Drew Johnson’s “The Eloquent Vindicator in the Electric Room” is a thought-provoking piece about the assassination of Congressman James M. Hinds in 1868 (and if you’re thinking “Who?”… well, that’s his point); what brings it here is this paragraph:
His wife ran a rummage sale posing as an antique store. She and I spoke for just a few minutes but couldn’t figure out just what variety of cousins we were. Then, unbidden, she began to talk about the moment when emancipation and the end of the war freed the people enslaved by the Greears. The family, she said, told the people they had owned that they were no longer bound to them or to the land they had known. Some stayed, some left. That was all she told me, but her voice was sepia-toned, possessed by nostalgia for something she’d never known. Anemoia. A word all Americans ought to know.
I wasn’t familiar with the word, but that’s because it’s not a word at all in the traditional sense; it’s one of the ones coined by John Koenig for his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — see the end of this post from last year, where I say “I recently discovered the term occhiolism, ‘The awareness of the small scope of one’s own perspective and the way it limits one’s ability to fully understand the world’ […] I’m not normally a fan of invented words, but I like this one, which represents a concept important to me.” The same goes for this one, so (as I said then) good for Koenig! Wiktionary tells us it’s “Constructed from Ancient Greek ἄνεμος (ánemos, ‘wind’) + νόος (nóos, ‘mind’), with reference to anemosis, the warping of a tree by high wind ‘until it seems to bend backward’”; it really should be anemonoia, but it sounds better as is, so (*bangs gavel*) I’ll allow it. (As for anemosis, it’s not in the OED, but it is in M-W, so it probably is an actual word, though as far as I can tell from Google Books it occurs almost entirely in lexicons.)
The history of Arkansas is a fairly obscure byway of U.S. history and probably most folks were happy we got through eight years of an Arkansan in the White House without having to learn much about it. In the context of this story I think maybe it’s relevant that there’s a bit of a regional overlapping of a certain “wild west” or frontier style of extralegal violence with a separate and somewhat different tradition of extralegal violence found more broadly in the Jim Crow Deep South. The worst of both worlds, as it were.
Johnson wrote the piece he wanted to write based on chains of free association that interested him. I might have been interested in others, but it was his piece to write.
One road-not-taken comparison would be instead of looking at Hinds in connection with other people who died violently in other places and at other times to look at him in connection with the other now-obscure people who were doing much the same thing in the same time and place but managed not to get killed for it.
Hinds was one of three pro-civil-rights Republicans who were elected to the House of Representatives from Arkansas when its representation in Congress was first restored in 1868. Another one was like Hinds a carpetbagger, who was reelected once to Congress before being defeated and then losing a subsequent government job due to unspecified scandal before apparently becoming a pillar of the local business community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_H._Roots The third was perhaps more interesting because he was a local fellow who had been part of the minority of Arkansas whites who opposed secession and indeed served in the Union Army – he lived into the early 20th century holding intermittent federal patronage jobs and serving as a pillar of the increasingly-powerless state Republican party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Boles To what extent he and Roots had made their peace with the Jim Crow status quo in their later years, versus disapproving of it but having no practical non-symbolic tools at hand to do much about it, is not clear, although someone looking for an obscure historical topic could dig into it.
And then there’s the rather colorful Joseph Brooks, who was wounded in the attack that killed Hinds and went on six years later to lead the losing faction in the violent struggle for control of the state government known as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%E2%80%93Baxter_War
See also, perhaps, this memoiristic post by David Lowery from earlier this year giving the backstory to a song from his new autobiographical/memoiristic album about stopping in his ancestral Arkansas while moving from California to Virginia back in 1990, and brooding about the legacy of violence and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. https://davidclowery.substack.com/p/14-piney-woods (The Lowery family tree may be rooted in I think a different region of the state than that which adorns part of the Hattic family tree, and you can of course have lots of regional variation within a single state.)
Spurious nostalgia for an imaginary golden past looks quite likely to doom us all at present.
