One way to now a chess match is about to begin is to see people place pieces on a chessboard. There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C. As a pre-emptive move it is an overt threat and as a response to something that is actually happening it is complete overkill. Either way, trouble is brewing.
In March 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, announced that she would deploy 750 members of the National Guard to New York’s subway system.
Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.
Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.
National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).
I think a lot of people were also angry about that, and I think it may be a contributing factor to the success of Mamdani. As part of the feud between state-level and city-level politics, which is pretty intense despite being both nominally "D" because American politics doesn't have enough parties.
Arent the police effectively under the governors control already?
The DC is different and has a law that allows the federal government to do this. It’s unusual but not illegal and is a feature not a hack. corollary to a governar using both local police + NG
1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?
2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?
3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)
4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?
Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.
Regarding 2) it is well known that Hochul herself is a strong Israel supporter who has opposed Palestinian protests. She ordered CUNY school Hunter College to remove the Palestinian Studies professor position. Pro-Palestinian protestors have been arrested several times at her events.
(Incidentally, I personally support the UN Resolution 181 for a 2-state solution, so I am against the position of the US government - whether Republicans or Democrats)
The reason why nobody raised an eye then is because the people doing that weren't making all of the pre-requisite moves to set up a dictatorship. It was - of course - still misguided and it didn't work. Trump is using DC either simply 'because he can' (absent any actual reason), or as a trial ground to normalize such deployment to other cities in the future (he tried that once and failed). It also serves as a distraction from his Epstein files woes.
March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.
If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise.
The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown.
^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
If you're insinuating that crime is not actually down and statistics are merely lying, then you are mistaken.
Crime, pretty much everywhere in the US and by many different metrics, has been falling for over 3 decades.
It makes sense. Crime is getting harder and harder to committ with the advent of the Internet and new surveillance technology. Crime is, like all things in life, a risk-reward calculus.
Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime. You're often better off just... not... And getting help through provided channels. And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
> Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help.
> And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim.
Or, in a police state, the point isn't solving crimes.
In my city, any protest over a half dozen people gets a police response. However they may show up a couple hours late to you being robbed, but will probably tell you to go to their website and file a report they won't follow up on.
Paradoxically, as you reach more and more of a police state, the point of the police isn't to solve or prevent crimes. It's to use violence against threats to the police state.
“With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime.”
Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance. Rather, crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics, policing or lack there of, surely not by aggregate health care spending lol.
Medical debt is one of the most common kinds of debt in America. Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. So is anxiety over bills. Untreated mental or physical health issues can come into play as well.
I’ve known criminals, and a lot of people with huge debts, even known a few people who have had to declare bankruptcy. I assure you nobody is robbing or stealing or raping or killing people over medical debt. Student loans on the other hand…
> Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, the same factors that make one more prone to criminal activity also make them more prone to poverty; therefore, you cannot solve criminality by solving poverty, because the confounding factor is still present afterwards.
A man was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned to great fanfare by the Innocence Project. He received $4.1m for his troubles. A few years later, he killed another man over a $1200 drug deal gone bad[0].
Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
> Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
I think the vast, vast majority of people are committing crime to make money, and I think your singular counter example, which isn't really a counter example, is worthless.
Yes, SOME people are just bad and will always commit crime. Some.
However, most criminals do it for monetary gain.
Why do people even sell drugs? Surely, if their goal is to be evil and just make a lot of people hooked on heroin, they'd just give it away for free right?
Well, that isn't their goal. Their goal is to make money.
> Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance.
Its a simple question - is crime motivated by money or not?
If you answer yes, then you're wrong - things like the ACA that lessen financial burden MUST lead to less crime over time.
If you answer no, then you're probably not reasonable. Who legitimately believes that crime isn't caused by money issues?
> crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics,
Demographics absolutely do not drive crime, otherwise you have a broken world view. Being of a different demographic is a SYMPTOM, not the cause.
Being black does not cause crime, or being in a zip code does not cause crime. Being poor does, that zip code having poor education does, that zip code providing no opportunities does.
Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda.
HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
I’m very moderate by world standards. For example I think we should give gang members trials before we put them all in jail forever. In my home country we don’t have a gang problem, but we have an Islamist problem. Our former PM handled that by having military special forces just kill islamists. She had a 70% approval rating before a bizarre coalition of leftist students and islamists overthrew the government.
Western liberals are just outside the Overton window in terms of their toxic sympathy for criminals and disorder.
The “problem” you keep referring to can be boiled down to: extremes exist. HN, like any large population sample, is a bell curve of opinion, which, by definition has tails of extreme opinion at each end. However the most extreme and toxic opinions rarely get seen because they are taken care of by community flags and moderator bans.
They are covered by the first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines: “be kind”, which apply to all of us, including you, in the way you are engaging with others in this thread.
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread
The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.
I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.
Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.
Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.
If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.
It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.
There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.
I'm starting to understand the "touch grass" meme.
Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
Born and raised, and still living in an area that you likely wouldn't. You have no idea.
To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets.
However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does.
If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime?
Or will they continue to deny the tipping point?
At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets?
No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
> If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
Where is this "broad support" coming from? The actual people living in Washington DC, or rural outsiders who have conjured up some picture in their minds of "crime infested cities?" If you did a poll of everyone in DC, would the majority be in favor of increased policing?
It always seems like the people who are most vocal about crime in big cities are always the people who don't live in or visit those big cities.
There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
Hmm, to your anecdotes I will add mine. I have been harassed in the International District at around 10:00 pm by drug dealers - was offered drugs, told them to go away so I was yelled “Get off my block”. A hobo spilled his beer on my wife while riding the bus. A female coworker was offered oral sex by a hobo and asked to take her glasses off to “see her pretty eyes”. At a bus school stop on Fairview (right next to Amazon Campus) a hobo with his pants down to his knees was exposing himself in front of some kids (their mothers were trying to make some shield around the kids)
All of these around 2021-2022-2023. We moved out of Seattle in 2023. Maybe these snecdotes are not a big deal for you. For me they are scary.
>There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.
And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?
I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.
The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.
You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
>I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
And I remember that that was about focusing police on policing and spending more on having specialists provide social support and the kind of things that prevent crime, which cops aren't trained to do or any good at.
Not OP, but yes, "defund" meaning to reverse the excessive budgetary increases of the past 5-10 years, which increased militarization of police, alongside increasing qualified immunity precedent. Some people took "Defund The Police" to mean "No Police" (there will always be extremists, sincere or planted), and it turned out to be a terrible slogan for this reason. There's a healthy middle ground in which the police force is reduced to a reasonable level, and other services are funded, so the police with their guns and military training aren't the first responders when e.g. someone is suicidal or spraypainting graffiti.
And even if the suicidal person is holding a knife, or it's my house being spraypainted, I don't want the person shot!
>The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
>We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.
I did some minimal searching for Seattle and explosions in 2020 and I found plenty of sources reporting on different supposed explosions, at different times and places (within Seattle). Seems perfectly plausible to me.
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down?
More than one.
>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?
More than once.
>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?
Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.
So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
>Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?
No need to be snark. Unlike your comment, where you iterated what happened to you without any time specifics, my comment was for a specific time period as evident from the discussion.
There was nothing clearly stating any dates or years.
Just like you did, I assumed what you said all happened in the past three weeks.
Especially since I said[0]:
"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge."
Because we grow up fast here in NYC. A month ago I was a child. Now I'm pushing 60. All in the past three weeks!
>> Did you?
Literally the first line was starting with ">> Yugoslav communism...".
#Especially since I said[0]:
#"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several #attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the #Brooklyn Bridge."
That was for the robbery and before that you said:
#>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many #gun barrels have you stared down?
#More than one.
#>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just #standing there?
#More than once.
Nothing specific there. Why are you so antagonizing about it and trying to straw man something with my comment that doesn't exist? I only told you how I read (I'm probably not the only one) your comment and pointed out some context was missing and when you explained it, I accepted it.
For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
Democracy gets traded for dictatorship because someone shows up and says "I might not be perfect but I'm a hell of a lot better than these schmucks who've been ruining things". And when that person saying that stuff shows up at a point in time when the people who have been in charge of things have run the country into the ground with wars, debts and policies that give people no hope that things will get better, it's a pretty compelling message.
It would be, if it were true. But the premise isn't true and the solution isn't true either. It just sounds good and people tend to respond from fear and other emotions rather than rationality.
> I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them
What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.
All of them. In the context of a political appointment, "merit" reflects ability to carry out the President's political agenda. Trump's appointees have been phenomenally effective at doing what Trump promised to do.
“Merit” can mean different things depending on the nature of the job. Juilliard using auditions instead of SATs is still merit-based admissions. But “merit” never means someone’s race or ethnicity.
Put differently, DEI is when you have double standards based on race. Colleges do think test scores = merit, because that’s the primary criterion for selecting among within the group of whites/asians. It’s DEI when they use other factors to try and achieve desired racial balancing.
1) DEI can be done badly, of course, and in an ideal world would be unnecessary, I think anyone on either side of any spectrum wants merit over anything else, but for various historical, systemic, as well as unconscious bias [1], this has not been the case, statistically. DEI on the ~interviewer~ side, not the interviewee side can and has addressed [1]. I fail to see the downside. The only way to claim it's unfair would be to confess that [1] is real, meaning some solution is needed, meaning DEI has done ~some~ good [2].
I agree that quotas are certainly bad in principle, and many times in practice, but I have seen no credible claim where the status quo is a meritocracy, leading to the blatant showing in the current admin.
2) Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous (or any previous) administration.
It’s not only unnecessary, it’s illegal. If you think historic discrimination had negative effects, just target the negative effects among all people similarly situated.
> Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous administration
Aggressively pursuing the President’s agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Political appointees are just that—political. The relevant standard of merit isn’t who is the best nerd, but who will best carry out the agenda the President campaigned on. The whole point is that voters can change the direction of the executive branch through electing the President, who in turn appoints like-minded cabinet secretaries.
> Speaking in an NPR interview in November, Kennedy said Trump had given him three “instructions”: to remove “corruption” from health agencies, to return these bodies to “evidence-based science and medicine”, and “to end the chronic disease epidemic”.
Do you believe political agenda to be a suitable merit here as opposed to education and field work?
That is not the definition of merit that I'm familiar with. You are welcome to your own set of definitions, of course.
The only thing the Trump appointees (including the supreme court ones) have been phenomenally effective at is deconstructing the USA. And they're not done yet.
Trump is systematically engaging in performative actions to distract from the simple fact that the USA has elected a conman, criminal and serial abuser of women to the highest office. And you are cheering him on.
The only change I would make there is the "to" in "to distract".
On the basis of his behaviour in courts, I recon there's a common cause for performative behaviour and him being a convicted criminal, rather than it being an instrumental behaviour intended to distract. He doesn't behave as if he has a mental model for the difference between "I did a bad thing and should be ashamed" vs. "I am having power struggle and must fight dirty", nor any concept of a lie beyond observing that "liar" is an insult.
This isn't really an improvement, and other people may be playing him in this way for their own power games.
The criminal justice system is racist. The solution to crime is more complicated than “let all the criminals go” but sending in the National Guard is definitely not the solution. Also, given the current state of affairs, this will be forgotten about — because Trump will do something even more outrageously authoritarian. And your $100 won’t help when the regime kidnaps me out of my home.
I beg to differ mostly. The criminal justice system is heavily staffed by people of all colors and ethnicities, including many, many blacks, who in some cities predominate among the police (and general population, at least in some neighborhoods). Despite this, it's often just as bad towards civilians and minority civilians as a mostly-white police force.
More specifically, the criminal justice system is classist, and that minorities are often part of the poor and underclass in many cities makes them much more targets than their coincidental skin color, though it sometimes seems to serve as a useful visual marker for police to who it's easier to target on sight. The idea of so many police officers and other law enforcement officials who are themselves black or some other visibly non-white ethnic group nonethless targeting civilians who are of the same color, for race reasons, doesn't really make sense from a racism perspective, but it does make sense from a class perspective.
If the classism is indistinguishable from racism and often manifests in results where one race is particularly disadvantaged, then it's also racist.
Racism and classism feed each other. We've known that since even before the civil war. Claiming classism doesn't make racism - poof - disappear. It actually reinforces it.
You refute that violent crime is a large factor that caused authoritarianism in El Salvador? The post I was responding to made it seem like democracy and violent crime can somehow coexist or that they aren't in strong tension with one another. When it's pretty clear that they are. I was not saying it's the only cause of authoritarianism, or the most relevant cause in the current US moment.
> Dude, no it’s not. Everyone is parroting the “crime dropped from 2023” line, but nobody mentions that the 2023 spike pushed DC’s murder rate to as high as Haiti. Not Haiti normally, but the recent events in Haiti where gangs took over the country, causing the homicide rate go spike from about 10 per 100k normally (safer than DC has ever been) to about as bad as DC in 2023.
Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline? And 2024 as the year to use for reference (it is the last year for which complete data is available, after all).
And as for NYC, that wasn't dealt with on the Federal level but on the state and city level. And it left a power vacuum in the crime world that was soon taken up by others, which should have been dealt with rather than ignored. Who knew that policing cities of millions of individuals over decades is hard? Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
As for the comparison with Haiti you make (and not to mention Iraq, as you did elsewhere in this thread): countries, especially countries at war and places like Haiti do not excel in record keeping. As such you probably should take the numbers reported from those countries as somewhat polished before being presented.
> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?
Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.
1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
So, your answer to cherry picking - by your claim - is more cherry picking?
> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.
> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.
Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.
'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!
Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.
Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.
You keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.
I assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries.
And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?
> Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich.
Poverty doesn’t cause crime either! It’s another liberal attempt to deny reality. Puerto Rico’s median income is 10-20x higher than India or Bangladesh or many countries in Africa like Ghana. But Puerto Rico’s homicide rate is 5-8x higher.
You don’t need to suspend due process to put the offenders causing the most crime in prison. Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy, because the people committing most of the crime are serial offenders. 90% of people admitted to state prison have 2 or more prior arrests: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-case-for-prisons. I’m not saying we should suspend due process, but he should put the peddle to the floor and push hard right up against the line.
And your point about my being affluent cut the other way. It would be easy for me to be a liberal, because I can afford to live in a gated community. When I lived in DC I lived in the “designated safe zones” for the rich white/asian people. Rich people can buy their way out of inferior government-provided order and safety the same way we can buy our way out of inferior government schools. It’s everyone else that’s stuck with the inferior government version.
The sickest thing liberals do is use the poor and lower middle class as human shields to protect the 1-2% of serial offenders and mentally ill. Cleaning up the city isn’t an attack on lower class people. Lower class people are the ones who suffer the most from disorder and who stand to gain the most from order.
> Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy
Who is going to draw that line? You? Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting, and I would not want someone in charge who believed in this wild oversimplification. There are good people who commit crimes, and bad people who don't. Let's not be so quick to "easily" judge and label them.
> Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.
That was tried at some point, but it didn't quite have the effect that the proponents of that scheme hoped for. Unfortunately we didn't learn a thing, or so it seems.
> People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting
This seems like a religious belief. I’m not going to argue religion with you, but the data shows that 2/3 of all crime is committed by just 1% of people: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807 (“The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”).
El Salvador dropped the homicide rate by a factor of 50 in a decade by imprisoning just 2% of the population. Let’s say we can’t go that fast because we have due process and whatnot. But once someone is convicted of a violent crime, why can’t we just double the sentences to keep them off the streets longer?
I’d even be willing to make the prisons nice, like in Norway. The point is to get them off the streets.
Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.
(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)
As with the parent, I prefer civil liberties and small amounts of crime to any alternative.
Which is why the playbook for authoritarianism traditionally starts with lying about how much crime there actually is, thus justifying a crackdown.
If Trump wants to cite excessive crime as his reasoning, then he should provide statistics, not the unsubstantiated off-the-cuff insults he has thus far.
I hope you don’t find yourself in one of the out groups in the fascist state you seem so eager for. There’s a reason you don’t turn the military on the citizenry. They’re for fighting the enemies of the nation and the police are for maintaining order. When the military become the police, the citizenry become the enemy of the nation.
Costa Rica (a country my wife and I are seriously looking at moving to in retirement and planning to spend a couple of months there every year starting next year) famously doesn’t have a military to prevent military coups and to put more money into their excellent universal health care system among other things.
Costa Rica's homicide rate is 17 per 100,000 people. You probably won't notice it living in whatever expatriate enclave you and your wife are looking at, but that's a crushing burden on the average person in the country.
You’re conflating two different things. The number of guns in absolute terms doesn’t matter as much as availability to people who are inclined to commit crimes: a collector / prepper going from 10 to 11 guns affects the total count but doesn’t impact the crime stats the way an angry teenager going from 0 to 1 gun does.
This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
> Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.
Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
>This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
Yes, density would have been a better choice - what I was trying to get at is that when you have a lot of people in close proximity you have more social interactions which can turn negative. For example, here in DC violent crime is largely limited to a few areas where drunk people get out of bars late at night and various crews are fighting over territory, so the numbers go up but most people in the neighborhood aren't affected. The crime rate always goes up in the summer because people are out on the street where they can get into arguments, and everyone's a bit touchy during a heat wave.
You certainly have things like rural gangs, too, but if things are spread out you just don't have that critical mass to ramp the numbers up. This also plays out in other types of crimes – cars get stolen anywhere there are cars, but thieves are playing the odds and it's easier not to attract in a dense population while they'd stick out if they started going up some stranger's driveway in a place where there's no other traffic. When that Kia lock exploit was in the news, there were bored teenagers basically treating street parking as a shopping mall because the supply was huge and until they actually touched a car there was no crime in walking down a sidewalk.
Household ownership doesn't matter if the people who own them aren't likely to be involved in crimes - if a 50 year old farmer has a hunting rifle, their risk profile to society is really different than an angry 19 year old with a handgun.
While crime rates are per 100,000 people, population density makes a big difference because a low density, homogeneous population is going to have fewer interactions which turn negative. That's why people comparing crime stats usually compare cities or regions to avoid falsely reporting a correlation which is nothing more than a function of urban vs. rural density.
And considering that the US has the highest murder rate among first world countries, highest incarceration rate and spends the most on the military. Obvious the US is doing something wrong.
Costa Rica is also turning into the new haven for the drug cartels to run ops, after they were evicted from El Salvador, and the lack of a military certainly does not help here.
The city I spent all of my childhood and went to college in had a murder rate in the 20s per 100,000 the year I graduated. It wasn’t a large city.
Retirement is a long way away. But next year, we have an Airbnb in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose that is safe. It’s a high rise condo 2/2 with a gym and a pool.
The murder rate in “Atlanta” is also still around 20 per 100,000 and I lived in various suburbs of metro Atlanta until 2022 and was never in fear of my life going into the city. But I also lived in a suburban enclaves there.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be one of these ignorant entitled Americans who refuse to learn Spanish. I am close to A2 level Spanish now and should be there by the time we go next year. I can hold simple conversations.
Are we working from your private dictionary, or from the history books? My recollection is that Italian industrialists got along just fine with with Mussolini, and that he did not much tamper with private property.
Mussolini forced businesses to join fascist-controlled employer groups, and workers to join fascist-controlled labour unions - Trump appears completely disinterested in doing such a thing.
Hitler banned all youth groups except for the Nazi Party’s Hitler Youth. Mussolini tried to do the same; but the entrenched power of the Catholic Church meant he was forced to tolerate its youth groups competing with the fascist ones. I haven’t heard of any “Trump Youth” and Trumpism appears to lack the fascist focus on banning all civil society groups except those formally affiliated with the ruling party.
Both leaders enacted explicitly antisemitic legislation - Hitler with enthusiasm; Mussolini possibly more due to pressure from Hitler and a desire to please his Nazi allies than genuine antisemitic conviction. I’m not sure what Trump’s answer to Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws and Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali (Racial Laws) is meant to be
Calling Trump a fascist requires ignoring many things which Hitler and Mussolini had in common but which Trump lacks
In Italy under Mussolini's fascist regime, private property was generally respected, but with significant state intervention and control. While private ownership wasn't abolished, the state exerted considerable influence over the economy through the corporate system, regulating industries and labor.
Private Property: The fascist regime in Italy did not abolish private property. Mussolini's economic policy, known as corporatism, aimed to organize the economy through corporations representing various sectors (e.g., agriculture, industry).
State Intervention: While private ownership remained, the state played a central role in economic decision-making. The regime established a Ministry of Corporations to oversee the economy and regulated labor relations through the Charter of Labour.
Corporatism: The fascist regime organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations. These corporations were intended to represent the interests of both employers and employees within each sector, but in practice, they were largely controlled by the fascist state and party members.
Limited Independence: The corporations and labor organizations had limited independence, and the state played a significant role in regulating their activities and resolving disputes.
Influence on Production: The fascist state influenced production and economic activity through various agencies and institutions, such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale (IRI), which held shares in key industries, and the Instituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI), which controlled credit.
As in more regulation (leftist), not less (current admin)
Fascism is the expansion of the state, anti-small-government.
Again, you don't know what you're talking about.
Propaganda isn't something that only happens to poor brown people in 3rd world countries. Its foolish to think that the people who do this overseas would never do it to you.
Doubling down on this when you're wrong is like someone in an abusive relationship that keeps running back and defending their abuser.
Centralizing power and removing obstructions yet being against censorship and wanting to arm the public?
Again, its incompatible with your warped view and understanding b/c you've heard the word again and again that has no meaning.
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
Straight from the dictionary, I'm going to stand by my words here.
Which doesn't apply to the current administration, just fantasyland.
A small government regime, that wants to arm the public, is against censorship, wants to de-regulate industries, pro-capitalist, etc.. is not compatible with fascism.
How the hell is your fantasy a reality when you're literally wanting to arm the public and expand free speech?
The last guy wanted to get people fired from their jobs over an experimental jab (Nuremberg trials, anybody?), while his supporters were in favor of taking their kids and imprisoning parents into camps - expanding the government, increasing regulations, and literally forming a Ministry of Truth (DHS Disinformation Governance Board).
We've normalized bad behavior (ie: immigration law, Disinformation Governance Board, etc..) in this country for years and ignore laws governing that, so when we have to correct that behavior people tend to forget how we got here. I saw more systemic racism and discrimination under Obama & Biden than I have under Trump or Bush. I saw race and antisemitism heavily weaponized to divide and conquer under liberal administrations more than I ever have under centrist or right leaning administrations.
Its not fascism. Its just fools cherry picking things to live out some weird good guy/bad guy fantasy of theirs.
If this were a tech document, I'm sure the understanding would be far greater - but somehow that type of thinking and understanding goes out the window when it comes to this.
At various points, several western European nations have been "democratic socialist", with varying degrees of success. Not so much of those since the end of the Cold War, but they were generally on the liberal side when it came to personal freedom. For example, the UK — and sure, the UK had The Troubles and all the associated awfulness, and the Empire for some of that period, ditto — the police forces in England, Scotland, and Wales were not (and still are not) routinely armed.
Well, yes, but the next problem to talk about is definitions. Democratic socialism is a name that's not really socialist. Socialism is state control of the economy. That's fundamentally different to creaming the top off a capitalist economy.
Now if the UK enlarges the state to the point where the NHS owns everything and all resource allocation is directed by some bureaucrats, then, sure it's actual socialism. Until then it's capitalism with a giant all-powerful anchor attached called the state.
When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying but I think it does matter. First of all, the police shouldn’t be militarized, so the fact that they already are doesn’t make it any better. Second of all, the military is fundamentally different from the police, who are at least nominally controlled by the city (yes, I know the President can and has taken control of the D.C. police). The people of D.C. shouldn’t be policed by a force that doesn’t answer to them, especially since the vast majority of them didn’t vote for the federal administration that’s currently seizing control of municipal law enforcement.
>When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
Why is grass height any of the government's business? Who voted for the people who did that? Who came up with the legal theories under which those laws exist? Why were these ever a justifiable pretense for the government to threaten people with force in the first place?
We all know the argument. It's some mumbo jumbo about mice and pests and public health, about blight and property values, and government interest in those things. But now the people (demographically, if not literally the same individuals in some cases) who were the ones peddling it are the ones threatened by it and it's made immediately clear to them how bullshit their justification was.
I feel like I'm the fucking goose chasing the guy in the down coat and I don't want to be.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
So you don't trust the stats from last year - which show a decline, but you've already implied that you _will_ trust the stats from this year, if they show a decline.
Additionally, this administration has already shown a propensity toward firing people when they report inconvenient data - jobs data, climate data, etc. That renders any stats reported by this admin going forward very suspect.
You are engaging in motivated reasoning, at best. Not objective analysis.
If you don't trust the stats, then again, how would you know what effect the National Guard has? I can give you my subjective assessment as a DC resident, which is that crime is pretty low and it's a great place to live, but that isn't very useful to anyone who doesn't know me personally.
If you don't trust the stats then the Guard is being sent in for no reason and there will be no way to determine what impact they have. That is a terrible situation for everyone.
> It’s nice to be data driven but that isn’t really possible in our low trust society.
I don't think these concepts (interpersonal trust vs. accuracy of government statistics) are very related. For example China has one of the highest levels of interpersonal trust in the world (https://ourworldindata.org/trust), but notoriously unreliable government statistics.
It's not terrible for everyone. It's great for people who control the National Guard as well as has the ability to control what people are told about their impact.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
(This is not related to the content of your post - I just needed a place to put this reply.)
Ah yes the famous police state of the netherlands. "We have higher crime rates than nordic countries so therefore we must have more and more and more militarized police" is not exactly my idea of reasoned thinking.
Why should I live in a more dangerous society than the Netherlands (which isn't "nordic")? Or Australia? I fit in those places fine. Why can't we have that at home? Why is this level of crime acceptable just because it is lower than 1980? What liberty do I give up by having some guardsmen standing around?
My point is that an ever more militarized police directed by a vengeful president is not actually going to make society safer. I too would like programs that actually address the causes of crime but instead we are going to get more violence done to the poor, racial minorities, and people using their voices.
His point is that the crime rate being lower in these places does not happen due to them having militarized police, so assuming that militarized police in general, much less literally using the military for policing will drop the crime rate doesn't track.
You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.
Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.
I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.
We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.
The Royal Marechaussee is 1/10th the size of the National Police Force and as you noted have quite specialized tasks. They are not the people handling day to day crime and interactions with civilians for mundane police actions. They also receive plenty of training related to the policing duties and are trained on how to police civilians. The national guard does not, and even MPs receive very different training and operate in a very different manner to the regular police.
This is very different than universally militarizing your police force across the nation or employing soldiers untrained in policing as police.
What do you believe the venn diagram of soldier and police skillsets looks like?
I think it looks like a normal venn diagram. Some things are similar and some different and it depends on what deployments or forces each has worked on. That's why NG troops are getting extra training in police duties and working together with normal police.
Police training academy is already generally considered to be insufficient, which is part of why cops continue to receive so much ongoing training as part of the job.
Getting a few rushed bootcamp style classes is not going to do anything to remotely bridge that gap.
DC has incredibly strict gun laws. I doubt many of the weapons used in crimes are legal. I don't think you will be truly any less free having national guard soldiers walking around. Actually seems better than the usual dystopian tech solutions people come up with. Maybe they will try it for thirty days and people will like it.
DC isn't an island. It's super easy for people in the region to get hold of guns, it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun. The question of whether guns used in crime are legal or not seems moot to me, they are equally deadly if misused.
> it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun
Actually, the whole issue is that this is not true! Statistically speaking, the average crime in DC, whether involving a gun or not, goes uncaught, unresolved, and ultimately unpunished.
Because it's not like it is surrounded by countries with lax gun laws. You can't buy a semi-automatic rifle or a handgun and a pile of ammo with the same ease in, say, Belgium that you can in West Virginia. Like, which country in Europe do you think has the laxest gun laws, for comparison? Having lived in both Europe and the US, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US.
There are a lot of weapons from the former Yugoslavian war still floating around in Europe, both single pieces an much larger caches. These pop up with some regularity in crime busts and given the number of weapons that went missing (> 1 million weapons remain unaccounted for) this will likely remain a problem for a long time to come.
At least the Ukraine/Poland border now scans the bulk of the vehicles to prevent the next issue like that. But the ones that are already in the EU are going to surface only bit-by-bit as they get used or uncovered. Given how hard it is to obtain weapons here they are very valuable.
It's so different that for as long as I've lived here I have seen a gun maybe a handful of times, the vast majority of those were guns holstered on the hips of police on patrol (and not even a single time in their hands) and a gun that a private owner was maintaining who uses it exclusively to shoot at a range. Other than that, no guns here, at all.
No, I think the answer is that is only different in that Americans in DC are more criminal. Both places have strict gun laws with licensing requirements. In both places you can get illegal guns, and these are the ones used in crime if a gun is used, otherwise it will be an illegal knife. However in the Netherlands the laws are followed and/or policed better. Maybe now in DC the laws will be enforced better too, and maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave. I predict that few people lose any liberty and that this experiment reduces certain crimes (like street murder, assaults, random robberies/muggings) a lot.
I've spent time in both countries. The difference could not be much larger when it comes to policing.
Laws certainly are not policed better here. The big differentiator is the much smaller wealth gap (though it is still sizeable and should be further reduced) as well as the much more relaxed attitude towards things that we consider illness and/or self-harm, a lot of which ends up being dealt with as crime in the USA. Furthermore, a hospital procedure isn't likely to bankrupt you and when you do become homeless there are - if you want - institutions that will help to get you out of that situation.
It is far from ideal. But it is night and day compared with the USA. I don't recall seeing as much police anywhere else (including such diverse places as Colombia, Panama, Canada and almost every country in Europe), nor did I see people in general being afraid of the police. Sure, you still don't fuck with them but as a rule they're really there to serve and protect, which - ironically - they have to write on the side of their vehicles in the USA, either to increase the pretense or as a personal reminder to the occupants of the vehicle, it is hard to tell which.
I will add that in addition to my longer comment, I doubt that "wealth gap" has much at all to do with these differences in criminality.
Yes, the US has a high gini coefficient. But the median income is very similar to the netherlands, with NL being maybe 5000$ higher. Median wealth per capita is very similar between the two and Americans have slightly higher purchasing power, although again pretty similar. I don't think crime is higher in the US because rich people are sending the poor into a murderous rage, and if it is so then it just indicates there really is a culture problem.
Bureau of Justice statistics says that the US has about 1,200,000 police across agencies. Given a US population of 340 million this is about 283 people per employee (it says this includes civilian personnel, idk how many): https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/census-state-and-lo....
The Netherlands has about 51,000 police officers. They also have 14,000 support officers and some other civilians with some law enforcement powers (I will leave these out since idk how civilian support officers counted in BoJ stats). That is something like 352 people per officer (18 million over 51,000). On top of this there are around 7,000 gendarmie who you will see around at events or government sites, under the ministry of justice.
Australia has a little less per capita (27 million people, 65,000 officers 415:1) but also their defense forces have some domestic authorities that in the US might be law enforcement. Some forces are protesting because they want to hire more people, take that for what you want.
I wouldn't call this a drastic difference and in my anecdotal experience, as opposed to yours, the police are about as visible in all three places, maybe more so in Australian cities because they walk around in large groups wearing hi-vis.
Note that these are similar police presence rates despite probably higher crime in the US (I guess this would depend on offence). If you have higher crime, why wouldn't you have more police?
In contrast to what you say, crime clearance seems to be much higher in the Netherlands. The homicide clearance rate is around 80% compared to 50-65% in the US (depends on year). I believe clearance rates for burglary are also several times higher. So the laws are better enforced.
Colombia, since you brought it up, has a very similar police presence to all of the above. They should probably get more since they have 5x the murders of the US.
I do not really see the relevance of the attitude towards healthcare bill costs to this discussion. Your view of the US as extremely over policed compared to other societies seems misguided based on the data, and maybe driven by ideology since you bring up mostly irrelevant facts like hospital costs (these don't generally bankrupt the homeless in America because they usually don't pay anyway, since they have no money and just go to emergency room). The statistics I see on homelessness do not even indicate that America has a particular homelessness problem in comparison to the Netherlands, for example, in fact they are right next to one another on this list (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...) with Australia being higher. I am sure you can quibble about how the statistics here are collected or what it means.
My thesis is simple. I think Americans commit more crimes because they are more criminal and it is more normalised in society. I think we have all the laws we need, but a lot of inertia preventing us from enforcing them. I think this is particularly true in certain urban areas. I think deploying hundreds of national guardsmen in the capitol is an interesting experiment which stands some chance of changing this a bit, and that it comes as minimal cost to civil liberties of law abiding citizens. Maybe it will work or maybe not, but it doesn't seem outrageous for a city with 200 murders per year in the richest country on earth. I think a more criminal population requires more intensive policing than a less criminal one.
I've spent close to 45 years out of 60 in NL, and I've interacted with the police a handful in that time, and usually I initiated the interaction (other than random alcohol checks). I've spent less than a year contiguously in the United States and have interacted with the police there on every visit, sometimes multiple times per visit. And I never initiated the contact.
> maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave
I say this as someone who's split his life between the US (on both coasts) and Europe: the US's police forces are far more visible, and employ far more force, than in Europe.
Is it really? It is not hard to go the hague and see gendarmerie. I see police all over Europe when I go. If they apply less force, it may be because the population is less criminal, or perhaps they get better people into their forces. I think Europeans have way more regulations that are enforced.
The claim that "more" won't change anything is empirical. Let's come back in a few months and see if DC is safer or not--I will admit if I was wrong.
Again, I think this is an interesting solution because it is actually less invasive than all the tech solutions to just have guys on the street who watch and maybe come up and talk to you and then forget about it. If you are just going about your day peacefully, are you going to lose anything here?
We seem to have gotten a surveillance state with cameras and sensors (and censors) everywhere that somehow doesn't police easily solvable/preventable crime. If I thought there was some big civil liberties tradeoff I might think differently, but it seems like we lost those while still having to buy our deodorant from behind locked cabinets and occasionally getting shot by some guy with ten priors.
The complaints and protests that this goes against civil liberties has just started to ring hollow because there are few visible serious efforts to protest the real abuses of civil liberties which mostly come from tech and the surveillance economy. Somehow the energy is directed against guys in uniform standing around making sure the street doesn't get turned into a drag race.
There are 1.21 firearms for every person in the USA. There are .15 for every person in Europe.
If you don't understand how having 8x the number of firearms per capita increases the ease in which criminals have access to them, I'm not sure what to say. Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access.
I'm not even for gun control - I feel like the genie is so far out of the bottle at this point that there's no real sense in trying to put it back in, and the only way for everyday citizens to be on level ground when it comes to self defense, home protection, etc., is being armed themselves. But acting like states or cities with strict gun control actually have the ability to prevent criminals from having access to them is silly.
"Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access."
So have more police to enforce the laws? Why is there this belief that increasing police cannot do anything? Again, I bet this works and that DC has lower crime during the period the NG is there. It is empirical, let's see.
Gun smuggling is not the kind of crime that national guardsman standing around looking menacing stops. This is the sort of work detectives and specialized units do. Specialized surveillance, physical and digital, informants, etc. People taking plea deals in exchange for additional info.
How would a military force without the training or skillset required to do this help? Without the community knowledge? Without the contacts in it?
The issue isn't whether or not more (and better trained) police would help - they almost certainly would. But that is different from deploying the national guard.
The other problem is that even if crime rates are reduced, that is one statistic in a vacuum - how much damage does it do to public perception of the police? We know it does - see above. What incidents might occur from the lack of training the NG has in policing civilians? What damages does it do to the fundamental freedoms within the country?
What fundamental freedoms are people in DC going to lose? See my other comment---I think this is much less intrusive on civil liberties than adding more surveillance.
National Guardsmen may not find many guns if they arent searching people, but people will think twice about using them with guardsmen standing around. They will get into and escalate altercations where guns might be used less. There are plenty of prior cases where more policing has reduced crime like this, and DC was not doing enough, so this is going to be tried. If the police decide to work together with them enthusiastically, then even more can be done with the extra manpower.
I don't think public perception of police will change much, and anyway it always hovers around 50% confidence in surveys.
Oh, you just have to look around the world to see how effectively a dictator's deployment of national armed force reduces the official crime statistics. There's absolutely positively zero doubt in mind that will be a reported outcome :-)
The whole point of the District of Columbia not being a state is that the United States is an equal compact between the states, and it would not be fair for the seat of the federal government to be in a state. So I'm a hard pass on DC statehood. I find GP's suggestion better.
Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
> Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
Yes I would, the people of DC should have representation, but using retrocession to get there would dilute any influence they have on their own politics and local control. I understand that the founders were worried about fairness and no state being favored over another by selecting one to be the capitol of the country, but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today – especially if that state were made up out of whole cloth from the people who had already lived there.
> but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today
On the contrary, it is a significant concern for me and I'm sure I'm not alone in my thoughts.
Fully half of the top ten richest counties in this country are suburbs of DC, a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying. I find this to be an absolute travesty that shows just how much incentive and corrupting force there is in the federal government.
Return the land to the states. Keep a small federal territorial enclave for actual federal buildings and functions. Make a lot more of these territorial enclaves all around this vast country so that power is less concentrated in one place. That's one thing the Germans got right, in their federalism.
> a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying.
Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)
Now, I'm not a student of politics, so I may be making some error, but I'd say (1) only about 2/3 of the ones on that list* are in a decent political position, and (2) that in any event a shifting of the balance of power between states (not just US states, any states) and their corresponding federal government is a big deal and not to be done lightly.
Of course, because I'm not a student of politics, I also don't take any strong position about what the USA should or shouldn't do with DC. If y'all turn DC into Trump's personal walled castle and themed gold-plated golf course, all I'm gonna do is get some popcorn, I won't stop you.
* including e.g. the one I live in, where the president has far less power than in the American system and real power is with the chancellor, and also the voting system is completely different and supports a plurality of parties not just two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
Just to clarify: I meant the fact that the capital of a country needs some kind of special exception. That normally really isn't the case.
