“I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
Tony Campolo
Behind much discussion…there hover two propositions that I think much less admissible than the new morality
1: That if a book is literature it cannot corrupt. But there is no evidence for this, and some against it…
2: That if a book is a great work of art it does not matter if it corrupts or not, because art matters more than behaviour. In other words art matters more than life; comment on life, the mirroring of life, matters more than life itself. This sounds very like nonsense
C.S Lewis
THIS ESSAY CONTAINS ONE USE OF A VERY STRONG RACIAL SLUR
ONE
Please tick all that apply:
▢ I am not going to read [x]
▢ I don't think you should read [x]
▢ I don't think anyone should read [x]
▢I don't think anyone should be allowed to read [x]
▢ I think that anyone who reads [x] should be killed
Where [x] =
A: Cerebus the Aardvark,
B: Charlie Hebdo Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed,
C: Monty Python's Life Of Brian,
D: the Satanic Verses,
E: the Talons of Weng Chiang
Pete Seeger sings a funny song about a bigoted American politician named Mr Bilbo. It contains the stanza:
When the king of England started pushing Yankies around
We taught him a lesson down in Boston town
A very brave negro, Crispus Attucks was the man
Was the first to fall when the fighting began.
When I first heard the song, I was very surprised that he used the word “negro”. I thought that sounded quite racist: only slightly better than that other word beginning with the same letter.
I now know that when Seeger sang the song, "negro" was the preferred term: Martin Luther King used it too. "Black" would have been regarded as rather demeaning; "coloured" as quite patronising. “Person of colour” wasn’t current.
When Pete Seeger sang the song, he didn’t mean it to be racist; and when his first listeners heard it, they didn’t understand it to be racist. But if you sang it tomorrow, you might well be considered racist. When Peter, Paul & Mary recorded the song, they changed “negro” to “black man”. They also changed “Puerto Ricans” to “Hispanics”, and the title of the song to Mr Bigot, because no-one would have heard of Theodore G Bilbo.
It is highly unlikely that J.R.R Tolkien had heard of either the song or the politician.
We had a little book containing some American folk songs at school: Casey Jones and Johnny Appleseed and Coming Round The Mountain. Miss Griffiths told us plainly that there was nothing funny about the song in which the burly little tramp traveled a long a lonesome road looking for his liking. That, of course, made it even funnier. An elderly bespectacled spinster was talking to a class of nine year olds about bums. That no-one in a 1928 hobo jungle would have seen the joke is neither here nor there. In the end she redacted the song book with a jar of tip-ex.
The Al Jolson movie was retitled Hallelujah I'm a Tramp for the UK release.
While we are on the subject of bottoms: I saw the National Theatre's production of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof the other week. I thought it was very good. So did most of the critics. But, notably, the only thing that the man in the Daily Telegraph had to say was that the production contained some nudity: a rear view of a naked man taking a shower. This was literally the only thing he could see in the production: a man's bottom dominated the text and blotted out everything else in the show. This was doubtless a puerile response to a serious piece of drama; but the producer knew very well that bums draw attention to themselves: put an arse in a play and the play becomes about arses. It doesn't follow that you should never do it and it certainly doesn't follow that you should never be allowed to do it. But you can't pretend that you don’t know what the reaction to it is likely to be.
Eric Bogle wrote a song called I Hate Wogs. Anyone can tell from 40 paces that the song is a not particularly subtle piss-take of racist attitudes. It has stanzas like:
I was queuing down the registry a picking up my dole
In front of me was a Yugoslav, in front of him a Pole
Behind me an Italian, behind him was a Turk
Those lazy migrant bastards they never bloody work!
But some people can't see beyond the title. "Wog" is a racist word, the song contains the line "I hate wogs" so the song is a racist song. Other people say "I love it that you are coming right out and saying the word Wog in order to stick it to the PC libtards, ha-ha!” So probably the song was a bad idea, even though Eric Bogle's intentions were good. Miss Griffiths would have been more concerned that he said "bastard" and "bloody'.
The Band Played Waltzing Matilda and the Green Fields of France are two of the best and saddest songs ever written.
Yoko Ono’s Woman Is the Very Strong Racial Slur of The World was also probably a well-intentioned mistake. I think we can probably still sing De Camptown Races, Doo Dah provided we get rid of de silly phonetic spelling.
There is a very old, very lost and very black and white Doctor Who story called The Celestial Toymaker, about a baddie putting lethal twists on toys and children's games. In the first episode someone recites the eennie-meenie-mini-mo rhyme. This is about as innocent and harmless a use of the most offensive word in the English language as it is possible to imagine. There is no racial context. There is no malicious intent. The word in the poem doesn't refer to a black person, or anything else: it's just a jingle. But it’s still the most offensive word in the English language.
Now I have told you that someone once said "nigger" in Doctor Who, you have to decide what to do with that information. If you discretely remove the story from BritBox, that says something about how you regard racial slurs. If you let it go out in its original form, that says something too. You could bleep it out, which draws attention to it. You could cut the whole scene, which is the same as pretending that racism doesn’t exist. You could dub a different word over the top, which smacks of Miss Griffith’s tippex. Or you could put a disclaimer at the front: "This episode contains one use of a very strong racial slur." What you do tells us something about how you feel about race, language, and very bad 1960s Doctor Who stories.
The one thing you cannot do is nothing. Or, rather: doing nothing is still a choice.
TWO
"Reading [x] makes me feel uncomfortable."
"That's fine. Don't read it, then."
"Yes, but YOU reading [x] makes me feel uncomfortable."
"Why do your feelings of discomfort override my right to consume media?"
"Why does your right to consume media override my feelings?"
We can no longer talk about offence or offensiveness. The word “offence” has been rendered unusable by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr, and other cunts.
Many years ago, I responded to the assertion that it doesn't matter whether something is offensive or not -- that claims of offence are literally without meaning and that I shouldn't give a shit which wanker my words offend -- by quoting a certain passage from a certain novel by Robert Heinlein. If nothing is offensive, I insinuated, then this passage is not offensive. If this is offensive, then offensiveness exists.
We have already established what kind of a woman you are: we are now merely haggling about the price.
This went down about as well as you’d expect. One of my friends directly accused me of being a fascist. One of them stopped reading my blog. One of them claimed that I had gone mad and hasn't spoken to me since.
I now understand that "offend" in this context only ever meant "offend Muslims"; or just possibly “offend Muslims and Christians". Either "offence" means specifically "how a religious person feels if a holy person in their faith is defamed" or else it means "to feel bad unreasonably; to feel bad without a good cause". If a bad joke about Jesus upsets me, I have taken offence, because it is not reasonable of me to be upset by bad jokes about Jesus. If a bad joke about gang rape upsets you, you have not taken offence because being upset about rape jokes is perfectly reasonable.
Even the very lowest kind of gammon is not quite prepared to come right out and say "black people are not human" and "trans people do not exist". So instead they say "There are sinister forces which will not allow people to say that black people are not human and that trans people do not exist; it is those sinister forces that we should be worried about. Free speech uber alles! ” And then they say "People who say that they believe that black people are human and trans people exist are only doing so as a pretext to take away your right to free speech, and all your other rights."
We are not told that we are wrong to think that slavery was a bit out of order and that it would have been better if 1970s television had been a bit less racist. We are told that people who think that slavery and blackface minstrels are regrettable have a quality called "wokeness" and that the existence of this quality will shortly precipitate the fall of western civilisation.
But we do have to drop the term offence. It is, if nothing else, too subjective. You say "I was offended" and I say "I was not offended" and you say "You ought to have been offended" and I say "You ought not to have been offended" and you say “Who gets to decide” and we both say “Well, me, obviously” and so between the two of us we lick the platter clean.
We could theoretically come up with a legal definition which would infallibly divide all literature into the "decent" and the "indecent".
Tits = decent.
Cocks = indecent.
Floppy cocks = decent.
Stiff cocks = indecent.
I believe that British police used to operate a rule of thumb that said that artwork became indecent if a penis was at an angle of greater than 45 degrees: ingenious erotic artists came up with scenarios in which male models were, for some reason, upside down. And of course, anything can magically transition from "indecent" to "decent" by the judicious application of some pixels, or a bleep sound, even though we all know perfectly well what is being hidden. But our criteria of “decency” and “indecency” would come down to “what I am offended by, and what I think you ought to be offended by.”
