Obsidian Wings

Your weekend open post: Kids and their damn music

wj writes

Why do I get the feeling that, if we start talking music rather than politics, the usual Obsidian Wings moderation will go right out the window? ;-)

Oh yeah! Being a day ahead, I can pop some popcorn. 

What's the difference between Fox News and the Republican base?

by Doctor Science

From my view on the outside, it looks as though there are two important groups in the Republican party: the Establishment, and the Base. By the "Establishment" I mean major individual and corporate donors, and career politicians (and their staffs). By the "Base" I mean the Republican primary voters. The fact that Tea Party-type candidates can usually win Republican primaries against candidates supported by the Establishment tells me that the Tea Party represents the Base pretty well.

The biggest policy difference I know between the Base and the Establishment is that the Establishment wants immigration reform, preferably with a guest worker program, and the Base is utterly opposed to it. This was demonstrated clearly during W. Bush's presidency (when he tried to put through immigration reform and his own party slapped him down), and doesn't seem to have changed since.

In general, the Base seems to despise conservative compromise and moderation, and that's one reason they were never more than lukewarm about Romney (the quintessential Establishment candidate, as I think we can all agree). Except for immigration, most of the policy differences between Base and Establishment seem to be about matters of degree (i.e. how much to compromise), not about goals or principles. But that's just how it looks to me -- I may be missing some important aspect.

What I want to know is, is there any issue where Fox News' editorial opinions are closer to the Establishment than the Base? One thing that's known about the internal workings of Fox News is that John Moody, Senior VP for News, used to send out a morning memo that set out the theme or main talking points for the day's coverage, a unifying message that could be repeated throughout the day. It's not clear that he still does this -- Gabriel Sherman, author of the unauthorized biography of Roger Ailes, thinks they don't need them any more, because any competent employee knows which way the wind blows at Fox and how to present it.

But I figure that means that any reasonably intelligent watcher of Fox News should be able to deduce what the day's memo was, or what it would have been if it existed -- because, AFAIK, Fox has a unified, consistent worldview, and that's one of its big selling points.

On immigration, AFAIK Fox is closer to the Base than the Establishment -- just see how often they use the word "illegals". And IIRC during the 2012 Republican primaries they spotlighted or promoted a whole string of candidates before Romney locked it up.

But I am, as I said, not an insider, and most of my relatives and Facebook-friends aren't big Fox News fans. So, those of you who watch Fox -- or who talk to (or are talked at by) Fox News fans -- what, if anything, is an example of the difference between the positions of the Republican Base and/or Tea Party, and the positions of Fox News?

And then, how could an outsider (like me) tell whether Fox and the Base agree because Fox is accurately following the Base, or because the Base is getting its facts and opinions (and expressions, like "illegals") from Fox News? Who's in the driver's seat?

Nice, on the Promenade des Anglais, painted by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec when he was only 17. The picture is of the painter's father driving a four-in-hand.

It's not about the danger or difficulty of police work, it's about Respecting My Authority

by Doctor Science

In almost every speech or article about police behavior, there's a reference to the "difficult and dangerous job" police do, and how they deserve our respect for it.

How dangerous is policing, really? Does society usually have more respect for people who do dangerous jobs in general, and dangerous but necessary jobs in particular? I've looked at the statistics, and they suggest No. Police don't receive respect for facing danger, but for their authority.

Cartman, from the South Park episode "Chickenlover".

So, how dangerous is policing?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics highlights 10 "Occupations with high fatal work injury rates" each year in its Fatal Occupational Injuries Report. I've collated these lists for 2008-2013:

Fishing and logging are consistently far and away the most dangerous US occupations; third place is always aircraft pilot -- almost all from crashes of small airplanes, crop dusters, etc. After that, there's a clump of occupations involving high places, heavy equipment, or both, especially roofers, trash collectors, and farmers. Truck drivers represent by far the largest numbers of occupational deaths, because they have a very high death rate (always in the top 10) and there are a great many people in that line of work.

The biggest caveat about this list is that it doesn't have a separate category for "oil and gas extraction workers", which should probably be in the top 10, but doesn't seem to fall into a single category for easy measurement.