NL is kind of special: the capital of the country is Amsterdam, but the seat of government is the Hague. But in Belgium, which is about as divided as it comes, the seat of government is Brussels, which is itself bi-lingual.
I don't think this is a problem that requires a particularly convoluted solution. What it does require is for people to simply play by the rule of law. And that's the thing that the United States is currently putting to the test on every metric that matters.
All DC statehood proposals cut out the capitol complexes from the territory that would turn into a state. The seat of power would remain not in a state.
I don't think that matters though. I'm more concerned about the broader metropolitan area where all the people with all those powers and all the people who are on their coattails reside. Which is currently Virginia and Maryland. Shrinking DC proper is basically a no-op on that front.
If anything were to happen it should probably be the creation of a "middle" Virginia on some sort of Northeast southwest line so that the metropolitan area is split among three states to dilute it.
Failing that just split it among VA/MD, that'd basically leave the status quo unchanged with regard to interests and power but at least make less people's lives subject to political football.
The crime rates in DC have been dramatically falling over the last couple years, just as they have been falling across most cities in the country for the last couple decades.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
In India where a social media post pissed off someone. It was sarcastic criticism - no threats, no slurs). But won't get into details, sorry. (Also arrested a few times for participating in mass protests against corruption, but that was in a large group, so wasn't all that stressful.)
I also had bad luck when traveling to the US. Got detained by the CBP - I think because I accidentally sneezed on the officer and pissed him off. (Either that or I looked like some terrorist). Had to stay in a cell for more than a day. I wasn't even questioned!
Thankfully, nothing happened after that. Was good to catch up on sleep though, since there was nothing to do.
The degrees to which this is true varies tremendously, depending on how much the concept of "rule of law" is applied. In China (and other police states) the rule of law is not applied, in most European countries and the US (at least prior to this administration) it is (generally speaking; there's always corruption here and there).
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
The capital of a country, especially one in a special status like Washington DC, should be a shinning star of perfection, nit in the top 20 hell holes you'd never want to be caught dead in at midnight alone.
That sounds like a reference to North Korea. If that wasn't your intention: the capital of a country is usually (but not always) also the largest city. The largest city will have the largest group of people on the fringe. By definition it will never be a 'shining star of perfection', but neither are they in the 'top 20 hell holes', they have more of everything, and that - unfortunately - includes more crime. But the DC version is a bit more complex in that the biggest criminals are not found on the streets but in various offices.
For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."
"“In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,” the researchers wrote. “The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.”"
"“Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of proactive policing can inspire additional crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police stops, summonses and so on,” the authors wrote."
I've lived in NYC since the mid-90s which was about the peak for crime so that's exactly what I'm commenting on. The police did some things better, but the dropping crime rates were not just local or even national, but global. No mayor or police chief can take credit for it. Similarly if you want to attribute the 2020 crime wave and recent ebb, it begins and ends with COVID-19. No humans involved at all.
> [...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
> DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe.
DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.
"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."
DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups. If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk at 3am in certain neighborhoods, it had no impact on your life. Fox News likes to describe it as Sarajevo or Mogadishu but it just isn't - go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches. There certainly are crimes happening but anyone telling you it's out of control or that the police are powerless to stop it is lying to you for political reasons.
> DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups.
I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.
Objectively speaking, DC’s 27 homicides per 100k people in 2024 is almost double what it was in 2012. If actually started going back up before the pandemic. And in absolute terms, DC has about 8 times the homicide rate of a relatively safe american city like new york or san diego.
> If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk
It’s ultimately driven by gangs, but most people killed aren’t gang members per se. They’re gang adjacent, or siblings or friends who get caught up in the gang wars. Also, the gangs aggressively recruit young men in the neighborhoods where they operate. It’s very “you’re with us or against us.”
> go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches.
I’ve lived in downtown Baltimore, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. I know how cities work. But the violence is a constant for the people who live there. We got to know an Indian family who had a great Indian restaurant in the ghetto in Wilmington, which has a similar homicide rate to DC. Yeah, on any given day you won’t see someone get murdered. But they had someone get killed on the street outside their restaurant. And EMTs wouldn’t come for hours because they were worried about getting caught in a gang firefight. Then another person got shot in the street near my wife’s office at 5 am waiting for the Nike Store to open. That was just in one year. Imagine growing up there and not being rich each to isolate yourself from the violence.
No, DC and Chicago are not Fallujah. I travel to DC frequently and have never had any reason to fear violent crime. I take the metro. I walk long distances, including late at night. I have relatives who live there. They do not worry about violent crime. They certainly don't consider it "Fallujah". I've also seen aides to the same republican politicians who spout all this fear mongering rhetoric out at night at DC bars without any apparent fears for their safety. Frankly, it's an incredibly insulting to say that DC is Fallujah. There is literally an article on the Department of Justice website from January with the title "Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low". The statistics that you quoted are several years out of date and you conveniently neglected to mention the decline after 2023. You chose a number from 2023 of 40 per 100k, but the number from 2024 was 27 per 100k. That's cherry-picking data to make a point. It's dishonest. You also neglect to mention the differences in data collection practices between the United States and a country like Haiti or Iraq. Exactly how trustworthy are wartime homicide statistics in a country undergoing complete social collapse?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
If you look at the actual list of homicides in a major American city, the victims are often people who are involved in the drug trade. Homicides are often highly concentrated in small areas. A large portion of the city sees no homicides at all in a given year. I don't know if an equivalent map exists for DC, but you can look at a map of homicides in Boston in 2024. There are a few areas where there are clusters with 2-3 homicides within a few blocks. Then there are whole neighborhoods where there are no homicides at all, or just one or two. https://www.universalhub.com/crime/murder/2024
Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
For decades now, the media has painted a sensationalized picture of big cities. I was traveling once and was talking to an older couple from a rural area. When I told them where I lived, they were genuinely concerned for my safety. I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
I've read the same "30 year low" press release. 30 years ago, in the 90s, DC's homicide rate was hovering around the 70-80 per 100k range, which are truly frightening numbers not be seen outside of literal wartime[0]. It's good news that violent crime is down since then, but it speaks to a blind spot[1] that you do not find the current violent crime rate to be utterly unacceptable.
> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.
> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?
[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.
I think what I was trying to convey is that the image of life in an American city that the parent was portraying, when he described a beautiful, wealthy city as "Fallujah" (which he has now deleted), and what this couple clearly had in their head, is just completely alien to most people who actually live in those cities. The impression that you get from conservative media and often local TV news is just completely divorced from reality - or at best the media has taken the experience of a relatively small number of people who live in particularly dangerous housing projects, or particularly dangerous streets, and presented it as how the city works in general. I know Boston better than Washington, so I'll use that as an example. Admittedly, it's a city with much lower crime than Washington, but I've had plenty of experiences talking to older, more conservative people who live in suburban and rural areas, and seem to think it's crime ridden. I used to work in several neighborhoods that are considered dangerous - Roxbury and Mattapan, and I've spent time in some of the rougher parts of Dorchester. I've been inside a number of low-income housing projects. I've walked and ridden buses in these neighborhoods. What I noticed was that whatever concern I felt about my safety came from things that I had heard from the media, not from anything that I personally saw, or even anything that happened to anyone I knew. There are a few exceptions to this, like a few blocks in the South End where homeless addicts congregate where I would genuinely be concerned about something happening. The neighborhoods where I've lived - which are not necessarily affluent - have all felt perfectly safe, with the exception of some petty thefts - particularly bike thefts.
I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.
Boston and New York are in a totally different league than DC. Even at DC’s best in 2012, it had a homicide rate more than three times as high as those cities. And currently, DC’s homicide rate is more than six times as high.
And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.
The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.
The point that I'm trying to make is that relentless propaganda from right-wing media gives people a false impression of life in cities like Washington DC. Hence the poster I was responding to casually comparing Washington to Fallujah and Haiti, one a literal war zone, and the other a place where the social order completely collapsed and even basic services like electricity and clean water were not available. It's an absolutely absurd comparison, and yet many people who only get their information from this propaganda machine absolutely believe this.
What is out of touch is declaring that the crime problem, which is actually improving, is an emergency that justifies deploying troops to the streets of the capital. These troops are being deployed to the areas around the national mall where they are highly visible - but there is very little violent crime and a lot of existing police presence around the monuments. They aren't trained or experienced in street-level law enforcement. Neither are the FBI agents, who are being taken away from other critical priorities like counterintelligence to patrol the national mall. Note that Trump did not deploy the national guard on January 6th, when there was a genuine threat on the national mall. This is not a genuine effort to address crime. It is an extremely cynical effort to look like they are addressing crime while they grab more and more unchecked executive power.
> The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023.
Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.
Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.
> Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population.
The GP elsewhere in the thread pointed out that in like-to-like comparisons of Washington, DC against peer world cities, it fares really poorly in violent crime.
> Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce
I doubt that the people who are committing crimes were disrupted from the workforce.
> DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's
Both things can be true: DC used to be worse in violent crime, and today's violent crime is still unacceptably high.
DC is part of the United States, which has high levels of income inequality and easier access to guns than any other advanced country. The drug war keeps pulling people in because we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people. In other countries, you have better medical care (fewer people buying fentanyl on the street because they can't get legal chronic pain treatment), and if people don't have easy access to guns the homicide rate is lower because while there are people just as mad at the world they're getting in fist or knife fights rather than shootouts which are more likely to be lethal and affect more people. Yes, people still get seriously hurt but if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.
In particular for DC, note also that Republicans have blocked for many years efforts by DC's government to restrict the supply of guns and the lack of a national strategy means that someone who can't buy a gun in DC goes a few miles away to Virginia. In most other countries, you don't have the option of even a short walk offering access to very different laws. This also shows up in the crime stats: in my neighborhood there've been a couple of fatal shootings over the last decade – and in every case both the perp and victim were people from Maryland who came over the border to do a drug deal because they can switch jurisdictions in 5 minutes and thus confuse a police response.
> if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.
Funnily enough, academic work suggests the exact opposite, that the homicide rate in this country could be 5x higher were it not for advancements in trauma care[0]. Inner-city hospitals are applying battlefield medicine techniques and saving lives, turning homicides into aggravated assaults.
> we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people
The state of West Virginia, which has more guns and a higher share of unhappy, economically marginalized young people than Virginia, has a lower homicide rate than its eastern neighbor.
Ultimately, we likely disagree on "the root cause of crime", as it were. I don't believe that more aid for the poor or reducing income inequality will materially reduce violent crime rates, because by and large people do not commit violent crime in order to escape poverty. Instead, people are poor for a lot of the same reasons that they commit crime: they have poor impulse control, high time preference, and little consideration for those around them. We have not yet figured out a way to apply money to people in such a way to change these undesirable behavioral patterns, so I am against spending more of the taxpayer's money in this fruitless endeavor. The ways that do work have fallen out of favor in society.
I believe what will make a material impact is lengthier sentences and more pretrial detention; that is, policy must favor the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of repeat criminals.
Poverty is the underlying driver of most crime. Poverty, in turn, is the result of wealth hoarding by the ruling class.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
>There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C.
What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!
D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).
This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....
D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
A big part of the reason why DC has these problems is because they do not control much of their own budgeting due to the nature of how the federal government manages the territory.
Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.
Many cities have to deal with multiple levels of government, e.g. a state and county government. And DC has a massive budget. DC’s actual 2024 expenditures were $18.7 billion. Austin is $6 billion and Travis County is another $2 billion. San Diego’s budget is about $9 billion.
Philadelphia and Baltimore have a median income half that of DC. They’re among the poorest large cities in the country, while DC is one of the richest.
DC’s problem is that it’s run by people that are somehow dumber than Congress. A literal crackhead was mayor in the 1990s. I think Mayor Bowser is actually doing an excellent job,[1] but she’s the first good mayor the city has had in my lifetime, and everyone around her sucks.
[1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much. She’s not a Resistance type, and always says something like “well I don’t agree but we’ll do our best.” https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5446868-dc-crime-tr... (“I’m going to work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster. Let me put it that way.”).
Do you live in DC or travel there frequently? It's very much not a dump. There are great museums, great parks, a vibrant food and nightlife scene, and many beautiful neighborhoods. There is a lot of poverty (not very visible to tourists), and there is some homelessness (which is visible), but it remains a great city to visit and to live in.
A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?
Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month.
Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.
Teenagers can be strong. Almost every adult would be dumb to pick a fight with a high school football player. And the reality of fighting is that generally once you’re up against two or three other people, you’re going to get beat up. It’s not a Jason Bourne movie. World-class MMA fighters have been jumped. One person generally cannot fight several people.
If you’re enjoying the fact that two individuals attempted a person’s car and then beat them up, just because the victim doesn’t agree with your politics, you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you.
There's a massive gulf between someone merely disagreeing with you and someone taking an active role in (what many people believe to be) deeply evil acts, especially while ignoring the consensus-building mechanism our society uses to determine how taxpayer money is spent (Congressional appropriations).
You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
We can reasonably anticipate these programs will be shuttered for at least another year, if not another decade (or permanently). We can argue here or there about the exact numbers, but it's a waste of everyone's time so I just provided a generous range instead.
At the end of the day... what exactly do you think the billions of dollars of food and drugs sent to unfathomably poor areas were doing if not keeping a huge number of people alive?
I may have said in another comment, that I was actually against most of these cuts. Those programs (like PEPFAR). I actually worked with USAID 20 years ago teaching programming classes in Romania and Serbia, and not once did anyone I encountered have a single cynical view on anything. We were all just working hard to "teach a man to fish". So I know that these types of programs play a huge part in showing the world that we actually walk the walk in wanting a better world.
I still can't get behind the idea of wishing violence for policy changes. Maybe that's a core principle of mine. It feels anti-American, since we (historically) try to rise above that, even if we often fail.
The nature of policy changes at such high levels is that many decisions are going to result in people dying (think of geopolitical decisions, think of Syria, the famine in Sudan right now, etc).
And while this administration has definitely been more damaging than the past administrations, my reaction is to argue till our faces are blue whether it was a bad policy decision or not, rather than wish violence.
I understand (and agree with) the impulse against violence in general, and definitely for things that are reasonable points of political disagreement. But I think you'd probably agree there's a limit, correct?
As a self-aware reductio ad absurdum, you ought to agree that violence in response to a policy of rounding up a certain ethnic group and murdering them en masse would be justified or at least in the realm of "not regrettable?"
And yes, I agree that many policy decisions can result in people dying. The moral valence of each one depends on the costs and benefits and the efforts undertaken to minimize the former and maximize the latter. And the intent is a factor too. Killing someone after a period of community deliberation for killing a child is a very different moral event than killing someone for fun.
In this particular instance, the cost/benefit analysis comes out to many people's calculation outrageously weighted to the cost side, and it is demonstrably the case that zero effort was put into minimizing those costs. This was also all knowable from Big Balls' position given that he knows how to use the Internet and could gain access to any expert in the world to more fully understand what he was doing. So he holds a lot of moral culpability (which does not imply carjacking him is a good way to deal justice, to be clear).
I will take my own advice on “intent matters” - and there’s been little care intent wise shown to actually study the impacts of these cuts. Which does make them feel more malicious.
They are one way in which Ukraine got hurt, without making it specifically about Ukraine. One day there was a USAID presence on every border crossing to help smoothen entry of aid goods and people into the areas where they were needed most and the next day it was all gone, here and there a lost sign lying about or already repurposed.
Not really, maybe I'm just too naive, but I don't want our society to devolve where we're enjoying violence inflicted on the "other" even if I absolutely hate what they're doing and how they're doing it (like in the case of a lot of DOGE stuff).
> you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you
Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1].
Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human.
Big Balls is only 19 and was intervening, unarmed, in a carjacking attempt of a woman by up to 10 people as reported. DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country. Would you have the balls to protect a woman in that situation?
You are absolutely wrong. People have died as a direct result of USAID cuts and will continue to die. Here's some reporting on the subject: https://archive.is/YknTv
There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
Sorry, I did not make myself clear enough. I'm not disputing that there exist people whose lives depend on USAID. I'm disputing the claim that there is a direct moral culpability on the part of the people who work for the administration that cut USAID funding, or the American electorate that empowered said administration, for those deaths; and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals.
> There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away.
Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is.
To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
Sorry, but no: the person pulling the trigger does not get to shirk ethical culpability, especially if they're sadistically relishing their hatchet job.
There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE!
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
In the BBB, they deferred tax hikes on poor people to after the midterms (we all know why, but that's an aside), meaning they didn't feel they needed the budget balanced immediately.
Yet with USAID they cut it the next month, meaning people have died, without any warning.
If they had done this by saying "We will cut off this funding starting 2027, other countries, foundations, organizations, etc would have time to plan/divert/ramp up to fill the gaps.
Your argument fails, not on principle, but on details.
Evil is stopping all aid immediately without a tapering period. Evil is letting life-saving medicine and food rot in warehouses because somebody was horny about taking a chainsaw to the federal government, saving nothing and wasting billions in the process. Evil is making a cruel decision to let people die solely for the sake of political theater.
You can talk about this in the abstract all you want, but at the end of the day, someone chose to let people suffer and die when a far more humane approach with the same financial outcome could have been taken. For flash. For pizzaz. For revenge, perhaps.
Huge portions of the United States do in fact have a very similar relationship with their water companies, because their water companies are given water rights by the relevant state governments.
I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
I literally said "one of the highest" not the absolute highest. Being in a top 10 or 20 list on murder rates is not an achievement to strive for, but it absolutely places you in upper echelon of murder. DC has had 100 murders so far in 2025, just 12 shy of 2024 with 3.5 months to go: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime
St. Louis situation is absolutely abysmal. 20 is way too high, 69 is way too high. These are 3rd world numbers that are absolutely inexcusable. And we're only talking about murders here, if you look into other violent crime data, it's also substantial for D.C.
The FBI frequently gets involved in murder cases all over the country, there are field offices everywhere. States are significantly different things than the special federal District of Columbia. There, it is generally up to the Governor to deploy the national guard, although plenty of exceptions and precedents exist for the President to do so.
Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor. DC is the only place the president has jurisdiction in this scenario.
> Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor.
Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
... except this president federalized and deployed the national guard in California only earlier this summer, over the objections of the state's governor, so is that rule still a rule?
There's exceptions to general rule, the national guard is ultimately a state-federal entity and the President can activate them to enforce federal law. Laws on this go all the way back to 1807. They've been federalized by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon without consent of the associated Governor.
He was able to provide a justification, however thin, which he presumably can't in the case of St Louis. Not that I disagree with the general sentiment. He's only doing this as a political stunt and St Louis wouldn't serve that purpose as well even if he could somehow swing it legally.
I'm sure there are also federal buildings in St Louis; the justification from California works almost anywhere.
But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues.
The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
I don't know if it was staged, but i am skeptical. The reason why is the photograph of the guy covered in blood. It's obvious that he has suffered a bloody nose and maybe been punched in the mouth, but that all the blood on his body is smeared over him rather than being from multiple injuries. I have been in a lot of fist fights in my life, including groups rather than 1 on 1, and had a good few bloody noses. Such an injury doesn't leave you covered in blood like that. All the blood on his body is smeared, and so is all the blood on his pants - note there aren't any tears in the fabric. A bloody nose bleeds a lot but it doesn't spray all over the place.
It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.
Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.
Evidence? These days, who needs evidence? Windmills cause cancer, redistricting mid-decade is totally necessary, and the president is 6'3", 215-pounds.
No proof, it’s just incredibly convenient. Just like when Kristi Noam just happened to get her purse stolen by someone who was in the country illegally right when the ICE raids were about to start. In this case, the well-known DOGE intern just happens to get carjacked in the city limits of DC right when Trump’s new DC Attorney General is being installed and the National Guard is ready to go.
No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.
If crime was going crazy in D.C. the GOP would be all over it in a flash and the local and national press would be monetizing the info. All this is a stunt to deflect from whatever is bothering the big orange dummy at the moment.
It is, in part, a distraction, from (particularly) discussion of the Epstein files, but the one thing the Trump regime is efficient with is using elements of their real authoritarian agenda as their distractions when they need one. So, sure, DC is a distraction, but its also a part of a fairly overt broad campaign against the homeless (not against homelessness as a social condition, against homeless people as subhuman enemies), that is itself tied into the national campaign of ethnic cleansing and the national campaign against the mentally ill (again, not against mental illness), and the DC operation is also part of the progressive militarization of civilian law enforcement.
If this sounds like things that occur together in fascist regimes, well, there's a reason for that.
Washington DC is already federalized under the Constitution. DC does not belong to a state and exists as a special region with very specific Federal definitions for its existence.
> So when the military was deployed to LA due to ICE riots
ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.
>then they left without incident
They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.
But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)
No, I choose the obvious one (#2), but that it is obvious requires considering it in the context of the other actions by the Administration regarding the military and law enforcement and related areas happening prior to, concurrent with, and since the deployment to LA (including, particularly but far from exclusively, the ones for which the deployment to LA was done explicitly to support), rather than considering one isolated fact about the LA deployment in a vacuum.
Definitely a warning sign, even if the warning light went out again. It may even have had a slightly positive effect in waking up the Democrat governor.
It’s really the administration of whatever SCOTUS lets him get away with. Trump - by pressure testing the law - lets SCOTUS reimagine the constitutional order.
The administration has said they will not feel compelled to follow federal court orders. Who is to say they won't ignore orders from SCOTUS either, and go the Andrew Jackson route?
Forget who said they will do this or that; federal judges have been actually defying SCOTUS[0] because they disagree politically with the administration. Sometimes the call comes from inside the house...
They have been defying SCOTUS because they disagree with the administration. 'Politically' doesn't enter into it, when the administration starts to do blatantly illegal stuff some people will just not accept that, no matter what the politics of the ruling party nominally are.
The whole point of SCOTUS is that they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal in this country[0]. Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?
[0]: Not what is right or wrong, and obviously like any other human enterprise, they are capable of making mistakes.
It is - to me, at least - abundantly clear that SCOTUS is now a political instrument and no longer in any way impartial. Between that, a congress and a senate that seem to be incapable of standing up for the rule of law you can no longer claim that SCOTUS is the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not, besides that, they only are supposed to rule on whether or not something violates the constitution or not.
> Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?
This is a weird and convoluted strawman, I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here, given your apparent stance on all this, did you maybe omit a negative in there?
> they only are supposed to rule on whether or not something violates the constitution or not.
The constitution is the supreme law of the land, so yes, by definition, they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not. Note that I explicitly pointed out that decisions on what is legal and what is not doesn't always line up with what is right and what is not. I'm not saying that the Supreme Court is some divine moral arbiter, just that under the laws that organize this country, there is no higher court that can tell it that it is wrong.
You're free to disagree with SCOTUS decisions. I disagree with quite a few myself. The justices don't even agree with each other a lot of the times[0]! But it would be good for the republic for people to not reach for the "SCOTUS is now clearly political!" jar every time they disagree with a decision or the makeup of the court, because your political opponents will feel the same way, as well.
> I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here
Let me clarify: you seemed quite worried that the Trump administration would defy SCOTUS rulings. My rebuttal was that lower court judges are already doing that, because of their opposition to some of what the administration is doing; that is, they are issuing rulings that clearly contravene prior SCOTUS rulings, in defiance of the law.
Prima facie, the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging in, and I find the apocalyptic talk about authoritarianism, fascism, or the end of democracy in the US very unpersuasive, not to mention unhelpful and unhealthy.
> the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging
So ignoring court orders to quickly deport people happened before?
Could you show me an example where Biden ignored a court ruling, because i dont know any. Ill insta-upvote you, if you can show the occurrence numbers are roughly equal.
If you cant provide any example, i strongly suggest you reconsider your above statement about the end of democracy, or whether you would be willing to storm the capitol to defend it against trump.
Like illegally using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport people when the act literally states it's a wartime authority (no new wars). like illegally deporting Abrego Garcia to the one country that he wasn't allowed to be deported to.
Thanks - the Supreme Court clarified this in their ruling. But, the Supreme Court has also ruled that the US administration can deport individuals to third countries, while legal challenges to the practice are pending.
I see this as a perfect example of the US Supreme Court clarifying the scope and applicability of law - just like they rejected Biden's student loan forgiveness under the HEROES act and Biden found a workaround instead.
I hate comments like this, so I hate making them myself as well, but are you trolling?
If so, forgive me for not responding.
If you are not trolling, and well intentioned: why don't you go and read some of that main-stream-news that everybody loves to piss on these days and use that to get to at least a moderately up-to-date state of mind before engaging in threads like these. It would save a lot of time.
If you are of the mindset that you are in fact informed and that Trump's administration has not yet performed any acts that are blatantly illegal then you're entirely on your own, or at least, I would hope you are (unfortunately, you probably would not be).
Cults need isolation from former environments and values, thats a key element in any cult initialization. Resulting in internalized ignorance so strong, not even a speaking burning bush could convince them otherwise, let alone main stream media.
No, I am not trolling. Mainstream news hyper-exaggerates and when one studies the matter, one realizes that few laws if any are broken. Several court battles are waged until the Supreme Court makes judgements on the scope and applicability of the law. Once that is done, the administration follows the ruling or chooses a workaround law.
AFAIK, the Trump Administration - as controversial as it may be - has not broken any Supreme Court rulings. Legal workarounds are not unique to this administration - such were done by the previous Biden administration as well. Please note the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s broad student loan forgiveness plan, ruling it exceeded the administration’s authority. Nevertheless, a workaround was found by using the Higher Education Act instead.
Too much of the focus is on Trump and not nearly enough on the people who are willing to vote for such an obviously corrupt conman. Trump will be dead within a decade, but these voters who actually want a dictator as long as he hurts the people they think should be hurt will be voting for generations.
Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.
Can someone figure the other hats? Gulf of America, USA, 4 More Years, Make America Great Again, but the one top center is hard to read, something with Everything? Trump Will Fight About Everything? The black one top right is even harder.
Found images that could match the everything one, Trump Was Right About Everything! Funny to see when he has contradicted himself, for example releasing Epstein file or throwing it away.
The amount of willful ignorance people must maintain to continue to give Trump the benefit of the doubt is fucking amazing. It’s no wonder Nigerian scams work. We have seen it on a massive scale. Some people just aren’t built for logical deduction and have the memory of a goldfish I guess.
Well, you can round down everything short of outright civil war to 'zero' but then you might miss important signals that you could act on. That doomsday message so far seems to be largely on the money, and in some ways has already been exceeded. That doesn't mean it can't get much worse.
The old guard of nonfascist Republicans wasn't purged until late in the last Trump term and into the period between Trump terms, and was particularly strong in the first half of the last term, the second half of last term, the Democrats controlled the House, limiting. There was not a trifecta under a fully Trump-aligned Republican Party until the current term. That makes a difference in outcomes, and has already made obvious differences in outcomes in exactly the direction discussed.
> The National Guard was there on January 6, though they were delayed several hours.
They were? I didn't see them keeping the mob at bay, or protecting the Capital from being stormed, in the footage I saw. Do you have a link to said footage that you can provide?
The statute Mr. Sund cites (2 U.S.C. § 1970) specifically says that the National Guard can provide support to the US Capitol Police in an emergency if approved by "the Chief of the Capitol Police, if the Chief of the Capitol Police has determined that the provision of assistance is necessary to prevent the significant disruption of governmental function and public order within the United States Capitol Buildings and Grounds".
Mr. Sund was the chief of the Capitol Police that day.
Ummm, the law cited by the Chief clearly states the guard can be called to assist by the senate sergeant at arms OR the house sergeant at arms OR the Capitol Police board.
Pelosi didn’t do it. But she wasn’t responsible for doing it, and the board Mr Sund chaired could have done it themselves much faster.
And all of this is just what they are allowed. It did not stop trump from doing his job. Which he didn’t…
Thanks, but did you read what you wrote ? You seem to be actually supporting the argument that the Chief cannot unilaterally act by himself, especially when Pelosi's Sergeant At Arms denied his request - several times.
That would mean treason on his part if he overruled the Sergeant.
Setting aside whether federalizing D.C. policing is wise, there’s a simple checkbook question people miss: Guard deployments aren’t free.
In D.C. 2020, the Guard put the peak daily cost at ~$2.65M for ~5,000 troops, about $530 per Guard/day. That’s a decent order-of-magnitude yardstick for today. Source: Reuters (contemporaneous) – https://www.reuters.com/article/world/what-was-the-cost-for-the-national-guard-to-deploy-in-dc-up-to-26-million-a-idUSKBN23J05Y/
For a rough scale: 800–1,200 troops = mid–six figures per day, before you add transport/lodging decisions that move the number a lot. A recent LA activation was budgeted $134M for 60 days ($2.2M/day) off DoD testimony, which matches that ballpark.
I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one. The king has nearly no power. He's a figurehead. He's just there to press the "STOP" button when things have gotten out of hand. But whenever a king abuses this power, the lawmakers cut it from him. So he just sits there in a palace, living luxuriously from tax money. In good times, we ask why he's allowed to do this (but not out loud, that would be illegal).
Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.
A constitutional monarchy is not something which has a "point" in some sort of intelligent design sense. You wouldn't design one that way.
A constitutional monarchy is what you get starting from an absolute monarchy and gradually draining the power out of it and transferring it to democratic institutions. It then satisfies the demand of the public who want the roleplay of an absolute ruler, and are scared of a fully egalitarian system, but without letting them actually do any absolutism.
King Charles does not have operational control of the military. He only has a large amount of personal loyalty, which is not quite the same thing. He holds a number of operational ranks from his service, from which he is retired, and a number of honorary senior titles.
The UK is just as vulnerable to troops-on-the-streets fascism as anywhere else. (Bloody Sunday etc)
> Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police.
That's not true in the case of European constitutional monarchies. The elected government has total power except for some very specific duties around the administration of government, like dissolving parliament. And even then, those are largely ceremonial.
I do think having so much power with one person who cannot easily be replaced at any point is bad for democratic government. In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant.
True, it doesn't apply everywhere. I'm thinking rights get cut when abused. Under the Meiji Constitution (1889-1947), Japan's emperor was Commander-in-Chief, and after the end of WW2, he was not. But even as a figurehead, he was useful in uniting the factions to end the war when multiple parties wanted to keep it going.
"In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant."
Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM. Often one that promises to do the opposite of what the previous PM did, then forgets the promises or blames them on something else.
> Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM
I guess that depends which country you're talking about. The UK has had a bad time of it leadership wise, but I would say this is probably an accurate reflection of the divisions and problems it faces as a country. Or maybe people just remember the stability of Thatcher and Blair and forget that isn't the norm by PM, just the norm by time because those individuals lasted so long. I live in NZ where the system is a bit more coalition driven and that seems more stable between elections (nobody wants to be seen as the one wrecking the current parties power) and less between because everyone can switch sides.
Which current constitutional monarchy gives the monarch power to the same degree that it gives power to the elected head-of-state?
I don't know a single one, maybe Thailand comes close? Though with > 50% of their senate members appointed by the military I would not even call them a democracy, not even close.
There was a popular candidate a party wanted as prime minister, who was not yet allowed to run as senator because of a sodomy conviction. So they tried to get his wife elected into a prominent position to streamline his path to prime minister. The party held the richest state in the country by a large majority and forced the head of state to step down, triggering a by-election. The wife won elections easily in that territory. It was a dick move because she is never physically in the area, but the area also didn't want to elect the Islamist party and voted for this more secular party. So she was voted as senator representing citizens in a region she didn't particular care about.
But senator wasn't enough, they wanted her in a head of state position. The sultan called out this BS and requested three names for candidates. The party submitted only one name. Sultan insisted on three names, and when they submitted three, he picked the second name as head of state.
So while kings don't have the power to block a democratic process, in this case, it prevented nepotism, which would also have messed up democracy.
In 2022, none of the three major coalitions won enough seats to form the government. Votes were split 38%, 30%, 22%. They all hated each other and part of the campaign promises were to bring down the other coalitions for corruption. The monarch ended up combining the parties into a unity government, which also entailed picking the Prime Minister.
To this day, bullet holes remain in the ceiling of the Spanish parliament building to remind them of the coup attempt. I can't find it anymore, but there was a good drama movie about these events on Netflix a while ago.
> I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one.
Bagehot divided the dignified and the efficient. I've long thought that one glaring downside of the American presidential system is that it tries to combine the two roles in one office.
Non-monarchic parliamentary democracies often separate the head of government (prime minister) and chief of state (president); it’s not exclusively a thing done by Constitutional monarchies. Instead, lacking the separation is, among representative democracies, a distinguishing (mis)feature of Presidential systems.
The majority of non-monarchic parliamentary systems still have a separate chief of state and head of government (including semi-presidential systems, which are basically parliamentary democracies but the chief of state has a wider set of formal powers without being head of government).
In the EU, for instance, excluding monarchies and presidential systems, every single member state fits the pattern of having a separate chief of state and head of government, mostly with the same titles. Here's a list of EU states that aren't monarchies or presidential systems, identifying whether they are parliamentary or semi-presidential and, if the separated CoS and HoG have titles other than the most common, what those titles are. Unless noted, in the examples, the usual English title of the CoS is "President" and the HoG is "Prime Minister", exceptions have the HoG title in parens (there are not exceptions for the CoS title.)
> the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
This only works on paper, and on paper congress or SCOTUS would've stepped in much sooner.
In practice, the monarch either has a lot of power, or does whatever the real head of government wants. Especially with how Trump can claim that he has the mandate of the people given that he won the election, and it's not like he doesn't wrap his motives behind legitimate claims. It's pretty easy to just claim that he has to do X for the security of the nation.
In reality, if the US had a monarch, they too would've gone along with whatever Trump wanted because to not do so is the nuclear option. It would be the equivalent of states trying to secede or not recognizing the current administration as legitimate and choosing to declare Harris as the real POTUS.
The mere existence of a king does provide some check, because at the back of the mind of the “real” government is the question - if the king rebelled against us, would we win?
We can't really speculate what the US would be like as a constitutional monarchy, as it's just very culturally anti-monarchic. The Second Amendment and free speech, for example.
In a monarchy, laws often restrict people from insulting the monarch. Not in UK, I believe, but even British culture pays their respects to the king. As a result, the king's words hold a lot of power. A president can "talk down" to congress, but a PM is still a servant of the king.
Let's say someone like Sir Richard Branson decides to do a Trump. If he claimed that he had to do X for the security of the nation, the king would be able to call him out on it. As head of military, the king has access to all the confidential data. The Supreme Court and Congress may be missing data. As the PM has to get the king to rubber stamp military actions, the king still has the right to veto it.
In case this isn't a rhetorical question, the homicide rate in DC is such that it beats out all 50 states by a considerable amount[0]. (The most murderous state, Louisiana, is roughly half as murderous as DC.)
There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!
Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.
If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".
Sure. At a rate of 26.6 homicides per 100k as of the conclusion of 2024, it would belong in the top 10 most murderous cities in the US, and would appear to fall in the top 100 in the world.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. There are a handful of other American cities with worse crime, so we should give DC a pass?
Constitutionally it belongs to the federal government, which devolved some level of home rule to the local government starting about 50 years ago. The evidence seems clear that local authorities aren't doing the job well.
When you don't give the local authorities the money and autonomy to do so it should not be a surprise that they cannot effectively do their duty. When you take a look at the trend of the data over time it doesn't tell a story of crime that isn't being managed. It may not be as quick or as thorough, but it has been downward trending.
> When you don't give the local authorities the money and autonomy to do so
DC spent over $26k per resident, well above the overall US federal budget of roughly $20k per person. And the DC budget doesn't even have to account for a globe-spanning military!
What autonomy is it lacking that it can't put repeat violent offenders behind bars?
> When you take a look at the trend of the data over time it doesn't tell a story of crime that isn't being managed. It may not be as quick or as thorough, but it has been downward trending.
Outside of six whole years, the homicide rate in DC hasn't been under 20/100k in 50 years. "Downward trending" from 80 in 1990 to 20s now is great in isolation, but terrible when you realize that places like Paris and London are in the low single digits.
Perhaps it is worth going to actually read some of the limitations (representation, budget, taxation) of what the government of DC is actually capable of doing versus doing a simple straight line math exercise. Crime is a problem, but taken within context it isn't anywhere near as bad as Baltimore or Philadelphia.
You keep citing the homicide rate but do not consider the geography and constraints of the capital region, i.e., some of the crime and violent offenders are from non-residents. You can't simply compare it to a city like London or Paris for many reasons.
> Crime is a problem, but taken within context it isn't anywhere near as bad as Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Baltimore and Philly are worse, yes. That's little reprieve for the average Joe living in DC surrounded by disorder. DC, being exclusively federal territory, has the unique legal situation where the president could deploy the National Guard for policing.
> You keep citing the homicide rate but do not consider the geography and constraints of the capital region, i.e., some of the crime and violent offenders are from non-residents. You can't simply compare it to a city like London or Paris for many reasons.
I don't understand your line of reasoning. Do you care to clarify? Neither London, nor Paris, nor any other city in this country are islands where entry and exit are controlled. Some American cities with really bad crime, like St. Louis or Philly, abut state lines and likely get a lot of cross-state criminal traffic as well.
I think the problem that many people, including me, have with your justification is very similar to trumps own televised justification: its vague and selective.
Fact is there are other "worthy" candidate cities to deploy NG to, to counter crime. Additionally, trump is unreliable and generally unfit as a POTUS. Given these two, the concern about trumps tendency to abuse of power, which he demonstrated already, is a very valid response to him mobilizing NG in the most sensitive political region.
You cant calm these concerns with comparably similar crime rates.
Ontop, isnt it an assumption, that NG can actually help with rampand crime? I imagine they project hard force on the streets but do not react to 911 calls.
Also, your budget justification was vague too. The total spending per capita does not allow any clues on relative spending on law enforcement. There must be a reason why its significantly higher and maybe thats why LE falls short too.
> Fact is there are other "worthy" candidate cities to deploy NG to, to counter crime.
DC is unique among those cities because it is federal territory where the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction, according to the constitution. It's harder to deploy the National Guard to St. Louis, for example, because you also have to deal with the government of Missouri (and probably that of Illinois, too, since the metro area spans both states).