I forget who said that the legal definition of pornography was “whatever gives the judge an erection”. Gut feelings are not a very good guide to anything.
The only sequence in Game of Thrones which honestly made me feel uncomfortable was the Walk of Shame at the end of Season 5. I felt I was being made to watch the actress, rather than the character, being humiliated. Truthfully, it was the (presumably simulated) shit she was being pelted with that disgusted me, rather than her forced disrobing. But then I'm very immature about this stuff. Most of the nude scenes didn't make me go "hubba hubba porno" so much as "snigger snigger I've seen his BUM". (Or, in deference to Miss Griffiths, his tramp.) But my reaction isn't a good way of judging what is artistically valid, or morally permissible, or politically useful.
THREE
"This did not offend me"
"Well it should have done."
"This did offend me but I watched it anyway"
"Well you shouldn't have done"
“Some parts of this offended me but other parts did not."
"The good parts are no excuse for the offensive parts."
"This cannot be good art because it was offensive."
"This cannot be offensive because it is good art."
"Because this is good art it does not matter whether it is offensive or not"
"Because this is offensive it doesn't matter whether or not it is good art"
And then of course someone will say “You can’t judge the past by the standards of the present.”
This is a moronic thing to say and it is very frequently said by morons.
But it may be that some of the people who say it are struggling towards the thought that texts have multiple contexts: what the Big Rock Candy Mountains meant to Harry McClintock is different from what it meant to Miss Griffiths. You can't judge art from the past exclusively by the standards of the present. I am entirely on board with the idea that the Gospel of Mark does not only mean what it meant to the sandal-wearing children to whom the disciple first narrated the story in October or November of the seventieth year of the common era. It also means what N.T Wright says that John Wesley said that Martin Luther said that Saint Paul said it meant. And a great many other things as well. Othello isn’t just what Shakespeare meant; it’s what Sir Lawrence Olivier thought that Shakespeare meant, and what F.R Leavis thought that Shakespeare meant and (especially) what Mrs Blaine who taught me O Level English thought (wrongly) that Shakespeare meant.
Some people call this approach post-modernism. They define post-modernism as the belief that books mean anything you want them to mean; and affect to believe that this theory has been put about by Jewish communists in Frankfurt as part of a plot to destroy western civilisation. But they probably don’t read my articles, or indeed, anything else.
When I was around fourteen, some boys in my school got into one of the science labs at break time and started fooling around with expensive and possibly dangerous equipment. The physics teacher punished them by hitting them, as hard as he could, repeatedly, with a running shoe he presumably had to borrow from someone for the occasion. It is not true that times were different and that it hadn't occurred to anyone that spanking teenaged boys was a bad idea. But it is true that the Overton window was in a different place: that kind of punishment was on the radar as the kind of thing which might happen in a school. If it had happened last week the physics teacher would presumably have been escorted off the premises in a straitjacket. If you are my age, you probably think "Teachers are not allowed to slipper boys any more, and that's a damn good thing"; but if you are in you 20s, you are probably literally unable to believe that such a thing could ever have happened: that the teachers did it, and that the boys acquiesced to it. But if I were to say "Actually, he was a pretty nice teacher: I don't suppose he hit more than ten boys the whole time I was at school" you would know what I meant. The present is only one of the standards according to which you can judge the past.
FOUR
Tick all that apply:
▢ White people ought not to watch 1970s Doctor Who stories.
▢ White people may watch 1970s Doctor Who stories but should omit Talons of Weng Chiang.
▢ White people may watch Talons of Weng Chiang on condition they don’t enjoy it.
▢ White people may watch 1970s Doctor Who stories but ought not to write about them.
▢ White people may write about 1970s Doctor Who stories, but ought not to write about Talons of Weng Chiang.
▢ White people may write about Talons of Weng Chiang, provided they acknowledge that it is racist.
▢ White people may write about Talons of Weng Chiang provided they concentrate exclusively on its racism.
▢ White people who comment on the racism in Talons of Weng Chiang are virtue signal millennial snowflake PC SJW woke.
I got right through an O level, an A level, a Degree and a Masters in English literature writing essays that said that race wasn’t really that big a part of Shakespeare’s Othello, that he was probably an Arab rather than a negro, and certainly there was nothing racist in the text. And that if you allow Paul Robeson or Lenny Henry to play the part it follows that only fat people can play Falstaff and only native Danish speakers can play Hamlet and only murderers can play Macbeth. Private Eye sneered at Russell T Davies' decision to cast a gay actor to play a gay actor in a TV series about a gay actor because that implied that from now on he would only be able to cast actual Daleks as Daleks in Doctor Who.
And then a year or so ago I saw the National Theatre production of Othello, and there were some black guys I knew from work in the audience, and I sat there cringing, thinking, my god, this is a racist play, why have I never admitted that this is a racist play before? This is a play which only makes sense on the assumption that you can take the black man out of the jungle but you cannot take the jungle out of the black man. This is a play that says that dark-skinned people can acquire a thin veneer of civilisation but the teeniest little push will crack all that and leave them foaming at the mouth screaming about handkerchiefs. Coloured johnnies are dashed excitable, what? Not their fault, of course, but what do you expect, they come from hot countries.
It is still a fantastic play. And say awhile that in Aleppo once a most malignant and a turbaned turk beat a Venetian and traduced the state I took by the throat the circumcised dog and smote him thus; I was with the Philippine Army on the final advance on Reykjavik. It is probably a better play now I have admitted that it is a racist play because now I am engaged with what Shakespeare actually wrote, not a fantasy version dreamed up for me by Mrs Blaine.
And yes, at this very moment, people are rushing to Twitter to say that by engaging with the actual text of Othello I have called our National Poet a racist, insulted every English man, every English woman and every English schoolboy, and if something isn’t done about me I'll be rampaging through the streets of Stratford cancelling statues.
And others are saying that as a white person I have no business talking about Othello at all.
I am not saying we shouldn't stage Othello. I am not even saying that white actors shouldn't be allowed to essay the role. Theatre is largely colour blind. Judy Dench can do Prospero and Stephanie Cole can do Lear so I don't see why we shouldn't hear Patrick Stewart saying all my fond love thus do I blow to heaven if he ever wants to. Although there are so many good black Shakespearean actors and so few good black Shakespearean roles that we can probably live without it. I am just saying that racism is one of things about Othello.
In the 1970s, flag days were still relatively common. On most Saturday afternoons some charitable soul would be standing on the street corner asking for loose change, and shoppers would pin a small paper badge on their coat to show their support for the cause. Lifeboatmen was a popular one; cancer research was another. We still called disabled children "spastics" and nasty children still used "spastic" as a term of abuse. Poppy Day was one flag day among many.
There followed a very subtle game of “I said you said she said I said”. Some people circulated a deliberate untruth, that They, the Political Corrects, had BANNED the sale of Muslims in case it offends Poppies. This was never true, and the Royal British Legion kept on saying that it wasn't true. But because some people thought that They wouldn’t let you wear poppies, it became more and more important for right thinking folk to wear poppies, in order to show that they weren’t caving in to the people who don’t want other people to wear poppies. The poppies got physically bigger and more absurd, and people started to wear them earlier and earlier in the year. There is a pub near me festooned with ten foot tall paintings of poppies. At least one far-right nutter named their daughter Poppy. Poppy-wearing became increasingly compulsory and increasingly a signifier of your opposition to the left-wing poppy-banning forces of political correctness gone mad. Which meant, of course, that many of us moderately liberal types, who were quite happy to pin poppies on our lapels when they just represented a few pence contributed to the care of disabled veterans, felt that we couldn't wear the now obligatory and politicised symbol.
The same thing happened to That Statue. And I am very much afraid that the same thing is happening to some of the movies, TV shows and comic books that I used to love.
FIVE
"This thing is incredibly racist."
"Yes, but it was based on a different incredibly racist thing."
"Oh, well, that’s all right then."
"This thing is incredibly racist."
"Yes, but there are other incredibly racist things"
"Oh well, that’s all right then."
"This statue celebrates a slave trader."
"Yes, but there were other slave traders."
"Oh, well, that’s all right then."
