Item — HN Reader

> When he was a young Ph.D. student, Mr. Scharpf was conducting dissertation research in Buenos Aires when a government official dropped a fateful offhand comment during a conversation in a cafe. During the military dictatorship, the official said, the intelligence officers who did the regime’s worst dirty work were “essentially idiots.”

At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers.

Let me just cue up Jesse Welles and Join ICE real quick...

2 comments

Police are a great example of this. The biggest police departments all struggle to recruit today. They are always hiring and have dropped standards to reach out for more candidates. Why? Anyone with a brain knows the best job in policing is some little wealthy suburban pd where your biggest situations will be dealing with teenagers partying when their parents leave them the house for the weekend. Versus you know, dealing with people on meth or actual organized crime. As such those small town PDs are very difficult to join, and can enforce higher standards namely in education (such as a B.S. requirement) and still have plenty of good candidates. Probably also explains when you see something real happen in these small towns, like a school shooting, and the cops are just clearly too scared to go into the school themselves. Just not what they were expecting to deal with at all when they signed up for the doctor and lawyer suburb pd.

Or is it positions that enable petty tyranny or other antisocial behavior are more likely per capita outside of cities?

It’s frustrating to see the top commenters all trying to provide original takes, while only demonstrating they did not read the article which already makes *the exact same points!*

Seriously, it’s a good article. Read it. And yes, it explicitly discusses ICE.

What makes you think I didn't read the article? I read it.