Sep 4, 2023·edited Sep 5, 2023Liked by Yassine Meskhout
Not speaking of your august self, but when normie liberals say “Defund the police”, what they mean is "take money from the undeserving (blue-collar and less educated cops, most of whom are also painfully unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar, college-educated social workers and nonprofit professionals who can be counted on if nothing else to uphold the very latest goodthink wokeness).
Anyway good that you got wise. Too many humans keep on doubling down.
N.b. Freddie deBoer's essay-dialogue eviscerating "Defund The Police" is hilarious.
Yes, there was an insane amount of slippery language games with that slogan. One of Seattle's pathetic attempts was to reclassify 911 dispatchers as "not the police", ta-da!
Hi Yassine, interesting post. It reminds me of Robert Conquest's first law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." Your first-hand experience with hordes of criminals convinced you of the importance of police, which have been around since time immemorial and it's flabbergasting that people even entertain the notion that one can "abolish the police" and maintain a functioning society. It's funny, though, as I've undergone a bit of the opposite transition: I used to think the police were great and upholders of the law, and I still think they do that to an extent, but I have since come to see their first priority is upholding the dictates of the state whatever it happens to be -- they will do anything to retain their salaries and pensions -- and upholding law and order is a distant second. In other words, they are merely a tool and can be wielded by those in power for either good or ill. I have a lot of respect for a guy like Greg Andersen who refused to uphold the insane COVID lockdown mandates, but who was immediately terminated for having such a principled position: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-officer-leave-after-urging-cops-not-enforce-stay-home-n1206456
"but I have since come to see their first priority is upholding the dictates of the state whatever it happens to be -- they will do anything to retain their salaries and pensions -- and upholding law and order is a distant second"
Great essay. It goes to show that many of our viewpoints are held not by rationality, but by a desire to fit into one’s chosen ingroup.
Also, the development of prisons in the UK and the US was considered a progressive accomplishment: before the invention of mass incarceration, the penalty for most crimes was death. And if prisons were abolished today, we’d probably see a return to public executions, only this time in the form of lynch mobs. Someone can be accused of a crime, and since there are no police or prisons, a mob or a group of vigilantes can simply kill that person without fear of consequence. For example, a woman could make a false accusation of rape and get a mob to kill the accused, like what happened in the South back in the day. So prison abolition would essentially bring back lynching.
I had a funny convo with a ‘communist anarchist’. He was all Defund the Police. I asked what we would do if a really bad guy was shooting people. He said ‘the community can come together’. I said ‘untrained?’ No, we should train them. Everyone? ‘Well, we can train a few to guide the others.’ ‘Okay, should they be armed?’ Absolutely not! But after a few sentences he conceded they should be armed. Okay, we were getting somewhere. ‘Paid, or unpaid?’ Unpaid. ‘Do you actually think an unpaid volunteer will confront an armed man or men?’ Okay, probably not. So paid. ‘During an event how do we know who are the good guys?’ ‘They will have to wear something that identifies them. Such as an armband.’ Too easy to copy, I pointed out. We decide some sort of uniform would be appropriate. ‘Okay,’ I said. We were getting somewhere. ‘What we have then is DEFUND THE POLICE! And then form a paid group of trained, armed, and uniformed group to deal with bad guys.’ Yes, he said. He agreed this idea was taking shape well. He was excited. ‘What should we call them?’ He was stumped. I lit up! ‘I have it. We can call them....police.’ He got confused and said ‘well then we have the same thing as we have now.’ Right, I said. ‘Your solution to the police is to form another police force.’
Yassine: "I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have, but abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality. Radical stance, I know."
You may be encouraged by the "progress of another pilgrim" 😉🙂, Steven Pinker, who followed the same path and reached more or less the same conclusion, though some 50 years ago:
"As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."
As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, "If one is not a socialist at 20 then one has no heart. But if one is still a socialist at 50 then one has no brain."
I didn't know about Pinker's anarchist years! I'm familiar with the Montreal police strike but don't think it serves as a good cautionary tale about the utility of law enforcement because it all happened over such a narrow window of time. No one had time to really prepare an alternative to police, and the chaos quickly snowballed as it encouraged opportunistic participants to get into it while the system was overwhelmed.
It would be like if a town long reliant on hydropower suddenly announced that it would switch to coal power for just one day, and then used the ensuing blackout to conclude coal power is unworkable.