That’s not to say that I can’t imagine benign versions. “Hey, do you remember when Conservative shadow ministers were dismissed the very next day for making racist speeches? Do you remember when the [future] leader of the Labour Party said “this party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing”? Ah me! How happy we were then!”
(I was just reading a biography of the leader in question, which actually brought home to me just how very unaware I was of the actual state of the UK as a whole in the years when I was a medical student. Perfect for anemonononoia!)
@Hat: I think a comment I posted about half an hour ago may have been eaten by the software because of too many links. They weren’t actually spam. Can you liberate it? Thanks!
If we are talking about spurious nostalgia in America, and invented words, how about ethnokleptalgia (ἔθνος + κλέπτω + ἄλγος) to describe Americans who claim an ethnic identity they’ve never experienced, based on some long-ago ancestor’s migration?
Hey, I’m happy for Americans to make spurious claims to Welsh identity, so long as they’re prepared to send me money.
I should point out that virtually all Welsh people are of noble descent, if that would encourage them.
(This is actually true, more or less: in the latter part of the Middle Ages, economic and demographic changes led to the near-total disappearance of the taeogion “villeins” in Wales; the clear majority of people left in the countryside were of bonheddig “noble” origin. Just without any actual, like, money or resources.)
you can of course have lots of regional variation within a single state
You sure can, and northwest Arkansas (the Hattic homeland) has essentially nothing to do with the Piney Woods (which is practically part of Louisiana) or the Delta (which is practically part of Mississippi).
Also, I have (as I think I have mentioned before) an ancestor from Merthyr Tydfil.
Good enough!
(I have relatives thereabouts myself, though they got there via Argentina. The family was from North Wales originally.)
[that last NP is rather cryptic/compacted: this sort of trust fall?]
In the vein of “knowing nothing can sometimes enable a person to know other things, and say them”, what I am constantly surprised by about USA (but probably shouldn’t be) is that too many people have too many guns, and seem to think that shooting someone you don’t like is reasonable behaviour.
Is the prevalence of (allegedly) politically-motivated shootings much different from the prevalence of shootings-in-general?
To Johnson’s claim: the purported lack of interest in political shootings is because there’s just too many of them. Why care about a shooting in 1868 when there’s an overwhelming number (too many to hold in mind) of shootings in this year?
I think I may have to share ethnokleptalgia with my genealogist buddies. Oh the troupes of Cherokee princesses Americans have hidden in their family trees!
The claim that Rep. Hinds was “the first US congressman to be assassinated while in office” is FWIW defensible but maybe a little tendentious. Prior to the Civil War, four members of Congress (including one Senator) were killed in duels and two more died under mysterious circumstances claimed by some to have resulted from deliberate poisoning. Less than a year before Hinds was shot, Congressman Hamilton of Ohio was beaten to earth by his own son, who apparently escaped prosecution due to a belief that he was insane.
The rate of violent death for member of Congress then slowed down considerably post-1868 (and it’s been 42 years since the last one, knock on wood), although except for a fairly obscure one in 1905, the remaining 20th-century killings were all pretty high profile: in two cases because those killed were actual or potential candidates for the presidency (Huey Long & Rob’t Kennedy Sr.); in the other two because the Congressmen killed were killed as part of (or at least in relation to) incidents that also killed hundreds of others and were thus quite newsworthy even without the dead-Congressman angle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_United_States_Congress_killed_or_wounded_in_office
(Note fwiw a certain lack of editorial consistency in the list of those “wounded,” mixing and matching incidents which could easily have been fatal and were or could have been prosecuted as attempted murder, on the one hand, with much less serious ones, on the other.)
I’m not sure I understand AntC’s question. Obviously there are times and places (e.g. Northern Ireland during the “Troubles”) where politically motivated shootings make up a comparatively high percentage of total shootings and other times and places where they make up a much lower percentage. And in the U.S. there was quite a wave against high-profile targets during the period beginning with the killing of Pres. Kennedy in 1963 and ending with the wounding of Pres. Reagan in 1981* but then a considerable lull for many years thereafter, even though “regular” homicide rates were high throughout the Eighties before peaking in the early Nineties and then starting a sharp decline (with rate of decline having considerable regional variation**).
