Crisis in Chicago

[TheKitttenGuard]

9 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Like Bill Hicks says, why don't you just  burn every album you've ever listened to that didn't suck.  You don't get the Beatles after Hard Days Night (not even the early stuff if you count booze).  No jazz.  No blues.  No Motown.  

Some drugs have awful social consequences.  Others not so much.  Opioids and alcohol certainly take a large societal toll.  Weed, LSD, and shrooms.... Not so much.

Today a Young man took LSD for the first time. He realized all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. We are all one conscious experiencing itself subjectively.  There is no such thing as Death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.

Here's Tom with the weather.

[Jo498]

There is no city big enough in the Netherlands to be compared to Chicago I am afraid (and it does not have enough people of African descent either).

But say, that in a country/city  with strict gun laws, more liberal drug laws, less punitive prison sentences, better jobs, better social security we'd find that the demographics still matter in the way you are hinting at. Maybe in that hypothetical situation there is far less violent crime and the perpetrators are not 95% non-whites but "only" 65% (which would still be far out of proportion in the hypothetical scenario), so we had strong evidence that for whatever reasons we cannot control with typical social policies the demographic is "prone to violent crime".

I don't really see how this could matter for social policies. Should we conclude that we could save ourselves the effort to improve the conditions? I think not because in the hypothetical scenario crime was considerably reduced, after all. Should we take away some rights or add some special help/watchpeople for the problematic demographic? Back to segregation for better control? This seems a lot of work, politically certainly not feasible and also simply unfair because the non-criminal individual who cannot help belonging to the demographic would be treated like a (potential) criminal and discriminated against. I think the only thing one can do (and that is probably done already anyway) is to use the prevalence of crime in a certain demographic as heuristics for police and social work.

[Iskaral Pust]

21 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

We have? Just reading this thread, the issue seems to be very strongly related to the demographics of the criminal population. (It seems that most of you disagree with the explanation of why crime in Chicago is correlated with ethnicity – culture, structure, history, etc. – but nobody seems to deny the fact of this correlation.) 

It's a fair point but such a thorny issue that few of us are willing to leap in where angels would fear to tread.  There are other parts of the world where an ethnic underclass exists in a cycle/culture of poverty, although from what I've read their social problems are generally poor socioeconomic attainment, low education attainment, substance abuse (especially alcohol), domestic & sexual abuse and petty criminality.  I'd like someone with better knowledge of the topic to refine that list. 

None of these AFAIK are among the natural experiments for legalizing narcotics.  Nor do any of them produce a murder rate in any way comparable to Chicago or similar; the presence of guns being the biggest proximate difference. 

As to whether demographic correlation is also causation of Chicago's crime, this is one of the fundamental political divisions in America.  There is no true data, only ideological belief.  One end of the spectrum thinks the systematic suppression of slaves and their descendants has created an underclass so hopeless that their social problems are the fault of everyone else, while the other end thinks that almost every ethnic group arrived poor and marginalized and gradually assimilated and earned their way into the middle class and that the same should be expected despite much more severe and longer lasting mistreatment.  There's lots of points of nuance along the spectrum, plus even more extreme versions at the tail ends of either side, but the basic pattern of whether it is a failing of government/society or personal responsibility maps to the usual political spectrum.

But, as I said before, fixing the long term disenfranchisement of the underclass lacks political consensus or will, so we probably have to start with proximate interventions even if we don't have close natural experiments available for all choices.  The problem is most severe here, so it may need to be the first to attempt some of the potential solutions. 

[Commodore]

best way to reduce violence is legalize all drugs and firearms, but it won't happen any time soon

[Hereward]

If the best way to reduce the murder rate is legalisation of both, can you explain why London's rate is 1.6?

[TrueMetis]

3 minutes ago, Hereward said:

If the best way to reduce the murder rate is legalisation of both, can you explain why London's rate is 1.6?

The US is a special snowflake.

[Iskaral Pust]

Commodore -- a five year average masks the current problem in Chicago. 

The uncomfortable fact is that Chicago and the other cities with the highest murder rates generally have the highest concentrations of poor black people.  LA, NY, Houston, Dallas and the other large cities not on that list generally have concentrations of poor Latinos but relatively fewer African Americans.  The exception overall is Minneapolis with a relatively small population of urban poor of any ethnicity, despite an influx of Somali refugees.

[Happy Ent]

12 hours ago, Jo498 said:

[…] Maybe in that hypothetical situation there is far less violent crime and the perpetrators are not 95% non-whites but "only" 65% (which would still be far out of proportion in the hypothetical scenario), so we had strong evidence that for whatever reasons we cannot control with typical social policies the demographic is "prone to violent crime".

I don't really see how this could matter for social policies. Should we conclude that we could save ourselves the effort to improve the conditions? 

How could that not be the most important thing to determine? Otherwise how can you argue for changing any other policy? If you eject reasoned analysis from the debate, then there is no argument for or against any social policy. How can you even begin to reason about “efforts to improve” if you remove what seems to be the explanatory variable?

The reasoning you describe is completely outside of my mindset. Either we try to understand what’s going on or we don’t.

If this thread is just about social signalling, about mis-using a real crisis as a platform to advocate our favourite social policies (without any interest if they even address the crisis), then I fear I will get very little out of it.

[Jo498]

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. Let me try again. My hypothetical scenario does not claim complete understanding, only a strong correlation of some demographic with crime despite the measures described in the scenario. So one possible reaction would be to keep searching and find deeper reasons, e.g. a "culture of violence", genetics etc. But the point is not to not want to know. Rather I wonder that if we knew what could one do without being horribly unjust to a large part of that demographic.

