The US has a different kind of democratic tradition. Some will say they're more democratic, but I think it has a lot to do with the "winner takes all" principle vs. "proportional representation". Deep down inside, it's what a significant chunk of the population wants: "as long as there are still people whom I can't identify with out there breaking the rules, we're still not tough enough on crime". The largest group is the one that gets represented, and doesn't have to share power.

I notice a clear difference between cultures in how this is perceived is in the view with respect to good, evil and punishment in general. I think in Scandinavia in general people don't really believe in good and evil, at least not in the American sense. We don't divide the world into good guys and bad guys.

All the way back to Viking times Scandinavians have practices much milder punishment than the Anglo-Saxons. It might be a Germanic thing. The dutch also were much milder than the British historically. In fact the english seemed almost offended in the 1700s by how mild punishment was in the Netherlands.

I think anglo-saxons have simply been conditioned more strongly to desire revenge and retribution.

I remember how relatives from the US visited a central European capital, and were surprised how little diversity they saw. To them Hungarians, Germans, Slovenes, Poles, Russians, Turks, Roma, Bulgarians, Greeks etc seemed all pretty much the same. I remember how I first visited a couple of north American major cities and was surprised how little diversity i saw. To me they seemed all pretty much the same.

However, more to the point: why do you believe that all retribution is necessarily unjust? That's too broad a stroke and I think the problem has to do with modern sensibilities and also with semantics, i.e., words like "retribution" have taken on very narrow and pejorative meanings. Naturally, there are instances of retribution that are evil. These are instances of cruelty motivated by pride (understood as vice) and hatred of the other, or ones which are excessively harsh in relation to the crime committed. However, not all retribution is of such a nature, and indeed inadequate or deficient punishment is evil and unjust.

Of course, we cannot know absolutely what motivates a jury or a judge, but these are third parties that ideally have no personal stake in the matter and thus not as susceptible to acting out of hatred for the offender. If the punishment is on par with the crime committed and is done out of a desire for justice, a desire to reform the offender (when applicable) and with the preservation of the juridico-social order, then there is no issue with retribution. Indeed, it is in this case a virtuous thing.

Are you including the blood eagle in that comparison :)

It got a new height with the 'Durchsetzungsinitiative', a popular initiative we get to vote on in a month. It wants to enforce the result of the popular initiative on the (automatic) deportation of foreign criminals which got accepted by 52.3 of voters (and 17.5 of cantons) in 2010. The party behind both says that the governement and parlamental chambers are stalling the implementation of the initiative and do not adhere to its meaning hence the second one (which says they have to do the original one word by word).

The stuff happily ignores some principles of the law like proportionality, higher up international law and such.

Yeah, the combination of the so called cuddle justice and foreigners has been proven to work very good to get votes here (works even better now with more refugees).

The general reaction to this situation is to trust this newcomer more than the establishment, since he had the guts to reveal the big lie. (This is a logical fallacy, but emotionally it's awesome.)

The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Witness the attempts by various politicians to sweep Cologne under the rug, for example, or removing ethnicity from crime statistics in Sweden. It's hard to keep a problem like this completely under wraps; eventually something like Cologne will hit the internets and eventually the media won't be able to ignore it.

If you want a left wing solution to the problem of Muslim immigrants failing to assimilate, robbing and raping people, the left will actually need to acknowledge the problem and propose a solution. If the left continues ignoring the issue, then folks will naturally turn to the racist right wing folks who seem to be proposing solutions rather than lying about the problem.

(Note: don't interpret my criticism of the European left as support for the racist right. And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Obviously not from Sweden...)

However I agree the biggest problem right now in Europe is the left wing not actually recognizing the problem expect in a few countries (Denmark being one of them)

Only then will it be possible to look at the problem and come up with alternatives to what the far right is proposing (which is basically we are just going to send them all home)

Could you quantify how severe you see those problems as being, how they're lied about, and what sort of solution you think might be possible?

My impression (as a leftish European, so discount it as you please) is that no one denies that some Muslim immigrants commit crimes, nor indeed that some Muslim immigrants are terrorists, but that the usual lefty view is:

1. This, in itself, no more calls for action against Muslim immigrants (or against Muslim immigration) than the fact that some people with beards commit crimes calls for action against people with beards.

2. Overreaction to fear of Muslim immigrants is a bigger problem than crime committed by Muslim immigrants. (E.g., crimes with Muslim victims are commoner than crimes with Muslim perpetrators, and this sort of fear is one reason why.)

3. Accordingly, asking "what can we do to stop unassimilated Muslim immigrants killing and raping and robbing?" is a bad question in the following senses: (a) if it's the main question you're asking about relations between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, that probably means you have an unbalanced view of what's going on, and (b) asking it loudly and publicly is liable to do more harm by encouraging anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry than it does good by promoting measures that reduce crime by Muslim immigrants, and (c) actually taking the measures one might come up with when answering the questions is also liable to do more harm by making Muslims' lives harder than it does good by reducing crime.

A few notes. First: I don't know whether the parenthesis in #2 is actually correct. My impression is that it is, but I don't have all the statistics that would be needed to check. Regardless, I would guess that most of the lefty types you have in mind share my impression that it's correct. Second: something can be a bad question as in #3 but still be a question it would be good, in principle and all else being equal, to know a good answer to.

Third: appreciating the European-lefty mindset on this may be easier if you try replacing "what can we do about violent crime by Muslim immigrants?" with "what can we do about financial malfeasance by The One Percent?" or "what can we do about computer crime committed by evil hackers?". In all these cases, there are some actual crimes (and not-actually-criminal wrongdoings) that we'd be better without. In all these cases, people unsympathetic to the group being targetted are liable to overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat, and there are unscrupulous journalists and politicians stirring up fear to further their own agendas. In all these cases, trying to prevent those crimes and other wrongdoings runs the risk of messing with people's civil liberties. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that these cases are parallel in every respect.)

The issue is being lied about because rather than giving out stats to answer the question of how much of that 15x is due to immigrants, the Swedish authorities decided to stop tracking ethnicity of perpetrators instead. Similarly, witness the attempts by the mayor of Cologne to blame the victims and avoid disclosing the identity of the attackers. (A quick google search suggests similar incidents happened in a Stockholm music festival and other places.)

The fact is that left wing Euro politicians control access to the data and are locking it down. They also make claims like "overestimate the actual magnitude of the threat" - but if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it?

I'm not proposing any solutions. I'm not even claiming to have a solid grasp of the statistics (unlike, say, a similar discussion of US crime). If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate, by all means post stats proving me wrong. I'm only saying that it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us.

Under such circumstances, people turning to the racist right is a pretty natural thing to do. At least these guys aren't liars, and see our problems, right?

(Again, that last sentence is not my view. A quick search of my comment history will suggest that I'm pluralistic to a degree that only an extreme capitalist can be.)

If the Daily Mail published an article saying that snow is white, I would check the next winter in case I've been wrong all these years.

In the present case, even if it weren't an issue perfectly calibrated to suit the Daily Mail's preferred varieties of shit-stirring, that 15x figure should cause doubt. Those immigrants would have to be impossibly rapey, or else the previous inhabitants (even though some of them were presumably immigrants) would have to be startlingly un-rapey.

