring at me. You’re kinda creepy.
I’m the guy many years ago who said my generation (the boomers) has got to go. I haven’t changed my mind. Glad to see you’ve prospered.
James
Art Deco:
Capital punishment either deters criminality or removes those who murder from the criminal population? Tell me, it does neither? Or do you think Cicero is proposing summary execution of turnstile jumpers? Oh I forgot, you know what Cicero is speaking of better than he.
And of course you have statistically analyzed all of Zaphod’s comments and found them to be 100% irredeemable.
I like this chart. Maybe it will add to this discussion.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chart+of+different+values+at+different+economic+levels&t=iphone&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fbloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com%2Flancasteronline.com%2Fcontent%2Ftncms%2Fassets%2Fv3%2Feditorial%2F6%2Ff8%2F6f8f1fd4-518c-5104-a6b6-3a9bc4d8c6a9%2F523288ff71595.image.jpg
Everyone, stop the personal attacks.
Art Deco:
You write that, prior to the Great Society: “So was the white family [reasonably intact at the time], which is a wreck as we speak. It’s less of a wreck than the black family, but family relations among whites were in 1958 tidier and more conventional than they were among blacks; different starting points, changes of similar magnitude.”
That is true on some metrics but not on others. What you write is true for out-of-wedlock births, but not for marriage itself, at least not as measured by the number of black women and men over 35 who have been married. In 1958, the rate of married women and men over 35 who had ever been married was higher in black women and men than in white women and men. Not true anymore; the lines crossed many decades ago, around 1970.
The angst of these time has provoked a rather “spirited discussion” in response to Neo’s post. The poisons administered to our society post WWII have taken a long time to trash our nation, but they are now in full bloom:
The 4 rules are valid:
1. Finish high school.
2. Get a job that has some future to it.
3. Don’t get a police record.
4. Don’t get married and have children before the first three are accomplished.
As for hating capitalism and the rich:
As Robert A Heinlein wrote:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
He also popularized the phrase from the 1930s
TARNSSAAFL – “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”
there are many “educated” people coming out of our colleges that have been fed the lie that there IS a free lunch.
Art Deco:
You write that, prior to the Great Society: “So was the white family [reasonably intact at the time], which is a wreck as we speak. It’s less of a wreck than the black family, but family relations among whites were in 1958 tidier and more conventional than they were among blacks; different starting points, changes of similar magnitude.”
That was true on some metrics but not on others. What you write is true for out-of-wedlock births, but not for marriage itself, at least not as measured by the percentage of black women and men over 35 who have ever been married. In 1958, the rate of men and women over 35 who had ever been married was higher in black men and women than in white men and women. Not true anymore; the lines crossed many decades ago, around 1970.
Capital punishment either deters criminality or removes those who murder from the criminal population? Tell me, it does neither? Or do you think Cicero is proposing summary execution of turnstile jumpers?
What he’s proposing is “Feral young men need to be shot, not housed at our expense until they become possibly non-feral at the age of 55!”. About 600,000 people are remanded to state prisons each year. What do you think he means?
I’m with Art Deco on this. “Feral young men need to be shot” is one of those statements with a lot of undefined terms, to say the least, and it’s hard to interpret it in any way that isn’t offensive. Who are “feral young men”? From the context, it sounds as though he’s saying young men who are convicted of homicide, but he doesn’t make that clear. Is he advocating this for perps of all races, or just black perps? Is he advocating an automatic death sentence for a conviction of homicide of any degree? That isn’t the law anywhere. Is he advocating passing new laws with mandatory capital punishment for all homicide convictions? And by “shooting,” is he mandating firing squads? Or is he advocating some extra-judicial lynching-like process?
Art Deco:
Ask Cicero to clarify for what offenses feral young men should be shot. Murder? Child molestation? Rape? Looting? Arson and attempted murder in a riot? Hate crimes? Which of these are part of your magic 600,000?
Once again your pull a statistic from the ether and magically it becomes relevant, well “that dog don’t hunt” even “If you say so.”
BTW “feral” young men are the major killers of other “feral” young men, but in the olden days the State was the entity that executed such men for murder. Now days not so much. Or haven’t you noticed that either?
In Utah execution by firing squad is still be an option IIRC.
Shooting the perp is necessary when he/she/it is in the process of committing the crime of murder, rape, arson, looting and he/she/it cannot be stopped from hurting others by less violent means.
Arsonists during riots in particular should be immediately taken down by all means necessary. So should those who point high power lasers in the faces of people with the aim of depriving them of eyesight for the rest of their lives. Pointing such lasers at aircraft should also merit immediate extinction.
Ask Cicero to clarify for what offenses feral young men should be shot.
Why? If he wishes to clarify, let him do it
I decided to wade into the waters and give my opinion, not anyone else’s.
For the first time in my life I have a LOADED gun on my coffee table and beside my bed.
Art Deco: “…..but there’s one constant: a demand for low-skill labor.”
I’m not sure what you define as low skill labor. Both my brothers only got high school educations. Both served in the military. Both became self reliant citizens who raised families and had a relatively comfortable retirement. Both worked as skilled tradesmen. One an electrician, the other as a landscape manager.
There are decent jobs out there for high school graduates. Carpenter, electrician, plumber, HVAC installer, welder, auto mechanic, truck driver, factory worker, etc. can all be done by high school grads. Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs Guy, Is trying to get more young people interested in these sorts of necessary work. We’re not strictly an information economy (I think of it as more of a Disinformation economy) and probably never will be. People doing these jobs will never get rich, but they can have a comfortable life and a decent retirement if they play their cards right.
Art Deco:
You keep asking me to speak for Cicero. Unlike you, I do not claim to know what he intended to the specificity you desire.
Here is a real time example of feral “youth” (<55 yr old) that may get shot. It is from the rural area south and east of Portland: "You loot we shoot," and "Looters will be shot." The feral youths from the Portland area are mostly not BIPOC BTW. Just as the feral "youth" (<55 yr old) who murdered the Patriot Prayer member in Portland wasn't BIPOC. He was "tragically" shot by LEOs in Lacey WA.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/09/13/oregon-sheriffs-deputy-investigating-fires-pays-price-for-saying-unkind-words-about-antifa-n924823
I endorse much of what J.J. writes.
I do not agree that people doing the Mike Rowe route will never get rich. If they move up the ladder to become their own boss and become small businessmen and women they have a good chance to become financially well off. Ahem, ever heard of the MyPillow guy?
But a person who goes $100K into debt to get a “studies” degree — will be a slave to debt for life, and will think the world owes him/her/it everything that him/her/it cannot achieve — and will become one of the perpetually aggrieved.
J.J.
But they will never be able to hang around with PhDs or work in a college or university setting except as unspeakables who keep the edifice working. 😉
Quite the party in this thread. I’m late.
Eva, that was an interesting chart. But how would the distribution of answers look in Newark? 🙂
Chuck, that was cute about the hookers waving. They must be pretty nice. 🙂
Someone I know was able to do very, very well as a plumber. (This of course is no mystery.)
His mother—a Jewish mother of the old school—however, really, REALLY wanted him to be a doctor. She didn’t let up about it, either.
Old school.
So he called his outfit (i.e., himself) “Doctor Plumber”.
(Never told me what his mother thought about THAT, though….)
You keep asking me to speak for Cicero.
In your imagination only.
I’m not sure what you define as low skill labor.
1. Food service
2. Janitorial / housekeeping work
3. Home health aide
4. Retail clerk / cashier / shop assistant / receptionist / desk clerk / file clerk
5. Groundskeeping
6. General construction labor
7. General farm labor
8. General factory production line
9. Attendants’ positions
10. Porter’s positions
11. Refuse collection
Positions such as van drivers, cab drivers, etc you might put on the borderline between unskilled and semi-skilled.
Have a look at the detailed occupations listed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics site. About 1/4 of the jobs in the economy are ‘bad jobs’. Some portion of those are young people just starting out, some portion are held by people needing supplementary income for their households whose primary occupation is something else, and some people hold them for extra income in retirement. For most, though, they do this sort of work all their lives. Cicero despises them for that.
There are decent jobs out there for high school graduates.
Agreed. Skilled trades are not my subject. Skilled tradesmen typically have satisfactory incomes and live in suburban homes. If they’re living in Newark, it’s because they want a cheap rent or because they have friends or family nearby.
Since hardly anybody these days has been taught the story of how–through centuries of sacrifice and arduous work–the cities they are living in have been built up, created, nor are they any longer taught a value system that would make them care, value, and act on that knowledge to preserve their cities if they were, well, you get what we have now.
People have this false idea that, once established, civilization will just always be there, that a state of civilization is somehow inevitable and tough, while, in reality, civilization is actually a pretty fragile thing; a web of ideas, values, relationships, and expectations.
Break enough of those ideas, values, relationships, and expectations and civilization will very quickly crumble and disappear, and the violence and anarchy that civilization was designed to protect us from will come roaring back.
Some years ago, our church youth group did a service project in downtown Flint, MI. Cleaned up a small park. It had a street along one side and homes backed up to the other three sides. The city provided us with huge numbers of large cardboard cartons. And a wheelbarrow to put the stuff on the street where the trash department would collect it.
We needed more cartons. Enormous amounts of trash. The distance from the side doors of the homes was about the same as from the side doors to the curb where the weekly free trash pickup would make it disappear.
So why was it in the park?
It’s one thing to blame “feral youths” or a few jerks. The tennis court was three inches deep in broken glass. This takes a positive effort. There’s your jerks–who come from some place?–making life tough for all.
But why the trash in the park when the city would pick it up for free?
I saw another case; there were numerous efforts in the city’s “Operation Brush up”. Kids coming out of a lady’s back yard like a row of ants carrying….car batteries, old bicycles, crap of all kinds. The adult in charge was a high school principal whose jaw was so tight from anger that I thought she might crack her teeth. The city, having surveyed the situation, had provided a ten-yard dump truck and a front-end loader.
A lady, standing on the porch, said it was her mother’s home and her mother didn’t put all that crap in the back yard. The neighbors had. With some effort, considering it could have been put on the curb for free pickup.
I currently live in a small/medium town. Due to work with Meals on Wheels and Feeding America, I know where the food insecurity homes are most common. You can’t tell the difference by whether there’s trash and litter around. There isn’t any.
As Thomas Sowell said, cultures vary and differences have consequences.
Ya know those bags of trash, or mattresses you see dumped along the side of the road?