I am old enough to remember when Mr Potato Head was an actual potato. The whole point of her was that you stuck eyes, noses and mouths into vegetables. Then someone spotted that it wasn't that great an idea to encourage children to stick pins into things you might eat afterwards. There is something mildly surreal about continuing to market a potato-themed toy with a plastic potato but the toy is still quite popular. I don't think I was particularly aware that there was more than one character: I thought you just got a selection of body parts and stuck them on the potato and created a funny face. I knew there was a Star Wars figure called Darth Tater.
We all care very much about the symbols of our childhood. I still think occasionally about an old comic book character called Spider-Man: I doubt if anyone else remembers him.
Of course The Left affected to be very amused when The Right affected to be very cross because Mister Potato Head had been rebranded as "Potato Head". Har-har we all said how can you possibly be getting so cross about the gender of a toy vegetable. Har-har we said you can't even get your facts straight: they aren’t saying Mr Potato Head is a girl, they are just saying that Mr Potato Head and Mrs Potato Head will be two iterations of a toy simply called Potato Head.
In the 1950s, it seemed natural for Mrs Potato Head and Wee Jimmie Potato Head to be two special cases under the Mr Potato Head umbrella; because men and white people were the norm from which women and black people were an eccentric deviation. In 2021 that way of thinking seems a little bit less natural. The toy manufacturer is, in fact, taking a tiny, meaningless, not very important, almost imperceptible, baby step towards a world where gender is a very very tiny bit less important than it was before. They are, in fact, saying "The old branding was slightly sexist; the new branding is a slight improvement." And the people who grew up with the old branding, the people who grew up playing with vegetables, the people whose core identity is Mr Potato Head, the ones who saw the movie eight times in 1978 are hurt. Honestly hurt. Because that tiny change says “The thing you used to like, when you were little, maybe the last time in your whole life you felt happy, was a tiny little bit sexist” and if you admit that, you have to say “Somewhere at the core of my being in those happy little Saturday evenings with my TV set and my action figures and my plastic vegetable, at some level, there is a little bit of me that is sexist”. And so we deny and make up words like woke and SJW and PC gone mad and say that if you are going to say Potato Head rather than MISTER Potato head it logically follows that you will have to surgically neuter all males at birth and set fire to the Houses of Parliament.
And we are the same. We have allowed our identity to become tangled up with what is basically a quite disposable piece of old-fashioned kids TV.
Some of us are able to hold both ideas in our heads: to invest Doctor Who with a level of importance that it doesn't deserve -- which nothing in the world could possibly deserve -- while recognising the absurdity of what we are doing.
Increased leisure time; new ways of accessing and consuming media; the collapse of most churches and community groups and the utter vacuity of 1970s comprehensive education means that some of us have allowed something which should only ever have been peripheral to become central to our lives.
We stopped just being people who liked particular TV shows and particular movies: we became Doctor Who fans or Star Wars fans or Gamers. So we experience a change of direction, a disappointing sequel, a negative review, or an accusation of racism as a personal attack on our very identity.
Many of us can understand that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were felt by some Muslims as personal attacks on their very identity. Some Christians were honestly and personally hurt by Jerry Springer the Opera. Some silly people are currently saying some very silly things about Union Jack but I am prepared to accept that some sensible people find disrespect for national symbols genuinely painful. Some of us would regard it merely as a nuisance if the grave of one of our relatives were vandalised: we'd pay a mason a few hundred quid to fix it and carry on. But some of us would feel the same way we would have felt if our living father or grandfather had actually been harmed.
If somethings are sacred, then there is such a thing as desecration.
I remember being rather shocked by a 1992 BBC documentary called Resistance is Useless which for the first time said on air that Doctor Who was silly and repetitive and sexist and badly put-together. (It also coined the word "anorak" to refer to an obsessive fan.) We knew that other people -- mundanes -- sometimes said this about us, but to hear it going out over the BBC, through, as it were, official channels felt like a slap in the face.
Every informed Christian knows that the stories of Jesus's resurrection in the Bible are contradictory and very probably symbolic rather than documentary, but it was viscerally shocking in 1984 to hear this said by a bishop.
Jesus and Mohammed and the Union Jack are one thing: but Doctor Who is really odd place to put your identity.
SIX
"Yes, as I was saying, they're a mysterious lot, the Chinese. Enigmatic."
"You mean to say the celestial Chang was involved in all these Machiavellian machinations? "
"Yes, up to his epicanthic eyebrows."
"Now I've got a couple of inscrutable Chinks and a poor perisher who was chewed by a giant rat"
"That's how you might see it, Mister Ching-ching, but as far as I'm concerned all I want is a pair of smoked kippers, a cup of rosie and put me plates up for a few hours, savvy?"
You can, as a matter of fact, sometimes do a small, sensible thing without doing a big, silly thing as well. If a librarian chooses to move Huckleberry Finn from the children's section to the adult's section, it does not follow that he must also make a bonfire of every Jane Austen novel in existence. If a streaming service adds a comment to a puppet show mentioning that it sometimes makes fun of foreign people in a way we probably wouldn't do nowadays, it does not follow that every copy of Winnie the Pooh should be locked in a vault an sealed for a thousand years. It is in fact a very big step from letting The Cat’s Quizzer fall out of print and burning the Bible. It was never the case that Bristol council could only have put a contextualising sign alongside the statue of the slave trader on condition that the Greek government also raze the Acropolis to the ground.
It is much easier to focus on individual words or symbols than it is to engage in actual literary criticism. It is highly probable that some very proper Mills and Boon romances have a terrible attitude to Christian chastity; and it is equally probable that Lady Chatterly's Lover ultimately came down strongly on the side of the sanctity of marriage. Huckleberry Finn, considered as a text, might be racist, or it might not be. To find out, you would have to read it, and, even worse, think about it. Much easier to count the number of f-words and n-words and c-words and assume that the point is proved.
It is widely agreed that the sinophobic elements in Talons of Weng-Chiang were drawn from the Hammer versions of Sax Rohmer's yellow peril novels. (I am not quite sure what a 1960s version of a 1920s pulp novel was doing in a Victorian pastiche.) Similarly, it is agreed that Jar Jar Binks was based on a stereotyped West Indian fool who was rather common in 1930s movies. It isn't clear how this is a defence. One incredibly racist thing was apparently based on another incredibly racist thing. I rather liked Jar Jar Binks.
It is widely agreed that Robert Holmes himself had no particular objection to Chinese people. It is further conceded that he did not film Talons of Weng-Chiang with the intention of stirring up anti-Chinese feeling. I am also prepared to accept that George Mitchell, maestro of the Black and White Minstrel Show, would not have particularly disliked any individual black person if he had met one. Everyone, up to an including Donald Trump has examined their own skeleton and discovered that none of the individual bones are racist. There do exist people who have a strong and overt theory that dark-skinned people are inferior to light-skinned people, but that kind of racism is relatively rare. And there are cruel people who like to make fun of people who are different from them, who think that childishly calling people "chocolate" or "fattie" or "four eyes" is a great joke.
A text can still be racist even though the person who created the text can truthfully absolve himself of racism in those senses.
Doctor Who sometimes included white actors with silly yellow make up pretending they couldn't say their Rs. This is a fact. I accept that you may perceive this as an attack on the ludicrously overvalued TV show and therefore an attack on you personally. You can deny it. God put the dinosaur bones there to test our faith and the SJW scientists created the covid hoax to make us all wear muzzles. You can embrace it. It is okay to make fun of Asians because Asians really are funny. You can minimize it and say that it's just a bit of fun and they don't really mind. You can shift the burden of proof and say that you only think that making fun of Asians is wrong because the wokes have got to you; that old fashioned racist science fiction is the purest kind and you are prepared to stuff the Hugo ballots to prove it. Or you can process it. This thing we like has got some bad things in it.
What you can't do is ignore it. Or, rather: ignoring it is a choice as well.
Doctor Who exists in its original context -- 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Basil Brush, Jim'll Fix It, Sugar Puffs, TV Comic. But if Doctor Who does not also exist in a contemporary context then it is dead art, ephemera, as interesting as a page of advertisements in a 1952 edition of the News Chronicle. Outside of the academy, we don't care what regency ladies thought of Jane Austen, or what Tudor gentlemen thought of Shakespeare. Those texts are still alive: what matters is what they mean to a young person reading them for the first time, tomorrow. On the other hand very much the only thing which matters about Chaucer is what his works meant in the fifteenth century. Those texts exist only as dead artefacts.
