It really seems like a significant portion of the American intelligentsia just doesn't understand—or wont admit—that in every society a small but non-trivial minority of men are both (1) highly prone to violence and causing havoc and (2) can't be "fixed" or rehabilitated and must be sequestered from society in one way or another.
Very true. Hence the non-sensical objection that ‘prison doesn’t work’ because recidivism rates are typically 60%+, which only looks like failure if you haven’t understood that most criminals are unreformable in the first place.
Or it could be because culturally homogeneous societies tend to be high-trust, and culturally diverse societies tend to be low-trust. High-trust societies are able to have more lenient justice systems.
Black societies aren't necessarily homogenous. African borders do not tend to coincide with African ethnicities because they weren't set in place by Africans. The whole point of Nigerian Pidgin is that it is what allows Hausa-speaking northerners, Yoruba-speaking westerners, and Igbo-speaking easterners to communicate with each other.
Even where African countries are heterogenous at a national level, they are usually highly homogenous at a local level. Each tribe exists in its own area. And even at a national level they are only “non-homogenous” in the same unimportant way that a country of Danes and Swedes would be non-homogenous.
> even at a national level they are only “non-homogenous” in the same unimportant way that a country of Danes and Swedes would be non-homogenous.
This is not true; different ethnies are often very different indeed, and even more commonly they despise each other. Central Africa has several populations of pygmies. Mali "unites" various sedentary black groups in the south with white nomadic Tuaregs in the north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuareg_rebellion_(2012)
Rwanda was a society of pastoralist Tutsis ruling sedentary Hutus. The mixture there is not the fault of foreign assignment of borders, but it's certainly not an example of homogeneity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
That you see two different people as being the same as far as you're concerned won't get them to agree with you or make your beliefs either true or reasonable.
The Nordic reoffense rate for whites is similar to what it is in the US.
Also, while the reoffense rate for blacks is higher than it is for whites, it's honestly not massively different (the difference is only about 15% after adjusting for offense).
The biggest difference is basal crime rates, not reoffense rates. The base crime commission rate is about 4x higher.
‘The interesting question here is why people are so resistant to the idea that the crackdown is working. I think there’s a common mental trick where analysts are uncomfortable with the existence of a tradeoff, so they pretend it doesn’t exist.’
This is v true, but I suspect another aspect of this is the decidedly midwit love of ‘counter intuitive’ thinking of the sort you find in pop psychology/Freakonomics-style books, and which is inculcated in elite universities etc.
Saying ‘put the criminals in jail and crime will go down’ just doesn’t satisfy that itch, despite it being obvious (in addition to having the potential to remove job opportunities for policy wonk/social worker types).
Again, this is a "who/whom" issue so it all depends on who thinks who are the criminals. The left essentially wants a similar "throw them in jail" style crackdown to happen in America so long as it targets their political opponents.
We also have to remember the roots of modern leftist thinking on crime, which are highly influenced by race and egalitarian ideals. The reality that some people are just bad (i.e. are just going to be violent/predatory) and can't be "fixed" in some way is very threatening to the extreme egalitarian norms held by these people.
"The reality that some people are just bad" directly contradicts their holy dogma, the Blank Slate. Remember under the Blank Slate dispensation, literally everything is caused by society and its "structures", from what you wanna do to who you wanna screw.
The Blank Slate gives them carte blanche to meddle in every sphere of life, plus provides the foundation of the eternal Leftist sales pitch: Give us total control and utopia will appear.
Thus anything that goes against sacred dogma must be denied and denounced, most esp when it comes to criminals, another protected victim class who would all be choir boys if it weren't for capitalism and capitalists, who of course are the real criminals.
Well if just lock them up worked the US, with by far the largest number of incarcerated people per capita, would be the safest country on earth. I have zero doubt that some people are just born bad. But surely there are people who commit crimes for other reasons than innate "badness." Have you ever committed a crime? Can you imagine a scenario in which you would? What would make you more or less likely to? What happens to a normally good person who just makes one minor mistake? Is it worth giving them a criminal record and destroying their chances for future employment? If your only prospect in life was a shitty min wage job with no real opportunity for advancement and then your mom or your kid got sick and you had medical bills you couldn't pay do you think stealing might seem more appealing?
I guarantee that the best thing we could do to drop crime rates is medicare for all. We already pay 2x as much as peer countries for healthcare with worse results that don't cover everyone.
So, debating the morality of locking up criminals is completely separate from discussing what policies will actually reduce crime. Your viewpoint is a perfect example of left-wing egalitarian ideals that are very uncomfortable with the idea of ever treating anyone as lesser, even when their actions clearly violate the social contract (i.e. crime).
That is an ideological commitment and I don't have much interest in trying to counter-argue it. However, "just lock them up" is in fact what "works," policy-wise. If you think there is still too much crime in the US, this is because the US does not lock up enough people for long enough. The idea that any other policy will ever reduce crime in any meaningful way goes completely against reality.
The idea that violent crimes are committed due to lack of "Medicare" in particular, is an extreme non-sequitur. Most violent crimes are committed by young men, people who typically have no health problems at all, or only minor ones that they don't care very much about. I would dare you to try and find violent crimes where the motive was lack of access to Medicare, a program specifically designed to pay the healthcare bills of old people, or lack of access to healthcare in general.
There's also the idea that the entire world is just a mechanistic world of cause --> consequence. This means that if someone commits a crime, it's not his fault but societies fault, they see the individual as a cog in the machine who just moves around because of how society is shaping him. This is why the feel "compassion" for a lot of criminals, ironically, they don't feel compassion for those who disagree with them, or other type of people like racists, xenophobics, homophobics, transphobics, etc, this is a highly contradictory situation, where only some people that commit certain types of crimes: murder, rape, thief, etc, are victims of society and are subjected to the mechanics of cause-consequence, but the other types of behavior that I mentioned before are the result of highly immoral and evil people that have become like that on their own decisions so they must be destroyed. This is a huge and weird contradiction that actually reveals that it's NOT about the belief or the logic, but once again, about how they feel about certain types of people and crimes. A guy who said something slightly racist could face harsher consequences than someone who killed or robbed today.
Every policy committee of Harvard PhDs advising the govt should have a randomly selected grandmother with veto power.
'What? Just lock people up, that'll learn 'em.' 'Shouldn't the kiddos be learning their multiplication tables instead?' 'Take off your coat or you won't feel the benefit later.'
