kapitza

I want to order a time machine and send you back to have a conversation with your great-grandparents, for whom you seem to have so little respect.

Sure, the "list" isn't real. People wouldn't have been passing it around in the '70s if it hadn't reflected the actual experience of living in the '40s, which many, many people at that time remembered well.

A time machine is not actually available. Your great-grandparents are probably dead. But you can still go read a bunch of books from the amazing, wonderful, astoundingly different, and yes -- not at all perfect -- world that they lived in. Chronological chauvinism is not a healthy emotion.

This passage from the Economist article I think nicely, and unintentionally, demonstrates the level of insanity here:

The result was that some 20,000 convicts who otherwise would have been sent to prison remained free. The state incarceration rate reverted to 1990s levels without an attending rise. Indeed, studies found no effect on violent crime and a small effect on property crime. (Each year of prison not served due to California's reform was estimated to cause an additional 1.2 auto thefts.) However, the social cost of a stolen Corolla is not clearly greater than the cost to taxpayers of a year of prison time.

So, 20,000 innocent people per year have their cars stolen. But no biggie! Without plutonium, how would we have electricity? If someone steals 1.2 cars per year, why lock him up? It's not worth the cost of a "Corolla."

The result is the insane predatory atmosphere of a normal American (for me, SF) street, in which anyone with any sense is on yellow alert all the time except behind locked doors. As for my children, I'm resigned to being a helicopter parent until they're old enough to... defend themselves, I guess? Should probably start with those karate lessons now.

Meanwhile, in Japan, which has zero tolerance for crime, you can send your five-year-old around the corner to buy milk. Have you ever lived in a crime-free society? Even visited? Try it sometime -- the feeling is downright amazing. You really don't know what you're missing.

You'll have to forgive me if I prefer to trust Dr. Pryor and common sense over the Brookings Institution's "studies and accidental experiments."

If people were fruit flies and it was possible to actually conduct controlled experiments in "social science," I'd be happy to take their results seriously. Or more to the point, if controlled experiments were possible, no one would take uncontrolled experiments seriously (not to mention studies by the Brookings Institution, with its very large axe to grind -- see the Moskos commentaries on Brookings research linked above).

But the definition of science isn't "the best we can do." When actual science isn't physically practical, "the best we can do" is not science but pseudoscience. Fortunately, there are other ways to use our brains.

The question that enables rigorous analysis is always: "where did these ideas come from?" Some people invent ideas on their own, but that's so rare it's lost in the noise.

It's very, very unlikely that your hypothetical observer looked at the world and concluded independently that all members of the species Homo sapiens have equal potential.

First, this person would have to be thinking independently, which is very rare. Second, there is no empirical evidence for this proposition -- or at least, none has ever been brought to my attention. (Fortunately, equality of potential is by no means the only reason to believe in equality of opportunity.)

If I observe that someone is a Catholic, which is more likely: that he learned his Catholicism from another Catholic? Or that he independently derived the Trinity from empirical evidence?

Your hypothetical observer may have derived his or her opinions about school choice and local government from personal observation. More likely, they came from Rush Limbaugh. Their opinions on human biology are straight-up American humanism, ie, leftism. (With nontrivial historical links to Christianity, but that's a separate conversation.) So... a wolf-dog.

Reason has nothing to do with it. The number of deaths due to car accidents, even falling down the stairs, is much greater. The main impact of terrorism is the irrational fear, not the rational risk aversion. But it's much easier to stamp out terrorism by force, hard as that may be, than to convert human beings into rational animals.

The goal of terrorists is to achieve power through violence. The gold standard would be the PLO, now the PA. The ANC also did extremely well with this strategy.

There are two effective ways to combat terrorism. One is to surrender to the terrorists. Neither the PLO, nor the ANC, nor the IRA, is setting off any bombs these days. Works great especially if surrounded by a cloud of euphemisms.

The other is to treat the terrorism as an isolated incident and counterattack on the political front. Consider the response to Timothy McVeigh or especially Dylann Roof -- textbook. Great stuff, America still knows how to do it.

If terrorism is committed in the name of the Confederate flag, ban the Confederate flag and crack down on white nationalists everywhere. Even the peaceful ones. Especially the peaceful ones. No one ever said that the best way to defeat racist terrorism is to satisfy the legitimate grievances of moderate racists. But if the USG adopted this strategy, the GOP would probably grow a "militant wing" in well under a decade...