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October 9, 2024 19 mins

In another miraculous edition of The Armstrong & Getty One More Thing Podcast, Jack considers a concert, Joe brings us an article by Charlies Lehman about America's Disorder Problem and MichaelAngelo has a brilliant idea.  

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're out of order. I'm out of order. This whole
country is out of order. It's one more thing.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm strong and getty, one more thing.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
We're trying to remember what line or what movie rather
than that screed was from.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
And it's an ancient al Pacino movie reference, back when
he somewhat acted as he was transitioning into his yells
all the time phase.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Right, What was that the Whoah movie?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
No, Scent of a Woman. The Scent of a Woman
is the Hua movie? Who It doesn't matter, No, it
doesn't before we get to that. So I've been thinking
about taking my kids to see the Eagles of the
Sphere in Vegas. Because I've been to the Sphere to
see the video show, which is amazing. I'd like to
see a concert there. At least one of my kids

(00:51):
really likes the Eagles, so I'd like to go, but
I need to see it.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
As you know, I insist on calling them some Eagles.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Okay, really, if Don Henley's there and a cover band
that sounds like the rest of them, I'm happy. But
I need to see a little more effort out of
my kids' school wise before I do an expensive, lavish
fun trip like this, I think, but I might go
see this not at the sphere, but doing residency where

(01:20):
you just camp at a at a casino and you
play there every single night. The Crew Motley Crue, and
I'm thinking, single guy my age, that's a perfect place
to meet women. Isn't it a Motley Crue concert venue.
It's gonna be everybody like roughly my age.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, yes, I see your point.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, it might be a good place to go shoot
your shot.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Jack. I'm appalled for some reason, but I'm not sure why.
I just I always had contempt for the uh that
sort of hair band rock, you know. I've revisited some
of the Crew stuff, and some of it's good hard rock.
Just a whole image thing put me off because I

(02:03):
was more of the thinking man, it's hard rock guy.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
I don't know if this is true or not, but
it's possible that they felt the same way. But we're told, look,
in this current moment, you need to have giant hair
and dress like this.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
It's the equivalent of the picture that they tried to
make us take for our entire career, standing back to back,
smiling like morons, and we always refused to do the cliche.
DJ Team pic. It was just too revolting.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Maybe I'll spray a little Pulo after shave on my
neck and go check out a Crew concert in Vegas.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
You do that, wear a bandana around your neck? Shot
shot God, oh boy, you know it's Katie. It's one
of the great pleasures of my life. Amusing and or
appalling you doing this.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
Glad you guys just deflated me.

Speaker 1 (03:06):
I love you. So a couple of interesting things. I
read this piece by who wrote this? Oh, Charles Layman.
Do you know Charles Faine Layman. He writes right now
for the Free Beacon, which is doing some great journalism.
If you're not hip to the Washington Free Beacon, that
is one of the foremost conservative publications. Sometimes over the

(03:28):
line a little bit, but man, they got some great
thinkers there anyway.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
So his piece is.

Speaker 1 (03:33):
About America's disorder problem, and he starts off with a
discussion of whether crime is on the rise or not,
and actually, and it surprises me, he missed the fact
that the FBI statistics are are completely wildly inaccurate. They
leave out some major cities, and they their their methodology

(03:55):
is terrible. And then the very Justice Department, for which
the FBI works does another giant survey or it's one
of your government branches on crime victims and asks people
have you been a victim of crime this year? And
the numbers there's a wild mismatch because of the number
of people who don't bother calling the cops though they
have been victimized by crime, indeed often violent crime. So anyway,

(04:17):
but we'll skip over that. His not going into that,
but what I call the cops of.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
My house got broken into if my car and I
don't know that, I would, you.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Know, I probably would. It depends. Are you in a
blue city, blue county, blue state or red.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
I definitely wouldn't if my car got broken into.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
Not even a question I've done, especially in California, complete.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Waste of time house maybe, But it depends.

