How is this relevant? How does this fact invalidate any of what the article stated?

Funny how attribution brings out defensiveness. Do you also think all bylines should be removed from articles?

It doesn't appear to me that the OP was saying anything about invalidation.

People naturally form us-vs-them tribal mentalities, and the fact that this is the top comment of this post indicates that its a tribal mentality that's leading it to be upvoted.

It's like saying on a Roy Moore post that the investigation was carried out by CNBC: it leads to Republicans invalidating any finding of the investigation. This default of ignoring any information from the Other Side is what almost got Roy Moore elected.

This us-vs-them mentality needs to be noted. The fact that this comes from a think tank does not immediately mean they don't raise a good point.

I thought the article lacking in some regards, which other commentors have already noted (the general "crime is out of control" narrative without comparison to historical data; implying connection between specific robberies and homelessness without providing supporting evidence).

I was curious about who wrote it, and felt it was worthwhile to share what I found.

That being said, if one wishes to attack the article, I think a strong argument could be made that this is not real research, but a cherry picking of anecdotes that fit the existing viewpoint of the author. It may be true that crime is out of control in Portland, and that the homeless are to blame, but a more convincing argument for this could be made with real statistical research.

I agree that tribal bullshit has hit a dangerous fever pitch. I also agree that the product of think tanks are not inherently incorrect.

But, if you wanted to bet me I couldn't guess what Americans For Prosperity thinks of the tax bill without reading anything from them about it, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat.

You don't fix this by ignoring attribution or yelling at people for noting it. You also don't do so by attacking strawmen.

How about just, you know, addressing the points the article made?

- Because nobody ignores attribution.

- Not only is life it too short to pretend outfits that exist to promote a particular agenda are, in fact, neutral arbiters this time around, but doing so is actively empowering bad actors arguing in bad faith.

Puzzle me this: a person you know to be con-artist wants you to do something. You can't figure out an angle, but it is a weird-seeming thing to ask.

Do you ignore what you know about this person in making your decision?

The wonderful thing with multi-user forums like this is the crowd-sourcing aspect.

Conservative think tanks are well known to lie to promote their agenda.

That's sound like anything political and not just conservatives. Speaking of conservatives (and to bring things back to the article), I remember reading on HN that salt lake city, Utah is one of the best at handling homelessness.

Credible concrete arguments for why some article might be flawed or biased tends to carry a lot more weight than just attacking the place it was published in for its political views.

"Credible concrete arguments for why some article might be flawed or biased tends to carry a lot more weight than just attacking the place it was published in for its political views."

That all depends. When it's been hidden, I think it's essential to know the ethos of the organization that paid for the work to be done and disseminated. It isn't plain in the piece that it was brought to us by the Manhattan Institute, which is one of many think tanks producing "journalism" that has never, ever found a problem that the "free market" wasn't the precise cure for.

Context is super-important.

Why are you taking it as an attack? He's just giving context to the piece.

Perhaps, given the topic, I jumped too quickly into confrontational left-vs-right thinking.

Anyhow: I quite dislike it when articles and arguments are dismissed with simple labeling tactics ("they said this other thing before, so what they say now carries no weight").

I should have written "dismissed" rather than "attacked".

I thought the article was poorly argued, so I looked up the authors and thought it was worth sharing the info and to let others draw their own conclusions.

My own suspicion is that this "research institute" hasn't really done true research into whether crime is out of control and the homeless are to blame. Maybe it really is out of control, but I suspect that the authors don't truly care to investigate, seeing as they simply chose some anecdotes that fit the views they have held for decades.

Sorry you're getting downvoted.

Sorry, but I think you should have spent that effort refuting the arguments - instead you just spread some kind of implicit-guilt-by-political-leaning ("look, this a right-wing site - obviously it's not even worth your effort to refute the claims"). That's not productive.

> Sorry you're getting downvoted.

Thanks for that.

But even now what you're arguing against is attribution. His original comment is just attribution, there's no guilt attached. Readers may choose to attach their political opinions to attribution and you may think that's fair or not but it seems ridiculous to me to be calling out someone for posting about the interests behind a story.

So let's cut the crap and be real here, this article is basically propaganda. The entity responsible for producing it will never produce a politically unbiased article examining some critical issue because their raison d'etre is to produce politically biased articles. What you're saying is that it's on us an individuals to line by line refute all the crap propaganda that gets spewed out. There's no way to do that in the 21st century, there's too much information. We need to be able to attribute and write-off when necessary. This article was written by a right-wing think-tank who's explicit mission is to promote free market ideals? Why would I read that? You and I both basically already know what is in it and that the writer is a complete partisan.

I'm not a big fan of labeling things as left and right wing.

In this case, the article is about homelessness, and I found it interesting to know that the institute has for decades held a fixed opinion on individual responsibility.

I have no idea whether the rest of the institute's positions could be neatly categorized.

You shouldn't have written "dismissed" either -- the OP just posted a link and noted that they were conservative. Maybe "implicitly dismissed", but even that is pretty paranoid; though, to be fair, that is probably what the OP meant. (I think the partisanship in this country is shameful, dangerous, and rather silly -- just saying.)