How Video Games Ended The Great American Crime Wave

The truth is that nobody really knows why all forms of crime have been declining steadily since 1992. It’s obviously a combination of factors, but i think Video Games deserve a lot more credit than they get. The Freakonomics folks have looked at this briefly, but there needs to be much more focus on this variable. As attractive as theories like unleaded gasoline and “Broken Windows” policing are to some people, I think people need to look at the question much more simply. Crime is primarily committed by young men. What do young men do with their time? Video Games. What did they do in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s? Drugs and crime. That’s what I was up to anyway. Obviously there’s still time for drugs and crime with the youth of today, but the mix has changed dramatically.

Criminologists are already well aware of “street time” as a factor in crime. The heaviest crime months are always the months when it is most pleasant to roam the streets. If there are less young men roaming the streets there is less crime. Video Games have done us an incredible favor.

You may be surprised to hear that Crime is still falling in the United States. I’ve covered the supposed “Ferguson Effect” over and over. This is the idea, pushed by the New York Times, and everybody’s favorite FBI director James Comey, that Black Lives Matter has scared police departments and led to a dramatic increase in crime. I’ve always been against the way that the “Ferguson Effect” concept has been used. But I have been open to the idea. It makes sense. Justified lack of trust in police forces is probably the main reason why crime persists in inner city communities. Blaming Black Lives Matter for this, however, rather than brutal policing has always struck me as a flat out evil choice. I did a video comparing this to blaming the scandals of the Catholic Church on sex abuse victims, and I very much believe this to be true.

I may not have needed to spend so much time trying get out ahead of the “Ferguson Effect”. It turns out it doesn’t exist outside of a few places with particularly horrific recent examples of police brutality like Chicago and Baltimore. There’s a reason why Trump, Giuliani, and Lead “Broken Windows” propagandist Heather MacDonald spend so much time shouting about Chicago. The news everywhere else remains good.

The worst example that the pro “Stop and Frisk” types had throughout 2016 was Washington, DC. In 2015, Murders went up a full 54%. That Breitbart article I linked there of course probably didn’t emphasize the fact that the 2015 figure only brought murders back to the level they were at in 2008, and 2015’s 162 murders was still only a third of Washington DC’s 1991 peak of 482 murders. Regardless, a 54% increase is something to freak out about, and it provided great support those who wanted to portray America’s cities as spinning out of control. I can’t be bothered to check, but I am pretty sure Trump used the Washington, DC figure in his inauguration speech in Cleveland in July 2016. It made an impact. Unfortunately for the Trumpkins, Washington, DC hasn’t cooperated. In 2016, Washington, DC murders fell 17%. Philadelphia posted one of it’s best years ever in 2016. Crime has continued to fall in New York City, despite the end of Giuliani’s cherished “Stop and Frisk” program.

So there’s a reason the “Law and Order” types keep shouting about Chicago. They don’t have anything else left. I suppose we should be grateful to them for bringing attention to the plight of Chicago, which is a very real problem. I need to do a video on Chicago before too long, but I believe the problem there to be largely about police brutality, and the corruption and budget issues that plague Chicago at large. I laid out part of that case here, with a dismantling of a Wall Street Journal piece on Chicago.

As a final note, you may be wondering why I haven’t addressed Trump’s anti-immigration Executive Order. I have a lot to say on this, but I honestly don’t see much of a point in adding to the chorus of electronic condemnation at this point. I was marching at the Los Angeles airport on Sunday. Over the coming months I will have a lot to say about Islam, Terrorism, the United States, and the way that our politicians abuse the issue. Rest assured, the Trump administration will not come out of that discussion unscathed. Nor will the Obama or Bush administrations.

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When Can We Impeach Donald Trump?

“When Can We Impeach Donald Trump?” I couldn’t stop thinking this on Saturday. On his second day as president Trump managed to drop a line about Iraq that would have been an international incident if it had come from any other politician. Nobody noticed though, because his administration’s lies about the crowd at his inauguration were so outrageous. I guess I’m kind of on board with the idea that we should give Trump a little time to succeed or fail, but his performance on his first full day was so disastrous that it made sense to look at impeachment in some detail with this week’s video.

The biggest misconception about impeachment is that Trump needs to commit some kind of special “impeachable offense” to be vulnerable to the process. That’s not what history shows. Sure Bill Clinton’s impeachment was about perjury to some degree, but Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was not. It was a purely political process. Impeachment is about how Congress votes, not actual wrong-doing. Any presidency, and Trump’s most of all, does things that could fit under the Constitution’s super vague “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” definition. If we want to impeach Trump before 2018 we’ve got to get the Republicans on board.