Perhaps I watch Doctor Who too much in its original context. Perhaps I am too hung up on recreating those mythical Saturday tea times before Daddy got sick and before the bullying became serious. Perhaps I am too inclined to look at Talons of Weng Chiang as part of a process which had Robots of Death in front of it, Horror of Fang Rock behind it -- and not incidentally, the Lively Arts to the left of it, the Blue Peter Make Your Own Theatre leaflet to the right of it, and Jesus of Nazareth on the other side.
Talons of Weng Chiang is a component of the Who-text as well as a way into 1970s cultural history. You hardly need to watch Doctor Who to find out that the 1970s were as racist as fuck.
There are people who look at this preposterously racist artefact and say “This artefact is not racist”. There are people who say that if you look at this preposterously racist artefact and see anything apart from its racism then you are aligning yourself with the first group.
This is an old TV show.
It contains racial stereotypes and language that may course offence, and violence. And other things.
Meanwhile, every day on twitter mentally damaged pseudo-fans call the present show “woke” because two out of the four main characters are non-white, and the lead is non-male.
Next week’s story is set on a lighthouse. The one after that involves a robot dog and a sentient prawn.
A period of silence would be welcome.
Bum.
476 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 476 of 476Oh, just in case people are not aware: the U.S.'s diversity is not an explanation for our higher crime rates vis-a-vis Europe. American whites commit more crimes than Europeans, particularly in the Southern and Western states. Our Northern whites are about the same as Europeans though, perhaps a smidge higher.
‘Drug addiction (a crime in most countries) causes poverty.’
We have blocks of flats throughout the centre of Dublin. They are the last remnants of a vast working-class enclave (most were shipped out to new estates on the suburbs in the 30’s, 40’s & 50’s), many of whom survive on welfare. The vast majority of the city’s heroin addicts grew up in one or other of these flats. They were poor because they were born poor and their addiction issues have their roots in that same poverty - ie, drug addiction (in Ireland, anyhow) is a symptom of poverty, not the cause of it.
'Crime causes poverty. Poverty does not cause crime.'
Again, I would cite the example of the flats above. Besides, how do you explain - say - a starving man robbing food from a shop?
Still seeing nothing to explain using race as a criteria. The Pew Report is equally in error in this regard. Why/how is it relevant?
The vast majority of the city’s heroin addicts grew up in one or other of these flats.
Did they? Or do the heroin addicts all live there now, regardless of whether they grew up there?
But certainly it may be the case that welfare and government dependence cause crime. This has certainly been the view of a great many people. See the Moynihan Report (1965). At the time, we first started seeing the explosive growth of out-of-wedlock births in the black American population (which, contrary to standard beliefs, was not the case from 1865-1950 when blacks married at higher rates than whites). This has since spread into white populations in both Britain and America, for sure.
Besides, how do you explain - say - a starving man robbing food from a shop?
See Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. A very smart man, Victor Hugo. In the book, Jean Valjean acknowledges that he should not have stolen the bread. That, indeed, the bread probably could have been his just for the asking. However, he rages against the society which over-punishes him for his crime, thereby setting him at war with society. After his release from prison, he steals the silver from the Bishop and steals a coin from a child. It is only after the Bishop "buys his soul for God" that Valjean becomes the anti-Faust. Rather than selling his soul to the Devil, God buys his soul instead.
I have never understood the mindset of being too proud to ask for charity, but not too proud to steal. I believe this kind of mindset occurs across all races and classes. Though, of course, the desperately poor are the only ones who ever actually have to make that choice. Fortunately, in the U.S., we don't have that problem anymore. Nobody in the U.S. steals because he is starving. Thieves typically steal to feed their addictions or because they are young and stupid.
‘Did they? Or do the heroin addicts all live there now, regardless of whether they grew up there?’
Most Dublin heroin addicts grow up in the flats and end up on the streets - ie, their families boot them out because of anti-social behaviour.
‘….it may be the case that welfare and government dependence cause crime.’
I’m intrigued! I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate?
‘See Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.’
So poverty does cause crime? Jean Valjean steals the bread because he’s starving, right?
Poor people have not historically been more prone to crime than wealthier people. If anything, they were probably less prone. Virtue was very important to the poor in a way it never was to the rich. Idleness probably causes crime though.
Most Dublin heroin addicts grow up in the flats and end up on the streets - ie, their families boot them out because of anti-social behaviour.
This happens to members of the idle rich in the U.S. as well. (See Donald Trump's brother, Fred Trump Jr., though they did let him live in the unfurnished attic near the end of his life.) Some families (like the Kennedys) are more tolerant of their drug-addicted and alcoholic kin than others.
No stats? Graphs? Links? :(
(re the good old days, idleness being a factor in criminality etc)
Cross-cultural comparisons which we all know already. E.g. U.S. whites have higher crime rates than the UK despite being wealthier and having similar poverty rates. Japan has a third of the crime compared to the UK despite having a similar poverty rate. South Korea has a lower crime rate than the UK, despite being poorer. See this link.
Poor people don't have time to be criminals; they are too busy earning a living. But, sure, there is probably some effect of poverty causing crime. E.g. Fred Trump Jr. did not become a criminal because his family kept bailing him out so he could continue to afford his alcohol habit even when he could no longer hold down a job. The Kennedys appear to be almost all criminals, but they usually just commit sex crimes rather than property crimes. (And they don't become impoverished as a result, of course.)
I am, of course, not at all a believer in the "good old days," which were both poorer and more crime-ridden. Since I believe that effective policing is what is causing the modern reduction of crime, I also have to believe that the great wealth explosion over the last 400 years, which is what made it possible for society to be able to afford police obviously is a factor.
What’s fascinating - once you start looking - is how reluctant Americans are to put crime into any socio-economic context. The wiki entry (‘Crime in the United States') categorises crimes according to gender and race (!)* and ignores their socio-economic background entirely. This is pretty much true of everything else I googled.
* why not do it according to religion? It would be just as relevant.
(or irrelevant)
I would recommend American Homicide by Randolph Roth if you'd like U.S.-specific data on historical homicide rates. (Though it only deals with homicides, not crime in general.)
I don't think anyone denies that poorer people commit more crimes, at least property crimes, than wealthier people in the modern U.S. The question is why.
I appreciate that the U.S. does categorize it by race (unlike many countries) since I believe crime has a lot to do with culture and race can be a proxy for culture, though certainly not a perfect one. I would for example very much like to see Canada's crime breakdown by race. I think we could learn something from that, but the Canadian government disagrees with me. (We can speculate as to why they disagree.) I also like looking at crime rates geographically across this enormous nation for the same reason. (Southern Americans have a different culture than Northern Americans. Westerners have an even different culture. And so on.)
"I was once at some kind of conference where two clergymen, obviously close friends, began talking about "uncreated energies" other than God. I asked how there could be any uncreated things except God if the Creed was right in calling Him the "maker of all things visible and invisible". Their reply was to glance at one another and laugh. I had no objection to their laughter, but I wanted an answer in words as well. It was not at all a sneering or unpleasant laugh. It expressed very much what Americans would express by saying "Isn't he cute?" It was like the laughter of jolly grown-ups when an enfant terrible asks the sort of question that is never asked. You can hardly imagine how inoffensively it was done, nor how clearly it conveyed the impression that they were fully aware of living habitually on a higher plane than the rest of us, that they came among us as Knights among churls or as grown-ups among children. Very possibly they had an answer to my question and knew that I was too ignorant to follow it. If they had said in so many words "I'm afraid it would take too long to explain", I would not be attributing to them the pride of Friendship. The glance and the laugh are the real point--the audible and visible embodiment of a corporate superiority taken for granted and unconcealed. The almost complete inoffensiveness, the absence of any apparent wish to wound or exult (they were very nice young men) really underline the Olympian attitude. Here was a sense of superiority so secure that it could afford to be tolerant, urbane, unemphatic.