Note FWIW that that particularly violent era in U.S. political history overlaps substantially if not exactly with e.g. the violent period in Italian political history known as the “years of lead” (anni di piombi) as well as a variety of violent episodes elsewhere in Europe, so some of the background causal factors may cross borders. (The wiki article on the years of lead doesn’t even mention the attempted killing of the Pope in 1981, presumably because the assailant’s motivations seemed extraneous to the very Italy-specific context that had motivated e.g. the killing of Aldo Mori a few years earlier, but that seems too parochial a view to me.)
*It is rather extraordinary in hindsight that Gerald Ford, arguably the least polarizing and inflammatory U.S. president of my lifetime, was while in office the subject of not one but two assassination attempts. The best explanation would be that it was simply the fashion of the time.
**Here’s a chart showing the considerable variation in homicide rate in Arkansas from 1979 to 2017 graphed against the variation in the national average: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/states/arkansas/murder-homicide-rate-statistics
what I am constantly surprised by about USA (but probably shouldn’t be) is that too many people have too many guns, and seem to think that shooting someone you don’t like is reasonable behaviour.
That is not something that can only be noticed and/or spoken of from afar; trust me, it is a commonplace of public discourse here. It’s just that the NRA (יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ) has created a critical mass of Americans who feel strongly that it is their God-given right to carry as many weapons as they like, anywhere and everywhere, without let or hindrance. They are strangely resistant to the idea that this in any way increases the likelihood of gun violence.
Yet by 2014 the per-capita homicide rate in the U.S. was less than half of what it had been when it peaked in 1991 despite the persistence of these cultural/political factors and attitudes and no significant diminution in the total number of guns floating around. So it would appear that there are other important causal factors that are less intractable. (The rate went back up significantly after 2015 but then declined again – 2024 was close to the prior modern low and 2025 is reportedly on track to be even better but we obviously should be overconfident about that yet.)
And again you have both diachronic swings in the rate and persistent synchronic differences within the U.S. E.g. despite the considerable up and down swing within Arkansas it pretty much at all times had a higher rate than e.g. Maine – also a predominantly rural state w/ plenty of pine trees.
“Sonder” is another obscure sorrow that has escaped confinement. There’s even an AirBnB clone named after it.
Yet by 2014 the per-capita homicide rate in the U.S. was less than half of what it had been when it peaked in 1991
Yes, these things are very complicated. But maintaining that the prevalence of guns and gun culture has nothing to do with murders seems very like maintaining that the occasional cold winter proves that there’s no such thing as global warming.
I think “culture” is a word like “dialect” where you may need to be careful about using it in the singular. is the “gun culture” of the South Side of Chicago the same as the “gun culture” of rural Montana? But this can easily become the sort of “American exceptionalism” that seems parochial, because it assumes that the only foreign countries of interest in the world are in Europe, so if the U.S. deviates in some regard from a European average it must be noteworthy. The U.S. has a lower homicide rate at present than the vast majority of the other former European colonies throughout North and South America, often a dramatically lower one. Why should Uruguay (with FWIW a lower rate than most other South American nations) have a homicide rate roughly double that of the U.S.? The political clout of the local gun lobby? Cultural factors dating to colonial times? The legacy of coups d’etat and military juntas within the living memory of older residents? But then (as to both of the latter two possible factors) why is it so much higher at present than Argentina’s?
I can’t answer those questions (nor, as far as I am aware, can anyone else), but if you don’t know what I mean by America’s “gun culture” or think America is no different in that regard than any other country, I don’t know what to tell you.
But this can easily become the sort of “American exceptionalism” that seems parochial, because it assumes that the only foreign countries of interest in the world are in Europe, so if the U.S. deviates in some regard from a European average it must be noteworthy.
That assumption is an error, but I wouldn’t call it “American exceptionalism”.
And comparisons with countries of similar wealth are often justified. For the U.S., a lot of those countries are in Europe—maybe all but Canada and Australia, if your measure is “equivalized” median income.