A more likely hypothesis is that something else changed; perhaps the Swedish authorities changed where they draw the boundaries between rape and other sexual assaults? Or perhaps some procedural change has made Swedes more willing to make accusations of rape? I can think of several other hypotheses, all of them more likely than that immigration made the rate of rapes go up by 15x.

So, let's look a bit further. First of all: this comparison is between 1975 and 2014. Forty years is a long time, and many things have happened in Sweden (and everywhere else) since 1975. Why blame it on immigration? Well, because someone wants to blame it on immigration, so far as I can tell.

Well. Did Sweden change its definition of rape, or its treatment of people who report rape, or its thoroughness in collecting statistics, or anything of the sort, since 1975? Yes, apparently they did. For instance, near the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_Sweden you will find this: "Sweden reformed its sex crime legislation and made the legal definition of rape much wider in 2005, which largely explains a significant increase in the number of reported rapes in the ten-year period of 2004-2013."

And, a little further down, this: "Sweden also applies a system of expansive offence counts. Other countries may employ more restrictive methods of counting. The Swedish police registers one offence for each person raped, and if one and the same person has been raped on a number of occasions, one offence is counted for each occasion that can be specified. For example, if a woman says she has been raped by her husband every day during a year, the Swedish police may record more than 300 cases of rape."

I know you've got a data-science background. Put on your analyst's hat for a moment and think about that claim of a 15x increase. Do you really find it credible? At all?

There may indeed be lies being told about immigrants and crime. I would not advise you to assume that they're all coming from the same side.

I don't find a surge in crime relating to changing demographics implausible. In the US we have widely varying (read: 8-10x) crime rates between ethnic groups, so if our ethnic composition changed we could get significantly more crime as a result. Perhaps Sweden has similar effects. Or perhaps not; but if the data proved otherwise, why would the establishment hide it?

(Muslim immigrants do not in fact make up 20% of the population of Sweden.)

In the same sense as left-wing and right-wing politicians everywhere control access to crime data and are locking it down.

> if the data supported that claim, wouldn't they release it rather than hide it?

Let me describe for you a hypothetical world. I don't know how closely it resembles the real one. In this hypothetical world, Muslim immigrants are 2x more likely than other people to commit violent attacks such as rape, make up a small fraction of the population, and are widely hated and feared; violent attacks on Muslim immigrants are 3x more common than violent attacks by Muslim immigrants; the fear many people feel of violence from Muslim immigrants is -- if, e.g., you calibrate it against other kinds of violence they fear -- far out of proportion to their actual risk of being attacked by Muslim immigrants. So, in particular, if the public knew and understood and internalized that 2x figure, they should actually be reassured by it because the risk they face is very small; but, just as in the real world, the public in our hypothetical world don't always respond with perfect rationality.

Now imagine you are a politician (of the left or the right, I don't care), you're aware of these numbers (or have guessed at them), and you are trying to decide whether published crime statistics should break out Muslim immigrants as a separate category of offender.

I suggest that you are likely to think as follows: "If we do this, every right-wing anti-Muslim anti-immigrant group in the country is going to seize on that 2x figure and make hay with it. It will widely be taken as confirming fears that Muslim immigrants are a terrible threat to public safety. Violent attacks on Muslims will go through the roof. Lots more people will be hurt and killed, and any sort of integration will become more difficult. Which will probably lead to more crime by Muslim immigrants in the future, too. Even if by some magical process releasing those numbers made rape by Muslim immigrants completely go away, it would still lead to a lot more harm than good."

I'm not saying you'd be right to think that. Maybe actually "better more data than less data" is a universal principle that trumps everything else. Maybe releasing the numbers wouldn't really have such bad effects. Maybe it actually would somehow lead to a big decrease in crimes committed by immigrants. I don't know. But the point is that I just sketched a perfectly plausible process by which politicians might decide it's better not to publish potentially inflammatory numbers, even if those numbers indicate that anti-immigrant politicians and journalists exaggerate the actual magnitude of the threat.

> If I'm wrong and Muslim immigrants to Europe actually commit crimes at the base rate

I doubt that. I bet Muslim immigrants to Europe are, e.g., systematically somewhat poorer than the population as a whole, which would probably mean more violent crime and (e.g.) less embezzlement even if there were no cultural differences at all. I bet they drink less alcohol, which would probably mean less of some kinds of violent crime and e.g. far less DUI. Etc. I'd be astonished if there weren't all kinds of differences in the rates at which Muslim immigrants and (say) Christian multigeneration natives commit all sorts of crimes.

> it looks like there is a real problem, and it looks like it's being hidden from us.

Suppose someone has a theory that financial misconduct like fraud and embezzlement and insider trading are much more widespread among the rich than in the general population. If they point out -- correctly, so far as I know -- that official crime statistics don't break out the richest 1% of the population when reporting rates of these crimes, are they justified in saying that "there is a real problem and it's being hidden from us"?

Sure. Only recently, the German BKA released numbers [1] on crimes committed by immigrants. As you can see, until September last year, the number of immigrants (the red line in the first graph) increased faster than the number of crimes committed by immigrants (the green line in the same graph). Generally, immigrant criminality is dominated by petty offenses (shoplifting, fare evasion) and immigration-related offenses (such as forged passports). As far as nationality is concerned, immigrants from Balkan countries dominate the lists of suspects (on a per capita basis), while crime among Iraqis and (especially) Syrians appears to be disproportionately low.

Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents. Low socio-economic status alone means a higher propensity to commit crimes (and poorly integrated, low-income immigrants have been a concern since forever, whether that was Turkish guest workers [2] or the Russian-German immigrants of the 1990s [3]). But there is no evidence that Muslim immigrants are more likely to commit crime, either. In fact, technically the (predominantly Christian [4]) Balkan countries seem to be far more likely to turn out criminal immigrants.

Note further that most of the suspects in Cologne seem to belong to or be affiliated with pre-existing crime groups [5] from Morocco [6] and Algeria, people who were either there illegally or were using the refugee crisis as a cover. While these should be deported, this is difficult, because their countries refuse to take them back.

In general, traditional criminogenic factors seem to be plenty sufficient to explain immigrant crime, and that's really not all that surprising. Whereas ethnic and religious factors seem to be either sourced from anecdotes or the result of incidental correlation.

Completely separate from that is the challenge of integrating such a huge number of immigrants into German society. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that had been botched twice before; there is the language barrier, widespread skill gaps, and the difficulty of cultural acclimatization to deal with.

> The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems.

If that hypothesis of yours were correct, then in Germany, this would not just be the establishment left, but also plenty of establishment conservatives. While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened). While not exactly pogroms, far right violence has also been a persistent concern and many people still remember Solingen [7] and Rostock-Lichtenhagen [8].

I don't see anybody lying or otherwise dissembling about the problems related to integration; it is no secret that previous immigration waves were far from successful in this regard (as noted above), and nobody expects this to be a cakewalk.

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/fluechtlingskrise-bka-...

[2] Recommended reading on the situation of Turkish guest workers until the 1980s is "Lowest of the Low" ("Ganz unten") by Günther Wallraff.