I think you've nailed it. The pundit class in the Anglosphere simply doesn't do tradeoff thinking when it comes to issues that they find emotive. Civil liberties are a prima facie good, and since they're good they can't contribute to anything bad, and crime is bad, so civil liberties have no relationship with crime. That really is the sum total of the thought process.
You can apply it to so many things. COVID lockdowns. An unalloyed good. Their proponents wouldn't even countenance the damages to education and to the mental health of those who need high levels of socialization. It wasn't even "we are making this temporary tradeoff - there will be some costs, but the benefits outweigh them."
Politically this makes sense. Pointing out the flaws in your own plan is seen as weak, even if you believe your plan to have benefits that far outweigh those flaws. But I think because we don't speak this way and because we're not expected to speak this way, we also don't bother thinking this way. (Maybe this is backwards and the thought precedes how we speak.) My point is that I think much of our pundit classes and political classes have actually lost the ability to think about these tradeoffs at all, and that they are acting in the service of 100% good, 100% of the time, and that they genuinely can't anticipate any downsides to their chosen courses of action. It's a holy crusade all of the time.
Reminds me of the David French "transing kids is just one of the blessings of liberty" BS. Classical liberalism is just "unalloyed good". So one must convince themselves that allowing kid transing is good.
It's an effective strategy by the pundit class to safeguard their own power and influence. It seems like they are stupid if you think they actually have the good of society as their goal, but if you assume the goal is simply to accrue clout for themselves, then their behavior makes perfect sense.
I love the midwit meme so this is a great post in my opinion.
This same "midwit effect/tradeoff denial" exists in nearly every issue or area of politics.
"Climate change": People deny that fossil fuels have any benefits, and instead prefer to pretend that "green alternatives" are actually more efficient options for energy generation.
Abortion: People deny that unborn children are in fact human beings so they don't have to feel bad about destroying them.
Taxes: People deny that higher taxes have any negative economic effects, and instead say that higher taxes will actually cause more economic growth because there will be more public services.
Welfare: People deny that welfare may incentivize its recipients to not work, and instead say that it will actually lead to more jobs because people will be able to pursue their dreams or something.
And so forth and so on. Always and forever, people must have their cake and eat it too.
Good points. I'm on the right, but for fairness' sake, I was trying to think of the degree to which parts of the right are guilty of tradeoff denial.
Second Amendment Purists: "Gun control never saves lives; there is no government-imposed restriction or inconvenience that could ever prevent a criminal from shooting someone." (in truth, there's a liberty/safety tradeoff here, though the left targets guns based on how scary they look rather than their effect on public safety)
Laffer Curve: "Cut taxes, raise MORE revenue." (to be fair, trivially true at a high enough tax rate, but the idea that this always works is pure Zombie Reaganism)
Randian/Nietzschean Right: "Looking out for your own best interests is more moral than looking out for your fellow man." (Rightism untempered by Christian charity can be scary and I don't recommend it)
Manosphere Right: "Women are happier when they have zero rights and are fully owned by men." (some level of feminism is a negative-sum game that makes everyone unhappy, but up to a point adding women's rights is a positive or zero-sum game that makes women happier at the expense of men)
>Second Amendment Purists: "Gun control never saves lives; there is no government-imposed restriction or inconvenience that could ever prevent a criminal from shooting someone."<
While I agree it is true that if you go extreme enough on gun control you can probably prevent some amount of shootings, the actual right-wing counterpoint to gun control is that more armed law-abiding citizens will ultimately deter crime and criminal shootings. For instance, one suggestion to address school shootings is to increase security measures at schools rather than simply trying to confiscate AR-15s for the 5 millionth time.
Broadly agree with the other 3 you posted. However I do want to point out that the right wing is less vulnerable to this phenomenon than the left (which is not to say that they aren't vulnerable to it at all, because everyone is still human) due to a difference in core worldview. When faced with an unfortunate reality, a right winger is more likely to say "tough shit, deal with it," whereas the left wing is more likely to try and re-define reality in an effort to magically change the uncomfortable fact through sheer force of narrative control. Right wingers also tend to be much more aware of moral hazard/perverse incentives. Basically the right is more pessimistic about human nature compared to the left (i.e. accepting that some people are simply evil vs blank slatism).
Of course, I am right wing, so I am biased. But I think this is a real difference. I also think one of the most "midwit/tradeoff blind" topics for the right is the extent to which power should be wielded against the left. Many on the right are very hesitant to "stoop to the left's level" and engage in tactics like public shaming, "canceling," and to generally make a nuisance out of themselves in the same way that the left does. I have encountered lots of conservatives who really really want to believe that if they can just convince enough people to vote Republican through calm, reasoned dialogue, then we can "save the country" without having to get our hands dirty.
On gun control, the low-hanging fruit would be to think about ways to create more obstacles and disincentives for low-IQ, low-impulse-control offenders who want to carry handguns. Though you might argue that more of these ideas actually belong to the right (e.g., the MSU shooter was let off on a guns charge by a Soros DA).
Fair observation about the difference between right and left.
I suppose I think there are also tradeoffs when you start behaving antagonistically towards the other side, and sometimes that's missed in this discussion. I'm not sure what you mean by all the tactics you describe.
I suppose my politics at this time are to obstruct the left all the time, in all possible ways, within the bounds of the law. But that has tradeoffs! It would be nice to be able to cooperate and pursue the common good. I just think the threat of leftist tyranny exceeds the benefits of cooperation. And I don't think rightist tyranny is a real threat, because the right is institutionally incapable of exercising power at the national level.
>On gun control, the low-hanging fruit would be to think about ways to create more obstacles and disincentives for low-IQ, low-impulse-control offenders who want to carry handguns. Though you might argue that more of these ideas actually belong to the right (e.g., the MSU shooter was let off on a guns charge by a Soros DA).<
I'm not sure how you create obstacles to acquiring a gun that specifically targets "low-IQ/low-impulse-control" aside from maybe background checks which has already been a thing forever.
>I suppose I think there are also tradeoffs when you start behaving antagonistically towards the other side, and sometimes that's missed in this discussion. I'm not sure what you mean by all the tactics you describe.<
Well the trade off is antagonizing half the country. You'll have a harder time being friends with liberals for instance. There will be more political and social conflict. I think it's definitely the case that if one side of the aisle just fully surrendered to the other, then you'd see for instance, less cases of family members refusing to speak to each other over political disagreements, because there wouldn't be any disagreements to begin with.