Well, I’ve always thought that it likely took a lot more effort to load up a truck or car, locate a lonely road, get a lookout involved so that you could heave it out when there was nobody looking, then taking off quick vs. just taking this stuff to the dump.
Break enough of those ideas, values, relationships, and expectations and civilization will very quickly crumble and disappear, and the violence and anarchy that civilization was designed to protect us from will come roaring back.
You have a scatter of failed states in Tropical Africa, and there are several Arab countries suffering chronic internal warfare. Not our problem right now.
if they were, well, you get what we have now.
About 10% of the population lives in slum neighborhoods. The business districts have been trashed because Democratic pols elected to permit it.
As Thomas Sowell said, cultures vary and differences have consequences.
You have vandals in slum neighborhoods who trash places. Initial trashing generates a feedback loop. You also have devil-may-care types who toss cigarette buts and chicken bones and food wrappers around (and who do that in public parks all over). Put security cams some places, smack ’em with short stays in jail, smack ’em again with fines, and clean up the trash to defeat the feedback loop.
Force or the threat of force i.e law enforcement—police–are always an implicit part of establishing and maintaining civilization and then, as well, there is also the rest of the Legal system—the Law, prosecutors, judges, jails.
Police are the “cleanup crew,” usually arriving after the crime has been committed but, if they offer a credible threat of force, that is usually enough to keep order and to maintain civilization.
This is why ANTIFA and BLM are attacking the police, and pushing to abolish the police—to destabilize and, ultimately, to destroy the current civilized order.
That is why Soros has spent many tens of millions to get Leftist prosecutors and judges into positions of power, so that they can refuse to indict, hold, or convict criminals, adding to the destabilization of the existing order, of civilization, with the ultimate aim of destroying our current civil order, and rebuilding it on a Communist pattern.
That is why the Leftist push to release criminals from jail and to, ultimately, abolish jails—destabilization.
They are working to open up the City Gates, ushering in the Barbarians, chaos, and violence.
When you can no longer go out to eat, in the expectation that you will be safe, and that if someone attacks you (and your property, by the way) they will almost certainly be identified, hunted down, arrested, prosecuted, and put in jail, your feeling of “safety,” your faith in the protection offered to you and yours by your civilization starts to erode–and that is the whole point.
One they have done their best to destabilize, tear down, and discredit our current civil order, those on the Left will offer their solutions to “fix” the “crisis” that they themselves have created.
No easy answers .
some things that may help.
1. All business enterprises in hell-holes like Newark, Baltimore, etc., exempted from Federal income tax, payroll taxes, etc. for 20 years.
2. open charter / magnet schools totally separate from the existing corrupt school districts. All students must wear uniforms to school . Disruptive students get expelled after sufficient warnings.
3. increase police forces by 50% and have them open dozens of satellite police stations – within the areas to be patrolled – throughout the city to help gain the trust of the law abiding citizenry. Implement “aggressive” policing. This will require many black police officers to avoid charges of racism.
4. immediately send clean up crews to pick up trash anywhere it is found an maintain clean streets.
Encourage citizens to sweep up front of their homes, etc.
5. bulldoze all abandoned buildings or better yet, give them free of charge to developers who must then build housing. The developers should be exempted from all Federal taxes for at least 20 years.
6.Arrest and jail all criminals; at a minimum make Newark a very unpleasant place for criminals to force them to get out of dodge.
Culture is everything and it takes many years to modify sociopathic / destructive behaviour of groups. (see Sowell’s description of the Irish immigrants ).
See “Life At The Bottom.” by Theodore Dalrymple.
The liberal progressive / socialist policies of the Great Society destroyed the black family and is the basic cause of the problems within the inner cities. The KKK could not have implemented a more destructive policy; a policy that destroys generation upon generation of black families.
Further, many (most?) black leaders are nothing more or less than house n******s for the white dominated, liberal progressive / socialist demokrat party. The white and black elites of the demokrat party (e.g. Obama, Holder, Pelosi,
Sharpton, et al. ) have contempt for lower class blacks and consider them below human, untermensch, feral beasts whose only purpose is to provide votes for these elites.
You will note that these elites have made ZERO effort to improve the lot of the black underclass (aside from placing more on food stamps). They much prefer “hanging” with the uber rich black and white Hollywood elites on their $100 million yachts or moving to 99.999999% white enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard (or is it Cape Cod?).
Black leaders have joined with the white dominated demokrats to oppose at every turn charter / magnet schools, while they send their own kids to private schools and Ivy League colleges. Indeed, Obama as president opposed !!!!!! scholarship programs in Washington, DC for promising black students.
Ultimately it will require the black residents of inner cities to vote for politicians who will actually make efforts to improve their conditions. So far, they have supported for 50 years or so politicians who have zero interest in bettering the lives of the black underclass.
P.S.–I might also add that, once you see that those who do occasionally try to exercise their natural right to defend themselves are not backed up by a lot of the legal systems around our country but are, in fact, quite often the ones who are getting hassled, arrested, and punished for trying to defend themselves, your faith in your civilized order takes a real nosedive.
There are many layers to understand what happened (and is still happening) to Newark. And Detroit, Baltimore, et.al. But a chunk of it lies in the actual plan to destroy it.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/14/how-the-1960s-riots-foreshadow-todays-communist-weaponization-of-black-pain/
When a city or town’s reason for existence goes away it begins to shrink and collapse, I recently took a trip through the high plains area of Texas going through county seat towns that were the center of agricultural life 100 years ago and still hanging in 60 years ago with lots of retail stores and services to meet the needs of the population and local merchants, bankers and others making decent lives along with the less educated performing needed services. Now these towns have block after block of boarded up lovely old brick and stone buildings, a few open as antique and junk stores and a few owner operated places to eat. That is the smaller all across the United States version of the our obsolete economy that has left the larger cities stranded with the survivors living off of tax revenues that will keep on dwindling as they build larger political staffs to fix the problems of the have-nots at the very bottom. While we quibble over the obvious stuff that has happened in the past and we circle the drain I am not seeing much leadership helping us plan where we go from here. The plight of the inner city multi-generational black people might be the canary in the mine shaft, the weakest being the most vulnerable in this current almost science fiction reality today.
Lots of thought going on in the comments above and I hope some one comes up with the right ideas and helps us form a good plan to turn this around. The old fix it with commie crap we knew always ends up the same place so it’s best to fight and resist that at the outset. My the Lord help us as we move on through the history of our nation and who knows, perhaps the best is yet to come.
This has turned out to be one of the most vigorously debated topics I’ve seen yet.
While technological change can be a destructive force—see horse drawn vehicles, buggy whips, 8 track, and mechanical adding machine manufacturers–and has an array of bad side effects to offer us, it also has some good things as well.
I am somewhat surprised that we here in the U.S. have not already grabbed with both hands the pretty obvious opportunities that will be made available, if we can site extraction and manufacturing operations in space (big initial investment and risk, but even bigger potential payoff) and are not already manufacturing and extracting in space—lots of raw material available out in the solar system—starting with the Moon, the ability to run processes and to manufacture materials, including exotic materials impossible/very expensive to manufacture on Earth, with the added bonus of not increasing any kind of pollution on Earth.
If we have such a space-based raw material extraction and manufacturing operation, and given long distance working via the Internet, relocation of workers out from major cities, plus a lot of re-education, perhaps a lot of those mostly abandoned buildings in towns around our country could be redeveloped into centers for various kinds of allied research, development, and manufacturing.
When a city or town’s reason for existence goes away it begins to shrink and collapse,
Newark is a small segment of greater New York. Greater New York is not shrinking or collapsing.
NB, as people grow more affluent, their consumption of certain goods increases and will at times increase more rapidly than their income. One of those goods is space. It’s not all that surprising that as people had more housing options, they opted for more owner-occupied housing, more detached housing, more space-per-person, and more lawn. How that’s going to be expressed in fully built-up core cities would be fewer households in a given accommodation, fewer shared facilities, interior renovations to make fewer apartments in a given space, the razing of structures and the redeployment of the land to other uses, &c. All manifest in declining population. It’s a problem for the municipal government if (1) they have fixed costs which presume a certain revenue flow (which flow is facing headwinds as population declines) or (2) the propensity to leave is correlated with affluence (so your capacity to generate revenue flow to meet variable costs is compromised) or (3) It’s co-incident with the advent of more intense social pathology. And of course you have synergistic and feedback effects which amplify these phenomena.
Many years ago Walter Williams explained how to avoid poverty. I read a story that his rules for avoiding poverty were put on a billboard. They were called racist and were removed. Evidently the people complaining about racism are not the brightest bulbs in the chandler.
https://winteryknight.com/2020/06/12/two-black-economists-explain-how-to-end-poverty-in-america-2/
Socio-economic bottom-dwellers: “Cicero despises them for that”, says our resident guru, Art Deco, the pontificator, the all-knowing and all wise.
Socio-economic bottom dwellers do not build an upwardly-mobile society. I take that as obvious. Even Art inferentially suggests that, with his grand and detailed top-down recipe for Newark’s resurrection.
As to feral young men, I am obviously going to the “broken windows” method of NYC policing. Feral is a significant social pathology, just as it ecologically with feral housecats, which kill songbirds for sport outside their abodes, to which they return for chow. They play with their dying victims first, though.
Feral house cats have been estimated to kill many millions of songbirds per year in the US.
Feral is not trivial. If not dealt with vigorously, the severity of crimes by the feral just increases. Did we not learn anything from the Giuliani-Bloomberg years compared to the deBlasio era? What has happened to the NYC homicide rate?
What is being done about the feral young shooters in Southside Chicago?
Ferality is on the march. I am surprised that Neo does not seem to see that.
John Tyler gets it! As do some others.
Snow on Pine, I’d love to see it happen but we have a political class that can’t work together for the common good. Unlike private industry where an eye is kept on costs and weighed against current or anticipated future revenue, there is no such activity in the Federal government, not to my knowledge. Sure, they’ll talk about the deficit from time to time and try to use it as a wedge issue but none of them truly cares about it. In private industry “projects” are pulled all the time because they didn’t meet expectations. That’s the nature of it. If no one cared then the business would fail and they would be unemployed, so the incentive is there to keep a steady eye on it. In my opinion no one does that in the Federal government. Laws are passed, and burdens placed on businesses and individuals. The author(s) of the legislation are touted as great statesmen and honored in their State by having bridges and highways named after them. The legislation can never, ever be criticized or come under scrutiny for being harmful, because the act of criticizing it is tantamount to attacking the legislator and the voters who support him or her. I don’t see any happy ending. We’re spending like mad but getting very little in return.
