https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1985417708079321124
This is not going to be a post about race or Black people. Please have a little patience while I get to its actual point.
For several decades there was a taboo in the major media against showing mugshots of Black criminals or even mentioning the race of a non-white offender in text.
Recently - quite recently, like since about 2022 - I've noticed that this taboo seems to have disintegrated. I think I've figured out why.
Cheap surveillance cameras are what did it, I think. There's been such a flood of video evidence of Black street crime that it has broken containment.
I understand the impulse behind that containment. Media gatekeepers thought of it as virtuous anti-racism. But yesterday it occurred to me that the long-term effects of having this taboo collapse may go beyond what we normally think of as racial issues.
The laws and customs of modern liberal democracies are built on the assumption that everybody in them is basically peaceful and has low time preference. Of course we all know that some people aren't, but we're accustomed to thinking of violent and impulsive behavior as something we have pushed to the margins of society and can relatively easily suppress.
Ubiquitous video challenges this assumption. It's just too easy now to find documentary evidence of lots of stupidity and violence, not as dry text but as visual immediacy in motion.
We've all seen the video of Iryna Zarutska being stabbed to death. I'm not claiming this video is what broke the containment, because I think it happened a few years sooner. But it is an index of the new reality. There's no going back from this.
One immediate result is that "anti-racist" gatekeeping now looks pointless. So incentives have flipped, and media now shrugs and uses Black mugshots as clickbait.
Downstream, I think the classical-liberal assumption that human beings other than children and obvious mental defectives are universally competent to be equals in a free society is now under an unprecedented kind of pressure.
As a libertarian, I'm unhappy about this. It's not good for my normative political desires. It's more difficult to argue for liberty when there are not simply individuals but identifiable large classes of people that are morally incompetent.
Ubiquitous video is giving us that identifiable large class. I think this is a more corrosive problem than a simple resurgence of racism would be.
How do you argue against aristocracy when there's a lower class that really is violent and stupid, and we're immersed in moving evidence of this?
This is my real point. Congratulations to anybody who persisted long enough to get here.
I don't have a facile answer to this question. I do think it's important for everybody who loves liberty to start thinking about it.
https://x.com/esrtweet/status/1985422270114750703
That doesn't follow from my mainpost. Nobody ever thought libertarianism collapses because children exist!
What we need to think about carefully is the boundaries of who can be in the game. At the limit, we're back to an aristocratic society.
Another way of putting this is that libertarianism may be an aristocratic idea that mistakes itself for a universalism.