The conman who attempted to defraud Don Gaetz was not, as far as I can tell, a "former DOJ official." Stephen Alford is a Florida real estate developer with a history of fraud convictions. I can't find that he has any connection to the DOJ. He seems to have noticed that Matt Gaetz was under investigation for paying for sex with underage girls, and then attempted to leverage that circumstance to con Don Gaetz out of $25M.
While I'm sure the DOJ is impressively corrupt, this particular case does not seem to prove it.
The DOJ has already arrested and charged Alford for this con. Don Gaetz personally helped them to catch him by wearing a wire. The case is solved. I'm not sure why Matt Gaetz needs to run the DOJ in order to "find out exactly who did that to his dad."
Moreover, it's unclear how a sex trafficker of underage girls could possibly be qualified for any public service role. It seems irresponsible to refer to the investigation into him paying a 17 year old for statutory rape as a "sex investigation," as if this were just a scandalous liaison between consenting adults.
Similar comment as last time. Jeff lacks appropriate skepticism about data. The previous batch of data was revised upward while people weren't paying close attention. He didn't bother to address that.
Also, the FBI data on Chicago alone was short 118 murders relative to Chicago's data.
When a known liar tells you something (the FBI, or Cheka) you don't have any new information. This is the same organization that had the Hunter Biden laptop story suppressed as Russian disinformation while having had said laptop in their possession for a year and having verified it. Between DEI incompetence and a culture of lying, why should anything they say be taken at face value? Again, they miscounted Chicago murders versus the number of murders Chicago reported by 118. Their explanation is BS.
His weak attempt to address the discrepancy in various ways (UCR vs NCVS) crime can be estimated eliminates any trust in his work for me. If you don't know why two measurements of the same thing vastly uncorrelated but assume its fine when they resume correlation at some time in the future, you don't understand how to analyze data.
I've attempted to pick apart your stats previously and could never find a problem. You've noted how the numbers don't support your previously assumed beliefs in the past. That makes your work trustworthy. He fails that test. That makes me assume he would cherry pick data and manipulate it to support his beliefs. No trust=I don't care what he says.
If the trends line up with CDC WONDER then I don't see how the trend could be wrong, since the CDC WONDER data comes through a completely different channel. I think that comparison is solid, and it's why I believe his work.
CDC Wonder is not mentioned in the article. I'm not a crime expert. I am pretty good at spotting BS. Justification for the FBI's 118 missing Chicago murders has not been addressed in a meaningful way. I don't believe people that have been caught manipulating or mishandling data. The 2022 revised data showed crime up, not down. I'll wait for revised numbers.
Crime might be up, it might be down. As to murders, I would not be shocked if it's true murders are down. Many of the people murdered are murderers. But, when the FBI numbers are off by 10-19% relative to localities records, the claimed 11.6% decrease seems irrelevant.
Quoting from WT:
"According to the MCCA data, Chicago ended last year with 617 killings, compared to the 499 documented by the FBI.
Dallas saw 292 killings, while the FBI recorded 242. Baltimore suffered 260 homicides in the MCCA data, but 233 in the FBI’s numbers."
That's 195 missing murders in just 3 cities out of the 2500 decrease. Murder may not really be down 11.6%...
To not address these discrepancies makes his work untrustworthy to me. I don't claim expertise here, but if it takes 5 minutes to find major problems with the headline that the author does not bother to address, I don't care what he has to say.
My eternal exhortation to members of the ideological camp that advocates "noble lies" (that is, the Left) is "scrutinize your sources". They never do, of course, and their arguments suffer accordingly. I read the article purporting to show a decline in violent crime, and it does not address the oft-mentioned criticisms of the data sources cited.
I'm not worried about teaching them to be better. I do wonder whether the reporting of obvious untruth has it roots in stupidity and gullibility from being in a cult, or the belief that much of the population is dumb enough to buy it. I think it's 90/10 with the 90 on the side of believing the citizenry has been that foolish.
I catch people on the right pushing nonsense too, but it's less of a "one voice" thing and reflects individual ignorance and stupidity, maybe a desire to be "interesting." Tucker Carlson agreeing that Winston Churchill was the biggest villain of WWII seems like a great example of nonsense from someone on the right. A couple things like that put someone on my list of "untrustworthy." After that, they have to be entertaining to be listened to or read.