How that’s going to be expressed in fully built-up core cities would be fewer households in a given accommodation, fewer shared facilities, interior renovations to make fewer apartments in a given space, the razing of structures and the redeployment of the land to other uses, &c. All manifest in declining population.
Nice theory, but as of February 2020 New York City was growing in population. It took the combined incompetence and malevolence of DeBlasio and Cuomo to reverse that, but the point is that people have been saying for 20 years that big cities are doomed, and in the case of the really big cities the opposite happened. The last six months only show how massive a screwup is required to reverse that growth. And my guess is that NYC will bounce back once all this idiocy is in the past.
Jimmy, I wish I were as optimistic. My State, New York, will re-elect Cuomo in a landslide. DeBlasio is term-limited but from what I observe his successor will be just another radical leftist. I hear that Rudy Giuliani’s son is mulling a run. I wish him good luck.
Brian, I live in NYC, so I share your concerns, but try to remain hopeful. Hadn’t heard about Giuliani’s son, but have heard of other possible sane candidates. God forbid, someone like AOC runs and gets elected. My hope rests on enough people having they’re eyes opened by all the recent events, much as what happened in 1994 with Dinkins getting replaced by Giuliani in the wake of Crown Heights. May be wishful thinking on my part.
Cicero:
But in the Art Deco world if you feed the feral beasts they will cease their instinct-driven (or other baser motivations) killing of God’s other beautiful creatures (speaking only feral cats and song birds). I’m sure the master of misapplied statistics will correct this assessment of his world view.
Snow on Pine said: ” …took a lot more effort to load up a truck or car, […] vs. just taking this stuff to the dump.”
In a lot of places, the dump is not necessarily an option. The dump could either be a long way away or cost quite a bit of money – or both. $45 per load is what the municipal dump costs in my area. And whether you have one bag or an entire truck full doesn’t matter. It’s still one load. $45 is a lot for someone who is just barely making ends meet. Then there are the materials that the dump won’t take, things like old tires, batteries, and even some electronics.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying dumping is a good thing and I’m not trying to minimize it. I think the laws against dumping should be enforced vigorously with high fines and possible days in jail when caught.
But I also think the best way to minimize dumping is to have some reasonable alternative available. Municipal dumpsters located in strategic places around the county would be one option.
Note that I also say “minimized”, not eliminated. Like the poor, trashy people will always be with us.
I was the project manager on a small construction project a few years ago. We had a 30 yard dumpster on the site. Friday afternoon rolled around and I called the dumpster folks to come and empty it before ending work for the weekend. The construction foreman chastised me for doing that. I asked why? He said wait till Monday morning and you’ll see. Well, on Monday morning that dumpster was full to overflowing. There was even a full size sofa with love seat in it. Yeah, I learned a lesson with that one.
Nice theory, but as of February 2020 New York City was growing in population.
Yes, and just about every core city in America other than New York had a declining population between 1950 and 1980, unless they were in a state where municipal annexation was still practiced. New York itself did as well during those 30 years. The county I grew up in hasn’t had periods of demographic decline lasting more than a few years, and, with some hitches, saw peak population in 2014, and is only a fraction of a % point off peak. The core city in that county saw peak population in 1950 and has declined continuously since, albeit at a variable rate. It is now 40% off peak. Given that Burn Loot and Murder has hit the town and Mayor Lovely [ha!] Warren suffers delusions of adequacy, the situation will only be getting worse.
What people who know the history will tell you is that much of the decline registered (at least through 1970) was coincident with improved affluence and improved living conditions for the most impecunious. At one time, you had two and three families to a unit on the near northeast side. The population loss was the prosperous wage earners able to afford suburban homes, the next ratchet down moving into their old properties, and the population thinning out in the most crowded areas. Some of the choices made in re public works ca. 1955 were suboptimal, IMO, but keep in mind suburban housing and commuting by car were something welcomed by a large constituency. You got people commuting, you benefit from improved methods of processing traffic.
I’m of a New Urbanist bent myself and wish things had been done differently, but my taste isn’t everyone’s. IMO, the most salient problem was the breakdown of public order after 1960, and a crucial structural feature of that was that police patrols were vested in municipal rather than county government.
Cicero:
I am surprised that your argument is so weak. “Feral” is the wrong word for what you mean – the people you are speaking of have been raised by other people. No, they are not feral. They have been socialized into a destructive subset of a particular culture, and in addition some of them are almost certainly sociopaths. Nothing I said indicates that I don’t recognize that as a problem, and it’s a cheap and poorly-placed shot to say otherwise.
I asked some very pointed questions, such as who would be doing this “shooting” you advocate and under what circumstances. I am all in favor of the “broken windows” approach. But it didn’t involve “shooting” unspecified “feral” people.
Socio-economic bottom-dwellers: “Cicero despises them for that”, says our resident guru, Art Deco, the pontificator, the all-knowing and all wise.
I’m nothing of the kind. I just summarize the import of what you say, which requires no wisdom, just basic literacy.
Socio-economic bottom dwellers do not build an upwardly-mobile society. I take that as obvious. Even Art inferentially suggests that, with his grand and detailed top-down recipe for Newark’s resurrection.
There is no such thing as an ‘upwardly mobile society’. There are upwardly and downwardly mobile families within a given society. There are people whose relative position improves and declines in the course of their work life. There is economic growth, wherein you have improved productivity from one year to the next. The involvement the vast majority of employees have with this improved productivity is making use of processes and technologies developed by others, and their improved output may be hardly discernible. And, of course, there are occupations where it’s difficult to discern any improvement in output given inputs over many decades. Are you going to start calling school teachers ‘bottom dwellers’?
People who undertake low skill jobs are participants in a voluntary transaction. Someone pays them and they perform a service. Their pay is commensurate with the marginal benefit of the service to their employer. Ordinary people (to varying degrees) appreciate the efforts of common-and-garden service employees and aren’t rude to them and don’t make a habit of trashing them.
WRT dumping. In rural areas it’s difficult. As noted above. It costs and it may be inconvenient. A local municipality bought some land from the estate of a deceased farmer–who hadn’t farmed it in a while. The cost of clearing off the dumped crap was more than the land.
My issue was with those who chose to avoid the easy and neat way and chose to mess up, deliberately, their own or others’ property.
From WW II for some time, whole subdivisions were slapped down by the square mile. It was starter homes for young guys getting started and it was a hell of a lot better than they’d anticipated pre-war. The housing plans all had side door opening off the hall from the kitchen to the basement–past the milk chute for you older folks–and onto the single-car driveway. Turn one way and go maybe twelve yards and you’re at the curb. Turn the other way go maybe twelve yards and you’re at the back end of your property. Turn eight feet and you’re where you keep your trash cans for the weekly pickup. Which is free. It is in this circumstance where cultural choice matters, uninfluenced by other factors.
But in the Art Deco world if you feed the feral beasts they will cease their instinct-driven (or other baser motivations) killing of God’s other beautiful creatures (speaking only feral cats and song birds). I’m sure the master of misapplied statistics will correct this assessment of his world view.
In Art Deco world, young slum dwellers respond to incentives like everyone else, and age in ways similar to everyone else. You deter, punish, and incapacitate, and people make different decisions on the margins – decisions about what to do with their time, about who to hang with, about how to improve their purchasing power. People grow older, they take fewer risks and get less delight in risk. They grow less impetuous. What I expect to happen is what commonly and perhaps usually happens: lousy characters have a spell or two in prison and then think better about what to do with their life when they’re paroled. Ken Auletta interviewed a judge in New York City in 1980 who had this to say: “they get to be about 35 and we seldom see them anymore”.
Even Art inferentially suggests that, with his grand and detailed top-down recipe for Newark’s resurrection.
Newark doesn’t need a resurrection. People live and work there and the population stabilized around 2010. It needs better quality of life.
By the time the Giuliani-Bratton program had been fully implemented, the most troublesome neighborhood in NYC was Bedford-Stuyvesant, which then had a homicide rate of 15 per 100,000. In 1980, that rate would have been just a shade above the mean for a metropolitan urban area. However, 15 per 100,000 is less than half Newark’s current rate and less than a quarter Camden’s. Robbery rates have over the last generation tended to track murder rates in metro areas. Lots of improvement possible.
Neo, we exchange “cheap thoughts”.
Feral cats have cats as single female parents. Let’s stick with my model! Can we do that? The behavior of feral cats I described is a product of their “culture”, of genetic origin in the case of cats, just as loyalty and a modest degree of conscience occur in dogs, whose ears drop and who slouch when chastised by Master. Once cats start to kill songbirds they never de-escalate!
Art criticizes my writings. OMG.
In the Art Deco world there is no capital punishment for certain things (murder for example), maybe those misguided poorly socialized youths will out grow that phase, or just move on to other less risky “crimes,” or graduate to having younger folks do the “wet” work for them? Trust Art Deco, his model has worked so well over the last 70 years.
But wait, we have more statistics, inconceivable.
“If you say so.”
Cicero:
You have yet to answer my questions.
Feral cats are cats. “Feral” is a term that, as applied to humans (and that’s what we’re talking about) has a very distinct meaning, and it means that the person was raised in isolation.
You wrote: “As to feral young men, I am obviously going to the ‘broken windows’ method of NYC policing. Feral is a significant social pathology, just as it ecologically with feral housecats…” Your analogy was not about the details of their feral nature (which you never defined, as I previously asked to do, until now), but about their pathology, which I have never denied. But “feral” is the wrong word to use as applied to people, because it means something different in people.
You have yet to answer my other questions from 8:52 last night, and I think that is telling. I will repeat them:
Cicero:
Oh, and about feral cats – the definition of feral cats has nothing to do with the cats’ feline parentage or being raised among other cats. It has to do with their lack of human close contact. In other words, unlike house pets, they are not raised among humans, they are raised by other cats.
The “feral” humans of whom you speak have plenty of human contact. Whether raised by single parents or by two parents, by grandparents or by foster parents, they are raised by other human beings, competently or incompetently. So your analogy breaks down in that sense, as well.
In my post an hour ago I said this about politicians:
I think that there is a little bit of that going on here in the forum. From what I’ve read some people have said some things that some others find offensive, derogatory, you name it. What I see now are people “doubling down” like the politicians I complained about. Can we agree to let this slide? It doesn’t help anyone if some things were said in haste, and heavens forbid we have to walk it back. Maybe it is best to just walk away and leave for a while.