In fact, a senator famously called for troops to be deployed to those cities in the height of the unrest in 2020[0]. He was excoriated for it by his political opponents, and the editor in charge of the NYT opinion pages resigned over allowing that piece to be published. So there are people who would like to see dramatically stronger law enforcement everywhere, not just DC.
Politics aside: Agreed; you’re correct about DC being wholly unique which is why it’s difficult to compare to other cities (by the numbers) for a lot of regions. There really is not an option other than the National Guard in such a situation hence why there’s a carve out in the 1970s (?) act.
I am avoiding the argument regarding stronger law enforcement because there is a very little vague basis for it in this case. But legally speaking, it is within the letter of the law because there isn’t another option without triggering the Posse Comitius act.
I wonder if the fact that of the top ten murderous states, nine of them are run by Republicans has anything to do with the fact that Trump hasn't even vaguely hinted at National Guard deployments there.
It's probably more the fact that DC constitutionally belongs to the federal government, so it's a lot easier for Trump to unilaterally deploy the National Guard there.
I have no problem admitting that other cities have higher violent crime rates, though I have no particular knowledge of Marksville, LA. I'm not sure why you would suggest that. I would approve of stronger efforts of curbing violent crime in those places, as well. I feel terribly for the innocents who live in those cities, as much as do for those in DC.
This isn't just a list of highest murder rates per capita, it's got some population threshold- likely the 300k population on wikipedia- which boils down to there being like 5 Republicans that have managed to get elected in large cities.
The point is that if you have a small municipality, a small number of murders would easily top your examples. St. Louis has a murder rate around 70/100k. As a toy example, Murphy, N.C., population 1700, saw a double murder last year. So their rate is almost 118/100k.
So yes, your list is applying some sort of population threshold, which means you are then also just selecting for big cities.
There are no major cities run by the republicans. The closest we get is Jacksonville (which is a county with some urban area) and Mesa (a suburb of phoenix)… and does anyone really want to live in Jacksonville or Mesa?
Maybe occasionally a Republican will slip in as mayor of San Diego or Miami, but 90% of the time even those cities are run by democrats.
> and does anyone really want to live in Jacksonville or Mesa?
So those people count less because they vote for the wrong guy?
Some apparently believe that because "cities are run by _democrats_" 164 years in charge is not a problem in itself. 164 years of continious ruling over a city, but of course the other side is the currupt threat to democracy. The mental gymnastics involved are olympic.
My point was that neither Mesa nor Jacksonville are seen as great places to live, and you aren’t going to convince HN that they should vote like these cities do so that their own more appealing cities can be more like those less appealing cities.
There simply aren’t many examples of what America’s economically vibrant cities would be like if the other side was in charge, but maybe vibrancy is just not compatible with conservative ideology, and the stick to the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas because they are more…conservative (places elect leaders that mesh with their values).
It's worth questioning why most people living in urban areas lean and vote more liberal than the rest of the country. Those areas also tend to make (and thus contribute) more money on average, too.
Alright, so tax volume is an accurate measure for who is a more worthy voter, but not how many urbanites care enough for democracy to even show up to a ballot box?
Multi-generational city rule and less than a third of voters showing up are not even abysmal data points – it's a gotham-style dystopia.
A lot of those cities are in the black belt where the red states they are in actively practice voter suppression, eg by making inner city voters wait in long lines without access to water. You can’t just blame the voters for not showing up when the state you are in is actively against them voting.
The DNC doesn’t “rule” over cities. Mayors are not DNC representatives or federally aligned. This is a disingenuous report with no sources and should be held with Extreme skepticism.
You honestly believe murder rate is higher in cities because the mayor is a Democrat? Or are cities with Democrat mayors much larger and diverse than Republic mayor cities? Do you think the people in Democrat cities vote in a Democrat mayor because they want more murder?
You can read a million different things from a list of items with similar attributes. Especially one compiled without sources or any context of the regions of the US.
Not the GP, but obviously as a general rule, Republicans are the hard-on-crime (three strikes, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time") party and Democrats are the soft-on-crime (Soros DAs, "we must address the root causes of crime") party. Even the most partisan on either side must admit this to be true.
From there, it's not a great leap to think that places with a soft-on-crime attitude at the local level might engender more criminal activity than places with the opposite attitude. Similar to why there are so many homeless people in California: the weather is lovely and local attitudes are permissive to it compared to other places, so it sucks less to be homeless there than, say, North Dakota. I think it passes the smell test to suggest that it sucks less to be a violent criminal in Baltimore than, say, Carmel, Indiana.
> are cities with Democrat mayors much larger and diverse than Republic mayor cities
That's hilarious. It is interesting that these memes are so persistent even in light of the present. No, Republicans are not 'hard on crime', they are hard on anybody that isn't a white, preferably wealthy, evangelical republican.
How convenient of your political opponents to be so cartoonishly evil, so that only the most ignorant or craven could possibly support them!
In reality, Trump gained in all minority populations between 2020 and 2024. He actually lost white Protestants, and white voters in general, in the same time period[0]. In income, too, poorer voters shifted more towards the Republican candidate, while the more well-off shifted more towards the Democratic candidate.
This has been a fascinating realignment in traditional partisan composition. You're probably right that historically the Republican Party has been hard on those who aren't white, rich, and religious; but over the past 10 years or so, it's actually the Democratic Party that is the party of the white, rich, and religious[1].
Believe it or not, there exist pretty good reasons why some people don't find the whole "convicted felon" thing to be very persuasive. But besides, do you dispute my overall characterization of the two parties? Insofar as major political parties can be generalized, this is true, is it not?
Maybe you should just retort with a list of your favorite big Republican run cities as counter examples? I’ve noticed you haven’t mentioned any, just throwing out rural areas or small towns in Indiana?
I’m curious about the association between income disparity and crime rate.
I suspect big cities tend to have a larger underclass population and a larger wealthy class. Predictable results ensue: Democrat administrations, and higher crime rates.
> Not the GP, but obviously as a general rule, Republicans are the hard-on-crime (three strikes, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time") party and Democrats are the soft-on-crime (Soros DAs, "we must address the root causes of crime") party.
This is not true at all. There are plenty of violent, hard on crime moderate Democrats that run these cities. Your bias and romanticization of politics is showing. Again in your comment the description is disingenuous and lacking sources and evidence.
You might want to research the US moderate political beliefs. Many are RINOs and DINOs which pokes a lot of holes in the current culture war. Especially if you spew bs such as, Rs are hard on crime and Ds are soft on crime.
> What are you implying about diversity?
What are you implying about it? I am implying that any time people of diverse cultures and beliefs are packed together in an area like a city, you probably end up with a higher murder rate situation than if those people weren’t packed together into a city. Yes?
Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.
"The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission."
It's confusing because DC does not have a governor so it looks like an edge case that has not been tested before.
the DC national guard is under the direct command of the president. The law may use the words "state" and "governor" but I'd take the other side of any bet that says that will be interpreted to mean that the president doesn't have the authority to deploy the DC guard in DC because of the posse comitatus act.
Suffice to say that before this morning I had only a vague idea about how legally complicated this could get. For instance, there's an opinion from the Department of Justice (albeit an old one) that concluded that the President can use the DC National Guard for law enforcement purposes (in that case, drug interdiction) without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.
"One set of troops, the District of Columbia National Guard, has historically operated as the equivalent of a state militia (under Title 32 of the United States Code) not subject to Posse Comitatus Act restrictions, even though it is a federal entity under the command of the President and the Secretary of the Army."
This ruling has been widely misinterpreted. It does not mean that the president can make an unlawful declaration and that the National Guard, for example, must follow it even though the declaration is inconsistent with the law.
That said, it’s not immediately clear to me that this would be illegal. The National Guard and the District of Columbia is a unique edge case because D.C. is not a state.
To be clear I don’t like this move nor where it is going. I’m not endorsing it, only trying to understand the legal basis.
You're right, but if someone down the chain of command refuses to obey a declaration they consider illegal, the president can (and will) just repeatedly fire people until someone does what he wants.
We're talking about the military. In the worst case he can do a lot more than fire people for their disobedience. He's already indicated publicly that he believes General Mark Milley ought to be hung, although to date his efforts to end the general have not gone further than removing his security detail. (the general is believed to be an assassination target of Iran...)
And to go back to the original comment, the president cannot be prosecuted for doing any of this since it's part of his "official duties." I'd expect this Supreme Court to walk back the specifics of this ruling the moment a Democratic president starts pushing the limits, however.
Any administration member can be pardoned by Trump for following illegal instructions, and Trump cannot be charged for a crime if it’s ‘related to the official duties of being the President.’
How is that not a blank check to do whatever you want? Anyone that breaks the law can be pardoned later and Trump has immunity.
Even if Trump isn’t the one, this means we are ready for our Caesar and fall of the Republic.
Of course I think we’ve been sliding toward our decadent imperial phase for quite some time. This did not materialize out of nowhere. The Executive long ago took the power to declare war from Congress, at least in practice, and that was one of the first huge steps.
Personally I think Trump will die, there will be a power struggle, and it will be one of the next few. There’s even some chance it could be a left-populist authoritarian. Political winds can shift fast in an environment like this.
Rome, for all its might was puny in comparison to the United States. The downfall and/or breakup of the USA will leave the world in pieces. If it happens - which I really hope it will not, though I don't see how at this point it is still unavoidable - millions of people will die the world over. Every two bit dictator will see their chance and grab it knowing the next opportunity to do so will be at least a century away. The number of democracies and the number of people living in an (actual) democracy is already a minority. Democracy may well soon become an endangered species in the zoo of possible governments.
China will probably rise up in our place, which is why I think MAGA just handed the world to China.
In that first state of the union when he talked about a golden age I was like “yeah, this is the Chinese century. He’s gonna burn it down.” Literally gilding the White House is a caricature of how you’d depict the fall of an empire in bad fiction. An editor would say that was cliche.
China is going through its own issues at the moment. Larger numbers of people are rising up against the CCP and recent events are becoming more and more frequent. Their government is predictably cracking down harder on its citizens. But you could be right, just not with the CCP but rather whatever government takes its place soon. The riots have not yet reached their precipice but it's getting nasty.
A more liberal and open Chinese government would be exactly what they need if they want to take the place of the USA on the world stage. Of course a revolution is not guaranteed to produce that. Revolutions often end with a new boss worse than the old boss. But it could. It's a dice roll, a high risk thing, which is why people have to be pushed really hard to do it.
It helps the US for China to have its own "make China great again" revanchist authoritarian CCP. It slows their overall growth and keeps them from engaging with the world. Walls are for losers. Global mercantile empires must be porous and outward facing. This porosity becomes the main source of their soft power and causes them to export their culture globally.
If China starts allowing a little more immigration that would turbocharge their rise, since every immigrant community inside China becomes the terminal end of a line of influence reaching back to wherever they came from.
If they don't liberalize then who knows. Maybe the US will decide to remove the shot gun from its mouth, in which case the window will close.
For what it's worth it will probably be quite a while before China reaches the Make China Great Again phase. At the moment they have not even reached the Stop Bludgeoning Citizens Again.
> Larger numbers of people are rising up against the CCP and recent events are becoming more and more frequent.
Do you have a source on that, preferably one that's not quoting a cult like the chinese version of scientology, not uploading daily china-will-collaspse-soon videos, not a tankie, or other random type of propaganda/fanboy outlet?
Just videos that leak out of China. Be sure to save what you find if yt-dlp [1] supports it as YT are taking them down or flagging them as adult. I put them in my 4chan collection.
As a side note, if you are really part of Antifa and if they are really under the control of who I think they are then just get your handler to reach out and have your team assigned to China. Are you proficient in Mandarin? They who shall not be named should already have loads of videos. Be safe.
I'm not sure what exactly the orders were, but Calley, one of the My Lai massacre war criminals was in fact convicted. But many others who should have been convicted were not.
Calley claimed he was following orders from Medina (his SO) but Medina denied giving them.
Trump has pardoned several people who attempted to breach the capital and murder elected representatives to stop the ratification of a democratic presidential election.
All he needs is a single paper that says "All members of the military following the orders of President Trump are pardoned for all crimes past and future related to said orders" and - boom - accountability gone!
For now. But there is no reason why a future government of the USA would not see that in an entirely different light. After all, those that went to trial after WWII also argued that their actions were legal and it turned out not to be the case.
There is no legal mechanism for unpardoning someone, the constitution only allows it to go one way. It would require an amendment, and we can't even pass laws with this legislature.
And for good reason, mind you. Same reason as dismissal without prejudice gets some flak as easily abused for corrupt leverage.
A future government is not necessarily bound to the one the preceded it depending on the way the one government changed into the other. And the way things are going right now there is a non-zero chance that the USA will see a reboot of its system of government, if it doesn't actually fall apart into multiple different countries.
It was. I was there. The National Guard was delayed until like 6 pm but they were definitely there locking down the ENTIRE city. They stayed for days afterwards. It even says so in the link you provided.
a lot of people defended Trump after jan 6 by saying he offered the national guard but was turned down by the mayor. Now he is suddenly able to deploy the national guard regardless of the mayor's input.
It’s just bare motivated reasoning. Their football team had the ball so anything they do is okay. Meanwhile when Reagan started showing dementia symptoms they made him go get evaluated.
Of course I've heard him speak, he does press conferences every single day, sometimes for hours. He takes questions all the time including impromptu ones on Air Force One. He did 3 hour podcasts during the campaign, he's incredibly poised and this has been affirmed by everyone from Jensen Huang to Modi to Tim Cook to Bill Maher.
Biden was kept hidden and carefully managed and his staffers had to cut him off and remind him of the current year. You may not like Trump, but everyone that works with him closely, recognizes he is more intellectual than his public persona would seem to imply.
So why does he sound like an incomprehensible moron? And why are all of his plains straight up broken, like tariffs that would have been appropriate to stop the destruction of American industry twenty years ago, but at this point are just closing the barn door long after the horse moved away? If he's really some wise leader and only rambled incoherent word salad to appeal to the "common man" and get elected, he has now been elected. Shouldn't he be revealing his wise persona, leading, and bringing the skeptical into the fold with some intelligent policies?
Most elderly people are capable of sitting around for hours rambling, especially on political topics. In fact, what's difficult is getting them not to. Occam's says that affirming the emperor is definitely wearing clothes is just the type of politically correct fluffing that happens in every autocracy. Lying to ingratiate yourself with flattery certainly costs less than paying larger bribes.
LOL. Sure he can ramble for hours. But if you read a transcript of any of those conferences, he's literally incomprehensible, can't string more than two logical sentences together. It's just a jumble salad of key trigger words. And when he does present facts, it's either incorrect or an outright lie. It's an embarrassment, frankly.
Used GPT to get the numbers real quick and it came up differently. Definitely should have checked the sources.
Point remains though that 2020 is a statistical outlier election that resulted in a 22 million total vote count increase over 2016.
Joe Biden had signs of dementia in 2020 and barely campaigned publicly. Somehow this old bag with not one inspiring historical speech or rally, riveted voters to turn out in numbers higher than any president in history.
Somehow these same voters that were motivated to stop the orange man in 2020 disappeared in 2024, when orange man runs for a 3rd time.
2012 Obama and 2016 Clinton got roughly the same number of votes (~65M), somehow in 4 years time Biden was able to rally an additional 16 million to the polls, with his sheer intellect and brilliance and inspirational qualities.
And then his VP comes up 7 million short 4 years later against the same "existential threat", despite all the same provisions for mail in ballots etc being in place. It's like Covid restrictions were used as cover for massive voter fraud.
Well, first of all, you've moved the goalposts quite a bit. 14 million down to 7 million cuts the supposed problem in half.
I don't think it's particularly complex, most people vote based on the tangible issues they're experiencing. It shouldn't be surprising that they voted against the incumbents each time. In 2020 they didn't like Trump's handling of COVID so they voted against him. In 2024 they didn't like Biden's handling of inflation so they voted against his VP. Just as some people were motivated to vote for those reasons (among others), many people lost their motivation to vote at all.
Regarding the difference between 2012 Obama and 2020 Biden, Trump also received more votes in 2020 than Obama did -- in fact, he surpassed Obama's vote total in 2024 as well. Trump in 2020 and 2024 even surpassed Obama's vote totals from 2008, even though Obama received 3.5 million more votes in 2008 than in 2012. Really, it's pretty simple, there were 16 million more people in the US in 2020 than 2012. Of course the raw vote numbers went up.
The vote totals aren't a strong point. In 2020 there were 152,320,193 votes cast between the two main candidates; in 2024 there were 155,508,985 votes cast. That is, more people voted in 2024 than in 2020, so claiming that 2020 was some statistical outlier with a bunch of extra votes doesn't really make sense.
I have this theory that one easy way to curry favor with Trump is tell him about some previously esoteric/unused power the executive has. So much of what he does seems to just be because he can do it, and not because it actually has a real goal or purpose. Like a kid playing with toys. I realize he says that tariffs are meant to bring in revenue or increase domestic manufacturing or [pick random reason]. Or that he's doing this due to DC apparently turning into Fallujah but looking back over his first term and now this one, its the same pattern.
That’s an interesting observation. I’ve wondered how he can be so “creative” if you can call it that, but I guess if you have lots of assistants who can read all of the “well, technically you can do XYZ” sections buried deep in odd legal texts, and you enjoy doing stuff just to get more limelight, these actions are inherently attention grabbing because they are so novel.
I think it is not only limelight. He is a conman/hustler type of personality based on all the things he has done in the past so he probably likes loopholes and shortcuts that can be exploited. Doing things fairly and correctly are slow and for losers in his book.
Yes. The really dangerous people are Miller, Vought, and their Project 2025 allies. I’m quite sure they’re constantly workshopping new and exciting ways to expand dictatorial power.
I choose to believe that trump's whole campaign is motivated out of spite for getting ribbed after the birther movement. Everything he does, he does it to flabbergast the democrats "because he can"
They need to fully test their boundaries before midterms. It probably helps that SCOTUS is overturning injunctions now while things are kind of mellow.
The main motivation is narcissistic supply. He knows people will be angry. He sops up the attention.
For him at least I don’t think there’s anything deeper other than he found this way to get people to either adore him or hate him. In either case he’s the center of attention.
Once the toy he stops generating attention, he will get bored and he will find a new toy.
DC often serves as America's protest stage. Controlling its police means controlling what kinds of dissent are permissible at the symbolic heart of democracy.
Controlling the physical space around Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy means that every legislator, judge, and federal worker sees the Guard on their commute.
The message is environmental and atmospheric. Propaganda for the governing class. Power made visible to those for whom there is intent to intimidate.
Extending that, DC notoriously exists as an anomaly violating the foundation that the US was founded on. It is a city that isn't a city, a population with little representation in the federal apparatus that controls it.
DC's legal vulnerability makes it perfect for testing. What works there can be threatened elsewhere. "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.
The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period.
DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!
You take care of the homeless (and not the homeless 'problem') by accessible mental healthcare, by having good social programs and by ensuring that healthcare costs are equally distributed across society rather than used to bankrupt individuals who then become one of many feedlines into homelessness. Of course that would never happen to you so you see a homeless problem where there are instead many other problems.
For a large swath of the USA homelessness is a real possibility and whether or not they will end up in that situation is mostly a game of chance.
Just endless promises from liberals about how they will fix problems with more liberalism. But I've lived in half a dozen deep blue cities and the only one that came close to actually solving any problems was New York City at the tail end of 19 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg's aggressive policing. Everything else has been empty promises and actually making things worse in most cases.
Even if you believe that the ordering the National Guard to DC is going to address homelessness in some positive way, Trump doesn’t care about that. Mobilizing troops to DC is the latest step in his efforts to dismantle democratic government and consolidate power.
Cleaning up DC is item #11 on Trump’s 2024 platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform (“REBUILD OUR CITIES, INCLUDING WASHINGTON DC, MAKING THEM SAFE, CLEAN, AND BEAUTIFUL AGAIN.”).
Your complaint isn’t really about “dismantling democracy,” but instead about Trump running roughshod over all the Democrats who run DC even when the people elect a Republican President, such as the anti-democratic permanent civil service. DC is the people’s city. It is constitutionally a federal enclave, and under the DC Home Rule Act the President has the right to federalize the police. Trump did so to carry out the policies people voted for.
No I mean small-d democratic rights which Trump has been eroding as he consolidates power - retaliating against free speech, deploying federal forces against protestors, suspension of due process, concentration camps, and undermining the independence of the judiciary by attacking judges. By limiting our focus to the legal justification of the militarizing of DC we miss the big picture - erosion of small-d democratic norms and processes in our country.
NYC had a mob problem, and Giuliani and later Bloomberg addressed this, somewhat effectively. Still, when I visited NYC in the early 2000's it still wasn't a safe city by my standards, but those were informed more by what I experienced in other countries than the USA. Washington DC currently does not have a mob problem, and isn't nearly as crime ridden as you make it out to be in your comments in this thread. Yes, homeless people exist. And they exist because of various policies, including federal ones that steer people towards homelessness if their lives get upended. Other affluent countries do not have these problems. Of course people in those other affluent countries typically pay more taxes.
If you really do not like the liberal policies that cities tend to have then maybe you should vote with your feet and move to a rural area or to a city that is run by the Republicans? Then you can be with the people who see things your way.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.
Your proposal is that the military response is primarily to combat homeless encampments in DC, that this is appropriate, and that this won’t happen elsewhere because this problem is unique to DC?
It's not just a military response, but also federalizing the police force. He can go after both the homeless encampments and the gangs. This is appropriate because:
1) Americans deserve a capital city that's at least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego, which have homicide rates one-third or one-quarter as high as D.C. over the last decade--even excluding the COVID-era spike in homicides.
2) The orderliness of a city is primarily an issue of policing and incarceration. You don't need to pass national gun control, or address "root causes"--just take gang members off the streets and put them in prison.
3) The problem isn't unique to D.C., but D.C. is an outlier because (a) the aesthetics of D.C. are important because it's the nation's capital; and (b) Trump has express statutory authority to federalize the D.C. police force under the DC Home Rule Act. DC thus can serve as a testbed for Republican policing in a major city, most of which won't elect Republican mayors.
> least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego
Neither of those cities are very safe and orderly. Didn’t 3 people just get killed in Austin yesterday? DC is also tiny compared to the outlying cities that surround it. Baltimore anyone?
This is probably just more distraction to get the news stories away from those Epstein files.
Pre-covid, Austin’s homicide rate was around 4 per 100k. San Diego’s is typically under 4x DC’s never got below 14 per 100k (in 2012) and spiked up to 40 per 100k in 2023.
DC is 20% more populous than Baltimore. The nearest city larger than DC is Philly, 140 miles away.
I left China in 2016 and now I live in Seattle. I lived in Austin for a summer in 2001 (the summer before 9/11) and it was…hard, I had to evict a squatter from my sublet, the property crime was high and people skulked around in the morning looking through everyone’s trash. Anyways, not sure if your argument is that it is better or worse now, but definitely not a place I want to live in ever again.
There are 6.3 million in the greater DC area, DC is a small part of what goes on in that region.
The solution to homelessness is not to bring in the military and “send the homeless far away” (to paraphrase what Trump said). The solution to homelessness is to provide housing and support.
The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.
Homeless people are people too. The government owes them its support just like it owes support to the finance guy who goes to work in a suit. "Use guns to make sure that wealthy people never have to see a poor person" is horrifying to me.
I love how you just switched seamlessly from “homeless people” to “poor people” as if they’re the same group. The serial offenders and chronically homeless are a distinct 1-2% of the population.[1] They terrorize ordinary poor people far more than they bother rich people. The police already clear the homeless encampments out of the neighborhoods where the finance guys and tech bros live. This is about extending that benefit to the other 97% of the population.
[1] This is obviously true, because every city has poor people, but not every city allows homeless people and serial criminals to intrude on the public sphere. Tokyo has many, many people who are quite poor by the material standards of DC. Tokyo isn’t clean and orderly because it somehow got rid of all the poor people.
I don't know where the homeless encampments are, but I've been going to DC for work every 6 months for the past 3 years and have not seen any homeless. Last time there I took a very long evening walk from the Lincoln Memorial to Congress and then back to through the Penn Quarter all the way to Kennedy Center, late in the evening, all prime tourist areas, and didn't see a single homeless person.
I'm sure they exist somewhere -- but downtown DC is definitely not "covered" with homeless encampments.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…
> Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.
Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?
Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.
> Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city.
You've really been stockholm-syndromed by this godforsaken country and Western culture's persistent aversion to enforcing the law against anyone perceived as less fortunate. This wouldn't be acceptable in peer Eastern countries' capitals like Singapore, Tokyo, or Beijing
And what's the national guard supposed to do with the homeless? Beat them senseless on the sidewalk? Don't you think that would leave a much worse impression on hypothetical tourists? Jesus fucking Christ.
Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.
In fairness they are also talking about using FBI special agents to assist with the homeless problem. I, uh... can't imagine that will actually happen but who the hell knows as this point.
Have you ever been to DC? National Guard is literally constantly all over the city. The headlines are a bit sensationalized and even DC's mayor on MSNBC earlier today was cautiously optimistic about more law enforcement on the streets.
> "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.
The fact that Trump mobilized troops in LA to help with ICE raids was way more worrying, but they were withdrawn a week and a half ago by the Pentagon without much hullabaloo.
We ought to refuse to address the content of the message if there is even a single em-dash — things written with AI can’t be true, aren’t worth considering, and lack substance or merit.
Either have opinions or don't, but don't delegate opinions to chat bots. It defeats the purpose of discussion forums. Also slop is only partially due to the model. The rest is the prompt and editing process. It's tiresome to read to ChatGPT-specific bombastic drama like "The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period."
I was in a very negative space earlier this year due to the current direction the US is heading. Mostly because I am someone that doesn't want to hear problems without a call to action I can actually engage with. The things that are happening at the national level are very hard to do anything about but I did realize that I could engage at my local level so I decided to just start showing up. I now regularly attend my local city counsel meetings. I don't go and make a bunch of remarks but I have, on a few occasions, added to the public comments and, I think, I was listened to. If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up. At a minimum you will get far more informed but you may just find that you can actually make a change too.
I absolutely applaud this. I doorknocked a thousand doors for my local state election and came out of the experience more optimistic than ever. Real people, listen. Real people want to make the world better. Getting out there is the antidote to doomerism.
> If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up.
I have reservations about this line of thought.
For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact. If the actions they took have brought them here, of what use were the actions?
And second, I would like to see some hard evidence that you have in fact effected/enacted change by showing up beyond just being more informed and participating in what can otherwise be (from personal experience) either a snooze-fest or an echo chamber.
I say this as an immigrant: But if you're not an immigrant, a medicare recipient or maybe in the military, your state and municipal governments have significantly more influence on your life than your federal government and most people rarely pay attention to this level of politics.
This lets the people who do pay attention have complete capture. You know your rent is high? Yea that's mostly your state and municipal government doing the bidding of landlords and landed gentry.
High housing prices are probably 5% caused by economically inefficient uses of land (e.g. surface lots in downtown areas) that an LVT would solve, and 95% by zoning and other building regulations. Though perhaps you're right that if the only tax allowed to be collected was LVT, zoning would automatically cease to be an issue.
Keeping local communities habitable is each individual's responsibility towards the community. This much should be ingrained in everyone. If you treat yourself and act as an individual you will never accomplish anything.
I don't intent this comment to be a "you're wrong" comment. I'm only saying that OP's POV runs on an assumption that can be damaging.
Law as something distinct from the immediate whim of the executive backed by military force is under (both figurative and literal) attack in the US right now.
Look, I don't know what you kids are into. But laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just the promise of violence that's enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean? Want to make some bacon?
It directs the executive agencies to seek to loosen any restrictions on non-consentual admission to psychiatric facilities and to force homeless (and people with mental illness) into them.
It also aims to end drug abuse recovery programs and says that not having physical space for patients shouldn't stop them, IIRC.
I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes. It would seem, he could literally just deploy the NG and physically prevent them and that would be sufficient to swing the election.
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section I, Clause 3[0][1] states (in part):
The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted."
Doesn't make sense because they would still need a majority electoral votes. If the election goes gop, then keeping the Dems out does nothing. If the election goes dem, then keeping Dems out also pushed the process nowhere.
if they delay the vote long enough they can say there’s no clear winner and the house effectively gets to appoint the president.That’s what they were trying to do on January 6.
This time it has the neat side effect of letting them cleanly appoint Trump for a third term without him being elected twice, which (it will be claimed) does not violate the 22nd amendment.
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”
>I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes.
Your understanding is incredibly confused. Yes, electors need to meet within each state to cast their ballots at a location specified by each state.
Those ballots are certified by (a) state official(s) (on or before December 12th) and those ballots are then forwarded to DC (IIRC, to the National Archives) and those certified ballots are conveyed to the capital for counting on January 6th.
So, no. The electors needn't go to Washington DC to "cast their ballots." In fact, if they did so on the appointed day for them to cast their ballot, they'd be unable to do so, as that process would be proceeding without them in the state which designated them as an elector.
He just wants to make sure something like January 6 does not happen; i.e., there's no possibility of a reverse Uno when he actually _does_ try to steal the election this November. He knows fully well that he's going to lose the House, and possibly the Senate this November. And MF hates to lose, he's got such an ego.
He would have to get permission of the governor. I think there is a loop hole for DC because it has no governor.
"The Act (Posse Comitatus Act) does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor."
Wiki Page on the Posse Comitatus Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
Like he got permission from California's governor? Trump has abdicated any pretense of following the law at this point, it's approaching offensive to use "following the law" as a defense now.
I made a concious effort to just stop looking at politics. Uninstalled twitter, stopped reading all news, stopped mentally engaging with friends when they bring up political topics, but holy ** this guy is making it impossible.
This is quite awful. Courts are doing nothing. Balance of powers, checks and balances have been weakened through attrition and external forces — wealthy businessmen/lobbyists.
What he did is not illegal. What are the courts going to do? All he has to do is name any random thing he considers to be an emergency, and calling up the National Guard in DC is completely within his rights.
It is both. Use a thing you wanted to do anyway to distract from a crisis. It's just an optimization, really: if you are going to have to do something as a distraction it may as well be something that you intended for all along rather than something that you don't want to do because it is a more effective distraction. If it weren't it would be easier to see that it was in fact a distraction and now you have one more thing you wanted anyway.
I'm with you, it's almost like that has become another distraction where they know in the end, it won't matter. Meanwhile I can barely keep up with the wild executive orders based on outdated laws. Someone is just pulling the strings.
Miller, Bannon, Vought and Thiel would be my top four puppet masters. Trump only believes in himself, and they make use of that to pursue their agendas.
Trump's voting base don't care about overreaching federal powers, they care about epstein. You are not going to turn any new demographic to your side with this nuanced civil liberties narrative, which has been cried many times before.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" is the perfect meme to destroy confidence in trump.
The latest polling disagrees. The ministry of truth has been hard at work and 47% of conservatives now say they would still support Trump if he was found to be a part of Epstein's minor sex trafficking. 26% "don't know" what they would think (i.e. would still support him).
So... The window has been moved completely off of the house. Raping children is actually acceptable among the MAGA base and Epstein is no longer a concern for them. Woops.
To be fair, polling bias applies. Probably not that high, but still. Even among die-hard, that's bad.
It's never dropped of my news, from him moving Maxwell to a minimum security prison, to questions about whether he'll pardon her, to the signed letter with illustrations he wrote for Epstein's birthday.
I don't think the world will ever forget, certainly my social circles and social media are still buzzing with it.
In many ways it's more damning than watergate, though people are debating whether to call it Epsteingate or Pedogate.
Yeah it's been hard for it to leave the news cycle when there are new developments still happening all the time. Latest one being a federal judge denying the request to unseal the transcripts for cases relating to Ghislaine Maxwell. And at least going by Ground News, seems to have been widely covered by outlets today.
Meh. DC federal takeover and Trump/Putin Alaska are the dominant news stories on both CNN and MSNBC. There was one story above the fold on MSNBC homepage regarding Trump and Epstein on MSNBC and that story was more about how Vance’s downplaying comments could be read as supportive of more disclosure. Another story well below the fold on Epstein which is more about his victims than Trump.
CNN has one story way below the fold on their homepage mentioning Epstein *for subscribers only.
The story is effectively dead. Whatever legs people thought this had are effectively gone except for the rabid progressives who just want anything they can to damage Trump…or the Qanon crowds. In my opinion, those two folks belong together and can enjoy their alignment, two ends of the horseshoe.
Yes. Based on talking to people like you IRL, I don't think democrats understand how big the epstein situation is.
Revealing the epstein docs/list was a major selling point for the q-anon/conspiracy voters during the election. This is the first major controversy that puts trump against a sizable majority of his supporters, which are becoming disillusioned.
We are reaching a nixon-esque turning point where the cover up is worse than the crime.
Did that happen in the same universe as the Sinbad “Shazam” movie?
I keep getting all these multiverses mixed up. Here I thought in this universe he was only found liable in a civil suit about sexual harassment, not convicted in a criminal court for a sexual crime.
> This is the first major controversy that puts trump against a sizable majority of his supporters, which are becoming disillusioned
Which means exactly what? What political alternative do the whackado Qanon/ultraMAGAs have? Certainly not the democrats—they are so far out of alignment with MAGA that any Epstein disappointment looks mild in comparison. Sure…UltraMAGA may frustrated with Trump but they will never get a chance to vote for him again to express that disappointment. So they will be faced with a choice of a GOP candidate who will run on much of Trumps politics (but won’t be him) and a democrat party that appears now to be tacking further left in to the socialism waters as its new bearing.
That is not wise. (I'm ignoring the question of whether it's legal or constitutional or justified. Those are important questions. They matter. But for this comment, I'm ignoring them.)
Trump just made himself owner of the crime rate in DC. Every crime that occurs there is now Trump's failure. That is not something that he's going to want.
He can, of course, almost completely stop crime in Washington D.C. Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it. Boom, big win and look at how crime-free the empty streets are, aside from the dozen police on every corner, snipers on every roof.
Is there anything to learn from that? Of course not. Aside from the liberty for security trade, should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
> Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it.
Criminology studies have shown that you in fact do not need a hyper-resourced police state to achieve this. The Pareto rule applies very strongly in criminality; the majority of violent crime is committed by a tiny fraction of the population[0]. About 90% of prisoners have been arrested more than three times[1].
You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country (a result of the common law tradition coming down from Blackstone) and the degree to which local policy in places like DC outright favors the rights of the criminals over the rights of the innocents that must live near them. There's a lot of room to improve the lives of the law-abiding before there are "snipers on every roof".
> should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
DC isn't just any town; it has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous. In 2024 alone, it had over 5000 cars stolen in a place that only has 350k cars. That's more than one in a hundred.
Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x, or try some other radical thing? Because this isn't working out.
> You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country
The US has almost 2 million people in prison. It has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet.
US - 541 per 100,000
Canada - 90
Germany - 68
Japan - 33
Doesn't seem like it's that hard to get a conviction. The US has a sociology problem, not a difficulty getting convictions problem.
> It has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous.
It has the 19th highest murder rate for US cities. It sits behind Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1/4 the rate of St. Louis, Missouri. Still a terrible murder rate, and it shouldn't be normalized, but there is utterly nothing exceptional about DC. And it's miles safer than virtually anywhere in methville, Appalachia.
As to car thefts, it sits at 61st among US cities, behind Nashville TN, Savannah GA, and Lexington, KY. Eh.
>Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x
In the ultra-low tax US of A? Har. Ignoring that its crime rate is not remotely exceptional relative to other cities, already the vast majority of US cities are barely solvent, and policing is already the most expensive line items for city budgets.
Should there be a massive restructuring of policing? Yes, absolutely. Should career criminals face fewer reprieves? Absolutely. Does the US have a catastrophic sociological probem? Absolutely.
Is this an easy fix that Big Brain Trump is going to solve? LOL, no, give me a break.
> Doesn't seem like it's that hard to get a conviction. The US has a sociology problem, not a difficulty getting convictions problem.
There are more people in prisons in America because more people commit crimes in America, compared to those other places. And more people commit crimes than are caught and convicted. If the US was in fact a police state, those incarceration rates would be even higher.
> there is utterly nothing exceptional about DC
The subject under discussion is Trump having the National Guard to perform law enforcement duties. DC is indeed exceptional in that it is the only jurisdiction where he could do that.
> it's miles safer than virtually anywhere in methville, Appalachia
Factually untrue. The state of West Virginia, the archetype of "Methville, Appalachia", has a lower homicide rate than its vastly richer neighbor Virginia (almost twice as high of a median household income).
> Should career criminals face fewer reprieves? Absolutely.
> Is this an easy fix that Big Brain Trump is going to solve? LOL, no, give me a break.
Given what we know of recidivism, Trump's brain does not need to be all that big to make a noticeable difference. In fact, you already touched upon the solution: just don't keep releasing multiple-times convicted violent criminals back into the population. A tiny fraction of the population is responsible for the majority of violent crimes. Just keep them away from the rest of society and you'll have made a big difference in the lives of the less well-off who, for the most part, have to live next to these people.
Existing big-city police forces already have the resources to stop crime in their respective cities. They just choose not to do it. If you want to see how capable they are of stopping crimes that are of interest to them, try setting up an illegal food stand or parking without paying the meter. You'll be busted within hours.
They have budgets in the Billions of dollars, tons of surveillance equipment, military grade weapons, and a monopoly on force. But they still can't deal with street thugs, belligerent crazy people, or jerks on the subway like cities in other countries manage to do?
I don't know what Trump's game is in all of this, but we should stop pretending that blue cities aren't already playing their own games and they clearly don't involve stopping or solving crime.
As if that matters. He never takes responsibility for literally anything. Blames other people for his appointees and laws. All negative consequences are always someone else's fault.