The U.S. has a lower homicide rate at present than the vast majority of the other former European colonies throughout North and South America, often a dramatically lower one. Why should Uruguay (with FWIW a lower rate than most other South American nations) have a homicide rate roughly double that of the U.S.?
I’d certainly start by looking at wealth.
I suspect that colossal (by comparison to other countries) number of firearms per person in the US is explained mainly by large number of boring people keeping their guns for hunting, target shooting, and no particular reason at all, just having them around. I don’t think that this is what is meant by “gun culture”. Relatively small number of gun enthusiasts weigh heavily on “culture” and not so much on statistics.
According to this survey, the main stated reason for gun ownership in the U.S. is protection or safety.
If you’re going to study gun culture, or cultures as J.W. says, you might also want to look at depictions of guns in entertainment and the nature and strength of political opinions on guns.
What I said about the wealthiest countries by equivalized median income (adjusted for purchasing-power-parity) is probably not true. The table in the Wikiparticle I linked to doesn’t purport to be complete, and is conspicuously missing the Arab oil-exporting countries, among others that might be high on the list.
I imagine this is an active subfield of criminology, with papers and dissertations and books and everything.
Yup.
the main stated reason for gun ownership in the U.S. is protection or safety
I believe that the actual statistics show that gun ownership in the US significantly increases your risk of dying by a gun (though I think this is largely driven by suicide and domestic accidents.) I suspect that red-blooded Americans (if they accept the validity of arithmetic at all) would in any case argue that this just proves how right the gun owners in question were to be afraid of death by gunfire, and that the solution is obviously more guns.
@DE: accurate on both counts.
and there is a very substantial difference between the place of guns in the actually-rural u.s. (substantially lower than the 20% counted as “rural” in the census – likely at most 10%), and in the suburban/exurban zones where most u.s. gun owners live. the former does meaningfully involve hunting as a regular part of life; in the latter, “hunting” may be an occasional activity, but is primarily an excuse for owning guns* – just as, for the same white and relatively wealthy population, various kinds of fictional Traditionally Masculine work are used as excuses for owning pickup trucks whose beds never in fact see cargo that isn’t bagged at the checkout counter of a big-box store.
but u.s. gun fetishism isn’t particularly complicated, subtle, or hard to understand: it’s very explicitly** just equal parts big-prosthetic-dick bullshit and white supremacist race-war preparation.
.
* deployed in contexts where “protection” is implausible, or (surprisingly often) in ways where the game in question clearly includes humans.
** in the words of both its most respectable propagandists (take your pick of NRA leaders and u.s. senators) and its openly neo-nazi propagandists (from charlie kirk to george lincoln rockwell), and of damn near every “ordinary guy” interviewee the NYBeobachter and its ilk dig up.
At the same time, gun fetishism (and I agree it’s ridiculous), has almost as tenuous a connection to the murder rate as most pick-up drivers have to cargo hauling.
(Mine hauled my business’s kayak paddles and life jackets for 20 years, and now that I’ve sold the business, I’m trying to trade the truck in for another EV before the credit expires on Monday.)
I’d also be cautious about the correlation/causation between gun ownership and violent death.
Stick with Uruguay. We’ve probably already heard everyone’s just-so stories about the U.S. Stop, as it were, talking about English and see if your syntactic theory can account for the facts of some other language that hasn’t already been overdiscussed. You can even look up Uruguay’s GDP-per-capita and compare its homicide rate to that of European and Asian countries with lower GDP-per-capita stats.* Or see how well GDP-per-capita rank order predicts homicide-rate rank order within Latin American and/or Caribbean nations.
Uruguay, come to think of it, is sort of fascinatingly understudied in all sorts of areas. Remote enough from the U.S. that no one thinks of it as a peer country, yet somehow not exotic enough as to attract interest for that very reason. No style of music as well known as that emanating from Argentina or Brazil. Even if at some point in the 20th century it had Marxist guerillas who were ruthlessly suppressed by a CIA-friendly junta (which it did!), they were not name-brand Marxist guerillas who became celebrities in U.S. college towns, nor did the strongmen who squelched them become name-brand villains in ditto. Nor do we even know enough about the Uruguayan economy to know what shadowy and exploitative corporate interests the CIA would have been trying to serve. No oil, no bananas. (OK, I looked it up: at present the leading Uruguayan exports to the U.S. are Frozen Bovine Meat and Sulfate Chemical Woodpulp.)