Yassine: "... but don't think it serves as a good cautionary tale about the utility of law enforcement ..."
Still playing "... similarly squirmy motte-and-bailey games"? 😉🙂
Seriously though, I can at least sympathize with that argument, but maybe something of a false analogy. Kind of the nature of the argument in favour of police in the first place that too many people, in general, will "opportunistically" engage in rape and pillage, in murder and mayhem if not restrained one way or another.
But I generally agree with the tenor of your argument. Something of a serious if not "mission critical" problem that far too many of our fellow compatriots are so narrow-minded and dogmatic as to be incapable of or unwilling to consider their "unexamined assumptions", their entirely subjective articles of faith. ICYMI, you in particular might have some interest in a rather brilliant essay over at Quillette by US/UK lawyer/philosopher Elizabeth Finne on "The Tyranny of the Subjective", this bit in particular:
Finne: "The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as 'audi alteram partem' (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective."
Apropos of which and as a "note from our sponsor", you might also have some interest in my exchange with UK lawyer and, apparently, "gender-critical feminist" Sarah Phillimore who basically insisted I was "contemptible" for defending the standard biological definitions for the sexes:
She starts off great -- taking a page from your book -- by asserting that "I don’t find being challenged or getting things wrong a genocidal attack upon my very essence." However, she very quickly changes her tune when I argue, on some solid evidence, that she no longer possesses any "essence of female", that her membership card in the "female" category has been "revoked".
No one complains until it is their own ox that's being gored -- everyone but me and thee, of course ... 😉🙂. And I have serious doubts about ... me -- kind of the nature of the beast, of unexamined assumptions, of lives hanging by threads. "Fear and trembling", indeed.
I almost used the phrase "elasticity of crime" in my previous comment but decided against it. What the Montreal strike unequivocally teaches us is "if you're going to get rid of police, don't do it suddenly and without warning". Now, there might be additional lessons to draw from that incident but they're on less stable footing (which, you know, isn't the same thing as being *wrong*).
And, offhand, it seems that you're begging the question, that you're assuming that "abolishing the police SLOWLY and WITH warning" will produce results other than what transpired in Montreal.
Sep 5, 2023·edited Sep 5, 2023Liked by Yassine Meskhout
Completely infuriating section where you refer to vegans’ views and casually assume they can’t all be true. With the partial exception of health and possible exception of labour exploitation (never looked into it tbh), those opinions you list are unequivocally correct. This is what happens when people tune out facts because of how heavily they’ve stereotyped the people talking about a particular topic.
>you refer to vegans’ views and casually assume they can’t all be true.
I never made this assumption. It's possible for all those facets to be true but the next sentence I wrote will still remain sound advice: "There’s a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you’re liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications."
They could all be true, but if a person is a vegan for ideological reasons, one suspects motivated reasoning with the other arguments that coincidentally line up that way. Most things in life involve tradeoffs.
You didn't explicitly state the assumption that they aren't true, but you did imply it. Using it as an example only makes sense if you considered the idea that the claims were all true to be absurd.
The problem is that they *are* true (or mostly true, for the partial exception). It's just very frustrating when important facts are dismissed out of hand.
I'm sure there are good examples out there of the risk you were referring to. You should have used one of those instead.
I believe some facets are true, some are false, and most I don't know enough to opine. I try to be mindful of the word count and a comprehensive analysis over the merits of a vegan diet would have been way too much of a tangent, and besides the very limited point I was trying to make. You're right that I could have provided a more explicit disclaimer but this again runs in tension with wanting to avoid cumbersome writing, given how many other opportunities there are in any given essay to inject just a bit more nuance.
I'm not suggesting you should have gone on a tangent about those views. I'm saying you shouldn't have mentioned them at all. You needed an example of dogma leading to false beliefs. The vegan thing isn't that.
I thought about this more and I agree that the language I used implied it was all false. I went back and added a disclaimer "It’s certainly possible that all those things are indeed true, but the point here is there’s a risk..." to better clarify my position. I appreciate your pushback here.
All those assertions are arguable. A grass fed steer arguably kills fewer animals than a ploughed field. Moral? Maybe. Health might be true for some, but wouldn’t be for others. I have seen data that refutes this strongly.