Speaker 1 (04:45):
And there are certainly some neighborhoods, some of the rougher
neighborhoods where the most crime is that if somebody knocks
you down and takes your phone, you would just go
buy another phone, Yeah, which is unfortunate. But anyway, getting
back to Layman's point, he's taking about the perception that
crime is on the rise, whether it is still rising

(05:08):
or as Plateau or is even going down a little bit.
And he talks about and he starts in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
he says, and he talks about their crime is kind
of leveled off. But I argue they've done so at
the expense of controlling disorder in the city, public homelessness, trash,
drug related violations, etc. This is what has prompted persistent

(05:28):
unease even as crime has come down.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Interesting, I was just thinking that the whole perception thing
is up. I have a perception of crime is up,
but it's mostly because I see scary looking people laying
on the sidewalk and you know, garbage carts tipped over
places and just stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah. And then the other quibble I have with them
is that not only is the reporting of crime being down,
the arresting of reported criminals is down. The prosecution of
arrested criminals down because of the breakdown of our police
and our justice system. So again, I do not trust
crime statistics unless they are the victim's survey.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
And you know who has accurate statistics is the walmart
that I went to recently and needed some idbprofue because
I had a headache and it was locked up and
it didn't used to be, never was before, but it
is now just happening. Like the last couple of weeks
they locked up everything in the pharmacy area at the Walmart.
They didn't do that for fun, because that would be

(06:29):
expensive and a pain in the ass. They did it
because they had to, right.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
And he does talk about police deprioritizing order enforcement, and
now I'm done quibbling to his writing. I increasingly think
that this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not
measured like crime. There's no system for aggregating measures of
disorder across cities, but if you look for signs, they
are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown

(06:54):
bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares
in many cities. To jackpoint, the unsheltered homeless population has
risen sharply. People seem to be controlling their dogs less.
Road deaths have risen, even a vehicle miles driven declined,
suggesting people are driving more irresponsibly.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
That's that's everybody's perception.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Public drug use in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia
has gotten bad enough to prompt crackdowns. These are fuzzy signals.
But they jibe with my personal experience. In the half
dozen cities I've visited in the past year, visible disorder
has been a common feature.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yesterday and Davis, I saw a guy's full ass that
would fit into this too, where it just feels like,
just feels like things are worse because this guy was
pushing his cart down the kind of limp and down
the street and his pants sound solow. I was looking
at his entire Harry Valentine staring straight at me.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Wasted junkies showing bare ass in the public. That's right,
that's disorder. Most conspicuous in my experience is the way
that retailers have responded. It's not just CVS. Coffee shops
seem to have gotten more hostile and less welcoming. This is,
I suspect because they are dealing with people who steal,
cause a ruckus or shout up in the bathroom, disorderly
behaviors that they have to deter before they cost them customers.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
You know, here's another example, or maybe you're going to
get to this one, but this one's all these little
impressions that just give you a little bit of a
h That's right. Society sucks. Anytime I'm any place and
I want to go to the bathroom, there's a code.
Need to give you the code because it's locked. It's
just another Oh that's right, society sucks now. Used to

(08:31):
be able to come here and you eat and you
just go to the bathroom, but now you have to
get a code because so many criminals or whatever the
hell is going on.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
Or it's like when San Francisco got all warm and
fuzzy and just at the Starbucks and decided, oh, anybody
can use our bathrooms, the homeless people need it. That
lasted for like what two months before they ended up
just closing all the bathrooms because they.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
Got so trashed. Should so they either have a code
or there's no bathroom at all, Right.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
So what is disorder anyway? Part of the problem with
talking about disorder is that it's hard to define. In
disorder and crime, a Northwestern political science researcher Wesley Scogan
argues that disorder is in part distinguished from crime by
the untidiness of its definition and its dependence on often
fuzzy normative values. So you define it by the fact
that it's hard to define. Assault and battery is easy