In the Art Deco world there is no capital punishment for certain things (
I did not engage in a discussion of punishment. I made a glancing reference to punishment derived from the experience of a typical prison inmate. Again, 600,000 people are remanded to state prisons every year, Fewer than 2% are so remanded for murder or aggressive manslaughter.
A discussion of homicide rates is useful because it’s the type of crime where there are few reporting problems and few problems of definition. Also, the temporal and spatial variation in miscellaneous sorts of crime tends to track the variation in homicide rates. You reduce homicide rates, you reduce the frequency of every kind of street crime to one degree or another.
I’ll attempt to get into the office later today, and will be happy when doing so to answer for my part, any questions as to the deserts of the morally “feral” and their imagined claims to be treated as misguided peers by those upon whom they prey.
If the local church lady wishes me to respond to his contention, misdirected though it was, that,
… I will be happy to do so on a device other than a tablet.
Just let’s get our ducks in a row first, so we know just who and what he is claiming as his authority for insinuating that we have an obligation to do anything about, or for them at all, apart from responding with force when they cross interpersonal boundaries they have no secular business transgressing. That way we won’t waste time pretending to discuss ostensibly pragmatic issues, when what is really being mooted is some parish council position paper in the local Sunday bulletin.
DNW, I do enjoy your writing so don’t allow my criticism to affect you as much as the person you quoted.
If you have hung around here long enough you’ve learned that I admire Asian society, specifically Japanese but probably because I found it easier to speak than Mandarin.
In Japanese culture EVERYONE has value. No one has a “bad job”. They are all equally important. I for one am very grateful that the gentleman that drives the big truck at 5am is there to pick up my trash.
Just let’s get our ducks in a row first, so we know just who and what he is claiming as his authority for insinuating that we have an obligation to do anything about, or for them at all, apart from responding with force when they cross interpersonal boundaries they have no secular business transgressing. That way we won’t waste time pretending to discuss ostensibly pragmatic issues, when what is really being mooted is some parish council position paper in the local Sunday bulletin.
The question was ‘Where do you want them to live?’. The answer will be the name of a place or places or a description of the sort of place you have in mind. Another possible answer might be, “I haven’t given it much thought”. Any of these is more concise and takes less effort than typing out the verbiage you’ve provided thus far.
Life is what you make it. When you are young you can take risks and bounce back, so do it. I think the problem with Americans is that they have become too risk-averse and dare I say, lazy. I’ll probably get grief for this but several years ago during the oil boom in the Dakotas I urged my nephew to go. (He learned industrial welding from his father.) I said that they are paying $100 an hour. Do it for 5 years, come back, live with Mom for however long it takes to find a good woman to call your wife, and then move out of New York. With a $million in the bank start your own business. Did he do it? No. Why? Go ask him.
Guess what? He found a good woman and they are marrying in a couple months. Good for them! One thing he doesn’t have…$million in the bank. The timing would have been perfect. Don’t listen to Uncle Brian, he’s just an old fool.
This is rich, Art Deco complaining about DNW being too wordy! DNW needs some stats so Art can connect with the argument? 🙂
Brian:
North Dakota during the last boom was a risky place in my experience, now the boom phase is past (for now anyway). Glad to hear your nephew has found a good woman and hope things go well for them!
Brian Morgan:
I’ve cued it up for the relevant scene:
I was sentenced to Death of a Salesman by one of my high school English teachers. The author fancied he was lampooning and debunking the humbug of the age but the debunking exercise was worse humbug.
neo, I’m honored!
This reminds me of a bit of Twitter fun that I witnessed the other day. Someone was serious trying to urge people to turn their grassy yards into a vegetable garden, and that if we all did it then no one would go hungry.
I grew up in a upper middle class town in New Jersey in a school district that graduated the likes of Bill Maher and David Remnick of the New Yorker Magazine.
The parents of a friend of mine lived off the land just around the corner from my Elementary School. They had an acre of land that was productive all season. There was enough to feed them, and supply a roadside stand during the summer. That is what it took to feed three people! What they did for protein, I don’t know.
So when I hear no-nothings talk about feeding themselves and the world on their 100 square-foot plot of land, I laugh, and at the same time I am sadden at how ill-educated people have become.
So yeah, life is tough. It doesn’t mean that you have to be a cold, heartless person. It just means that you need to be productive throughout your life and take opportunities when given.
Neo, my Dad had no problem with me associating with people who had dirt under their fingernails. He spent a year in Louisiana in the early ’50s. He fell in love with a farm girl but her father didn’t like him because he was a “city slicker”! Even after that heart break my father still championed the working poor. I am proud of him for that and for teaching me those lessons.
Please read the following as amiably intended as you can. The problem with these exchanges is that the issues and the responses become somewhat confused or mixed. I would invite you to review what I actually first said, paying attention to the informal tone and the qualifiers added. Then look at the response which I objected to as misleading: as it misrepresented what I was actually contending both as to object [the municipality per se] and scope, including the relevance of the municipal population to the economic engines at work within the civic boundaries.
I was not referring to bad jobs, nor to the moral worth of the poor, but to the economic rationale for the existence and perpetuation of cities in relation to the population that dwells within them.
If I seem irked it is because in an ostensible reply to what I had subsequently written in expanding upon and claiming my remarks were fair and justified, yet another commenter began depositing a litany of observations distracting from the point – i.e., my point – in contention.
This obvious rhetorical move, is one I am extremely impatient with; and which is a manifestation of trollish bad faith in my book. And my book includes a great deal of experience in dealing with trolls and their polemical redirection and re-framing techniques.
Nonetheless, as I get time, I will respond, at least in part, to it.
Now, as for your remarks concerning Asian societies, particularly the Japanese.
I have never lived in, or even been to Japan. I know, or better, have dealt with substantial numbers of Japanese – virtually all men – in business over quite a number of years.
I also know in a rather more comprehensive way, American men who spent their career lives working for the Japanese. And to hear them talk, though they worked side by side with the Japanese for years, they virtually never got to know them very well, despite frequently socializing with them, and traveling to Japan as employees of Japanese corporations.
Their view of Japanese mores, was largely negative. Though this might be in some measure due to the kind of men willing to work for the Japanese and the kind of men the Japanese selected for … That is they selected for men who could be dominated and who would work in an environment wherein they were granted no real autonomy, or trust, or status. As a result, they received in turn American men with little loyalty, and in some cases, rather flexible ethics themselves.
I have had one “moral” conversation with a Japanese man who apparently considered my father a friend; and who visited my office socially in order to tell me that he had quit his Japanese corporation after 20 some years, and was settling in America now that he had gone back home to retrieve his bride to be and returned.
We got on the topic of Japanese “solidarity”. He told me essentially this, though unlike a couple of years ago I cannot now reconstruct the conversation verbatim.
He said that Japanese unity was much more formal and based on social pressure and appearances than real fellow feeling. He stated that in recent years Japanese had become much less respectful and considerate of the elderly, and that a crass kind of materialism and shallowness had begun to pervade Japanese society.
He related, visibly affected, one of the incidents that prompted him to decide on the United States. He said that as he was driving on the freeway, he began to have car trouble. Maybe a tire, or something relatively minor. He pulled off and began to cast about mentally for a solution, not knowing quite what to do, when a man in a beat-up truck, pulled over and offered to help. The guy changed the tire or got the vehicle started for him, and refused any compensation.
Tadaki, could not believe that someone in such obviously straightened circumstances, and with troubles of his own, would stop to help a stranger. He was almost crying, as he related the story.
You might also check out – for what it might be worth, if anything – SerpentZa’s YouTube channel on China, and his remarks on the unwillingness of Chinese citizens to lend a hand to people obviously in distress on the street.
Perhaps your experience there was different. In which case I am sure he would be glad to see some input.
Regards,
DNW
Brian Morgan: “The legislation can never, ever be criticized or come under scrutiny for being harmful, because the act of criticizing it is tantamount to attacking the legislator and the voters who support him or her.”
Too true. It seems that our pols don’t believe that unintended consequences can occur. IMO, it would be an improvement if all legislation had to be reviewed for unintended consequences every seven – ten years. One that certainly needs it is the Endangered Species Act. It has been turned into a cudgel against all forms of extraction industries and is at least partly to blame for the present wild fire situation on the West Coast.
If DJT gets elected for a second term, he may get around to fixing some of the unintended consequences. 🙂
Another answer might be that because I do not own them, and because I do not owe them either, and because they are ostensibly free and competent citizens, politically responsible for their own goddamned behavior, and neither wards of the state nor my responsibility moral or otherwise, I don’t give a damn where they live, just as long as they cause me no trouble or annoyance with their behavior.
If their trials and tribulations do not spill over into the body politic at large, then the working poor population of Newark, who, the city complains hold only 18% of the jobs within the municipal boundaries, can work wherever they like, and flail however much they like, and elect authorities who allow “feral” and predatory youth to run wild, as repeatedly as they like…
They are not my problem, until they make themselves my problem. Then, when they become my problem, they become liable to my solution: be that allowing them to destroy each other, or drawing some metaphorical warning a line in the sand which they may not cross except at their peril, or, any number of dozens of other possible limited government solutions. Provided that the solutions do not involve any obligations on my part, I’m open to any number of liberty preserving solutions which you and they might wish to try. How’s that for a spiritually and politically generous answer?
The fact is that that your points 5 through 7 are unexceptionable and would be worthy of acknowledgement if the following criteria were met: if it were not you who had made them, and if they actually had some relevance to the limited contention I originally mooted and defended.
This is rich, Art Deco complaining about DNW being too wordy! DNW needs some stats so Art can connect with the argument? ?
He’s just devoted another 800-odd words to not answering a seven word question and not correcting the fallacy in his second comment (NB, the fallacy was the basis of the whole comment, which ran on for 800-odd words; he must have had a job as a newspaper columnist at one time).
Gentlemen,
It is not seemly to engage in a fistfight in the living room of the home where you are a guest.
This is Neo’s home.
Do not let the insanity of what we are going through lead you to forget the civility that should be shown during a discussion. Note: DISCUSSION! We are all better than that, and I have respect for the long-time commenters here. What happened in the many entries above is an outlier that we should all learn from.
Another answer might be that because I do not own them,
And that answer is another evasion on your part.