Interestingly, earlier today i read Bob Black's essay on conflict and dispute resolution in stateless societies. He looks to preindustrial societies (many of which were functioning anarchies) for inspiration. While I don't feel his ideas are fully fledged, I like his foundation of mediation and conflict resolution more than Friedman's. I can see how that could go very wrong. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-justice-primitive-and-modern
Tribal societies cast people out of the tribe if they were bad. An outcast would not be taken by any other group because a young male or female was very valuable to the tribe. For a tribe to cast them out meant that person was seriously bad news.
I come to a similar conclusion to you from the opposite direction. When I was growing up, I thought the police would be the good guys (with very few exceptions) and that they would always be trying to do the right thing (they might make mistakes, but those would be rare, right?). "Defund the police" was a concept that was so extreme as to be incomprehensible. I've seen enough reporting on problems over the years, however, to make me reconsider some of my assumptions. I still think that most individual police officers are trying to do their job and it's an important job that needs to be performed (but not glorified). But there are also some systemic issues which undeniably exist for the police, both in perverse incentives which reduce the utility of good cops (e.g. asset forfeiture and quotas), as well as a work culture which sometimes discourages accountability for bad behavior (e.g. the "Blue Wall of Silence", police unions, qualified immunity). Overall, however, I do think progress is being made, even as the issues seem to get more divisive.
> I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have,
Given that you've had a completely insane position on criminal justice until fairly recently, what makes you think you're competent to judge what those improvements are? In particular, what makes you think you're more competent to judge what those improvements are than the people currently running the police?
I would like to think that my ability to acknowledge & explain error would give me some kind of an edge. Beyond that, I try to avoid making arguments that rely on taking my word for things. I lay things out transparently and link to tons of direct evidence so that in case I'm wrong, those who disagree would have an easier time pointing it out.
Please feel free to go through my archive and point out anything you think I got wrong 😊
That's nice. Now are you willing to take your share of responsibility for all the damage and murders committed as a result of the ACAB movement while you were supporting it?
Sure, that seems fair. People should be held responsible for what they advocate for. I abandoned the position by 2018, way before I starting writing anything of substance on a public platform. It'll be tricky doing the calculus but we'd need to figure out what the harms (and benefits) of the ACAB movements were during the time I supported it, and then figure out how much (if anything) my facebook status updates contributed to advancing the movement.
So what slogan would you prefer for “substantially shift the burden of public safety away from armed violence workers and onto public agencies and community organizations better able to address interpersonal harm and resolve conflict without causing further harm to the social fabric”?
I feel like “Defund the Police” is about as pithy a slogan as you can have to capture that idea but if you have a better one I’m all ears.
I agree that the slogan matches the position you're describing, but the slogan wasn't what I had issues with. I haven't encountered a plausible proposal that can deal with interpersonal harm/conflict without 'armed violence workers'. I think people have a sanitized view of the type of calls police actually respond to and just how often violence can flare up unexpectedly, and so the call to replace police with social workers or whatever just comes across as delusional to me. Sometimes the only appropriate option is to send in the men with the guns. There are plenty of exceptions to this, and one example I would love to see implemented is to replace the vast majority of traffic stops by armed police with remote enforcement.
"one example I would love to see implemented is to replace the vast majority of traffic stops by armed police with remote enforcement."
On this point, we agree. I suspect it will happen sooner rather than later with automation. Bridge and road tolls. "red-light" cameras. All about making money for the government with the excuse of safety, but I digress.
For example, I am driving around Spain this week in a rented car. May of the highways have had constantly changing speed limits (and I mean constantly changing 80-100-120-80-60-120, etc within a kilometer or two). I notice on my dash board, the new speed limits immediately appear, even when we are in the middle of nowhere, including temporary ones for construction zones). This car always knows where I am and how fast I am going. It screams at me if I even slightly drift out of my lane despite no one being around me. When I turn the car in, I expect a bill of 600 Euros for the car, and 16,000 euros for the traffic violations. I bet people will long for the days when the only got a ticket if they got caught. And, yes, self-driving cars will solve this problem.
The speed limit update comes from some camera built into the car that can read signs, I noticed this when I was driving a 2020 Toyota recently in a rural road. The speed notification was blank up until the exact moment we passed a sign on the side of the road.
Hah. That would explain it. I was thinking was navigational based, but the speed changes were so precise, whereas navigational is not that precise on a curvy road in the mountains, etc.
