We never get the government we want - NYT

As if we needed more evidence for the incoherence of pearl cluthcing hysteria of the New York Times, they give us: Social Distancing, Without the Policeby The Editorial Board.

They want to be authoritarian fascists and force people to bend to their will but they don't want to be seen to be authoritarian fascists. And heaven forbid that, despite all the empirical and replicated evidence that uniform policies across variant cultures and classes will always have disproportionate impact, they want everyone to suffer equally from their own efforts to coerce through arrest. Reality never delivers to them the magical unicorn they wish.

Of the 125 people arrested over offenses that law enforcement officials described as related to the coronavirus pandemic, 113 were black or Hispanic. Of the 374 summonses from March 16 to May 5, a vast majority — 300 — were given to black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

Videos of some of the arrests are hard to watch. In one posted to Facebook last week, a group of some six police officers are seen tackling a black woman in a subway station as her young child looks on. “She’s got a baby with her!” a bystander shouts. Police officials told The Daily News the woman had refused to comply when officers directed her to put the mask she was wearing over her nose and mouth.

Contrast that with photographs across social media showing crowds of sun-seekers packed into parks in wealthy, whiter areas of the city, lounging undisturbed as police officers hand out masks.

So it is obvious that the city needs a different approach to enforcing public health measures during the pandemic. Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to understand this, and he has promised to hire 2,300 people to serve as social distancing “ambassadors.”

Nice touch - Ambassadors. But ambassadors only ever have credibility when they represent meaningful power. Joseph Stalin is famously said to have asked an adviser, dismissively, “How many divisions does the Pope have?” It all comes down to force. If the ambassadors don't work, there will still be arrests and the ambassadors won't work as long as the Mandarin Class are seeking to impose policies not consented to.

The editors, with their pearls, and blazers, and privilege, and class, and spacious apartments, and weekend getaways, and trust funds, and sinecures, are so eager to assert their authority over everyone else through the laws they advocate. And then hate to be seen as hypocritical racist hysterics.

Reminds me of the old Libertarian meme:

Click to enlarge.

If the Times editorial board would like to reduce the number of times when they have to be embarrassed by the racial consequences of their own policies, then they might choose to 1) focus on individual citizens and not made-up identities, 2) respect citizen rights and freedoms, 3) recognize that credentials are not an indicator of knowledge or wisdom, 4) acknowledge that narrow domain expertise in one area has little predictive value beyond the domain boundaries, 5) recognize that most of life is a function of emergent order rather than imposed design, 6) accept the wisdom of crowds in the face of the unknown, 7) accept that diverse cultures, values and behaviors will always produce disparate impact, 8) recognize that a Pareto distribution is no indication of bad intent or flawed implementation, 9) think quantitatively, empirically, and rationally, and 10) accept that people are not blank slate automatons to be shaped by coercive designs.

Probably too high a price for them to pay. Easier to write self-indicting editorials off-loading blame to others for their own favored authoritarianism.