The question is whether "keeping the peace" in this sense is worth the long term consequences. I would compare it to, for instance, World War II. Entering World War II had some pretty enormous costs for the United States. A lot of men died and a lot of resources were spent. But, when it was over, there were no more Nazis. The cost was deemed to be worth the end result.
While we are screaming at each other over social media instead of firing machine guns at each other in today's "culture war," I think the same dynamic more or less applies. Much of the "normie" right wing remains in some degree of denial over this IME, though that has been steadily improving over time as the left keeps proving its hostility over and over again. People want leftist ideology to go away but expect it to somehow disappear without any serious confrontation or conflict.
You can still see some of this in the response to Michael Knowles saying that "transgenderism must be eradicated from public life," for instance here: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/why-im-leaving-the-daily-wire?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. This person recognizes some of the problems with transgender ideology but the notion of truly going to war with the gender specials still causes her to balk. The problem is that the left has already been at war with the right for a long time, and burying one's head in the sand will not make that truth go away. There is no hesitation on the left about whether right wing viewpoints should be utterly eradicated out of existence. In war, your enemy necessarily has a say in the terms of engagement.
>I suppose my politics at this time are to obstruct the left all the time, in all possible ways, within the bounds of the law. But that has tradeoffs! It would be nice to be able to cooperate and pursue the common good. I just think the threat of leftist tyranny exceeds the benefits of cooperation. And I don't think rightist tyranny is a real threat, because the right is institutionally incapable of exercising power at the national level.<
The common-good solution, in my opinion, would be to pursue separation. But even most right wingers immediately shut off their brains at this suggestion, so unfortunately we will have to endure at least a few more election cycles of failure, nonsense and decay before anyone starts to well and truly get serious about the future.
I am not really convinced that right-wing thinking is more rational in general:
1. The idea that more armed law-abiding citizens will ultimately deter crime and criminal shootings seems like a good sounding right-wing myth, at least I haven't seen any statistical evidence for it.
Logically, I would expect the opposite to be true - the chance of robbery or violent crimes might be reduced by the deterrent of the attacked person/'house owner' having guns but the chance that the encounter ends in death is probably much higher.
The almost entirely white Vermont has 2.5 the murder rate of Germany, so I don't think race is an appropriate explanation (definitely not for all the difference).
2. Most social conservatives have an absolutely skewed view on abortion, believing that it's mostly committed by lazy liberal college educated women, not poor black and latino women usually with one child who don't want to raise another child in poverty.
They deny that the legalization of abortion was a major factor in the fall of the crime rates (contributing probably half of it) and a national abortion ban would seriously execerberate these problems within a generation.
3. Most of the right-wing people (not just them, but they especially) have an absolutely irrational view on terrorism, which is really a minuscule danger. In many ways, it's analogous of the left-wings view on school shootings (which again, are vanishingly rare, although not as much as terrorism), the difference is that the right was actually able to instill restrictive measures to 'fight terrorism'.
4. Much of the right also holds the view that 'government spending which doesn't go to the military is bad', when many studies show that spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare can actually spur growth.
I also think you misrepresent the left-wing view on climate change. Most leftists don't deny that fossil fuels have advantages (how could they? they are still used exactly because they are generally cheaper and more reliable), they just think that they cause serious externalities which should be factored in.
Finally, the right-wing is perfectly willing to cancel people when they have the power to do so, a good example is how Republican states countered the BDS.
>I am not really convinced that right-wing thinking is more rational in general<
Rational would be a different argument, the idea is that right wingers are more capable of recognizing that trade offs exist. Abortion and crime is a perfect example of this. I am sure that many right wingers are fully aware that reducing the black population would reduce crime rates. They are simply not willing to accept the trade off of, y'know, murdering babies in order to do it.
>Logically, I would expect the opposite to be true - the chance of robbery or violent crimes might be reduced by the deterrent of the attacked person/'house owner' having guns but the chance that the encounter ends in death is probably much higher.<
This is a bizarre framing. Are you implying that a man who shoots a home invader in self-defense has committed murder just the same as if the home invader shot him?
>Most of the right-wing people (not just them, but they especially) have an absolutely irrational view on terrorism, which is really a minuscule danger.<
Most right-wing people of today view the Bush years with disdain and consider the "war on terror" to have been a mistake.
>Much of the right also holds the view that 'government spending which doesn't go to the military is bad', when many studies show that spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare can actually spur growth.<
The idea of counting government spending (which is only enabled by taxing private wealth) as "growth" is a perfect example of left-wing tradeoff denial. Instead of recognizing the trade-off and saying that the economic damage of higher taxes is worth the increase in government services, they just claim that actually higher taxes and more government spending is somehow also good for the economy overall, as if the government just has a magical value printer that it can spin up at will.
>I also think you misrepresent the left-wing view on climate change. Most leftists don't deny that fossil fuels have advantages (how could they? they are still used exactly because they are generally cheaper and more reliable), they just think that they cause serious externalities which should be factored in.<
The typical left winger denies that eliminating fossil fuels would have any serious trade offs. If you care about climate change at all, this is your position pretty much by definition. To be honest in advocating for an end to fossil fuels would mean that you'd have to pretend to be okay with an end to the modern lifestyle as we know it. Do you think cargo freighters are getting across the ocean using batteries?
Climate alarmists instead talk as if fossil fuels can somehow be eliminated without any real change in standard of living, i.e. denial of tradeoffs.
Empathy prevents the analysis of tradeoffs. I view Liberals/progressives as being crippled by being overly emotional and empathetic and cannot accept tradeoffs which harm whatever group they are devoted to protecting. What is best for society writ large can't ever come at any expense of anyone.
"What is best for society writ large can't ever come at any expense of anyone."
You're giving them too much credit. It certainly can and does come at the expense of someone else; just depends on who you are. The left knows which groups they are devoted to protecting and which groups that have to bear the expense of the consequences of "protecting" said groups.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that, beyond Miranda and the will to combat crime, in El Salvador, gang members (MS 13) tattoo their bodies profusely. It is very easy to identify and immediately haul that guy to jail. El Salvador isn't concerned with charging them with a crime and giving them their day in court. It is all out war made easy by the tattoo ID. I also think thousands of them have emigrated to the USA in order to evade prison. It's our problem now.