[3] Poor integration led to a crime wave among young white Russians and probably helped the Russian mafia strengthen their foothold in Germany.

[4] Which, of course, has probably nothing to do with religion or nationality, either, but more with organized crime originating in Eastern Europe.

[5] http://www1.wdr.de/themen/aktuell/vorfaelle-hauptbahnhof-koe...

[6] Morocco in particular encourages emigration to Europe; it reduces unemployment and results in more cash transfers to Morocco. However, because Morocco is far from a free country, asylum requests still have to be taken seriously.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solingen_arson_attack_of_1993

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostock-Lichtenhagen_riots

1) What is the crime rate committed by Muslim immigrants, as compared to natives? (You suggest it's higher. How much higher?)

2) What's the crime rate for Muslim immigrants of low socio-economic status, compared to Germans of low socio-economic status?

3) How many additional robberies/rapes/murders/etc will result from allowing in 1000 extra immigrants? (Compute by projecting from existing crime data.)

And how much public acknowledgement of these facts can we expect from the establishment?

While politicians did botch the response to New Year Eve's events, the simpler explanation is that they were worried about attacks on refugees by the far right (which also promptly happened).

Perhaps. But when the racist right points out this "botched response" (designed to hide the truth), surely you can understand why this gets them extra credibility with voters? And similarly, does anyone besides the racists have a plan to prevent another Cologne?

Let me again emphasize that my criticism of the lying left is not intended as support for the racist right. It's just my explanation as to why people are taking the racist right seriously.

No, I don't suggest it's higher. I suggest that there is no obvious correlation between religion and crime rate. The lowest crime rate (by far, as in a factor of three or so below the average) is among Syrians (a predominantly Muslim country), then Iraqis (another predominantly Muslim country), then a mix of other countries (predominantly Balkan countries with a Christian majority, but also Afghanistan). Most criminals per capita come from Serbia, by a huge margin (and still make up a relatively small fraction of Serbian immigrants). The natural conclusion is that crime rate is correlated with other factors, not religion.

> 2) What's the crime rate for Muslim immigrants of low socio-economic status, compared to Germans of low socio-economic status?

Nobody has dug that deeply into the data yet. Partly because religion isn't something that's accurately known (even in Germany, only a minority of Muslims self-identified as Muslims in the most recent census, for whatever reasons; whether the rest acted out of privacy concerns or because they have been secularized, I do not know). I do know that one study (a couple of decades ago, mind you) that tried to adjust for social-economic factors between Turkish immigrants (predominantly Muslim, though you have to distinguish between Sunnis and Alevites) and Germans did not find any real measurable difference after that.

> 3) How many additional robberies/rapes/murders/etc will result from allowing in 1000 extra immigrants? (Compute by projecting from existing crime data.)

You cannot extrapolate, because so far the projection is not linear in the number of refugees. This probably has a number of reasons: for starters, violent crime appears to be concentrated within refugee reception centers as the result of people living close together with little room for privacy and under less than ideal conditions; but as the number of refugees grows, the number of refugees within reception centers doesn't. For another, other serious crime appears to be concentrated within criminal organizations that do not grow at the same rate as the number of refugees.

Most importantly, it's not like there's an actual policy option for allowing or not allowing them in. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the refugees are coming to Europe now because other countries are overflowing and can't take any more. Unlike America, Europe isn't surrounded by oceans to keep refugees out. Any credible attempt at controlling the influx of refugees has to begin with the border between Greece and Turkey, which is difficult for a number of reasons (starting with the quasi-cold war between Greece and Turkey and the fact that you cannot just let refugees drown). Even if the border could be controlled, there is no guarantee that refugees would not find a way through, say, Russia (which is already happening, after all, and it's not like Putin wouldn't have an incentive to show them the way). Any policy that assumes that you can make a major dent into the refugee influx is pure fantasy, IMO.

> Perhaps. But when the racist right points out this "botched response" (designed to hide the truth), surely you can understand why this gets them extra credibility with voters? And similarly, does anyone besides the racists have a plan to prevent another Cologne?

The racists don't have a plan to prevent another Cologne. Not a credible one, anyway. They live in a fantasyland where you can just push a button and immigration stops.

In the end, what happened in Cologne is like a mass shooting in the US: individually, a horrific event, but one for which there is no quick and easy public policy response, and in the end, does not pose a much bigger statistical risk than being hit by lightning. The best public policy response to Cologne is probably to recognize that the suspects primarily belong to existing organized crime groups and therefore to deal with these gangs. That, unfortunately, does not have an easy solution, but comes down to pretty traditional police work. The biggest problem in this area is that budget cuts have hit law enforcement pretty hard; Germany could definitely use quite a few more police officers.

In any event, the biggest public policy challenges lie in the civil sector right now: for example, teaching refugees the language and teaching them skills that make them employable is one of the biggest concerns, but there's a shortage of teachers.

Sorry, I misinterpreted this phrase as being a suggestion that it's higher: "Note that this does not mean that immigrants do not commit less crimes than residents."

So what are the numbers, for immigrants and Germans?

The racists don't have a plan to prevent another Cologne. Not a credible one, anyway. They live in a fantasyland where you can just push a button and immigration stops.

Most politics is pure fantasyland. Consider Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders here in the US - both are spouting pure fantasy that appeals to the emotions of their base.

In the end, what happened in Cologne is like a mass shooting in the US: individually, a horrific event, but one for which there is no quick and easy public policy response, and in the end, does not pose a much bigger statistical risk than being hit by lightning.

Eyeballing the numbers, this seems unlikely. As far as I know, tens to hundreds of people were not struck by lightning in Cologne, and similar numbers at the Swedish music festival "We Are Sthlm" every year since 2014.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/its-not-only-germany-that...

So on the one hand, we've got left wing types denying reality as you do above. Then we've got right wing types at least acknowledging the problem and proposing to do something about it.

Unless left wing types can compromise on ideology and actually acknowledge reality (Muslims raping women is a vastly larger problem than lighting strikes), people will turn to the racist right for solutions.

I don't know of any recent study, as I told you?

> Eyeballing the numbers, this seems unlikely. As far as I know, tens to hundreds of people were not struck by lightning in Cologne

But you need to amortize the numbers over time and the population of the country. The biggest problem in Cologne was that the police got caught flatfooted, something that's unlikely to happen again (German police normally have plenty of experience of dealing with nasty crowds, see the hooligan problem). 9/11 was also a horrible event, too, but there's pretty much zero chance that any terrorist will ever again be able to fly a passenger plane into a building, so the statistical risk of experiencing that when boarding a plane is essentially nil (and was extremely low even beforehand).

> So on the one hand, we've got left wing types denying reality as you do above

First of all, I'd be careful with categorizing me as a "left wing type" (except by US standards, but David Cameron would probably count as a "left wing type" there now). In this area, my stance probably comes close to classical liberalism, which is traditionally considered a centrist position (plus, my overall positive view of law enforcement tends to not win me many friends on the far left). More importantly, I like to base my judgement on facts, not anecdotal media reports.

Second, I'm the one who has cited actual statistics that at least so far seem to disprove your thesis that Muslims seem to be disproportionately prone to crime and to which you haven't offered a counterargument (remember that a single counterexample disproves a universal thesis). Conversely, you seem to base your claims solely on anecdotal evidence (the plural of which, I remind you, is not data).

