Younger generations are probably more racist than their parents but not their grandparents. There are a lot of reasons this probably happened, and it wasn't something done to infants, but transpired over the last 10-15 years.
I think part of it is being raised on the internet right as the cultural backlash against progressivism, "cancel culture" and Obama started to accelerate across social media, and right-wing grifting became big business after Gamergate.
It wants Hyundai's investment and it wants to create American jobs and also have Hyundai follow the laws. The extremity of the right is fueled by an apparently prevalent reluctance to enforce any rules.
And take them where? Bear in mind the seal team came in on a sub that didn't even have air. They probably don't have restraints of any kind or a way to keep them from shouting...
Which is not to say what they did do was right, but "just kidnap some people" is not really a practical reality.
I like conspiracy theories as much as the next guy (especially when it would only technically require a few people here), but it seems more likely Holt just got eaten by a shark or drowned. People die in open-water situations all the time.
I think whatever the surveys said, the egg prices/inflation actually had little to do with Trump victory and the left shouldn't be misled by this. People vote now for emotional reasons, reasons of identity, and these rational reasons are mostly cover--something you tell a pollster but not the real truth. Take note of anyone you know who gave this reason and see what they say about 6 months of manufacturing decline, slowing job growth, or about the inevitable inflation from tariffs...I bet most defend it in some way.
The right is now split into a faction that rejects foreign interventions and wants to withdraw, if not total isolationist then something in that direction, and another faction. At the elite level this other faction is ascendant. The lesson they have drawn from US military failures from Vietnam to GWOT is different from the former faction. In their view the problem is that we were not aggressive enough, we were too constrained by overly legalistic and conservative rules of engagement and various ideological goals which polluted the prosecution of the wars and prevented us from "winning". They DO want a more cruel, more aggressive force posture. They admire and defend Israel in large part because they see it as a model of a force which really believes in "winning". A substantial portion of the voter base is attracted to this, enthused by the prospect of aggressive campaigns in Latin America with relaxed rules of engagement, and sees the renaming to Department of War as a "based" declaration of this doctrine. The country is moving more in this direction and the more isolationist (kind of "Buchananite") wing is getting purged again, but with some concessions made to them.
I am not sure the left has any answer to this right now because it has discredited itself with so many, especially losing a lot of younger men (those under 21 heavily favor Republicans), and generally the country may simply be moving in this direction. I think be clear eyed what you are facing.
The problem with trying to read things into the results of the 2024 election is that they’re totally in line with a global thrashing of incumbents that occurred that year. Incumbents in the US actually did better than the average.
Humbly, I think this thinking is part of the problem. The incumbents were crushed because they mostly all copied each other and are seen as part of the same system. There are Western parties which have behaved differently and were not crushed. It wasn't just a meteorological event.
It was about the eggs but also immigration and men in women's private spaces and sports. Identity wasn't a big factor although everyone in high places and their bots work hard to make it so. We shall see.
Many actually do not seem to know this, especially in the political/think tank class. There are highly placed Democratic officials who blame inflation and point to this research.
This spectrum of political doctrine is also about to run the US economy into a very rough recession that I don’t think will be undone until Trump and his ideas get the boot from politics in some meaningful way.
The jobs probably aren't disappearing because of AI but because of previous over-hiring and a slowing economy. It seems like a cover story to push people into accepting underemployment.
Kids who used to study electrical engineering, or mechanical engineering or go into finance and accounting, decided all to major in computer science instead, because if you are going to be an office drone, why not be an office drone in the field that everyone is getting 6-figure starting salaries in?
Surely the overabundance of graduates in CS played into the current situation.
Do apprentices really earn that much before they become journeymen? I thought there was some sort of process in place where you got some in the job training at the expense of getting paid less, at least in construction.
I commented about this on another thread, and probably most around here disagree with my general point there, but this fact amazes me. We have gotten all this tech creating a surveillance state but then it isn't even used to give better policing. You will just get mugged on camera by someone with ten prior charges and then be ignored by police.