*Of course, some poor countries have suspiciously low reported homicide rates because they do not have competent and well-functioning statistics-collection bureaucracies. This is definitely a reason to be skeptical of reported rates from many parts of Africa – I’m less sure about Asia.
Back to the original topic here, I couldn’t help noticing the intersection between the derivation of anemoia (“Constructed from Ancient Greek ἄνεμος (ánemos, ‘wind’) + νόος (nóos, ‘mind’), with reference to anemosis, the warping of a tree by high wind ‘until it seems to bend backward’”) and the title of the novel Gone with the Wind, which refers to the character Scarlett O’Hara’s nostalgia for a life she had in fact known — the wind in that case being the devastation that had swept through Georgia during the Civil War.
Martin’s point is an interesting one, but there’s a contrast between what is irretrievably gone because it has been blown away and what remains but is warped or bent. I’m frankly not following the logic of the coiner of anemoia in terms of how the bent tree actually represents the emotional state the coinage is supposed to apply to.
It does seem that one should be careful not to muddle up anemosis (a thing that can happen to trees/timber) with anemotis (an epithet of Athena, subduer of the winds or perhaps of the wind-specific gods).
To hat’s point that “anemosis” occurs largely in lexicons, the synonym offered in some definitions of “windshake” by contrast appears more often in running prose in fairly technical publications intended for those involved in forestry or trades that make use of lumber. I guess foresters were not, as of a century ago, one of the occupational groups that preferred learned classical-style words to transparent compounds of Anglo-Saxon morphemes.
In the 21st century, “windshake” appears in the _Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English_ as if a rusticism, but a century prior it was in bulletins issued by the U.S. Forest Service that do not appear to be written in rustic dialect.
FWIW “windshake” does not seem to focus on any bent or warped outward appearance of the tree while standing, but instead on cracks in the wood caused by the effect of wind on the tree (rendering the wood less useful) that become obvious only after the tree has been felled and is being cut up for use as lumber.
In Nigeria, a country where armed robbers are, um, not unheard-of, the standing wisdom is to give in at once, give the robbers everything they want, and beg them not to shoot you. This appears to be much more successful as a means of preserving your life than trying to shoot the robbers yourself. Nigerians have experience in these matters.
Ghana, I am glad to say, is very much safer than the US. (I’m pretty sure this is no artefact of inadequate data collection.)
[I think I’ve previously told the story of a Nigerian trainee who was attached to us in Ghana. He got home one evening to find a burglary in progress in his house. He couldn’t stop talking about it for days: “Ghana is a wonderful country! I shouted at a burglar and he ran away!”]
I would guess the difference between Uruguay and the US is that in the former most gun violence is done by professional criminals, for whom guns are a tool of the trade. Whereas the US leads in random angry gun violence. The latter is affected by gun availability and by the cultural belief that if all else fails (that being variously defined), you use a gun. Professional robbers and gangs are less dependent on these constraints.
Uruguay specifically is an important port for cocaine exportation. I would guess the shootings there are mostly associated with drug gang turf wars, not with random angry individuals.
Sulfate Chemical Woodpulp played at Toad’s while I was in town, but I was into jazz in those days and had no idea how big they would become.
It’s obviously a very sensitive, contentious issue, but if black-on-black homicide is deducted, the US homicide rate is much more comparable with that in Europe.
On gun deaths the picture is muddied because guns are a much preferred way of suicide in the States.
@hat: Who could have expected at the time that SCW’s Uruguayan fanbase would sustain them economically until the time was finally right for their mainstream U.S. breakthrough?