There's another layer to the tattoo thing that further makes it easy. In addition to what can be seen with the naked eye, these gangs don't take kindly to those who LARP as gang members. So the notion some innocent El Salvadoran store clerk would get an MS-13 tattoo to blend in is non-existent. These gangs are sophisticated enough to know who even gave them the tattoo, making it even more unlikely for this to happen.
By the way, in order to get a gang tattoo and thus be properly initiated, you pretty much have to kill or rape someone. Not that this will quell the concerns of those who would be concerned to begin with, but worth mentioning to those who agree already.
Having represented numerous criminals over the years, I can attest that a credible threat of being in jail does have significant impact at deterrence.
Most criminals have low-impulse control issues, so they are not too focused on consequences. Most criminal acts take place when the criminal is under the influence. Even so, knowing they have a huge chance at jail does deter even their short term thinking.
Now if we had harsh jail environments, this would work better.
Modern jails are like hotels with free healthcare, internet, food, gym, libraries, etc. paid for by the taxpayers, comprising the bulk of the victims of the crime. So, the victims of violent crime are paying and will pay for their perpetrator's cushy life. Modern prison is a punishment for the non-criminal citizen rather than the criminal, humiliating the victims far more than the perpetrators.
Still, once faced with the justice system, criminals want to avoid jail at all costs. This would only increase if the world adopted the jails of El Salvador.
I agree, of course. I was just musing on how different modern 1st world prisons are, at least in white countries (don't know about Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc.) from what they used to be. They used to be terrifying, now they are just dull and mildly depressing, both for the prisoners and the free citizens. Imagine paying for murderers, serial rapists, attempted murderers, burglars, car thieves, drug dealers, etc. to have what amounts to a 1st world comfy life in prison, better than the life of every person living pre-1900, better even than the life of virtually all 3rd worlders both inside and outside of prison today, better than the life of many 1st worlders outside of prison today. Inconceivable just 70 years ago.
> As in many other Latin American countries, mano dura (iron fist) is enduringly popular, offering voters the assurance of unsparing punishment and mass incarceration for criminals even though it repeatedly fails to curb violence over the long run.
You could also translate "mano dura" as "steady hand", or "hard grip". Not a literal translation, but neither is "iron fist".
I think another reason people are reluctant to acknowledge this is that it’s easier to adhere to a “one-size-fits-all” ideology rather than admit that the world is complicated, and that different situations might necessitate different policies. Crime is a good example: it makes sense that Norway and El Salvador should have different practices here, but people find it easier (for both ideological and cognitive reasons) to impose simple models that can be applied universally.
Having represented many criminals over the years including murderers up for the death penalty, I can attest that criminals hate going to jail and a credible threat at jail can
People who criticize what Bukele did don't understand how people lived in En Salvador before this, the atrocities committed by these monsters. This is not normal criminality, it's not just some random guy stealing a cellphone in the center of a big city, it's criminal gangs that work like mafias, corrupting and controlling everything around them, killing, raping, torturing, stealing poor people's money. This is a terrorist group and it must be dealt as such. More than 90% of people in El Salvador agree with Bukele.
The midwit mentality see 'authoritarianism' as something bad immediately without analyzing the circumstances because he equates it to fascism/nazism or other types of dictatorships. They try to apply the same model of thinking they've been applying their entire life without actually understanding what's going on in this case.
“The assumption that ‘things tend to revert to the mean’ is a much better assumption than ‘trends continue until they reach numbers never seen before.’”
Tangential, but does this do to arguments of the sort that OSHA was not responsible for decline in workplace accidents because the trend line preexisted the establishment of that agency?
But consider a broader perspective: despite mean reversion, we've seen steady progress on all sorts of measures, including violence (Better Angels and all that), since through programs such as the British Hanging Cure we've shifted the mean over time. It is not unreasonable to think that we could remove the 1% of 1% of 1% of the population with strong criminal propensities from the breeding pool and see enduring beneficial effects, albeit at the expense of some libs and NGO's getting their hair tousled and eyes wet for a news cycle or two.
They think that trampling the rights of criminals will open the door to fascism. Also, some probably believe in the blank slate. It’s a kind of widespread hybristophilia; or as Hanania argues, regarding Wokeism, “excessive niceness”.
Maybe I’ve missed something, but surely the whole debate about El Salvador/Bukele crack-down resolves to the ethical dilemma of how many innocent (or “slightly guilty” people!) is it ok to punish in order to decrease the murder rate. If we could conclude that everyone in prison was a guilty party, it might be easier!
Anecdotally, I've heard the same case could be made for Yogi Adityanath in India, who has supposedly "cleaned up" the streets of Uttar Pradesh. If true, it does get us into philosophical territory fairly quickly - (1) Most liberal principles are only worth uploading because we expect them to have good long term consequences if applied consistently (2) Some local decisions in line with these principles will have negative expected value and we should accept them since its required to hold the system together (3) However, some states - like El Salvador or parts of India - are not places where these principles are generally upheld anyway and any liberal order that emerges can only do so in the absence of horrific violence and disorder.
European crime levels are a lot lower than America's even with much lighter sentences and lower incarceration rates, as well as a strong focus on rehabilitation. Even if there is the hypothesis that police officers are freer to work and cases don't usually gets dismissed due to failure in complying with defendant's rights, that is far from uniform across Europe. Germany has a strong level of defendant protection and still sits at very low crime rates. The crime rates are not uniform across Latin America either. Countries like Chile and Uruguay also guarantee a lot of rights to suspects and defendants, and still have very low crime rates (at least until recently in the case of Chile anyways). Of course there is a tradeoff, but the Salvadoran recipe may not be the only option.
It really seems like a significant portion of the American intelligentsia just doesn't understand—or wont admit—that in every society a small but non-trivial minority of men are both (1) highly prone to violence and causing havoc and (2) can't be "fixed" or rehabilitated and must be sequestered from society in one way or another.
Very true. Hence the non-sensical objection that ‘prison doesn’t work’ because recidivism rates are typically 60%+, which only looks like failure if you haven’t understood that most criminals are unreformable in the first place.
(3) It doesn't take a huge percentage to reach Critical Mass Unsalvageable (per David Cole).
