Good morning. Hello. How are you, today? I am okay. Listening to some band called Dolly Mixture that I just learned about from a K Records spam email. I am pretty into them. K Records spam is good spam.
So no takers on Mike Posner and that great Bag End joke, huh? Well, that’s okay. I quite liked yesterday’s edition, but I find that different strokes for different folks is real even amongst close friends. Also maybe you didn’t grow up in a weird hippie town where everyone named things “Rivendell Hall” and whatnot. God, people in Fairbanks loved naming things after Lord of Rings. By the time I read The Hobbit, I was confused. I thought it was taking place in interior Alaska.
Our June oven broke yesterday and it is a huge tragedy in this family. We are addicted to the thing. Everyone that comes and visits loves it too, so some of you probably know how sad it is to lose the thing. I’m not sure we’ll get it back. And then I’ll be faced with the horrible, horrible dilemma about whether to spend that much money on another one. I love the product but the pricing the company is currently doing on the oven is complete bullshit. God this is going to be a weeks-long ordeal and I am not looking forward to it. Jane lost her shit about it yesterday morning. She was not happy that her waffle had to be toasted in a goddamn toaster like a farmer. She was indignant that my veggie sausage had to be cooked in the microwave, and she’s not wrong. Microwaved sausage is gross. Hopefully today she just rolls with it.
So I was reading an article yesterday about crime and the increase in crime, and then a series of tweets going on about how the supposed “crime wave” is a lie and I realized I had a thing or two to say about crime. Doesn’t that sound positively Republican? I apologize in advance. But here’s the thing: they’re both right! Crime, over the last two decades, has gone down spectacularly. Let’s take New York, which in this situation seems to be pretty middle-of-the road. For example, in New York, crime is down eighty-one percent since 1990. Murder is down 79%. Burglary 87%. Crime is so much better in the twenty-first century than it was when I was growing up. It is an astonishing, amazing accomplishment. Crime was so bad in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It is so much better now.
But! Also! Crime is totally worse now than it was two years ago! In New York, murders are up 50% over two years ago. Hate crimes are up 42%. These numbers are, remember, off of incredible, historic lows. But it is absurd to take the position some liberals are that it doesn’t matter. Of course it matters.
That’s all pretty straightforward: crime is up, off of historic lows. It makes for a fantastic mirror for which anyone to project their opinions: if you like what is happening politically right now, you can claim that things are still really good, that the crime will diminish again with the resurgance of the post-pandmic economy, etc. If you don’t like whomever’s in charge of your city, state, country, you can blame them for an “increase in crime.” Everyone sees what they want to see.
But there’s one more component, I think, that is important to remember: no one knows why crime ever went down in the first place. There are a bajillion theories, and most of them are wrong, disproven or unproven. There’s the whole Broken Windows thing — heavily policing even small offenses creates an atmosphere where criminals are more reluctant to commit more serious crimes — which ushered in a bunch of bad cops as police chiefs. Mostly, but not completely disproven, and to blame for things like stop and frisk. There’s the Freakonomics approach, tying the reduction in crime to more progressive abortion laws. Maybe it was harsher sentencing laws, or the decrease in crack cocaine use. Maybe it was the economy, or looser gun laws, or tougher gun laws, or more spending on police. I remember reading one really good article that blamed it on how much cheaper televisions got. Some say the decrease in booze consumption did it, others say it was the increase in anti-depression and other medications. Maybe it was gentrification! There’s the unleaded gasoline theory.
The point is: no one knows! No one knows!
Which, if you think about it, is totally scary.
I mean, I suspect for the last thirty years, we didn’t think about it, actively, day-to-day. But the reduction in crime has been a huge thing in America. It’s made our cities safer, it’s allowed for our creative class (us!) to move back to cities. It’s brought companies back to the cities. It’s given rise to Brooklyn’s renaissance and LA’s hipness and SoHo’s rents and the Village not dying and Austin’s massive growth and cool little midwestern cities like Knoxville and Asheville. It’s had a massive positive impact on virtually all of our lives — even in smaller towns like my home town, crime is way, way down since when I was growing up.
Our children have had a totally different relationship to crime than we have. Yes, the sensationalist media still reports every murder breathlessly, but they are consuming less of that type of sensationalist media (not necessarily for better media, just for different, less local, sensationalist media). Q Anon aside, the whole bugbear of the creepy dude in a van kidnapping your kid off of the side of the road has almost completely disappears because it basically doesn’t happen anymore (not that it happened much back then). These days, the vast majority of crime is domestic, or corporate or state-sponsored.
