Slow Boring

> It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless.

Our Latino law school classmates at places like Northwestern and Columbia are by and large progressive, and thus that change likely reflected the preferences of the Hispanic student body at Northwestern Law. I'm not sure why the preferences of moderate Hispanics who aren't there should matter in that context.

> I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r...*It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.*

Bro, as you stated, they literally voted in the mayor in one of the most important--if not the most important--cities in the country lol. While the academic bubble is…

Drug laws would need to change first before any dent in organized crime. And there's still sex work, and good old influence peddling, etc. And then still there's a long way to go with immigration reform. (Undocumented immigrants are a very vulnerable and lucrative victim group. From human trafficking to no-contract cash-only jobs, the classic sweatshop model, and more.)

At this point, I'm fairly certain that it's a pipe dream to assume that it's possible to "fix it" without serious sustained effort (which costs some money obviously) and without also drastically improving the adjacent systems (as you said also). Sure, we can call it social services, but the goal is to really reduce both crime and police brutality.

It's a complex problem, but very simply the funding issue is that militarization was cheap (because military handed off a lot of things for cheap/free), and any and all social service thing got more expensive simply due to big "external" factors like the Baumol effect (human labor is relatively getting more expensive compared to anything that benefits from capital investment, ie. industrialization, mass production, technological progress), the Southern Strategy culminated, War on Drugs revved up, social polarization increased, inequality shoot up, these all led to more crime, more tough-on-crime programs, more people in the criminal justice system, and that's a lot more expensive. And of course reintegration and related social programs got worse for the same…

> So, progressive groups support minorities, and then promote minorities with progressive opinions

Progressives promote minorities with progressive opinions and pass those progressive opinions off as representative of those minority groups. White progressives self-consciously wear that label; non-white progressives invoke their ethnic identity without the progressive qualifier.

Progressives in media, academia, and politics often use their institutional power to manipulate the public narrative surrounding minorities. As my dad once lamented, "CNN made Ilhan Omar into the face of American Muslims."

> you don't like that because you're a minority with non-progressive views and feel underrepresented?

I personally don't like it because I have fairly typical views for my minority group and I don't like being misrepresented. I'd like a more honest public discourse that acknowledges something like "brown people love Obamacare, but really don't want their young kids learning about sex."

More importantly, it disenfranchises the very minorities these progressives purport to speak for.

It enables white progressives to hijack the political power of minorities within the broader center and center left (Democrats and Democrat leaners). For a spell in 2020, progressives turned "Defund the Police" into the "Black" position on policing, and weaponized claims of "racism" against anyone who opposed violent protests and riots. They got the Op-Ed guy at the New York Times fired for…

Every so often the Trump administration seems like they might actually care about getting my vote. A recent executive order making it easier to do research on psychedelic therapy is another example [0]. A policy shift to reform IRB review for social and behavioral science [1] would be really targeted at me.

I know politics is hard to talk about, but I generally think that we underappreciate the importance of being agentic in politics. Obviously I prefer that our government follow the law and uphold the constitution. But the many ways in which the current administration got things done by being quick, by "flooding the zone" [2], and by using tactics that apparently no one noticed before [3-4] are worthy of study and emulation.

I know the obvious response to this is to note that a lot of what they're doing is illegal, and again, I think that's bad. But they really make the current Democratic leadership seem out of touch and old [5] by comparison. Combined with policy positions that are far from the median voter's [6], it doesn't make for a winning look/platform.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/accelerating-medical-treatments-for-serious-mental-illness/

[1] https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institutional

[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/trumpian-policy-as-cultural-policy.html

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought-profile-donald-trump

[4]…

Even though I'm inclined to believe people have deeper issues that would prevent them from thriving anywhere, I find Yglesias persuasive on this one [0]. Drug abuse and mental illness prevalence don't predict homelessness rates... rents do. Obviously you want to lower the rents in the places with housing crises, but those crises exist for deep and persistent reasons. Meanwhile, if in fact some currently homeless people are capable of thriving under conditions of lower rent, getting them into those conditions where they actually exist today could be cheap and cost-effective. A corporate relocation package is like $5,000, and a permanent BMR unit is like $500,000-$1m. It's orders of magnitude. I would love to see someone do the RCT. Even if the success rate is low, let's help the people we can help. Hell, I'll pay for a few out of pocket.

But I doubt it would get past an ethics committee, and if it did there would be a huge scandal. We're pretty deeply committed that the huddled masses of the world must be housed within SF. Even as we're equally deeply committed that they not exist at any particular site within SF, and won't contemplate anywhere near the unit counts (from a budget perspective or a permitting perspective) that would be required.

[0] https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing

One note on this: the primary way that the U.S. system differs from the rest of the world is in the average length of sentence. At any given moment we have more people in prison because the people we put in prison stay there longer, not simply because we put more people in prison.

A startling fact: if you released every person in prison on a drug charge the U.S. it would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is both because the reality is that the U.S. has a lot of violence and because we tend to issue very long sentences for violent criminals. This is a good thread that covers some of this: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/1376971131039666177

The article I pulled that link from is also very good, but it might be only for subscribers (I'm not sure). This is that article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/mass-incarceration

It covers a whole bunch of stuff that's relevant to this thread -- what kind of people are in prison, what kinds of crimes did they commit, what works to deter crime, why do we have such a high incarceration rate, what effect does policing have on crime, are longer sentences a deterrent, and so on -- and I'm tempted to quote it at length, but I think the best thing I can do is just link it and leave it at that.