For many people, the main obstacle to going hard for impeachment is Vice President Mike Pence. If we get rid of Trump, Mike Pence becomes President, and a lot of people see that as worse. The fact that Pence is a fervently religious man, and a doctrinaire old school conservative is seen as more threatening than Trump. I do not find that approach convincing. I don’t like religious or anti-choice politicians either, but the threats that these two men pose strike me as very different. And the threat that Trump poses is much greater. With Pence we’ll get a conservative supreme court justice or two, and perhaps another four years of the old abortion-increasing abstinence education focus that folks like him love. That would be a shame and it would hurt a lot of people. With Trump we risk the destruction of the American world order, and four years of degradation of any common ideas of political honesty and common decency. That hurts the whole world, and presents a non-zero chance of ending it. I’ll go with Pence over Trump any day.

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Smug Republicans and The French Revolution

Some Republicans are still celebrating Trump’s election. If they knew the history of the French Revolution they wouldn’t be. As tumultuous as the Trump transition has been, it’s going to get much worse. Believe it or not, this really is a honeymoon phase. All the norm breaking and vileness of the Trump presidency will soon be turned on the Republican Party. Trump doesn’t have any other choice if he wants to keep his base with him. Though 18th century France couldn’t be more different from the contemporary United States (debatable), the gyrations of the French Revolution provide an interesting model for what this might look like.

This video owes everything to Mike Duncan and his incredible “Revolutions” podcast. Duncan is working his way through significant revolutions of the modern era. So far he’s covered the English Civil War, and the American, French, and Hatian Revolutions. He’s currently working his way through the Latin American revolutions of the early 19th century. They come out in mostly weekly, breezy, fun and digestible half hour segments. I admire a project that goes on for years like this. He’s working his way towards his beloved Russian Revolution, though I would be surprised if he got there before the 2020s.

Duncan’s work came to my attention about a year and a half ago through his old podcast The History Of Rome. That too was a seriously ambitious project. Over 5 years or so, and 179 episodes, he covered Rome’s history from the founding of the city in the 700s BC (supposedly) to the fall of the Western Empire in 476 AD. I had had the idea that turned into my TEDx talk before finding the History of Rome, but I never would have had the confidence to speak on ancient history, even as an amateur, without this podcast. It’s great stuff. If I can steer you his way, I’ll be doing you a favor, and doing just a bit to re-pay Duncan for his work.

Swimming in history is a great thing. I’m constantly reading it, and thanks to Duncan, I hear about it every day at the gym too. What I try to do with my channel is convey that sense of history, and inject a bit of it into our discussions of politics and current events. Outside of a few issue areas (FATCA, Criminal Justice), I don’t know that much more about politics than your average Washington, DC journalist or academic. But I know a ton more about history, and I think that’s what makes my channel worth watching. Even if the audience finds the comparisons I draw ridiculous (I occasionally do too), the hope is that it’ll get people thinking in new and different ways. One of the things that makes this the best job I’ve ever had is the way that events, my reading, and my somewhat improvisational approach to the weekly topics point me in directions I would not have expected. For example, I now have enough videos on French history to make a playlist. That’s weird.

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Is Russia Winning? | World War 3 II

Mainstream discussion of Russia practically parodies itself. I’ve never been one to avoid low-hanging fruit though, so here you are. We’ve reached new levels in the United States. Previously more peace oriented Democrats are now terribly worried about the Vlad menace. So are any Republicans that have the self-respect necessary to remember the anti-Russia hawkishness their party represented before it got Trumped.

Basically, there’s not a lot of sanity out there.

One article in particular convinced me to make this video. “Putin’s Long War”, published in Politico, was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read. Russia’s desperate scrambling has been recast as strategic genius. It’s reckless use of a ramshackle military instrument is portrayed as Bismarck level world-shaping. I think my video provides a more authentic picture. Many thanks to the Economist for visuals for the beginning. I lifted it quite “transformatively” from one of their more memorable recent covers.

This video nicely fits into a “World War 3” series concept I’ve been developing. This may seem like an odd choice for a channel that’s lately announced that it wants to be more positive. In fact I’m pretty optimistic about World War III. It’s something that will almost certainly happen. What I’m optimistic about is the time frame. It could happen in 50 years, or it could happen in 500 years. I hope to use the series here to lay out how we can push that date further into the future. This may surprise some of you, but there is a sizable on-line subculture that thinks World War III is just around the corner. If this series can reach some of them and get them to chill the F out, that’d be nice. Here’s the first installment of the series in case you missed it.