Note that I haven't disagreed that immigration will likely negatively affect the overall crime rate in a measurable way (if only because of the low SES of these immigrants; other factors may come into play, too, but that would be pure conjecture at this point). I have also pointed out that it is likely to cause social problems in general because of the known difficulties with integrating a large foreign population with limited resources across a language and culture barrier with (often) considerable skill gaps.

> Unless left wing types can compromise on ideology and actually acknowledge reality (Muslims raping women is a vastly larger problem than lighting strikes), people will turn to the racist right for solutions.

I did not make a statistical comparison between Muslims raping women and lightning strikes; I referred specifically to the events in Cologne, which do not appear to have had a religious motivation or cause.

I'm glad you've provided stats, I just unfortunately don't read German.

Critical journalists who tend - by a variety of factors like age and education - to be on the more 'left' side of the political spectrum write a large amount of critical articles about those various conservative initiatives, like the one mentioned above. The attacked parties gain an incredible amount of publicity and they've taken the tabloids as their "publicity hostage".

Combine this with the diffuse resentment of those readers/people not feeling represented by government, those conservatives easily win at elections and votes - even when some of those initiatives are in clear disarray of everything the country stood and stands for.

I always think of Woody Allen's "Bananas": By tomorrow the official language will be Swedish (same as Switzerland ;) ) and people have to wear their underwear on their heads. But at least its against the establishment.

The death of those sometimes outrageously stupid political ideas could be easily achieved by simply ignoring them and their pundits. This might force the political players to get back to actual problem-solving concepts and lead to healthier debates in the media.

But then again, maybe that's the wrong approach.

I thought that this 'alliance' was called ownership. Rupert Murdoch et al whose political agenda is less government control and more control for the private sector which translates into private control by fewer (and fewer) people with less accountability. Essentially what we are going through, world wide, is a consolidation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

This consolidation suites the purposes of the ownership of media companies, and it is the media companies that set the tone and content of their reporting. Over the last 50 years there has been a massive consolidation in the ownership of media companies, with a corresponding massive shift to a very right wing perspective in popular reporting.

I can not think of a single time that a strike by a Union has been reported in a favorable light, for example.

Your comparison doesn't make any sense. I'm guessing you don't understand the right wing in the US very well.

That far right in Switzerland and you get into neo-nazi ideology, fascism etc. which is represented in the SVP and New Right types.

US conservatives are mostly not like that. US conservatism is a mainstream ideology that represents upwards of a quarter of all Americans. Most are in favor of vastly reducing the size of government (but not reducing the military or spying). Ted Cruz for example is not a nazi sympathizer and rather than in favor of a huge government ala fascism, would prefer to cut it in half. Fascism favors dramatically increasing the power of government, and the power of government over the economy; US conservatives typically are against that (even if it's not very well represented in the politicians).

In America, neo-nazi types, the KKK, skinheads etc have practically no power or representation in politics, they are fringe outcasts that are not accepted in any major party. That has been the case for decades. Unlike in countries such as Sweden for example, where neo-nazi parties hold elected power.

The Koch brothers are considered far right wing in the US - they're libertarians that believe in high degrees of social liberty, ending mass-incarceration and the war on drugs, and a small government.

I agree that my comparison is not very accurate. I didn't mean "far-right" in terms of neo-nazi and other extremist ideology, but parliamentary far-right - strictly geographically speaking. (And although they like to create a martial vocabulary, I tend to disagree that the SVP/New Right is anything close to neo-nazis... at this point in time - after all the SVP-styled conservatism does represent at least a quarter of Swiss votes)

It strikes me as the biggest parallel between US- and CH-far right (as described above) that their voters seem to be less critical of the political suggestions their political leaders make. Harsh punishments and swift deportations of foreigners that are pictured as potentially criminal/dangerous/job-threatening are just an example of this kind of rhetoric.

So, when journalists condemn a certain "deportation/punishment" ideas of such a politician, IMO all they are doing is giving him a platform to communicate those ideas. Which was the point I was trying to make in terms of the original post about punishment.

Guess, I got lost :)

That's funny! The 1996 immigration reform commission was the "Hug Commission", and "hug" in English means "cuddle"

I think Denmark will come out on top in this, other countries should take a cue from them.

Note: I live in a neighbouring country.

Edit: Moderated "general public" to "large parts of the general public"

Dansk Folkeparti (Danish Peoples Party) arose because of the established primarily left leaning political parties completely ignored and froze out the party to begin with.

The biggest political party, the Social Democrats (also likes to call itself the workers party) lost touch with it's voters when society in general went from production sectors to service sectors. A rising unrest about immigration manifested itself in a lot of voters who didn't benefit from the immigrants coming and taking jobs or just living of welfare that many danish voters felt they paid for (Denmark have extreme taxes)

And so while the political establishment tried to ignore them they slowly grew to become now the second biggest political party in Denmark. However now for other reasons than muslim immigration. The reason now is that DF is the only party that really takes the average joes concerns seriously no matter how primitive they might seem to many.

Today most parties are in line with DF as they have recognized that you can't just take in a lot of people and then expect them to become a natural part of society.

Denmark has one of the most honest debates about immigration and it speaks volume about the level of political corectness and control over the media in other countries that even though Denmark is one of the countries who take most immigrants and refugees, spend most money on immigration both domestically and internationally and has some of the most extensive rights for immigrants it still had to defend it's political line in the EU.

Denmark is fairly clear on what it's doing. There are many bad things I can say about my home country but I actually think that debate wise we have some of the most free and civilized debates especially considering the hot topics we often discuss.

See for example [0] (Swedish) and links within.

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/internationella-medier-sver...

The populist complaint against rightist politicians in the United States is that they claim to oppose illegal immigration, but that's actually just a scam to fool the rubes into voting for them. When push comes to shove, they quietly endorse the current (Democratic) administration's policies on the matter and make sure that efforts to block them always fail. Given that, the factors behind Trump's support aren't so different from the factors behind support for populists in Europe.

DF is gaining because ordinary people are seeing their jobs being outsourced or underbid by eastern european citizens. In fact this is today the primary reason for why parties like DF gets more and more power. They are the only parties who actually takes peoples concern seriously. There is a much much bigger fraction of the western society who do not stand to benefit from technological progress, multicultural society and globalized workforce.

If anything what is happening right now is a national conservative trend where people who aren't benefitting will vote on the parties that are sceptic to progress.

And still, conservatives and racists are routinely headlining most popular medias and public debates. They don't have any problem to express their point of view.

What is rightfully "put down" is incitement to ethnic or racial hatred (which is also illegal in most Europe countries).

> in large parts of the general public.

I assume what you call "large part of the general public" are the usual 20% that vote for far right parties.

But go back 20 years in Denmark or just a couple of years in Sweden and you will see a different pictures. They were the parias of society.

Despite the huge success Sveriges Demokraterne had at last election the other parties decided to completely ignore them and to keep them out of power.

Swedish police has not been allowed to put ethnicity into reports even when it was relevant.