I haven't finished reading this post yet, so maybe you get to this later, but I was struck by this part:
> To pick on one example for demonstration’s sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth.
Speaking entirely anecdotally, there's a tendency among some people to believe that whatever position they hold is the best *across all possible metrics*, rather than the best matrix of trade-offs and gains. To pick a semi-random example, people can't just enjoy Star Wars as a fun popcorn flick, it has to have the best political messaging and writing and acting and philosophy and so on. This is obviously extremely rarely true, doubly so if it's something crafted by flawed and limited human hands and minds.
I *wonder* if this is an example of dichotomous/categorical thinking, possibly motivated by poor/insecure self- or world-view? (That's pure speculation, please do not take it as even a little bit solid.)
I mean, maybe. But confirmation bias just means that you attend to, seek out, and weight information that is consistent with your pre-existing views, it doesn't really speak to the broader trend I'm describing where the property/idea is subject to adulation, kind of a halo effect on crack.
Like, I'm more likely to weight things that confirm my political priors as well-argued, rather than things that argue against my priors. But that doesn't mean I'm going to say that the argue-r is also super generous and smart and virtuous. It seems importantly different to my eyes.
Not speaking of your august self, but when normie liberals say “Defund the police”, what they mean is "take money from the undeserving (blue-collar and less educated cops, most of whom are also painfully unwoke) and give to the deserving (white collar, college-educated social workers and nonprofit professionals who can be counted on if nothing else to uphold the very latest goodthink wokeness).
Anyway good that you got wise. Too many humans keep on doubling down.
N.b. Freddie deBoer's essay-dialogue eviscerating "Defund The Police" is hilarious.
Yes, there was an insane amount of slippery language games with that slogan. One of Seattle's pathetic attempts was to reclassify 911 dispatchers as "not the police", ta-da!
Hi Yassine, interesting post. It reminds me of Robert Conquest's first law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best." Your first-hand experience with hordes of criminals convinced you of the importance of police, which have been around since time immemorial and it's flabbergasting that people even entertain the notion that one can "abolish the police" and maintain a functioning society. It's funny, though, as I've undergone a bit of the opposite transition: I used to think the police were great and upholders of the law, and I still think they do that to an extent, but I have since come to see their first priority is upholding the dictates of the state whatever it happens to be -- they will do anything to retain their salaries and pensions -- and upholding law and order is a distant second. In other words, they are merely a tool and can be wielded by those in power for either good or ill. I have a lot of respect for a guy like Greg Andersen who refused to uphold the insane COVID lockdown mandates, but who was immediately terminated for having such a principled position: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-officer-leave-after-urging-cops-not-enforce-stay-home-n1206456
"but I have since come to see their first priority is upholding the dictates of the state whatever it happens to be -- they will do anything to retain their salaries and pensions -- and upholding law and order is a distant second"
No do firefighters
Gell-Mann amnesia is definitely a factor!
Great essay. It goes to show that many of our viewpoints are held not by rationality, but by a desire to fit into one’s chosen ingroup.
Also, the development of prisons in the UK and the US was considered a progressive accomplishment: before the invention of mass incarceration, the penalty for most crimes was death. And if prisons were abolished today, we’d probably see a return to public executions, only this time in the form of lynch mobs. Someone can be accused of a crime, and since there are no police or prisons, a mob or a group of vigilantes can simply kill that person without fear of consequence. For example, a woman could make a false accusation of rape and get a mob to kill the accused, like what happened in the South back in the day. So prison abolition would essentially bring back lynching.
A fundamental purpose of criminal law is to protect the criminals from what would happen to them if it weren’t for the law.
I had a funny convo with a ‘communist anarchist’. He was all Defund the Police. I asked what we would do if a really bad guy was shooting people. He said ‘the community can come together’. I said ‘untrained?’ No, we should train them. Everyone? ‘Well, we can train a few to guide the others.’ ‘Okay, should they be armed?’ Absolutely not! But after a few sentences he conceded they should be armed. Okay, we were getting somewhere. ‘Paid, or unpaid?’ Unpaid. ‘Do you actually think an unpaid volunteer will confront an armed man or men?’ Okay, probably not. So paid. ‘During an event how do we know who are the good guys?’ ‘They will have to wear something that identifies them. Such as an armband.’ Too easy to copy, I pointed out. We decide some sort of uniform would be appropriate. ‘Okay,’ I said. We were getting somewhere. ‘What we have then is DEFUND THE POLICE! And then form a paid group of trained, armed, and uniformed group to deal with bad guys.’ Yes, he said. He agreed this idea was taking shape well. He was excited. ‘What should we call them?’ He was stumped. I lit up! ‘I have it. We can call them....police.’ He got confused and said ‘well then we have the same thing as we have now.’ Right, I said. ‘Your solution to the police is to form another police force.’