@Y: the Uruguayan government does seem to offer lots of sorts of statistical breakdowns of their homicidios. Go here https://observatorioseguridad.minterior.gub.uy/pentaho/api/repos/:public:observatorio:MININT_Observatorio.wcdf/generatedContent
and then poke around. For full-year 2024 they break down Motivos/circunstancia precipitantes into four-to-six categories (with the fifth being “other” and the sixth being “unknown”), with AJUSTE DE CURENTAS / CONFLICTOS ENTRE CRIMINALES responsible for 53.7%. I don’t know if there’s a directly comparable breakdown for the U.S., at least of high quality, and of course the comparatively low Ecuadorian percentage for unknown suggests perhaps unwarranted confidence in having correctly characterized ambiguous situations. Uruguayan percentage committed con arma de fuego is a bit lower than the US (64% v. 79%); Uruguyan percentage of victims who are male is higher (88% v. 78%).
But the overall Uruguayan rate is double the U.S. rate, so if you think the Ecuadorian number is driven by “professionals” whereas U.S. homicides are mostly “random,” it would follow that Ecuadorian professionals are dramatically more than twice as lethal as their American counterparts.
@jwb
They would not have to be less lethal, I suspect that they are more adapted to cooperative criminal enterprises or the turf divisions have been settled longer (compare relative paucity of West European state warfare with territorial redivision in 20-21 C).
>In Nigeria, a country where armed robbers are, um, not unheard-of, the standing wisdom is to give in at once, give the robbers everything they want, and beg them not to shoot you. This appears to be much more successful as a means of preserving your life than trying to shoot the robbers yourself. Nigerians have experience in these matters.
Chicagoans have a certain amount of experience as well, and you’d be surprised. You can browse the archives of the Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown blog (cwbchicago.com) for incidents involving concealed carry permit holders.
I don’t own a gun, don’t plan to and I’m quite sure I would not be successful in escaping armed robbers by drawing my own weapon. But I read about a fair amount of success, along with an unfortunate number of robbery victims who choose compliance and still get shot. I think the devil is in the details here.
While I do understand that some police-involved shootings also involve police lies about what transpired, many clearly do not – criminals draw, but the police are more clinical. The fact that the police win more than they lose further underlines my sense that appropriate training and response may mean that some people can do better defending themselves than begging for their lives.
The Uruguayan authorities do do a little bit of victim-blaming, with pie charts showing the percentage of homicide victims with “antecedentes penales,” meaning a prior criminal record of their own. It’s 59% for the first six months of 2025. That’s not necessarily much higher than in the U.S., although different studies have come up with different figures as noted in this recent investigation of the question in the state where Ryan lives: https://icjia.illinois.gov/researchhub/articles/victim-offender-overlap-firearm-homicide-victims-with-and-without-criminal-records/
not name-brand Marxist guerillas who became celebrities in U.S. college towns
i kinda hate to quibble, because i agree with the comment’s overall point, but:
during their period of activity (late 1960s-early 1970s) the Tupamaros were very much a Big Name for the u.s. revolutionary left, and a very central, regularly acknowledged, influence on the u.s. versions of foco theory that shaped the Weather Underground and their less-publicized peers (arguably more important than the cuban model, since the Tupamaros talked specifically about urban guerrilla operations). their current obscurity to most u.s. leftists doesn’t reflect their fame and significance at the time.
and, similarly, eduardo galeano has had at least two periods of being one of the most widely read latin american intellectuals among u.s. leftists: first in the late 1970s/early 1980s when his work appeared in english (Las Venas Abiertas..; Días y noches…; Memoria del Fuego), and again in the late 1990s/early 00s, when that early work was reissued and later works translated (El Fútbol…; Patas Arriba). (the influence of Venas Abiertas on zinn’s People’s History isn’t really relevant here, but i think it’s important enough that i can’t let it go unmentioned)
but i do very much wish that murga uruguaya got more recognition, especially the great Araca La Cana, who’ve been at it since 1934!
The mentioned piombo is itself a prime suspect: lead from leaded gasoline makes people violent if they grow up inhaling it.
Yes, but there is another factor: being known to have a gun makes you a target for burglary, because small arms in particular are easy to carry away and sell – and the burglars are armed. Because they’re armed, they don’t even necessarily feel a need to wait till you’re out of the house; that’s called a home invasion.