Sweden (and Germany) invited immigrants and fugitives to just come. Now Sweden sobered by reality closed it's borders to Denmark because they can't have anymore.

I am not a big proponent of DF and personally I am an "open borders, but no money" kind of person. This is one of the things I believe works really well here in the US.

But they were wrong about it becoming an issue. Especially since Denmark have so lucrative social benefits as they do (which the fugitives and immigrants go after and I don't blame them)

But this is a much more complicated discussion than just right wing racist parties vs. the good people on the left.

The discussion in Europe right now really is about how the EU makes sure that it balances it's international obligations with it's obligations over it's citizens.

In my opinion, this is not the case. Even criticism based on reason and facts with legitimate concerns tend to get flogged for being racist and hate speech. The climate seems to be changing now, though, with major news corps and public figures starting to express more concern than they ever have (also claiming they always have been critical, so it's quite pathetic in my view).

> I assume what you call "large part of the general public" are the usual 20% that vote for far right parties.

I may have a clouded memory, but I don't think 20% voting far right is anywhere near usual when speaking of Scandinavia in a historical context.

Also, even what's considered to be right wing politics in Scandinavia has traditionally been quite socialist.

I think the argumentative tactic is to claim that you are leftist/cultural-marxist/whatever who is "being silent about problems" if you don't portray the issues exactly the same way as they are doing. It works because in the beginning the left did not want to talk about the problems.

(I am not from a neighbouring country but not that far away)

- takes away our jobs, while simultaneously leeching off of our taxpayers' money

AND

- helps us solve our demographic problem / labor shortage, while simultaneously moving back to his home country as soon as peace is restored there

I don't remember any such incident in Denmark.

As an anecdote this is the same Denmark that went insane over a retailer selling Marmite, costing many thousands of euro in fines and punishments. That would fit the pattern of once the binary switch flips from non-criminal to criminal, a medium sized book is thrown at all miscreants.

Another possible anecdote is I know their neighbors, and probably the Danes also, punish drunken driving similar to how attempted murder is treated in the US. That would also fit the theory.

Drunk driving means first getting your drivers card taken if you have too much alcohol in your blod but it requires a lot.

And I am not sure what you mean punishment wise. Care to elaborate?

And in any case, attempt implies intent.

They measure the impairment and BAC is an instrument to that. Otherwise it would be of no interest. There used to be other impairment tests, like walking the line, before breath testers became commonplace.

> And in any case, attempt implies intent.

As manslaughter is an unintentional killing, I thought the metaphor was fairly obvious.

You know drunk drivers are prone to committing manslaughter other variables being equal, you do it anyway: well that's an attempt. Rationale behind it is irrelevant, just like noone cares you needed those money badly when you killed that cashier.

> costing many thousands of euro

Doesn't add up.

But this is not a discussion about democracy and actually not so much about the length of sentences (although that does matter) this was more a discussion about what constitutes a crime that you go to prison for and what constitutes stupidities that might be illegal but shouldn't treated as if you are on the verge of becoming either a mass murders, criminal mastermind or drug overlord.

I have two kids, one which is american citizen the other now with a green card and I am hoping with time to apply for american citizenship (Denmark allow dual citizenship). My concern is that my kids grow up in a society with these kind of laws and I don't want them to be caught in some Kafkan universe which there are plenty of examples of here.

With regards to Civil unrest in Denmark. Then no. There is of course debates and there are people who think the rules are too lax. And so the justice system needs to find a balance where it's primary function is to deter people from committing crimes to begin with and then make sure the victims of crimes feels the offence adequately punished.

This is not an easy task and Denmark is not perfect but as much as I feel free in the US I am a thousand times more afraid of the US justice system than the Danish. It's the one thing I fear here and I am by all intents and purposes of the word a law abiding citizen.

The purpose of putting to people in jail stems from the 3 Rs: Retribution, Removal, and Rehabilitation. Retribution: punishment for the crime. Removal: removal from society so no further harm can be committed by the individual. Rehabilitation: make the individual a better person so they don't commit more crimes and become better citizens.

Unfortunately, we usually don't accomplish all 3, but 1 of the 3 usually gets done.

I am less interested in the harshness of the crimes than in the defintion of the crimes. This to me is much more important.

Where the actual sentencing becomes important (and potentially problematic) is when you are defining too much as a crime as it forces you to go even harder on other on harder crimes.

The feeling of justice isn't an absolute system it's a highly relative one with some upper and lower bounds. There are plenty of examples of female victims of violent men who feel vindicated by being able to tell the violator what he did to them or to understand why he did it. Just as an example of a punishment which is less deterministic in outcome than many of the rules we see in the US.

Unfortunately, it's much easier to crank up the penalties and posture as "tough on crime" than it is to make sure police are actually closing cases.

As an example, in capital punishment allowing specifically members of the families of the victims to sit in on an execution is solely based on vengeance. Neutral observers, sure -- to document it. Relatives and family, sure -- to allow them to say goodbye. But the victims' involvement ends with that of the judges. If it weren't for the aspect of vengeance, the execution would be "not for them", it's just carrying out the sentence.

The police doesn't even bother charging criminals as they systematically walk free. Criminals accumulate dozens of offenses on their criminal records in complete impunity.

Denmark, Switzerland, Norway or Sweden can afford to have very lax justice systems because they have a population that commits little crime. But with a different population these systems would just fall apart.

From the things I know about France I can see many obvious reasons why crime might be higher. It is a very strict society compared to e.g. Scandinavia which allows e.g. children and youngster a much freer life. The French are more likely to engage in almost psychological terror against their children. Well behaved children who don't make noise and sit still is valued in France, while Scandinavians are far more tolerant towards the natural behaviour of children and perform very mild sanctions towards bad behaviour.

France is also a more elitist and technocratic society, while Scandinavia is more egalitarian and cares more about the common man than the elite. The dehumanising vast monotone areas built in France which are now rife with crime would never have been built in a Scandinavian society.

I know I sounded very negative now. I didn't include all the wonderful things about France, because the whole point was to highlight why it isn't just a matter of having different people. The organisation of society creates the people.

The same could be said about the US. It is a society organised to produce violence.

Second, France isn't a war zone and most of us live pretty safely and happy over here.

More importantly, do you know for sure that the situation would be better with harsher prison sentences?

More seriously, the problem is not so much homicides than common criminality. Courts almost always give suspended sentences for petty crime, and even when the judge does not suspend the sentence, the policy is to automatically suspend it behind the scene afterwards if it's less than 6 months (juge d'application des peines). And if a criminal still ends up in jail, he would only ever do between half and two third of the sentence. The whole system is designed to be toothless.

The example of New York City under Giuliani is a pretty spectacular example of the impact of a tougher penal policy against crime. I am not suggesting this should be the only response but I do think that no response will be efficient without it.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615

According to what I could dig up from Google, it's had a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 people and a serious assault rate of 299 per 100,000 people over the last couple of years.

Those are respectively slightly higher (1.2 vs 1.0) and significantly lower (400 vs 299, although data collection methodologies may be different) than the UK where I live, which is generally considered to be a reasonably safe country crime-wise.

(Didn't really have time to dig into other crime categories - would be interested to hear if they buck the trend.)