"This sense of corporate superiority is not always Olympian; that is, tranquil and tolerant. It may be Titanic; restive, militant and embittered. Another time, when I had been addressing an undergraduate society and some discussion (very properly) followed my paper, a young man with an expression as tense as that of a rodent so dealt with me that I had to say, "Look, sir. Twice in the last five minutes you have as good as called me a liar. If you cannot discuss a question of criticism without that kind of thing I must leave." I expected he would do one of two things; lose his temper and redouble his insults, or else blush and apologise. The startling thing is that he did neither. No new perturbation was added to the habitual malaise of his expression. He did not repeat the Lie Direct; but apart from that he went on just as before. One had come up against an iron curtain. He was forearmed against the risk of any strictly personal relation, either friendly or hostile, with such as me. Behind this, almost certainly, there lies a circle of the Titanic sort--self-dubbed Knights Templars perpetually in arms to defend a critical Baphomet. We--who are they to them--do not exist as persons at all. We are specimens; specimens of various Age Groups, Types, Climates of Opinion, or Interests, to be exterminated. Deprived of one weapon, they coolly take up another. They are not, in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they are merely doing a job of work--spraying (I have heard one use that image) insecticide...."
C.S Lewis "The Four Loves"
I feel that someone ought to mention that Eugenie Scott is female.
Andrew: I would be interested to know where in the following sequence of propositions you start disagreeing with (Eugenie Scott as I understand her and) me.
1. It's often the case that one can state a claim much more briefly than one can rebut it with anything that goes beyond "Hitchens' Razor"[1].
2. In a debate-like context, one can thus set forth a large number of claims in rapid succession in the knowledge that anyone disagreeing with you who wants to do more than just say "you're wrong" will have to do a lot more work and take up a lot more time/space than you did in stating them.
3. For good or ill, in a debate-like context, if one person makes an authoritative-sounding claim ("There is no evidence outside the New Testament for the existence of a historical Jesus", "Planetary orbits are approximately ellipses with the sun as focus", "J S Bach could not possibly ever have met Dietrich Buxtehude") and another responds with a simple denial, onlookers are likely to give more credibility to the original claimant than to the denier.
[Note: At least one of the examples I used is definitely true; at least one is definitely untrue.]
4. So the strategy of making a lot of low-effort claims is a potentially effective one in debate-like contexts where one's opponents face any sort of limit to the time they're allowed to take, how much they can say before readers get bored, how much energy they consider it appropriate to expend on the discussion, etc.
5. Further, this rhetorical strategy sometimes actually is used (deliberately or not, honestly or not).
6. If someone is faced with an instance of this rhetorical strategy, and for whatever reason is unable or unwilling to put in (let's say) 10x the effort the other party did in order to address their claims properly, it would be unfortunate if onlookers consistently came to the conclusion that the claiming party is better informed, smarter, more likely to be right, etc., than the dissenting party, merely because persuasive rebuttal is much costlier than persuasive assertion.
7. The term "Gish gallop" provides a way for the dissenting party to address this situation, and encourage onlookers to at least consider whether the failure of the dissenting party to refute all the claiming party's claims might be as much because refuting is costlier than claiming as because the claims are irrefutable.
I think all of 1-7 are correct. On the other hand I agree that sometimes there really are a lot of good arguments for a particular position, and that if simply saying "Gish gallop!" were generally accepted as equivalent to refuting them all then that would be an even worse thing than not having any rhetorical tool to even the playing field a bit. The approach I recommend for those faced with (what they think is) a Gish gallop is as follows. (a) Point out that the other party has made a lot of claims without giving much support for either, and that each of them would take much more time/space/effort to address than it did to make. (b) Give a link to some such resource as the Wikipedia "Gish gallop" page. (c) Pick one or two claims -- perhaps at random, perhaps the ones you honestly consider strongest -- and address those fully, thus (if you're right) giving evidence both that refuting is costlier than claiming and that the claims can in fact be refuted.
(Sometimes someone may cry "Gish gallop!" wrongly. That does mean Gish gallops aren't real.)
[1] Hitchens always said "What can be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence", but I much prefer the slightly modified "What is asserted without evidence ...".
Cross-cultural comparisons seem not super-convincing as to whether poverty causes crime; e.g., it seems to me that there might be relevant differences between Japan and the United Kingdom other than their poverty rate and crime rate.
My mistake about Eugenie Scott. I'm pretty sure I knew that at one time, but I am now very old and my ability to acquire new memories is not nearly what it once was.
Cross-cultural comparisons seem not super-convincing as to whether poverty causes crime; e.g., it seems to me that there might be relevant differences between Japan and the United Kingdom other than their poverty rate and crime rate.
That assertion alone agrees with me that "poverty causes crime" cannot be a monocausal explanation. It's more than that though. In general, the relationship between amount of poverty and crime in a society is very weak. As Aonghus rightly pointed out, poverty probably is a cause (along with at least one other cause) of some instances of property crime. Though rich people certainly commit property crimes as well!
The approach I recommend for those faced with (what they think is) a Gish gallop is as follows. (a) Point out that the other party has made a lot of claims without giving much support for either, and that each of them would take much more time/space/effort to address than it did to make. (b) Give a link to some such resource as the Wikipedia "Gish gallop" page. (c) Pick one or two claims -- perhaps at random, perhaps the ones you honestly consider strongest -- and address those fully, thus (if you're right) giving evidence both that refuting is costlier than claiming and that the claims can in fact be refuted.
Or just don't respond and assume your audience can (and probably should) figure things out for themselves. There are a number of false factual claims in this comment thread alone which I have not bothered to rebut. I assume these claims were made in good faith though perhaps some of them were not.
I don't always provide links and such for my factual claims since I assume we are all smart enough to use that magical internet thing and can look things up for ourselves. You can take my word that I am never trying to "slip something by" anyone and I am always happy to be corrected. E.g. Gavin Burrows pointed out earlier in this thread that there are questions surrounding Georgia's voter roll purge before the election of 2018. This was new information to me and I am very interested in the resulting court case, which could change my mind about the amount of voter suppression in Georgia in that election. (It would have a hard time changing my mind a lot about the significance of it, given that Democratic and black turnout was record-breaking in that election and Kemp won by a solid, though not large margin.)
(For the record, 538 expected Kemp to win by 2.2 points based on polls. Kemp actually won by 1.4. I don't know if there's a theory about whether voter suppression effects polls or not. Perhaps there is one.)
Similarly, before the 2020 election, I expected Biden (based on polling) to win 350 electoral votes. I was wrong on Florida and North Carolina which Trump managed to hang onto and Biden won 306 electoral votes instead. (I got every other state right.)
I am therefore inclined to dismiss all arguments that Biden "stole the election" from Trump as so much garbage.
They are not, in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they are merely doing a job of work--spraying (I have heard one use that image) insecticide
Which of us do you honestly think is more inclined to dehumanize the people who disagree with him? You? Or me?
For what it's worth, I haven't seen anything that looks to me like dehumanization from either Andrew or Andrew.
I retract the question. I regretted writing it shortly after I did so. I only aspire to Vulcanness. I certainly haven't achieved it.
Speaking of which, I've been watching Star Trek: The Original Series with my daughter. One thing that struck me was what a great sense of humor they gave Mr. Spock. It's easy to miss because he never laughs, but he makes jokes all the time.
Oh, this is incredibly futile. However provovative I am, no-one pays the slightest attention to anything I say. I think I shall put this blog on hiatus and try my hand at writing mildly s/m themed New Gods / Thanos fan fiction instead.
Maybe a bit opaque? Were Andrew Stevens and I the smarmy clergymen, with you as the bemused onlooker? Or was poor Andrew the bemused onlooker trying to engage a group of lofty Brits? Is this Andrew Stevens’ blog or yours? Or maybe both? Could it be (given your interest in Spiderman) that Andrew Rilstone and Andrew Stevens are one and the same?
Hmmm….
I notice you never hold forth at the same time. You tend to be very quiet when he's around and visa versa.
I'd suggest you go with the Thanos-themed fan fiction, but it seems like you already have.
Andrew R, when you were incredibly provocative at least one person (Andrew S) took it as an attack and responded with a similarly provocative question. (I paid plenty of attention but like Aonghus wasn't entirely sure exactly what provocation you intended -- though I think Andrew S was the main target -- and decided that discretion was the better part of valour.)
