(12-06-2020, 08:02 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I would emphasize the difference between a scientific and a political world view. To a scientist, a flaw in a theory, observations of reality not matching what is observed, is an opportunity to refine the theory. If you have a political world view, your politics define how you see the world and what goals you seek. If the facts oppose the theory, you disregard the facts.
Political science is an oxymoron. If the statistical evidence refutes a pet theory, then genuine science requires that one either cast out or revise the pet theory. A few decades ago it was a common myth among liberals that crime was the result of oppression and poverty.. and the rage that one could reasonably expect by people who have experienced far too much for their delicate sensibilities. Maybe some who saw the connection between poverty (a result of limited opportunity and genuine hardships) saw the connection between poverty and crime and thought something like "there but for the Grace of God go I".
Crime was not a conscious choice; it was a consequence of what The Man (white oppressors) did, and not personal choices. Studies of offenders and non-offenders since showed:
1. Criminal offenses are strongly linked to personality types that might consign people to criminal ways of life: borderline personalities and pathological narcissism, extremist ideologies, and of course sociopathy and psychopathy.
2. The criminals were a small subset of the population, but the offenders did huge numbers of crimes. The rate of solving some crimes (burglary) is so low that burglars are typically arrested for some other offense that is easier to solve (like rape). Burglars are often rapists, so burglars are often caught for rape; in the event that rape can't be proved in a court of law, then maybe burglary can. Most offenders are one-person crime waves.
3. Plenty of people in even the poorest locations are non-offenders. Many people in the most impoverished locations choose honest work, even the most humiliating and most exploitative (like domestic service) and follow the rigid rules that their employers establish. People can adapt to extreme inequality (which may be the result of privileged narcissists and sociopaths setting the rules as political figures, which is itself a different story. Many people thoroughly hate their lives but do not lash out at Humanity as a whole for institutional abuse and economic exploitation. Some people take the necessary and appropriate response to such: rebellion against exploitation and abuse.
4. Borderline personalities and sociopaths can come from non-poor families. Such people are often headed down the social scale because middle-class life depends heavily upon emotional stability and because sociopaths are usually bad news in business. (Sociopaths might be effective salespeople, but they create trouble by misrepresenting merchandise, embezzling money, padding expense accounts, cheating on taxes, and other such malignant behavior). Such people as Ted "Unabom" Kaczynski and abortionist-assassin Paul Hill, cannibal Geoffrey Dahmer, Scott Peterson, and the Enron crew came from middle-class backgrounds. Some of the nastiest of Holocaust perpetrators in central Europe came from aristocratic families who had all of the advantages.
Donald Trump may have been deprived of something in childhood, like genuine love (not the buy-a-kid-out-of-trouble sort) and firm direction, but the more we see of him the more of us see a monster devoid of empathy, loyalty, fairness, and respect for those who disagree. (See how I respond to Classic X'er: I see that he has some problems, and that his dealings with the defeat of his idol Donald Trump fits the Kubler-Ross model of grief. I have been there on literal deaths and I figure that his attitude to the defeat of Donald Trump is similar to my response to his seemingly-impossible victory).
Oh, character is everything? Well, maybe there are physical causes and family dynamics, and poverty certainly makes raising children far more difficult. But not impossible! I've met migrant farm workers who live in poverty and economic insecurity... and I would trust them far more than I would trust meth fiends with the care of children. It helps that lead has been removed from gasoline and is no longer available in residential paint (environmental lead causes learning difficulties and a loss of impulse control, both of which have legitimate connections to criminality. "Character" may have gone out of fashion as something hard to define, and the character appropriate for getting along as a servant and for being an executive are very different. Class is real in what is now one of the most economically-polarized societies in the world. Economic inequality in America has approached levels characteristic of plantation societies, military dictatorships, and almost those countries in which some royal family owns the oil resources that are the primary source of national income, and such reflects the character of America's economic elites and the politicians that those elites want making the big decisions on our supposed behalf.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.