Again you began this exchange with “It does not appear there is any reason for Newark to continue to exist. ” Well, there are 275,000 people occupying residential housing there, in addition to the businesses and public institutions where people work, which have passed in and out of your consciousness during the course of the discussion, as convenient to whatever game you were playing.
Art Deco:
If you paid attention to DNW’s posts you would be putting on your clown shoes now because you just won the Bozo prize. DNW is not always concise but he isn’t an ex journalist. 😉
DNW,
Thank you for your reply.
My Japanese language tutor, who herself is Japanese and the same age as me, spoke of the disgrace of being defeated in the war. Their first objective was to disprove the notion that only cheap junk is “Made in Japan”. She said that the mood in Japan was electric in the years leading up to the export of inexpensive Japanese cars at a time when America suffered through oil embargoes. There is a song by Ayumi Ishida called “Blue Light Yokohama” in 1968 that romanticized the port of Yokohama: “rocking to-and-fro in the arms of her man as the ships rock against their moorings.”
You see this was personal for them. They had to prove that they were just as good. So what you’ve told me makes perfect sense. Japanese men never treated American men as equals, and probably never will. Is that so bad? Must we love each other? Respect yes. Love no.
And your story of kindness to the stranded traveler. Yep. That is Asian culture. A friend of mine who spent some years in China relayed a story of taking a train through the countryside. The train came abruptly to a halt. The engineer flung open the door and lectured a bloodied man who attempted suicide by train. He told him how disgraceful it was that he should delay the train’s passengers for his act of selfishness. The engineer slammed the door shut and the train proceeded on schedule.
Well, this seems rather cruel but in light of all that we’ve been discussing here in this forum, this is how cultures survive. Maybe America can find a happy medium but the way we are going, we will dissolve.
If you paid attention to DNW’s posts you would be putting on your clown shoes now because you just won the Bozo prize.
The prizes you’re handing out at random don’t interest me.
To all:
I am loathe to shut down comments on this thread because people seem to really want to talk about good old Newark.
And I am loathe to ban any veteran commenters.
But I will shut down this thread if the petty squabbling doesn’t stop. Those of you who are involved, you know who you are.
Ah, good old Newark. I remember having a conversation with a lady of the evening at the train station as I waited for my grandfather to pick me up. I never had an issue. I never understood why they accused me of being a cop. That persisted up until my 40s. I guess that people that “walk the fine line of law and order” are suspicious of others who just want to have a conversation. Like: “How did you get into this racket?” Their reply: “Are you a cop?” I’ve led an interesting life. And yes, people, all people, are interesting and deserve respect.
If you are going to rely on word count complaints, you ought to access the word count software that is available on-line.
J.J., thanks.
Hopefully I can squeeze that in before Neo shuts down this thread. I feel the walls closing in. If we had radios, what frequency should we tune to next?
As one of the prime offenders I admit I do understand your point, and your interest, and your ownership.
However, I would ask you to also consider the trollish behaviors that invite rebuttal and correction; in fact, demand it … despite, the fact that these exchanges seem to, and to some extent do, derail the direction you have intended these discussions to proceed along.
In some way, you are forced into acting like the school teacher who must demand order in the classroom without much regard for what precipitated the conflict.
Too bad dueling was made illegal. Much of this could be taken off-line. LOL But, then, there is always the psychopath intruder problem in any “honor based moral system”, as Haidt would call it.
My goodness people, can we just settle down. I like this thread. There are some great ideas and stories here.
Tell me if I am wrong. There are three types of people here:
1. Those who offer “data points” = anecdotes. That’s me.
2. Those who collect said data points and report the mean and standard deviation.
3. Those who comment on said mean and standard deviation.
There are a lot of #3’s here.
@Neo 3:08pm: ““Feral young men need to be shot” is one of those statements with a lot of undefined terms, to say the least, and it’s hard to interpret it in any way that isn’t offensive.”
Oops, I offended.
Does that never happen here? But we are not in a court of law. I am more than sick and tired of the Portland riots, and the blanket condemnation of police by both blacks and whites, the black pseudo-national anthem at NFL games, the gross disunity by those who should be grateful.
People like parker (where are you?) and I will not be the new Kulaks. That is what the explosion of gun and ammo sales is all about; the stores are all sold out, all of them. To what purpose(s) were they bought? Not for use in state-sanctioned firing squads after murder convictions, that much is certain.
You don’t like “feral”? I don’t either, not in people or critters. I shoot any cat I see when I’m out hunting. And feral is descriptive enough for me. What word would you substitute?
The trouble with a kitten is that
eventually it becomes a cat.
—Ogden Nash.
I’ve decided to “chill” after the disruption of COVID-19 in New York. We’re down to like 5 deaths per day in all of the State, so I’m sorry for the loss but I am happy for us on the whole.
I refuse to get worked up over riots. Somehow, someway, I’ve seen this play out before. It never works out well for the rioters.
I am truly sorry if the rioting is affecting you now. I guess all I can offer is flee if you can. Hopefully you have insurance. Then connect with others with Nick Sandman’s lawyer and sue the hell out of the City and State, and everyone else with deep pockets including Soros.
Domestic cats live a lot longer if they are kept indoors, and although they may not like it, the songbirds are not decimated, and the coyotes have to find other meals. Just say’n.
om, Coyotes nasty beasts. We’ve got them here in the valley. They come down from the hilltops at night. I shone a torch in their direction one night and had half a dozen yellow eyes staring back at me!
I guess the “Newark” thread is dead. So be it.
On Rush’s show today he advised us to never, ever mention your competitor’s name. It’s a Golden Rule he explained. This was in the context of CNN’s coverage of stories. They just can’t seem to go by one day without mentioning Fox or Rush, and of course Trump, in a disparaging light. People are turned off by it.
I find this true of my feelings for Michael Savage. He is one of the greatest gifts to broadcasting (sorry Rush) but when he calls Sean Hannity a “wall-banger” he turns me off. Frankly it’s been months since the last time I tuned in. I prefer Ben Shapiro but eventually he starts to annoy me too.
So where I am going with this is maybe we should consider lessening the personal attacks (except when it comes to Montage 🙂 I don’t think it wins anyone over, and it just sows division.
Thanks.
@Brian Morgan:
Bingo Re Japan. The job may be menial, but provided your uniform, diligence, and attitude are in good shape, you will be treated with politeness and respect.
Of course it helps to have a language and culture where most interactions are more ritualized and everyone instinctively knows what to do or say at any given time.
Well now Folks:
Hasn’t this been a fun thread? 🙂
And Now for Something Completely Different:
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/3-descriptive-constitution-of-the
Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) has penned another one of his very long screeds. It’s a very good antidote for any Muh Constitution Boomer CivNats who might happen to be present in this here forum. In short he describes the ways in which our present system actually functions. Even the dullest amongst us here must be dimly aware that the machinery of the Republic is not functioning as designed. Why that is takes more than a soundbite to explain, or at least to posit a good explanation. It’s a long read, but worth it.
@Neo I seriously think you’d enjoy chowing down on Yarvin’s writings. There’s lots to tease out there.
Cicero:
Of course you “offended,” I assume purposely. You often try to offend, and sometimes you succeed.
My other criticism is that you didn’t express what you actually were referring to, and the reader is left having to fill in the blanks. Nor did you ever answer my questions. You still haven’t. You bob and you weave.
You ask what those weapons were bought for? Self-defense, for the most part. It sounds like you’re suggesting much more than that.
I’m not here to tell you what words to use to express your thoughts more cogently. “Feral” doesn’t cut it, though, and I explained why.
DNW:
Yeah, I hate the schoolmarm disciplinary role. But if I don’t do it, the blog comments become a cesspool that would make this thread look like a polite tea party. And unfortunately, I don’t have the time to go through the whole fight and see who started it and who is the offender and who is really just defending him/herself. Sometimes it’s very obvious but much of the time it’s not, and so I have to just issue general threats.
Brian – Japanese easier speaking than Standard Chinese!? Huh. I always expected that Japanese would be much harder, though I never really tried to learn any of it, just a few random words which I probably don’t pronounce correctly anyway. Is Japanese not a tonal language at all? Maybe that explains part of the difference.
It’s a very good antidote for any Muh Constitution Boomer CivNats who might happen to be present in this here forum.
It’s a yammer hardly worth bothering with.
neo on September 14, 2020 at 10:18 pm said:
Yeah, I hate the schoolmarm disciplinary role.
* * *
My general solution to any disputes among the boys was NEVER try and find out who started it, but confiscate any toy or device in contention and send everyone to different corners.
I feel my efforts were rewarded after overhearing one of them tell the others, “We better stop fighting before Mom hears us.”
Is it time for punch and cookies now?
AesopFan:
That works well when the back-and-forth between the siblings is roughly equal and there’s not a pattern of one child being the one who is consistently persecuting the other. Sounds like you had the first situation. But in the latter situation, it doesn’t work.
Thank you, Neo.
But my task here is to make a statement or two, which you term bobbing and weaving, not to write a thesis, answer questions, or be cross-examined. You and I disagree on “feral” as applied to humans, but that’s OK.
We have disagreed before. I remember a particularly vehement disagreement about Ebola, in which you were the lawyer and I was the doc, and we never agreed.
If you think all the guns were bought for self-defense, well, there is defense of self, and there is a larger defense, of the nation and its constitution. One heck of a lot of guns have been sold this year. One does not need to cast about much to see many references to possible Civil War II. In the not-Boston where I live, people are afraid of the possibility of Democratic tyranny. Look at the chaos and crime in Democratic cities, the nil pros Democratic DAs!
Maybe you all are just softer and more gentle there in Massachusetts, after all these years of Democratic rule! Sen. Markey just won his primary, and he is all for the Green New Deal.
Cicero:
You overdo the lawyer stuff. I never practiced law, as I’ve said many times. I’m not a lawyer; I’m a law school graduate. But long before I ever went to law school, I felt thought that if you have a point to make you should be precise and logical about it. So I call you on those things. And I try to be precise and logical. I’m not cross-examining you. I’m asking questions that you need to answer in order to really think about what you’re expressing and have anyone else understand and not misunderstand it.
I said most of the guns recently purchased were bought for self-defense, and I stand by that. That doesn’t mean all of them are. And of course, if there actually was a civil war, quite a few of the guns would be used for more than self-defense.
@Philip Sells
Japanese is not tonal. It has a pretty regular type of grammar. Far less work to become functionally literate in Japanese than in Chinese. Still not easy though.