This is a fun and cutting dialogue, but did it really happen?
100%. It was laughable. He hadn’t thought through anything.
Salt Spring Island, chronic pot smoker.
Well being a left-anarchist requires not being able to think things through.
Yassine: "I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have, but abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality. Radical stance, I know."
You may be encouraged by the "progress of another pilgrim" 😉🙂, Steven Pinker, who followed the same path and reached more or less the same conclusion, though some 50 years ago:
"As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."
https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=10081068
As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said, "If one is not a socialist at 20 then one has no heart. But if one is still a socialist at 50 then one has no brain."
I didn't know about Pinker's anarchist years! I'm familiar with the Montreal police strike but don't think it serves as a good cautionary tale about the utility of law enforcement because it all happened over such a narrow window of time. No one had time to really prepare an alternative to police, and the chaos quickly snowballed as it encouraged opportunistic participants to get into it while the system was overwhelmed.
It would be like if a town long reliant on hydropower suddenly announced that it would switch to coal power for just one day, and then used the ensuing blackout to conclude coal power is unworkable.
Yassine: "... but don't think it serves as a good cautionary tale about the utility of law enforcement ..."
Still playing "... similarly squirmy motte-and-bailey games"? 😉🙂
Seriously though, I can at least sympathize with that argument, but maybe something of a false analogy. Kind of the nature of the argument in favour of police in the first place that too many people, in general, will "opportunistically" engage in rape and pillage, in murder and mayhem if not restrained one way or another.
But I generally agree with the tenor of your argument. Something of a serious if not "mission critical" problem that far too many of our fellow compatriots are so narrow-minded and dogmatic as to be incapable of or unwilling to consider their "unexamined assumptions", their entirely subjective articles of faith. ICYMI, you in particular might have some interest in a rather brilliant essay over at Quillette by US/UK lawyer/philosopher Elizabeth Finne on "The Tyranny of the Subjective", this bit in particular:
Finne: "The primacy of subjectivity is by no means limited to politics. It now permeates the framework through which we have traditionally mediated our competing narratives. Journalism, academia, science, and law are all affected. In short, any institution that exists to accommodate competing perspectives is being undermined by a new paradigm that privileges the subjective ‘lived experience.’ And, in the process, the meta-values which have traditionally enabled us to transcend our differing subjective experiences suffer. Foundational principles such as 'audi alteram partem' (listen to the other side), the presumption of innocence, proportionality, empiricism, and even the rule of law now must bow before the sovereignty of the subjective."
https://archive.ph/3sdwg
https://quillette.com/2018/03/19/the-tyranny-of-the-subjective/
Apropos of which and as a "note from our sponsor", you might also have some interest in my exchange with UK lawyer and, apparently, "gender-critical feminist" Sarah Phillimore who basically insisted I was "contemptible" for defending the standard biological definitions for the sexes:
https://substack.com/@humanuseofhumanbeings/note/c-39281979
https://sarahphillimore.substack.com/p/my-first-space-how-did-it-go/comment/39492610
She starts off great -- taking a page from your book -- by asserting that "I don’t find being challenged or getting things wrong a genocidal attack upon my very essence." However, she very quickly changes her tune when I argue, on some solid evidence, that she no longer possesses any "essence of female", that her membership card in the "female" category has been "revoked".
No one complains until it is their own ox that's being gored -- everyone but me and thee, of course ... 😉🙂. And I have serious doubts about ... me -- kind of the nature of the beast, of unexamined assumptions, of lives hanging by threads. "Fear and trembling", indeed.
I almost used the phrase "elasticity of crime" in my previous comment but decided against it. What the Montreal strike unequivocally teaches us is "if you're going to get rid of police, don't do it suddenly and without warning". Now, there might be additional lessons to draw from that incident but they're on less stable footing (which, you know, isn't the same thing as being *wrong*).