It's not just men, it's also women.
And yes, the reality is that they don't want to admit that they're lying about everything, because it is core to their political ideology.
This has long been known to science. You cannot "reform" people against their will. That would be mind control and is not actually a thing you can do.
comes from the naive worldview from the left, where everyone is naturally good
Or it could be because culturally homogeneous societies tend to be high-trust, and culturally diverse societies tend to be low-trust. High-trust societies are able to have more lenient justice systems.
Black societies aren't necessarily homogenous. African borders do not tend to coincide with African ethnicities because they weren't set in place by Africans. The whole point of Nigerian Pidgin is that it is what allows Hausa-speaking northerners, Yoruba-speaking westerners, and Igbo-speaking easterners to communicate with each other.
OK haiti
very homogeneous
still a disaster
Even where African countries are heterogenous at a national level, they are usually highly homogenous at a local level. Each tribe exists in its own area. And even at a national level they are only “non-homogenous” in the same unimportant way that a country of Danes and Swedes would be non-homogenous.
> even at a national level they are only “non-homogenous” in the same unimportant way that a country of Danes and Swedes would be non-homogenous.
This is not true; different ethnies are often very different indeed, and even more commonly they despise each other. Central Africa has several populations of pygmies. Mali "unites" various sedentary black groups in the south with white nomadic Tuaregs in the north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuareg_rebellion_(2012)
Rwanda was a society of pastoralist Tutsis ruling sedentary Hutus. The mixture there is not the fault of foreign assignment of borders, but it's certainly not an example of homogeneity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
That you see two different people as being the same as far as you're concerned won't get them to agree with you or make your beliefs either true or reasonable.
The Nordic reoffense rate for whites is similar to what it is in the US.
Also, while the reoffense rate for blacks is higher than it is for whites, it's honestly not massively different (the difference is only about 15% after adjusting for offense).
The biggest difference is basal crime rates, not reoffense rates. The base crime commission rate is about 4x higher.
‘The interesting question here is why people are so resistant to the idea that the crackdown is working. I think there’s a common mental trick where analysts are uncomfortable with the existence of a tradeoff, so they pretend it doesn’t exist.’
This is v true, but I suspect another aspect of this is the decidedly midwit love of ‘counter intuitive’ thinking of the sort you find in pop psychology/Freakonomics-style books, and which is inculcated in elite universities etc.
Saying ‘put the criminals in jail and crime will go down’ just doesn’t satisfy that itch, despite it being obvious (in addition to having the potential to remove job opportunities for policy wonk/social worker types).
The 'too clever by half' disease. It's aptly displayed in the midwit meme graphic in the article.
Again, this is a "who/whom" issue so it all depends on who thinks who are the criminals. The left essentially wants a similar "throw them in jail" style crackdown to happen in America so long as it targets their political opponents.
We also have to remember the roots of modern leftist thinking on crime, which are highly influenced by race and egalitarian ideals. The reality that some people are just bad (i.e. are just going to be violent/predatory) and can't be "fixed" in some way is very threatening to the extreme egalitarian norms held by these people.
"The reality that some people are just bad" directly contradicts their holy dogma, the Blank Slate. Remember under the Blank Slate dispensation, literally everything is caused by society and its "structures", from what you wanna do to who you wanna screw.
The Blank Slate gives them carte blanche to meddle in every sphere of life, plus provides the foundation of the eternal Leftist sales pitch: Give us total control and utopia will appear.
Thus anything that goes against sacred dogma must be denied and denounced, most esp when it comes to criminals, another protected victim class who would all be choir boys if it weren't for capitalism and capitalists, who of course are the real criminals.
Well if just lock them up worked the US, with by far the largest number of incarcerated people per capita, would be the safest country on earth. I have zero doubt that some people are just born bad. But surely there are people who commit crimes for other reasons than innate "badness." Have you ever committed a crime? Can you imagine a scenario in which you would? What would make you more or less likely to? What happens to a normally good person who just makes one minor mistake? Is it worth giving them a criminal record and destroying their chances for future employment? If your only prospect in life was a shitty min wage job with no real opportunity for advancement and then your mom or your kid got sick and you had medical bills you couldn't pay do you think stealing might seem more appealing?
I guarantee that the best thing we could do to drop crime rates is medicare for all. We already pay 2x as much as peer countries for healthcare with worse results that don't cover everyone.
So, debating the morality of locking up criminals is completely separate from discussing what policies will actually reduce crime. Your viewpoint is a perfect example of left-wing egalitarian ideals that are very uncomfortable with the idea of ever treating anyone as lesser, even when their actions clearly violate the social contract (i.e. crime).
That is an ideological commitment and I don't have much interest in trying to counter-argue it. However, "just lock them up" is in fact what "works," policy-wise. If you think there is still too much crime in the US, this is because the US does not lock up enough people for long enough. The idea that any other policy will ever reduce crime in any meaningful way goes completely against reality.
The idea that violent crimes are committed due to lack of "Medicare" in particular, is an extreme non-sequitur. Most violent crimes are committed by young men, people who typically have no health problems at all, or only minor ones that they don't care very much about. I would dare you to try and find violent crimes where the motive was lack of access to Medicare, a program specifically designed to pay the healthcare bills of old people, or lack of access to healthcare in general.
"by far the largest number of incarcerated people per capita"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
There's also the idea that the entire world is just a mechanistic world of cause --> consequence. This means that if someone commits a crime, it's not his fault but societies fault, they see the individual as a cog in the machine who just moves around because of how society is shaping him. This is why the feel "compassion" for a lot of criminals, ironically, they don't feel compassion for those who disagree with them, or other type of people like racists, xenophobics, homophobics, transphobics, etc, this is a highly contradictory situation, where only some people that commit certain types of crimes: murder, rape, thief, etc, are victims of society and are subjected to the mechanics of cause-consequence, but the other types of behavior that I mentioned before are the result of highly immoral and evil people that have become like that on their own decisions so they must be destroyed. This is a huge and weird contradiction that actually reveals that it's NOT about the belief or the logic, but once again, about how they feel about certain types of people and crimes. A guy who said something slightly racist could face harsher consequences than someone who killed or robbed today.
Every policy committee of Harvard PhDs advising the govt should have a randomly selected grandmother with veto power.