But not knowing why this changed? That is really scary!
Especially when you think about tinkering with any public policy whatsoever.
Our entire society, when looked at through the prism of violent crime, is basically a very delicately balanced machine. It’s like a 1970’s television with an antenna made out of a coat hanger and tinfoil that is just perfectly getting the signal and do not touch it because you are probably going to fuck it up and lose the tv signal.
And, if you think about it, this situation is perfectly ripe for conservatives. After all, what’s the famous William Buckley quote: “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop.” Which is what exactly I would yell if you tried to screw with my goldbergian antenna situation. Don’t touch it! It’s fine! You might break it!
But, of course, conservatives don’t fucking know either, and it’s just as likely that the whole reduction in crime was caused by Roe v Wade or Title 9 or the decrease in redlining. It is, of course, worth noting that crime got worse and worse through the Reagan and Bush administrations and finally turned around in the Clinton administration. Though, as we know, Clinton is not really known for his progressive criminal justice laws, but mayhaps the rates were influenced by some other piece of his legislation. Or the internet. We don’t know! We don’t know!
I do believe that the fact that we don’t know makes it worth talking about, having a robust discussion, in our society, when crime starts to get worse. And, of course, every change in the crime rate is a new batch of statistics to analyze. This time, of course, crime seems intrinsically tied to a massive economic and health event, and it does not seem unreasonable to assume that it will get better as the economic and health events improve. Though who knows! It will prove very instructive over the next decade!
My personal inclination is to not worry about it for the next year or two, see if it gets better as the economy gets better. But, of course, this might be totally wrong! It could be tied to income inequality instead, for example, which is still steadily getting worse (there was a large reduction in income inequality in the Clinton years roughly tied to the years of a reduction in crime).
And, in any cases, we’re changing too many variables at once. We may never know. There is a slow but steady bipartisan effort at reducing prison sentencing over the last decade. We’ve made some small progress on incarceration levels as well. Will those have an impact? No one knows!
I don’t really know where I was going with this. It’s hard to write up a pithy conclusion when your thesis is we don’t know anything about this! But it has been irking me yesterday, everyone talking about crime but no one admitting we’re clueless and have been historically clueless. Everyone picking up the issue and using it to push the beliefs they already have, using it to validate their worldview. It is manifestly not that simple, and so far I don’t see a single public voice admitting that.
In other news, I was thinking last night that if I get out of this job in the next year or two, I will still have time to go to one of those digital arts schools and get a certificate in visual effects and become a VFX animator in Hollywood for the last twenty years of my life. That seems kind of fun. Get your name in the credits, not get to go to premieres because you’re not important enough. Spend a lot of time with a Wacom tablet. Do people still use Wacom tablets?
Still trying to buy a PS5, following a bunch of alert Twitter accounts now, keeping like three tabs open. Still no luck. Really is amazing. I mean it’s June, they haven’t caught up to last year’s demand, and they’re already heading into the next holiday season. What a mess.
I don’t have any photos for you today.
Joan Robinson needs a biopic.
Today’s mix is a live mix. Because who doesn’t miss live music? Let’s go see some live music. I am ready. I would go see a show right now. It would be awesome. I have, sadly, not live seen every band on this mix. I haven’t seen Mount Eerie — but oh, god, I want to, even though I don’t think I have a friend emo and sad enough to accompany me to that show. I haven’t seen Pink Floyd, I haven’t seen Kacey Musgraves, god that kills me. I was actually outside of this exact Kacey Musgraves show, planning to go, and I could even hear it, but someone distracted me and I went to someplace on East 6th to drink — oh, no, I remember. I went to see Empress Of and Hinds at the Hype Hotel. Okay, that was awesome. I do not regret that. My friend did not have a badge for the Spotify house. It happens. But I do have the Kacey Musgraves Zippo and velvet painting, so I am a true fan.
Wow I overslept by, like, 40 minutes today. I didn’t think I was going to finish this in time. Fantastic. Have a lovely Thursday! Don’t play too much Civ VI. You know. Hypothetically.
A few things:
1) I enjoyed the Mike Posner talk, but really thought we’d get a Mike Posner mix…
2) not sure what a June oven is, but we have this steam/convection tabletop oven and it’s a goddamn dream. Reheats pasta like a miracle. Cuisinart Convection, Stainless Steel Steam & Convection Oven, 20x15 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01JRT2WOG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_JJZ82CBJW6JFWAJVRWZ2
3) Wacom tablets are awesome!