And yet, there’s a stunningly widespread cultural assumption – all across the political spectrum – that having a gun really will protect you, as if being a Good Guy With a Gun automatically made you faster at the draw.
Oh, nothing is settled there. WWII just finally got it through to people that any further attempt to settle with violence would just end up killing even more people on all sides and keep everything ruined; plus, for decades immediately after WWII, the US and the USSR were not only able but even willing to simply not allow that. People haven’t settled, they’ve given up at long last. Except Putin, but he can’t go on for much longer either.
Oh! My parents have had it at home for decades: Die offenen Adern Lateinamerikas. (Veins and arteries indiscriminately.) I still haven’t read it, but it’s known.
One of the more bizarre themes in American public life in the last few decades is an unwillingness to attribute the dramatic drop in homicide rates between say 1991 and 2014 to the one of the most obvious causes, namely punitive advance incarceration of potential murderers via the inhumane and illiberal expedient of giving them overlong prison sentences for nominally nonviolent drug crimes. Thus the market for alternative One Weird Trick causal explanations having to do with lead or abortion policy or anything else that would make the drop somehow inevitable due to events of many years previous rather than resulting from actual policies being pursued contemporaneously with the drop.
If nothing else, the lead hypothesis has nothing to say about why homicide rates spiked back up materially after 2014 before falling again after 2021.
But the lead hypothesis applies to Europe, where the recent spike has not happened.
Is that also why all Basques are hidalgos?
I appreciate rozele’s quibbles! By the time of my own college-town years, which coincided with the Sandinista-adulation boom (with the FMLN already fading a bit in comparison), the Tupamaros had faded from fame so much (their albums were all out of print and you couldn’t even find weird European reissues in the import bins …) that I must have inaccurately concluded that it had always been thus. And the mirror-image point of that was that Pinochet was very much demonized by name (brand recognition, again) whereas I doubt that any of my undergraduate contemporaries could have named any of the personalities running the illiberal junta in Uruguay that did not turn things back over to an elected civilian regime until our sophomore year.
Is that also why all Basques are hidalgos?
Might be, for all I know. After all, it’s pretty hard to get decent villeins these days.
One of the Uruguayan strongmen of the Seventies was of Basque descent. It all coheres!
one of the most obvious causes, namely punitive advance incarceration of potential murderers
The US is indeed a world leader in rates of incarceration, beaten only by El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, all known for their low murder rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
In terms of absolute numbers, the US leads the world. The PRC is not far behind, but cheats by having a much larger population.
Well, the murder rate in El Salvador is much lower now that almost all young men are locked up, isn’t it.
There can be little doubt, statistically, that permanent incarceration of all men would drastically reduce the rate of violent crime (at least, violent crime outside prisons), though I can see that there might be something of a quis custodiet problem. Perhaps “AI” might be the solution.
Have you forgotten the women? They can keep an eye on the locked-up men in their spare time, since running the world will have gotten substantially easier.
Good point.
“Meanwhile, I just hold on here. Bill keeps the floors clean, and I run the World Government. It really isn’t as difficult as you might think.”
(Le Guin)
God bless ULG. I still treasure the postcard I got from her.
Brewer is right. The dramatic fall in US homicide rates over the past decades has to do with right-wing tough-on-crime policies and virtually nothing to do with anything else. The only way to fight crime is a ruthless, aggressive and superbly well-funded criminal justice system, not demagogic campaigns about social justice.
That depends on a lot of things. Consider drug-related crimes in Portugal…
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/DFTT
Yeah, please do not engage.
Yeah, please do not engage.
I’ve often acted on that maxim with many of DE’s political lardings, which presumably don’t count as trolling.
And some have asked why the internet is so left-wing.
And some have asked why the internet is so left-wing.
I’m checking up on that. I started reading The Internet. When I’m done, I’ll have a clearer idea of whether that is true, on balance.
It’s because it was invented by Al Gore.