"HWFO opined in July of this year that Kamala Harris was in fact plenty qualified to be Vice President, compared to prior VPs, despite red tribe cries to the contrary."
"Qualified" is the wrong word.
Rather, it should be put differently: "To whom is Harris preferable?"
As far as I can judge, it does not compare like-for-like. On the one side, you have speeding camera tickets, which obviously can only track speeding violations. On the other, you have any traffic stop, which can charitably be for any kind of traffic violation and non-charitably may even include any kind of stop for non-traffic violations. I've scoured the paper whether they've tried to limit the police stop data to speeding violations specifically or at least adjust in any way for this, but there is no mention at all, which imo should make one very cautious.
In other words, the paper does not remotely show what it purports to show. The implied interpretation of the data as being evidence of discrimination is about as presumptuous - if not more so - as claiming it is evidence that blacks engage in more non-speeding traffic violations, or as evidence that blacks engage in more non-traffic crime that leads to them being stopped.
Edit: Also, the goodhart's law article is a nice idea about something that can possibly be a problem, but he offers no evidence whatsoever that it's currently a large problem, and his examples (which he even himself admits are "possibly facile") do not increase my trust in his judgement. The problem with "no child left behind" wasn't measuring performance, it was that the idea that bad student performance was entirely a function of the state failing the student. Likewise, poverty is only a problem of capitalism if you define it by deviation from a mean or median, which is nonsensical but unfortunately quite popular.
If anything, I'd argue we optimize less than ever and are becoming less efficient at it. My nephew's school stopped giving marks entirely. A professor with which I'm working on a university course literally told when discussing the exam "Why should we let anybody fail? We'll let them pass later in the oral exam anyway." As the article right above it explains, anti-meritocratic structures are conquering our institutions. It feels like an article on drowning, read on a desert planet.
The conman who attempted to defraud Don Gaetz was not, as far as I can tell, a "former DOJ official." Stephen Alford is a Florida real estate developer with a history of fraud convictions. I can't find that he has any connection to the DOJ. He seems to have noticed that Matt Gaetz was under investigation for paying for sex with underage girls, and then attempted to leverage that circumstance to con Don Gaetz out of $25M.
While I'm sure the DOJ is impressively corrupt, this particular case does not seem to prove it.
The DOJ has already arrested and charged Alford for this con. Don Gaetz personally helped them to catch him by wearing a wire. The case is solved. I'm not sure why Matt Gaetz needs to run the DOJ in order to "find out exactly who did that to his dad."
Moreover, it's unclear how a sex trafficker of underage girls could possibly be qualified for any public service role. It seems irresponsible to refer to the investigation into him paying a 17 year old for statutory rape as a "sex investigation," as if this were just a scandalous liaison between consenting adults.
Why summarize the situation the way you did?
Similar comment as last time. Jeff lacks appropriate skepticism about data. The previous batch of data was revised upward while people weren't paying close attention. He didn't bother to address that.
https://nypost.com/2024/10/19/opinion/fbi-update-proves-donald-trump-was-right-on-rising-crime/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/sep/26/fbi-crime-data-undercounts-killings-in-chicago-oth/
Also, the FBI data on Chicago alone was short 118 murders relative to Chicago's data.
When a known liar tells you something (the FBI, or Cheka) you don't have any new information. This is the same organization that had the Hunter Biden laptop story suppressed as Russian disinformation while having had said laptop in their possession for a year and having verified it. Between DEI incompetence and a culture of lying, why should anything they say be taken at face value? Again, they miscounted Chicago murders versus the number of murders Chicago reported by 118. Their explanation is BS.
His weak attempt to address the discrepancy in various ways (UCR vs NCVS) crime can be estimated eliminates any trust in his work for me. If you don't know why two measurements of the same thing vastly uncorrelated but assume its fine when they resume correlation at some time in the future, you don't understand how to analyze data.
I've attempted to pick apart your stats previously and could never find a problem. You've noted how the numbers don't support your previously assumed beliefs in the past. That makes your work trustworthy. He fails that test. That makes me assume he would cherry pick data and manipulate it to support his beliefs. No trust=I don't care what he says.