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Why The CIA is Terrified of Trump And Russia

I don’t like Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean I should jump in bed with the CIA. Over the past couple weeks, Democrats and progressives across this country have been doing exactly that. If you look at the reports on Russian involvement in the US election objectively, you quickly realize that there’s nothing surprising here. Countries do propaganda and attempt to influence other countries. This is nothing new. James Comey had a lot more to do with Hillary’s losing the election than Russia did and nobody’s going after him. Trump hasn’t helped matters of course, but this scandal has been consciously manufactured over the past few weeks.

Nobody is focusing on why that is. The US foreign policy establishment is terrified that Trump might actually change Russia policy for the first time since the mid-1990s. The point of the intelligence community leaks and press releases over the past month is to keep that from happening. And we’re all helping out. I’m afraid it might actually be working. Trump may want a good deal with Russia, but he won’t do it if he thinks it will hurt him politically.

One of the misconceptions most in need of correcting in this discussion is the idea that we’ve tried being friendly with Russia before. The story is that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to make peace with Russia and got burned. This is ridiculous. In fact the exact opposite is what actually happened. Yes, W. claimed to look into Putin’s soul and see a friend or whatever, but his policy trampled all over Russian interests and concerns. In 2004 he over saw the addition of seven countries to NATO, some of which were once members of the Russia friendly Warsaw Pact, and some of which were actually part of the Soviet Union itself. Additionally, the war in Iraq was carried out in violation of international law and against Russia’s security council veto.

Obama also claimed that he was going to “Reset” relations with Russia. He didn’t. There was more noise about NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, and there was the support of 2014’s ouster of a democratically elected and pro-Russian government in Ukraine. Perhaps most importantly there has been the massive US sponsored proxy war on Syria between 2011 and 2017. Russia has two or three countries in the entire world that are willing to cooperate with them militarily. Syria is one of them.

In addition to that, there is NATO’s little mentioned betrayal of Russia and China in Libya. I made a video about this just a few weeks ago.

Don’t let anybody tell you that we’ve already tried to be friends with Russia. If they do, they’re lying, or they have no idea what they’re talking about.

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Why Are So Many Celebrities Dying?

Celebrities are dying left and right. It’s only going to accelerate. But, as with much about the world it has got a lot more to do with how we look at things than anything concrete that is actually happening. More celebrities seem to be dying because we care more about more celebrities than we ever have before.

The genesis of this one is kind of interesting. With the majority of my videos I’m drawing on a ton of sources. The video produced is usually a synthesis of a number of things that I can tell myself is very much my own. That’s not so much the case here. There’s some of my own thought involved, but the most interesting thing about the video, the explanation for the acceleration in celebrity deaths, is completely drawn from one article. And I can’t find that article. It’s frustrating. There are few things more annoying than taking credit for other people’s ideas. Though I’m sure I unwittingly do it all the time, this time I know I am doing it. If any of you are familiar with the source that I got this stuff from, please let me know.

I’m not really a big celebrity guy. In early 2005 I threw a “Dead Celebrity Party” memorialized in the thumbnail for this video. It’s still one of the best parties I’ve ever thrown. The cult of celebrity holds few charms for me. Though I must admit, if I’m in a supermarket checkout lane I’ll guiltily read the tabloid headlines with some interest. But, I do think our celebrity obsession is bad for us. The worship of celebrity strikes me as a throw-back to an earlier and worse era, as I alluded to here….

We live in a more democratic age, but reading news about Kim and Kanye is part of an old-time desire to know more about our “betters”. We don’t have much of a hereditary aristocracy anymore, so celebrities fill the breach. If you doubt this interpretation, look at the treatment of the few real aristocrats that are left. The travails of the British Royal Family are reported on with exactly the same fervor and worship that is devoted to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. I don’t like celebrity culture because I refuse to concede that we have “betters”. The struggles of the aesthetically or monetarily gifted are no more interesting than our own.

So why do a video about celebrities? Views obviously. But beyond that, I feel like it’s a big enough part of our culture that I have to address it occasionally. One must deal with the facts on the ground. Also it would be a bit hypocritical to avoid the subject. Paradoxically, if I avoid talking about celebrities on democratic principles I am actually acting in an anti-democratic fashion. The people want to talk about celebrities. Who am I to deny them that? Plus I got to talk about Bob Ross and his happy little trees, which makes me happy.

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