I'm not particularly into mildly S&M-themed fanfiction, so I'll defer to others on that one. (But if you do write it, I insist that it could conceivably be both great literature and horribly racist, and that different people are allowed to give different weights to those two things in deciding what to do with it.)
On another site, someone was once (jokingly) accused of being my sock-puppet. We were similar ages (I'm 47, he's 48), had similar names, did similar jobs (both mathematical), were both Americans, and so forth. He responded, "Right. Because I'm some kind of super-genius who could pull off being both of us." I replied, "I have to admit that I could pull that off if I wanted to, but I am puzzled as to why I would bother."
Both Andrews are (so it seems to me) very smart but I would be surprised if either could do a genuinely convincing impression of the other.
Going back briefly to poverty and crime: Andrew, I thought you endorsed the idea that crime causes poverty while rejecting the idea that poverty causes crime. How can purely correlational comparisons between different societies' poverty and crime levels distinguish between those?
I'm very far from being expert on this stuff, but here are a few of the first things I found in a search for "association between poverty and crime" (which I would hope would turn up negative as well as positive findings). Most of these things are summaries of more detailed investigations; I haven't read those and am merely reporting what I found in the summaries. I haven't cherry-picked things to favour one side or another.
(Because of Blogger's comment-length limit I am moving the specifics to another comment. Summary of what I found follows.)
Every single one of the things I looked at claimed that poverty causes crime. At least some of them seem to have made a serious effort to distinguish this from crime causing poverty (though one of them claims that happens too).
I would like to understand better on what basis you claim that (on the whole, for most kinds of crime) poverty doesn't cause crime. Maybe you're right, but so far as I can tell most people who investigate the question have a very different opinion.
Here, as promised, the first few things I found. (I skipped one. It was definitely on Team Poverty Causes Crime; it looked likely to be unrigorous and politically motivated.)
https://www.london.gov.uk/city-hall-blog/link-between-poverty-and-violent-crime "three-quarters of the boroughs in London with the highest levels of violent offending are also in the top 10 most deprived, while the same boroughs also have higher proportions of children under 20 living in poverty than the London average". (Curiously specific phrasing and I wonder whether there's some data-mining going on, but on the face of it this suggests that one causes the other, or some third thing causes both.)
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=5508484140a84023a1e2d8b080e14d0a "People living in households in the US that have an income level below the Federal poverty threshold have more than double the rates of violent victimization compared to individuals in high-income households". (Again, establishing the pattern of causation is tricky; again, maybe there's some data-mining going on; but on the face of it this suggests a link.)
https://www.transformjustice.org.uk/an-uncomfortable-truth-the-strong-link-between-poverty-and-crime/ "background of children who commit crime ... poverty is a strong driver of violent offending amongst young people ... the youth and adult criminal justice systems appear to punish the poor and reproduce the very conditions that entrench people in poverty and make violence more likely". They claim to have established which way the causation goes; I don't know with what justification. But looking specifically at crime and poverty among the young, especially children, seems like a good way to make the effects you find be poverty -> crime rather than crime -> poverty (crime committed by children seems unlikely to cause much present poverty in those children's families, still less in their backgrounds).
https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/71188/1/JRF_Final_Poverty_and_Crime_Review_May_2014.pdf seems to be well aware of the difficulties, but none the less claims confidently that poverty does cause crime. Some of the things it claims: "Virtually all recent studies find a strong relationship between economic inequality, poverty and violent crime too [sc. as well as property crime -- g], between and within countries, across time", "When poverty occurs there is usually a time lag before criminal responses that are linked to poverty emerge" (this delay seems like strong evidence that it's poverty->crime not crime->poverty), "several studies have found that small redunctions in income inequality cause large reductions in homicide ... inequality influences homicide, whereas a society's average income level does not" [this agrees with my speculations upthread -- g].
https://journalofeconomicstructures.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40008-020-00220-6 finds no relationship between average income and crime rate and that "crime rate substantially increases income inequality"; reading further they claim to have shown that inequality and unemployment lead to greatly increased crime, and that crime leads to increased inequality and reduced income. Their writing is very unclear; I hope this doesn't indicate that their thinking is unclear too.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/ claims that absolute poverty causes crime rather than inequality. I am skeptical.
Ugh, I hoped the URLs would get automatically linkified. Sorry.
All of these, as far as I can tell, are claiming that poverty and crime are correlated, but we have to work harder than that to figure out what the causation is exactly.
I do concede Aonghus's point that poverty is a cause, neither necessary nor sufficient, of property crime. It seems pretty clear to me that we could have two people who are similarly situated in all other respects - but the one who is poor will have more motivation to steal than the one who is rich.
The problem that we run into is that, in recent history, crime has both gone up and gone down during times of falling poverty and growing wealth. It wasn't increases in poverty which caused the U.S. crime rate to spike between 1960 and 1990. Or between 1820 and 1870, when crime went up while poverty (at least up until 1860 and the start of the Civil War) was falling greatly.
My opinion, based on observation of human beings, is that certain psychological conditions cause people to commit crimes - poor impulse control, alcohol and drug abuse, etc. These things cause the people who have them both to become poor (regardless of whether they started out that way) and to commit crimes. And this is why it is extremely hard to untangle the causal arrow. However, cross-cultural and cross-historical comparisons show that crime does not simply go up and down with the poverty rate.
I am not going to be too insistent on the claim that poverty doesn't cause crime at all so long as I can convince you that a simplistic claim of "poverty causes crime" and that's all that matters is not true. We could eliminate poverty (arguably we have in the U.S. and probably other nations as well) and it still wouldn't eliminate crime.
Now, my own claim is probably too simplistic as well but a better hypothesis, in my opinion, is that the main driver in reduction of crime is effective policing and possibly population demographics (mostly age). In particular, it once made sense to me that the drive up in crime in the U.S. between 1960 and 1990 was because a much larger percentage of the population were young people (young men, in particular) due to the Baby Boom and this was a big driver. However, the Millennial generation should have had a similar effect and yet it didn't. (Indeed, I was astonished when I discovered that the Millennials had even eliminated the "death gap" between young men and young women. In the past, men would die at much higher rates between the ages of approximately 16-25 than women, due to homicides, suicides, and traffic accidents. Then men would come down again and match the women's death rate curve. This is no longer true; the Millennials were the first generation where men did not die at significantly higher rates at those ages and male and female death rate curves (when compared to age) are now very similar - i.e. a decline from ages 0 to 10 - the statistically safest age - and then an increase for the rest of one's life.)
However, I believe the "effective policing" explanation does make sense of cross-cultural and even cross-historical crime rate changes. It also makes sense of racial, as well as national, gaps as long as we allow for a "lag" as the culture gets used to effective policing. I believe Europe and Japan and South Korea have better policing and more trust in the police than the U.S. does. I believe the Northern U.S. has better policing and more trust in the police than the South and the West does (some of this due to the aforementioned "lags"). I believe American whites have better policing and more trust in the police than American blacks or American Latinos have. And so forth.
This is why I think police reform in the U.S. is such a crucial issue. It is very important that the police gain trust in minority communities and they should start first by earning that trust. The rank and file of minorities, polls show, agree with me on this. They don't want less policing; they want better policing. I think we have a decent model right here in the U.S. in Rudy Giuliani's police reforms of the 1990s in NYC. New York City went from being one of the worst police forces pretty much in the world to being one of the best. (This was, of course, before Rudy Giuliani fell into senile dementia and went completely bonkers.) Crime fell all over the country during Giuliani's tenure as Mayor of New York, but not nearly so much as it did in New York itself which went from being a cesspool of crime to being perhaps the safest big city in the U.S.
By the way, Giuliani got these reforms by doing things that many people (perhaps even me) in this comments section would regard as immoral. Giuliani's deal (whether implicit or explicit) with the NYPD was, "I will always back you to the hilt publicly and you will do your best not to embarrass me." Thus, he even defended them tooth and nail after the Amadou Diallo incident, which was pretty indefensible, but in return he got many fewer such incidents.
In my opinion, on this issue, the mistake the U.S. left is making is not focusing nearly enough on minorities as the victims of crime, which they disproportionately are. This is a mistake that minorities themselves virtually never make (except the quite wealthy among them who are insulated from that crime).