For anyone who disobeys the order, it's the end of their career; and every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time. Everyone at the top levels whose job is to actually take a stand against these acts, to serve as a rallying point for others to know when the time to resist has come, have abdicated their duty. If the authoritarians are smart, they will never create a situation where we are backed into a corner, where the time to fight is obvious; we will be convinced that our best course of action is to continue in lockstep with the system in the hopes of fixing it, right up until the slaughter.
> every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time.
Is that any better than people with a conscience staying and reluctantly following much worse orders in due time? At least when they leave, they send a message of resistance instead of silently capitulating.
Internal sabotage and/or physical resistance to the execution of unlawful orders (think My Lai type event) might be the more meaningful action for the ethically conflicted service member. I think things would be a lot worse if everyone sympathetic to the people resigned and left only regime loyalists in the ranks.
The question wasn't what should they do, it's why are they doing what they are currently doing?
That said, obviously the point of remaining is so that they can refuse those worse orders when they come, so that they can convince their peers to do the same or temper their actions, so that the administration needs to worry about pushing too far lest that wave of resignations comes at a critical moment. Alarming though the pattern may be, this is neither a clear cut violation of the constitution nor likely to be a major turning point in the administration's public support. Leaving now would be ineffectual - there is no plan in place to take advantage of a few resignations to put a serious damper on the current plans, nor will it stop what's to come. The people who resign now may feel good about themselves, maybe enough to justify the potential hardship they and their loved ones will suffer as a consequence, but they deny the rest of us a key resource. Resigning is a weapon that can only be fired once; it would be selfish and stupid to waste the shot.
The "30-year low in violent crime" still puts DC ahead of every state in homicide rate. If DC were a country, it would rank somewhere around the top 20 most murderous. Venezuela, a literal failed state, has a lower homicide rate. Russia, the dysfunctional kleptocracy that it is, is less than a third as murderous as DC.
Might not the people of DC deserve better? Is it possible that problems exist in real life outside of "media attention"?
What is your point? I'm well aware that DC is a city. Its crime stats are horrific as a city, compared to other cities. The cities that rank higher than DC are even more horrific. I'm dismayed that policymakers in all of these places favor the rights of multiply-convicted violent criminals over those of the law-abiding.
It's illustrative to compare against famously poorly-run countries. What are you trying to illustrate here by pointing out that DC is a city?
Ah, there’s where all the anti-AI posts went! I thought everybody on this site had drunk the kool aid, but it’s just any criticism doesn’t make the front page any more. Thanks, much appreciated.
plus it might divert eyeballs from all the truly critical news about which AI startup got how much in funding to do something 100 other companies are doing.
If that were the case there would never be any topics on HN about housing, healthcare, education, elections, war or tariffs, yet the "/best" page says otherwise.
This is a discussion forum for intellectual curiosity operated from the investment exhaust of a capital market participant. A recent, adjacent analogy is Jeff Lawson taking his Twilio winnings to buy and operate The Onion. The economic mechanizations are usually underpinnings to something more valuable. HN would still be valuable if YC closed up shop tomorrow (and I personally argue, of greater value than the accelerator; value is subjective of course, so opinions will differ on this). Stay curious.
The collapse of a representative democracy into a corrupt dictatorship similar to Russia should interest anyone who intends to invest money into this economy.
Why would you invest millions and years of your life into building a company if the administration can just decide to take your intellectual property [0] because you made them angry?
Why would you spend effort developing hardware and a domestic manufacturing process if the administration can just declare 100% tariffs on your critical components? Especially when your competitors can just pass off a little bribe and get special treatment: [1]
> Cook and Apple aren't walking away empty-handed. Companies that "are building in the United States," like Apple, won't be subject to a forthcoming 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, Trump said.
There is a reason you don't see world-changing companies arise from states with so much corruption. A free market requires neutral governance - no special treatment or favorites. With this new administration, the US market is looking much more skewed than in the past few decades, and that will have severe consequences for domestic innovation and research.
It certainly should, however large numbers of people in the technical community are welcoming it with glee. This isn't even reactive to the mob boss, this has been coming for years.
Meanwhile palantir is training AI models that assassinate journalist. Ethics are a major part of tech, we can make decisions that distribute billions in relief or execute millions.
Out of curiosity, is there a way we can request a mod to manually unflag this? I see comments in this thread have been killed, so I'm not sure why this is still flagged 3 hours later when it seems clearly relevant to HN?
A military deploying to the capital of the richest country on earth where most tech giants reside is important for tech.
Email them via the contact link at the bottom of the page. They're pretty responsive, though for political topics they're reluctant to unflag them because the discussions are often fruitless (just a bunch of people shouting at each other).
It's flagged for the same reason that posts describing the genocide Israel is doing in Palestine get flagged: the absolute intolerance of those in power to any dissenting opinions.
We've had multiple threads about Gaza that have spent many hours on the front page in recent months, including two about two weeks ago. It's not viable for us to give front page time to every major development in that terrible situation, but we also think it's important for HN to not act as if it's not happening.
I spend a fair amount of time flagging stuff in those threads that's outright anti-Semitic or propaganda, and if that goes on too long I just flag the whole post and move on. It's one thing to have an in-depth discussion about colonialism, the history of the surrounding Arab states and early Zionism, ongoing Israeli politics, the Jewish diaspora, etc. It's quite another to engage in a fruitless moral oneupsmanship (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"), or to reckon not at all with the fact that the destruction of Israel (through boycott, invasion, or minority democratic status) leads to the murder of horrifying numbers of Israeli Jews. As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing. I don't see that as a reason to drum up anti-semitism or casually imply the destruction of Israel and the attendant murder of millions of people would be a net good.
So, that's why I flag that stuff. I also think it's pretty absurd to think that HN censors opinions. I and others constantly criticize SV bigwigs like Marc Andreessen (can somebody ask ChatGPT how many goddamn 'e's are in his name, Jesus Christ) and Paul Graham, lots of tech-skeptic stuff gets posted here and makes it to the front page.
I am sorry you experience antisemitism, this bs should have disappeared long long long ago.
> As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing
We are too! The same way we decried the despicable genocidal actions Germany did on the Jewish population during WW2, we now decry the despicable genocidal actions of the state of Israel on the population of Palestine.
> (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"
Only one side is actually doing genocide at the moment, and that's Israel. Israel should stop the genocide and either engage in a war without war crimes, or better yet, stop annexing foreign territories and stop the war altogether. I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point, but there is only one side currently shooting at civilians at aid sites, stopping food from reaching the civilian population, and killing journalists.
> I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point
Nope, deliberately not saying this. I super don't care what the "whose fault is this" tally is. I'm only interested in saving lives and figuring out what's next.
The (awful) truth of this is there are no realistic good options. We're not invading, Israel won't allow UN peacekeepers in, surrounding Arab states can't challenge Israel militarily and/or don't want to aid the Palestinians, there is no political will in any country to send troops, and Israel doesn't actually need our support militarily or otherwise so we have no leverage anyway. So, either a given person's naive to this and they have reading to do, or they're aware and using the situation to further their own ends. Maybe that's anti-Semitic propaganda from some Muslim states (Iran). Maybe that's Russian (et al) disinformation ops driving political wedges into the Democratic Party. Maybe it's the DSA demagoguing the issue to (try to) win elections. Maybe that's committed anti-Semites carpeing those diems. All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.
Also I'm not Jewish! I do have family down the block from where Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was shot up though, plus a fair number of Jewish friends. Appreciate the sentiment though.
> The (awful) truth of this is there are no realistic good options.
There are. Israel stopping the genocide and building settlements in foreign territories that don't belong to them is a realistic good option.
Do you have something against Israel stopping the genocide it does on Palestine? What's the difficulty to stop shooting people at aid sites and allowing humanitary aid to enter the country? Or is it very difficult to not snipe journalists and bomb hospitals?
> All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.
Lots of words, yeah war is terrible, yeah reprehensible acts on both sides, yeah the issue is complex. But here are simple facts:
Israel is committing a genocide to the Palestinian population at this very moment. Undeniable. It's not complex to not do genocide, many of us succeed in avoiding to do a genocide on a daily basis. Today I and many other people across the globe didn't participate in a genocide, for example!
You need to do more reading, because you obviously have no idea why Israel is doing what they're doing. If they thought stopping was a good option, they'd stop. You whining like a child over and over again that they should stop and aren't, does nothing. Turns out there's evil people in the world. Deal with it.
> You whining like a child over and over again that they should stop and aren't, does nothing. Turns out there's evil people in the world. Deal with it.
Nope, will continue call it out! You deal with it.
> You need to do more reading, because you obviously have no idea why Israel is doing what they're doing.
Ah, the genocide apologism, I love it, it always comes out but selectively!
How'd you feel if somebody tries to tell you to do some reading into why Germany thought the Holocaust is a good solution to the "Jewish problem" (as they referred to it)? Not nice, right? There is no excuse to genocide, humanity said "never again", but keeps repeating its old mistakes. There is no apology or justification for genocide.
> have no idea why Israel is doing what they're doing
Let's unpack this.
- What do you think Israel is doing? (It's genocide)
- Why do you think Israel is doing this genocide? (It's inexcusable)
> Ah, the genocide apologism, I love it, it always comes out but selectively!
I've not done this, and I've said I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing. To be clear, I understand Netanyahu's motives to be "stay out of prison" and "repair legacy", while I understand the Likud party's motivation to be ethnofascism. But hey, maybe they'll see your posts and reconsider.
> What do you think Israel is doing?
I called it ethnic cleansing before the deliberate starvation, but I call it genocide now.
> How'd you feel if somebody tries to tell you to do some reading into why Germany thought the Holocaust is a good solution to the "Jewish problem"
The US and the USSR (et al) mounted truly inconceivable offensives against Nazi Germany. The lives lost in this effort are... indescribable. Your impotent forum posts don't compare. You can say genocide six times a post or sixty times; it makes no difference. If you think you're earning points with your speech where you have no risk whatsoever, you're a smaller person than I would've assumed (I like your anti-AI posts).
Listen, you've spent a lot of time arguing with me, a person who agrees with you, and I think we can further agree that's a suboptimal use of resources. I don't know you or what your day job is, but clearly you have a lot of energy about this stuff, and it isn't the last time it's gonna happen. There's lots of human rights organizations, or the UN, trying to make sure things like this can't happen, and they need people like you. Maybe look into it.
Gaza is not a foreign territory. It is part of israel. Israel won it over the course of a series of wars that they won in the last century. Almost all of which were not started by the israelis. If the gazans wanted sovereignty they shouldnt have started and lost so many wars. Losing has consequences.
> there is only one side currently shooting at civilians
The only reason the gazans are not doing this is because they are utterly incompetent, they cant. I dont see how that gives them the moral high ground. As soon as they gain the ability to shoot israeli civilians they will begin to do so again.
Both sides are led by truly despicable governments, no one has any amount of moral high ground in this conflict imo.
> The only reason the gazans are not doing this is because they are utterly incompetent, they cant. I dont see how that gives them the moral high ground. As soon as they gain the ability to shoot israeli civilians they will begin to do so again.
using dehumanizing/racist language as a defense for war crimes unfortunately doesn't fly at The Hague.
Not racist to point out the government in gaza has over and over and over and over and over and over again shown they will never stop until israel no longer exists. The israelis are lucky Hamas is so incompetent, oct. 7th couldve been much worse. The hague is a joke unfortunately, otherwise Hamas wouldve been dismantled long ago.
that's interesting because the government of israel has over and over and over and over and over and over again shown they will never stop until palestinians no longer exist. and that's the same justification they use!
you should ask Israelis if they feel like Oct 7 was a display of incompetence.
Counterpoint: As I understand it, t was Israeli military incompetence and Netanyahu's strategy of backing Hamas over the PA that caused Oct 7.
Oct 7 will never happen again because it shouldn't have been able to happen in the first place had Israel been less busy fomenting Palestinian extremism in Gaza, and beating/killing Palestinians in the West Bank.
There is no justification for the conditions in Gaza today. All I see are Israelis relishing in the suffering of another group of people. And I see Israeli extremists continuing to conflate Israeli Nationalism with Judaism, so that any criticism of Israel is called anti-Semitic.
> Israeli military incompetence and Netanyahu's strategy of backing Hamas over the PA that caused Oct 7.
I was about to make a joke about this to your sibling comment. Completely agree that oct 7 was one of the biggest security fuck ups in modern history, the militants never shouldve been allowed to escape gaza.
There is no defending Israel's actions over the last year. I just hate seeing people hitting the wrong points. The lopsided death count is irrelevant because it is Hamas' fault. The annexation of gaza is irrelevant because thats what happens when you lose a war you started.
Now starving them out and running them over Tiananmen square style, thats pretty relevant I think. Israels actions in the west bank were in many ways even worse until the starvation stuff started. Straight up state sanctioned terrorism happening over there
The lopsided death count is Hamas' fault because they are unable to kill any israelis at all. Hamas dies and Israelis dont = lopsided death count. Thats not a bad thing. As you pointed out, there are many actual bad things going on, so focus on that instead of dumb shit that doesnt matter. Makes you look like an idiot when you complain that Hamas cant kill israelis instead of talking about how theyre starving an entire society to death. Hamas does use human shields and that does make it valid for the israelis to kill the human shields, so again the lopsided death count mostly just serves to remind everyone that hamas doesnt give a shit about their population. That Hamas is not a government anyone wants to live under. Doesnt help their cause. Mass starvation does. You need to convince that the palestinian deaths are unjustified, not that they happened. Death happens in war.
By some of the top commenters no less. It's absolutely insane to me that people that have zero excuse not to be informed chose to willfully ignore the evidence in front of their own eyes just because the bullshit resonates with their fears.
The data is publicly available: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime. By any measure, it shows a horrifying level of crime, disorder, and antisocial behavior. If DC were a country, it would be among the top 20 most murderous in the world.
DC has had home rule for over 50 years. If this is a 30-year low in violent crime, it's all the more proof that radical change needs to happen soon, not something to be proud of.
Man this rhetoric is so empty and frankly idiotic. It’s not a country. It’s not a state. Compare like for like instead of doing these nonsense comparisons for dramatic effect.
26.6 murders per 100k in 2024 is neither empty nor idiotic. It's distressing. Why don't you compare that to peer cities around the world and see how it stacks up. You're right that I don't need dramatic effect; it's terrible on its own.
You seem to be very invested in the idea that cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, or New Orleans have it worse. You're right. What relevance does it have?
Why did Trump feel it not necessary to be invited by California's governor when he federalized national guard in California? Why is his DoJ arguing in court that it's not necessary?
You've pasted the Wikipedia link three times in this thread. What is your motivation for doing that? Do you support the takeover in DC?
Trump has repeatedly, blatantly violated the constitution, to such a degree I don't even feel the need to cite them because there are so many and you are definitely familiar with them. That is not using the same tools, it's making up new ones and co-opting old ones from fascist dictators.
The reason he gets away with it is a legislature and supreme court (note: only the supreme court, not the rest of them) who have decided to bow down.
I agree that it would be misleading to judge D.C. based on being at a 30 year low. Of the cities with the highest homicide rates, only Philadelphia has a higher population and rate. It's fair to say that there are other cities close in population. But it's clear that D.C. has a abnormally high homicide rate when compared to all of the other U.S. cities of its size or larger. Even if you only compared it to all other U.S. cities within, say, 100k of population, it's still at a very high percentile.
You are right it's misleading to say DC is at a 30 year low- the data I posted shows that it is actually at a 60 year low.
It's not clear at all that it has an abnormally high homicide rate at all. DC is not even listed on the link you provided- the one I provided has cities of equivalent size.
Just to be consistent with my sibling comment: it is improper to conclude that St. Louis is the most murdery place in America. The city of St. Louis metro population is 3 million people, who travel to the city proper to murder each other even though only 280k people live in those political boundaries.
I like how down in the comments you attack absolute numbers despite using absolute numbers in this post, but fail to note per capita numbers because per capita numbers would make this argument fall apart. Good luck with your campaign to make it look reasonable for a federal takeover of crime enforcement as a prelude to shutting down demonstrations against this administration.
Well, that press release was issued Jan 3 2025 by the incumbent appointed by the Biden regime. Whichever way you want to argue it... it's political.
The wikipedia article about then-US Attorney for DC includes this note:
"Under Graves, the US Attorney's Office declined to prosecute 67% of those arrested for crimes in DC in 2022, including 72% of misdemeanor arrests and 53% of felony arrests."
Crime is always down if you don't prosecute crime. Murder stats are the best to consider since those a harder (but not impossible) to fudge.
So you endorse using federal military resources to secure a city that is not the most dangerous place in the country and that is at generational lows for violent crime?
And you are okay with this in the context of a pedophile rapist felon traitorous president who is bent on vengeance, a famously thin skin and a primate's view of the use of power?
It doesn't, at all. It's born from the same complaint that, say, NYC outvotes the rest of the state although it's only a tiny portion of the total size.
And you'll see that Washington D.C. doesn't make the top ten for rates of any of the major violent crimes (murder, rape, etc.) nor for the "Total" violent crime.
Population does matter somewhat but not really in this case. If you’re invading a city because crime is high it only makes sense to do if it’s high in absolute numbers; otherwise you’re not really having much impact.
Could you say a few words on the impact of land area to the discussion?
Once you concede on that, could you say what homicide level requires a police state as a reaction? It would appear to be within a factor of two of the present numbers, but I can't work out where the line would be.
One of the biggest errors in the interpretation of crime statistics is improperly using the overnight resident population, instead of the better daytime population, as the denominator. This error is often committed in cases as various as St. Louis and Berkeley, as well as DC.
National crime levels are at 30 year lows. I think you're being rather disingenuous here. Media coverage on DC specifically seems entirely reasonable and the first report I looked at linked to the same stats you did.
You can tell that journalism is dead because they cite how much it's allegedly dropped in the past year with literally zero other info or context. Ok, dropped from what to what? How does this compare to other cities? Has it gone up consistently for the last deacde? How much crime is still happening after that drop? Is the drop in real, predicted crime, or just reports of it? Are there reasons why reporting would go down despite crime not going down?
And to cite these numbers without providing context at the same time of citing them that someone was literally fired for allegedly manipulating the data. And to be clear they're just allegations, but also the data is controlled by someone whose job and ego is tied to these numbers dropping, and the rate of the drop is basically unbelievable - 25% to 28% drop in a single year? After suggesting it went down 34% the year before?
Even if my info I just wrote is something someone could dispute, is it not part of journalism to at least provide the bare minimum of context for people to at least know why this is controversial? If Trump's position on this is so soundly and clearly misguided, then it shouldn't be a problem at all to provide all facts and context to demonstrate as much. Instead we're given a single fact with zero other context.
On national guard, 200 people at a time focused on administrative work:
> U.S. Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said that most National Guard troops live locally and that the idea is to deploy them in shifts of 200 soldiers each to provide a round-the-clock presence.
> The troops for now will be focused on providing logistical and administrative support to free up D.C. police officers, similar to their support role at the southern U.S. border.
And they basically don’t want to actually run the police dept:
> Trump named Terry Cole, the head of the DEA, as interim commissioner of the D.C. police. Cole told Police Chief Pamela A. Smith on Monday evening that the federal team is hoping for the Metropolitan Police Department to lead the effort,
> Cole described Trump’s takeover of the department as more of a collaboration, and he stressed that officials would meet and work together to figure out where to deploy resources, the official said.
Basically they’re putting bodies out there so DC can put more local cops in the streets. And they really don’t know how to run anything when it comes to policing DC. How would they? They need the local cops to actually understand the issues.
Not saying any of this is good. But wanted to add this context.
I’ll change my mind when there’s news beyond what I’ve stated. I feel confident in what I’ve stated because all parties (DC and Feds) are saying similar things.
But to take the opposite maximalist “Trump is a maniacal dictator” position ignores the pattern of bluster and back down from Trump.
Save your mental sanity. His goal is your outrage. He doesn’t have a plan.
The military is a blunt instrument. It is good at destruction and killing, not so good at construction and subtle care. Neither is the police, but they are at least a little bit better at it. You call in the military as a means of last resort when you are in a war. To call in the military to fight crime is about as useful as to bring a chain saw into an operating theater.
He doesn’t have a plan* other than finding the button that keeps him in the news and generates narcissistic supply. When he gets bored of that button he backs off. Then he finds a new shiny button to press that freaks people out and generates headlines.
Social media posts where people are freaked out - like many on this thread - is to him like the best high possible.
The best you can do is respond to actual facts on the ground and ignore the bluster.
* it’s the people around him with plans to be worried about
I mean sure but whether it is the people around him or him eroding democracy and shifting the overton window feels a bit like arguing semantics while the titanic is going down.
Edit: to the point about Trump wanting outrage, I don’t really care what he wants I want more people engaged in what is happening not less.
https://archive.md/cLI2c
One way to now a chess match is about to begin is to see people place pieces on a chessboard. There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C. As a pre-emptive move it is an overt threat and as a response to something that is actually happening it is complete overkill. Either way, trouble is brewing.
In March 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, announced that she would deploy 750 members of the National Guard to New York’s subway system.
Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.
Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.
National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).
I think a lot of people were also angry about that, and I think it may be a contributing factor to the success of Mamdani. As part of the feud between state-level and city-level politics, which is pretty intense despite being both nominally "D" because American politics doesn't have enough parties.
National guard is one thing, effectively private police forces another. The previous examples of that are not good.
Arent the police effectively under the governors control already?
The DC is different and has a law that allows the federal government to do this. It’s unusual but not illegal and is a feature not a hack. corollary to a governar using both local police + NG
Did Governor Hochul:
1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?
2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?
3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)
4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?
Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.
Regarding 2) it is well known that Hochul herself is a strong Israel supporter who has opposed Palestinian protests. She ordered CUNY school Hunter College to remove the Palestinian Studies professor position. Pro-Palestinian protestors have been arrested several times at her events.
(Incidentally, I personally support the UN Resolution 181 for a 2-state solution, so I am against the position of the US government - whether Republicans or Democrats)
The reason why nobody raised an eye then is because the people doing that weren't making all of the pre-requisite moves to set up a dictatorship. It was - of course - still misguided and it didn't work. Trump is using DC either simply 'because he can' (absent any actual reason), or as a trial ground to normalize such deployment to other cities in the future (he tried that once and failed). It also serves as a distraction from his Epstein files woes.
March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.
HN discussion of Hochuls actions at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39629397
Did she do Nazi salutes?
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If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
>will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.
Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
Of course: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise.
The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low.
If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.
> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low.
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown. ^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
So your position is that the police are untrustworthy and abuse their power?
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If you're insinuating that crime is not actually down and statistics are merely lying, then you are mistaken.
Crime, pretty much everywhere in the US and by many different metrics, has been falling for over 3 decades.
It makes sense. Crime is getting harder and harder to committ with the advent of the Internet and new surveillance technology. Crime is, like all things in life, a risk-reward calculus.
Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime. You're often better off just... not... And getting help through provided channels. And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
> Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help.
> And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim.
[0]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates
Or, in a police state, the point isn't solving crimes.
In my city, any protest over a half dozen people gets a police response. However they may show up a couple hours late to you being robbed, but will probably tell you to go to their website and file a report they won't follow up on.
Paradoxically, as you reach more and more of a police state, the point of the police isn't to solve or prevent crimes. It's to use violence against threats to the police state.
“With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime.”
Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance. Rather, crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics, policing or lack there of, surely not by aggregate health care spending lol.
Medical debt is one of the most common kinds of debt in America. Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. So is anxiety over bills. Untreated mental or physical health issues can come into play as well.
I’ve known criminals, and a lot of people with huge debts, even known a few people who have had to declare bankruptcy. I assure you nobody is robbing or stealing or raping or killing people over medical debt. Student loans on the other hand…
Maybe. But they are definitely ending up on the streets, on drugs / alcohol and eventually in the morgue.
> Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, the same factors that make one more prone to criminal activity also make them more prone to poverty; therefore, you cannot solve criminality by solving poverty, because the confounding factor is still present afterwards.
A man was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned to great fanfare by the Innocence Project. He received $4.1m for his troubles. A few years later, he killed another man over a $1200 drug deal gone bad[0].
Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/philadelphia...
> Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
I think the vast, vast majority of people are committing crime to make money, and I think your singular counter example, which isn't really a counter example, is worthless.
Yes, SOME people are just bad and will always commit crime. Some.
However, most criminals do it for monetary gain.
Why do people even sell drugs? Surely, if their goal is to be evil and just make a lot of people hooked on heroin, they'd just give it away for free right?
Well, that isn't their goal. Their goal is to make money.
> Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance.
Its a simple question - is crime motivated by money or not?
If you answer yes, then you're wrong - things like the ACA that lessen financial burden MUST lead to less crime over time.
If you answer no, then you're probably not reasonable. Who legitimately believes that crime isn't caused by money issues?
> crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics,
Demographics absolutely do not drive crime, otherwise you have a broken world view. Being of a different demographic is a SYMPTOM, not the cause.
Being black does not cause crime, or being in a zip code does not cause crime. Being poor does, that zip code having poor education does, that zip code providing no opportunities does.
You're working backwards.
Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda.
HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
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Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
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I’m very moderate by world standards. For example I think we should give gang members trials before we put them all in jail forever. In my home country we don’t have a gang problem, but we have an Islamist problem. Our former PM handled that by having military special forces just kill islamists. She had a 70% approval rating before a bizarre coalition of leftist students and islamists overthrew the government.
Western liberals are just outside the Overton window in terms of their toxic sympathy for criminals and disorder.
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You’re calling people “Nazis” and I’m the one arguing in bad faith?
If you keep calling people Nazis for views on policing that are to the left of Nixon and Lee Kuan Yew then they’ll start assuming you’re an anarchist.
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The “problem” you keep referring to can be boiled down to: extremes exist. HN, like any large population sample, is a bell curve of opinion, which, by definition has tails of extreme opinion at each end. However the most extreme and toxic opinions rarely get seen because they are taken care of by community flags and moderator bans.
They are covered by the first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines: “be kind”, which apply to all of us, including you, in the way you are engaging with others in this thread.
Please stop.
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread
The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.
I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.
Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.
Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.
If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.
No worries.
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It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.
There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.
I'm starting to understand the "touch grass" meme.
Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
Born and raised, and still living in an area that you likely wouldn't. You have no idea.
To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets.
However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does.
If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime?
Or will they continue to deny the tipping point?
At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets?
No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
> If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
Where is this "broad support" coming from? The actual people living in Washington DC, or rural outsiders who have conjured up some picture in their minds of "crime infested cities?" If you did a poll of everyone in DC, would the majority be in favor of increased policing?
It always seems like the people who are most vocal about crime in big cities are always the people who don't live in or visit those big cities.
I live in a high crime area of a major city.
Which city? Which "high crime area?" Crime is down all across the US and way down in most major cities. Let's see some statistics, friend.
I live in NYC[0] and I'm old. It's never been safer in the many decades I've been alive.
And the police have little to do with that. They're just the biggest and best-armed gang.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City[1]
[1] In fact, NYC saw fewer murders in 2024 than any year since 1958 -- long before my parents ever met.
There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
Hmm, to your anecdotes I will add mine. I have been harassed in the International District at around 10:00 pm by drug dealers - was offered drugs, told them to go away so I was yelled “Get off my block”. A hobo spilled his beer on my wife while riding the bus. A female coworker was offered oral sex by a hobo and asked to take her glasses off to “see her pretty eyes”. At a bus school stop on Fairview (right next to Amazon Campus) a hobo with his pants down to his knees was exposing himself in front of some kids (their mothers were trying to make some shield around the kids)
All of these around 2021-2022-2023. We moved out of Seattle in 2023. Maybe these snecdotes are not a big deal for you. For me they are scary.
>There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.
And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?
I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.
The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.
You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
>I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
And I remember that that was about focusing police on policing and spending more on having specialists provide social support and the kind of things that prevent crime, which cops aren't trained to do or any good at.
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Not OP, but yes, "defund" meaning to reverse the excessive budgetary increases of the past 5-10 years, which increased militarization of police, alongside increasing qualified immunity precedent. Some people took "Defund The Police" to mean "No Police" (there will always be extremists, sincere or planted), and it turned out to be a terrible slogan for this reason. There's a healthy middle ground in which the police force is reduced to a reasonable level, and other services are funded, so the police with their guns and military training aren't the first responders when e.g. someone is suicidal or spraypainting graffiti.
And even if the suicidal person is holding a knife, or it's my house being spraypainted, I don't want the person shot!
>The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy. >We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.
And this seems to be the incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_murders
Would you like to read that carefully?
I did some minimal searching for Seattle and explosions in 2020 and I found plenty of sources reporting on different supposed explosions, at different times and places (within Seattle). Seems perfectly plausible to me.
https://mynorthwest.com/local/peaceful-protests-planned-in-s...
https://projects.seattletimes.com/2020/local/protest-timelin...
https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/09/24/police-arrest-13-d... https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/07/26/officer-injuries-p...
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/07/28/44178586/so-what...
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down?
More than one.
>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?
More than once.
>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?
Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.
So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
Your city doesn't sound very safe as you claim in another comment.
>Your city doesn't sound very safe as you claim in another comment.
All that stuff was 30-50 years ago. As I mentioned (and linked[0] to statistics), I'm old and things have changed a lot.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879420
Edit: Actually it was 35-50 years ago, but who's counting?
Actually you have not mentioned it was 35-50 years ago. But thank you clearing it up.
>Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44850663
No need to be snark. Unlike your comment, where you iterated what happened to you without any time specifics, my comment was for a specific time period as evident from the discussion.
Did you?
There was nothing clearly stating any dates or years.
Just like you did, I assumed what you said all happened in the past three weeks.
Especially since I said[0]:
"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge."
Because we grow up fast here in NYC. A month ago I was a child. Now I'm pushing 60. All in the past three weeks!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44879506
>> Did you? Literally the first line was starting with ">> Yugoslav communism...".
#Especially since I said[0]:
#"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several #attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the #Brooklyn Bridge."
That was for the robbery and before that you said:
#>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many #gun barrels have you stared down?
#More than one.
#>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just #standing there?
#More than once.
Nothing specific there. Why are you so antagonizing about it and trying to straw man something with my comment that doesn't exist? I only told you how I read (I'm probably not the only one) your comment and pointed out some context was missing and when you explained it, I accepted it.
For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
Democracy gets traded for dictatorship because someone shows up and says "I might not be perfect but I'm a hell of a lot better than these schmucks who've been ruining things". And when that person saying that stuff shows up at a point in time when the people who have been in charge of things have run the country into the ground with wars, debts and policies that give people no hope that things will get better, it's a pretty compelling message.
It would be, if it were true. But the premise isn't true and the solution isn't true either. It just sounds good and people tend to respond from fear and other emotions rather than rationality.
> I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them
What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.
Trump is not fighting crime. He's fighting anything that doesn't kowtow to Trump.
Trump is systematically attacking democrats on their weakest polling issues: immigration, lax policing, and DEI.
Which of his appointments were determined on merit to combat this "DEI issue"?
All of them. In the context of a political appointment, "merit" reflects ability to carry out the President's political agenda. Trump's appointees have been phenomenally effective at doing what Trump promised to do.
You just redefined "merit" into a term that immediately invalidates their entire argument regarding DEI.
“Merit” can mean different things depending on the nature of the job. Juilliard using auditions instead of SATs is still merit-based admissions. But “merit” never means someone’s race or ethnicity.
Put differently, DEI is when you have double standards based on race. Colleges do think test scores = merit, because that’s the primary criterion for selecting among within the group of whites/asians. It’s DEI when they use other factors to try and achieve desired racial balancing.
1) DEI can be done badly, of course, and in an ideal world would be unnecessary, I think anyone on either side of any spectrum wants merit over anything else, but for various historical, systemic, as well as unconscious bias [1], this has not been the case, statistically. DEI on the ~interviewer~ side, not the interviewee side can and has addressed [1]. I fail to see the downside. The only way to claim it's unfair would be to confess that [1] is real, meaning some solution is needed, meaning DEI has done ~some~ good [2].
I agree that quotas are certainly bad in principle, and many times in practice, but I have seen no credible claim where the status quo is a meritocracy, leading to the blatant showing in the current admin.
2) Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous (or any previous) administration.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
[2] https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-...
> DEI can be done badly, of course
DEI in practice means racial preferences and quotas. That’s why the term arose around the same time as a renewed push for explicit racial quotas: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/01/12/fifth-circuit-vac...
> and in an ideal world would be unnecessary
It’s not only unnecessary, it’s illegal. If you think historic discrimination had negative effects, just target the negative effects among all people similarly situated.
> Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous administration
Aggressively pursuing the President’s agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Political appointees are just that—political. The relevant standard of merit isn’t who is the best nerd, but who will best carry out the agenda the President campaigned on. The whole point is that voters can change the direction of the executive branch through electing the President, who in turn appoints like-minded cabinet secretaries.
> Speaking in an NPR interview in November, Kennedy said Trump had given him three “instructions”: to remove “corruption” from health agencies, to return these bodies to “evidence-based science and medicine”, and “to end the chronic disease epidemic”.
Do you believe political agenda to be a suitable merit here as opposed to education and field work?
That is not the definition of merit that I'm familiar with. You are welcome to your own set of definitions, of course.
The only thing the Trump appointees (including the supreme court ones) have been phenomenally effective at is deconstructing the USA. And they're not done yet.
Trump is systematically engaging in performative actions to distract from the simple fact that the USA has elected a conman, criminal and serial abuser of women to the highest office. And you are cheering him on.
The only change I would make there is the "to" in "to distract".
On the basis of his behaviour in courts, I recon there's a common cause for performative behaviour and him being a convicted criminal, rather than it being an instrumental behaviour intended to distract. He doesn't behave as if he has a mental model for the difference between "I did a bad thing and should be ashamed" vs. "I am having power struggle and must fight dirty", nor any concept of a lie beyond observing that "liar" is an insult.
This isn't really an improvement, and other people may be playing him in this way for their own power games.
The criminal justice system is racist. The solution to crime is more complicated than “let all the criminals go” but sending in the National Guard is definitely not the solution. Also, given the current state of affairs, this will be forgotten about — because Trump will do something even more outrageously authoritarian. And your $100 won’t help when the regime kidnaps me out of my home.
It’s sexist too. Arguably even more sexist than racist.
>The criminal justice system is racist.
I beg to differ mostly. The criminal justice system is heavily staffed by people of all colors and ethnicities, including many, many blacks, who in some cities predominate among the police (and general population, at least in some neighborhoods). Despite this, it's often just as bad towards civilians and minority civilians as a mostly-white police force.
More specifically, the criminal justice system is classist, and that minorities are often part of the poor and underclass in many cities makes them much more targets than their coincidental skin color, though it sometimes seems to serve as a useful visual marker for police to who it's easier to target on sight. The idea of so many police officers and other law enforcement officials who are themselves black or some other visibly non-white ethnic group nonethless targeting civilians who are of the same color, for race reasons, doesn't really make sense from a racism perspective, but it does make sense from a class perspective.
If the classism is indistinguishable from racism and often manifests in results where one race is particularly disadvantaged, then it's also racist.
Racism and classism feed each other. We've known that since even before the civil war. Claiming classism doesn't make racism - poof - disappear. It actually reinforces it.
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This is a particularly uneducated take. Violent crime is down massively from a few decades ago.
You refute that violent crime is a large factor that caused authoritarianism in El Salvador? The post I was responding to made it seem like democracy and violent crime can somehow coexist or that they aren't in strong tension with one another. When it's pretty clear that they are. I was not saying it's the only cause of authoritarianism, or the most relevant cause in the current US moment.
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> Dude, no it’s not. Everyone is parroting the “crime dropped from 2023” line, but nobody mentions that the 2023 spike pushed DC’s murder rate to as high as Haiti. Not Haiti normally, but the recent events in Haiti where gangs took over the country, causing the homicide rate go spike from about 10 per 100k normally (safer than DC has ever been) to about as bad as DC in 2023.
Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline? And 2024 as the year to use for reference (it is the last year for which complete data is available, after all).
And as for NYC, that wasn't dealt with on the Federal level but on the state and city level. And it left a power vacuum in the crime world that was soon taken up by others, which should have been dealt with rather than ignored. Who knew that policing cities of millions of individuals over decades is hard? Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
As for the comparison with Haiti you make (and not to mention Iraq, as you did elsewhere in this thread): countries, especially countries at war and places like Haiti do not excel in record keeping. As such you probably should take the numbers reported from those countries as somewhat polished before being presented.
> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?
Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.
1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
So, your answer to cherry picking - by your claim - is more cherry picking?
> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.
> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.
Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.
'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!
Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.
Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.
Both can be true. Ostensibly, reducing poverty-related crime would allow resources to be effectively deployed against the remainder.
There’s no such thing as “poverty related crime.” My dad’s village in Bangladesh is dirt poor, but has very little crime.
You keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.
I assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries.
And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?
> Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich.
Poverty doesn’t cause crime either! It’s another liberal attempt to deny reality. Puerto Rico’s median income is 10-20x higher than India or Bangladesh or many countries in Africa like Ghana. But Puerto Rico’s homicide rate is 5-8x higher.
You don’t need to suspend due process to put the offenders causing the most crime in prison. Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy, because the people committing most of the crime are serial offenders. 90% of people admitted to state prison have 2 or more prior arrests: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-case-for-prisons. I’m not saying we should suspend due process, but he should put the peddle to the floor and push hard right up against the line.
And your point about my being affluent cut the other way. It would be easy for me to be a liberal, because I can afford to live in a gated community. When I lived in DC I lived in the “designated safe zones” for the rich white/asian people. Rich people can buy their way out of inferior government-provided order and safety the same way we can buy our way out of inferior government schools. It’s everyone else that’s stuck with the inferior government version.
The sickest thing liberals do is use the poor and lower middle class as human shields to protect the 1-2% of serial offenders and mentally ill. Cleaning up the city isn’t an attack on lower class people. Lower class people are the ones who suffer the most from disorder and who stand to gain the most from order.
> Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy
Who is going to draw that line? You? Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting, and I would not want someone in charge who believed in this wild oversimplification. There are good people who commit crimes, and bad people who don't. Let's not be so quick to "easily" judge and label them.
> Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.
That was tried at some point, but it didn't quite have the effect that the proponents of that scheme hoped for. Unfortunately we didn't learn a thing, or so it seems.
> Who is going to draw that line? You?
That’s why we have courts?
> People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting
This seems like a religious belief. I’m not going to argue religion with you, but the data shows that 2/3 of all crime is committed by just 1% of people: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807 (“The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”).
El Salvador dropped the homicide rate by a factor of 50 in a decade by imprisoning just 2% of the population. Let’s say we can’t go that fast because we have due process and whatnot. But once someone is convicted of a violent crime, why can’t we just double the sentences to keep them off the streets longer?
I’d even be willing to make the prisons nice, like in Norway. The point is to get them off the streets.
Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.
(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)
The criminals all have guns in Bangladesh and India too, and all over Africa.
For more info on the historical context of this, check out this Cogito Episode[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sPRFvWOBwo
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As with the parent, I prefer civil liberties and small amounts of crime to any alternative.
Which is why the playbook for authoritarianism traditionally starts with lying about how much crime there actually is, thus justifying a crackdown.
If Trump wants to cite excessive crime as his reasoning, then he should provide statistics, not the unsubstantiated off-the-cuff insults he has thus far.
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I hope you don’t find yourself in one of the out groups in the fascist state you seem so eager for. There’s a reason you don’t turn the military on the citizenry. They’re for fighting the enemies of the nation and the police are for maintaining order. When the military become the police, the citizenry become the enemy of the nation.
Look at the UK experience in Northern Ireland - not something to be emulated.
Costa Rica (a country my wife and I are seriously looking at moving to in retirement and planning to spend a couple of months there every year starting next year) famously doesn’t have a military to prevent military coups and to put more money into their excellent universal health care system among other things.
Costa Rica's homicide rate is 17 per 100,000 people. You probably won't notice it living in whatever expatriate enclave you and your wife are looking at, but that's a crushing burden on the average person in the country.
While appalling I don’t think you would find it 'crushing', even ignoring the jibe about expat conclaves.
Costa Rica’s 17 in 100k is ~2.5 times bigger than the US’ 6 in 100k people killed by homicide.
Thanks to gun crime, the US’ homicide rates are at least 7x the rest of the first world, anglophone, countries where rates are sub 1 in 100k.
By that measure it is 2-3x more confronting, to move from the United Kingdom to the States than it is from the US to Costa Rica.
> Thanks to gun crime, the US’ homicide rates are at least 7x the rest of the first world, anglophone, countries where rates are sub 1 in 100k.
Except it's not "thanks to gun crime." Some of the states with the lowest homicide rates, like Idaho and Utah, have the most guns.
You’re conflating two different things. The number of guns in absolute terms doesn’t matter as much as availability to people who are inclined to commit crimes: a collector / prepper going from 10 to 11 guns affects the total count but doesn’t impact the crime stats the way an angry teenager going from 0 to 1 gun does.
This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
> Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.
Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
>This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
Yes, density would have been a better choice - what I was trying to get at is that when you have a lot of people in close proximity you have more social interactions which can turn negative. For example, here in DC violent crime is largely limited to a few areas where drunk people get out of bars late at night and various crews are fighting over territory, so the numbers go up but most people in the neighborhood aren't affected. The crime rate always goes up in the summer because people are out on the street where they can get into arguments, and everyone's a bit touchy during a heat wave.
You certainly have things like rural gangs, too, but if things are spread out you just don't have that critical mass to ramp the numbers up. This also plays out in other types of crimes – cars get stolen anywhere there are cars, but thieves are playing the odds and it's easier not to attract in a dense population while they'd stick out if they started going up some stranger's driveway in a place where there's no other traffic. When that Kia lock exploit was in the news, there were bored teenagers basically treating street parking as a shopping mall because the supply was huge and until they actually touched a car there was no crime in walking down a sidewalk.
The states with the most guns also have the highest percentage of households that own at least one gun: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map._Percent_of_hous.... In the Idaho to Dakotas region, more than half of households have a gun. But the same region has among the lowest homicide rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti...
Crime rates are reported per 100,000 people, so population isn’t the reason.
Household ownership doesn't matter if the people who own them aren't likely to be involved in crimes - if a 50 year old farmer has a hunting rifle, their risk profile to society is really different than an angry 19 year old with a handgun.
While crime rates are per 100,000 people, population density makes a big difference because a low density, homogeneous population is going to have fewer interactions which turn negative. That's why people comparing crime stats usually compare cities or regions to avoid falsely reporting a correlation which is nothing more than a function of urban vs. rural density.
Is this just an anecdote, or are you claiming that having a military would somehow reduce the homicide rate? How would this work in practice?
Probably by having the panopticon-effect.
The same way a surveillance camera in every room would also reduce bad behavior...
Only way to achieve that is if people are afraid of these forces and perceive them as effective at policing.
If they're not, nothing will happen.
And considering that the US has the highest murder rate among first world countries, highest incarceration rate and spends the most on the military. Obvious the US is doing something wrong.
Costa Rica is also turning into the new haven for the drug cartels to run ops, after they were evicted from El Salvador, and the lack of a military certainly does not help here.
And the military stops drugs in the US?
Meh, that's not really any worse than Albuquerque and I haven't been murdered once here.
The city I spent all of my childhood and went to college in had a murder rate in the 20s per 100,000 the year I graduated. It wasn’t a large city.
Retirement is a long way away. But next year, we have an Airbnb in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose that is safe. It’s a high rise condo 2/2 with a gym and a pool.
The murder rate in “Atlanta” is also still around 20 per 100,000 and I lived in various suburbs of metro Atlanta until 2022 and was never in fear of my life going into the city. But I also lived in a suburban enclaves there.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be one of these ignorant entitled Americans who refuse to learn Spanish. I am close to A2 level Spanish now and should be there by the time we go next year. I can hold simple conversations.
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Are we working from your private dictionary, or from the history books? My recollection is that Italian industrialists got along just fine with with Mussolini, and that he did not much tamper with private property.
Mussolini forced businesses to join fascist-controlled employer groups, and workers to join fascist-controlled labour unions - Trump appears completely disinterested in doing such a thing.
Hitler banned all youth groups except for the Nazi Party’s Hitler Youth. Mussolini tried to do the same; but the entrenched power of the Catholic Church meant he was forced to tolerate its youth groups competing with the fascist ones. I haven’t heard of any “Trump Youth” and Trumpism appears to lack the fascist focus on banning all civil society groups except those formally affiliated with the ruling party.
Both leaders enacted explicitly antisemitic legislation - Hitler with enthusiasm; Mussolini possibly more due to pressure from Hitler and a desire to please his Nazi allies than genuine antisemitic conviction. I’m not sure what Trump’s answer to Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws and Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali (Racial Laws) is meant to be
Calling Trump a fascist requires ignoring many things which Hitler and Mussolini had in common but which Trump lacks
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In Italy under Mussolini's fascist regime, private property was generally respected, but with significant state intervention and control. While private ownership wasn't abolished, the state exerted considerable influence over the economy through the corporate system, regulating industries and labor.
Private Property: The fascist regime in Italy did not abolish private property. Mussolini's economic policy, known as corporatism, aimed to organize the economy through corporations representing various sectors (e.g., agriculture, industry).
State Intervention: While private ownership remained, the state played a central role in economic decision-making. The regime established a Ministry of Corporations to oversee the economy and regulated labor relations through the Charter of Labour.
Corporatism: The fascist regime organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations. These corporations were intended to represent the interests of both employers and employees within each sector, but in practice, they were largely controlled by the fascist state and party members.
Limited Independence: The corporations and labor organizations had limited independence, and the state played a significant role in regulating their activities and resolving disputes.
Influence on Production: The fascist state influenced production and economic activity through various agencies and institutions, such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale (IRI), which held shares in key industries, and the Instituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI), which controlled credit.
As in more regulation (leftist), not less (current admin)
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Fascism is the expansion of the state, anti-small-government.
Again, you don't know what you're talking about.
Propaganda isn't something that only happens to poor brown people in 3rd world countries. Its foolish to think that the people who do this overseas would never do it to you.
Doubling down on this when you're wrong is like someone in an abusive relationship that keeps running back and defending their abuser.
Centralizing power and removing obstructions yet being against censorship and wanting to arm the public?
Again, its incompatible with your warped view and understanding b/c you've heard the word again and again that has no meaning.
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
Straight from the dictionary, I'm going to stand by my words here.
Which doesn't apply to the current administration, just fantasyland.
A small government regime, that wants to arm the public, is against censorship, wants to de-regulate industries, pro-capitalist, etc.. is not compatible with fascism.
How the hell is your fantasy a reality when you're literally wanting to arm the public and expand free speech?
The last guy wanted to get people fired from their jobs over an experimental jab (Nuremberg trials, anybody?), while his supporters were in favor of taking their kids and imprisoning parents into camps - expanding the government, increasing regulations, and literally forming a Ministry of Truth (DHS Disinformation Governance Board).
We've normalized bad behavior (ie: immigration law, Disinformation Governance Board, etc..) in this country for years and ignore laws governing that, so when we have to correct that behavior people tend to forget how we got here. I saw more systemic racism and discrimination under Obama & Biden than I have under Trump or Bush. I saw race and antisemitism heavily weaponized to divide and conquer under liberal administrations more than I ever have under centrist or right leaning administrations.
Its not fascism. Its just fools cherry picking things to live out some weird good guy/bad guy fantasy of theirs.
If this were a tech document, I'm sure the understanding would be far greater - but somehow that type of thinking and understanding goes out the window when it comes to this.
And Socialism step 1. And monarchy step 1. Category error.
Again, not Socialism, sub-categories of it, sure.
However Social Democracy is the goal and that's not its step 1.
Yeah, maybe certain types of fascism are great too. I wouldn't count on it for it or socialism, though.
At various points, several western European nations have been "democratic socialist", with varying degrees of success. Not so much of those since the end of the Cold War, but they were generally on the liberal side when it came to personal freedom. For example, the UK — and sure, the UK had The Troubles and all the associated awfulness, and the Empire for some of that period, ditto — the police forces in England, Scotland, and Wales were not (and still are not) routinely armed.
Well, yes, but the next problem to talk about is definitions. Democratic socialism is a name that's not really socialist. Socialism is state control of the economy. That's fundamentally different to creaming the top off a capitalist economy.
Now if the UK enlarges the state to the point where the NHS owns everything and all resource allocation is directed by some bureaucrats, then, sure it's actual socialism. Until then it's capitalism with a giant all-powerful anchor attached called the state.
When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying but I think it does matter. First of all, the police shouldn’t be militarized, so the fact that they already are doesn’t make it any better. Second of all, the military is fundamentally different from the police, who are at least nominally controlled by the city (yes, I know the President can and has taken control of the D.C. police). The people of D.C. shouldn’t be policed by a force that doesn’t answer to them, especially since the vast majority of them didn’t vote for the federal administration that’s currently seizing control of municipal law enforcement.
>When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
Why is grass height any of the government's business? Who voted for the people who did that? Who came up with the legal theories under which those laws exist? Why were these ever a justifiable pretense for the government to threaten people with force in the first place?
We all know the argument. It's some mumbo jumbo about mice and pests and public health, about blight and property values, and government interest in those things. But now the people (demographically, if not literally the same individuals in some cases) who were the ones peddling it are the ones threatened by it and it's made immediately clear to them how bullshit their justification was.
I feel like I'm the fucking goose chasing the guy in the down coat and I don't want to be.
It wasn't a law-based one, but it escalated from a HOA requirement.
Anything eventually involves the military shooting nukes at you.
Yes, it does matter. The chain of command is entirely different.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
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So you don't trust the stats from last year - which show a decline, but you've already implied that you _will_ trust the stats from this year, if they show a decline.
Additionally, this administration has already shown a propensity toward firing people when they report inconvenient data - jobs data, climate data, etc. That renders any stats reported by this admin going forward very suspect.
You are engaging in motivated reasoning, at best. Not objective analysis.
If you don't trust the stats, then again, how would you know what effect the National Guard has? I can give you my subjective assessment as a DC resident, which is that crime is pretty low and it's a great place to live, but that isn't very useful to anyone who doesn't know me personally.
If you don't trust the stats then the Guard is being sent in for no reason and there will be no way to determine what impact they have. That is a terrible situation for everyone.
> It’s nice to be data driven but that isn’t really possible in our low trust society.
I don't think these concepts (interpersonal trust vs. accuracy of government statistics) are very related. For example China has one of the highest levels of interpersonal trust in the world (https://ourworldindata.org/trust), but notoriously unreliable government statistics.
That is a terrible situation for everyone.
It's not terrible for everyone. It's great for people who control the National Guard as well as has the ability to control what people are told about their impact.
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Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
(This is not related to the content of your post - I just needed a place to put this reply.)
DC seems to have more murders than the netherlands each year despite being 25 times smaller. I guess what one considers safe is very subjective.
Ah yes the famous police state of the netherlands. "We have higher crime rates than nordic countries so therefore we must have more and more and more militarized police" is not exactly my idea of reasoned thinking.
Why should I live in a more dangerous society than the Netherlands (which isn't "nordic")? Or Australia? I fit in those places fine. Why can't we have that at home? Why is this level of crime acceptable just because it is lower than 1980? What liberty do I give up by having some guardsmen standing around?
My point is that an ever more militarized police directed by a vengeful president is not actually going to make society safer. I too would like programs that actually address the causes of crime but instead we are going to get more violence done to the poor, racial minorities, and people using their voices.
His point is that the crime rate being lower in these places does not happen due to them having militarized police, so assuming that militarized police in general, much less literally using the military for policing will drop the crime rate doesn't track.
You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.
Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.
I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.
We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.
Gendarmerie is the Belgian term still in use there, in NL we use Marechaussee because we didn't like to be reminded of the French occupation.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koninklijke_Marechaussee
The Royal Marechaussee is 1/10th the size of the National Police Force and as you noted have quite specialized tasks. They are not the people handling day to day crime and interactions with civilians for mundane police actions. They also receive plenty of training related to the policing duties and are trained on how to police civilians. The national guard does not, and even MPs receive very different training and operate in a very different manner to the regular police.
This is very different than universally militarizing your police force across the nation or employing soldiers untrained in policing as police.
What do you believe the venn diagram of soldier and police skillsets looks like?
I think it looks like a normal venn diagram. Some things are similar and some different and it depends on what deployments or forces each has worked on. That's why NG troops are getting extra training in police duties and working together with normal police.
Police training academy is already generally considered to be insufficient, which is part of why cops continue to receive so much ongoing training as part of the job.
Getting a few rushed bootcamp style classes is not going to do anything to remotely bridge that gap.
Ah, but you're not free in the Netherlands because you don't have a second amendment. /s
DC has incredibly strict gun laws. I doubt many of the weapons used in crimes are legal. I don't think you will be truly any less free having national guard soldiers walking around. Actually seems better than the usual dystopian tech solutions people come up with. Maybe they will try it for thirty days and people will like it.
DC isn't an island. It's super easy for people in the region to get hold of guns, it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun. The question of whether guns used in crime are legal or not seems moot to me, they are equally deadly if misused.
> it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun
Actually, the whole issue is that this is not true! Statistically speaking, the average crime in DC, whether involving a gun or not, goes uncaught, unresolved, and ultimately unpunished.
How is this different from the netherlands?
Because it's not like it is surrounded by countries with lax gun laws. You can't buy a semi-automatic rifle or a handgun and a pile of ammo with the same ease in, say, Belgium that you can in West Virginia. Like, which country in Europe do you think has the laxest gun laws, for comparison? Having lived in both Europe and the US, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US.
There are a lot of weapons from the former Yugoslavian war still floating around in Europe, both single pieces an much larger caches. These pop up with some regularity in crime busts and given the number of weapons that went missing (> 1 million weapons remain unaccounted for) this will likely remain a problem for a long time to come.
At least the Ukraine/Poland border now scans the bulk of the vehicles to prevent the next issue like that. But the ones that are already in the EU are going to surface only bit-by-bit as they get used or uncovered. Given how hard it is to obtain weapons here they are very valuable.
https://thedefensepost.com/2020/07/30/weapons-yugoslavia-eur...
It's so different that for as long as I've lived here I have seen a gun maybe a handful of times, the vast majority of those were guns holstered on the hips of police on patrol (and not even a single time in their hands) and a gun that a private owner was maintaining who uses it exclusively to shoot at a range. Other than that, no guns here, at all.
No, I think the answer is that is only different in that Americans in DC are more criminal. Both places have strict gun laws with licensing requirements. In both places you can get illegal guns, and these are the ones used in crime if a gun is used, otherwise it will be an illegal knife. However in the Netherlands the laws are followed and/or policed better. Maybe now in DC the laws will be enforced better too, and maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave. I predict that few people lose any liberty and that this experiment reduces certain crimes (like street murder, assaults, random robberies/muggings) a lot.
I've spent time in both countries. The difference could not be much larger when it comes to policing.
Laws certainly are not policed better here. The big differentiator is the much smaller wealth gap (though it is still sizeable and should be further reduced) as well as the much more relaxed attitude towards things that we consider illness and/or self-harm, a lot of which ends up being dealt with as crime in the USA. Furthermore, a hospital procedure isn't likely to bankrupt you and when you do become homeless there are - if you want - institutions that will help to get you out of that situation.
It is far from ideal. But it is night and day compared with the USA. I don't recall seeing as much police anywhere else (including such diverse places as Colombia, Panama, Canada and almost every country in Europe), nor did I see people in general being afraid of the police. Sure, you still don't fuck with them but as a rule they're really there to serve and protect, which - ironically - they have to write on the side of their vehicles in the USA, either to increase the pretense or as a personal reminder to the occupants of the vehicle, it is hard to tell which.
I will add that in addition to my longer comment, I doubt that "wealth gap" has much at all to do with these differences in criminality.
Yes, the US has a high gini coefficient. But the median income is very similar to the netherlands, with NL being maybe 5000$ higher. Median wealth per capita is very similar between the two and Americans have slightly higher purchasing power, although again pretty similar. I don't think crime is higher in the US because rich people are sending the poor into a murderous rage, and if it is so then it just indicates there really is a culture problem.
Bureau of Justice statistics says that the US has about 1,200,000 police across agencies. Given a US population of 340 million this is about 283 people per employee (it says this includes civilian personnel, idk how many): https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/census-state-and-lo....
The Netherlands has about 51,000 police officers. They also have 14,000 support officers and some other civilians with some law enforcement powers (I will leave these out since idk how civilian support officers counted in BoJ stats). That is something like 352 people per officer (18 million over 51,000). On top of this there are around 7,000 gendarmie who you will see around at events or government sites, under the ministry of justice.
Australia has a little less per capita (27 million people, 65,000 officers 415:1) but also their defense forces have some domestic authorities that in the US might be law enforcement. Some forces are protesting because they want to hire more people, take that for what you want.
I wouldn't call this a drastic difference and in my anecdotal experience, as opposed to yours, the police are about as visible in all three places, maybe more so in Australian cities because they walk around in large groups wearing hi-vis.
Note that these are similar police presence rates despite probably higher crime in the US (I guess this would depend on offence). If you have higher crime, why wouldn't you have more police?
In contrast to what you say, crime clearance seems to be much higher in the Netherlands. The homicide clearance rate is around 80% compared to 50-65% in the US (depends on year). I believe clearance rates for burglary are also several times higher. So the laws are better enforced.
Colombia, since you brought it up, has a very similar police presence to all of the above. They should probably get more since they have 5x the murders of the US.
I do not really see the relevance of the attitude towards healthcare bill costs to this discussion. Your view of the US as extremely over policed compared to other societies seems misguided based on the data, and maybe driven by ideology since you bring up mostly irrelevant facts like hospital costs (these don't generally bankrupt the homeless in America because they usually don't pay anyway, since they have no money and just go to emergency room). The statistics I see on homelessness do not even indicate that America has a particular homelessness problem in comparison to the Netherlands, for example, in fact they are right next to one another on this list (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...) with Australia being higher. I am sure you can quibble about how the statistics here are collected or what it means.
My thesis is simple. I think Americans commit more crimes because they are more criminal and it is more normalised in society. I think we have all the laws we need, but a lot of inertia preventing us from enforcing them. I think this is particularly true in certain urban areas. I think deploying hundreds of national guardsmen in the capitol is an interesting experiment which stands some chance of changing this a bit, and that it comes as minimal cost to civil liberties of law abiding citizens. Maybe it will work or maybe not, but it doesn't seem outrageous for a city with 200 murders per year in the richest country on earth. I think a more criminal population requires more intensive policing than a less criminal one.
I've spent close to 45 years out of 60 in NL, and I've interacted with the police a handful in that time, and usually I initiated the interaction (other than random alcohol checks). I've spent less than a year contiguously in the United States and have interacted with the police there on every visit, sometimes multiple times per visit. And I never initiated the contact.
> maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave
I say this as someone who's split his life between the US (on both coasts) and Europe: the US's police forces are far more visible, and employ far more force, than in Europe.
"More" isn't going to change anything.
Is it really? It is not hard to go the hague and see gendarmerie. I see police all over Europe when I go. If they apply less force, it may be because the population is less criminal, or perhaps they get better people into their forces. I think Europeans have way more regulations that are enforced.
The claim that "more" won't change anything is empirical. Let's come back in a few months and see if DC is safer or not--I will admit if I was wrong.
Again, I think this is an interesting solution because it is actually less invasive than all the tech solutions to just have guys on the street who watch and maybe come up and talk to you and then forget about it. If you are just going about your day peacefully, are you going to lose anything here?
We seem to have gotten a surveillance state with cameras and sensors (and censors) everywhere that somehow doesn't police easily solvable/preventable crime. If I thought there was some big civil liberties tradeoff I might think differently, but it seems like we lost those while still having to buy our deodorant from behind locked cabinets and occasionally getting shot by some guy with ten priors.
The complaints and protests that this goes against civil liberties has just started to ring hollow because there are few visible serious efforts to protest the real abuses of civil liberties which mostly come from tech and the surveillance economy. Somehow the energy is directed against guys in uniform standing around making sure the street doesn't get turned into a drag race.
There are 1.21 firearms for every person in the USA. There are .15 for every person in Europe.
If you don't understand how having 8x the number of firearms per capita increases the ease in which criminals have access to them, I'm not sure what to say. Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access.
I'm not even for gun control - I feel like the genie is so far out of the bottle at this point that there's no real sense in trying to put it back in, and the only way for everyday citizens to be on level ground when it comes to self defense, home protection, etc., is being armed themselves. But acting like states or cities with strict gun control actually have the ability to prevent criminals from having access to them is silly.
"Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access."
So have more police to enforce the laws? Why is there this belief that increasing police cannot do anything? Again, I bet this works and that DC has lower crime during the period the NG is there. It is empirical, let's see.
Gun smuggling is not the kind of crime that national guardsman standing around looking menacing stops. This is the sort of work detectives and specialized units do. Specialized surveillance, physical and digital, informants, etc. People taking plea deals in exchange for additional info.
How would a military force without the training or skillset required to do this help? Without the community knowledge? Without the contacts in it?
The issue isn't whether or not more (and better trained) police would help - they almost certainly would. But that is different from deploying the national guard.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1805161115 https://www.csis.org/analysis/sending-national-guard-dc-wron...
The other problem is that even if crime rates are reduced, that is one statistic in a vacuum - how much damage does it do to public perception of the police? We know it does - see above. What incidents might occur from the lack of training the NG has in policing civilians? What damages does it do to the fundamental freedoms within the country?
What fundamental freedoms are people in DC going to lose? See my other comment---I think this is much less intrusive on civil liberties than adding more surveillance.
National Guardsmen may not find many guns if they arent searching people, but people will think twice about using them with guardsmen standing around. They will get into and escalate altercations where guns might be used less. There are plenty of prior cases where more policing has reduced crime like this, and DC was not doing enough, so this is going to be tried. If the police decide to work together with them enthusiastically, then even more can be done with the extra manpower.
I don't think public perception of police will change much, and anyway it always hovers around 50% confidence in surveys.
Oh, you just have to look around the world to see how effectively a dictator's deployment of national armed force reduces the official crime statistics. There's absolutely positively zero doubt in mind that will be a reported outcome :-)
> (I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
Alternatively, we could just make DC a state, which I'm broadly in favor of.
The whole point of the District of Columbia not being a state is that the United States is an equal compact between the states, and it would not be fair for the seat of the federal government to be in a state. So I'm a hard pass on DC statehood. I find GP's suggestion better.
Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
> Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
Yes I would, the people of DC should have representation, but using retrocession to get there would dilute any influence they have on their own politics and local control. I understand that the founders were worried about fairness and no state being favored over another by selecting one to be the capitol of the country, but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today – especially if that state were made up out of whole cloth from the people who had already lived there.
> but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today
On the contrary, it is a significant concern for me and I'm sure I'm not alone in my thoughts.
Fully half of the top ten richest counties in this country are suburbs of DC, a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying. I find this to be an absolute travesty that shows just how much incentive and corrupting force there is in the federal government.
Return the land to the states. Keep a small federal territorial enclave for actual federal buildings and functions. Make a lot more of these territorial enclaves all around this vast country so that power is less concentrated in one place. That's one thing the Germans got right, in their federalism.
> a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying.
Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)
Funny how in every other country in the world this is a solved problem.
Most countries are not federal republics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_republic (or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation#/media/File:Map_of_...)
Now, I'm not a student of politics, so I may be making some error, but I'd say (1) only about 2/3 of the ones on that list* are in a decent political position, and (2) that in any event a shifting of the balance of power between states (not just US states, any states) and their corresponding federal government is a big deal and not to be done lightly.
Of course, because I'm not a student of politics, I also don't take any strong position about what the USA should or shouldn't do with DC. If y'all turn DC into Trump's personal walled castle and themed gold-plated golf course, all I'm gonna do is get some popcorn, I won't stop you.
* including e.g. the one I live in, where the president has far less power than in the American system and real power is with the chancellor, and also the voting system is completely different and supports a plurality of parties not just two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
Just to clarify: I meant the fact that the capital of a country needs some kind of special exception. That normally really isn't the case.
NL is kind of special: the capital of the country is Amsterdam, but the seat of government is the Hague. But in Belgium, which is about as divided as it comes, the seat of government is Brussels, which is itself bi-lingual.
I don't think this is a problem that requires a particularly convoluted solution. What it does require is for people to simply play by the rule of law. And that's the thing that the United States is currently putting to the test on every metric that matters.
All DC statehood proposals cut out the capitol complexes from the territory that would turn into a state. The seat of power would remain not in a state.
I don't think that matters though. I'm more concerned about the broader metropolitan area where all the people with all those powers and all the people who are on their coattails reside. Which is currently Virginia and Maryland. Shrinking DC proper is basically a no-op on that front.
If anything were to happen it should probably be the creation of a "middle" Virginia on some sort of Northeast southwest line so that the metropolitan area is split among three states to dilute it.
Failing that just split it among VA/MD, that'd basically leave the status quo unchanged with regard to interests and power but at least make less people's lives subject to political football.
The crime rates in DC have been dramatically falling over the last couple years, just as they have been falling across most cities in the country for the last couple decades.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
If you're lucky.
> Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
Unless you have personal political clout, this is True for any nation.
I am surprised that you believe this. May I ask which country you are from and what experiences shaped this belief of yours
In India where a social media post pissed off someone. It was sarcastic criticism - no threats, no slurs). But won't get into details, sorry. (Also arrested a few times for participating in mass protests against corruption, but that was in a large group, so wasn't all that stressful.)
I also had bad luck when traveling to the US. Got detained by the CBP - I think because I accidentally sneezed on the officer and pissed him off. (Either that or I looked like some terrorist). Had to stay in a cell for more than a day. I wasn't even questioned!
Thankfully, nothing happened after that. Was good to catch up on sleep though, since there was nothing to do.
Naw, quite a few countries have this nice thing called an “independent judiciary” and “rights” not subject to the whims of an egomaniac
The degrees to which this is true varies tremendously, depending on how much the concept of "rule of law" is applied. In China (and other police states) the rule of law is not applied, in most European countries and the US (at least prior to this administration) it is (generally speaking; there's always corruption here and there).
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-cri... - August 10th, 2025
Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-... - January 3rd, 2025 (My note: Published by this admin's DoJ in January of this year)
DC Metro Police 2025 Year-to-Date Crime Comparison - https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance
But Washington is clearly reigned by a criminal
"So bad"? They're nineteenth in terms of highest murder rate among US cities. The rate had been falling for over a decade, save a brief spike in 2023.
The capital of a country, especially one in a special status like Washington DC, should be a shinning star of perfection, nit in the top 20 hell holes you'd never want to be caught dead in at midnight alone.
That sounds like a reference to North Korea. If that wasn't your intention: the capital of a country is usually (but not always) also the largest city. The largest city will have the largest group of people on the fringe. By definition it will never be a 'shining star of perfection', but neither are they in the 'top 20 hell holes', they have more of everything, and that - unfortunately - includes more crime. But the DC version is a bit more complex in that the biggest criminals are not found on the streets but in various offices.
For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
The idea is that with more police presence, criminals will think twice before attempting anything. Standing around is part of this.
A good example of this is NYC around 2000. It worked.
> A good example of this is NYC around 2000. It worked.
Counterexample: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."
"“In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,” the researchers wrote. “The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.”"
"“Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of proactive policing can inspire additional crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police stops, summonses and so on,” the authors wrote."
NYC did indeed see a big crime drop in the 2000s… but so did everywhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me...
I've lived in NYC since the mid-90s which was about the peak for crime so that's exactly what I'm commenting on. The police did some things better, but the dropping crime rates were not just local or even national, but global. No mayor or police chief can take credit for it. Similarly if you want to attribute the 2020 crime wave and recent ebb, it begins and ends with COVID-19. No humans involved at all.
> [...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
> DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe.
DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.
"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."
DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups. If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk at 3am in certain neighborhoods, it had no impact on your life. Fox News likes to describe it as Sarajevo or Mogadishu but it just isn't - go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches. There certainly are crimes happening but anyone telling you it's out of control or that the police are powerless to stop it is lying to you for political reasons.
> DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups.
I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.
Objectively speaking, DC’s 27 homicides per 100k people in 2024 is almost double what it was in 2012. If actually started going back up before the pandemic. And in absolute terms, DC has about 8 times the homicide rate of a relatively safe american city like new york or san diego.
> If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk
It’s ultimately driven by gangs, but most people killed aren’t gang members per se. They’re gang adjacent, or siblings or friends who get caught up in the gang wars. Also, the gangs aggressively recruit young men in the neighborhoods where they operate. It’s very “you’re with us or against us.”
> go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches.
I’ve lived in downtown Baltimore, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. I know how cities work. But the violence is a constant for the people who live there. We got to know an Indian family who had a great Indian restaurant in the ghetto in Wilmington, which has a similar homicide rate to DC. Yeah, on any given day you won’t see someone get murdered. But they had someone get killed on the street outside their restaurant. And EMTs wouldn’t come for hours because they were worried about getting caught in a gang firefight. Then another person got shot in the street near my wife’s office at 5 am waiting for the Nike Store to open. That was just in one year. Imagine growing up there and not being rich each to isolate yourself from the violence.
No, DC and Chicago are not Fallujah. I travel to DC frequently and have never had any reason to fear violent crime. I take the metro. I walk long distances, including late at night. I have relatives who live there. They do not worry about violent crime. They certainly don't consider it "Fallujah". I've also seen aides to the same republican politicians who spout all this fear mongering rhetoric out at night at DC bars without any apparent fears for their safety. Frankly, it's an incredibly insulting to say that DC is Fallujah. There is literally an article on the Department of Justice website from January with the title "Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low". The statistics that you quoted are several years out of date and you conveniently neglected to mention the decline after 2023. You chose a number from 2023 of 40 per 100k, but the number from 2024 was 27 per 100k. That's cherry-picking data to make a point. It's dishonest. You also neglect to mention the differences in data collection practices between the United States and a country like Haiti or Iraq. Exactly how trustworthy are wartime homicide statistics in a country undergoing complete social collapse? https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
If you look at the actual list of homicides in a major American city, the victims are often people who are involved in the drug trade. Homicides are often highly concentrated in small areas. A large portion of the city sees no homicides at all in a given year. I don't know if an equivalent map exists for DC, but you can look at a map of homicides in Boston in 2024. There are a few areas where there are clusters with 2-3 homicides within a few blocks. Then there are whole neighborhoods where there are no homicides at all, or just one or two. https://www.universalhub.com/crime/murder/2024
Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
For decades now, the media has painted a sensationalized picture of big cities. I was traveling once and was talking to an older couple from a rural area. When I told them where I lived, they were genuinely concerned for my safety. I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
I've read the same "30 year low" press release. 30 years ago, in the 90s, DC's homicide rate was hovering around the 70-80 per 100k range, which are truly frightening numbers not be seen outside of literal wartime[0]. It's good news that violent crime is down since then, but it speaks to a blind spot[1] that you do not find the current violent crime rate to be utterly unacceptable.
> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.
> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?
[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.
I think what I was trying to convey is that the image of life in an American city that the parent was portraying, when he described a beautiful, wealthy city as "Fallujah" (which he has now deleted), and what this couple clearly had in their head, is just completely alien to most people who actually live in those cities. The impression that you get from conservative media and often local TV news is just completely divorced from reality - or at best the media has taken the experience of a relatively small number of people who live in particularly dangerous housing projects, or particularly dangerous streets, and presented it as how the city works in general. I know Boston better than Washington, so I'll use that as an example. Admittedly, it's a city with much lower crime than Washington, but I've had plenty of experiences talking to older, more conservative people who live in suburban and rural areas, and seem to think it's crime ridden. I used to work in several neighborhoods that are considered dangerous - Roxbury and Mattapan, and I've spent time in some of the rougher parts of Dorchester. I've been inside a number of low-income housing projects. I've walked and ridden buses in these neighborhoods. What I noticed was that whatever concern I felt about my safety came from things that I had heard from the media, not from anything that I personally saw, or even anything that happened to anyone I knew. There are a few exceptions to this, like a few blocks in the South End where homeless addicts congregate where I would genuinely be concerned about something happening. The neighborhoods where I've lived - which are not necessarily affluent - have all felt perfectly safe, with the exception of some petty thefts - particularly bike thefts.
I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.
Boston and New York are in a totally different league than DC. Even at DC’s best in 2012, it had a homicide rate more than three times as high as those cities. And currently, DC’s homicide rate is more than six times as high.
And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.
The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.
The point that I'm trying to make is that relentless propaganda from right-wing media gives people a false impression of life in cities like Washington DC. Hence the poster I was responding to casually comparing Washington to Fallujah and Haiti, one a literal war zone, and the other a place where the social order completely collapsed and even basic services like electricity and clean water were not available. It's an absolutely absurd comparison, and yet many people who only get their information from this propaganda machine absolutely believe this.
What is out of touch is declaring that the crime problem, which is actually improving, is an emergency that justifies deploying troops to the streets of the capital. These troops are being deployed to the areas around the national mall where they are highly visible - but there is very little violent crime and a lot of existing police presence around the monuments. They aren't trained or experienced in street-level law enforcement. Neither are the FBI agents, who are being taken away from other critical priorities like counterintelligence to patrol the national mall. Note that Trump did not deploy the national guard on January 6th, when there was a genuine threat on the national mall. This is not a genuine effort to address crime. It is an extremely cynical effort to look like they are addressing crime while they grab more and more unchecked executive power.
> The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023.
Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.
Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.
[1] Here, I'll do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Washington,_D.C.
> Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population.
The GP elsewhere in the thread pointed out that in like-to-like comparisons of Washington, DC against peer world cities, it fares really poorly in violent crime.
> Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce
I doubt that the people who are committing crimes were disrupted from the workforce.
> DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's
Both things can be true: DC used to be worse in violent crime, and today's violent crime is still unacceptably high.
DC is part of the United States, which has high levels of income inequality and easier access to guns than any other advanced country. The drug war keeps pulling people in because we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people. In other countries, you have better medical care (fewer people buying fentanyl on the street because they can't get legal chronic pain treatment), and if people don't have easy access to guns the homicide rate is lower because while there are people just as mad at the world they're getting in fist or knife fights rather than shootouts which are more likely to be lethal and affect more people. Yes, people still get seriously hurt but if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.
In particular for DC, note also that Republicans have blocked for many years efforts by DC's government to restrict the supply of guns and the lack of a national strategy means that someone who can't buy a gun in DC goes a few miles away to Virginia. In most other countries, you don't have the option of even a short walk offering access to very different laws. This also shows up in the crime stats: in my neighborhood there've been a couple of fatal shootings over the last decade – and in every case both the perp and victim were people from Maryland who came over the border to do a drug deal because they can switch jurisdictions in 5 minutes and thus confuse a police response.
> if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.
Funnily enough, academic work suggests the exact opposite, that the homicide rate in this country could be 5x higher were it not for advancements in trauma care[0]. Inner-city hospitals are applying battlefield medicine techniques and saving lives, turning homicides into aggravated assaults.
> we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people
The state of West Virginia, which has more guns and a higher share of unhappy, economically marginalized young people than Virginia, has a lower homicide rate than its eastern neighbor.
Ultimately, we likely disagree on "the root cause of crime", as it were. I don't believe that more aid for the poor or reducing income inequality will materially reduce violent crime rates, because by and large people do not commit violent crime in order to escape poverty. Instead, people are poor for a lot of the same reasons that they commit crime: they have poor impulse control, high time preference, and little consideration for those around them. We have not yet figured out a way to apply money to people in such a way to change these undesirable behavioral patterns, so I am against spending more of the taxpayer's money in this fruitless endeavor. The ways that do work have fallen out of favor in society.
