Is he the same guy who wrote the N+1 piece advocating letting the crime rate rise? In the words of MST3K, I salute you for having the courage to put your fantasies on screen, sir.
If this is thread for critiques of liberal-progressive policies from the left, I thought this--regarding affirmative action--was worth thinking about (I do think there is something to the dynamic described):
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/06/racecraft-racism-social-origins-reparations/
And then on the other side you have people like Michelle Alexander -- read all the way to the end of her book -- who has a very different argument about affirmative action. And by the way, I don't think her argument is aimed at the Left as much as it's aimed at the liberal legal and civil rights establishment; they've been focused on affirmative action and diversity, she argues, while mass incarceration has unfolded under their noses. She makes an interesting observation: "Whereas black success stories undermined the logic of Jim Crow, they actually reinforce the system of mass incarceration."
Think about that for a minute. Because under the old Jim Crow, the idea was that black people couldn't do anything; if you were black, you couldn't be a doctor, couldn't be a lawyer, and certainly couldn't be president. And so we cheered for every black doctor or black lawyer, because that challenged the logic of the old Jim Crow.
But the ideology of the new Jim Crow, is to pump up the few black success stories in order to denigrate everybody else, in order to further pathologize black people, as if to say, "If you're not the president, then what the eff is wrong with you?" And so she argues that affirmative action ("now we're admitting 8 black people to Harvard . . . see?") is part of the structure of blame for everybody else. And that's important.
I remember the Spartacists used to show up on the U of C campus to yell about how gun control was racist, particularly the effort to ban "Saturday Night Specials." It's the only gun some can afford!
Ugh, if there's one thing that I find particularly grating (and constant) in American discussions about political stuff it's this kind of "but we don't know what could happen if we did this and maybe this awful thing could happen as a result of some very complicated and poorly described pathways" argument. We are not alone in the world and, as often as not, those things have already been tried a great many times in comparable countries without anything resembling the effects people ascribe to them in those arguments.
Hold up, there were black doctors and lawyers, and black schools for them in the South. Not enough, obviously, the schools and students and graduates all struggled, but it's not accurate that there was some kind of absolute prohibition. (There was a saying that in the South, black college students who wanted a secure living went into preaching, and the dreamy idealists went into law.)
It's not like respectability politics didn't exist in 1910.
they've been focused on affirmative action and diversity, she argues, while mass incarceration has unfolded under their noses.
I think it's also worth noting that affirmative action and programs to encourage diversity are popular in part because they are cheap. They don't cost anything, they just reallocate existing resources.
In contrast, mass incarceration, better education and social services are expensive. It's very revealing which of those things we're actually willing to pay for. Affirmative action may be harmful in that it is perceived as a zero-cost substitute for some of these other things.
The thing that really makes this land for me was the Michelle Alexander quote at the link:
"I had an [assistant U.S. attorney who] wanted to drop the gun charge against the defendant [in a case which] there were no extenuating circumstances. I asked, 'Why do you want to drop the gun offense?' And he said, 'He's a rural guy and grew up on a farm. The gun he had with him was a rifle. He's a good ol' boy, and all good ol' boys have rifles, and it's not like he was a gun-toting drug dealer.' But he was a gun-toting drug dealer, exactly."
There's a similar argument with regard to hate crimes legislation - that increasing the power and reach of the carceral state is too compromised a position for progressives. I don't know about if there's as stark a tendency in unequal enforcement as the one described in that quote though.
I like this from the link in 3:
Second Amendment cultists truly believe that guns are political power. That guns in fact are the only source of political power. That's why, despite loving guns, and despite being so right-wing, they betray such a paranoid fear and hatred of armed agents of the government (minus Border Guards, they all tend to love our Border Guards). If you think guns, rather than concentrated wealth, equals political power, then you'd resent government power far more than you'd resent billionaires' power or corporations' hyper-concentrated wealth/power, because government will always have more and bigger guns. In fact you'd see pro-gun, anti-government billionaires like the Kochs as your natural political allies in your gun-centric notion of political struggle against the concentrated gun power of government.
How very convenient that works out to be.
Also it links back to the Gourevitch article from the OP.
It's not like respectability politics didn't exist in 1910.
Indeed, one might base one's argument on a belief that some small segment of African-Americans -- an Elite Eleventh, say, or a Notable Ninth -- were going to do that slow boring of hard boards.
I'm not sure your average gun nut thinks that guns are power and that wealth isn't, so much as that guns are attainable power and wealth isn't. And while we can say that the government is always going to outgun you, the fact is that for a white person, the Cliven Bundy model isn't completely unreasonable. Of course, the real power for most of you gn population is over intruders and house invaders -- a vanishingly small threat, sure, but more real than black helicopters.
an Elite Eleventh, say, or a Notable Ninth
Perhaps a Tweedy Twelfth?
"Militaristic bobby thumb control."
Totally the name of my next band.
Gourevitch's variant of non-argument as quoted in the post seems more-or-less unique to American gun culture, particularly the libertarian wing of it that wants to pretend that the only alternative to widespread gun nuttery is being dominated by the "warrior cop" (cf. Radley Balko), though I don't know if G. himself is a libertarian or just being taken in by a typically-libertarian debate club tactic here. The reality to me would seem to be that the "warrior cop" is fuelled and excused by the lack of gun control; a strong NRA and a strong culture of militarized policing are practically joined at the hip, the only worthy response to a bad guy with a gun being a good guy with a bigger gun and so on.
(That said, G. has a non-trivial point about the perversion of gun control arguments in service of racist policing methods like stop-and-frisk. I can't go there with him that such perversions are a necessary consequence of gun control.)
Agreeing with 20, I don't find it very convincing that better gun control laws would inexorably militarize the police. What I do believe is that, under the current policing and criminal justice climate we have, they would function in the same way current drug laws do in terms of whom they are wielded against. If there is a meaningful issue being raised, it's whether (from a pony-land progressive perspective), you delay efforts gun control (and other reforms aimed at criminalizing more behavior) until you've rolled back the network of forces that make up "New Jim Crow".
I'm confident that our nation's police can find reasons to arrest black people even in the absence of gun control laws.