Chinese is a totally different beast. It’s a tonal language (how many depends on the dialect: Shanghainese kind of atonal, Cantonese you really don’t wanna know). The grammar is very simple: Think “Long time no see” as the aeons (helped along by purely ideographic writing) have eroded away the cases, inflections, etc.
Chinese grammar is much simpler than Japanese ditto. Another big issue is that Chinese are broadly speaking a rough and ready rude people…. so it’s easier to learn the language and not inadvertently insult everyone you speak to.
Languages like Japanese and Thai which have honorifics and different modes of speech for different social relationships are much more of a minefield when starting out.
You can just about mortally insult someone in Japanese or Thai just by not using the appropriate form of ‘Pretty Please’. Chinese cursing is of the Italian/Spanish variety and best avoided on or around Mother’s Day, if you get my drift 🙂
Cantonese Idiom is amazing; they have very precise and nasty slang expressions to describe just about every human frailty in existence. It’s like being a butterfly being pinned to a collector’s board when someone picks the right one. There’s even one for Art Deco.
Philip,
It was for me but there there are two modes of speech: formal and familiar. Formal is the default for all interactions unless you’ve established a friendly relationship. I do well with formal speech.
The biggest challenge is the written language since there are three character sets: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Hiragana and Katakana can be mastered quickly but you could spend a lifetime learning the Kanji (i.e. Chinese characters).
Japanese are not shy about the differences between masculine speech and feminine. In fact a lot of great comedy comes when men and women switch gender-specific words. Also I’ve heard women selectively use masculine forms when demanding action but it is more than just raising your voice. It’s really very interesting stuff.
Maybe someone on the forum who speaks Mandarin can chime in but I suspect that there are similar rules.
EDIT: I see that Zaphod got in before me. Thanks, Zaphod.
This thread really went off the rails.
I was born in the Ironbound section of Newark and still have family there (at least part-time). We moved to the suburbs when I was 3 or 4 and eventually landed “down the shore” (Toms River).
The Ironbound section is safe and clean for the most part, but very dense and very difficult to find parking. It has a very large Portuguese and Brazilian population with a large number of very good restaurants. The rest of the city pretty rough to say the least. It is also surrounded by cities that are rough – East Orange, Irvington being the worst.
There are a couple of stores Downtown as pointed out, but for the most part it clears out after 5 and the vast majority of stores are not ones you’d want to shop at. The Prudential Area has brought some much-needed activity to the area. There is a cluster of restaurants and a couple of new hotels near the venue.
They have been talking about Newark’s come back for most of my life. I won’t hold my breath. It is a major transportation hub with commuter rail, highways, major airport and a port. A lot of folks pass through daily, but not too many of them stop or stay there.
As bad as Newark is – Trenton may be worse (I drove through this past Sat.). I went to college on the outskirts and the city has deteriorated the bast 25 – 30 to a surprising degree. Camden is usually singled out as the worst. I won’t argue with that, but there are some attractions there (Battleship New Jersey, Aquarium, Rutgers – Camden). You don’t have to go through the bad areas to get to them, at least.
I had the pleasure of being in North Philadephia last month – I won’t bore you with the details, but it certainly gives the above mentioned NJ cities a run for their money.
Zaphod,
Thanks for the Mencius Moldbug link. I’ll give it a good read. I first heard of Moldbug from these guys:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfhkaO2fOmIX05DQ72uZsig/videos
First the channel was named “Asian Capitalists”, now “A Dormant Dynasty”. I believe that they are Hong Kongers now living in Canada.
Tom Murin,
Ahh, Toms River. I grew up in the New Brunswick area up until the age of 10. I remember day trips with my Mom, one waypoint being Toms River. I think it was there along the roadside there was a “Hire’s Root Beer” outdoors soda fountain. To this very day I can still taste a vanilla ice cream float with Hires Root Beer. Good times.
I remember having to pass over many drawbridges as we drove. Somewhere we stopped and I watched a man fishing. He caught something. A snake? No it was an eel. He placed it in a canvas bag and then proceeded to beat the snot out of it against the rocks! I was horrified. Just a kid.
@Brian Morgan:
Thanks for the tip about that Channel. I’ve subscribed and will take a look.
Modbug / Yarvin *is* wordy, but I believe he’s justified in being so. If there’s a gigantic invisible elephant in the room, you can’t just walk up to people and say ‘Hey, look at that Elephant!’… you have to walk around the whole damn thing with a paint gun and give it two coats of gloss before you have something everyone can see in the whole. Otherwise we spend our lives arguing about the finer points of the tail while others fight wars over the ears or the trunk.
PS: Puts a new spin on Jellied Eel.
Zaphod,
I particularly like the video that has the phrase “Age Of Slaves” in the title. I think it is the one that is the fourth from the most recent. Lots of Moldbug in there. The next phase in the cycle is “Age of Priests,” if I’m not mistaken. We see it happening with Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, Hollywood, even Dr. Fauci and our authoritarian governors fit the pattern.
That works well when the back-and-forth between the siblings is roughly equal and there’s not a pattern of one child being the one who is consistently persecuting the other. Sounds like you had the first situation. But in the latter situation, it doesn’t work.
It’s beneficial to the young if parents don’t stoke the ordinary conflict between siblings. I’ve seen situations where a feedback loop develops. Parental mistreatment of child A >> anger taken out on child B >> parental punishment of A for mistreating B >> more anger taken out on B, and so forth.
Zaphod,
DJT represents an existential threat. He is of an earlier time: “Age of Merchants”. If DJT fails to halt current momentum then we are destined for total breakdown of traditional social order. We don’t get restorative Revolution, we become fractured into thousands of pieces that by themselves can’t do much of anything constructive. This is when the George Soros’ of the world lay claim to the pieces.
It’s all very interesting. I like to be optimistic about things but sometimes I just shake my head and say “we’re doomed.”
Family used to go to the Jersey shore each year when I was a kid and passed through Camden area–still remember the time the river along the highway was on fire because of the chemicals floating on top of the water–sometimes, instead, the river had colorful, giant, many foot high bubbles floating on top.
P.S.– Once saw what I believe was a Federal government produced
map (EPA?) of the U.S. which highlighted the incidence of cancer, and you could very clearly see in red the high levels of cancer surrounding the rivers which passed through the industrial areas of New Jersey–and other places in the U.S. as well.
Snow on Pine, yes!
When the young no-nothings lecture me that we are destroying the planet, I tell them of the many improvements in just my lifetime. They become flustered and declare “it’s not enough!”
Zaphod & Brian:
I have some education in basic Standard Chinese, so I can occasionally understand bits of written Japanese where they’re using kanji. Of course the pronunciation is sometimes unknown to me, but it’s always fascinated me that I can read parts of two different languages in their separate spheres that way. (Also grappling sometimes with the Simplified vs. Traditional, of course.)
Brian & Tom:
Whenever I see Toms River come up, I think of Tom Brown’s books. I used to love those.
(Since we seem suddenly to have an aggregation of Toms in this paragraph, I’ll just point out that I have a cousin named Tom, too. Also, one of my college classmates in the same major was named Tom.)
A couple times a year my Dad would pack up the car and load up the family for the 400 mile trip to Canada to visit relatives. The last 100 miles saw us pass through Buffalo, NY, the outskirts along the NYS Thruway. It always seemed to be around dusk so the light was fading. Mile after mile of industry. Large stacks of flammable gas burning. Possibly many skilled men toiling inside, working to provide us with modern conveniences. And then it was gone. From what I read, better shipping lanes were built along the St. Lawrence Seaway. All of those jobs lost. It’s the story of New York State. Former greatness, and now a shell of its former self. The “Empire State”. And now NYC is crushed. The leftists will blame Capitalism. Ha! No, you need to blame anti-Capitalism.
Brian Morgan–Have to laugh at the TV ads from the state government of New York that pop up on my TV every couple of weeks, touting what a “land of innovation” and what a great place the State is to start a new business in –“lowest taxes in years!”
It is pretty obvious that the U.S. has needed at least some form of national level Industrial Policy to help us to keep our workers working–to transition from a mostly industrial to a high tech and service economy–in a way that makes that transition as painless and as successful as possible.
Of course, given the government’s tendency to screw everything up, and all of the deformation of such a program that occurs with corruption, perhaps it is too much to expect our Federal government to perform such a miracle.
Funny, how our government managed the many gigantic efforts of WWII with so much apparent success.
I’m tempted to thank that, beside the overriding directing goal of survival, the people who ran those programs then were of a different breed–with a whole different mind-set, ethic, and value system than such government bureaucrats have today.
Snow on Pine, I thank God that we have Elon Musk. We need many more like him. They are out there but between government rules and regs, and a media and education system that demonizes them, we are in danger.
It is pretty obvious that the U.S. has needed at least some form of national level Industrial Policy to help us to keep our workers working–to transition from a mostly industrial to a high tech and service economy–in a way that makes that transition as painless and as successful as possible.
No, we don’t need some Felix Rohatyn wannabe tossing around investment funds.
Neo, a law school graduate has the stigmata (in the Christian sense of the word, the signs) of being a lawyer. One is taught how to reason and act as a lawyer in law school, is one not? Thus IMO a law school grad thinks like a lawyer. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing! it’s inevitable.
The same process occurs in medical school and in the residency years. But it takes a lot longer, ten years in my case.
We are two different breeds.
Law is about winning arguments on behalf of clients, is it not?
Medicine is about healing the injured, the sick. Who will decide for MDs how this is best done? Law school grads.
I would make a wretched lawyer. But I was deemed one of the Best Doctors in my specialty when those rankings were done.
Cicero:
Actually, no. At least, that’s not been either my experience or my observation. In law school, one is not “taught how to reason and act as a lawyer.” At least, that wasn’t the case when I was in law school many moons ago, although it makes sense that a person would think so.
What I was trying to say in an earlier comment is that I always thought “like a lawyer” in that I was very logical and could mount arguments in a logical way, even as a tiny kid. It was actually a joke in my family and used to drive my mother a bit nuts. I remember being around 3 or 4 years old and she used to tease me about this tendency. As a very young child (7 or 8), when I thought I was the victim of some injustice in the family, I used to write what you might describe as little briefs pleading my case, and leave them as notes on my parents’ bed. No one taught me or told me to do this (it was not quite as obnoxious as it sounds; I still have one of the notes and it’s kind of cute, printed in this child’s block lettering). My point is that no one taught me to be this way – and, what’s more important, it is my observation that that is even more true of most people in law school. They are already “that way” or they wouldn’t have gone to law school in the first place. And in fact, I was less that way than most of my classmates, and did not fit in well at all because I really didn’t enjoy a lot of the conflict that went on.