Not claiming your statement isn't true, but unless I'm misreading the statistics the effect doesn't seem to be a massive crime wave.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/report/living-death-life-without-parole...

Is that actually the law or some kind of convention?

Wikipedia says otherwise:

In Denmark, a life sentence (Livsvarigt fængsel in Danish) theoretically means life without parole: that prisoners will spend the rest of their lives in prison. However, prisoners are entitled to a pardoning hearing after 12 years.... Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment serve an average of 16 years, more for cases considered to be particularly grave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Denmark

I don't even know what's the point of such sentences. Is it for PR purposes? "Look at us, we gave Osama Bin Laden 1,200 years in prison! Aren't we tough?!" Because it makes no sense to me. Just like it makes no sense to get a few years for rape or murder but be even charged with 30+ years for some online crimes.

>I don't even know what's the point of such sentences. Is it for PR purposes?

It is not for PR purposes, usually.

It is so that if a person is acquitted of one of the crimes they still stay in jail for the others. If someone gets 50 years for rape and murder and is later acquitted for murder, but not rape, they still serve their rape sentence.

The judge can decide if the jail time is served concurrently or consecutively.

It seems silly to give someone 3 life sentences, after all, you only have one life. But that means they'd have to be acquitted of 3 different crimes to get out of jail. The other reason is if those life sentences come with the possibility of parole after x years - by stacking those life sentences consecutively it would delay the parole hearings until after the person is dead.

Buy sometimes it is used to emphasize the crime's severity. Such is probably the case with the 40,000 year sentence for the Spanish terrorists. Even though they will only serve 40 years - the max allowed by Spanish law.

Denmark had a guy who killed 4 policemen. They let him out 33 years later on a pardon; by then he was 71 and had server about 33 years.

There aren't very many of these sentences, I think you can find the complete list here in the Danish article on Wikipedia:

https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livsvarigt_f%C3%A6ngsel

About 50 since 1971.

What's the rationale for that limit? Is that the maximum time it takes to reform someone? The time after which anyone's being a threat to society expires? The magic number of years for just retribution for all (combinations of) crimes?

On a practical level, I believe the idea is that longer sentences do not provide any additional deterrent. Nor do they provide better opportunities for reintegration. Both effects probably see decreasing marginal utility with longer sentences. Even more practical: most violent crimes are committed by males aged 18 to 30. 18 + 16 = 34.

On an ethical level, European law often relies on the concept of 'dignity' which is ill-defined but (for this purpose) interpreted to mean that even hideous crimes do not justify the destruction of all of a person's future.

As a family of concepts human rights often rely on the concept of dignity, so all law (or ethics) -- European, American, African, Samoan, Caribbean, Peruvian, whatever -- that is based on or significantly influenced by human rights often also relies on the concept of dignity. But yeah, as you say, the concept is so broad and, without a substantiating framework, generally empty of meaning that I can imagine that (though not how) some could use it to say that even 1) planning and intentionally murdering 77 innocent people and then 2) going on to remain unreformed and unrepentant of it shouldn't "justify the destruction of all of a person's future". (Though, thankfully, as far as I know, people who think like that so far either 1) lack the courage of their convictions or 2) lack the power (or both) to actually impose that view of 'dignity' on any society.)

The rational for such limits in Europe is always the same: the law of diminishing returns. Increasing the max sentence after a certain point no longer has any impact on crime rates, so why do it? It costs money and creates unnecessary human suffering.

Notice that Europeans do not place the same importance on retribution as Americans do. You hear less talk of "paying your debt to society" and such things. The modern European justice system is mostly seen as a mechanism of deterrence. I suspect that this is because Europe is more secular.

In that respect I see these short sentences for very serious crimes (multiple murders, etc) to be more dangerous than helpful.

Obviously it's only a problem in countries where you have significant levels of violent crimes.

At least that's how it works in Finland. The whole system is designed to get people to become productive and healthy citizens with minimal suffering, not to provide retribution.

You can accept that, adjust your goals and move forward or deal with the inevitable frustration and anger of being unable to get vengeance for the rest of your life.

On that view, it's generally just right to reward people for good and punish them for evil. Consequences -- even grand ones like balancing the cosmic scales of justice -- don't enter it.

For the same reason the severity of the sentence should be driven by the aversion of the society to the crime committed more than considerations on what will happen to the criminal after the sentence has been executed.

Punishment and rehabilitation are just parts of achieving the goal: Punishment tries to prevent further crime, both by the person being punished, and people that know what will happen to them if they are caught. Rehabilitation is great when it succeeds: Sending a rapist out to do more raping isn't so great.

All of our policies about punishment, rehabilitation and enforcement quality are tradeoffs, and the question is what's the best tradeoffs. The biggest one, IMO, has little to do with the size of the punishment (they are all pretty big), but with deterrence. Nobody is going to stop killing someone because they'll "only" get 15 years in jail. 15 years in jail is horrible for most people that aren't living in terrible conditions outside. The real kick is in chances of getting caught. The criminal believes that he won't get caught, so the size of the punishment is not necessarily that relevant, other than in keeping the person that committed the crime away from doing the same again outside of jail (crime vs other immates happens!). Improved enforcement quality, and making sure that people just don't even want to do criminal things, regardless of the punishment, is where it's at.

The problem with that is that enforcement itself is a tradeoff: We could do a lot to prevent crime in NYC if 25% of people were in some form of law enforcement (including policing the police), but it'd be a tradeoff we'd all be unwilling to make, because it'd be very wasteful.

So it's nowhere ear as simple as you paint it.

The goal is peace. It has to be peace. You might never reach that goal entirely but you can try and you want people that ensure peace exists and people that restore it once it has been violated.

Quite clearly exerting vengeance through the justice system is not the best way to achieve that goal, in fact it's obviously by far the worst.

That's why from feudal to modern societies, the Lord / King / Judge renders justice. The system becomes just again by the retaliation being decided and executed by a higher form of authority.

If someone beats me up, and we both go in front of the judge and the judge decides to do nothing because of some procedural reason or because doing nothing would benefit some greater social good, this is the very definition of injustice.

I am not saying that a justice system shouldn't care about rehabilitating criminals after they serve their sentence, but that negating the punitive role is negating the very reason why the justice system exists and is accepted.

That means justice is combination of deterrence and rehabilitation to a. discourage behaviours that are detrimental to society as a whole and b. to ensure that the offender ceases that behaviour and becomes a productive member of society again.

'Punishment' can play as small or as large a part in point (a) as you want, but the more you make it a large part of (a), the less success you will have with point (b). And failing at point (b) means you effectively fail point (a) - ie offenders coming out of the justice system who can't integrate back into society often reoffend.

Americans are a scary people.

Per capita you incarcerate more people than any other major country (developed or not).

There is also a quote of Gandhi I cannot find. So I'll paraphrase: If you are angry at someone, and he did not intend to hurt you, you should not be angry. If he did intend to hurt you, he is not as wise/it's in his nature, and you should not be angry.

If we follow your logic it is. Retribution would only serve the British girl but not the community. The community has nothing to gain from punishing the prince but everything to loose from loosing all these Saudi contracts. If you think justice is only about serving the community, not about retribution then you will happily approve the decision of the court. My personal position is that it is the very negation of justice, and that behaving this way jeopardize the acceptance of the judicial system by the population.