'What? Just lock people up, that'll learn 'em.' 'Shouldn't the kiddos be learning their multiplication tables instead?' 'Take off your coat or you won't feel the benefit later.'
"Every policy committee of Harvard PhDs advising the govt should have a randomly selected grandmother with veto power."
this may be the best political suggestion i've heard in years.
I'm voting Randomy Selected Granny in 2024
I think you've nailed it. The pundit class in the Anglosphere simply doesn't do tradeoff thinking when it comes to issues that they find emotive. Civil liberties are a prima facie good, and since they're good they can't contribute to anything bad, and crime is bad, so civil liberties have no relationship with crime. That really is the sum total of the thought process.
You can apply it to so many things. COVID lockdowns. An unalloyed good. Their proponents wouldn't even countenance the damages to education and to the mental health of those who need high levels of socialization. It wasn't even "we are making this temporary tradeoff - there will be some costs, but the benefits outweigh them."
Politically this makes sense. Pointing out the flaws in your own plan is seen as weak, even if you believe your plan to have benefits that far outweigh those flaws. But I think because we don't speak this way and because we're not expected to speak this way, we also don't bother thinking this way. (Maybe this is backwards and the thought precedes how we speak.) My point is that I think much of our pundit classes and political classes have actually lost the ability to think about these tradeoffs at all, and that they are acting in the service of 100% good, 100% of the time, and that they genuinely can't anticipate any downsides to their chosen courses of action. It's a holy crusade all of the time.
Reminds me of the David French "transing kids is just one of the blessings of liberty" BS. Classical liberalism is just "unalloyed good". So one must convince themselves that allowing kid transing is good.
Is transing kids “classical liberalism”? Seems more in line with illiberal Wokeism.
It's an effective strategy by the pundit class to safeguard their own power and influence. It seems like they are stupid if you think they actually have the good of society as their goal, but if you assume the goal is simply to accrue clout for themselves, then their behavior makes perfect sense.
Would any other president made a deal with the Taliban like Trump did??
I love the midwit meme so this is a great post in my opinion.
This same "midwit effect/tradeoff denial" exists in nearly every issue or area of politics.
"Climate change": People deny that fossil fuels have any benefits, and instead prefer to pretend that "green alternatives" are actually more efficient options for energy generation.
Abortion: People deny that unborn children are in fact human beings so they don't have to feel bad about destroying them.
Taxes: People deny that higher taxes have any negative economic effects, and instead say that higher taxes will actually cause more economic growth because there will be more public services.
Welfare: People deny that welfare may incentivize its recipients to not work, and instead say that it will actually lead to more jobs because people will be able to pursue their dreams or something.
And so forth and so on. Always and forever, people must have their cake and eat it too.
Good points. I'm on the right, but for fairness' sake, I was trying to think of the degree to which parts of the right are guilty of tradeoff denial.
Second Amendment Purists: "Gun control never saves lives; there is no government-imposed restriction or inconvenience that could ever prevent a criminal from shooting someone." (in truth, there's a liberty/safety tradeoff here, though the left targets guns based on how scary they look rather than their effect on public safety)
Laffer Curve: "Cut taxes, raise MORE revenue." (to be fair, trivially true at a high enough tax rate, but the idea that this always works is pure Zombie Reaganism)
Randian/Nietzschean Right: "Looking out for your own best interests is more moral than looking out for your fellow man." (Rightism untempered by Christian charity can be scary and I don't recommend it)
Manosphere Right: "Women are happier when they have zero rights and are fully owned by men." (some level of feminism is a negative-sum game that makes everyone unhappy, but up to a point adding women's rights is a positive or zero-sum game that makes women happier at the expense of men)
>Second Amendment Purists: "Gun control never saves lives; there is no government-imposed restriction or inconvenience that could ever prevent a criminal from shooting someone."<
While I agree it is true that if you go extreme enough on gun control you can probably prevent some amount of shootings, the actual right-wing counterpoint to gun control is that more armed law-abiding citizens will ultimately deter crime and criminal shootings. For instance, one suggestion to address school shootings is to increase security measures at schools rather than simply trying to confiscate AR-15s for the 5 millionth time.
Broadly agree with the other 3 you posted. However I do want to point out that the right wing is less vulnerable to this phenomenon than the left (which is not to say that they aren't vulnerable to it at all, because everyone is still human) due to a difference in core worldview. When faced with an unfortunate reality, a right winger is more likely to say "tough shit, deal with it," whereas the left wing is more likely to try and re-define reality in an effort to magically change the uncomfortable fact through sheer force of narrative control. Right wingers also tend to be much more aware of moral hazard/perverse incentives. Basically the right is more pessimistic about human nature compared to the left (i.e. accepting that some people are simply evil vs blank slatism).
Of course, I am right wing, so I am biased. But I think this is a real difference. I also think one of the most "midwit/tradeoff blind" topics for the right is the extent to which power should be wielded against the left. Many on the right are very hesitant to "stoop to the left's level" and engage in tactics like public shaming, "canceling," and to generally make a nuisance out of themselves in the same way that the left does. I have encountered lots of conservatives who really really want to believe that if they can just convince enough people to vote Republican through calm, reasoned dialogue, then we can "save the country" without having to get our hands dirty.
Obviously I take a different view.
On gun control, the low-hanging fruit would be to think about ways to create more obstacles and disincentives for low-IQ, low-impulse-control offenders who want to carry handguns. Though you might argue that more of these ideas actually belong to the right (e.g., the MSU shooter was let off on a guns charge by a Soros DA).
Fair observation about the difference between right and left.
I suppose I think there are also tradeoffs when you start behaving antagonistically towards the other side, and sometimes that's missed in this discussion. I'm not sure what you mean by all the tactics you describe.
I suppose my politics at this time are to obstruct the left all the time, in all possible ways, within the bounds of the law. But that has tradeoffs! It would be nice to be able to cooperate and pursue the common good. I just think the threat of leftist tyranny exceeds the benefits of cooperation. And I don't think rightist tyranny is a real threat, because the right is institutionally incapable of exercising power at the national level.
>On gun control, the low-hanging fruit would be to think about ways to create more obstacles and disincentives for low-IQ, low-impulse-control offenders who want to carry handguns. Though you might argue that more of these ideas actually belong to the right (e.g., the MSU shooter was let off on a guns charge by a Soros DA).<
I'm not sure how you create obstacles to acquiring a gun that specifically targets "low-IQ/low-impulse-control" aside from maybe background checks which has already been a thing forever.