All the recent policy, technical leaps, and innovation around policing seem to be focused on cracking down on protesting and speech, and not really on what people would consider "fighting crime". You could get mugged on the street corner in broad daylight (or worse) and the police won't even answer your phone call, but the minute you show up on that street corner with 10 friends carrying signs and shouting, 20 officers will show up in riot gear, and every one of you will be identified using technology.
The purpose of the system (the police in this casse) is what it does.
Nope. That's an ideology, not a statement of fact. It completely negates the possibility that systems can become corrupted (or simply fail) and no longer work towards their original purpose.
The surveillance is there not to catch small thieves, but those who are against the government, against wars etc. A small thief doesn't threaten the regime in any way so he can be dealt with after more dangerous people are dealt with.
Not in Britain there isn't. We have constant retail theft and violence against staff and the Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley asking the public to do the crime fighting
Ah yes the famous police state of the netherlands. "We have higher crime rates than nordic countries so therefore we must have more and more and more militarized police" is not exactly my idea of reasoned thinking.
Why should I live in a more dangerous society than the Netherlands (which isn't "nordic")? Or Australia? I fit in those places fine. Why can't we have that at home? Why is this level of crime acceptable just because it is lower than 1980? What liberty do I give up by having some guardsmen standing around?
His point is that the crime rate being lower in these places does not happen due to them having militarized police, so assuming that militarized police in general, much less literally using the military for policing will drop the crime rate doesn't track.
You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.
Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.
I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.
We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.
The Royal Marechaussee is 1/10th the size of the National Police Force and as you noted have quite specialized tasks. They are not the people handling day to day crime and interactions with civilians for mundane police actions. They also receive plenty of training related to the policing duties and are trained on how to police civilians. The national guard does not, and even MPs receive very different training and operate in a very different manner to the regular police.
This is very different than universally militarizing your police force across the nation or employing soldiers untrained in policing as police.
What do you believe the venn diagram of soldier and police skillsets looks like?
I think it looks like a normal venn diagram. Some things are similar and some different and it depends on what deployments or forces each has worked on. That's why NG troops are getting extra training in police duties and working together with normal police.
Police training academy is already generally considered to be insufficient, which is part of why cops continue to receive so much ongoing training as part of the job.
Getting a few rushed bootcamp style classes is not going to do anything to remotely bridge that gap.
My point is that an ever more militarized police directed by a vengeful president is not actually going to make society safer. I too would like programs that actually address the causes of crime but instead we are going to get more violence done to the poor, racial minorities, and people using their voices.
DC has incredibly strict gun laws. I doubt many of the weapons used in crimes are legal. I don't think you will be truly any less free having national guard soldiers walking around. Actually seems better than the usual dystopian tech solutions people come up with. Maybe they will try it for thirty days and people will like it.
DC isn't an island. It's super easy for people in the region to get hold of guns, it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun. The question of whether guns used in crime are legal or not seems moot to me, they are equally deadly if misused.
> it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun
Actually, the whole issue is that this is not true! Statistically speaking, the average crime in DC, whether involving a gun or not, goes uncaught, unresolved, and ultimately unpunished.
Because it's not like it is surrounded by countries with lax gun laws. You can't buy a semi-automatic rifle or a handgun and a pile of ammo with the same ease in, say, Belgium that you can in West Virginia. Like, which country in Europe do you think has the laxest gun laws, for comparison? Having lived in both Europe and the US, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US.
There are a lot of weapons from the former Yugoslavian war still floating around in Europe, both single pieces an much larger caches. These pop up with some regularity in crime busts and given the number of weapons that went missing (> 1 million weapons remain unaccounted for) this will likely remain a problem for a long time to come.
At least the Ukraine/Poland border now scans the bulk of the vehicles to prevent the next issue like that. But the ones that are already in the EU are going to surface only bit-by-bit as they get used or uncovered. Given how hard it is to obtain weapons here they are very valuable.
It's so different that for as long as I've lived here I have seen a gun maybe a handful of times, the vast majority of those were guns holstered on the hips of police on patrol (and not even a single time in their hands) and a gun that a private owner was maintaining who uses it exclusively to shoot at a range. Other than that, no guns here, at all.