As for learning how to act like a lawyer, I never did (other than what was already natural to me), nor was there a course in it. We were taught by the Socratic method, which is different from practicing law. I avoided class participation like the plague, because I didn’t like the spotlight on me.
So basically, law school had, if anything, the opposite effect on me. I turned away from it for a long time. My mode of argument is native to my personality, if anything, rather than any effect of law school. What I did learn in law school was about how the legal system functions both generally and specifically. My favorite course was philosophy of law – jurisprudence – which is a more general overview and has nothing to do with the skills a lawyer needs.
“t’s beneficial to the young if parents don’t stoke the ordinary conflict between siblings. I’ve seen situations where a feedback loop develops.” – Art Deco
We consciously tried to avoid that sort of thing.
We were blessed with kids who didn’t seem to have an inbuilt predisposition to bullying, but we endeavored to squelch any random surges.
I understood from them later that Number One Son did have a tendency to assert primogenital authority, but I don’t think they let him get away with it much; it also helps that he is basically a consensus-collegial leader, not an autocrat (a personality “defect” that caused him to wash out of AF OTS, for which we are very thankful).
Neo,
Thanks for your kind reply.
But I am stuck on the fact that lawyers argue over all issues, pro and con, and in so doing, inevitably shade the facts to suit their arguments. The use of the word “arguments” is shot throughout the law, even in a book by Scalia for laity that I’m reading.
I submit that I am a child of reason, and that, in medicine one must anticipate the future, the likely outcomes of procedure X or treatment Y.
“Whenever I see Toms River come up, I think of Tom Brown’s books. I used to love those.” – Philip
I have a couple of the books picked up in various sales, but never read them as a child, although we all knew by osmosis who Tom Brown was.
(although he was not to be confused with that Brown whose body lies a’moulderin’).
“This has been a grave undertaking,” said Tom cryptically.
“They are already “that way” or they wouldn’t have gone to law school in the first place.” – Neo
Personality does seem to be ingrained, and people tend to follow professions that fit their innate tendencies, if they can at all.
“You must be mad,” said the Cheshire Cat to Alice, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
“Why do you bother? I for one couldn’t…,” said Tom carelessly.
Art Deco:
That’s not the sort of situation I’m talking about.
I’m talking about a lopsided situation in which one child is persecuting the other, and it’s not a “cycle of violence” thing nor is it “ordinary” conflict. It is very important to recognize and distinguish that situation from the more common ones such as the one you describe.
Cicero:
And yet you argue here a lot. A lot.
I also am very science-minded. In fact, as a child I thought I would become a scientist. Advanced chemistry disabused me of that notion, although I loved the earlier course. I am highly conversant with analyzing medical research, for a layperson anyway. I’ve had training in statistics at the graduate level (although it’s ancient history and I would NOT do well in a test at this point), and in fact I have strong tendencies towards science and always have.
Logic is logic, and it can be used in many ways and channeled in many directions.
from the more common ones such as the one you describe.
The one I describe is not what you described. Don’t know that it’s all that common. I have seen cases.
Art Deco:
Of course it’s not the one you described. I attempted to make it clear that I was describing a different situation. But sometimes parents find it hard to differentiate. I have seen parents who treat an actual abuse situation at the hands of one sibling towards the other as though it’s a more mutual, evenly-balanced interaction, a sort of tit-for-tat. In an abuse situation, parents must intervene to protect the child who is the victim. Sibling abuse does happen – sometimes sexual, but much more often physical and emotional. In some cases it happens outside the awareness of the parent, because the abuser may be sneaky about that.
What you described is more common, at least in terms of family therapy clients and family therapy theory. One intervention commonly used in those situations is to back a parent off, if the parent is doing too much that is exacerbating the problem rather than helping it. But that is a dangerous thing to do in an abuse situation. So one must differentiate, and that’s not always easy to do, either.
I’m determined to help this thread reach 200 comments. To that end, I’m going to make a substantive contribution by returning to the original subject of Neo’s post by way of a thought that I just had.
I wonder if indeed we should allow a handful of majority-black cities to disband their existing police operations and see what they come up with to replace those. Newark, I think, would be a bad test case because of its close proximity to many other cities cheek-by-jowl. But someplace like Minneapolis, maybe… the idea being that – and in this I’m thinking forward to what I believe and actually partly hope will be a longer-term consequence of this astounding year, that being the de facto political independence of a chunk of the urban black population, means and circumstances TBD – if a couple of such places were allowed that kind of free hand with reshaping their police forces, we and they could get a better idea of where the level of political maturity stands and what kind of ideas that community might have; if the undertaking crashes and burns spectacularly, better known now than later, and it would build experience and political maturity for down the road.
For this is something which I think these inner-city, impoverished urban areas lack: political maturity. The rest of America acquired this over centuries, stemming from a tradition of political independence, local autonomy of some degree, etc.; there’s a huge backstory to how the institutions of our republic, as expressed at the municipal and county levels, came to be. I think the inner cities lack that seasoning. They and their citizenry, politician types, voting populations and so on have, within living memory, only ever functioned through one lens: essentially, as cyclones of poverty, welfare-dependent, almost like reservations on federal life support. Is that too wild a way of putting it? Maybe it is. I’m just thinking out loud here for the most part.
Hence, if a few of them were actually to go through with the idea of turning the police forces totally upside down, a potential silver lining is that they might learn from the experience. Oh, it would be painful, to be sure; but pain is a great teacher.
Philip Sells:
You say you wonder if we should allow it. I don’t see how we could stop it, even if we wanted to do so. Cities have a lot of leeway to determine how their own policing will work. If Minneapolis is determined to disband its police, so be it. I suppose that someone in that city could mount a legal challenge of some sort. Or perhaps a state legislature could set guidelines. But other than that, cities have quite a bit of autonomy.
Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis are not majority-black cities. They want to radically restructure their police. They seem to be majority progressive cities with some Marxist elements wanting full control (a bug, or a feature?) Sure why not try it out (over whose dead bodies) certainly “we” can limit any adverse effects before they metastasize (probably not).
Seriously, no thanks, try it out in someone else’s country, say Somalia or Afghanistan where the culture of tribalism and clan justice is well rooted.
om:
Indeed, I meant to add that the cities that seem most serious about doing this are not majority black. That’s not surprising, since most black people in surveys want policing, often more rather than less. In fact, Seattle has a relatively small black population (7%), and Portland 5.8%. Minneapolis is much higher with 18.6%, but that’s still not very high.
I’ve suggested here that the U.S. ought to have some sort of Industrial Policy, because as far as I know, we haven’t had such a policy since, say, WWII, nor do we have one now.
Why do we need such a policy?
And what would such and Industrial Policy policy consist of.
As to why, to avoid a repeat of the virtually unnoticed and un-resisted hollowing out of our industrial capacity.
The slow withering away of our industrial capacity didn’t take place over night–it took probably several decades to produce the empty factories, the boarded up stores on small town main streets, the flight of the young to bigger cities and the jobs they offered, and the resultant flight of essential services from small towns all over the country–and particularly in the Heartland–which has made many of these towns wither, and start to die.
As far as I am aware, during those decades no one apparently had the actual responsibility or the power to bring this very troubling development into sufficient public consciousness for it to be recognized, and seen as a real and urgent problem, nor the power to propose and to initiate efforts at mitigation–ways to keep those manufacturing jobs, or to find substitutions for them; to keep our people working, and the places they lived in viable and alive.
I am not proposing a huge overwhelming Federal bureaucracy.
But, what I am proposing is some national level monitoring and awareness of events taking place on the ground at local levels, and the formulation of policies, and recommendations for actions designed to combat and to reverse such hollowing out, to find new ways to create and new things to create in those now empty factories and towns, recommendations that come with funding to enable various proposed solutions to be tried, so that the ones that can actually produce those alternative jobs are found and implemented.
You say you wonder if we should allow it. I don’t see how we could stop it, even if we wanted to do so. Cities have a lot of leeway to determine how their own policing will work. If Minneapolis is determined to disband its police, so be it. I suppose that someone in that city could mount a legal challenge of some sort. Or perhaps a state legislature could set guidelines. But other than that, cities have quite a bit of autonomy.
Not looked at case law. If I’m reading the relevant provisions of the Minnesota Constitution correctly, the legislature has plenary discretion to define the powers and duties of local government, so could transfer the provision of police services to county government. Greater Minneapolis splays over 7 counties; the population of the whole is distributed as follows: Hennepin, 42%; Ramsey, 18%; Anoka, 12%; Dakota, 11%; Washington, 9%; Scott, 5%; Carver, 3%. The populations of these counties are between 91,000 and 1,152,000, so there should be ample funds and manpower to develop specialized bureaux in each.
“Ample funds” easy to say when you are spending other people’s money and do not live there. They might need some of those funds to clean up the rubble resulting from progressive policing policies imposed by the Mayor and the Governor. It doesn’t seem that Minneapolis can survive much more wokeness.
“Ample funds” easy to say when you are spending other people’s money and do not live there.
They have city police departments, suburban police departments, town police departments, and sheriff’s patrols. They pay for those now. A consolidated department allows them (with reference to impecunious areas or troubled areas) to distribute the cost of policing troubled areas over a larger social field and allows for more specialization within a given police department as you have more manpower in one hierarchy.
Math is hard.
You are spending other people’s money and assuming those counties want a piece of the wonderful wokeness of Minneapolis.
You are also assuming that the Art Deco consolidated Social Justice Suggestion Squad (instruction manual/software available from ACME Inc.) will be more cost effective than the policing system that the counties have now.
Math may be hard but hubris comes easy it seems. Recent polling indicates that communities that have endured “mostly peaceful protesting” aren’t too keen for less effective policing.
They have mall cops too, how do they fit in? 🙂
You are spending other people’s money and assuming those counties want a piece of the wonderful wokeness of Minneapolis.
I’m not spending anyone’s money. I’m pointing out that if you transfer supervision of police services to county governments, the manpower currently employed by local police does not suddenly grow more expensive and the revenue sources do not evaporate. If they can afford umpteen municipal police services, they can afford a county police service.
You are also assuming that the Art Deco consolidated Social Justice Suggestion Squad (instruction manual/software available from ACME Inc.) will be more cost effective than the policing system that the counties have now.