I believe what will make a material impact is lengthier sentences and more pretrial detention; that is, policy must favor the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of repeat criminals.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124155/
Poverty is the underlying driver of most crime. Poverty, in turn, is the result of wealth hoarding by the ruling class.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions
Every action taken by a police organization is per se a political action. That's why "police" are called that.
I am curious what the people in the National Guard think about this, do they all think this is a good idea.
By my reckoning next stop would be an “accidental fire” in the House of Representatives.
“I said no immediately because it’s like signing up for the Gestapo,” the Guard source said.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-trumps-dc-deployment-...
>There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C.
What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!
D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).
This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....
D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.
A big part of the reason why DC has these problems is because they do not control much of their own budgeting due to the nature of how the federal government manages the territory.
Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.
Many cities have to deal with multiple levels of government, e.g. a state and county government. And DC has a massive budget. DC’s actual 2024 expenditures were $18.7 billion. Austin is $6 billion and Travis County is another $2 billion. San Diego’s budget is about $9 billion.
Philadelphia and Baltimore have a median income half that of DC. They’re among the poorest large cities in the country, while DC is one of the richest.
DC’s problem is that it’s run by people that are somehow dumber than Congress. A literal crackhead was mayor in the 1990s. I think Mayor Bowser is actually doing an excellent job,[1] but she’s the first good mayor the city has had in my lifetime, and everyone around her sucks.
[1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much. She’s not a Resistance type, and always says something like “well I don’t agree but we’ll do our best.” https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5446868-dc-crime-tr... (“I’m going to work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster. Let me put it that way.”).
> I think Mayor Bowser is actually doing an excellent job,[1]
> [1] My theory is that Bowser secretly doesn’t hate Trump that much.
I don't think you intended it but this reads as an admission that you primarily approve of her due to her seeming opinion of Dear Leader.
Do you live in DC or travel there frequently? It's very much not a dump. There are great museums, great parks, a vibrant food and nightlife scene, and many beautiful neighborhoods. There is a lot of poverty (not very visible to tourists), and there is some homelessness (which is visible), but it remains a great city to visit and to live in.
Reading between the lines of his post history it’s obvious that what he means is that a lot of Black people live there, therefore dump.
You should read a bit more then and then you'll realize how bizarre it really is. You're on to something, but you're not quite there yet.
A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?
Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month.
In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...
Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.
[flagged]
Yes, Big Balls allegedly got his ass beat by a couple of 15 year olds.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
Teenagers can be strong. Almost every adult would be dumb to pick a fight with a high school football player. And the reality of fighting is that generally once you’re up against two or three other people, you’re going to get beat up. It’s not a Jason Bourne movie. World-class MMA fighters have been jumped. One person generally cannot fight several people.
If you’re enjoying the fact that two individuals attempted a person’s car and then beat them up, just because the victim doesn’t agree with your politics, you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you.
That’s a bridge too far for me.
There's a massive gulf between someone merely disagreeing with you and someone taking an active role in (what many people believe to be) deeply evil acts, especially while ignoring the consensus-building mechanism our society uses to determine how taxpayer money is spent (Congressional appropriations).
You can dispute the evil of those acts, but it should be clear that many people do find it evil to kill several hundreds of thousands or potentially even millions of innocent people in order to yield $66 per year per average taxpayer in savings. So their feelings about Big Balls' victimization is not mediated by their disagreement with him.
Sorry what? Kill several hundreds of thousands or millions of people? What are you even talking about? That screams "Citation Needed"
Maybe I missed something.
Here is a running counter of the toll so far: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=titl...
We can reasonably anticipate these programs will be shuttered for at least another year, if not another decade (or permanently). We can argue here or there about the exact numbers, but it's a waste of everyone's time so I just provided a generous range instead.
At the end of the day... what exactly do you think the billions of dollars of food and drugs sent to unfathomably poor areas were doing if not keeping a huge number of people alive?
Ok thanks, I will look into this.
I may have said in another comment, that I was actually against most of these cuts. Those programs (like PEPFAR). I actually worked with USAID 20 years ago teaching programming classes in Romania and Serbia, and not once did anyone I encountered have a single cynical view on anything. We were all just working hard to "teach a man to fish". So I know that these types of programs play a huge part in showing the world that we actually walk the walk in wanting a better world.
I still can't get behind the idea of wishing violence for policy changes. Maybe that's a core principle of mine. It feels anti-American, since we (historically) try to rise above that, even if we often fail.
The nature of policy changes at such high levels is that many decisions are going to result in people dying (think of geopolitical decisions, think of Syria, the famine in Sudan right now, etc).
And while this administration has definitely been more damaging than the past administrations, my reaction is to argue till our faces are blue whether it was a bad policy decision or not, rather than wish violence.
I understand (and agree with) the impulse against violence in general, and definitely for things that are reasonable points of political disagreement. But I think you'd probably agree there's a limit, correct?
As a self-aware reductio ad absurdum, you ought to agree that violence in response to a policy of rounding up a certain ethnic group and murdering them en masse would be justified or at least in the realm of "not regrettable?"
And yes, I agree that many policy decisions can result in people dying. The moral valence of each one depends on the costs and benefits and the efforts undertaken to minimize the former and maximize the latter. And the intent is a factor too. Killing someone after a period of community deliberation for killing a child is a very different moral event than killing someone for fun.
In this particular instance, the cost/benefit analysis comes out to many people's calculation outrageously weighted to the cost side, and it is demonstrably the case that zero effort was put into minimizing those costs. This was also all knowable from Big Balls' position given that he knows how to use the Internet and could gain access to any expert in the world to more fully understand what he was doing. So he holds a lot of moral culpability (which does not imply carjacking him is a good way to deal justice, to be clear).
Yep you make some good points.
I will take my own advice on “intent matters” - and there’s been little care intent wise shown to actually study the impacts of these cuts. Which does make them feel more malicious.
They are one way in which Ukraine got hurt, without making it specifically about Ukraine. One day there was a USAID presence on every border crossing to help smoothen entry of aid goods and people into the areas where they were needed most and the next day it was all gone, here and there a lost sign lying about or already repurposed.
Where did I say anything about enjoying it? Where did I cheer anyone on?
All I did was give a short reply and a link to a news source.
Maybe you should talk to someone about your persecution fetish?
This feels like a dog whistle to me.
Not really, maybe I'm just too naive, but I don't want our society to devolve where we're enjoying violence inflicted on the "other" even if I absolutely hate what they're doing and how they're doing it (like in the case of a lot of DOGE stuff).
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> you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you
Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1].
Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-do...
If said violence actually happened. It's a little too convenient that the "victim" was "Big Balls".
Big Balls is only 19 and was intervening, unarmed, in a carjacking attempt of a woman by up to 10 people as reported. DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country. Would you have the balls to protect a woman in that situation?
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You are absolutely wrong. People have died as a direct result of USAID cuts and will continue to die. Here's some reporting on the subject: https://archive.is/YknTv
There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
Sorry, I did not make myself clear enough. I'm not disputing that there exist people whose lives depend on USAID. I'm disputing the claim that there is a direct moral culpability on the part of the people who work for the administration that cut USAID funding, or the American electorate that empowered said administration, for those deaths; and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals.
> There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away.
Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is.
To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
> and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals.
I explicitly said it is not fine, please don't put words in my mouth.
Sorry, but no: the person pulling the trigger does not get to shirk ethical culpability, especially if they're sadistically relishing their hatchet job.
There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE!
It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
In the BBB, they deferred tax hikes on poor people to after the midterms (we all know why, but that's an aside), meaning they didn't feel they needed the budget balanced immediately.
Yet with USAID they cut it the next month, meaning people have died, without any warning.
If they had done this by saying "We will cut off this funding starting 2027, other countries, foundations, organizations, etc would have time to plan/divert/ramp up to fill the gaps.
Your argument fails, not on principle, but on details.
Evil is stopping all aid immediately without a tapering period. Evil is letting life-saving medicine and food rot in warehouses because somebody was horny about taking a chainsaw to the federal government, saving nothing and wasting billions in the process. Evil is making a cruel decision to let people die solely for the sake of political theater.
You can talk about this in the abstract all you want, but at the end of the day, someone chose to let people suffer and die when a far more humane approach with the same financial outcome could have been taken. For flash. For pizzaz. For revenge, perhaps.
That’s fucking evil.
Gutting USAID has killed people.
There isn’t any other way to look at it.
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Huge portions of the United States do in fact have a very similar relationship with their water companies, because their water companies are given water rights by the relevant state governments.
I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
> What a ridiculous argument.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You're right, I should cool off for a bit. Names are flying all across the thread, and it's hard!
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> DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country
If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess?
https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-...
St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k.
St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
I literally said "one of the highest" not the absolute highest. Being in a top 10 or 20 list on murder rates is not an achievement to strive for, but it absolutely places you in upper echelon of murder. DC has had 100 murders so far in 2025, just 12 shy of 2024 with 3.5 months to go: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime
St. Louis situation is absolutely abysmal. 20 is way too high, 69 is way too high. These are 3rd world numbers that are absolutely inexcusable. And we're only talking about murders here, if you look into other violent crime data, it's also substantial for D.C.
The FBI frequently gets involved in murder cases all over the country, there are field offices everywhere. States are significantly different things than the special federal District of Columbia. There, it is generally up to the Governor to deploy the national guard, although plenty of exceptions and precedents exist for the President to do so.
Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor. DC is the only place the president has jurisdiction in this scenario.
> Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor.
Legally, there are exceptions to that (primarily the Insurrection Act, though there are some deployments that are permitted within states on federal authority on other legal bases with tightly-constrained functions), and practically, the legal limits don't matter because response time off the courts is to slow for them to act as a meaningful brake. (E.g., the lawsuit filed the first court day after the order to mobilize the guard for LA just reached the trial stage this week.)
And apparently Los Angeles
https://apnews.com/article/national-guard-los-angeles-immigr...
... except this president federalized and deployed the national guard in California only earlier this summer, over the objections of the state's governor, so is that rule still a rule?
There's exceptions to general rule, the national guard is ultimately a state-federal entity and the President can activate them to enforce federal law. Laws on this go all the way back to 1807. They've been federalized by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon without consent of the associated Governor.
He was able to provide a justification, however thin, which he presumably can't in the case of St Louis. Not that I disagree with the general sentiment. He's only doing this as a political stunt and St Louis wouldn't serve that purpose as well even if he could somehow swing it legally.
I'm sure there are also federal buildings in St Louis; the justification from California works almost anywhere.
But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues.
https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-l...
The President has been able to federalize the guard since 1792, see the Militia Act: https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect...
Red states overwhelmingly have the highest murder rates lmao
Widespread poverty and guns.
You mean red states with large blue cities in them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti.... The states with the lowest homicide rates include a mix of very blue (Massachusetts) and very red (Iowa, Utah).
The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
This has happened before - a staged arrest in DC as propaganda
https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...
So what you're saying is that the attack was just "crisis actors"?
Every accusation is an admission. Always has been.
Then I accuse you of being a handsome genius
I'd like to see your evidence that it was staged. So far I have not seen anything that indicated that it was.
I don't know if it was staged, but i am skeptical. The reason why is the photograph of the guy covered in blood. It's obvious that he has suffered a bloody nose and maybe been punched in the mouth, but that all the blood on his body is smeared over him rather than being from multiple injuries. I have been in a lot of fist fights in my life, including groups rather than 1 on 1, and had a good few bloody noses. Such an injury doesn't leave you covered in blood like that. All the blood on his body is smeared, and so is all the blood on his pants - note there aren't any tears in the fabric. A bloody nose bleeds a lot but it doesn't spray all over the place.
It's conceivable this his shirt got pulled off during the fight, but equally conceivable that he took it off and wiped blood on himself. I've seen people fake injuries at political demonstrations, using the old pro wrestling trick of making a small cut in the hairline with a sharp blade (scalp wounds bleed a lot because there are so many capillaries on the head). I can't say this is what's happened here, but it just doesn't look consistent with real violence.
Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion. If it were a regular mugging or carjacking, you'd expect to read the woman was pushed to the ground and her bag taken. This could be poor quality reporting, but stories like this generally include a catalogue of all victims' injuries.
Article including the photo I'm describing: https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
Just responding to
> Another reason I'm skeptical of the reported account is that there's no mention of injuries to his female companion.
The story is that he pushed her into the car first then faced the carjackers.
This is somehow even less plausible than her running away.
Evidence? These days, who needs evidence? Windmills cause cancer, redistricting mid-decade is totally necessary, and the president is 6'3", 215-pounds.
No proof, it’s just incredibly convenient. Just like when Kristi Noam just happened to get her purse stolen by someone who was in the country illegally right when the ICE raids were about to start. In this case, the well-known DOGE intern just happens to get carjacked in the city limits of DC right when Trump’s new DC Attorney General is being installed and the National Guard is ready to go.
No proof, but wow do they just happen to get exactly the event they need for the PR.
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I deny you the right to put words in my mouth.
OK, let’s keep this very simple
The use of US military troops on the civilian mainland of the United States in a non-emergency situation is wrong.
Also, the current crime situation in the District of Columbia is not an emergency situation.
Upvote if you agree Downvote if you disagree
If crime was going crazy in D.C. the GOP would be all over it in a flash and the local and national press would be monetizing the info. All this is a stunt to deflect from whatever is bothering the big orange dummy at the moment.
It is, in part, a distraction, from (particularly) discussion of the Epstein files, but the one thing the Trump regime is efficient with is using elements of their real authoritarian agenda as their distractions when they need one. So, sure, DC is a distraction, but its also a part of a fairly overt broad campaign against the homeless (not against homelessness as a social condition, against homeless people as subhuman enemies), that is itself tied into the national campaign of ethnic cleansing and the national campaign against the mentally ill (again, not against mental illness), and the DC operation is also part of the progressive militarization of civilian law enforcement.
If this sounds like things that occur together in fascist regimes, well, there's a reason for that.
Let's go the obvious one step further so we have the integrity and unambiguity for which this situation calls:
The use of US military troops on the civilian mainland of the United States in peacetime situation is wrong.
Also, war has not been declared by Congress regarding the situation in the District of Columbia.
For what it's worth, I agree with both of your statements.
Downvoted for the annoying baiting people to some specific action. Please don't. It's not Facebook.
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The “staged” part is speculation and not necessary. Even without that, we have federalization of a regional PD because one Republican was assaulted.
Washington DC is already federalized under the Constitution. DC does not belong to a state and exists as a special region with very specific Federal definitions for its existence.
So when the military was deployed to LA due to ICE riots, then they left without incident is a warning sign too? Or maybe that was just just a test?
> So when the military was deployed to LA due to ICE riots
ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.
>then they left without incident
They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.
But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)
The lack of extended military deployment and restoration of local control can be seen two ways:
1. "both a test and a warning sign"
2. Evidence Trump has no intention of turning the country into a military dictatorship.
You choose the more exptreme interpretation (#1) instead of the obvious one (#2)?
No, I choose the obvious one (#2), but that it is obvious requires considering it in the context of the other actions by the Administration regarding the military and law enforcement and related areas happening prior to, concurrent with, and since the deployment to LA (including, particularly but far from exclusively, the ones for which the deployment to LA was done explicitly to support), rather than considering one isolated fact about the LA deployment in a vacuum.
You don’t have to view it in a vacuum, you can simply view the event as increasing or decreasing the risk of the military takeover.
When the military was deployed then peacefully left, you still viewed that as an increase in the risk of a military takeover?
Even though the troops were withdrawn?
I’m just trying to understanding this upside down world where when something doesn’t happen it’s proof it’s more likely to happen in the future.
Definitely a warning sign, even if the warning light went out again. It may even have had a slightly positive effect in waking up the Democrat governor.
Not sure what trump’s preferred game is, but pretty sure it’s not chess.
Snacking on the chess pieces.
Sadly, some of the malignant people around him are more cunning.
s/now/know/
We’re only ~1/7 of the way through this administration. There is so much more time left on the clock for shenanigans.
It’s hard to imagine three summers from now being anything other than a hellscape. I hope to God I’m wrong.
Meanwhile SCOTUS has opted out of doing their job allowing the executive branch to do what it likes (as long as it’s their guy…)
It’s really the administration of whatever SCOTUS lets him get away with. Trump - by pressure testing the law - lets SCOTUS reimagine the constitutional order.
The administration has said they will not feel compelled to follow federal court orders. Who is to say they won't ignore orders from SCOTUS either, and go the Andrew Jackson route?
Forget who said they will do this or that; federal judges have been actually defying SCOTUS[0] because they disagree politically with the administration. Sometimes the call comes from inside the house...
[0]: https://archive.is/PkRaM
They have been defying SCOTUS because they disagree with the administration. 'Politically' doesn't enter into it, when the administration starts to do blatantly illegal stuff some people will just not accept that, no matter what the politics of the ruling party nominally are.
The whole point of SCOTUS is that they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal in this country[0]. Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?
[0]: Not what is right or wrong, and obviously like any other human enterprise, they are capable of making mistakes.
It is - to me, at least - abundantly clear that SCOTUS is now a political instrument and no longer in any way impartial. Between that, a congress and a senate that seem to be incapable of standing up for the rule of law you can no longer claim that SCOTUS is the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not, besides that, they only are supposed to rule on whether or not something violates the constitution or not.
> Are you saying that federal judges in lower courts are given leeway to act against the law, provided they disagree with the administration?
This is a weird and convoluted strawman, I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here, given your apparent stance on all this, did you maybe omit a negative in there?
> they only are supposed to rule on whether or not something violates the constitution or not.
The constitution is the supreme law of the land, so yes, by definition, they are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not. Note that I explicitly pointed out that decisions on what is legal and what is not doesn't always line up with what is right and what is not. I'm not saying that the Supreme Court is some divine moral arbiter, just that under the laws that organize this country, there is no higher court that can tell it that it is wrong.
You're free to disagree with SCOTUS decisions. I disagree with quite a few myself. The justices don't even agree with each other a lot of the times[0]! But it would be good for the republic for people to not reach for the "SCOTUS is now clearly political!" jar every time they disagree with a decision or the makeup of the court, because your political opponents will feel the same way, as well.
> I'm not even sure what kind of question you want me to answer here
Let me clarify: you seemed quite worried that the Trump administration would defy SCOTUS rulings. My rebuttal was that lower court judges are already doing that, because of their opposition to some of what the administration is doing; that is, they are issuing rulings that clearly contravene prior SCOTUS rulings, in defiance of the law.
Prima facie, the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging in, and I find the apocalyptic talk about authoritarianism, fascism, or the end of democracy in the US very unpersuasive, not to mention unhelpful and unhealthy.
[0]: But perhaps not as often as you think: https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-courts-ideologically-split-...
> the administration isn't engaging in any behavior that their political opponents aren't engaging
So ignoring court orders to quickly deport people happened before?
Could you show me an example where Biden ignored a court ruling, because i dont know any. Ill insta-upvote you, if you can show the occurrence numbers are roughly equal.
If you cant provide any example, i strongly suggest you reconsider your above statement about the end of democracy, or whether you would be willing to storm the capitol to defend it against trump.
> when the administration starts to do blatantly illegal stuff some people will just not accept that
What is this "blatantly illegal stuff" ?
Like illegally using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport people when the act literally states it's a wartime authority (no new wars). like illegally deporting Abrego Garcia to the one country that he wasn't allowed to be deported to.
Thanks - the Supreme Court clarified this in their ruling. But, the Supreme Court has also ruled that the US administration can deport individuals to third countries, while legal challenges to the practice are pending.
I see this as a perfect example of the US Supreme Court clarifying the scope and applicability of law - just like they rejected Biden's student loan forgiveness under the HEROES act and Biden found a workaround instead.
I hate comments like this, so I hate making them myself as well, but are you trolling?
If so, forgive me for not responding.
If you are not trolling, and well intentioned: why don't you go and read some of that main-stream-news that everybody loves to piss on these days and use that to get to at least a moderately up-to-date state of mind before engaging in threads like these. It would save a lot of time.
If you are of the mindset that you are in fact informed and that Trump's administration has not yet performed any acts that are blatantly illegal then you're entirely on your own, or at least, I would hope you are (unfortunately, you probably would not be).
Cults need isolation from former environments and values, thats a key element in any cult initialization. Resulting in internalized ignorance so strong, not even a speaking burning bush could convince them otherwise, let alone main stream media.
No, I am not trolling. Mainstream news hyper-exaggerates and when one studies the matter, one realizes that few laws if any are broken. Several court battles are waged until the Supreme Court makes judgements on the scope and applicability of the law. Once that is done, the administration follows the ruling or chooses a workaround law.
AFAIK, the Trump Administration - as controversial as it may be - has not broken any Supreme Court rulings. Legal workarounds are not unique to this administration - such were done by the previous Biden administration as well. Please note the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s broad student loan forgiveness plan, ruling it exceeded the administration’s authority. Nevertheless, a workaround was found by using the Higher Education Act instead.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
https://www.project2025.observer/en
I remember when people here on HN were telling us Trump had no relation to Project 2025.
Too much of the focus is on Trump and not nearly enough on the people who are willing to vote for such an obviously corrupt conman. Trump will be dead within a decade, but these voters who actually want a dictator as long as he hurts the people they think should be hurt will be voting for generations.
Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.
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If you're going to make that sort of claim you need to provide a source (or three).
You can just google it. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-white-house-...
I wanted to see it too... o_O
Can someone figure the other hats? Gulf of America, USA, 4 More Years, Make America Great Again, but the one top center is hard to read, something with Everything? Trump Will Fight About Everything? The black one top right is even harder.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/us/2093383/trump-unveils-new-...
https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/08/11/white-house-gift-sho...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trumps-white-house-g...
https://www.newsbreak.com/inquisitr-news-522568/416701726407...
https://www.thepoke.com/2025/08/11/trump-and-his-dictator-gu...
White House should be painted with vertical white & red stripes. Blue flag at the top and some gold trim. Elephants already in.
Found images that could match the everything one, Trump Was Right About Everything! Funny to see when he has contradicted himself, for example releasing Epstein file or throwing it away.
Only missing the black hat.
The amount of willful ignorance people must maintain to continue to give Trump the benefit of the doubt is fucking amazing. It’s no wonder Nigerian scams work. We have seen it on a massive scale. Some people just aren’t built for logical deduction and have the memory of a goldfish I guess.
This was the same doomsday message in the last Trump term. Nothing happened.
Well, you can round down everything short of outright civil war to 'zero' but then you might miss important signals that you could act on. That doomsday message so far seems to be largely on the money, and in some ways has already been exceeded. That doesn't mean it can't get much worse.
Apart from January 6th. Which was dissipated once a Capitol guard decided he finally had enough cause to shoot someone.
My comment still stands relevant in response to the country turning into a “hellscape” because of the current administration.
The old guard of nonfascist Republicans wasn't purged until late in the last Trump term and into the period between Trump terms, and was particularly strong in the first half of the last term, the second half of last term, the Democrats controlled the House, limiting. There was not a trifecta under a fully Trump-aligned Republican Party until the current term. That makes a difference in outcomes, and has already made obvious differences in outcomes in exactly the direction discussed.
... except for all the stuff that happened. You know, an attempted coup, Covid and the half a million Americans it left dead.
IIRC, the Guard was not called out on January 6, 2021:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
People's president :)
You keep spreading this, but it's simply untrue. The National Guard was there on January 6, though they were delayed several hours.
> The National Guard was there on January 6, though they were delayed several hours.
They were? I didn't see them keeping the mob at bay, or protecting the Capital from being stormed, in the footage I saw. Do you have a link to said footage that you can provide?
https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article/2466077/dod-detai...
As mentioned already, they got there late, but the statement that they were not deployed on Jan 6 is patently false.
Oh, i only read about injured local police officers on jan.6.
Where was the NG when they were needed the most? And why?
Trump repeatedly said he didn't have the authority to call them.
Why would he call the guard on people he sent there?
It was Pelosi's call and she denied the request from the Chief at the time
https://x.com/ChiefSund/status/1954975181106970823
The statute Mr. Sund cites (2 U.S.C. § 1970) specifically says that the National Guard can provide support to the US Capitol Police in an emergency if approved by "the Chief of the Capitol Police, if the Chief of the Capitol Police has determined that the provision of assistance is necessary to prevent the significant disruption of governmental function and public order within the United States Capitol Buildings and Grounds".
Mr. Sund was the chief of the Capitol Police that day.
Yes, but he didn't have authority under the statute because the Sergeant at Arms rejected approval. He called the Sergeant several times.
How could he overrule the Sergeant ? That would mean treason - he would be thrown under the bus and spend a decade-plus in jail.
Also Pelosi herself explicitly took responsibility for not granting approval for the National Guard. She is herself on video stating this.
> in an emergency
any effective deployment would have had to occur ahead of time, when it would not have been considered an emergency
The point of this entire thread is that Trump is unilaterally deploying the guard right now with no one else's approval or even consent.
Ummm, the law cited by the Chief clearly states the guard can be called to assist by the senate sergeant at arms OR the house sergeant at arms OR the Capitol Police board.
Pelosi didn’t do it. But she wasn’t responsible for doing it, and the board Mr Sund chaired could have done it themselves much faster.
And all of this is just what they are allowed. It did not stop trump from doing his job. Which he didn’t…
https://policy.defense.gov/portals/11/Documents/hdasa/refere...
Provision of assistance Assistance under this section shall be provided -
(A) consistent with the authority of the Capitol Police under sections 1961 and 1966 of this title;
(B) upon the advance written request of -
(i) the Capitol Police Board; or
(ii) in an emergency -
(I) the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate in any matter relating to the Senate; or
(II) the Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives in any matter relating to the House of Representatives; and
(C)(i) on a temporary and reimbursable basis;
(ii) on a permanent reimbursable basis upon advance written request of the Capitol Police Board; or
(iii) on a temporary basis without reimbursement by the Department of Defense and the Coast Guard as described under paragraph (1)
Thanks, but did you read what you wrote ? You seem to be actually supporting the argument that the Chief cannot unilaterally act by himself, especially when Pelosi's Sergeant At Arms denied his request - several times.
That would mean treason on his part if he overruled the Sergeant.
https://cha.house.gov/2024/8/new-obtained-hbo-footage-shows-...
Setting aside whether federalizing D.C. policing is wise, there’s a simple checkbook question people miss: Guard deployments aren’t free.
If you want a plain-English explanation of what drives those day rates (lodging, per diem, lift, command overhead) and how to scale them, this explainer lays out the math: https://www.thepricer.org/how-much-does-national-guard-deplo...> Guard deployments aren’t free.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/ is stil ticking along nicely.
I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one. The king has nearly no power. He's a figurehead. He's just there to press the "STOP" button when things have gotten out of hand. But whenever a king abuses this power, the lawmakers cut it from him. So he just sits there in a palace, living luxuriously from tax money. In good times, we ask why he's allowed to do this (but not out loud, that would be illegal).
Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.
A constitutional monarchy is not something which has a "point" in some sort of intelligent design sense. You wouldn't design one that way.
A constitutional monarchy is what you get starting from an absolute monarchy and gradually draining the power out of it and transferring it to democratic institutions. It then satisfies the demand of the public who want the roleplay of an absolute ruler, and are scared of a fully egalitarian system, but without letting them actually do any absolutism.
King Charles does not have operational control of the military. He only has a large amount of personal loyalty, which is not quite the same thing. He holds a number of operational ranks from his service, from which he is retired, and a number of honorary senior titles.
The UK is just as vulnerable to troops-on-the-streets fascism as anywhere else. (Bloody Sunday etc)
> Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police.
That's not true in the case of European constitutional monarchies. The elected government has total power except for some very specific duties around the administration of government, like dissolving parliament. And even then, those are largely ceremonial.
I do think having so much power with one person who cannot easily be replaced at any point is bad for democratic government. In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant.
True, it doesn't apply everywhere. I'm thinking rights get cut when abused. Under the Meiji Constitution (1889-1947), Japan's emperor was Commander-in-Chief, and after the end of WW2, he was not. But even as a figurehead, he was useful in uniting the factions to end the war when multiple parties wanted to keep it going.
"In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant."
Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM. Often one that promises to do the opposite of what the previous PM did, then forgets the promises or blames them on something else.
> Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM
I guess that depends which country you're talking about. The UK has had a bad time of it leadership wise, but I would say this is probably an accurate reflection of the divisions and problems it faces as a country. Or maybe people just remember the stability of Thatcher and Blair and forget that isn't the norm by PM, just the norm by time because those individuals lasted so long. I live in NZ where the system is a bit more coalition driven and that seems more stable between elections (nobody wants to be seen as the one wrecking the current parties power) and less between because everyone can switch sides.
Which current constitutional monarchy gives the monarch power to the same degree that it gives power to the elected head-of-state?
I don't know a single one, maybe Thailand comes close? Though with > 50% of their senate members appointed by the military I would not even call them a democracy, not even close.
They are not the same degree. The monarch is simply there to override irrational behavior.
One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajang_Move
There was a popular candidate a party wanted as prime minister, who was not yet allowed to run as senator because of a sodomy conviction. So they tried to get his wife elected into a prominent position to streamline his path to prime minister. The party held the richest state in the country by a large majority and forced the head of state to step down, triggering a by-election. The wife won elections easily in that territory. It was a dick move because she is never physically in the area, but the area also didn't want to elect the Islamist party and voted for this more secular party. So she was voted as senator representing citizens in a region she didn't particular care about.
But senator wasn't enough, they wanted her in a head of state position. The sultan called out this BS and requested three names for candidates. The party submitted only one name. Sultan insisted on three names, and when they submitted three, he picked the second name as head of state.
So while kings don't have the power to block a democratic process, in this case, it prevented nepotism, which would also have messed up democracy.
In 2022, none of the three major coalitions won enough seats to form the government. Votes were split 38%, 30%, 22%. They all hated each other and part of the campaign promises were to bring down the other coalitions for corruption. The monarch ended up combining the parties into a unity government, which also entailed picking the Prime Minister.
That's an interesting read, thank you. I'm not up to speed at all on politics in that region so this is very nice as a reference point.
This was actually put into practice during the Spanish transition to democracy. The King gave a televised address denouncing an attempted fascist coup and ordered them to stand down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt#Juan...
To this day, bullet holes remain in the ceiling of the Spanish parliament building to remind them of the coup attempt. I can't find it anymore, but there was a good drama movie about these events on Netflix a while ago.
> I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one.
Bagehot divided the dignified and the efficient. I've long thought that one glaring downside of the American presidential system is that it tries to combine the two roles in one office.
Non-monarchic parliamentary democracies often separate the head of government (prime minister) and chief of state (president); it’s not exclusively a thing done by Constitutional monarchies. Instead, lacking the separation is, among representative democracies, a distinguishing (mis)feature of Presidential systems.
That's interesting. Which countries do this?
> That's interesting. Which countries do this?
The majority of non-monarchic parliamentary systems still have a separate chief of state and head of government (including semi-presidential systems, which are basically parliamentary democracies but the chief of state has a wider set of formal powers without being head of government).
In the EU, for instance, excluding monarchies and presidential systems, every single member state fits the pattern of having a separate chief of state and head of government, mostly with the same titles. Here's a list of EU states that aren't monarchies or presidential systems, identifying whether they are parliamentary or semi-presidential and, if the separated CoS and HoG have titles other than the most common, what those titles are. Unless noted, in the examples, the usual English title of the CoS is "President" and the HoG is "Prime Minister", exceptions have the HoG title in parens (there are not exceptions for the CoS title.)
Austria: Parliamentary (Chancellor), Bulgaria: Parliamentary, Croatia: Parliamentary, Czechia: Parliamentary, Estonia: Parliamentary, Finland: Parliamentary, France: Semi-presidential, Germany: Parliamentary (Chancellor), Greece: Parliamentary, Hungary: Parliamentary, Ireland: Parliamentary (Taoiseach), Italy: Parliamentary, Latvia: Parliamentary, Lithuania: Semi-Presidential, Malta: Parliamentary, Poland: Semi-Presidential, Portugal: Semi-Presidential, Romania: Parliamentary, Slovakia: Parliamentary, Slovenia: Parliamentary
They've managed to achieve both undignified and inefficient.
> the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.
This only works on paper, and on paper congress or SCOTUS would've stepped in much sooner.
In practice, the monarch either has a lot of power, or does whatever the real head of government wants. Especially with how Trump can claim that he has the mandate of the people given that he won the election, and it's not like he doesn't wrap his motives behind legitimate claims. It's pretty easy to just claim that he has to do X for the security of the nation.
In reality, if the US had a monarch, they too would've gone along with whatever Trump wanted because to not do so is the nuclear option. It would be the equivalent of states trying to secede or not recognizing the current administration as legitimate and choosing to declare Harris as the real POTUS.
The mere existence of a king does provide some check, because at the back of the mind of the “real” government is the question - if the king rebelled against us, would we win?
That depends on whether or not you make your king the head of the military.
We can't really speculate what the US would be like as a constitutional monarchy, as it's just very culturally anti-monarchic. The Second Amendment and free speech, for example.
In a monarchy, laws often restrict people from insulting the monarch. Not in UK, I believe, but even British culture pays their respects to the king. As a result, the king's words hold a lot of power. A president can "talk down" to congress, but a PM is still a servant of the king.
Let's say someone like Sir Richard Branson decides to do a Trump. If he claimed that he had to do X for the security of the nation, the king would be able to call him out on it. As head of military, the king has access to all the confidential data. The Supreme Court and Congress may be missing data. As the PM has to get the king to rubber stamp military actions, the king still has the right to veto it.
Why is the current level of crime in DC worthy of deploying the National Guard, but January 6 wasn't?
In case this isn't a rhetorical question, the homicide rate in DC is such that it beats out all 50 states by a considerable amount[0]. (The most murderous state, Louisiana, is roughly half as murderous as DC.)
There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!
Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.
If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti...
[1]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime
Okay, now do cities. DC is not a state.
Sure. At a rate of 26.6 homicides per 100k as of the conclusion of 2024, it would belong in the top 10 most murderous cities in the US, and would appear to fall in the top 100 in the world.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. There are a handful of other American cities with worse crime, so we should give DC a pass?
Constitutionally it belongs to the federal government, which devolved some level of home rule to the local government starting about 50 years ago. The evidence seems clear that local authorities aren't doing the job well.
When you don't give the local authorities the money and autonomy to do so it should not be a surprise that they cannot effectively do their duty. When you take a look at the trend of the data over time it doesn't tell a story of crime that isn't being managed. It may not be as quick or as thorough, but it has been downward trending.
> When you don't give the local authorities the money and autonomy to do so
DC spent over $26k per resident, well above the overall US federal budget of roughly $20k per person. And the DC budget doesn't even have to account for a globe-spanning military!
What autonomy is it lacking that it can't put repeat violent offenders behind bars?
> When you take a look at the trend of the data over time it doesn't tell a story of crime that isn't being managed. It may not be as quick or as thorough, but it has been downward trending.
Outside of six whole years, the homicide rate in DC hasn't been under 20/100k in 50 years. "Downward trending" from 80 in 1990 to 20s now is great in isolation, but terrible when you realize that places like Paris and London are in the low single digits.
Perhaps it is worth going to actually read some of the limitations (representation, budget, taxation) of what the government of DC is actually capable of doing versus doing a simple straight line math exercise. Crime is a problem, but taken within context it isn't anywhere near as bad as Baltimore or Philadelphia.
You keep citing the homicide rate but do not consider the geography and constraints of the capital region, i.e., some of the crime and violent offenders are from non-residents. You can't simply compare it to a city like London or Paris for many reasons.
> Crime is a problem, but taken within context it isn't anywhere near as bad as Baltimore or Philadelphia.
Baltimore and Philly are worse, yes. That's little reprieve for the average Joe living in DC surrounded by disorder. DC, being exclusively federal territory, has the unique legal situation where the president could deploy the National Guard for policing.
> You keep citing the homicide rate but do not consider the geography and constraints of the capital region, i.e., some of the crime and violent offenders are from non-residents. You can't simply compare it to a city like London or Paris for many reasons.
I don't understand your line of reasoning. Do you care to clarify? Neither London, nor Paris, nor any other city in this country are islands where entry and exit are controlled. Some American cities with really bad crime, like St. Louis or Philly, abut state lines and likely get a lot of cross-state criminal traffic as well.
I think the problem that many people, including me, have with your justification is very similar to trumps own televised justification: its vague and selective.
Fact is there are other "worthy" candidate cities to deploy NG to, to counter crime. Additionally, trump is unreliable and generally unfit as a POTUS. Given these two, the concern about trumps tendency to abuse of power, which he demonstrated already, is a very valid response to him mobilizing NG in the most sensitive political region.
You cant calm these concerns with comparably similar crime rates.
Ontop, isnt it an assumption, that NG can actually help with rampand crime? I imagine they project hard force on the streets but do not react to 911 calls.
Also, your budget justification was vague too. The total spending per capita does not allow any clues on relative spending on law enforcement. There must be a reason why its significantly higher and maybe thats why LE falls short too.
> Fact is there are other "worthy" candidate cities to deploy NG to, to counter crime.
DC is unique among those cities because it is federal territory where the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction, according to the constitution. It's harder to deploy the National Guard to St. Louis, for example, because you also have to deal with the government of Missouri (and probably that of Illinois, too, since the metro area spans both states).
In fact, a senator famously called for troops to be deployed to those cities in the height of the unrest in 2020[0]. He was excoriated for it by his political opponents, and the editor in charge of the NYT opinion pages resigned over allowing that piece to be published. So there are people who would like to see dramatically stronger law enforcement everywhere, not just DC.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protes...
Politics aside: Agreed; you’re correct about DC being wholly unique which is why it’s difficult to compare to other cities (by the numbers) for a lot of regions. There really is not an option other than the National Guard in such a situation hence why there’s a carve out in the 1970s (?) act.
I am avoiding the argument regarding stronger law enforcement because there is a very little vague basis for it in this case. But legally speaking, it is within the letter of the law because there isn’t another option without triggering the Posse Comitius act.
