Links – 03/05/2017

  • After I published my post the racial disparity in incarceration rates, someone recommended this piece by Adolph Reed, which is absolutely excellent. I think it’s exactly what a consistent and intelligent progressive should say about this.
  • The pharmaceutical industry is apparently fighting against Trump’s plan to downsize the FDA. It’s as if powerful corporations liked big regulatory agencies because they can be captured… I plan to write about regulatory capture at some point.
  • The Brookings Institution has published few informative pieces about the Republican corporate tax reform plan. I don’t really have a view about this, but I thought this was interesting and that I should share it.
  • The European version of Politico has published a profile of Geert Wilders that you may want to read if you don’t really know who he is and want to understand what’s going on in the Netherlands where the elections are taking place soon.
  • Tino Sanandaji, the brother of Nima Sanadaji whose book I recently discussed, wrote a very good piece on crime in Sweden and its relationship to immigration.

6 thoughts

  1. I agree the National Review piece on crime in Sweden is very good. One minor nitpick. The article says:

    “the reporting implies there has been a large crime wave brought about by the recent migration crisis. This is misleading.”

    While it’s true that some right-wing reporting exaggerates the level of crime in Sweden, I do think it’s probable that the 2015 European migrant crisis caused a significant spike in the number of sex crimes in the country.

    The NTU survey itself reports the following numbers of victims of sexual assault for the last 10 years:

    2005 – 64k, 2006 – 54k, 2007 – 52k, 2008 – 56k, 2009 – 67k, 2010 – 54k, 2011 – 52k, 2012 – 62k, 2013 – 98k, 2014 – 76k, 2015 – 129k

    Given this, as well as the fact that migrants have been responsible for hundreds of sex-related crimes during events such as New Year’s Eve celebrations across various European cities, I think it’s not a stretch to suspect the recent rise in sex assaults may have something to do with the migration crisis.

  2. The problem with Sanandaji’s approach is that he equates exaggeration by Trump with outright deception by the Swedish establishment. That kind of false moral equivalence is a recipe for political quietude.

    That said, political quietude is a Scandinavian tradition, and their political history, though banal and meaningless, is not unhappy, which is more than most countries can say.

    1. Yeah, I agree that it’s a false equivalency. Trump was just being his ridiculous self, but what the Swedish political elites are doing is actually much worse.

  3. Adolph Reed Jr. really is one of the sharpest left intellectuals right now. I was actually also going to recommend that piece, as well as this one, which is a more general critique of “antiracism” as it figures in contemporary American left-liberal politics.

    1. Thanks, I’ll read this later. I already put his 1999 (I think) book, which looks great, in my Amazon basket. The article I talk about in that post basically convinced me that there was still a small corner of the American left that wasn’t completely hopeless. It’s one of the best things I have read in a very long time. I can’t believe it took me so long to find out about this guy.

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