My point was: What now in a liberal democratic state? (I can think of all kinds of measures one could take in a Nazi-style state: round them up and shoot them, put them in camps or segregated ghettos, deport, sterilize etc. But this is obviously not ethically acceptable).

Ethically acceptable measures would mainly be to change heuristics for police work, we could e.g. defend selective stop and frisk because a certain group is evidently more prone to crime. What other measures would you suggest that would both improve the situation and avoid a massive restriction of rights of innocents only because they belong to a certain demographic? Because in the scenario (as well as in reality) most of them are not criminals. Maybe special (re-)educational or social help? (I thought we were doing such things already in most countries with problematic demographics (and/or regions.) But in that case one could always argue that this is a waste of effort, because it will only reach a fraction of the violence-prones. And we have basically assumed that they tend to be violence prone despite the measures already taken.

The bottom line is: No matter what we know we cannot suggest social engineering that is profoundly unjust. (This has nothing to do with signalling, it is simply the recognition of the moral sphere or the sphere of rights as largely independent.) This very severely restricts the value of such knowledge.

[Commodore]

8 hours ago, Hereward said:

If the best way to reduce the murder rate is legalisation of both, can you explain why London's rate is 1.6?

culture and standard of living create a less violent environment

drug prohibition makes violence profitable (the other way violence can be profitable is theft, but that's a tough way to earn a living), need to remove that incentive

gun legalization makes violence risky, creates a disincentive

[Iskaral Pust]

2 hours ago, Commodore said:

culture and standard of living create a less violent environment

drug prohibition makes violence profitable (the other way violence can be profitable is theft, but that's a tough way to earn a living), need to remove that incentive

gun legalization makes violence risky, creates a disincentive

I don't think you've made your point at all.  London has large clusters of multi-generational poor and low educated people living in the equivalent of housing projects, including ethnic minorities from former colonies, and wealth inequality is extreme.  Drug prohibition and illegal use is much the same as in the US, and potentially just as lucrative and worthy of violence.  The major difference is the presence of guns.  Hereward, I believe, makes the point that prohibiting both guns and drugs coincides with a much lower murder rate than in the US.  Why would we need to legalize both when we know prohibiting both is effective elsewhere?

Across all developed countries, the US has a much higher murder rate and the only significant differentiating factor is the availability of guns.  

[Happy Ent]

10 hours ago, Jo498 said:

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. Let me try again. […]

 

Good answer. Thank you.

[Westerosi Coast Gangster]

I feel for all the innocent lives lost. as for the ones doing the shooting, their deaths are the result of many failures.

[Swordfish]

On 1/14/2017 at 2:04 AM, larrytheimp said:

Like Bill Hicks says, why don't you just  burn every album you've ever listened to that didn't suck.  You don't get the Beatles after Hard Days Night (not even the early stuff if you count booze).  No jazz.  No blues.  No Motown.  

Some drugs have awful social consequences.  Others not so much.  Opioids and alcohol certainly take a large societal toll.  Weed, LSD, and shrooms.... Not so much.

I'm advocating for legalization here.  So I don't have an issue with legalization of drugs.

I do, however, find the claims that there would be no Beatles and no jazz without weed to be pretty dubious. There's been plenty of art created without the use of drugs.  

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

5 hours ago, Swordfish said:

I'm advocating for legalization here.  So I don't have an issue with legalization of drugs.

I do, however, find the claims that there would be no Beatles and no jazz without weed to be pretty dubious. There's been plenty of art created without the use of drugs.  

 

Well, the part of your post I took issue with was "no societal value".  You think it's dubious that drugs played a role in the creation of certain art, I strongly disagree.  

I'd also humbly submit Aldous Huxley, Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey.  The Grateful Dead.  

[Swordfish]

47 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Well, the part of your post I took issue with was "no societal value".  You think it's dubious that drugs played a role in the creation of certain art, I strongly disagree.  

I'd also humbly submit Aldous Huxley, Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey.  The Grateful Dead.  

I'm not saying it doesn't contribute.  You can change that to 'limited societal value' if you'd like.  it doesn't change the thrust of the argument i was making there.

But again, 'say goodbye to jazz' is pure hyperbole.

 

[all swedes are racist]

6 hours ago, Swordfish said:

I'm advocating for legalization here.  So I don't have an issue with legalization of drugs.

I do, however, find the claims that there would be no Beatles and no jazz without weed to be pretty dubious. There's been plenty of art created without the use of drugs.  

 

well, duh. that's heroin

[Swordfish]

31 minutes ago, chairman lmao said:

well, duh. that's heroin

Ha.  Fair enough,  Still hyperbole.

[Jo498]

The "art" argument also shows the limits of consequentialism. Even if one granted that a certain piece of art would not have been produced if drugs hat been inaccessible, one would have to compare this with the probability of the artist sucumbing to drug-related stupor, imbecility, death before he produces more great art. (Basically, the prohibitionist could claim by a very similar argument 25 or more additional years for Charlie Parker to produce great music instead of being dead.) And how many deaths, ruined careers and broken families related to drugs is "Kind of Blue" or "Sgt. Pepper" worth? To formulate such a question is to recognize that it is impossible to answer and should not be the guide to drug-related ethics or policies.

[Lord of Rhinos]

This American Life did a two part episode back in 2013 about gun violence in Chicago.  They had three reporters spend five months at Harper High, a school that had 29 students and recent students shot over a period of a year.  It is a harrowing listen but if you want to understand gun violence in Chicago it is an informative piece.  One of the interesting things the episodes mention is that drugs have very little to do with the shootings.

 

Here's the link: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/harper