Subject: Re: STOP ENGAGING WITH FASCISTS
Some folks on the right, incl some on this board, truly raise my hackles, but many others in my life are friends and family members that I’d like to learn to communicate with more effectively about important matters. Thank you.

Again, my pleasure. And since people rarely talk to other folks IRL the way they will on a message board, there's far more fruitful opportunities for actual conversation.

As long as I'm pontificating on how to effectively argue these points, I'll throw out one other belief that I have. Namely:

Almost all discussions about law enforcement are actually at heart a debate about Blackstone's ratio.

Blackstone's ratio, for all the normal people who didn't go to law school and get forced to learn who Blackstone was, is the famous aphorism that:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

When this gets discussed, it's often raised as something that everyone believes. But it's actually a very contested proposition. Not necessarily that there's a balancing between protecting the innocent and punishing the guilty, but where that balance should be struck. Is it really ten? I've often seen it quoted as one hundred, and not ten. Should it perhaps be higher? Maybe lower?

And there's not only the general principle of where we should strike the balance between protecting innocence and punishing guilt, but also the fact that we're dealing with different populations with different interests. To quote from the Wikipedia page:

The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who listened as a British lawyer explained that Britons were so enlightened that they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, "Better for whom?"

Almost all of the current debates over ICE enforcement map pretty neatly onto this framework. Let's restate the Ratio:

It is better that ____ criminal undocumented aliens remain at large than _____ otherwise law-abiding undocumented aliens have their lives upended by deportation.

Conservatives will have different numbers than progressives! Conservatives (generally) believe it is very bad to have any criminal undocumented aliens remain at large. They also place a very low value on letting otherwise law-abiding undocumented aliens avoid deportation. They think those people are cheaters and lawbreakers, and while conservatives might not care too much about prioritizing them for deportation, they certainly don't feel that their interests deserve much protection. So they think the right policy places a lot of emphasis on getting the criminals vs. minimizing disruption to the non-criminals. Meanwhile, progressives tend to reach the opposite conclusion. Not because they have any particular desire to benefit the criminal undocumented, but because they care a lot about the people that they think are fundamentally good and sympathetic (despite being undocumented) suffering the trauma of having their lives essentially destroyed.

These beliefs play out all over the immigration issue. Should ICE agents just grab whoever they can, or target known criminals? Well, it depends on how you view that ratio. Grabbing people even at random among the undocumented population can result in even a single additional criminal being removed from the country, so people will differ about how many non-criminals they're willing to damage in order to get them.

Recognizing that's what's going on with many conservative vs. progressive disputes about many law enforcement issues can help you figure out where your interlocutor is and what might persuade them.



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