No, I think the answer is that is only different in that Americans in DC are more criminal. Both places have strict gun laws with licensing requirements. In both places you can get illegal guns, and these are the ones used in crime if a gun is used, otherwise it will be an illegal knife. However in the Netherlands the laws are followed and/or policed better. Maybe now in DC the laws will be enforced better too, and maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave. I predict that few people lose any liberty and that this experiment reduces certain crimes (like street murder, assaults, random robberies/muggings) a lot.
I've spent time in both countries. The difference could not be much larger when it comes to policing.
Laws certainly are not policed better here. The big differentiator is the much smaller wealth gap (though it is still sizeable and should be further reduced) as well as the much more relaxed attitude towards things that we consider illness and/or self-harm, a lot of which ends up being dealt with as crime in the USA. Furthermore, a hospital procedure isn't likely to bankrupt you and when you do become homeless there are - if you want - institutions that will help to get you out of that situation.
It is far from ideal. But it is night and day compared with the USA. I don't recall seeing as much police anywhere else (including such diverse places as Colombia, Panama, Canada and almost every country in Europe), nor did I see people in general being afraid of the police. Sure, you still don't fuck with them but as a rule they're really there to serve and protect, which - ironically - they have to write on the side of their vehicles in the USA, either to increase the pretense or as a personal reminder to the occupants of the vehicle, it is hard to tell which.
I will add that in addition to my longer comment, I doubt that "wealth gap" has much at all to do with these differences in criminality.
Yes, the US has a high gini coefficient. But the median income is very similar to the netherlands, with NL being maybe 5000$ higher. Median wealth per capita is very similar between the two and Americans have slightly higher purchasing power, although again pretty similar. I don't think crime is higher in the US because rich people are sending the poor into a murderous rage, and if it is so then it just indicates there really is a culture problem.
Bureau of Justice statistics says that the US has about 1,200,000 police across agencies. Given a US population of 340 million this is about 283 people per employee (it says this includes civilian personnel, idk how many): https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/census-state-and-lo....
The Netherlands has about 51,000 police officers. They also have 14,000 support officers and some other civilians with some law enforcement powers (I will leave these out since idk how civilian support officers counted in BoJ stats). That is something like 352 people per officer (18 million over 51,000). On top of this there are around 7,000 gendarmie who you will see around at events or government sites, under the ministry of justice.
Australia has a little less per capita (27 million people, 65,000 officers 415:1) but also their defense forces have some domestic authorities that in the US might be law enforcement. Some forces are protesting because they want to hire more people, take that for what you want.
I wouldn't call this a drastic difference and in my anecdotal experience, as opposed to yours, the police are about as visible in all three places, maybe more so in Australian cities because they walk around in large groups wearing hi-vis.
Note that these are similar police presence rates despite probably higher crime in the US (I guess this would depend on offence). If you have higher crime, why wouldn't you have more police?
In contrast to what you say, crime clearance seems to be much higher in the Netherlands. The homicide clearance rate is around 80% compared to 50-65% in the US (depends on year). I believe clearance rates for burglary are also several times higher. So the laws are better enforced.
Colombia, since you brought it up, has a very similar police presence to all of the above. They should probably get more since they have 5x the murders of the US.
I do not really see the relevance of the attitude towards healthcare bill costs to this discussion. Your view of the US as extremely over policed compared to other societies seems misguided based on the data, and maybe driven by ideology since you bring up mostly irrelevant facts like hospital costs (these don't generally bankrupt the homeless in America because they usually don't pay anyway, since they have no money and just go to emergency room). The statistics I see on homelessness do not even indicate that America has a particular homelessness problem in comparison to the Netherlands, for example, in fact they are right next to one another on this list (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...) with Australia being higher. I am sure you can quibble about how the statistics here are collected or what it means.
My thesis is simple. I think Americans commit more crimes because they are more criminal and it is more normalised in society. I think we have all the laws we need, but a lot of inertia preventing us from enforcing them. I think this is particularly true in certain urban areas. I think deploying hundreds of national guardsmen in the capitol is an interesting experiment which stands some chance of changing this a bit, and that it comes as minimal cost to civil liberties of law abiding citizens. Maybe it will work or maybe not, but it doesn't seem outrageous for a city with 200 murders per year in the richest country on earth. I think a more criminal population requires more intensive policing than a less criminal one.
