I don't see any evidence for the hand-waving concept that "people just got meaner." People got poorer. Social inequality got worse. And people are dying earlier.
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And the lack of quality leadership, and the failures of the media to demand accountability, only exacerbated things
aug 14, 2025, 1:59 pm • 3 0 • view
Sure, it seems plausible that the richest and most powerful people in the world going mask-off fascist crook might have given folks downstream some social license to be shitty too. But the policies they've pushed, with the effects you've noted, probably did more work than their vibes did.
aug 14, 2025, 1:33 pm • 6 0 • view
All of these criticisms sidestep the big elephant in the room which is that the idea of a novel crime epidemic is simply not borne out by statistical evidence
aug 14, 2025, 1:28 pm • 24 0 • view
I agree. I mean, it's perhaps viable to say murders went up in some places, but I don't think we know why. (Also these crime stats don't count, for example, the fact that police shootings went up or you know Jan 6)
aug 14, 2025, 1:29 pm • 14 0 • view
aug 14, 2025, 1:34 pm • 4 0 • view
The real crime is not explaining to your audience that these are not percentages but incidence per 100,000 population
aug 14, 2025, 1:37 pm • 3 0 • view
Yeah, I mean whatever whatever crime stats (is my feeling), but there are also just more guns in certain place.
aug 14, 2025, 1:38 pm • 0 0 • view
It is definitely true that the 2020 protests made law enforcement very very angry. It radicalized them, in a sense. But that's because the protests demanded racial reckoning and asked police to stop killing people. They got mad. It doesn't mean the asks were somehow wrong.
aug 14, 2025, 1:34 pm • 365 68 • view
When NYC tried to reduce police brutality and increase police accountability in the 1990s, Guiliani incited a riot by the NYPD. It helped him get elected mayor. Nothing has changed.
aug 14, 2025, 2:46 pm • 6 0 • view
They were already very mad though so it’s not like they did a 180.
aug 14, 2025, 5:28 pm • 0 0 • view
When I tell my teen they cannot play video games all night and they get mad, the answer isn't "shhh don't put limits on video game playing." It's that sometimes people get mad when you are asking them to change.
aug 14, 2025, 1:34 pm • 208 10 • view
Law Enforcement Baronial Class means that when police get mad, it's somehow more important than the anger of everybody else.
aug 14, 2025, 1:35 pm • 206 22 • view
This is a great metaphor. Police are modern society's knights, and in real-life, knights were entitled, violent thugs, not the chivalrous heroes of legend.
aug 14, 2025, 3:16 pm • 3 0 • view
The Republican back-the-blue mentality only goes one way, toward more allowances for police profiling, intimidation, and violence
aug 14, 2025, 1:39 pm • 4 0 • view
Left: "Hey we think the police should have less power and money to kill people and commit crimes." Police: No! Stomps upstairs. Slams door. OpEd writers: And then the left went too far.
aug 14, 2025, 1:37 pm • 236 53 • view
My own hand-waving theory is that people in the USA are allergic to any kind of ambiguity or uncertainty. They don't want to sit and think about what might be happening, nor do politicians and and the chattering class want to, idk, ask people.
aug 14, 2025, 2:11 pm • 124 7 • view
There's an idea in the USA that "discomfort" among elites (here, I include the police, but also judges, academics, etc) is so intolerable it requires an immediate change in policy. Yet, actual material changes -- lower life expectancy, inequality, etc -- are somehow just the ways things are.
aug 14, 2025, 2:14 pm • 134 17 • view
This is something we have been fighting against since antiquity, the chief characteristic of the ruling class is the always the resistance to change even in turbulent times that demand revolution
aug 14, 2025, 2:21 pm • 29 1 • view
white discomfort towards confrontation manifests the dialectic of the ruling class being able to comfortably dismiss the rise of fascism even as it creates footholds in their own neighborhoods. pills swallowed means happenings of fascism shrugged off for the sake of cognitive comfort.
aug 14, 2025, 3:23 pm • 1 0 • view
agreed, more in conversation with this thought, this thread linked to a video here:
aug 14, 2025, 3:27 pm • 2 0 • view
thank you 💜
aug 14, 2025, 3:38 pm • 1 0 • view
the ruling class, long united,
aug 14, 2025, 2:32 pm • 10 0 • view
Some of it is MLK’s insight—tension is bad, therefore the oppressed should stay quiet instead of upsetting the apple cart
aug 14, 2025, 3:01 pm • 11 1 • view
Related to adoption of policies preferred by the top 10% regardless of popular support:
aug 15, 2025, 12:01 am • 0 0 • view
Rich white men refuse to admit they’re wrong. They’re certain about one thing and then the opposite without a lick of cognitive dissonance. When you question their beliefs, they claim you’re attacking them. Trump, Musk, and Kennedy are case studies in rich white men who can’t admit they are wrong.
aug 14, 2025, 4:02 pm • 3 0 • view
I’ve known people who rant about the importance of *nuance*, and then utterly fail to grasp that the people pushing topics (& scapegoats) to propagandize them toward right-wing ideology are very explicitly ignoring nuance. When I bring the nuance, they act like it’s tiresome; burdensome.
aug 14, 2025, 3:52 pm • 2 0 • view
Some people find the mental effort of dealing with complexity to be an unacceptable discomfort. Then there’s the discomfort of confronting their biases. It’s more than they can handle, being so busy feeling oppressed as is… but they sure do find it comfortable to feed those biases.
aug 14, 2025, 3:55 pm • 1 0 • view
And to be fair, most people are overburdened by stress & anxiety and are living in environments not suited to their best functioning.
aug 14, 2025, 3:56 pm • 1 0 • view
We are uncomfortable with problems that cannot be easily solved or that we can't buy our way out of, because (not to be too Lacanian about it) they remind us of our society's two main fears, which are also unsolvable problems--aging and death.
aug 14, 2025, 3:09 pm • 1 0 • view
Citing the decline in crime in the mid-late 90s without mentioning Roe v. Wade or the fact that we stopped farting tons and tons of heavy metals into the air.
aug 14, 2025, 1:56 pm • 8 0 • view
Especially the ones who were attracted to law enforcement because of its many opportunities to act out their issues of racism and dominance
aug 14, 2025, 4:30 pm • 2 0 • view
We’re seeing the direct side effects predicted as part of increased economic polarization and decreased access to harmed populations to fairness in a rich-owned legal system and get to see people deny that this is a predictable formula.
aug 14, 2025, 2:19 pm • 3 0 • view