Just as easy maybe, but fundamentally incorrect. Its mechanism of action is killing people -- choosing to believe the claim that killing those people will save lives alters neither the purpose nor MO of the tool.
The goal of the mechanism is to kill fewer people than other available methods.
Tools are, simply put, devices that increase a user's leverage.
We live in a world full of tools capable of leveraging against life. We also live in a world with individuals and groups who - for whatever reasons - choose to use that leverage.
We can't get rid of tools like this. They are very straightforward inventions, especially as technical knowledge increases. The simplest nuclear fission reactor is a bomb. That does not make nuclear fission fundamentally worthless, and whether you agree that knowledge about it is a "good" or not, that knowledge is not going to simply disappear.
> choosing to believe the claim that killing those people will save lives alters neither the purpose nor MO of the tool.
How a tool is used does not change what it is or what it does. It does, however, define the purpose. If the purpose of killing someone is to prevent that individual from taking another life - or several other lives - then the purpose of the tool used is to save lives. The goal for perfecting a tool that is to be used for that purpose is to minimize the amount of lives taken, and damage done. That means a "better" bomb takes fewer lives, saving more.
If you choose to believe that an individual taking action against the life of another has not forfeit his/her own right to live, then you might consider this tool to have no legitimate purpose. Frankly, I disagree, and hope you will reconsider.
I don't see anything in the page you linked that would qualify him as a "left-wing economist". Neither supporting an openly capitalist political party nor providing theoretical underpinnings for financial deregulation qualify as "leftism".
When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”
What this guy's analysis fails to account for is that power matters, smart people coming up with solutions for "mistakes" (whether "hard" or "easy") is necessary, but not sufficient. The question is, and has only ever been, which is to be master -- who has the power?
It's possible -- I'm not a regular reader of his blog, and thus might be missing stylistic cues, or other occluded methods of admitting a failing. The only thing I read him admit to is that he's less sure of himself than before. Likewise, "Right now I think conflict theory is probably a less helpful way of viewing the world in general than mistake theory" doesn't quite express the idea that "these two theories actually address vastly differing questions that I and the rest of 'respectable' society have been conditioned to conflate". (edit) To clarify: how to obtain power (conflict theory) vs how to effectively wield power (mistake theory)
Yeah, that's a reasonable criticism. I read your first comment as suggesting he didn't recognise conflict theory as existing.
My instinct is also to characterise the theories in a similar way. I'd describe it as how things ought to be (mistake theory) vs how to achieve that (conflict theory), but I guess that's kind of the same thing you're saying.
However, I'm not sure you can entirely separate these theories though. A mistake can be creating a society which encourages power imbalances, and a consequence of power imbalances can be societies that are less able to notice certain mistakes.
Re: your last paragraph, it seems to me that the question of "who wields power" will always have material priority -- one of the benefits of power is deciding what is and isn't a "mistake". Look at climate change -- no amount of scientific consensus or popular belief-that-it-is-a-mistake has succeeded in constraining those people whose activities are driving it (I'm speaking not just of DJT's recent escapades in pulling the US from the Paris deal, but the insufficiency of Paris itself). This is power. No amount of problem-identifying/solving has (or will) convince the captains of industry that maintaining their current economic growth targets is less preferable than making vast swaths of the earth less hospitable to life.
Yes, making a criminal - who has committed a crime, been convicted and sentenced to jail time - do work is not equivalent - morally or otherwise - to racialized slavery.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
What if the policies can be shown that a distinct criminalization was made to expressly target a specific demographic? Or what if we can show that health and infant mortality trends mirrors that of the 18060's map of slave county census? We have more than a smoking gun - we have the blood spatter and the bullet, and the gun in the person's hands still smoking. 150 years later, and it's still going strong.
BTW, how's that water upgrade going on in Flint, MI? I'll give you a hint: they're a bunch of black people who live there. It's already out of the news.
>--Lee Atwater, 54th Chairman of the Republican National Committee
I highly recommend you listen to that entire interview to understand why it's important. He said it while he was a campaign strategist for Reagan and was talking about historical campaign strategies of the 50s and 60s.
I agree but I think this a more recent development. Specifically as ISIS has been driven out of a number of oil fields in the North of Iraq and lost that oil as a source of funding.
I think the "idolatry smashing" propaganda videos are more selective now as ISIS needs to rely more on the sales of those artifacts for funding due the loss of the oil.
> Before we talk about Harvard grads destroying the eocnomy, lets talk about making it less and less likely for 75% of the people imprisoned to ever be able to contribute to society once they are released.