It’s a comment board for discussion public affairs. If you object to seeing people’s opinions about public affairs in pixels, you can always log off.
I do not assume there are diseconomies of scale in policing that are going to be manifest at the county level. (Not that the question actually interests you).
Clue to Art Deco:
Counties have Sheriffs. You may have noticed that the two LEOs shot in Compton CA were Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies. Compton it too poor to have it’s own police force or may have decided to defund it’s police, IDK which. There are regulars at this site from the LA area (not counting Montage) who know about Compton. My lived experience in CA is outdated and limited to Victorville and Martinez/Benicia.
I don’t object to your opinion, you seem to object to a critique of it. Don’t assume you know my interests, again that hubris thing.
HERE is om BTW, typing isn’t high on my skill set.
I was suggesting Minneapolis somewhat coincidentally; the main factor in which I was interested at that moment of writing was that I wanted somewhere relatively isolated in terms of having an urban area a long way away from other cities, which Newark obviously is not. This in order to physically isolate the adverse effects which I would anticipate from turning the local police into a social experiment. That’s the only reason Minneapolis popped into my head, really. I mean, yes, St. Paul is next door, so… maybe St. Louis instead?
(We made it past 200! Hooray! 🙂 )
Counties have Sheriffs.
Yes, I know that. Lived in counties with Sheriff’s for 45 years. Lived under sheriff’s patrols for 20 years.
You may have noticed that the two LEOs shot in Compton CA were Los Angeles County Sheriff deputies.
Yes I did.
Compton it too poor to have it’s own police force or may have decided to defund it’s police, IDK which.
I think they elected to dissolve the municipal police and contract for patrols from the Sheriff’s department. Presumably more flexible or cost-effective.
I don’t object to your opinion, you seem to object to a critique of it. Don’t assume you know my interests, again that hubris thing.
I’m waiting for a critique. Haven’t had one yet. (A critique is different from a response; have had plenty of responses, most of them puerile). I don’t know why you fancy I think I ‘know’ your interests. Don’t recall hearing from you before. (Unless you’re ‘om’ under another handle and attempting to make use of a different persona).
Art Deco:
It is om, but om already said the “HERE” was unintentional and some sort of typing glitch. See this.
Purile: always classy.
It wasn’t a different persona it was a typing error, as I posted immediately, so you could keep up, see 8:26 PM by om. You are something.
You propose that the counties surrounding Minneapolis who are “awash” in moola should agree to fund a regional police force because the city police force wouldn’t respond to riots and a Governor that couldn’t restore public safety? Because centralized authority and control will yield economies of scale? Bigger and centralized will compensate for bad judgement from a Mayor or Governor or did you forget those facts? That isn’t a math question it’s a taxation and local control issue.
Why should the counties want any part of that?
Technocrats like big expert solutions. were you one, or wished you could have been one?
Have your tried posting this solution at PowerLine.blog?
And what about those mall cops? 😉
Art Deco:
This is the reason I commented about what I was interested in
“(Not that the question actually interests you).”
Does that quote seem a bit arrogant? It is your words. Sheesh.
According to the Comment Counter when I started typing, we have now passed 212.
In response to Philip’s thought experiment, I merely mention these posts for pondering.
https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1303482835647381505
“This was completely unexpected. The community helped a police officer detain a violent perp.”
But watch HOW they do it.
If you think police brutality is a problem, wait until you get Community Enforcement.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/07/women-plan-all-black-community-georgia-400-years-racial-oppression/
There are always people looking for Utopia.
Hasn’t worked out in the past.
Won’t here either.
But it’s a free country (so far) and they are welcome to try!
https://www.tenforjustice.com/
Check out the suggestions and see how many you think are actually workable.
It would help if their primary goal was achievable this side of the Millennium.
I can think of at least one type of community that does not require police or prisons.
You really don’t want to live there.
They have mall cops too, how do they fit in?
Mall cops are private security guards. Security guards are licensed in New York. Not sure about other states. Police forces in New York have a franchise to deputize security guards who’ve been through a special training program. I’ve heard of that in re college campus security, not mall security.
The root of the problems among US poor is:
Systemic Promiscuity.
As long as “free sex” is celebrated as good, unmarried women will be having babies that are born into sub-optimal families.
There no possible “social justice”, nor any other justice, that results in average outcomes of millions of kids from sub-optimal families having the same results as the outcomes of kids from optimal families.
Mothers married to fathers; husbands and wives, together, raising their kids. The nuclear family.
“Systemic racism” is not a major cause of the problem, nor is it even well defined. Single mothers raising kids IS the major cause.
The shame should be on the fathers, especially, for sleeping and leaving without marrying and committing.
There probably will come a time when marriage is more rewarded by the gov’t (cash) and society (prestige), which might help reverse the current trends towards more irresponsible promiscuity.
The shame should be on the fathers, especially, for sleeping and leaving without marrying and committing.
No, it shouldn’t. The mothers have agency, the mothers know they will be the primary caretakers of the children, the mothers are the party that our asinine laws have given plenary discretion over abortion and adoption. Nor is it true that the sire’s disposition is the only factor in preventing these couples from marrying. There’s quite a constituency for the child-support economy among women. Give us cash and go away. The constituency for a marriage economy if the price is that the mother is not the one in charge is smaller.
Tom Grey:
Good luck with that! (/sarc)
Well not a totally objective source, but it seems that the policing problem in Minneapolis may not be the lack of a regional police agency spanning all the counties surrounding Minneapolis but the politicians that set policy for Minneapolis police:
https://www.redstate.com/mike_miller/2020/09/16/after-months-of-demonizing-the-police-violent-crime-on-the-rise-minneapolis-city-council-asks-where-are-the-police/
Even with mall cops (and school crossing guards too?) deputized if the rot is at the top it won’t matter. Why would the surrounding counites trust their safety to progressive (best case, Marxist worst case) loons in Minneapolis?
but it seems that the policing problem in Minneapolis may not be the lack of a regional police agency spanning all the counties surrounding Minneapolis but the politicians that set policy for Minneapolis police:
I can never figure out if the key point goes over your head every time or you’re just pretending for effect.
The key point: your grand idea is flawed, saving money on manpower is foolish if the efficient organization is run by fools or those worse than fools.
Do you get that or did that go over your head? But keep counting and rearranging those beans, it’s math after all.
Art Deco – Yes, the shame should be on the fathers, especially, tho there should also be shame on the mothers.
Women who sleep around are sluts. There is no similar negative word for men who sleep around – womanizer is more admired. Both should be shamed, but in this culture where the womanizers are admired, there should be more shame on the fathers so as to change the culture.
That’s part of what #MeToo should be trying to do. But not much surprise, more rich and powerful Dems, and other friends of Epstein (who didn’t kill himself), are the jerks who more often sleep around promiscuously.
Including Willie Brown, who should be more shamed than Kamala Harris, especially because he was married.
Yes, the shame should be on the fathers, especially,
Why especially?
Women who sleep around are sluts. There is no similar negative word for men who sleep around – womanizer is more admired. Both should be shamed, but in this culture where the womanizers are admired, there should be more shame on the fathers so as to change the culture.
Displays of cowardice are status-lowering among men. Sluttishness was (as recently as 1970) status-lowering among women. That reflects the different vocations of men and women.
Having a child out of wedlock 60 years ago induced shame among men and women. Now it induces shame among either.
That’s part of what #MeToo should be trying to do. But not much surprise, more rich and powerful Dems, and other friends of Epstein (who didn’t kill himself), are the jerks who more often sleep around promiscuously.
You’re free associating. #metoo is humbug, and should disappear. It has everything to do with dealing more playing cards to female employees, providing them with trumps to wreck the careers of men who they have it in for for one reason or another. Some of the wrecked are guilty, some not. Any investigatory or adjudicatory procedure put in place will be so done to reduce the risk from liability, so it will in turn reflect the biases of the court system. The real object of the #metoo pushers is to remove the burden of proof from the plaintiff.
As for Epstein, weird outlier cases don’t tell us much about social relations, though they do tell us something about the range of human behaviors. AFAIK, Epstein wasn’t advertising to the world that he was banging 17 year old girls and then passing them on to his houseguests.
Including Willie Brown, who should be more shamed than Kamala Harris, especially because he was married.
I gather you’re of the opinion that it’s not adultery if you’re raiding from the outside.. A lot of women seem to think that way, at least if they’re not married to the cheater.
The key point: your grand idea is flawed, saving money on manpower is foolish if the efficient organization is run by fools or those worse than fools.
County governments run by men with suburban constituents are less likely to be run by fools. The point is not that esoteric.
Tom Grey:
The feminist movement has for most of America destroyed the concept of chastity or sexual morality in females. That has been the case for at least one generation as manifested by the “hook up culture,” “Slut Walks,” and the abhorrence of traditional Christian moral standards. Now those with biological clocks find that the sexuality line sold to them by feminists mostly served to enable irresponsible males to live a life that was guided by their other head.
Sad for them and their life choices IMO.
Art Deco:
Who will be in charge of the Regional Police Authority? Someone selected by the counites or someone selected from the more populous metropolis? A fool or worse than a fool, appointed by a Governor? The current Governor who wouldn’t send in the National Guard? The National Guard, is that from the metropolitan area or from the entire state, not just the surrounding counties? Yet in spite of having that resource available it was not used, strange, resources available yet not used.
Your point again is what? You made my point, Art, a County Sheriff, is not likely to allow “peaceful protests” that are actually riots in his jurisdiction. This has been the case in Snohomish County vs King County Washington this summer. The King County Sheriff BTW wasn’t in charge of policing in Seattle. The Snohomish Co Sheriff laid down the law. BLM/Antifa tried to intimidate harass the former Seattle Police Chief in Snohomish Co, the Antifa/BLM didn’t like it when locals met them with firearms as they were trespassing.
“If you say so,” doesn’t make it it so.
Art Deco:
Regarding County officials and a different Northwest USA example: The Multnoma Co DA (the county that includes Portland) is infamous for his “catch and release” No-bail No Charges approach to “Antifa/BLM” that are arrested. Washington County and Clackamas County (south and west of Portland) DAs and Sheriffs have refused to participate in the Portland “peaceful protest” follies even though the Governor said they would in August. So the Oregon State Police had to provide manpower assistance to Portland as ordereed by the Governor.
Who would call the shots in this Art Deco Portland regional police force? Some loon from Portland or someone from the suburban/rural Washington and Clackamas Counties?