(09:18):
to define anyway. Unlike criminology, which avoids many complex conceptual
issues simply by pointing to the statute books to classify behavior,
the study of disorder necessarily examines conflicts over uncodified sets
of norms. The concept joins together such distinct activities as building, abandonment,
and public drinking. Indeed, the challenge of defining disorder is

(09:40):
part of what has made it a controversial topic, with
critics contending that disorder is just another word that the
powerful use for whatever it is. The non white, poor
and otherwise marginalized do, yes, that's you're a racist to
be against disorder.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's really good stuff. So all that pushback about here
statistics showing crime is going down, Well, if I you know,
I'm at a little restaurant and all of a sudden
they don't have a bathroom anymore, and I want to
buy myabiprofen and it's locked up, and just lots of
little things like that. Yeah, you have the sense that
there's more disorder.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
A couple more chunks from this that I thought we're
so thought provoking, and you know, just doesn't aside to
everybody else on the crew. I love the fact that
we can stretch out and go into these things in
a little more depth during the One More Thing podcast,
since the you know, the the radio show which becomes
armstrong and getting on demand is governed by the clock

(10:31):
in a way that perus podcast is not. Yeah, I
know there are days, I think anyway, when we think
of disorder, we might think of, for example, a man
blasting loud music from his phone in a subway or
in an airplane terminal, which.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
If he's just sitting there. How about if he's just
sitting there, working man in the subway, Well.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
That's definitely disorderly. Yes. Teenagers spray painting graffiti on a
public park, a large homeless encampment taking over a city block,
a man throwing his trash on the ground and walking away.
A group of women selling sex on a street car.
These are all disorderly behaviors, as distinguished from the physical
disorder of an abandoned lot. One feature that seems to

(11:12):
join them is the way in which they affect public
as opposed to private space. The guy playing loud music
in pinges on everyone else, the encampment in the litter
both constrain the use of the street corner. These behaviors
in other words, claim for the disorderly individual space which
is nominally for everyone and therefore which is meant to
be shared by everyone. From this little exercise, he writes,

(11:35):
I want to take a first stab at a definition
disorder is domination of public space for private purposes. What
do you think of that?

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Pretty good?

Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yep, if I want to go to that very dramatic.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
But when my kids were younger, especially, you want to
go to the park and there's some rando guy laying
in the grass with his pit bull running around. Yeah,
all of a sudden, I'm not going to that park anymore.
He has claim that for his private space living, working.

Speaker 1 (12:01):
Oh and it's sort of pointing out for Blue staters
in Red States this is not a problem living, working,
or commuting in such spaces, as most city dwellers must
entail some degree of cooperation so that everyone can get
some part of the thing which no user has a
specific legal right to public space that has to be shared.
Private purposes are those things which, by contrast, we do

(12:22):
only for ourselves, or which others might want to be
excluded from our doing. Listening to music, sleeping, producing trash,
having sex, etc. And then he gets into the fact
that disorder is the natural state.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
Of the world.

Speaker 2 (12:36):
Ah, good point.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
Which is true politically, Physicsly, it feels the opposite because
you've been around order your whole life or I have.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Right, it feels like that's the natural state and we're
letting something creep in. No disorder, All that gross stuff
is the natural state until you enforce the other stuff
on it.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Right, Yeaholtly, what is the thing? The natural state of
the universe's entropy or the trend is toward in other words,
chaos disorder. And then he points out and I'll just
touch on a couple more aspects of this, but he says,
an odd feature of many parts of American society is
how little litter there is. And if you've ever spent

(13:19):
any time in Mexico, you know this to be true. Yeah,
you can go to some cities and see a lot
of it, but there's far less even there than there
ought to be relative to how much litter. Rational actors
ought by default to produce, So littering. Putting trash somewhere
other than a designated receptacle unburdens the litter at by
default essentially no cost. It's easy and if done correctly fun.

(13:41):
If you don't believe me, try chucking cans off an overpath.
But that we don't because we have created a certain
amount of order in our society. And it's to all
of our wonderful, wonderful benefits. And the fact that we
don't have coffiness music in every you know, gate at

(14:04):
the airport, and and you know, people are not masturbating
on every public conveyance or park bench and the rest
of it. Thank god. I don't think there's not graffiti everywhere.