I wonder if the fact that of the top ten murderous states, nine of them are run by Republicans has anything to do with the fact that Trump hasn't even vaguely hinted at National Guard deployments there.
It's probably more the fact that DC constitutionally belongs to the federal government, so it's a lot easier for Trump to unilaterally deploy the National Guard there.
He didn’t seem to have any problem doing so in California…
And then last time anyone wanted him to deploy them in DC he apparently couldn’t because the mayor didn’t allow him to…
It’s got near zero to do with that.
How is it compared to New Orleans (34.7) since you mentioned Louisiana? Or Baltimore (58.3 WTF???) which is next door?
They don't want to do that because they'd have to admit that Marksville LA has about twice the violent crime rate.
I have no problem admitting that other cities have higher violent crime rates, though I have no particular knowledge of Marksville, LA. I'm not sure why you would suggest that. I would approve of stronger efforts of curbing violent crime in those places, as well. I feel terribly for the innocents who live in those cities, as much as do for those in DC.
Sure thing.
Here is the list of the top-20 murder-rated cities in the US:
St. Louis, MO – Mayor Cara Spencer (DNC), DNC rule 76 years.
Baltimore, MD – Mayor Brandon Scott (DNC), DNC rule 56 years.
New Orleans, LA – Mayor LaToya Cantrell (DNC), DNC rule 153 years.
Detroit, MI – Mayor Mike Duggan (ex DNC), DNC rule 63 years
Cleveland, OH – Mayor Justin Bibb (DNC), DNC rule 35 years
Las Vegas, NV – Mayor Carolyn Goodman (Husband of ex-DNC mayor), DNC rule 82 years
Kansas City, MO – Mayor Quinton Lucas (DNC), DNC rule 34 years
Memphis, TN – Mayor Paul Young (DNC), DNC rule 53 years.
Newark, NJ – Mayor Ras Baraka (DNC), DNC rule 72 years.
Chicago, IL – Mayor Brandon Johnson (DNC), DNC rule 94 years.
Cincinnati, OH – Mayor Aftab Pureval (DNC), DNC rule 41 years
Philadelphia, PA – Mayor Cherelle Parker (DNC), DNC rule 74 years
Milwaukee, WI – Mayor Cavalier Johnson (DNC), DNC rule 65 years
Tulsa, OK – Mayor Monroe Nichols (DNC), only outlier in this list with significant non-DNC mayors
Pittsburgh, PA – Mayor Ed Gainey (DNC), DNC rule 91 years
Indianapolis, IN – Mayor Joe Hogsett (DNC), DNC rule 9 years.
Louisville, KY – Mayor Craig Greenberg (DNC), DNC rule 56 years
Oakland, CA – Mayor Sheng Thao (DNC), DNC rule 48 years
Washington, D.C. – Mayor Muriel Bowser (DNC), DNC rule 64 years
Atlanta, GA – Mayor Andre Dickens (DNC), DNC rule 164 years
This isn't just a list of highest murder rates per capita, it's got some population threshold- likely the 300k population on wikipedia- which boils down to there being like 5 Republicans that have managed to get elected in large cities.
> This isn't just a list of highest murder rates per capita
It is: https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-...
Edit: To be fair though, it is A list. I'm sure there are others as well, as the authors note, its hard to gather most recent data
The point is that if you have a small municipality, a small number of murders would easily top your examples. St. Louis has a murder rate around 70/100k. As a toy example, Murphy, N.C., population 1700, saw a double murder last year. So their rate is almost 118/100k.
So yes, your list is applying some sort of population threshold, which means you are then also just selecting for big cities.
There are no major cities run by the republicans. The closest we get is Jacksonville (which is a county with some urban area) and Mesa (a suburb of phoenix)… and does anyone really want to live in Jacksonville or Mesa?
Maybe occasionally a Republican will slip in as mayor of San Diego or Miami, but 90% of the time even those cities are run by democrats.
> and does anyone really want to live in Jacksonville or Mesa?
So those people count less because they vote for the wrong guy?
Some apparently believe that because "cities are run by _democrats_" 164 years in charge is not a problem in itself. 164 years of continious ruling over a city, but of course the other side is the currupt threat to democracy. The mental gymnastics involved are olympic.
My point was that neither Mesa nor Jacksonville are seen as great places to live, and you aren’t going to convince HN that they should vote like these cities do so that their own more appealing cities can be more like those less appealing cities.
There simply aren’t many examples of what America’s economically vibrant cities would be like if the other side was in charge, but maybe vibrancy is just not compatible with conservative ideology, and the stick to the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas because they are more…conservative (places elect leaders that mesh with their values).
It's worth questioning why most people living in urban areas lean and vote more liberal than the rest of the country. Those areas also tend to make (and thus contribute) more money on average, too.
sure. So to answer your question, lets start with the voter turnout in those cities:
St. Louis, MO (DNC rule 76 years): 29%
Baltimore, MD (DNC rule 56 years): 58%
New Orleans, LA (DNC rule 153 years): 29%
Detroit, MI (DNC rule 63 years): 17%
Cleveland, OH (DNC rule 35 years): 29%
Las Vegas, NV (DNC rule 82 years): ?? %
Kansas City, MO (DNC rule 34 years): 19%
Memphis, TN (DNC rule 53 years.): 23%
Newark, NJ (DNC rule 72 years.): 12%
Chicago, IL (DNC rule 94 years.): 35%
Cincinnati, OH ( DNC rule 41 years): 19%
Philadelphia, PA ( DNC rule 74 years): 18%
Milwaukee, WI ( DNC rule 65 years): 31%
Tulsa, OK (outlier): 26%
Pittsburgh, PA (DNC rule 91 years): 30%
Indianapolis, IN ( DNC rule 9 years.): 27%
Louisville, KY (DNC rule 56 years): ??%
Oakland, CA (DNC rule 48 years): 36%
Washington, D.C. ( DNC rule 64 years): ??%
Atlanta, GA (DNC rule 164 years): 25%
(for mayoral elections)
You're just shoving data around thinking it proves a point. What point do you think that it proves?
Alright, so tax volume is an accurate measure for who is a more worthy voter, but not how many urbanites care enough for democracy to even show up to a ballot box?
Multi-generational city rule and less than a third of voters showing up are not even abysmal data points – it's a gotham-style dystopia.
A lot of those cities are in the black belt where the red states they are in actively practice voter suppression, eg by making inner city voters wait in long lines without access to water. You can’t just blame the voters for not showing up when the state you are in is actively against them voting.
The DNC doesn’t “rule” over cities. Mayors are not DNC representatives or federally aligned. This is a disingenuous report with no sources and should be held with Extreme skepticism.
Obviously you’re right but my god that is a very troubling coincidence…
You honestly believe murder rate is higher in cities because the mayor is a Democrat? Or are cities with Democrat mayors much larger and diverse than Republic mayor cities? Do you think the people in Democrat cities vote in a Democrat mayor because they want more murder?
You can read a million different things from a list of items with similar attributes. Especially one compiled without sources or any context of the regions of the US.
Not the GP, but obviously as a general rule, Republicans are the hard-on-crime (three strikes, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time") party and Democrats are the soft-on-crime (Soros DAs, "we must address the root causes of crime") party. Even the most partisan on either side must admit this to be true.
From there, it's not a great leap to think that places with a soft-on-crime attitude at the local level might engender more criminal activity than places with the opposite attitude. Similar to why there are so many homeless people in California: the weather is lovely and local attitudes are permissive to it compared to other places, so it sucks less to be homeless there than, say, North Dakota. I think it passes the smell test to suggest that it sucks less to be a violent criminal in Baltimore than, say, Carmel, Indiana.
> are cities with Democrat mayors much larger and diverse than Republic mayor cities
What are you implying about diversity?
> Republicans are the hard-on-crime party
That's hilarious. It is interesting that these memes are so persistent even in light of the present. No, Republicans are not 'hard on crime', they are hard on anybody that isn't a white, preferably wealthy, evangelical republican.
How convenient of your political opponents to be so cartoonishly evil, so that only the most ignorant or craven could possibly support them!
In reality, Trump gained in all minority populations between 2020 and 2024. He actually lost white Protestants, and white voters in general, in the same time period[0]. In income, too, poorer voters shifted more towards the Republican candidate, while the more well-off shifted more towards the Democratic candidate.
This has been a fascinating realignment in traditional partisan composition. You're probably right that historically the Republican Party has been hard on those who aren't white, rich, and religious; but over the past 10 years or so, it's actually the Democratic Party that is the party of the white, rich, and religious[1].
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/demographic-...
[1]: The new left-liberal dogma that comes in many names, but has a lot of overlap with traditional religion.
> Not the GP, but obviously as a general rule, Republicans are the hard-on-crime … party.
…To the point that they elected a convicted felon to the presidency.
Believe it or not, there exist pretty good reasons why some people don't find the whole "convicted felon" thing to be very persuasive. But besides, do you dispute my overall characterization of the two parties? Insofar as major political parties can be generalized, this is true, is it not?
Maybe you should just retort with a list of your favorite big Republican run cities as counter examples? I’ve noticed you haven’t mentioned any, just throwing out rural areas or small towns in Indiana?
I’m curious about the association between income disparity and crime rate.
I suspect big cities tend to have a larger underclass population and a larger wealthy class. Predictable results ensue: Democrat administrations, and higher crime rates.
> Not the GP, but obviously as a general rule, Republicans are the hard-on-crime (three strikes, "don't do the crime if you can't do the time") party and Democrats are the soft-on-crime (Soros DAs, "we must address the root causes of crime") party.
This is not true at all. There are plenty of violent, hard on crime moderate Democrats that run these cities. Your bias and romanticization of politics is showing. Again in your comment the description is disingenuous and lacking sources and evidence.
You might want to research the US moderate political beliefs. Many are RINOs and DINOs which pokes a lot of holes in the current culture war. Especially if you spew bs such as, Rs are hard on crime and Ds are soft on crime.
> What are you implying about diversity?
What are you implying about it? I am implying that any time people of diverse cultures and beliefs are packed together in an area like a city, you probably end up with a higher murder rate situation than if those people weren’t packed together into a city. Yes?
rule?
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Overall crime is down in DC. And they just stripped more funding from the DC govt.
"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
> "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."
AFAICT, from Peru's General Óscar Benavides:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides
Oh do I have a story to share with you!
https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trum...
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"Only idiots answer a question with another question."
As a software engineer, I'm offended. I thought our only two options for answers were "what are you trying to do?" and "why do you want to do that?"
null statement
Trump pushed to have the National Guard there to keep the peace on January 6th:
https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trum...
"Pence took lead as Trump initially resisted sending National Guard to Capitol" (https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/pence-national-guard)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.
From the Wiki Page:
"The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission."
It's confusing because DC does not have a governor so it looks like an edge case that has not been tested before.
the DC national guard is under the direct command of the president. The law may use the words "state" and "governor" but I'd take the other side of any bet that says that will be interpreted to mean that the president doesn't have the authority to deploy the DC guard in DC because of the posse comitatus act.
Suffice to say that before this morning I had only a vague idea about how legally complicated this could get. For instance, there's an opinion from the Department of Justice (albeit an old one) that concluded that the President can use the DC National Guard for law enforcement purposes (in that case, drug interdiction) without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.
Source: https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/use-national-guard-suppo...
"One set of troops, the District of Columbia National Guard, has historically operated as the equivalent of a state militia (under Title 32 of the United States Code) not subject to Posse Comitatus Act restrictions, even though it is a federal entity under the command of the President and the Secretary of the Army."
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This ruling has been widely misinterpreted. It does not mean that the president can make an unlawful declaration and that the National Guard, for example, must follow it even though the declaration is inconsistent with the law.
That said, it’s not immediately clear to me that this would be illegal. The National Guard and the District of Columbia is a unique edge case because D.C. is not a state.
To be clear I don’t like this move nor where it is going. I’m not endorsing it, only trying to understand the legal basis.
You're right, but if someone down the chain of command refuses to obey a declaration they consider illegal, the president can (and will) just repeatedly fire people until someone does what he wants.
We're talking about the military. In the worst case he can do a lot more than fire people for their disobedience. He's already indicated publicly that he believes General Mark Milley ought to be hung, although to date his efforts to end the general have not gone further than removing his security detail. (the general is believed to be an assassination target of Iran...)
And to go back to the original comment, the president cannot be prosecuted for doing any of this since it's part of his "official duties." I'd expect this Supreme Court to walk back the specifics of this ruling the moment a Democratic president starts pushing the limits, however.
No, I think we all have a pretty clear interpretation of that ruling.
If no-one is going to uphold the legality, or lack there of, then there is no rule of law.
SCOTUS is not going to hold POTUS accountable.
Therefore, Trump is above the law.
Any administration member can be pardoned by Trump for following illegal instructions, and Trump cannot be charged for a crime if it’s ‘related to the official duties of being the President.’
How is that not a blank check to do whatever you want? Anyone that breaks the law can be pardoned later and Trump has immunity.
Even if Trump isn’t the one, this means we are ready for our Caesar and fall of the Republic.
Of course I think we’ve been sliding toward our decadent imperial phase for quite some time. This did not materialize out of nowhere. The Executive long ago took the power to declare war from Congress, at least in practice, and that was one of the first huge steps.
Personally I think Trump will die, there will be a power struggle, and it will be one of the next few. There’s even some chance it could be a left-populist authoritarian. Political winds can shift fast in an environment like this.
Speed running the fall of Rome.
Rome, for all its might was puny in comparison to the United States. The downfall and/or breakup of the USA will leave the world in pieces. If it happens - which I really hope it will not, though I don't see how at this point it is still unavoidable - millions of people will die the world over. Every two bit dictator will see their chance and grab it knowing the next opportunity to do so will be at least a century away. The number of democracies and the number of people living in an (actual) democracy is already a minority. Democracy may well soon become an endangered species in the zoo of possible governments.
China will probably rise up in our place, which is why I think MAGA just handed the world to China.
In that first state of the union when he talked about a golden age I was like “yeah, this is the Chinese century. He’s gonna burn it down.” Literally gilding the White House is a caricature of how you’d depict the fall of an empire in bad fiction. An editor would say that was cliche.
China is going through its own issues at the moment. Larger numbers of people are rising up against the CCP and recent events are becoming more and more frequent. Their government is predictably cracking down harder on its citizens. But you could be right, just not with the CCP but rather whatever government takes its place soon. The riots have not yet reached their precipice but it's getting nasty.
A more liberal and open Chinese government would be exactly what they need if they want to take the place of the USA on the world stage. Of course a revolution is not guaranteed to produce that. Revolutions often end with a new boss worse than the old boss. But it could. It's a dice roll, a high risk thing, which is why people have to be pushed really hard to do it.
It helps the US for China to have its own "make China great again" revanchist authoritarian CCP. It slows their overall growth and keeps them from engaging with the world. Walls are for losers. Global mercantile empires must be porous and outward facing. This porosity becomes the main source of their soft power and causes them to export their culture globally.
If China starts allowing a little more immigration that would turbocharge their rise, since every immigrant community inside China becomes the terminal end of a line of influence reaching back to wherever they came from.
If they don't liberalize then who knows. Maybe the US will decide to remove the shot gun from its mouth, in which case the window will close.
For what it's worth it will probably be quite a while before China reaches the Make China Great Again phase. At the moment they have not even reached the Stop Bludgeoning Citizens Again.
> Larger numbers of people are rising up against the CCP and recent events are becoming more and more frequent.
Do you have a source on that, preferably one that's not quoting a cult like the chinese version of scientology, not uploading daily china-will-collaspse-soon videos, not a tankie, or other random type of propaganda/fanboy outlet?
Just videos that leak out of China. Be sure to save what you find if yt-dlp [1] supports it as YT are taking them down or flagging them as adult. I put them in my 4chan collection.
As a side note, if you are really part of Antifa and if they are really under the control of who I think they are then just get your handler to reach out and have your team assigned to China. Are you proficient in Mandarin? They who shall not be named should already have loads of videos. Be safe.
[1] - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
There is a pretty good chance of that, I don't see any other contenders. Australia and NZ better watch their back.
That protects Trump, not his henchmen.
And soldiers are expected to refuse orders that are manifestly illegal
True. Has an American soldier ever been prosecuted for obeying an illegal order?
I'm not sure what exactly the orders were, but Calley, one of the My Lai massacre war criminals was in fact convicted. But many others who should have been convicted were not.
Calley claimed he was following orders from Medina (his SO) but Medina denied giving them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley only served 5 months behind bars, the other 35 were under house arrest.
https://time.com/archive/6878225/the-military-galley-paroled...
For the cold blooded murder of many civilians. Insanity, and one of those moments that humanity will judge its past by.
His henchmen are implicitly protected because he'll pardon them.
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Don't forget about Bengasi and the emails!
Trump topped that easily by pardoning the January 6th rioters even those attacked police officers.
Similar examples for the same by Biden?
This protects Trump, and Trump protects his henchmen. Look at the J6 pardons.
Trump has pardoned several people who attempted to breach the capital and murder elected representatives to stop the ratification of a democratic presidential election.
All he needs is a single paper that says "All members of the military following the orders of President Trump are pardoned for all crimes past and future related to said orders" and - boom - accountability gone!
For now. But there is no reason why a future government of the USA would not see that in an entirely different light. After all, those that went to trial after WWII also argued that their actions were legal and it turned out not to be the case.
There is no legal mechanism for unpardoning someone, the constitution only allows it to go one way. It would require an amendment, and we can't even pass laws with this legislature.
And for good reason, mind you. Same reason as dismissal without prejudice gets some flak as easily abused for corrupt leverage.
A future government is not necessarily bound to the one the preceded it depending on the way the one government changed into the other. And the way things are going right now there is a non-zero chance that the USA will see a reboot of its system of government, if it doesn't actually fall apart into multiple different countries.
IIRC, the Guard was not called out on January 6, 2021:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
It was. I was there. The National Guard was delayed until like 6 pm but they were definitely there locking down the ENTIRE city. They stayed for days afterwards. It even says so in the link you provided.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/politics/us-capitol-riot-hear...
https://archive.is/ZfKzG
yeah, well, those guys believed (or found it convenient to believe) the lie that trump actually won the election. why would he call the guard on them?
a lot of people defended Trump after jan 6 by saying he offered the national guard but was turned down by the mayor. Now he is suddenly able to deploy the national guard regardless of the mayor's input.
Isn't that...a lie?
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Haha didn't Mike Pillow lose a million bucks over this hilarious claim?
I don't understand how you people keep bringing up dementia for Biden but not for Trump. Have you listened to the man speak?
It’s just bare motivated reasoning. Their football team had the ball so anything they do is okay. Meanwhile when Reagan started showing dementia symptoms they made him go get evaluated.
Of course I've heard him speak, he does press conferences every single day, sometimes for hours. He takes questions all the time including impromptu ones on Air Force One. He did 3 hour podcasts during the campaign, he's incredibly poised and this has been affirmed by everyone from Jensen Huang to Modi to Tim Cook to Bill Maher.
Biden was kept hidden and carefully managed and his staffers had to cut him off and remind him of the current year. You may not like Trump, but everyone that works with him closely, recognizes he is more intellectual than his public persona would seem to imply.
> Of course I've heard him speak, he does press conferences every single day, sometimes for hours.
Dementia presents in the content, not the length. Plenty of people with dementia talk a lot; the problem is much of it is nonsensical.
So why does he sound like an incomprehensible moron? And why are all of his plains straight up broken, like tariffs that would have been appropriate to stop the destruction of American industry twenty years ago, but at this point are just closing the barn door long after the horse moved away? If he's really some wise leader and only rambled incoherent word salad to appeal to the "common man" and get elected, he has now been elected. Shouldn't he be revealing his wise persona, leading, and bringing the skeptical into the fold with some intelligent policies?
Most elderly people are capable of sitting around for hours rambling, especially on political topics. In fact, what's difficult is getting them not to. Occam's says that affirming the emperor is definitely wearing clothes is just the type of politically correct fluffing that happens in every autocracy. Lying to ingratiate yourself with flattery certainly costs less than paying larger bribes.
For the life of me I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Help me out please?
You're naming people beholden to him. There are lots and lots of people from his first term that don't think he is a bigly genius.
What's been your favorite response of his to the Epstein situation?
I think you should try holding Trump to the same standard to which you hold Biden. Just as an intellectual exercise.
If you're truly honest about doing that, you should wind up being disgusted 24x7.
> he's incredibly poised
LOL. Sure he can ramble for hours. But if you read a transcript of any of those conferences, he's literally incomprehensible, can't string more than two logical sentences together. It's just a jumble salad of key trigger words. And when he does present facts, it's either incorrect or an outright lie. It's an embarrassment, frankly.
2020: Biden 82,284,666 votes [1]
2024: Harris 75,017,613 votes [2]
Where are you getting 14 million? The actual difference was barely even half that.
1: https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/president
2: https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president
Used GPT to get the numbers real quick and it came up differently. Definitely should have checked the sources.
Point remains though that 2020 is a statistical outlier election that resulted in a 22 million total vote count increase over 2016.
Joe Biden had signs of dementia in 2020 and barely campaigned publicly. Somehow this old bag with not one inspiring historical speech or rally, riveted voters to turn out in numbers higher than any president in history.
Somehow these same voters that were motivated to stop the orange man in 2020 disappeared in 2024, when orange man runs for a 3rd time.
2012 Obama and 2016 Clinton got roughly the same number of votes (~65M), somehow in 4 years time Biden was able to rally an additional 16 million to the polls, with his sheer intellect and brilliance and inspirational qualities.
And then his VP comes up 7 million short 4 years later against the same "existential threat", despite all the same provisions for mail in ballots etc being in place. It's like Covid restrictions were used as cover for massive voter fraud.
Well, first of all, you've moved the goalposts quite a bit. 14 million down to 7 million cuts the supposed problem in half.
I don't think it's particularly complex, most people vote based on the tangible issues they're experiencing. It shouldn't be surprising that they voted against the incumbents each time. In 2020 they didn't like Trump's handling of COVID so they voted against him. In 2024 they didn't like Biden's handling of inflation so they voted against his VP. Just as some people were motivated to vote for those reasons (among others), many people lost their motivation to vote at all.
Regarding the difference between 2012 Obama and 2020 Biden, Trump also received more votes in 2020 than Obama did -- in fact, he surpassed Obama's vote total in 2024 as well. Trump in 2020 and 2024 even surpassed Obama's vote totals from 2008, even though Obama received 3.5 million more votes in 2008 than in 2012. Really, it's pretty simple, there were 16 million more people in the US in 2020 than 2012. Of course the raw vote numbers went up.
The vote totals aren't a strong point. In 2020 there were 152,320,193 votes cast between the two main candidates; in 2024 there were 155,508,985 votes cast. That is, more people voted in 2024 than in 2020, so claiming that 2020 was some statistical outlier with a bunch of extra votes doesn't really make sense.
This all feels like motivated reasoning.
lol you used autocomplete to give you facts? HAHAHHAHAHA your generation is cooked
Many people don't like Trump or Covid and would have voted for literally anyone else.
To be fair, he's right. In a well-functioning judicial system, he'd be in a tiny jail cell right now.
Washington DC should either be made a state or given to Maryland except for a small federal district. What a load of crap.
We don't want it.
I have this theory that one easy way to curry favor with Trump is tell him about some previously esoteric/unused power the executive has. So much of what he does seems to just be because he can do it, and not because it actually has a real goal or purpose. Like a kid playing with toys. I realize he says that tariffs are meant to bring in revenue or increase domestic manufacturing or [pick random reason]. Or that he's doing this due to DC apparently turning into Fallujah but looking back over his first term and now this one, its the same pattern.
That’s an interesting observation. I’ve wondered how he can be so “creative” if you can call it that, but I guess if you have lots of assistants who can read all of the “well, technically you can do XYZ” sections buried deep in odd legal texts, and you enjoy doing stuff just to get more limelight, these actions are inherently attention grabbing because they are so novel.
I think it is not only limelight. He is a conman/hustler type of personality based on all the things he has done in the past so he probably likes loopholes and shortcuts that can be exploited. Doing things fairly and correctly are slow and for losers in his book.
Yes. The really dangerous people are Miller, Vought, and their Project 2025 allies. I’m quite sure they’re constantly workshopping new and exciting ways to expand dictatorial power.
I choose to believe that trump's whole campaign is motivated out of spite for getting ribbed after the birther movement. Everything he does, he does it to flabbergast the democrats "because he can"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGpLg0b3DE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1NGWM8gP8
I think he wants revenge not only on democrats, but on the entire nation.
They need to fully test their boundaries before midterms. It probably helps that SCOTUS is overturning injunctions now while things are kind of mellow.
The main motivation is narcissistic supply. He knows people will be angry. He sops up the attention.
For him at least I don’t think there’s anything deeper other than he found this way to get people to either adore him or hate him. In either case he’s the center of attention.
Once the toy he stops generating attention, he will get bored and he will find a new toy.
DC often serves as America's protest stage. Controlling its police means controlling what kinds of dissent are permissible at the symbolic heart of democracy.
Controlling the physical space around Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy means that every legislator, judge, and federal worker sees the Guard on their commute.
The message is environmental and atmospheric. Propaganda for the governing class. Power made visible to those for whom there is intent to intimidate.
Extending that, DC notoriously exists as an anomaly violating the foundation that the US was founded on. It is a city that isn't a city, a population with little representation in the federal apparatus that controls it.
DC's legal vulnerability makes it perfect for testing. What works there can be threatened elsewhere. "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.
The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period.
> DC often serves as America's protest stage.
DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!
You take care of the homeless (and not the homeless 'problem') by accessible mental healthcare, by having good social programs and by ensuring that healthcare costs are equally distributed across society rather than used to bankrupt individuals who then become one of many feedlines into homelessness. Of course that would never happen to you so you see a homeless problem where there are instead many other problems.
For a large swath of the USA homelessness is a real possibility and whether or not they will end up in that situation is mostly a game of chance.
Just endless promises from liberals about how they will fix problems with more liberalism. But I've lived in half a dozen deep blue cities and the only one that came close to actually solving any problems was New York City at the tail end of 19 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg's aggressive policing. Everything else has been empty promises and actually making things worse in most cases.
Even if you believe that the ordering the National Guard to DC is going to address homelessness in some positive way, Trump doesn’t care about that. Mobilizing troops to DC is the latest step in his efforts to dismantle democratic government and consolidate power.
Cleaning up DC is item #11 on Trump’s 2024 platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform (“REBUILD OUR CITIES, INCLUDING WASHINGTON DC, MAKING THEM SAFE, CLEAN, AND BEAUTIFUL AGAIN.”).
Your complaint isn’t really about “dismantling democracy,” but instead about Trump running roughshod over all the Democrats who run DC even when the people elect a Republican President, such as the anti-democratic permanent civil service. DC is the people’s city. It is constitutionally a federal enclave, and under the DC Home Rule Act the President has the right to federalize the police. Trump did so to carry out the policies people voted for.
No I mean small-d democratic rights which Trump has been eroding as he consolidates power - retaliating against free speech, deploying federal forces against protestors, suspension of due process, concentration camps, and undermining the independence of the judiciary by attacking judges. By limiting our focus to the legal justification of the militarizing of DC we miss the big picture - erosion of small-d democratic norms and processes in our country.
NYC had a mob problem, and Giuliani and later Bloomberg addressed this, somewhat effectively. Still, when I visited NYC in the early 2000's it still wasn't a safe city by my standards, but those were informed more by what I experienced in other countries than the USA. Washington DC currently does not have a mob problem, and isn't nearly as crime ridden as you make it out to be in your comments in this thread. Yes, homeless people exist. And they exist because of various policies, including federal ones that steer people towards homelessness if their lives get upended. Other affluent countries do not have these problems. Of course people in those other affluent countries typically pay more taxes.
If you really do not like the liberal policies that cities tend to have then maybe you should vote with your feet and move to a rural area or to a city that is run by the Republicans? Then you can be with the people who see things your way.
Oh, wait...
NYC didn’t fix its homeless problem. Guiliani just bussed the homeless to Reading, PA.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.
Your proposal is that the military response is primarily to combat homeless encampments in DC, that this is appropriate, and that this won’t happen elsewhere because this problem is unique to DC?
I’m not a democrat. Help me steel-man your point.
It's not just a military response, but also federalizing the police force. He can go after both the homeless encampments and the gangs. This is appropriate because:
1) Americans deserve a capital city that's at least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego, which have homicide rates one-third or one-quarter as high as D.C. over the last decade--even excluding the COVID-era spike in homicides.
2) The orderliness of a city is primarily an issue of policing and incarceration. You don't need to pass national gun control, or address "root causes"--just take gang members off the streets and put them in prison.
3) The problem isn't unique to D.C., but D.C. is an outlier because (a) the aesthetics of D.C. are important because it's the nation's capital; and (b) Trump has express statutory authority to federalize the D.C. police force under the DC Home Rule Act. DC thus can serve as a testbed for Republican policing in a major city, most of which won't elect Republican mayors.
I see.
Perhaps we have a different definition of “appropriate.”
Are you a paid Republican operative? Or just a True Believer? You use a lot of words to push the cruelty you seem to want to see in the world.
> least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego
Neither of those cities are very safe and orderly. Didn’t 3 people just get killed in Austin yesterday? DC is also tiny compared to the outlying cities that surround it. Baltimore anyone?
This is probably just more distraction to get the news stories away from those Epstein files.
Don’t you live in China, lol?
Pre-covid, Austin’s homicide rate was around 4 per 100k. San Diego’s is typically under 4x DC’s never got below 14 per 100k (in 2012) and spiked up to 40 per 100k in 2023.
DC is 20% more populous than Baltimore. The nearest city larger than DC is Philly, 140 miles away.
I left China in 2016 and now I live in Seattle. I lived in Austin for a summer in 2001 (the summer before 9/11) and it was…hard, I had to evict a squatter from my sublet, the property crime was high and people skulked around in the morning looking through everyone’s trash. Anyways, not sure if your argument is that it is better or worse now, but definitely not a place I want to live in ever again.
There are 6.3 million in the greater DC area, DC is a small part of what goes on in that region.
The solution to homelessness is not to bring in the military and “send the homeless far away” (to paraphrase what Trump said). The solution to homelessness is to provide housing and support.
The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.
Homeless people are people too. The government owes them its support just like it owes support to the finance guy who goes to work in a suit. "Use guns to make sure that wealthy people never have to see a poor person" is horrifying to me.
I love how you just switched seamlessly from “homeless people” to “poor people” as if they’re the same group. The serial offenders and chronically homeless are a distinct 1-2% of the population.[1] They terrorize ordinary poor people far more than they bother rich people. The police already clear the homeless encampments out of the neighborhoods where the finance guys and tech bros live. This is about extending that benefit to the other 97% of the population.
[1] This is obviously true, because every city has poor people, but not every city allows homeless people and serial criminals to intrude on the public sphere. Tokyo has many, many people who are quite poor by the material standards of DC. Tokyo isn’t clean and orderly because it somehow got rid of all the poor people.
I'm very sorry that they frighten you. Deciding to just commit mass violence against them for this is evil.
Why not just build some streets especially for the tourists and other guests? You could call it the Potemkin Quarter.
I don't know where the homeless encampments are, but I've been going to DC for work every 6 months for the past 3 years and have not seen any homeless. Last time there I took a very long evening walk from the Lincoln Memorial to Congress and then back to through the Penn Quarter all the way to Kennedy Center, late in the evening, all prime tourist areas, and didn't see a single homeless person.
I'm sure they exist somewhere -- but downtown DC is definitely not "covered" with homeless encampments.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…
> Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.
Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?
Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.
> Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city.
I was just there for a week, mainly in the downtown area, and honestly don't recall seeing a single homeless person.
> Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city.
You've really been stockholm-syndromed by this godforsaken country and Western culture's persistent aversion to enforcing the law against anyone perceived as less fortunate. This wouldn't be acceptable in peer Eastern countries' capitals like Singapore, Tokyo, or Beijing
And what's the national guard supposed to do with the homeless? Beat them senseless on the sidewalk? Don't you think that would leave a much worse impression on hypothetical tourists? Jesus fucking Christ.
Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
I salute your honesty about what it is you think (and I agree!) this is actually about.
Obviously deploying literal military force against the homeless is batshit crazy. But that is where we are.
In fairness they are also talking about using FBI special agents to assist with the homeless problem. I, uh... can't imagine that will actually happen but who the hell knows as this point.
I guess FBI counterintelligence will be sweeping them for bugs
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Have you ever been to DC? National Guard is literally constantly all over the city. The headlines are a bit sensationalized and even DC's mayor on MSNBC earlier today was cautiously optimistic about more law enforcement on the streets.
> "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.
The fact that Trump mobilized troops in LA to help with ICE raids was way more worrying, but they were withdrawn a week and a half ago by the Pentagon without much hullabaloo.
I lived in DC for 5 years. From 2011 to 2014 and 2019 to 2020. I saw _a lot_ of cops, of nearly every jurisdiction, but never a national guard member.
This reads a little bit like AI. Particularly the sentence flow of the final few lines.
Because that’s what it is.
We ought to refuse to address the content of the message if there is even a single em-dash — things written with AI can’t be true, aren’t worth considering, and lack substance or merit.
Either have opinions or don't, but don't delegate opinions to chat bots. It defeats the purpose of discussion forums. Also slop is only partially due to the model. The rest is the prompt and editing process. It's tiresome to read to ChatGPT-specific bombastic drama like "The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period."
You think I delegated the opinion or the seriousness of this situation to the chatbot?
This is not just a run-of-the-mill news story. It's a fight for the rights enshrined in our constitution.
(And yes - I framed that the way a chatbot might to emphasize the point.)
You're going to have a hard time convincing me this is "overly dramatic" given the context.
I was in a very negative space earlier this year due to the current direction the US is heading. Mostly because I am someone that doesn't want to hear problems without a call to action I can actually engage with. The things that are happening at the national level are very hard to do anything about but I did realize that I could engage at my local level so I decided to just start showing up. I now regularly attend my local city counsel meetings. I don't go and make a bunch of remarks but I have, on a few occasions, added to the public comments and, I think, I was listened to. If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up. At a minimum you will get far more informed but you may just find that you can actually make a change too.
I absolutely applaud this. I doorknocked a thousand doors for my local state election and came out of the experience more optimistic than ever. Real people, listen. Real people want to make the world better. Getting out there is the antidote to doomerism.
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Please don't ever post mean swipes like this on HN, not matter who or what it's in reply to, but especially not something as benign as that comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up.
I have reservations about this line of thought.
For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact. If the actions they took have brought them here, of what use were the actions?
And second, I would like to see some hard evidence that you have in fact effected/enacted change by showing up beyond just being more informed and participating in what can otherwise be (from personal experience) either a snooze-fest or an echo chamber.
I say this as an immigrant: But if you're not an immigrant, a medicare recipient or maybe in the military, your state and municipal governments have significantly more influence on your life than your federal government and most people rarely pay attention to this level of politics.
This lets the people who do pay attention have complete capture. You know your rent is high? Yea that's mostly your state and municipal government doing the bidding of landlords and landed gentry.
Unfortunately it is impossible to institute a single land-value-tax without federal change
High housing prices are probably 5% caused by economically inefficient uses of land (e.g. surface lots in downtown areas) that an LVT would solve, and 95% by zoning and other building regulations. Though perhaps you're right that if the only tax allowed to be collected was LVT, zoning would automatically cease to be an issue.
Why discourage people from attending their local city meetings?
Sure, it might be a "snooze-fest", but you're not there for excitement.
The kinds of people who have time to attend city meetings are out of touch it's worthless
Keeping local communities habitable is each individual's responsibility towards the community. This much should be ingrained in everyone. If you treat yourself and act as an individual you will never accomplish anything.
I don't intent this comment to be a "you're wrong" comment. I'm only saying that OP's POV runs on an assumption that can be damaging.
The smaller the unit of government, the more it transcends politics and becomes about good governance and getting things done.
At least I thought that when living in GA and saw most of the modern governors both Democratic and Republican weren’t bat shit crazy.
Kemp (Republican) is still sort of trying to hold the line against the GA MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
But then I moved to Florida…
> For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact.
Yeah, and they're a big part of the reason why housing is a messed up as it is.
Works when/where archive.md is blocked:
A fun game is to replace "Donald Trump" in news stories with "Hillary Clinton" and to imagine the reaction if they were otherwise identical.
I'd hate to be a cop in DC. We all saw people get pardoned by Trump who admitted to assaulting law enforcement officers on Jan 6th.
My first thought is, I don’t know how bad his involvement with Epstein is that he has to go to these extents to distract people.
But this time around he has a playbook of “inching towards autocracy” very well defined and milestoned. He is executing on it very well too
Is being homeless now a violation of federal law?
Law as something distinct from the immediate whim of the executive backed by military force is under (both figurative and literal) attack in the US right now.
Whats under attack is the idea that this was ever not the case. Laws are arbitrary, temporary and not at all related to justice.
Look, I don't know what you kids are into. But laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just the promise of violence that's enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean? Want to make some bacon?
Trump created an executive order on that too, so they're trying: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/endi...
It directs the executive agencies to seek to loosen any restrictions on non-consentual admission to psychiatric facilities and to force homeless (and people with mental illness) into them.
It also aims to end drug abuse recovery programs and says that not having physical space for patients shouldn't stop them, IIRC.
There is a simple, direct, and immediate solution to this problem.
For transparency: NYTimes live stories have dynamic headlines. I've updated the title to match the current headline as of ~12pm.
Almost a "Trump crossing the Potomac" (Caesar / Rubicon) moment, where the Army enters the Pomerium [1] of democracy.
Let's hope it doesn't have the same effect (ie the eventual fall of the republic)
[1] No military weapons were allowed inside this boundary of ancient Rome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomerium
I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes. It would seem, he could literally just deploy the NG and physically prevent them and that would be sufficient to swing the election.
I am not sure he needs to be that overt.
The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section I, Clause 3[0][1] states (in part):
The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted."