Thought you were *right* the first time: "abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality" 😉🙂
Yes, yes, but please note the distinction I'm making here about being correct but for insufficient reasons
Seemed rather obscure.
And, offhand, it seems that you're begging the question, that you're assuming that "abolishing the police SLOWLY and WITH warning" will produce results other than what transpired in Montreal.
One of those things is not like the others.
Late to the party? 😉🙂
But how so? Seems only the young or committed communist ideologues are going to be so clueless as to try abolishing the police.
Completely infuriating section where you refer to vegans’ views and casually assume they can’t all be true. With the partial exception of health and possible exception of labour exploitation (never looked into it tbh), those opinions you list are unequivocally correct. This is what happens when people tune out facts because of how heavily they’ve stereotyped the people talking about a particular topic.
>you refer to vegans’ views and casually assume they can’t all be true.
I never made this assumption. It's possible for all those facets to be true but the next sentence I wrote will still remain sound advice: "There’s a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you’re liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications."
They could all be true, but if a person is a vegan for ideological reasons, one suspects motivated reasoning with the other arguments that coincidentally line up that way. Most things in life involve tradeoffs.
You didn't explicitly state the assumption that they aren't true, but you did imply it. Using it as an example only makes sense if you considered the idea that the claims were all true to be absurd.
The problem is that they *are* true (or mostly true, for the partial exception). It's just very frustrating when important facts are dismissed out of hand.
I'm sure there are good examples out there of the risk you were referring to. You should have used one of those instead.
I believe some facets are true, some are false, and most I don't know enough to opine. I try to be mindful of the word count and a comprehensive analysis over the merits of a vegan diet would have been way too much of a tangent, and besides the very limited point I was trying to make. You're right that I could have provided a more explicit disclaimer but this again runs in tension with wanting to avoid cumbersome writing, given how many other opportunities there are in any given essay to inject just a bit more nuance.
I'm not suggesting you should have gone on a tangent about those views. I'm saying you shouldn't have mentioned them at all. You needed an example of dogma leading to false beliefs. The vegan thing isn't that.
I thought about this more and I agree that the language I used implied it was all false. I went back and added a disclaimer "It’s certainly possible that all those things are indeed true, but the point here is there’s a risk..." to better clarify my position. I appreciate your pushback here.
He’s a vegan. It’s not like he’s going to come over to your house and beat you up.
All those assertions are arguable. A grass fed steer arguably kills fewer animals than a ploughed field. Moral? Maybe. Health might be true for some, but wouldn’t be for others. I have seen data that refutes this strongly.
Interestingly, earlier today i read Bob Black's essay on conflict and dispute resolution in stateless societies. He looks to preindustrial societies (many of which were functioning anarchies) for inspiration. While I don't feel his ideas are fully fledged, I like his foundation of mediation and conflict resolution more than Friedman's. I can see how that could go very wrong. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-justice-primitive-and-modern
Tribal societies cast people out of the tribe if they were bad. An outcast would not be taken by any other group because a young male or female was very valuable to the tribe. For a tribe to cast them out meant that person was seriously bad news.
Enjoy the floggings without any chance of being found innocent.
I come to a similar conclusion to you from the opposite direction. When I was growing up, I thought the police would be the good guys (with very few exceptions) and that they would always be trying to do the right thing (they might make mistakes, but those would be rare, right?). "Defund the police" was a concept that was so extreme as to be incomprehensible. I've seen enough reporting on problems over the years, however, to make me reconsider some of my assumptions. I still think that most individual police officers are trying to do their job and it's an important job that needs to be performed (but not glorified). But there are also some systemic issues which undeniably exist for the police, both in perverse incentives which reduce the utility of good cops (e.g. asset forfeiture and quotas), as well as a work culture which sometimes discourages accountability for bad behavior (e.g. the "Blue Wall of Silence", police unions, qualified immunity). Overall, however, I do think progress is being made, even as the issues seem to get more divisive.
> I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have,
Given that you've had a completely insane position on criminal justice until fairly recently, what makes you think you're competent to judge what those improvements are? In particular, what makes you think you're more competent to judge what those improvements are than the people currently running the police?
I would like to think that my ability to acknowledge & explain error would give me some kind of an edge. Beyond that, I try to avoid making arguments that rely on taking my word for things. I lay things out transparently and link to tons of direct evidence so that in case I'm wrong, those who disagree would have an easier time pointing it out.
