Here’s an observation that you might find counter-intuitive, unless you recognize that the police carry a cost in inherent destructiveness: more police doesn’t work.

In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review, opens new tab of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.”
“This line of research has exhausted its utility,” the authors wrote. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.”
Decades of data similarly shows that police don’t solve much serious and violent crime – the safety issues that most concern everyday people.
Over the past decade, “consistently less than half of all violent crime and less than twenty-five percent of all property crime were cleared,” William Laufer and Robert Hughes wrote in a 2021 law review article, opens new tab. Laufer and Hughes are professors in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.
Police “have never successfully solved crimes with any regularity, as arrest and clearance rates are consistently low throughout history,” and police have never solved even a bare majority of serious crimes, University of Utah college of law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman wrote in another 2021 law review article, opens new tab, including murder, rape, burglary and robbery.
Existing research also affirms the findings in the recent report on police work in California.

I once had a nice encounter with the local sheriff’s department when a visitor accidentally locked their keys in their car — they came right over and used their collection of simple tools to break into the car, and the officer was quite nice. He didn’t need to use his gun. I’m all for a disarmed police force, also one that doesn’t use an armored personnel carrier or tank.

A man’s got to know his limitations:

A friend points out to me that this sacred tradition which countless American soldiers fought and died to preserve is six years younger than the McRib.

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Have you ever wondered what would happen if the subject of Dolly Parton’s classic ballad “Jolene” were to be transformed into a Lovecraftian horror mid-song? Wonder no longer (h/t LGM commenter Clark Ashton Kutcher):

The first comment to this astounding performance is: “I’ve taken in a lot of versions of eldritch Jolene and yours is by far the best out there.”

I assumed this was a dry witticism, but that only reveals the depths of my ignorance of the treasures that lie buried beneath the cyber-oceans of the Internet.

It turns out that Eldritch Jolene is a whole musical sub-genre, featuring heated arguments between aficionados regarding who has truly understood the assignment.

Seriously though, all this is just another illustration of the Merit Myth: the idea, so critical to the very structure of the Meritocracy [sic], that “talent is in short supply.” H.P. Lovecraft pretty much starved to death, and the fact that this world features uncountable numbers of wildly talented artists who struggle to find any audience for their work, let alone any route to making their art their livelihood, would elicit its own flavor of eldritch horror if one were to contemplate it for any length of time.

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The student in question is an American of South Asian descent who was chosen by the administration, out of a couple of hundred eligible straight A students, to be this year’s valedictorian. I don’t see any indication that she had written her speech yet, so the basis for the cancellation is, putatively, “safety” concerns about somebody who apparently had, according to a group opposing the choice, “a link to a curated media page” as part of her social media bio. On that page are statements calling Zionism a racist settler-colonial ideology, and advocating the abolishment of the state of Israel.

So basically USC’s administration is saying that if the right people complain about having a student whose social media bio includes links to anti-Zionist statements as the valedictorian, that person will be removed — cancelled if you will — because of fabricated concerns about “public safety,” which as Pope Hat points out is the very definition of a heckler’s veto, assuming it’s the genuine reason for the cancellation, which very obviously it’s not.

While it’s true that nobody has a right to give a speech at graduation, cancelling a speech after inviting a student to give it because the student is an Asian-American with apparent sympathies for anti-Zionist views is really really bad. This isn’t in any way like protesting handing a big check to Condi Rice to come and spout pablum while demurely not mentioning any of her own war crimes, and anybody who makes that analogy, given LGM’s official anti-Condi Rice being given big checks to give commencement speeches policy, can step right off.

There’s something about this whole topic that drives otherwise reasonable people completely insane.

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Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book about the reactionary turn in white rural America that has predictably generated a great deal of criticism that is large on personal attacks and hand-waving and light on substantive response, the latter of which I’ve mean meaning to get to. (In the meantime, the authors respond here.) In the meantime, I wanted to highlight this blog by Tom Scocca, who responding to an attempt by a critic to draw what AFICT is a non-empirical, analytically useless distinction between “rage” and “resentment” points out that Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech did exactly what critics of white rural rage thesis insist that Democrats never do:

The key difference, Jacobs wrote, is that unlike rage, resentment “is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.” And liberals’ belief in white rural rage gets in the way of that necessary empathy, he argued, continuing a “reflexive condescension and dismissal of rural voters that escalated during the George W. Bush administration and peaked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign and her dismissal of Trump supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables.’”

What would expressing real concern for rural voters sound like? Jacobs explained that liberals need to find a whole new way of looking at Trump supporters. Trump’s rural voters are

“people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.“

Just kidding! That wasn’t Jacobs. It was Hillary Clinton, in those same remarks now known as the “Basket of Deplorables” speech. 

The whole point of the Basket of Deplorables speech was that there was more than one basket of Trump supporters. Clinton was telling her audience—the audience at the LGBTQ for Hillary Gala—that despite the visible, undeniable bigotry in the Trump movement, some of it directed specifically at them, not every potential Trump voter was a bigot or irredeemable. She was urging them to understand why ordinary Americans might be hungry enough for change to vote for someone like Trump.

And then the Trump movement responded by declaring that no, there was only one basket, that the racists and homophobes and xenophobes did, in fact, represent them all. The press, in turn, adopted the Trump position that Clinton had insulted everyone who supported Trump, and since her defeat has spent the next eight years, countless words, and who knows how much travel budget recreating exactly the message about understanding and empathy that Clinton had delivered in the first place—insisting, all the while, that no one had ever thought of it before. 

Eight years of asserting that Clinton said the nearly precise inverse of what she actually said has been very successful propaganda, and in the critics of White Rural Rage we see mostly futile attempts to square a familiar circle: i.e. 1)Democrats have made efforts to materially address the stated non-“deplorable” grievances of white rural America; 2)Republicans have not; and yet 3)white rural rage against Democrats and their core constituencies is both rationally justified and could be addressed by [insert vague underpants gnomes theory here] that Democrats stubbornly refuse to do because they regard all Trump supporters as deplorable. I will come back to this but it’s an exhausting cycle.

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