Speaker 2 (14:17):
It's a weird thing to do.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
Masturbate on a subway, Yeah, about a park bench.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
The fresh air, you know, the smell of the trees,
the squirrels, people walking by.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
I feel like if I were alone on a subway
with no danger of anybody even seeing me, I couldn't.

Speaker 5 (14:36):
I just wouldn't. It just doesn't seem nothing with that aude.
It just doesn't seem like a sexy atmosphere. I don't
want my bare bottom on that gross seat. There's just
a lot of reasons why I wouldn't.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
I mean history, Yeah, So then you combine the fact
that there are people watching, and I definitely just can't.

Speaker 3 (14:59):
You just gotta I get so high you don't realize
what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
Is that it?

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Hello, So finally I want to get to this and
this is it's a very very long think piece, and
I wish we had time for all of it.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
But now that stadium put my legs up on the
seat in front of me. Oh come on, yeah, wow unanimous.
I wish we had stones here, we'd stone you. But anyway,
why then is there not more disorder?

Speaker 1 (15:26):
And the answer is what criminologists and sociologists call social control,
the regulation of individual behavior by social institutions through informal
and formal means, shared values, shared values, and a responsibility
to your community, which your community will demand of you.
And that is what has crumbled, and part of it

(15:49):
is and I just read another philosophical piece on this
the whole diversity is our greatest strength. Bullshit that we
heard for years and years, and you dared not raise
your voice against we did for a long time. They
tried to shut us down several times. But and I'm
not anti diversity in a new way. It can make

(16:09):
things really interesting and can be a strength. But shared
values are a greatest strength by like a million miles,
and diversity challenges and often damages shared values. That's why
we have a disorder epidemic. We lack shared values and

(16:30):
a cohesive community that enforces them through formal and informal means.
Why did I not chuck garbage on the street I
grew up in in suburban Chicago land because I would
have been harshly, you know, remonstrated to use the fancy term.
I would have been chewed out, dragged by my ear

(16:51):
back home, or my dad would have had at me.
Is that true in your neighborhood? Now, friends, I ask you,
and why not?

Speaker 6 (17:02):
Okay, here's my idea. Jack says he can't find a bathroom.
What about a bathroom truck instead of an ice cream truck.
It's a truck with the you know, a little song plane.
People wave it down, down, you flag it down. People
go in the back, there's a you know stall, they
do their thing, and yeah, we know.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
What a toilet is.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
And then if you have to urinate it, yeah we
get that. I have been asking for more paid toilets
for years. That's what I've found in a number of places.
Mexico City had them, they have them, had them in Russia.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
I love the idea. That it keeps out a certain segment.
Who and it's not much money, but it keeps out
the worst segment and uh, and it keeps them clean
because they can afford to clean him.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
Although the one I went to one Moscow, it was
a paid toilet and it was very clean in there,
but it was just a hole in the ground. I
mean you just there was just a hole in the
cement squatting or a hole, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
Yeah, but it was cloe. So, Michael, if you need
like financing for this idea, because I'm picturing like sections
of various cities that have the food trucks, where's the
bathroom truck? Where there is food and drink, there is
need for a bathroom. I'm not a doctor, but I'm
pretty confident about this. Your bathroom trucks are a brilliant idea.

(18:20):
I think it's the volume. You couldn't get enough volume
to turn a profit. Yeah, eat more, no, no, no, no.
The number of toilets per vehicle. That's disgusting. That's worse
than what I said.

Speaker 6 (18:38):
You took pretty bad.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
Now you took the cake jack with the whole feet
up at the baseball stadium.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Yeah you mean yeah, I think we kind of did. Yeah, Michael, please.

Speaker 6 (18:53):
All right, Well I guess that's it.

Speaker 5 (19:00):
Yeah,
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