They’re meant to elicit half-joking agreement. This, on the other hand, is a statement of faith – worded about as strongly as possible – that mentions or alludes to zero reasons why anyone should think so and is knowingly thrown into a group that is expected to emotionally disagree with it. Why would anybody do that, except in order to get people upset? That’s where my accusation of trolling comes from.
(I tried to find a discussable nit in it anyway. Oh well.)
You’re just in the wrong silo here. Echo chambers are available for every conceivable shade of rightwingery, and then some. Even within the platform known as Twitter there are left, right and many other silos that you can apparently stay in unperturbed for months. Or maybe you should try to find a fitting subreddit or three.
Not to mention that this is not a political site; its proprietor (moi) happens to be a pacifist/feminist/anarchist, so those points of view sometimes get expressed, but it is primarily a site for discussion of language and literature, so political elements are extras that should stay in the wings and not parade before the footlights.
@David M.
You ignore that I started the comment by signaling agreement to another commentator (Brewer) who did mention and who did allude to possible reasons. The anarchist owner of this virtual property has stopped me talking about such harmless stuff as Ayn Rand’s philosophical links to Aristotle or why retail prices are not ‘greedflation’. Obviously, I wouldn’t dare expand on more sensitive topics e.g. why the leftist idea of overpunishment in the US is false or the actual causes driving violence and crime and the actual (i.e. the non-utopian) solutions.
‘Provokatsiya’ is one of the left’s favorite words. Just like all fanatics, they interpret the expression of different opinions not as evidence of the confusing antinomies of human social life but as a deliberate act of provocation directed against them. And as Vladimir Bukovsky reminded us, they regard the formation of dissenting opinions not as ideas that simply occur to people based on experiences that point to the unworkability of leftist ideas and policies but as reflections of someone else’s ‘influence’ either that of bourgeois propaganda (discover how it got through!) or of some anti-Soviet individual (uncover him and bring him in for observation!).
Well, then I’ll be bored instead of provoked. For the sake of completeness, though, I can’t help but point out that equating everyone you’re talking to with Soviet ideologues will come across as… well… trolling.
There are many protestant sects but if you get to know one you can easily recognize its kinship with all the others. Same goes with leftists. Their basic psychology and mentality is the same regardless of the sect they follow. The Western supporters of the Soviet Union and the Viet Cong (aka the useful idiot brigade) were cut from the same cloth as the current Western supporters of the fictitious nation of ‘Palestine’ and its islamist terrorists.
Yuck.
I suspect that what the fashbot is up to is trying to get banned.
The fake jewelry ads of long ago were annoying, but they weren’t trying to insult each and every person here, in multiple ways.
I wonder if there is a message-board out there where far-right trolls boast/whine about how many “woke” sites have banned them for fearless Truthing? I wouldn’t be surprised.
@David Eddyshaw: I don’t think so. I have a lot of experience with different types of trolls, and I think this one is as sincere as the creature in Three Hearts and Three Lions.
Your literary reference is lost on me, alas, but I’ll take your word for it.
(Judging by WP, the book seems to be unfair to Morgan le Fay, for whom I’ve always had a soft spot. OK, she did have her faults …)
It was recently discussed as emblematic of a certain kind of fantasy novel here.
a message-board out there where far-right trolls boast/whine about how many “woke” sites have banned them for fearless Truthing
the leader of the current u.s. regime has created an entire social media platform for that! (and subsectors of the far right have their own forums and such where plenty of it happens – i believe the Stormfront board scrapes collected quite a lot; i expect there are Discord servers full of it) but it’s not clear to me why those more dedicated spaces continue to exist, given how much space the “legitimate” media will give any fascist who cares to spin a sob story.
[comment deleted for personal vileness –LH]
Go search “crying Nazi” on YouTube. And stay there. Preferably in the comments.
Look, CJ, nobody can say I haven’t been tolerant to a fault of you, despite your trollish behavior; I believe in free speech and fearless discourse. I’ve discussed all sorts of topics with all sorts of people. But despite my encouragement to dial it back, you’ve refused and instead have pushed farther and farther into nasty bullying, which has no place here. As DM suggests, please take your bigoted presence elsewhere.