4 ms·

No, the article is invalidating people who hold an existing position. "The increase in murders is not a liberal cities problem but a national problem." It'd be

No, the article is invalidating people who hold an existing position. "The increase in murders is not a liberal cities problem but a national problem." It'd be even more convincing if they were able to solve all murder cases and prevent murder from ever happening again, but setting the bar there in order to recognize that a false narrative is not actually supported by the data is an unreasonable standard.

giantg2 5y ago
If that's what they are doing, then wouldn't the best thing for the article to do is show murder rates for the cities in a state, grouped by political leadership, as compared to each group as well as to the state rate? I mean, I could play devils advocate here and say that the reason the 1# state (LA at 12) is so high is that the cities drag up the state rate (top three cities have rates over 30 with Democrat leadership). I'm not saying that validates Republican positions, but the article certainly doesn't refute this. If that's the goal of the article, then it needs to provide the proper argument to invalidate that. Otherwise it seems like it's just obscuring the conversation through what is essentially a strawman argument (in the context of the liberal cities crime/murder argument that its targeting).
- cbsmith 5y ago
  I'm not going to defend the quality of the analysis, but I'm not sure where the "LA as #1 at 12" is coming from. In the article LA's per capita murder rate is 15.79 per 100,000, and it's #2. In general though, to support your devil's advocate thesis, you'd expect the states with the largest percentage of the population residing in urban areas would be the states with the highest murder rates. That would not be MS, LA, KY, AL and MO. So if the urban population is causal, you'd have to explain why the top states aren't NY, NJ, CA, MA, and NV. Perhaps there's a case to be made that urban Democratic leadership mixed with Republican state and Federal leadership was the problem, but that seems like a pretty complex relationship to establish, and doesn't align with the narrative.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Hmm, did they change the link? The article looks different and more in-depth than the first time I read it. I got those numbers from a separate article because I didn't see those in the original. Not necessarily the urban population, but the cities are the focus of the claim. HUD usually characterizes urban at the county level. This doesn't necessarily match with the cities themselves. This is especially true in suburbs. I live in an "urban" county and yet my county doesn't have a large city and I have corn fields around me. It's all because there are a lot of suburbs in the county with two small cities (and a bulk of the murders happen in the smaller, disadvantaged one). I believe that socioeconomic factors, oversimplified and summarized in my mind as a loss of hope (hope for a decent job, hope for a better life, hope to be respected/valued) are the main drivers. The claim is not that party leadership is responsible for crime, but that the policies can exacerbate it. And I don't see policies looked at here (or anywhere really). So I believe both sides are wrong. I think it's wrong that Fox is blaming it all on Democrat policies. I think this article is also wrong for implying that policies are not a factor, focusing on only murders and states (crime in general has been a complaint not just murders, and cities were called out not states), no explanation or investigation was performed into why anomalies exists, and some of the wording seems to be misleading (why use Trump instead of governor's who actually set policy, a 90ish% increase in WY... still at the low end under 4, etc). So I feel that both sides are disconnected from what the other side is actually saying, that everyone overpoliticizes stuff like this, and that we focus so much on trying to disprove the other side (which doesn't actually happen if we misunderstand the argument we attack) that we are distracting from proving our own.
    - cbsmith 5y ago
      > I think this article is also wrong for implying that policies are not a factor I think that's a misread of the article. I think what it is showing is that partisan leadership, and the policies that flow with it, don't have the causal relationship that the narrative claims (which shows that the narrative is fictional/hypothetical). At the very least, the narrative does not explain the national trend, which one would think ought to be our focus. I don't think anyone, including the author of the article, thinks there is no connection between policies and aggregate crime outcomes. It's hard to imagine there wouldn't be. There's mostly disagreement about the size of the impact and which policies have which impact. You're right, there's been no explanation or investigation by the author about anomalies. That's a rather higher bar than the false narrative.

giantg2 5y ago

If that's what they are doing, then wouldn't the best thing for the article to do is show murder rates for the cities in a state, grouped by political leadership, as compared to each group as well as to the state rate? I mean, I could play devils advocate here and say that the reason the 1# state (LA at 12) is so high is that the cities drag up the state rate (top three cities have rates over 30 with Democrat leadership). I'm not saying that validates Republican positions, but the article certainly doesn't refute this. If that's the goal of the article, then it needs to provide the proper argument to invalidate that. Otherwise it seems like it's just obscuring the conversation through what is essentially a strawman argument (in the context of the liberal cities crime/murder argument that its targeting).

cbsmith 5y ago
I'm not going to defend the quality of the analysis, but I'm not sure where the "LA as #1 at 12" is coming from. In the article LA's per capita murder rate is 15.79 per 100,000, and it's #2. In general though, to support your devil's advocate thesis, you'd expect the states with the largest percentage of the population residing in urban areas would be the states with the highest murder rates. That would not be MS, LA, KY, AL and MO. So if the urban population is causal, you'd have to explain why the top states aren't NY, NJ, CA, MA, and NV. Perhaps there's a case to be made that urban Democratic leadership mixed with Republican state and Federal leadership was the problem, but that seems like a pretty complex relationship to establish, and doesn't align with the narrative.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Hmm, did they change the link? The article looks different and more in-depth than the first time I read it. I got those numbers from a separate article because I didn't see those in the original. Not necessarily the urban population, but the cities are the focus of the claim. HUD usually characterizes urban at the county level. This doesn't necessarily match with the cities themselves. This is especially true in suburbs. I live in an "urban" county and yet my county doesn't have a large city and I have corn fields around me. It's all because there are a lot of suburbs in the county with two small cities (and a bulk of the murders happen in the smaller, disadvantaged one). I believe that socioeconomic factors, oversimplified and summarized in my mind as a loss of hope (hope for a decent job, hope for a better life, hope to be respected/valued) are the main drivers. The claim is not that party leadership is responsible for crime, but that the policies can exacerbate it. And I don't see policies looked at here (or anywhere really). So I believe both sides are wrong. I think it's wrong that Fox is blaming it all on Democrat policies. I think this article is also wrong for implying that policies are not a factor, focusing on only murders and states (crime in general has been a complaint not just murders, and cities were called out not states), no explanation or investigation was performed into why anomalies exists, and some of the wording seems to be misleading (why use Trump instead of governor's who actually set policy, a 90ish% increase in WY... still at the low end under 4, etc). So I feel that both sides are disconnected from what the other side is actually saying, that everyone overpoliticizes stuff like this, and that we focus so much on trying to disprove the other side (which doesn't actually happen if we misunderstand the argument we attack) that we are distracting from proving our own.
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    > I think this article is also wrong for implying that policies are not a factor I think that's a misread of the article. I think what it is showing is that partisan leadership, and the policies that flow with it, don't have the causal relationship that the narrative claims (which shows that the narrative is fictional/hypothetical). At the very least, the narrative does not explain the national trend, which one would think ought to be our focus. I don't think anyone, including the author of the article, thinks there is no connection between policies and aggregate crime outcomes. It's hard to imagine there wouldn't be. There's mostly disagreement about the size of the impact and which policies have which impact. You're right, there's been no explanation or investigation by the author about anomalies. That's a rather higher bar than the false narrative.