>I suppose I think there are also tradeoffs when you start behaving antagonistically towards the other side, and sometimes that's missed in this discussion. I'm not sure what you mean by all the tactics you describe.<
Well the trade off is antagonizing half the country. You'll have a harder time being friends with liberals for instance. There will be more political and social conflict. I think it's definitely the case that if one side of the aisle just fully surrendered to the other, then you'd see for instance, less cases of family members refusing to speak to each other over political disagreements, because there wouldn't be any disagreements to begin with.
The question is whether "keeping the peace" in this sense is worth the long term consequences. I would compare it to, for instance, World War II. Entering World War II had some pretty enormous costs for the United States. A lot of men died and a lot of resources were spent. But, when it was over, there were no more Nazis. The cost was deemed to be worth the end result.
While we are screaming at each other over social media instead of firing machine guns at each other in today's "culture war," I think the same dynamic more or less applies. Much of the "normie" right wing remains in some degree of denial over this IME, though that has been steadily improving over time as the left keeps proving its hostility over and over again. People want leftist ideology to go away but expect it to somehow disappear without any serious confrontation or conflict.
You can still see some of this in the response to Michael Knowles saying that "transgenderism must be eradicated from public life," for instance here: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/why-im-leaving-the-daily-wire?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web. This person recognizes some of the problems with transgender ideology but the notion of truly going to war with the gender specials still causes her to balk. The problem is that the left has already been at war with the right for a long time, and burying one's head in the sand will not make that truth go away. There is no hesitation on the left about whether right wing viewpoints should be utterly eradicated out of existence. In war, your enemy necessarily has a say in the terms of engagement.
>I suppose my politics at this time are to obstruct the left all the time, in all possible ways, within the bounds of the law. But that has tradeoffs! It would be nice to be able to cooperate and pursue the common good. I just think the threat of leftist tyranny exceeds the benefits of cooperation. And I don't think rightist tyranny is a real threat, because the right is institutionally incapable of exercising power at the national level.<
The common-good solution, in my opinion, would be to pursue separation. But even most right wingers immediately shut off their brains at this suggestion, so unfortunately we will have to endure at least a few more election cycles of failure, nonsense and decay before anyone starts to well and truly get serious about the future.
I am not really convinced that right-wing thinking is more rational in general:
1. The idea that more armed law-abiding citizens will ultimately deter crime and criminal shootings seems like a good sounding right-wing myth, at least I haven't seen any statistical evidence for it.
Logically, I would expect the opposite to be true - the chance of robbery or violent crimes might be reduced by the deterrent of the attacked person/'house owner' having guns but the chance that the encounter ends in death is probably much higher.
The almost entirely white Vermont has 2.5 the murder rate of Germany, so I don't think race is an appropriate explanation (definitely not for all the difference).
2. Most social conservatives have an absolutely skewed view on abortion, believing that it's mostly committed by lazy liberal college educated women, not poor black and latino women usually with one child who don't want to raise another child in poverty.
They deny that the legalization of abortion was a major factor in the fall of the crime rates (contributing probably half of it) and a national abortion ban would seriously execerberate these problems within a generation.
3. Most of the right-wing people (not just them, but they especially) have an absolutely irrational view on terrorism, which is really a minuscule danger. In many ways, it's analogous of the left-wings view on school shootings (which again, are vanishingly rare, although not as much as terrorism), the difference is that the right was actually able to instill restrictive measures to 'fight terrorism'.
4. Much of the right also holds the view that 'government spending which doesn't go to the military is bad', when many studies show that spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare can actually spur growth.
I also think you misrepresent the left-wing view on climate change. Most leftists don't deny that fossil fuels have advantages (how could they? they are still used exactly because they are generally cheaper and more reliable), they just think that they cause serious externalities which should be factored in.
Finally, the right-wing is perfectly willing to cancel people when they have the power to do so, a good example is how Republican states countered the BDS.
>I am not really convinced that right-wing thinking is more rational in general<
Rational would be a different argument, the idea is that right wingers are more capable of recognizing that trade offs exist. Abortion and crime is a perfect example of this. I am sure that many right wingers are fully aware that reducing the black population would reduce crime rates. They are simply not willing to accept the trade off of, y'know, murdering babies in order to do it.
>Logically, I would expect the opposite to be true - the chance of robbery or violent crimes might be reduced by the deterrent of the attacked person/'house owner' having guns but the chance that the encounter ends in death is probably much higher.<
This is a bizarre framing. Are you implying that a man who shoots a home invader in self-defense has committed murder just the same as if the home invader shot him?
>Most of the right-wing people (not just them, but they especially) have an absolutely irrational view on terrorism, which is really a minuscule danger.<
Most right-wing people of today view the Bush years with disdain and consider the "war on terror" to have been a mistake.
>Much of the right also holds the view that 'government spending which doesn't go to the military is bad', when many studies show that spending on infrastructure, education and healthcare can actually spur growth.<
The idea of counting government spending (which is only enabled by taxing private wealth) as "growth" is a perfect example of left-wing tradeoff denial. Instead of recognizing the trade-off and saying that the economic damage of higher taxes is worth the increase in government services, they just claim that actually higher taxes and more government spending is somehow also good for the economy overall, as if the government just has a magical value printer that it can spin up at will.
>I also think you misrepresent the left-wing view on climate change. Most leftists don't deny that fossil fuels have advantages (how could they? they are still used exactly because they are generally cheaper and more reliable), they just think that they cause serious externalities which should be factored in.<
The typical left winger denies that eliminating fossil fuels would have any serious trade offs. If you care about climate change at all, this is your position pretty much by definition. To be honest in advocating for an end to fossil fuels would mean that you'd have to pretend to be okay with an end to the modern lifestyle as we know it. Do you think cargo freighters are getting across the ocean using batteries?
Climate alarmists instead talk as if fossil fuels can somehow be eliminated without any real change in standard of living, i.e. denial of tradeoffs.
Empathy prevents the analysis of tradeoffs. I view Liberals/progressives as being crippled by being overly emotional and empathetic and cannot accept tradeoffs which harm whatever group they are devoted to protecting. What is best for society writ large can't ever come at any expense of anyone.
"What is best for society writ large can't ever come at any expense of anyone."