In this six-year period, police officers only showed up on the "most dangerous jobs" list once, in 2010. People talk about cops (and their families) worrying that they'll be killed on the job, but their chances are better than those of a truck driver, a roofer, a farmer, or a garbage collector. Policing is dangerous, but I don't think you can call it extraordinarily dangerous -- not given that it's less dangerous than farming or truck-driving, which aren't considered horrifically risky jobs. And it isn't even close to being as risky as fishing, logging, or piloting.

Now, policing *is* different from most jobs in that a lot of the risk is that you might be killed by another human, on purpose -- while this risky-jobs list is obviously weighted toward "nothing personal, it's just nature and the laws of physics". Homicide intuitively *feels* much more dangerous than a truck accident, even though the chances of a trucker dying in a crash are much higher than the chance a cop will be murdered.

It turns out, though, that cops aren't the ones with the highest risk of being murdered on the job. When I collated just data on homicides, here's what I found:

The most recent formal study of occupational homicide looked at 1983-92, pretty much the peak of the late 20th-century crime wave:

Murder rates were higher overall, but there's no doubt about the pattern[1] then and now: policing has a high risk of murder, but the outstandingly dangerous job is taxi driver. Taxi drivers don't usually a have a hugely higher death rate overall than cops only because they don't have as many fatal car accidents:

In other words, cops -- who are supposed to deal with violence professionally -- are more likely to die on the job in a car accident than from murder, while taxi drivers -- who spend their time driving -- are more likely to die from murder than a car accident.

Overall, I don't see evidence that the most dangerous jobs, or the ones with the highest murder risk, are particularly "respected" -- and they certainly aren't exceptionally well-paid. People don't talk about "garbage collectors, risking their lives for us every day" -- even though it's true. And it's not as though garbage collecting isn't truly useful and important work, either.

I suspect that one of the big differences between cops and other high-risk workers is that both police culture and popular culture exaggerate and heroicize the risks cops face, whereas taxi drivers, loggers, barbers, roofers, etc. tend to downplay (or ignore) the risks of their work.[2]

Police use this romantic, exaggerated idea of the risks they take to justify their demands for "respect", but they're not really asking for the kind of respect we give taxi drivers or fishermen. They want unquestioned, untrammeled authority. For instance, in our last thread about this, hairshirtthehedonist talked about an argument he had with a police officer neighbor about the Garner case:

It was nearly impossible to make the distinction between bad police behavior (or plain-old bad cops) and the police in general. Any support for protesters or investigations into potentially wrongful police conduct was taken not just as an attack on police in general (despite my coming from a family full of police, including my own father), but as an approval of the recent murders of the two NYPD officers.

When you treat any implication that you might know someone who's done anything wrong as a death threat, you're not just asking for "respect" in the usual sense. Just as when Patrick Lynch, head of the Patrolmen's union, says

The Mayor shows us no respect, and encourages the public to follow his lead.

-- where by "no respect" he apparently means, "warns his biracial son to be extra careful around police." Lynch doesn't want "respect", he wants both obedience and trust: for members of the public not merely to refrain from challenging the police, but to do so out of pure and complete trust.

And you know what, I can't respect that -- that's authoritarianism, pure and simple. What I *can* respect is Nashville, TN, police chief Steve Anderson, who wrote, about recent protests in that city:

"I have a son who I have raised to respect police officers and other authority figures, but if he comes to me today and asks "Why are the police allowing this?" I wouldn't have a good answer."

... First, it is laudable that you are teaching your son respect for the police and other authority figures. However, a better lesson might be that it is the government the police serve that should be respected. The police are merely a representative of a government formed by the people for the people—for all people. Being respectful of the government would mean being respectful of all persons, no matter what their views.

If "respect" is something that is only due to authorities or superiors, Anderson is making no sense. But I know of no better statement of what "respect" should mean in a democracy.

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[1] The homicide reports I use don't break down the occupational data to the level or with the same categories as this older report, so we can't compare them directly. I think we all expect that the occupations "convenience store cashier" and "late-night liquor store manager", for instance, have much higher homicide rates than average -- probably comparable to the (very high) risk for barbers.

[2] Many of the riskiest jobs are mostly taken by immigrants -- in New York City, for instance, 96% of taxi drivers are immigrants. It may well be that the murder risk for taxi drivers is just too high for American citizens to tolerate, given that the job comes with no premium in pay or respect. "Police officer" would then be the riskiest, most violent job native-born Americans will take, and "respect" is part of the occupation's pay scale.

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ETA: To include prettier versions of some of the charts. Data have not changed.