I've spent close to 45 years out of 60 in NL, and I've interacted with the police a handful in that time, and usually I initiated the interaction (other than random alcohol checks). I've spent less than a year contiguously in the United States and have interacted with the police there on every visit, sometimes multiple times per visit. And I never initiated the contact.
> maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave
I say this as someone who's split his life between the US (on both coasts) and Europe: the US's police forces are far more visible, and employ far more force, than in Europe.
Is it really? It is not hard to go the hague and see gendarmerie. I see police all over Europe when I go. If they apply less force, it may be because the population is less criminal, or perhaps they get better people into their forces. I think Europeans have way more regulations that are enforced.
The claim that "more" won't change anything is empirical. Let's come back in a few months and see if DC is safer or not--I will admit if I was wrong.
Again, I think this is an interesting solution because it is actually less invasive than all the tech solutions to just have guys on the street who watch and maybe come up and talk to you and then forget about it. If you are just going about your day peacefully, are you going to lose anything here?
We seem to have gotten a surveillance state with cameras and sensors (and censors) everywhere that somehow doesn't police easily solvable/preventable crime. If I thought there was some big civil liberties tradeoff I might think differently, but it seems like we lost those while still having to buy our deodorant from behind locked cabinets and occasionally getting shot by some guy with ten priors.
The complaints and protests that this goes against civil liberties has just started to ring hollow because there are few visible serious efforts to protest the real abuses of civil liberties which mostly come from tech and the surveillance economy. Somehow the energy is directed against guys in uniform standing around making sure the street doesn't get turned into a drag race.
There are 1.21 firearms for every person in the USA. There are .15 for every person in Europe.
If you don't understand how having 8x the number of firearms per capita increases the ease in which criminals have access to them, I'm not sure what to say. Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access.
I'm not even for gun control - I feel like the genie is so far out of the bottle at this point that there's no real sense in trying to put it back in, and the only way for everyday citizens to be on level ground when it comes to self defense, home protection, etc., is being armed themselves. But acting like states or cities with strict gun control actually have the ability to prevent criminals from having access to them is silly.
"Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access."
So have more police to enforce the laws? Why is there this belief that increasing police cannot do anything? Again, I bet this works and that DC has lower crime during the period the NG is there. It is empirical, let's see.
Gun smuggling is not the kind of crime that national guardsman standing around looking menacing stops. This is the sort of work detectives and specialized units do. Specialized surveillance, physical and digital, informants, etc. People taking plea deals in exchange for additional info.
How would a military force without the training or skillset required to do this help? Without the community knowledge? Without the contacts in it?
The issue isn't whether or not more (and better trained) police would help - they almost certainly would. But that is different from deploying the national guard.
The other problem is that even if crime rates are reduced, that is one statistic in a vacuum - how much damage does it do to public perception of the police? We know it does - see above. What incidents might occur from the lack of training the NG has in policing civilians? What damages does it do to the fundamental freedoms within the country?
What fundamental freedoms are people in DC going to lose? See my other comment---I think this is much less intrusive on civil liberties than adding more surveillance.
National Guardsmen may not find many guns if they arent searching people, but people will think twice about using them with guardsmen standing around. They will get into and escalate altercations where guns might be used less. There are plenty of prior cases where more policing has reduced crime like this, and DC was not doing enough, so this is going to be tried. If the police decide to work together with them enthusiastically, then even more can be done with the extra manpower.
I don't think public perception of police will change much, and anyway it always hovers around 50% confidence in surveys.
Why would casualties necessarily go up with surveillance? Every argument for precision targeting can be reversed for evasion.
In Ukraine it’s relatively rare for large numbers of troops to be concentrated, because each side knows its opponents would observe the formation and make it a priority target. This makes something like the battle of the Somme unlikely to be repeated.
In call of duty do casualties go up when both sides have UAVs, compared to when both are without?
Arma Reforger has very good mods depicting drone combat like flying fpvs and bomber drones. Bohemia interactive simulations also focuses on drones in their newest warsim release