You're giving them too much credit. It certainly can and does come at the expense of someone else; just depends on who you are. The left knows which groups they are devoted to protecting and which groups that have to bear the expense of the consequences of "protecting" said groups.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that, beyond Miranda and the will to combat crime, in El Salvador, gang members (MS 13) tattoo their bodies profusely. It is very easy to identify and immediately haul that guy to jail. El Salvador isn't concerned with charging them with a crime and giving them their day in court. It is all out war made easy by the tattoo ID. I also think thousands of them have emigrated to the USA in order to evade prison. It's our problem now.
There's another layer to the tattoo thing that further makes it easy. In addition to what can be seen with the naked eye, these gangs don't take kindly to those who LARP as gang members. So the notion some innocent El Salvadoran store clerk would get an MS-13 tattoo to blend in is non-existent. These gangs are sophisticated enough to know who even gave them the tattoo, making it even more unlikely for this to happen.
By the way, in order to get a gang tattoo and thus be properly initiated, you pretty much have to kill or rape someone. Not that this will quell the concerns of those who would be concerned to begin with, but worth mentioning to those who agree already.
Having represented numerous criminals over the years, I can attest that a credible threat of being in jail does have significant impact at deterrence.
Most criminals have low-impulse control issues, so they are not too focused on consequences. Most criminal acts take place when the criminal is under the influence. Even so, knowing they have a huge chance at jail does deter even their short term thinking.
Now if we had harsh jail environments, this would work better.
Modern jails are like hotels with free healthcare, internet, food, gym, libraries, etc. paid for by the taxpayers, comprising the bulk of the victims of the crime. So, the victims of violent crime are paying and will pay for their perpetrator's cushy life. Modern prison is a punishment for the non-criminal citizen rather than the criminal, humiliating the victims far more than the perpetrators.
Still, once faced with the justice system, criminals want to avoid jail at all costs. This would only increase if the world adopted the jails of El Salvador.
I agree, of course. I was just musing on how different modern 1st world prisons are, at least in white countries (don't know about Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc.) from what they used to be. They used to be terrifying, now they are just dull and mildly depressing, both for the prisoners and the free citizens. Imagine paying for murderers, serial rapists, attempted murderers, burglars, car thieves, drug dealers, etc. to have what amounts to a 1st world comfy life in prison, better than the life of every person living pre-1900, better even than the life of virtually all 3rd worlders both inside and outside of prison today, better than the life of many 1st worlders outside of prison today. Inconceivable just 70 years ago.
> As in many other Latin American countries, mano dura (iron fist) is enduringly popular, offering voters the assurance of unsparing punishment and mass incarceration for criminals even though it repeatedly fails to curb violence over the long run.
You could also translate "mano dura" as "steady hand", or "hard grip". Not a literal translation, but neither is "iron fist".
I think another reason people are reluctant to acknowledge this is that it’s easier to adhere to a “one-size-fits-all” ideology rather than admit that the world is complicated, and that different situations might necessitate different policies. Crime is a good example: it makes sense that Norway and El Salvador should have different practices here, but people find it easier (for both ideological and cognitive reasons) to impose simple models that can be applied universally.
Having represented many criminals over the years including murderers up for the death penalty, I can attest that criminals hate going to jail and a credible threat at jail can
People who criticize what Bukele did don't understand how people lived in En Salvador before this, the atrocities committed by these monsters. This is not normal criminality, it's not just some random guy stealing a cellphone in the center of a big city, it's criminal gangs that work like mafias, corrupting and controlling everything around them, killing, raping, torturing, stealing poor people's money. This is a terrorist group and it must be dealt as such. More than 90% of people in El Salvador agree with Bukele.
The midwit mentality see 'authoritarianism' as something bad immediately without analyzing the circumstances because he equates it to fascism/nazism or other types of dictatorships. They try to apply the same model of thinking they've been applying their entire life without actually understanding what's going on in this case.
“The assumption that ‘things tend to revert to the mean’ is a much better assumption than ‘trends continue until they reach numbers never seen before.’”
Tangential, but does this do to arguments of the sort that OSHA was not responsible for decline in workplace accidents because the trend line preexisted the establishment of that agency?
But consider a broader perspective: despite mean reversion, we've seen steady progress on all sorts of measures, including violence (Better Angels and all that), since through programs such as the British Hanging Cure we've shifted the mean over time. It is not unreasonable to think that we could remove the 1% of 1% of 1% of the population with strong criminal propensities from the breeding pool and see enduring beneficial effects, albeit at the expense of some libs and NGO's getting their hair tousled and eyes wet for a news cycle or two.
"remove the 1% of 1% of 1% of the population"
320 people? That's fewer than in Congress.
Lol my bad
They think that trampling the rights of criminals will open the door to fascism. Also, some probably believe in the blank slate. It’s a kind of widespread hybristophilia; or as Hanania argues, regarding Wokeism, “excessive niceness”.
Maybe I’ve missed something, but surely the whole debate about El Salvador/Bukele crack-down resolves to the ethical dilemma of how many innocent (or “slightly guilty” people!) is it ok to punish in order to decrease the murder rate. If we could conclude that everyone in prison was a guilty party, it might be easier!
Anecdotally, I've heard the same case could be made for Yogi Adityanath in India, who has supposedly "cleaned up" the streets of Uttar Pradesh. If true, it does get us into philosophical territory fairly quickly - (1) Most liberal principles are only worth uploading because we expect them to have good long term consequences if applied consistently (2) Some local decisions in line with these principles will have negative expected value and we should accept them since its required to hold the system together (3) However, some states - like El Salvador or parts of India - are not places where these principles are generally upheld anyway and any liberal order that emerges can only do so in the absence of horrific violence and disorder.
European crime levels are a lot lower than America's even with much lighter sentences and lower incarceration rates, as well as a strong focus on rehabilitation. Even if there is the hypothesis that police officers are freer to work and cases don't usually gets dismissed due to failure in complying with defendant's rights, that is far from uniform across Europe. Germany has a strong level of defendant protection and still sits at very low crime rates. The crime rates are not uniform across Latin America either. Countries like Chile and Uruguay also guarantee a lot of rights to suspects and defendants, and still have very low crime rates (at least until recently in the case of Chile anyways). Of course there is a tradeoff, but the Salvadoran recipe may not be the only option.