I don't, for example, really question Aonghus's claim about Dublin's "Heroin Flats," though I do find it a bit strange that multiple generations of the same families have always lived there. I'd like to see some studies on that before I really buy that the causal arrow goes the way Aonghus thinks it goes. I am certainly sure that "Heroin Flats" is very poor, but is the cultural acceptance of heroin there really a result of poverty? In the early 19th century, laudanum addiction was nearly entirely confined to rich people (poor people couldn't afford it). I suspect, historically, this has usually been the case and alcohol and drug abuse disproportionately used to affect the rich. This is still true for some classes of drug use - alcohol and marijuana use in the U.S. disproportionately affects youth from wealthy families, not the poor. See this link for the full breakdown.
Their writing is very unclear; I hope this doesn't indicate that their thinking is unclear too.
This is tangential, but I normally find this to be the case.
Oh, as for economic inequality being a cause of violent crime, there is more evidence for that view, though even then the research seems to find that the wealthy flaunting their wealth is the problem. (E.g. Puritan New England had pretty high levels of economic inequality, but low intra-Puritan crime, but the Puritans had a very strong ethic against wealth flaunting. I have seen people claim that Ebenezer Scrooge was an anti-Semitic caricature, but of course he was actually an anti-Puritan caricature - the name, his dislike of Christmas, his miserliness and refusal to flaunt his wealth by continuing to live as frugally as he could, etc.)
But honestly, if you think about it, does that arrow make a lot of sense? How often is violent crime in any society a poor person assaulting a rich person out of envy (or even greed)? Has that ever been a typical pattern of crime? I suppose it is during times of mass unrest/riots/etc.
An Atlantic article says, "That said, when spending is visible, the rates of only certain types of crimes tend to spike. Theft and vandalism, interestingly, aren’t significantly more present, but murder and assault are. These findings actually take a bit away from Gary Becker’s hypothesis, seeing as a visibly luxurious car apparently isn't likely to inspire theft. Instead, this study adds to what’s called 'strain theory,' which is another way of making sense of criminal behavior. Strain theory suggests that when poorer people perceive inequality, they feel less of a commitment to social norms and in turn come to view crime as more acceptable. The key insight the Hicks’s study provides is that when potential criminals are giving up on social expectations, they’re doing so based on information that’s visible, not information that’s password-protected."
Pretty tenuous, it seems to me, but I suppose I can buy it. On the other hand, it seems awfully similar to my own theory. "Less of a commitment to social norms and in turn [they] come to view crime as more acceptable" seems to dovetail pretty well with cultural attitudes towards the police. (Indeed, we might find that societies with high inequality are also much less likely to have effective policing, for whatever reason.)
In real life, Thanos' obsession with death was a kind of paraphilia; the movie turned it into a kind of Malthusian eugenic programme.
In real life?
Just to clarify; I don’t think everybody in the flats ends up a heroin addict (actually, I think the percentage is relatively small) but nearly all Dublin’s heroin addicts would be from the flats. And if not, then from deprived areas on the outskirts of the city.
‘I do find it a bit strange that multiple generations of the same families have always lived there.’
It is kind of weird. Weird, but true. But one could just as easily ask oneself - what is the incentive to leave? Inner city flat-dwellers are often stigmatised for their strong inner city accents in much the same way (or so I speculate) a black person from the Projects in US might be stigmatised for being black. By extension, the flats have a strong communal identity. Leaving the flats would mean leaving the only family you ever really had.
I should add that I don’t know how true this is of the majority of flat-dwellers, but there is certainly a hardcore element who are born and live and die in the flats, bar the odd holiday to Spain.
A generational, criminalised underclass isn’t that uncommon in Ireland (and I would have expected the same to be true of the US) and you see it in small towns as well - reading a history of my local town revealed that the same people were causing as much trouble back in the early 19th century as their descendants are today. You could argue - legitimately in such cases - that the poverty is then self-perpetuating, but I’m not sure how this fixes the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhdXJrGr1iM&t=65s
A generational, criminalised underclass isn’t that uncommon in Ireland (and I would have expected the same to be true of the US) and you see it in small towns as well - reading a history of my local town revealed that the same people were causing as much trouble back in the early 19th century as their descendants are today.
I have seen historical evidence that this used to be the case in the U.S. E.g. I read about a woman criminal from the 19th century who blamed her criminality on coming from a long line of criminals.
Catholicism, maybe? In the U.S., criminal fathers don't typically hang around anymore to teach criminality to their children. The only real American crime families I can think of are families like the Kennedys (who are, in fact, Catholic). (When I bring up the Kennedys, I am half-joking, of course, but also not really. For such a wealthy family, they do seem to have a very large percentage of criminals, though of course not all of them are criminals.)
It seems weird to me that there might be people who care very much what their Church's position on divorce is, but not care very much what their Church's position on crime is, but I have also seen much weirder things in that very weird species, humanity.
Another way in which criminality causes poverty and which we can do something about is the punishment of criminals which makes it harder for them to re-integrate into society after their penal servitude is over and thus causes them to be impoverished upon release, regardless of whether they were poor, middle class, or whatever when they committed their crime. I.e. we essentially, in the U.S., give ex-cons a "scarlet letter" and make it very difficult for them to find a job. (Another point in Victor Hugo's excellent novel about post-Revolutionary France.)
I am strongly in favor of reforms along these lines, but nobody seems very interested.
In real life. In the way that there are real Spider-Man villains and made up ones.
In real life. In the way that there are real Spider-Man villains and made up ones.
"This is an Imaginary Story... Aren't they all?"
Andrew, at least two of the links I gave are to things that do explicitly claim to have determined that the causation goes in one particular direction. The JRF one has at least one argument to that end that I find quite convincing (namely, that the poverty comes substantially earlier than the crime) although I haven't actually checked out their data.
Nor have I checked out yours. But, again, taking the outside view I remark that the great majority of plausibly-smart people who claim to have looked into this seem to think that poverty causes crime. They could all be mostly wrong; such things have happened before; but I'd want some really strong evidence.
I do agree that it's very likely that part of what's going on is that other factors cause both poverty and crime.
Andrew, at least two of the links I gave are to things that do explicitly claim to have determined that the causation goes in one particular direction. The JRF one has at least one argument to that end that I find quite convincing (namely, that the poverty comes substantially earlier than the crime) although I haven't actually checked out their data.
How does that refute the idea that some third factor is causing both?
If you read the JRF study, by the way, I am more or less persuaded by everything they say; I'm just not sure they're saying what you think they're saying. E.g. "We must tread warily when speaking about crime and poverty in the same breath – most
people who are poor have no involvement in crime – despite the libel over millennia that
they are. Second, there isn’t necessarily a direct causal relationship between crime and
poverty. Rather, intervening conditions, experiences and events may cement this
relationship in some circumstances while not in others. As well as poverty, other events and
experiences need to occur too, which although strongly associated with poverty, are not
exclusively to it. We can nevertheless state that poverty generates conditions that make
delinquent and criminal ‘solutions’ more likely than would otherwise be the case. Finally,
being a victim of property and violent crime is also more likely if the person is poor." This all seems right to me.
Sorry about the formatting. I wasn't expecting the copy and paste to include whitespace.
I.e. my own favorite theory is that the primary weapon we have against crime is effective policing and trust in the police. It is easy for me to believe that impoverished neighborhoods have less effective policing and less trust in police.
I remember watching a very memorable interview with Cornel West (sorry, don't have a link) where he talked about how, when two black American men have a "beef" with each other, they generally will not trust the police to intervene and so the "beef" is more likely to end in violence.
However, this relationship (poverty and distrust of police) isn't a necessary one and does not always occur. E.g. my examples of Alaska (a fairly wealthy state, worst crime in the country) and West Virginia or Kentucky (very poor states, but below average crime rates for the U.S.).
I think this also makes sense of the economic inequality relationship. In highly unequal societies, poor people are much more likely to believe that the police are there simply to protect the wealthy. Sometimes this is false, but often it is true.
By the way, the "taming" of West Virginia and Kentucky is, historically speaking, pretty new. Those states were famous in the 19th century for the feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. (The Hatfields were fairly affluent and the McCoys were not impoverished, though they are generally considered lower middle class at the time.)