The TCF article... thanks for the introduction.
If the trends line up with CDC WONDER then I don't see how the trend could be wrong, since the CDC WONDER data comes through a completely different channel. I think that comparison is solid, and it's why I believe his work.
CDC Wonder is not mentioned in the article. I'm not a crime expert. I am pretty good at spotting BS. Justification for the FBI's 118 missing Chicago murders has not been addressed in a meaningful way. I don't believe people that have been caught manipulating or mishandling data. The 2022 revised data showed crime up, not down. I'll wait for revised numbers.
Crime might be up, it might be down. As to murders, I would not be shocked if it's true murders are down. Many of the people murdered are murderers. But, when the FBI numbers are off by 10-19% relative to localities records, the claimed 11.6% decrease seems irrelevant.
Quoting from WT:
"According to the MCCA data, Chicago ended last year with 617 killings, compared to the 499 documented by the FBI.
Dallas saw 292 killings, while the FBI recorded 242. Baltimore suffered 260 homicides in the MCCA data, but 233 in the FBI’s numbers."
That's 195 missing murders in just 3 cities out of the 2500 decrease. Murder may not really be down 11.6%...
To not address these discrepancies makes his work untrustworthy to me. I don't claim expertise here, but if it takes 5 minutes to find major problems with the headline that the author does not bother to address, I don't care what he has to say.
My eternal exhortation to members of the ideological camp that advocates "noble lies" (that is, the Left) is "scrutinize your sources". They never do, of course, and their arguments suffer accordingly. I read the article purporting to show a decline in violent crime, and it does not address the oft-mentioned criticisms of the data sources cited.
A larger rejoinder: https://principlesvstribes.substack.com/p/behind-the-glass-lies-damned-lies
I'm not worried about teaching them to be better. I do wonder whether the reporting of obvious untruth has it roots in stupidity and gullibility from being in a cult, or the belief that much of the population is dumb enough to buy it. I think it's 90/10 with the 90 on the side of believing the citizenry has been that foolish.
I catch people on the right pushing nonsense too, but it's less of a "one voice" thing and reflects individual ignorance and stupidity, maybe a desire to be "interesting." Tucker Carlson agreeing that Winston Churchill was the biggest villain of WWII seems like a great example of nonsense from someone on the right. A couple things like that put someone on my list of "untrustworthy." After that, they have to be entertaining to be listened to or read.
"HWFO opined in July of this year that Kamala Harris was in fact plenty qualified to be Vice President, compared to prior VPs, despite red tribe cries to the contrary."
"Qualified" is the wrong word.
Rather, it should be put differently: "To whom is Harris preferable?"
A comment on the black traffic stops study:
As far as I can judge, it does not compare like-for-like. On the one side, you have speeding camera tickets, which obviously can only track speeding violations. On the other, you have any traffic stop, which can charitably be for any kind of traffic violation and non-charitably may even include any kind of stop for non-traffic violations. I've scoured the paper whether they've tried to limit the police stop data to speeding violations specifically or at least adjust in any way for this, but there is no mention at all, which imo should make one very cautious.
In other words, the paper does not remotely show what it purports to show. The implied interpretation of the data as being evidence of discrimination is about as presumptuous - if not more so - as claiming it is evidence that blacks engage in more non-speeding traffic violations, or as evidence that blacks engage in more non-traffic crime that leads to them being stopped.
Edit: Also, the goodhart's law article is a nice idea about something that can possibly be a problem, but he offers no evidence whatsoever that it's currently a large problem, and his examples (which he even himself admits are "possibly facile") do not increase my trust in his judgement. The problem with "no child left behind" wasn't measuring performance, it was that the idea that bad student performance was entirely a function of the state failing the student. Likewise, poverty is only a problem of capitalism if you define it by deviation from a mean or median, which is nonsensical but unfortunately quite popular.
If anything, I'd argue we optimize less than ever and are becoming less efficient at it. My nephew's school stopped giving marks entirely. A professor with which I'm working on a university course literally told when discussing the exam "Why should we let anybody fail? We'll let them pass later in the oral exam anyway." As the article right above it explains, anti-meritocratic structures are conquering our institutions. It feels like an article on drowning, read on a desert planet.