No doubt you have seen the widespread reports of a spate of random attacks on Asian-Americans. Many of these have been especially disturbing because the victims were vulnerable old people. They have happened all over the country and are widely attributed to propaganda blaming the Covid-19 pandemic on China, usually framed as "the Chinese."* It is historically very common in epidemics for people to blame foreigners, or people perceived as foreigners, for introducing the disease, although obviously in most of these cases the people were U.S. citizens. (Note that many of the victims have been of Korean or other other heritage than Chinese.)
So, back in April the Senate passed legislation in response. It doesn't create any new category of crime or hate crime. All it does is create a position at DoJ to hasten processing of reports of Covid-19 related crimes or incidents; task DoJ and HHS to work with community based organizations to develop educational materials about anti-Asian prejudice and violence; and require the AG to work with state and local authorities to develop an on-line reporting system. Sen. Josh Hawley was the only senator to vote against it, because it's his policy to vote against everything. But now the legislation has gone to the house and 63 Republicans voted against it.
What is the constituency they are trying to please? People who want to walk up behind old people and hit them with a hammer? People who want to massacre massage parlor workers? The party has become the party of insanity, and maybe this is the least of it. But still, I don't get it.
Update: WTF do you mean I ignore the racial aspect of the attacks? That's the whole point you moron. And the race/ethnicity of the attackers, which is various, is completely irrelevant.
* It appears that the Chinese government initially tried to conceal the epidemic in Wuhan, which is bad, but obviously irrelevant.
7 comments:
I can't be certain of their motives, but I tend to oppose performative nonsense like this because it never has any effect on the situation and ends up being a bureaucratic employment program. Consider: this will require 4 new positions, a coordinator and their assistant, at both DoJ and HHS. Their communications with various local agencies and NFPs will take up perhaps 0.1 FTE at each. Since we keep adding these useless mouths, year after year, eventually each of those agencies will end up growing by another body.
And so forth, ad infinitum...
These things always begin with someone in power observing that a Bad Thing is happening, which is quite true in this case. Actual solutions being out of reach, what we get is a Coordinator To Address The Bad Thing, a Bad Thing Reporting Requirement, and a Bad Thing Database. None of this ever has the slightest effect on incidence of the Bad Thing but, from a bureaucratic perspective, that is largely beside the point. This is exactly the the process of accreting box checkers that Graeber described in Bullshit Jobs. It's important to mention that the process is by no means limited to government and my own observation is that it's a function of organizational size and age.
Honestly, I suppose I shouldn't really be opposed to this generally because bullshit jobs are the only kind we are capable of creating anymore and these, at least, come with decent pay and a union. So we have that.
I don't agree with this at all. In order to address any social problem, we need data about it. Good data about crimes is sadly lacking, and there is no reliable quantitative data about this particular category of crime. Being willfully blind to problems means wanting to pretend they don't exist and not doing anything about it. Bad thing databases are absolutely valuable. As far as the human resources involved, they are absolutely trivial, but most certainly not useless. The bill does not spend any new money at all, not one penny.
I'm a social scientist and I have a long history of working on problems of lack of data. You can't do anything about what you don't understand.
Don't mistake me, estemado Cervantes. I absolutely agree that good data is needed, but this will collect absolutely nothing of material value to addressing the problem because that is not contained within the sort of reporting that is generated. It is, in fact, something a crime reporting system is incapable of collecting. You would have to do in-depth, cognitive/behavioral interviews with the suspects, examining their life, exposures, and thoughts until the incident. This, in turn, would require them to admit to the act, something the system discourages with all of its considerable force.
Even if you manage to carry out such a feat, the results will likely be ignored because (a) they are inconvenient to those in power, (b) the implied solution is expensive and complicated, or (c) both. Example: We have clearly established through psychological surveys that the unifying characteristics of violent felony populations are poor impulse control and inability to project outcomes beyond the immediate. Nevertheless, the debate in "criminal justice" continues to revolve around deterrence vs quarantine, because we know how to do those, the money chain is well established, and americans are a rather bloodthirsty lot to begin with.
Lastly, that it allocates no funds is wholly irrelevant because that's not how this game is played. The funds will come in next years budget request on a staffing line item that no one will even look at. That is how bureaucracy works.
I'd like to weigh in on mojrim's side but from a slightly more abstract perspective.
Parts of a system are almost by definition interconnected. Adding a component almost always affects several other components, which must then be modified to deal with the addition.
At its worst adding a new component will not add to, but will multiply the complexity of the system. If a component affects every other component then adding component n+1 will not only add its own cost but also the cost of modifying the other n components to deal with it. There is actually a formula for the bare-bones version of this process:
. . . . . . (I had trouble formatting this. I hope its legible.)
Components in system
. . . . . . Cost of system
[n] , , , , [n*(n+1)/2]
1 , , , , , 1
2 , , , , , 3
3 , , , , , 6
4 , , , , , 10
5 , , , , , 15
6 , , , , , 21
7 , , , , , 28
... , , , , , . . .
This is of course highly over-simplified, but reality seems to follow a similar progression.
Lawmakers tend naturally to ignore this when they craft their thousand page bills, but I think it helps explain the byzantine procedures of some government agencies, and also the source of many of those bullshit jobs.
I'd much rather see us try to slip a solution to a new problem into an existing structure than create a new office to handle it.
A brilliant aspect of Andrew Yang's original Universal Basic Income proposal was that it goes to everyone; no preconditions. Relatively simple to administer, and we can simply fiddle a bit with tax rates for the wealthy to account for their UBI. We would probably make our government agencies more fair, and definitely less susceptible to manipulation, if we didn't struggle so hard to make them perfectly fair.
I think you are engaging in motivated reasoning here. It is not necessary to psychoanalyze all the perpetrators for the information to be useful. Do you think that crime reporting systems in general should not exist? That would be a very difficult argument to make.
As for whether the public policy response will be appropriate, that's a political problem. Knowledge is necessary but not sufficient. But blindness is never a desirable state. See my new post.
Previous comment was response to Mojrim. Chucky, the marvelous capabilities of the electronic digital computer and data analysis software would de-socks you. I do agree it might make sense to locate this within an existing office that maintains comparable systems, but as far as I can tell the legislation allows HHS to do that.
1. You're isolating the issue that Chucky is generalizing: how complexity works in large human systems. It's irrelevant who own the new office or how it's staffed, the N^N effect remains.
2. The mandate solves the political problem regardless of material effects. That's a large part of my point.
3. Also, that's a copout.
4. See my response on your new post.
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