As for Gandhi, it's similar to the Christian "if someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also". But I am not sure that a recipe that worked well against a democratic British parliament will work as well when facing a violent thug.

What? Why shouldn't I be angry if a fool intentionally hurts me?

The way people are treated shouldn't be based on what the most emotionally invested people want. What makes the person rehabilitated is that they don't do the crime again, and nothing else. You can't cause wrongdoing to someone who is dead, so the only downside to releasing the person is you might feel sad. Only if you dwell on it for the rest of your life. But you won't, people move on.

And you think it's an indictment on Biblical (and, apparently, also Oxonion) definitions of "fair" that they'd disagree with you on that?

"Just or appropriate" doesn't actually say anything about what should be done in a case of rape+murder. Who's to say life in prison is appropriate? I don't think it is. It's a waste. The young lady wasn't put in a hellish environment for a lifetime. And what do we as a society gain by wasting money on prisoners for exactly zero return on investment? We're basically punishing ourselves to spend that money. Better to wait until the problem is solved (i.e. we don't think they'll do it again) and let them out where they can do something useful.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the largest prison population in the world and a much higher violent crime rate than the vast majority of western countries. Objectively, the justice system in the US is inferior to the European system. This is not a matter of opinion or ideology, there is strong empirical evidence.

Handy graph: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2015/09/c...

If you could compare populations like that, then for instance the idea of banning guns to reduce the number of shootings in the US would be defeated by the example of Switzerland where pretty much every man has an assault riffle at home, and where you see little to no crime, and certainly no mass shooting. But the reality is that Swiss citizens behave differently than US citizens.

The comparison shows that it is possible to have low violent crime rates and low incarceration rates. After seeing that this is possible, I cannot understand why a country like the US would not go after these two goals. I am inclined to suspect that it has something to do with turning the prison system into a private business and the predominance of puritanism in American culture.

And let's not exaggerate the cultural differences between the US and Europe. We are talking about western democracies, stemming from the same intellectual source (the Enlightenment) and the same genetic source: the US was created by Europeans, and mostly consists to this day of people of European descent (yes, including "hispanics", as the name implies).

> the idea of banning guns to reduce the number of shootings in the US would be defeated by the example of Switzerland

The idea that banning guns is a requirement to have a peaceful society is effectively defeated by the Swiss example. It show that private gun ownership cannot be the ultimate cause of the problem.

By the way, the graph that is shown somewhere else, comparing incarceration and violent crime rates, shows no correlation between the two. A concept of "eras" has to be introduced to allow one to talk about these two metrics together.

Yes, but the statistics for violent crime in the US break down in interesting ways once you start looking at "genetic source", whatever that is. There is lots of discussion as to the _why_, of course

"Hispanics" in the US includes people of nearly pure European descent, nearly pure Amerindian descent, mixes of the two, etc. It's a pretty useless demographic category, really.

First of all, most countries with a life sentence does not have an upper bound (would be silly to call it life inprisonment), but rather a practice with an average sentence of such a length. There is nothing that prevents someone who is consideered dangerous to be kept in prison longer.

Second: Those who are kept the longest behind bars are those who are sentenced to psychiatric treatment (It's actually odd that you can be sentenced to psychicatric treatment, but you can in many european countries). That is essentially "you'll get out when you are no longer dangerous to yourself or others", which in many cases can be much longer than even the longest prison sentences. Many mass murderes and similar will be in this category.

Third: the idea behind short sentences is diminishing returns, the responsibility of the system to reform the convicted (if they fail it's their fault) and perhaps most of all - econonomic reasons. Unless I see concrete evidence that longer sentences are actually cost effective for keeping me safer, I'm not going to allow politicians to make such laws.

Cost effectiveness is key. One can't just argue that longer sentences automatically makes the streets safer, since it costs a lot. You have got to compare, dollar for dollar, with the effect spending the same money on (for example) Police, Drug treatment, Education, Job creation, ...

So the fundamental assumption is not that all criminals will reform, but that most will, others will at least reform enough to not be dangerous enough that the cost of keeping them in prison is worth it to society - the money can be better spent elsewhere.

That's a strange use of the word "secular", for which the Oxford dictionary that Google uses lists as "not connected with religious or spiritual matters". What's particularly religious or spiritual about the idea that the justice system ought to be about meting justice?

Secular societies are more interested in the outcomes than the moral righteousness of the system.

Not all secular societies or people are consequentalists. Some are at least as interested in the moral righteousness of a system -- in its means, in its processes, in what it does on the way to its ends -- as they are in what that system accomplishes. There are secular humanist deontologists and virtue ethicists.

However that is not quite the whole story. In Sweden, a life sentence is a sentence with no upper bound on the time, if you were immortal, you would be there forever. But, usually you are considered rehabilitated after, say, 10-16 years, if you indeed show signs that you have rehabilitated. Then there is no need to keep you locked up.

The "max X years" is meant as the number for which it took the longest time for someone to be considered rehabilitated. In the Swedish sense of it, it is not a "magic" number, but a case-by-case number.

EDIT: the user "nl" quotes the wikipedia article for Denmark in another reply which indicates it is more or less the same.

Denmark had a guy who killed 4 policemen. They let him out 33 years later on a pardon; by then he was 71 and had server about 33 years.

Here in the US, most of us think of Prohibition in exactly those terms.... but that didn't stop us from doing the exact same thing all over again and calling it good.

As other posters have suggested (and been duly modded down for it), prohibition isn't really about the drugs.

(Watching Ken Burns "Prohibition" is something I'd strongly recommend to just about anyone, not only is it a fantastic documentary as par for the course for Burns, but it was a steady stream of "HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF" in such stark terms as you rarely see.)

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/

Before I watched it I thought "how could people be so stupid as to think they would ever ban alcohol". After I watched it I was like "oh wow, people drank on average 1.5 bottles of hard alcohol a week? Drunks were everywhere? Opening a bar was super cheap because the alcohol companies subsidised them. Ok, maybe I get why people would vote for prohibition".

I'm not saying it was a good idea. It was clearly stupid idea which the rest of the doco made clear and is directly analogous to the war on drugs.

Another POV that gave me a new perspective was the idea that legal drugs (alcohol) kill way more people than the war on drugs kills. 3+ million a year die from alcohol. (http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/facts/alcohol/en/). Legalizing a bunch more drugs may have the unintended consequences of killing an order of magnitude more people than the war on drugs.

I'm not saying I'm for the war on drugs. All the unintended consequences of that are horrible as well. The USA's police state, seizure laws, militarization, etc. But, the idea that we'll end up possibly causing 10x more death from legalization makes me wonder if there's some middle position

While I'm not necessarily all in favor of weed, for example, I'm convinced that legalizing it, simply because of its properties, will not lead to even a fraction of the deaths that legalized alcohol use does.

It's difficult to discuss any kind of position when we use a term as vague as 'drugs'.

Trying to foresee all future consequences is pointless when you have no control over them anyway. Besides, how many lives have been destroyed by the War on Drugs? That requires second and third order reasoning, not simply a body count.