[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
The constitution is irrelevant. Trump does not care about it, and SCOTUS will let him do whatever he wants.
Doesn't make sense because they would still need a majority electoral votes. If the election goes gop, then keeping the Dems out does nothing. If the election goes dem, then keeping Dems out also pushed the process nowhere.
First past the post yo.
if they delay the vote long enough they can say there’s no clear winner and the house effectively gets to appoint the president.That’s what they were trying to do on January 6.
This time it has the neat side effect of letting them cleanly appoint Trump for a third term without him being elected twice, which (it will be claimed) does not violate the 22nd amendment.
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”
>I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes.
Your understanding is incredibly confused. Yes, electors need to meet within each state to cast their ballots at a location specified by each state.
Those ballots are certified by (a) state official(s) (on or before December 12th) and those ballots are then forwarded to DC (IIRC, to the National Archives) and those certified ballots are conveyed to the capital for counting on January 6th.
So, no. The electors needn't go to Washington DC to "cast their ballots." In fact, if they did so on the appointed day for them to cast their ballot, they'd be unable to do so, as that process would be proceeding without them in the state which designated them as an elector.
I really hope you're not an American citizen.
Thank you - you're correct, I'm horribly mistaken about how it all works! Thank you for correcting me.
As an aside, I posted the text (Article II, Section I, Clause 3) of the Constitution (where this process is defined) as another reply to your comment.
Not as a "gotcha," but to clarify the process for others who may not be well informed about it.
I'd note that I was also incorrect. Sealed ballots from each state are sent to the President of the Senate, not the National Archives. My mistake.
He just wants to make sure something like January 6 does not happen; i.e., there's no possibility of a reverse Uno when he actually _does_ try to steal the election this November. He knows fully well that he's going to lose the House, and possibly the Senate this November. And MF hates to lose, he's got such an ego.
US midterms are in 2026.
This goes deeper than I thought ....
;-)
DC out of control crime ?? He should look at Mobile AL, but we all know facts mean nothing to him.
He would have to get permission of the governor. I think there is a loop hole for DC because it has no governor.
"The Act (Posse Comitatus Act) does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor."
Gavin Newsom sued Trump over nationalizing the California NG against his wishes and those of the LA mayor.
Like he got permission from California's governor? Trump has abdicated any pretense of following the law at this point, it's approaching offensive to use "following the law" as a defense now.
psssssssst, psssssssssst, hey ,mexico, pssssst, ya over here it's Canada, let's take em now while there distracted, heck they might not mind!
I made a concious effort to just stop looking at politics. Uninstalled twitter, stopped reading all news, stopped mentally engaging with friends when they bring up political topics, but holy ** this guy is making it impossible.
Can't wait for the to have no impact on crime in Southeast.
Southeast only or east of the river? I'd say the latter.
This is quite awful. Courts are doing nothing. Balance of powers, checks and balances have been weakened through attrition and external forces — wealthy businessmen/lobbyists.
What he did is not illegal. What are the courts going to do? All he has to do is name any random thing he considers to be an emergency, and calling up the National Guard in DC is completely within his rights.
Someone is testing something out...
That's not even speculation, he explicitly stated plans to do the same in cities beyond the capital, and even named some likely targets.
This is, fairly overtly, a step (not the first step, but another step) towards a nationwide militarized police state.
Preparing for when the Epstein list leaks.
Reminds me of the Gleiwitz incident.
He'll do anything to distract from epstein.
I don’t like this narrative. I think he would still be overreaching federal powers even without Epstein.
It is both. Use a thing you wanted to do anyway to distract from a crisis. It's just an optimization, really: if you are going to have to do something as a distraction it may as well be something that you intended for all along rather than something that you don't want to do because it is a more effective distraction. If it weren't it would be easier to see that it was in fact a distraction and now you have one more thing you wanted anyway.
I'm with you, it's almost like that has become another distraction where they know in the end, it won't matter. Meanwhile I can barely keep up with the wild executive orders based on outdated laws. Someone is just pulling the strings.
Miller, Bannon, Vought and Thiel would be my top four puppet masters. Trump only believes in himself, and they make use of that to pursue their agendas.
Trump's voting base don't care about overreaching federal powers, they care about epstein. You are not going to turn any new demographic to your side with this nuanced civil liberties narrative, which has been cried many times before.
"Epstein didn't kill himself" is the perfect meme to destroy confidence in trump.
The latest polling disagrees. The ministry of truth has been hard at work and 47% of conservatives now say they would still support Trump if he was found to be a part of Epstein's minor sex trafficking. 26% "don't know" what they would think (i.e. would still support him).
So... The window has been moved completely off of the house. Raping children is actually acceptable among the MAGA base and Epstein is no longer a concern for them. Woops.
To be fair, polling bias applies. Probably not that high, but still. Even among die-hard, that's bad.
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it can easily be and quite likely is both at the same time.
Um…Is any one of note in public still talking about that? Way way out of the news cycle now.
Really? I saw news about it just today.
It's never dropped of my news, from him moving Maxwell to a minimum security prison, to questions about whether he'll pardon her, to the signed letter with illustrations he wrote for Epstein's birthday.
I don't think the world will ever forget, certainly my social circles and social media are still buzzing with it.
In many ways it's more damning than watergate, though people are debating whether to call it Epsteingate or Pedogate.
Yeah it's been hard for it to leave the news cycle when there are new developments still happening all the time. Latest one being a federal judge denying the request to unseal the transcripts for cases relating to Ghislaine Maxwell. And at least going by Ground News, seems to have been widely covered by outlets today.
https://ground.news/article/judge-rejects-unsealing-ghislain...
Meh. DC federal takeover and Trump/Putin Alaska are the dominant news stories on both CNN and MSNBC. There was one story above the fold on MSNBC homepage regarding Trump and Epstein on MSNBC and that story was more about how Vance’s downplaying comments could be read as supportive of more disclosure. Another story well below the fold on Epstein which is more about his victims than Trump.
CNN has one story way below the fold on their homepage mentioning Epstein *for subscribers only.
The story is effectively dead. Whatever legs people thought this had are effectively gone except for the rabid progressives who just want anything they can to damage Trump…or the Qanon crowds. In my opinion, those two folks belong together and can enjoy their alignment, two ends of the horseshoe.
Yes. Based on talking to people like you IRL, I don't think democrats understand how big the epstein situation is.
Revealing the epstein docs/list was a major selling point for the q-anon/conspiracy voters during the election. This is the first major controversy that puts trump against a sizable majority of his supporters, which are becoming disillusioned.
We are reaching a nixon-esque turning point where the cover up is worse than the crime.
It pairs well with being convicted in NY state by a jury of his peers for other sexual crimes.
Did that happen in the same universe as the Sinbad “Shazam” movie?
I keep getting all these multiverses mixed up. Here I thought in this universe he was only found liable in a civil suit about sexual harassment, not convicted in a criminal court for a sexual crime.
> This is the first major controversy that puts trump against a sizable majority of his supporters, which are becoming disillusioned
Which means exactly what? What political alternative do the whackado Qanon/ultraMAGAs have? Certainly not the democrats—they are so far out of alignment with MAGA that any Epstein disappointment looks mild in comparison. Sure…UltraMAGA may frustrated with Trump but they will never get a chance to vote for him again to express that disappointment. So they will be faced with a choice of a GOP candidate who will run on much of Trumps politics (but won’t be him) and a democrat party that appears now to be tacking further left in to the socialism waters as its new bearing.
That is not wise. (I'm ignoring the question of whether it's legal or constitutional or justified. Those are important questions. They matter. But for this comment, I'm ignoring them.)
Trump just made himself owner of the crime rate in DC. Every crime that occurs there is now Trump's failure. That is not something that he's going to want.
He can, of course, almost completely stop crime in Washington D.C. Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it. Boom, big win and look at how crime-free the empty streets are, aside from the dozen police on every corner, snipers on every roof.
Is there anything to learn from that? Of course not. Aside from the liberty for security trade, should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
> Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it.
Criminology studies have shown that you in fact do not need a hyper-resourced police state to achieve this. The Pareto rule applies very strongly in criminality; the majority of violent crime is committed by a tiny fraction of the population[0]. About 90% of prisoners have been arrested more than three times[1].
You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country (a result of the common law tradition coming down from Blackstone) and the degree to which local policy in places like DC outright favors the rights of the criminals over the rights of the innocents that must live near them. There's a lot of room to improve the lives of the law-abiding before there are "snipers on every roof".
> should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?
DC isn't just any town; it has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous. In 2024 alone, it had over 5000 cars stolen in a place that only has 350k cars. That's more than one in a hundred.
Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x, or try some other radical thing? Because this isn't working out.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
[1]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/arrest-history-pers...
> You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country
The US has almost 2 million people in prison. It has one of the highest incarceration rates on the planet.
US - 541 per 100,000 Canada - 90 Germany - 68 Japan - 33
Doesn't seem like it's that hard to get a conviction. The US has a sociology problem, not a difficulty getting convictions problem.
> It has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous.
It has the 19th highest murder rate for US cities. It sits behind Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1/4 the rate of St. Louis, Missouri. Still a terrible murder rate, and it shouldn't be normalized, but there is utterly nothing exceptional about DC. And it's miles safer than virtually anywhere in methville, Appalachia.
As to car thefts, it sits at 61st among US cities, behind Nashville TN, Savannah GA, and Lexington, KY. Eh.
>Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x
In the ultra-low tax US of A? Har. Ignoring that its crime rate is not remotely exceptional relative to other cities, already the vast majority of US cities are barely solvent, and policing is already the most expensive line items for city budgets.
Should there be a massive restructuring of policing? Yes, absolutely. Should career criminals face fewer reprieves? Absolutely. Does the US have a catastrophic sociological probem? Absolutely.
Is this an easy fix that Big Brain Trump is going to solve? LOL, no, give me a break.
> Doesn't seem like it's that hard to get a conviction. The US has a sociology problem, not a difficulty getting convictions problem.
There are more people in prisons in America because more people commit crimes in America, compared to those other places. And more people commit crimes than are caught and convicted. If the US was in fact a police state, those incarceration rates would be even higher.
> there is utterly nothing exceptional about DC
The subject under discussion is Trump having the National Guard to perform law enforcement duties. DC is indeed exceptional in that it is the only jurisdiction where he could do that.
> it's miles safer than virtually anywhere in methville, Appalachia
Factually untrue. The state of West Virginia, the archetype of "Methville, Appalachia", has a lower homicide rate than its vastly richer neighbor Virginia (almost twice as high of a median household income).
> Should career criminals face fewer reprieves? Absolutely.
> Is this an easy fix that Big Brain Trump is going to solve? LOL, no, give me a break.
Given what we know of recidivism, Trump's brain does not need to be all that big to make a noticeable difference. In fact, you already touched upon the solution: just don't keep releasing multiple-times convicted violent criminals back into the population. A tiny fraction of the population is responsible for the majority of violent crimes. Just keep them away from the rest of society and you'll have made a big difference in the lives of the less well-off who, for the most part, have to live next to these people.
Existing big-city police forces already have the resources to stop crime in their respective cities. They just choose not to do it. If you want to see how capable they are of stopping crimes that are of interest to them, try setting up an illegal food stand or parking without paying the meter. You'll be busted within hours.
They have budgets in the Billions of dollars, tons of surveillance equipment, military grade weapons, and a monopoly on force. But they still can't deal with street thugs, belligerent crazy people, or jerks on the subway like cities in other countries manage to do?
I don't know what Trump's game is in all of this, but we should stop pretending that blue cities aren't already playing their own games and they clearly don't involve stopping or solving crime.
And you will see how no crime will be reported.
Do you really think he will let out numbers that make him look bad
As if that matters. He never takes responsibility for literally anything. Blames other people for his appointees and laws. All negative consequences are always someone else's fault.
And his base gobbles it up.
Heck, even it did get attributed to him - it doesn't matter. 47% of conservatives said they'd still support Trump even if he raped children with Epstein: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-47-republican...
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If crime is at a 30-year low, what is the purpose of this? Is it to bring media attention away from the Epstein controversy?
To continue the pattern of throwing the military into regions of the country that don't vote for the regime.
It's a threat. What surprises me is that these people are all still following orders. They know there is no emergency - yet.
For anyone who disobeys the order, it's the end of their career; and every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time. Everyone at the top levels whose job is to actually take a stand against these acts, to serve as a rallying point for others to know when the time to resist has come, have abdicated their duty. If the authoritarians are smart, they will never create a situation where we are backed into a corner, where the time to fight is obvious; we will be convinced that our best course of action is to continue in lockstep with the system in the hopes of fixing it, right up until the slaughter.
> every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time.
Is that any better than people with a conscience staying and reluctantly following much worse orders in due time? At least when they leave, they send a message of resistance instead of silently capitulating.
Internal sabotage and/or physical resistance to the execution of unlawful orders (think My Lai type event) might be the more meaningful action for the ethically conflicted service member. I think things would be a lot worse if everyone sympathetic to the people resigned and left only regime loyalists in the ranks.
The question wasn't what should they do, it's why are they doing what they are currently doing?
That said, obviously the point of remaining is so that they can refuse those worse orders when they come, so that they can convince their peers to do the same or temper their actions, so that the administration needs to worry about pushing too far lest that wave of resignations comes at a critical moment. Alarming though the pattern may be, this is neither a clear cut violation of the constitution nor likely to be a major turning point in the administration's public support. Leaving now would be ineffectual - there is no plan in place to take advantage of a few resignations to put a serious damper on the current plans, nor will it stop what's to come. The people who resign now may feel good about themselves, maybe enough to justify the potential hardship they and their loved ones will suffer as a consequence, but they deny the rest of us a key resource. Resigning is a weapon that can only be fired once; it would be selfish and stupid to waste the shot.
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They're not at 30 year lows
They've been cooking the books on it.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
Pretty sure I saw that episode of The Wire.
Aside, this is a pretty useful comment, unlike your other one on this thread. More of this and less of that, please.
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Don't forget the prez plans on getting rid of people experiencing homelessness.
It doesn't matter. What Trump believes (in his broken little mind) is all that matters. That and Plan 2025 or whatever it is.
The "30-year low in violent crime" still puts DC ahead of every state in homicide rate. If DC were a country, it would rank somewhere around the top 20 most murderous. Venezuela, a literal failed state, has a lower homicide rate. Russia, the dysfunctional kleptocracy that it is, is less than a third as murderous as DC.
Might not the people of DC deserve better? Is it possible that problems exist in real life outside of "media attention"?
DC isn't a state or a country. How's it compare to other cities in the US?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
Sorting by Total here looks like #25 in violent crime and #29 in property crime.
Your source has DC at #30 in total crime, #25 in total violent crime, and #29 in total property crime.
Where is it in list literacy? ;)
DC is a city, not a state. You seem to be aware of this distinction in this comment [1] and yet you conflate the two here..
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871583
Stop spamming the thread with this nonsense. The correct comparison is to other cities, because it’s a city. Not a state or a country.
What is your point? I'm well aware that DC is a city. Its crime stats are horrific as a city, compared to other cities. The cities that rank higher than DC are even more horrific. I'm dismayed that policymakers in all of these places favor the rights of multiply-convicted violent criminals over those of the law-abiding.
It's illustrative to compare against famously poorly-run countries. What are you trying to illustrate here by pointing out that DC is a city?
Thank goodness somebody flagged this. All this commentary on the collapse of our democracy was really harshing my mellow.
I have been promoting the use of the active front page to my tech-minded friends and acquaintances that use this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
Can someone explain what 'active' stories are? It isn't described in the FAQ
IIRC ranked on interactions instead of score, includes flagged.
I have this as my bookmark. Haven't visited the front page for months.
Isn’t /active the real front page?
Thank you for this. I had no idea. It’s like a completely different (i.e., better) hackernews.
Ah, there’s where all the anti-AI posts went! I thought everybody on this site had drunk the kool aid, but it’s just any criticism doesn’t make the front page any more. Thanks, much appreciated.
Oh very nice thank you.
Been using it ever since another user mentioned it, the difference has been stark.
or just use https://hckrnews.com/
https://hcker.news/ is another good one.
plus it might divert eyeballs from all the truly critical news about which AI startup got how much in funding to do something 100 other companies are doing.
This is literally a news site for startup funding
No it's not, it's a site for "anything that good hackers would find interesting".
If that were the case there would never be any topics on HN about housing, healthcare, education, elections, war or tariffs, yet the "/best" page says otherwise.
This is a discussion forum for intellectual curiosity operated from the investment exhaust of a capital market participant. A recent, adjacent analogy is Jeff Lawson taking his Twilio winnings to buy and operate The Onion. The economic mechanizations are usually underpinnings to something more valuable. HN would still be valuable if YC closed up shop tomorrow (and I personally argue, of greater value than the accelerator; value is subjective of course, so opinions will differ on this). Stay curious.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The collapse of a representative democracy into a corrupt dictatorship similar to Russia should interest anyone who intends to invest money into this economy.
Why would you invest millions and years of your life into building a company if the administration can just decide to take your intellectual property [0] because you made them angry?
Why would you spend effort developing hardware and a domestic manufacturing process if the administration can just declare 100% tariffs on your critical components? Especially when your competitors can just pass off a little bribe and get special treatment: [1]
> Cook and Apple aren't walking away empty-handed. Companies that "are building in the United States," like Apple, won't be subject to a forthcoming 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, Trump said.
There is a reason you don't see world-changing companies arise from states with so much corruption. A free market requires neutral governance - no special treatment or favorites. With this new administration, the US market is looking much more skewed than in the past few decades, and that will have severe consequences for domestic innovation and research.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/harvard-patents-tar...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-donald-trump-gift-a...
It certainly should, however large numbers of people in the technical community are welcoming it with glee. This isn't even reactive to the mob boss, this has been coming for years.
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-net...
Yeah, a lot of these guys are convinced that they will get to be one of the oligarchs.
you do understand that start-ups are a thing for liberal, democratic, capitalist, free-market folks?
That's not the context that we are in politically or socially right now.
Meanwhile palantir is training AI models that assassinate journalist. Ethics are a major part of tech, we can make decisions that distribute billions in relief or execute millions.
Therac-25 feels downright quaint these days.
Yep. At least that was an accident.
Out of curiosity, is there a way we can request a mod to manually unflag this? I see comments in this thread have been killed, so I'm not sure why this is still flagged 3 hours later when it seems clearly relevant to HN?
A military deploying to the capital of the richest country on earth where most tech giants reside is important for tech.
We've unflagged it now.
Thank you.
Email them via the contact link at the bottom of the page. They're pretty responsive, though for political topics they're reluctant to unflag them because the discussions are often fruitless (just a bunch of people shouting at each other).
They will happily unflag tech-irrelevant fulff such as an article about Hulk Hogan dying.
Whereas extensively researched political articles like this one? Mum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44816165
It's flagged for the same reason that posts describing the genocide Israel is doing in Palestine get flagged: the absolute intolerance of those in power to any dissenting opinions.
We've had multiple threads about Gaza that have spent many hours on the front page in recent months, including two about two weeks ago. It's not viable for us to give front page time to every major development in that terrible situation, but we also think it's important for HN to not act as if it's not happening.
I spend a fair amount of time flagging stuff in those threads that's outright anti-Semitic or propaganda, and if that goes on too long I just flag the whole post and move on. It's one thing to have an in-depth discussion about colonialism, the history of the surrounding Arab states and early Zionism, ongoing Israeli politics, the Jewish diaspora, etc. It's quite another to engage in a fruitless moral oneupsmanship (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"), or to reckon not at all with the fact that the destruction of Israel (through boycott, invasion, or minority democratic status) leads to the murder of horrifying numbers of Israeli Jews. As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing. I don't see that as a reason to drum up anti-semitism or casually imply the destruction of Israel and the attendant murder of millions of people would be a net good.
So, that's why I flag that stuff. I also think it's pretty absurd to think that HN censors opinions. I and others constantly criticize SV bigwigs like Marc Andreessen (can somebody ask ChatGPT how many goddamn 'e's are in his name, Jesus Christ) and Paul Graham, lots of tech-skeptic stuff gets posted here and makes it to the front page.
I am sorry you experience antisemitism, this bs should have disappeared long long long ago.
> As with pretty much all war I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing
We are too! The same way we decried the despicable genocidal actions Germany did on the Jewish population during WW2, we now decry the despicable genocidal actions of the state of Israel on the population of Palestine.
> (neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis will wake up suddenly and say "Oh, HN has decided we're to blame; I guess we'll call the whole thing off"
Only one side is actually doing genocide at the moment, and that's Israel. Israel should stop the genocide and either engage in a war without war crimes, or better yet, stop annexing foreign territories and stop the war altogether. I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point, but there is only one side currently shooting at civilians at aid sites, stopping food from reaching the civilian population, and killing journalists.
> I appreciate your "there are two sides to every conflict" point
Nope, deliberately not saying this. I super don't care what the "whose fault is this" tally is. I'm only interested in saving lives and figuring out what's next.
The (awful) truth of this is there are no realistic good options. We're not invading, Israel won't allow UN peacekeepers in, surrounding Arab states can't challenge Israel militarily and/or don't want to aid the Palestinians, there is no political will in any country to send troops, and Israel doesn't actually need our support militarily or otherwise so we have no leverage anyway. So, either a given person's naive to this and they have reading to do, or they're aware and using the situation to further their own ends. Maybe that's anti-Semitic propaganda from some Muslim states (Iran). Maybe that's Russian (et al) disinformation ops driving political wedges into the Democratic Party. Maybe it's the DSA demagoguing the issue to (try to) win elections. Maybe that's committed anti-Semites carpeing those diems. All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.
Also I'm not Jewish! I do have family down the block from where Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh was shot up though, plus a fair number of Jewish friends. Appreciate the sentiment though.
> The (awful) truth of this is there are no realistic good options.
There are. Israel stopping the genocide and building settlements in foreign territories that don't belong to them is a realistic good option.
Do you have something against Israel stopping the genocide it does on Palestine? What's the difficulty to stop shooting people at aid sites and allowing humanitary aid to enter the country? Or is it very difficult to not snipe journalists and bomb hospitals?
> All pretty reprehensible; all getting a flag from me. How can I tell? I listen to upstream sources and recognize the talking points.
Lots of words, yeah war is terrible, yeah reprehensible acts on both sides, yeah the issue is complex. But here are simple facts:
Israel is committing a genocide to the Palestinian population at this very moment. Undeniable. It's not complex to not do genocide, many of us succeed in avoiding to do a genocide on a daily basis. Today I and many other people across the globe didn't participate in a genocide, for example!
You need to do more reading, because you obviously have no idea why Israel is doing what they're doing. If they thought stopping was a good option, they'd stop. You whining like a child over and over again that they should stop and aren't, does nothing. Turns out there's evil people in the world. Deal with it.
> You whining like a child over and over again that they should stop and aren't, does nothing. Turns out there's evil people in the world. Deal with it.
Nope, will continue call it out! You deal with it.
> You need to do more reading, because you obviously have no idea why Israel is doing what they're doing.
Ah, the genocide apologism, I love it, it always comes out but selectively!
How'd you feel if somebody tries to tell you to do some reading into why Germany thought the Holocaust is a good solution to the "Jewish problem" (as they referred to it)? Not nice, right? There is no excuse to genocide, humanity said "never again", but keeps repeating its old mistakes. There is no apology or justification for genocide.
> have no idea why Israel is doing what they're doing
Let's unpack this.
- What do you think Israel is doing? (It's genocide)
- Why do you think Israel is doing this genocide? (It's inexcusable)
Sure, I guess I'm drawn into this now.
> Ah, the genocide apologism, I love it, it always comes out but selectively!
I've not done this, and I've said I'm disgusted by what Israel is doing. To be clear, I understand Netanyahu's motives to be "stay out of prison" and "repair legacy", while I understand the Likud party's motivation to be ethnofascism. But hey, maybe they'll see your posts and reconsider.
> What do you think Israel is doing?
I called it ethnic cleansing before the deliberate starvation, but I call it genocide now.
> How'd you feel if somebody tries to tell you to do some reading into why Germany thought the Holocaust is a good solution to the "Jewish problem"
The US and the USSR (et al) mounted truly inconceivable offensives against Nazi Germany. The lives lost in this effort are... indescribable. Your impotent forum posts don't compare. You can say genocide six times a post or sixty times; it makes no difference. If you think you're earning points with your speech where you have no risk whatsoever, you're a smaller person than I would've assumed (I like your anti-AI posts).
Listen, you've spent a lot of time arguing with me, a person who agrees with you, and I think we can further agree that's a suboptimal use of resources. I don't know you or what your day job is, but clearly you have a lot of energy about this stuff, and it isn't the last time it's gonna happen. There's lots of human rights organizations, or the UN, trying to make sure things like this can't happen, and they need people like you. Maybe look into it.
> stop annexing foreign territories
Gaza is not a foreign territory. It is part of israel. Israel won it over the course of a series of wars that they won in the last century. Almost all of which were not started by the israelis. If the gazans wanted sovereignty they shouldnt have started and lost so many wars. Losing has consequences.
> there is only one side currently shooting at civilians
The only reason the gazans are not doing this is because they are utterly incompetent, they cant. I dont see how that gives them the moral high ground. As soon as they gain the ability to shoot israeli civilians they will begin to do so again.
Both sides are led by truly despicable governments, no one has any amount of moral high ground in this conflict imo.
> The only reason the gazans are not doing this is because they are utterly incompetent, they cant. I dont see how that gives them the moral high ground. As soon as they gain the ability to shoot israeli civilians they will begin to do so again.
using dehumanizing/racist language as a defense for war crimes unfortunately doesn't fly at The Hague.
What dehumanizing/racist language?
Not racist to point out the government in gaza has over and over and over and over and over and over again shown they will never stop until israel no longer exists. The israelis are lucky Hamas is so incompetent, oct. 7th couldve been much worse. The hague is a joke unfortunately, otherwise Hamas wouldve been dismantled long ago.
that's interesting because the government of israel has over and over and over and over and over and over again shown they will never stop until palestinians no longer exist. and that's the same justification they use!
you should ask Israelis if they feel like Oct 7 was a display of incompetence.
Counterpoint: As I understand it, t was Israeli military incompetence and Netanyahu's strategy of backing Hamas over the PA that caused Oct 7.
Oct 7 will never happen again because it shouldn't have been able to happen in the first place had Israel been less busy fomenting Palestinian extremism in Gaza, and beating/killing Palestinians in the West Bank.
There is no justification for the conditions in Gaza today. All I see are Israelis relishing in the suffering of another group of people. And I see Israeli extremists continuing to conflate Israeli Nationalism with Judaism, so that any criticism of Israel is called anti-Semitic.
> Israeli military incompetence and Netanyahu's strategy of backing Hamas over the PA that caused Oct 7.
I was about to make a joke about this to your sibling comment. Completely agree that oct 7 was one of the biggest security fuck ups in modern history, the militants never shouldve been allowed to escape gaza.
There is no defending Israel's actions over the last year. I just hate seeing people hitting the wrong points. The lopsided death count is irrelevant because it is Hamas' fault. The annexation of gaza is irrelevant because thats what happens when you lose a war you started.
Now starving them out and running them over Tiananmen square style, thats pretty relevant I think. Israels actions in the west bank were in many ways even worse until the starvation stuff started. Straight up state sanctioned terrorism happening over there
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The lopsided death count is Hamas' fault because they are unable to kill any israelis at all. Hamas dies and Israelis dont = lopsided death count. Thats not a bad thing. As you pointed out, there are many actual bad things going on, so focus on that instead of dumb shit that doesnt matter. Makes you look like an idiot when you complain that Hamas cant kill israelis instead of talking about how theyre starving an entire society to death. Hamas does use human shields and that does make it valid for the israelis to kill the human shields, so again the lopsided death count mostly just serves to remind everyone that hamas doesnt give a shit about their population. That Hamas is not a government anyone wants to live under. Doesnt help their cause. Mass starvation does. You need to convince that the palestinian deaths are unjustified, not that they happened. Death happens in war.
> As you pointed out, there are many actual bad things going on, so focus on that instead of dumb shit that doesnt matter.
I am just focusing on Israel committing a genocide on the Palestinian population.
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The revolution will not be televised.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vwSRqaZGsPw
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By some of the top commenters no less. It's absolutely insane to me that people that have zero excuse not to be informed chose to willfully ignore the evidence in front of their own eyes just because the bullshit resonates with their fears.
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Some of them, anyway. But judging by the bulk of the comments here most people do not.
Is Trump trying to distract from the fact that he was part of the Epstein thing.
https://archive.ph/2025.08.11-145539/https://www.nytimes.com...
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Creating problems that only you can solve is a proven way to justify authoritarianism.
These do not seem like the actions of a an administration that feels the need to justify anything.
They do need to justify it, just not to the people we usually consider to be authorities.
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She is. https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
The data is publicly available: https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime. By any measure, it shows a horrifying level of crime, disorder, and antisocial behavior. If DC were a country, it would be among the top 20 most murderous in the world.
DC has had home rule for over 50 years. If this is a 30-year low in violent crime, it's all the more proof that radical change needs to happen soon, not something to be proud of.
>If DC were a country, it would be among the top 20 most murderous in the world.
Unless other US cities were countries, in which case there push it off that list.
Man this rhetoric is so empty and frankly idiotic. It’s not a country. It’s not a state. Compare like for like instead of doing these nonsense comparisons for dramatic effect.
26.6 murders per 100k in 2024 is neither empty nor idiotic. It's distressing. Why don't you compare that to peer cities around the world and see how it stacks up. You're right that I don't need dramatic effect; it's terrible on its own.
You seem to be very invested in the idea that cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, or New Orleans have it worse. You're right. What relevance does it have?
> Why isn't Pamela A. Smith (current police chief of DC) doing her job and stopping the crime?
How is this different from "when did you stop beating your wife?"
Why did Trump feel it not necessary to be invited by California's governor when he federalized national guard in California? Why is his DoJ arguing in court that it's not necessary?
You've pasted the Wikipedia link three times in this thread. What is your motivation for doing that? Do you support the takeover in DC?
Yes, I do.
Trump has repeatedly, blatantly violated the constitution, to such a degree I don't even feel the need to cite them because there are so many and you are definitely familiar with them. That is not using the same tools, it's making up new ones and co-opting old ones from fascist dictators.
The reason he gets away with it is a legislature and supreme court (note: only the supreme court, not the rest of them) who have decided to bow down.
Do not pretend this is lawful.
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For the wealthy not the poor
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DC'a murder _rate_ is 19th in the country per Wikipedia, and 1/4 of #1 St. Louis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
The pace of muders in DC this year should put it somewhere around the mid 1960's numbers of around 150: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm
So... there are the raw numbers. Want to adjust your position on that "disinfo campaign?"
Here's a list of cities with per capita homicide rates: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_r...
I agree that it would be misleading to judge D.C. based on being at a 30 year low. Of the cities with the highest homicide rates, only Philadelphia has a higher population and rate. It's fair to say that there are other cities close in population. But it's clear that D.C. has a abnormally high homicide rate when compared to all of the other U.S. cities of its size or larger. Even if you only compared it to all other U.S. cities within, say, 100k of population, it's still at a very high percentile.
You are right it's misleading to say DC is at a 30 year low- the data I posted shows that it is actually at a 60 year low.
It's not clear at all that it has an abnormally high homicide rate at all. DC is not even listed on the link you provided- the one I provided has cities of equivalent size.
You can find it in the list under the heading 'Other statistics".
Just to be consistent with my sibling comment: it is improper to conclude that St. Louis is the most murdery place in America. The city of St. Louis metro population is 3 million people, who travel to the city proper to murder each other even though only 280k people live in those political boundaries.
I like how down in the comments you attack absolute numbers despite using absolute numbers in this post, but fail to note per capita numbers because per capita numbers would make this argument fall apart. Good luck with your campaign to make it look reasonable for a federal takeover of crime enforcement as a prelude to shutting down demonstrations against this administration.
Just want to point out that the "coordinated disinfo campaign" is based on a federal press release: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-....
Well, that press release was issued Jan 3 2025 by the incumbent appointed by the Biden regime. Whichever way you want to argue it... it's political.
The wikipedia article about then-US Attorney for DC includes this note:
"Under Graves, the US Attorney's Office declined to prosecute 67% of those arrested for crimes in DC in 2022, including 72% of misdemeanor arrests and 53% of felony arrests."
Crime is always down if you don't prosecute crime. Murder stats are the best to consider since those a harder (but not impossible) to fudge.
>>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_M._Graves
> Whichever way you want to argue it... it's political.
Yes, political information is political. Very astute.
So you endorse using federal military resources to secure a city that is not the most dangerous place in the country and that is at generational lows for violent crime?
And you are okay with this in the context of a pedophile rapist felon traitorous president who is bent on vengeance, a famously thin skin and a primate's view of the use of power?
Dallas had 108 murders in 1H 2025. Where's their invasion force?
Dallas has 5.6x the land area and nearly double the population.
You can't lie with numbers that are easily provable.
> You can't lie with numbers that are easily provable.
Climate change would like a word with you.
Why does land area matter exactly?
It doesn't, at all. It's born from the same complaint that, say, NYC outvotes the rest of the state although it's only a tiny portion of the total size.
Because it permits such nonsensical statements such as "France has more murders per year than London" (therefore London is safer by comparison QED).
When you can draw arbitrary borders, you can make the numbers mean whatever you want.
Crime counts are normalized to crime rates with respect to population, not land area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
And you'll see that Washington D.C. doesn't make the top ten for rates of any of the major violent crimes (murder, rape, etc.) nor for the "Total" violent crime.
Land area doesn’t matter
Population does matter somewhat but not really in this case. If you’re invading a city because crime is high it only makes sense to do if it’s high in absolute numbers; otherwise you’re not really having much impact.
Also half of DC actually lives in MD and VA.
Could you say a few words on the impact of land area to the discussion?
Once you concede on that, could you say what homicide level requires a police state as a reaction? It would appear to be within a factor of two of the present numbers, but I can't work out where the line would be.
One of the biggest errors in the interpretation of crime statistics is improperly using the overnight resident population, instead of the better daytime population, as the denominator. This error is often committed in cases as various as St. Louis and Berkeley, as well as DC.
National crime levels are at 30 year lows. I think you're being rather disingenuous here. Media coverage on DC specifically seems entirely reasonable and the first report I looked at linked to the same stats you did.
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/dc-crime-trends-trump-national-g...
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You can tell that journalism is dead because they cite how much it's allegedly dropped in the past year with literally zero other info or context. Ok, dropped from what to what? How does this compare to other cities? Has it gone up consistently for the last deacde? How much crime is still happening after that drop? Is the drop in real, predicted crime, or just reports of it? Are there reasons why reporting would go down despite crime not going down?
And to cite these numbers without providing context at the same time of citing them that someone was literally fired for allegedly manipulating the data. And to be clear they're just allegations, but also the data is controlled by someone whose job and ego is tied to these numbers dropping, and the rate of the drop is basically unbelievable - 25% to 28% drop in a single year? After suggesting it went down 34% the year before?
Even if my info I just wrote is something someone could dispute, is it not part of journalism to at least provide the bare minimum of context for people to at least know why this is controversial? If Trump's position on this is so soundly and clearly misguided, then it shouldn't be a problem at all to provide all facts and context to demonstrate as much. Instead we're given a single fact with zero other context.
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What a disgusting comment. Trump has really made America ugly.
In practice - so far - the facts on the ground don’t seem to look like a takeover. More like “more resources for local cops from feds”.
Which I’m not saying is good, but we should separate the bluster from the reality.
From this article
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/11/trump-dc-...
On national guard, 200 people at a time focused on administrative work:
> U.S. Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said that most National Guard troops live locally and that the idea is to deploy them in shifts of 200 soldiers each to provide a round-the-clock presence.
> The troops for now will be focused on providing logistical and administrative support to free up D.C. police officers, similar to their support role at the southern U.S. border.
And they basically don’t want to actually run the police dept:
> Trump named Terry Cole, the head of the DEA, as interim commissioner of the D.C. police. Cole told Police Chief Pamela A. Smith on Monday evening that the federal team is hoping for the Metropolitan Police Department to lead the effort,
> Cole described Trump’s takeover of the department as more of a collaboration, and he stressed that officials would meet and work together to figure out where to deploy resources, the official said.
Basically they’re putting bodies out there so DC can put more local cops in the streets. And they really don’t know how to run anything when it comes to policing DC. How would they? They need the local cops to actually understand the issues.
Not saying any of this is good. But wanted to add this context.
It's entirely ridiculous that you're taking the federal government's words about its intentions at face value.
I’ll change my mind when there’s news beyond what I’ve stated. I feel confident in what I’ve stated because all parties (DC and Feds) are saying similar things.
But to take the opposite maximalist “Trump is a maniacal dictator” position ignores the pattern of bluster and back down from Trump.
Save your mental sanity. His goal is your outrage. He doesn’t have a plan.
> all parties (DC and Feds) are saying similar things.
DC's mayor hasn't said the same thing as the Feds.
What has she said that contradicts what I’ve said/quoted?
The military is a blunt instrument. It is good at destruction and killing, not so good at construction and subtle care. Neither is the police, but they are at least a little bit better at it. You call in the military as a means of last resort when you are in a war. To call in the military to fight crime is about as useful as to bring a chain saw into an operating theater.
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He’s a narcissist that wants to stoke outrage.
He doesn’t have a plan* other than finding the button that keeps him in the news and generates narcissistic supply. When he gets bored of that button he backs off. Then he finds a new shiny button to press that freaks people out and generates headlines.
Social media posts where people are freaked out - like many on this thread - is to him like the best high possible.
The best you can do is respond to actual facts on the ground and ignore the bluster.
* it’s the people around him with plans to be worried about
I mean sure but whether it is the people around him or him eroding democracy and shifting the overton window feels a bit like arguing semantics while the titanic is going down.
Edit: to the point about Trump wanting outrage, I don’t really care what he wants I want more people engaged in what is happening not less.