Scott Alexander

Horse feces and flies instead of litter and graffiti.

People crowded ten to a tenement apartment instead of sharing the subway with a boombox guy.

Tobacco smoke everywhere, including restaurants and fancy hotels, instead of marijuana smoke everywhere.

Crime that looked like picaresque stabbings in bordellos or gunfights at saloons by characters with names like Thomas Piper, the belfry butcher, and Sarah Jane Robinson, the poison fiend, rather than insert various descriptions that would get me cancelled for racism.

We look for our current problems in the past and cannot find them, then romanticise the problems the past really had.

Many people complained that by talking about crime yesterday, I was distracting from the rise in disorder.

Probably people will complain today that by talking about littering and graffiti and so on, I'm distracting from some other kind of disorder, which is definitely increasing.

Maybe open-air drug markets or tent cities or the boomboxes.

That's fine.

But as I said when arguing with you in the comments, I think the following two statements are importantly different.

One, littering, graffiti, and most violent and property crimes are down, but tent encampments and boombox playing are up.

Shoplifting is stable nationally, but that could hide local variation.

As some areas gentrify and others worsen, there are shifts in who experiences these problems, and the well-off, highly literate white people who set the national conversation are getting more exposed to them.

Two, crime and disorder are rampant, nobody feels safe anymore, cities are falling apart, and the police don't care.

The West has fallen.

My goal isn't to deny anyone's lived experience, nor to discount the importance of solving these problems.

I support the death penalty for boombox carriers.

It's to push back against the sort of revolt-of-the-public-esque sense that everything is worse than it's ever been before, and society is collapsing, and maybe we should take the authoritarian bargain to stop it.

On an emotional level, I feel this too.

I can't go downtown without feeling it.