There are many science studies that once you become a prisoner, instead of actually improving yourself, you degrade to the point that you become better criminal.

The world goes to reducing punishments and this is the way to go. Usually there is a "healthy" amount of criminals in every nation, but you will never solve the problem by increasing the sentences, this actually makes it worse.

The major reasons for success of Scandinavian countries in crime and punishment are larger than a single metric, IMHO. They have a (more) comprehensive philosophy that touches on many areas, all of which work together.

If the US adopted the prison conditions and lighter sentencing of Norway without other measures, it would be a complete disaster. For the US to get similar benefits we would need to (ideally) first shift our attitude toward thinking of criminals as people, and thinking most of what benefits society rather than how to punish for punishment's sake.

The election cycle does have something to do with it: in the last year of his presidency, he has nothing to lose legislatively by putting all his proposals on the table. In previous years, he had to weigh each of them against the cost of losing whatever he was trying to accomplish with Congress.

That's not Obama's fault; it's the nature of the system. The President can't do whatever they want; their hands are tied by the other two branches of government. Blame John Adams.

Outgoing Presidents still work towards the future electability of other members of their party over the alternatives - in Obama's case, Clinton or Sanders over the Republicans. That's part of the opportunism, along with, yes, saving the more controversial unilateral actions for when they no longer need to worry about their own re-election or cooperation from Congress.

Liberal Democrats can then feel better (via recency bias) about a party that continued the Patriot Act, Gitmo, whistleblower prosecution, etc ad nauseam, while the next candidate can appeal to the moderate right that "hey, that was the last guy."

My point though was that it would be a misconception that an outgoing second term President doesn't have to weigh the impact of their decisions on future elections, even if they themselves will never run in one again. They aren't truly free to just drop whatever policies they want with no consideration for how it will impact future elections.

This one is getting done precisely because it can work with that agenda, unlike other possible policies that I'd bet, deep down inside, he has to know would also be good for the country - e.g. rescheduling marijuana or ending the war on drugs - but that would have a larger negative impact on future Democratic candidates.

And I don't know where you have been, but the Republicans have repeatedly tried to destroy anything Obama proposed. I say this as a fiscally conservative person (i.e. i am with the republicans on the financial side but with the democrats on the values)

Why are you with the Republicans on financial matters?

I am a partisan Democrats and enjoy scoring points on the internet as much as the next fellow, but I'm also genuinely curious. From my perspective, the Republicans are extraordinarily financially irresponsible, all reputation and no substance. (It's like the old saying -- you get a reputation as an early riser and you can sleep in til noon.) They want to cut taxes, yes, but their proposals to do so all involve drastically unbalancing the Federal budget to do so. At their most serious, they include unspecified $XYZ billion spending cuts and then never specify what they would actually cut to close the gap.

Obama's deficit, meanwhile, has largely been the result of automatic spending increases from pre-existing legislation in response to the Great Recession; his stimulus bill from the first year of his Presidency was a small fraction of the increased spending on Medicaid and Welfare and SNAP as millions of people lost their jobs, on Social Security as people retired early, and Medicare as people deferred medical treatment until they qualified.

The ACA was funded, is costing less than projected, and is in fact controlling medical costs, which makes long term financial projections much rosier than they were ten years ago. There is no plan to replace it, and repealing it, as Republicans keep trying to do, would be bad for our short term and long term financial health.

Obama has significantly reduced the size of the Federal workforce (I am actually unhappy about that, since it probably slowed down the recovery).

So why do you consider the Republicans fiscally conservative?

Where they then want to spend is where the agreement stops and I end up being more democratic when it comes to values.

How do you explain the rampant crack cocaine drug wars in New York and Miami in the 1980s that killed far more Americans than they do today? You're probably too young to realize how bad New York and Miami were before the war on drugs. How do you explain how Asia has even more "draconian" drug laws than the USA and yet crime is a fraction of ours?

Easy, the War on Drugs began in the early 70s.

The murders and general lawlessness that you reference from the 80s are a direct result of the War on Drugs.

[1] https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/michaela/pages/70/atta...

"The murders and general lawlessness that you reference from the 80s are a direct result of the War on Drugs."

Where were the "murders and general lawlessness" in other countries that had even more expansive Wars on Drugs, like Singapore or Taiwan? America's War on Drugs is relatively mild compared to these countries that sentence drug traffickers to death.

[1] http://www.crack-facts.org/historyofcrack.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic#History

> these countries that sentence drug traffickers to death.

USA put small-time addicted drug users, in long jail terms. But only if they use crack, the "poor/black people" variant of cocaine, not the (expensive) white-powder variant of cocaine that rich/white people used.

    > How do you explain how Asia has even more "draconian"
    > drug laws than the USA and yet crime is a fraction of
    > ours?

In most of asia (by population or by state), low crime rates can be easily attributed to being able to settle the matter privately with the policeman for a small amount of money.

That's not true in Japan, where organized crime registers with the police, or Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan which are hugely wealthy microstates.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_o...

Edit: Spoiler: the inhabitable area is about the size of Puerto Rico, a country it has 8x the population of, and something someone who had been there would know...

Edit: HN won't let me reply to your reply below, which I'll take as a hint that I should stop arguing. As your first post was limited to Asian microstates, I agree that I shouldn't have thrown European countries into the mix. I still question the "micro-ness" of Taiwan, which is more populous than Hong Kong or Singapore by a factor of 3 or 4 (and not quite as wealthy), but sure, whatever.

    > what it is that Singapore,
    > Hong Kong, and Taiwan have
    > in common ... exclude, say,
    > Belgium or Denmark

Update: but ya know, even if it wasn't about continent(!) the main difference is that Belgium and Denmark sit in the middle of large areas with border-free travel, largely homogenous policing, largely homogenous drug laws and share the same Supreme Court with their neighbours. Seeing them as micro-states, rather than constituent states of the EU for this purpose surely misses the point.

The crack epidemic was a supply and demand issue. During the 1980s, the CIA enabled the flow of cocaine to help fund the Contras and other right-wing revolutionary groups in Central America. The new routes led to new manufacturing practices, and supply skyrocketed. This in turn dropped the price drastically, making cocaine suddenly available and affordable for a lot of people who couldn't get it before. Crack was another technical/marketing innovation, taking the old practice of freebasing and industrializing it. A quick, intense high got down into the $10-20 range, something even the desperately poor could afford. And since mainstream society doesn't usually care much about the troubles of the desperately poor, the cocaine industry had a relatively untroubled new market.

The end of this era wasn't so much due to draconian laws as to the end of the cheap supply.

The reason it was bad was because it was illegal.

Tens of thousands of innocent people die in Mexico almost every year because of drugs being illegal.

Make it legal and you remove the very foundation these drug cartels are based on.

[1] http://www.crack-facts.org/historyofcrack.html

There might be more Asian states fulfilling the statement (Thailand?), but this was the first one which sprung to mind.

Correlation != Causality

https://www.aclu.org/issues/mass-incarceration/privatization...

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/23/6_shocking_revelations_about...

[1] http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf, p. 14

edit: to be clear I am against privatization of prisons because I think the incentives are woefully misaligned, but wanted to point out it's inaccurate to suggest they're the cause of our high incarceration rate