I have finally finished reading the entire JRF study and it is excellent. I can't find anything there which I disagree with.
"Changes in welfare have created traps that make escape from lifestyles in which offending and victimization are common difficult. Changes in housing have made it more difficult to
access affordable shelter, and have concentrated the risks of crime and victimisation into peripheral, public and rented housing enclaves, of concentrated poverty, segregation and
isolation. Changes in policing and CJS policy make it more difficult to avoid exacerbating children and young people’s putative criminal careers. Changes in labour markets towards
insecurity has weakened the offending reducing effects of long‐term employment.
"These changes meant that those who are near to exhausting their criminal careers and who are on the road to recovery to ‘normal’ life can be thwarted in their desistance by a series of interminable obstacles placed in their way. These include the likelihood of them having lost shelter through imprisonment or having a criminal or drug using record. Then once again
denied access to good affordable public housing because this isn’t generally available. Thrown onto the private rented sector, more often than not faced by interminable complexities, gaps and delays in receiving meagre JSA, housing benefit, or family welfare payments. Faced with employment discrimination having a criminal record. As a consequence, criminal careers are unnecessarily prolonged and hardened because positive choices and legitimate routes out of criminality are difficult or simply not available."
Again, sorry about the formatting. I thought I had eliminated all the carriage returns, but obviously not.
Do I think that modern welfare programs rope criminals (who may or may not have started out poor) and other poor people into the same net? Yes I do.
I have been informed, however, that I just hate poor people (including, I assume, my late mother and all of my ancestors) and that all my supposed concern about poverty is just faking it.
Also, that modern welfare programs can't be bad for poor people, as I believe, because they're so well-intentioned. Ergo, they must be great and people who oppose them simply oppose helping poor people.
I also oppose the minimum wage (or at least an actual effective minimum wage). In the early 20th century, when minimum wage laws were first passed in the U.S., Progressive reformers were unabashed that the purpose of the minimum wage was to give white men raises and throw minorities into unemployment. See this op-ed. Particularly, a federal minimum wage - in a huge country like the U.S. - has very disparate impacts on places with vastly different costs of living.
Sprite presents as a teenage boy, but he is really a thousand year old cosmic being, so there must be some element of consent when Ikaris spanks him.
Whatever about the shortcomings of the welfare system, I’m not aware of any realistic alternative - the Roman Empire (not exactly a welfare state) had a ‘Bread & Circuses’ policy when it came to dealing with the large, mostly unemployed population in Rome. Feeding and entertaining your underclass is one way of neutralising any threat they might represent.
You could, of course, abolish welfare so people had no choice but to work for punitively low wages - in effect, a form of serfdom. People would have just enough to pay the rent and to feed themselves. The problem is that you’re likely to get more and more civil unrest (look at what happened in pre-revolutionary France!) and to spend more and more money on policing, incarceration etc. This would be problematic in a country like the US especially, as it has the highest incarceration figures in the world (although it peaked in 2008) and the prison service already costs around 300 billion a year.
And obviously Thanos has a brother called Eros, which shows that Starlin had read his Freud, if nothing else. But clearly someone has to write dirty stories about a canonical Eternal with that name.
Maybe we should agree that the comic book character is Thay-nos but the movie character is Thanne-os?
You could, of course, abolish welfare so people had no choice but to work for punitively low wages - in effect, a form of serfdom.
I think 84% of Americans are in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (an absolutely insane number). About the same percentage of economists are opposed. We have better ways of alleviating poverty - the Earned Income Tax Credit, which simply gives money to the working poor (though called a tax credit, it is "refundable," i.e. you can get back from it more than you ever paid in taxes and many, many people do) - is fairly effective and raises typically have bipartisan support. (The EITC was passed by a Democratic Congress in order to stop Nixon's Negative Income Tax, which was dreamt up by Milton Friedman, but the EITC and the Negative Income Tax are very similar.)
I don't think anyone is opposed (or at least not much) to similar transfer payments such as Social Security Disability for those who can't work. I favor eliminating all the job training, housing, food support, and the thousand other welfare programs and simply giving poor people money and letting them figure out how to spend it. Even better would be replacing the whole thing with a UBI (Universal Basic Income) which everyone gets so we wouldn't have to worry about whether people are getting it fraudulently.
Part of the reason I want this is because bureaucrats are valuable people and I want to free them up to work in the private economy where they could do some good. I understand that some national governments are more competent than the U.S. federal government. You have to live here to understand how unbelievably incompetent they are - at everything. We do have some state governments which are reasonably competent; I live in one and Utah's is almost famously competent (due probably to the Church of Latter-Day Saints). (Though Utah, as an ex-Wild West state, has one of the worst records for police shootings.)
Is there any way to get there from here? Probably not. The bureaucracy is entrenched and will fight tooth and nail to keep itself entrenched.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are famously left-wing multi-billionaires. How much of their fortunes do they donate to the U.S. federal government? At a best guess, none. Because you're just pouring it down a rathole and everybody knows you're just pouring it down a rathole.
I worked retail management when I was in my 20s. One of my best employees was a single mother. She wanted to work more, I wanted to give her more hours, but we couldn't because if she made too much money, she would lose her family's health insurance (which was superior to what we could offer). This is absurd, but it's what you come to expect from the U.S. government. (Come to think of it, the UBI basically just is a version of Friedman's Negative Income Tax.)
But, hell, I'd be happy if governments just stopped herding poor people into drug-infested, crime-infested public housing projects.
*herd
*infested
I take it the last comment is meant to suggest that Andrew S's comment is dehumanizing? I don't see that it is; I think "herd" is accusing governments of being dehumanizing (which may or may not be a fair accusation, but is the sort of accusation we want people to be able to make, and I think this is a reasonable way to make it), and "infested" is comparing drugs and crime, not people, to vermin.
If Andrew had complained about those places being "infested" with criminals, I would agree with your criticism. I think. But it turns out that "infested" applied to people before it applied to vermin; the oldest sense of "infest" is something like "attack" or "trouble" and in the oldest known uses it's people doing the attacking or troubling. (It was fairly quickly generalized to other nuisances such as diseases and unwelcome political opinions.) I'm not sure a word can really be said to be dehumanizing when it has always been applied to humans as well as to other things. (Is the fact that it's also applicable to rats and plagues problematic? Not obviously; it's not dehumanizing to say that someone is "large" merely because mountains and icebergs are also large.)
A certain Old Testament professor always put the same question on the end of term exam "List the Kings of Israel and Judah in parallel columns." One year, however, he asked a different question: "List the Major and Minor Prophets in parallel columns." One of the students wrote: "I am certainly not worthy to judge between those venerable gentlemen, so instead, here is a list of the Kings of Israel and Judah."
This is just a defense mechanism of course. If someone can accuse me of hating poor people, then he gives himself permission not to pay any attention to my arguments. It is very common. It isn't even mean-spirited exactly. Confirmation bias is a very serious problem in humans because psychologically we believe, when our beliefs are attacked, that we are being attacked.
I could, for example, easily construct a theory that Lyndon Baines Johnson started the Great Society programs because he was an evil mastermind. He wanted to trap people into poverty to ensure they would continue to vote for his party. This even has a plausibility to it because Johnson was kind of evil. A former staunch segregationist, corrupt (he was fabulously wealthy and nobody is quite sure how he became so), vulgar, etc.
But it just doesn't work. A mastermind, Lyndon Baines Johnson was not. In fact, it is nearly unquestionable to me that he intended his programs to do exactly what he said they'd do - to eliminate poverty and reduce government dependence. This, of course, they manifestly failed to do.
If Andrew had complained about those places being "infested" with criminals, I would agree with your criticism.
To be fair to Mr. Rilstone, I am not a big fan of criminals. Nor do I think anyone else should be.
I could write something long about the problem I have with your mode of argument. But that didn't go well before.
I've been a bad, bad planet!
You have indeed! You need to go to the woodshed and fetch my energy draining device! I am cosmic being of unusual tastes.
Ooo, yes, drain me, devour me, consume my cosmic essence
You love it really.
Has anyone listened to my podcast?
Not I, but I never listen to any podcasts so that doesn't give you much information.
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