Please feel free to go through my archive and point out anything you think I got wrong 😊
> Beyond that, I try to avoid making arguments that rely on taking my word for things.
You're problem wasn't taking your word for things. It was adjusting your beliefs to fit into your progressive surroundings.
> Please feel free to go through my archive and point out anything you think I got wrong 😊
Looking through your archive, it might be easier to list the things you didn't get wrong.
Thank you for your thoughtful and actionable feedback 💖
That's nice. Now are you willing to take your share of responsibility for all the damage and murders committed as a result of the ACAB movement while you were supporting it?
Sure, that seems fair. People should be held responsible for what they advocate for. I abandoned the position by 2018, way before I starting writing anything of substance on a public platform. It'll be tricky doing the calculus but we'd need to figure out what the harms (and benefits) of the ACAB movements were during the time I supported it, and then figure out how much (if anything) my facebook status updates contributed to advancing the movement.
So what slogan would you prefer for “substantially shift the burden of public safety away from armed violence workers and onto public agencies and community organizations better able to address interpersonal harm and resolve conflict without causing further harm to the social fabric”?
I feel like “Defund the Police” is about as pithy a slogan as you can have to capture that idea but if you have a better one I’m all ears.
I agree that the slogan matches the position you're describing, but the slogan wasn't what I had issues with. I haven't encountered a plausible proposal that can deal with interpersonal harm/conflict without 'armed violence workers'. I think people have a sanitized view of the type of calls police actually respond to and just how often violence can flare up unexpectedly, and so the call to replace police with social workers or whatever just comes across as delusional to me. Sometimes the only appropriate option is to send in the men with the guns. There are plenty of exceptions to this, and one example I would love to see implemented is to replace the vast majority of traffic stops by armed police with remote enforcement.
"one example I would love to see implemented is to replace the vast majority of traffic stops by armed police with remote enforcement."
On this point, we agree. I suspect it will happen sooner rather than later with automation. Bridge and road tolls. "red-light" cameras. All about making money for the government with the excuse of safety, but I digress.
For example, I am driving around Spain this week in a rented car. May of the highways have had constantly changing speed limits (and I mean constantly changing 80-100-120-80-60-120, etc within a kilometer or two). I notice on my dash board, the new speed limits immediately appear, even when we are in the middle of nowhere, including temporary ones for construction zones). This car always knows where I am and how fast I am going. It screams at me if I even slightly drift out of my lane despite no one being around me. When I turn the car in, I expect a bill of 600 Euros for the car, and 16,000 euros for the traffic violations. I bet people will long for the days when the only got a ticket if they got caught. And, yes, self-driving cars will solve this problem.
The speed limit update comes from some camera built into the car that can read signs, I noticed this when I was driving a 2020 Toyota recently in a rural road. The speed notification was blank up until the exact moment we passed a sign on the side of the road.
Hah. That would explain it. I was thinking was navigational based, but the speed changes were so precise, whereas navigational is not that precise on a curvy road in the mountains, etc.
I haven't finished reading this post yet, so maybe you get to this later, but I was struck by this part:
> To pick on one example for demonstration’s sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth.
Speaking entirely anecdotally, there's a tendency among some people to believe that whatever position they hold is the best *across all possible metrics*, rather than the best matrix of trade-offs and gains. To pick a semi-random example, people can't just enjoy Star Wars as a fun popcorn flick, it has to have the best political messaging and writing and acting and philosophy and so on. This is obviously extremely rarely true, doubly so if it's something crafted by flawed and limited human hands and minds.
I *wonder* if this is an example of dichotomous/categorical thinking, possibly motivated by poor/insecure self- or world-view? (That's pure speculation, please do not take it as even a little bit solid.)
I think it's mostly just a manifestation of confirmation bias.
I mean, maybe. But confirmation bias just means that you attend to, seek out, and weight information that is consistent with your pre-existing views, it doesn't really speak to the broader trend I'm describing where the property/idea is subject to adulation, kind of a halo effect on crack.
Like, I'm more likely to weight things that confirm my political priors as well-argued, rather than things that argue against my priors. But that doesn't mean I'm going to say that the argue-r is also super generous and smart and virtuous. It seems importantly different to my eyes.