Open Mic for the week of 8/7/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
Insurance Law question:
I’m sure we’re all familiar with the gag about the cigar afficionado who insured his expensive cigars and then posted a claim about how they were destroyed “in a series of small fires”. The punchline is that the insurance paid out and then sued him for arson.
WITH THAT IN MIND:
Is something similar going on with Oberlin here?
I mean, instead of paying out, the insurance companies seem to be just saying “you don’t get to burn your cigars and then file a claim”.Report
Oberlin messed up big in this case. The Right keeps harping on this because they imagine that Oberlin is a super-important place to Democratic voters, hint it isn’t, and it sort of represents the closest you can to a Rightist parody of liberals in real life. For once.Report
Nut picking does seem to work much better against the Democratic Party than it does on the Republican Party. You can find tons of examples of far-right wingers and reactionaries being close to Republican power structures. But it never quite seems to land. On the other hand, it does seem to land when you take a rando on twitter or a College Campus and people think said person has a direct line to the DNC, Biden, Schumer, and Jefferies.Report
Sure, sure. “Nobody is arguing X!” “Oberlin was arguing X.”
But my question isn’t whether anybody is arguing X.
My question is about whether Oberlin has a case against their insurers.Report
The only answer here is that: it depends.
Defamation is an intentional tort and there is generally/usually no insurance coverage for intentional torts. Insurance can cover liabilities but generally only negligence or gross negligence.
However, insurance coverage law is tricky and it would depend on the language of the policy and a lot of very tricky and overlapping law.
Insurance companies have a duty to defend and a duty to indemnify. The duty to defend is much broader than the duty to indemnify. However, there can be cases where an insurer acts in bad faith and refuses to indemnify or protect the insured from an excess verdict. Here, there can be a bad faith law suit and a successful bad faith verdict comes with treble damages.
You, like many other people, own an auto insurance policy. Imagine you are in a car accident, and you are liable, and caused injuries. The lawyer for the injured plaintiff may choose to send a letter called a policy limit demand which seeks to prove that their client injures deserves the maximum payout from your policy. The insurance company has a duty to determine whether based on what it knows or should know from a reasonable investigation whether it is more likely than not that a jury would return an excess verdict to the plaintiff. If it determines that an excess verdict is more likely than not, it needs to pay the policy. If it doesn’t and there is an excess verdict, you are responsible for the excess and can sue your insurer for not acting in your interest but in their interest.
E.g., you have a million dollar auto liability policy and the plaintiff’s lawyer demands your insurance company pay it all to his or her client. The insurance company says no and the case goes to trial, the plaintiff prevails, and you are hit with a 2 million dollar verdict. You need to pay the 1 million not covered by your policy.
Even here, a bad faith lawsuit is not necessarily going to be successful because maybe the insurance company did a good faith investigation and its conclusion than an excess verdict was not likely was reasonable.
The decision to settle or not and for what rests with the insurance company generally. But it is supposed to avoid putting the insured at risk of an excess verdict. It has a legal duty to do so. Maybe Oberlin’s insurer had an opportunity to save it from facing an excess verdict but decided not to.
This was probably more info than anyone wanted.Report
No, that’s actually great info. Thank you!
The insurance company has a duty to determine whether based on what it knows or should know from a reasonable investigation whether it is more likely than not that a jury would return an excess verdict to the plaintiff.
This is where the rubber seems to meet the road for me.
From my perspective, it seems that a reasonable investigation would have shown that a jury would have returned an excess verdict to the plaintiff.
I mean, sure, hindsight is 20/20 and all that. But even so.
One theory out there that I saw said that one of the likely possible outcomes was insurance paying a pittance of the judgment and then dropping coverage entirely.
Was *THAT* someone who was engaging in premature schadenfreude? Did they know what they were talking about?Report
“Oberlin? Who dat?”Report
One thought I’ve had is that maybe what will bring about the Robot Corporate Dystopia Cyberpunk Future is not “money eats everything” but “companies get burned too often by following social-justice ideas and decide to just not bother with that stuff anymore”Report
Just like how “Christmas Party” turned into “Holiday Party”, “Pride” will turn into “We’re *ALL* awesome, aren’t we?”Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/opinion/transgender-republicans-lgbt.html
Jane Coaston goes on a unicorn hunt and finds an elected politician that is also a transgender woman and a Republican.
I share this because I think the media is obsessed with finding unicorns and I think it is to the detriment of their skills and to numerical reality as well as political and numerical reality. Instead the media seems to think that by highlighting the unicorns it can influence the “discourse” and get temperatures and negative partisanship to be turned down somehow.Report
Slightly more charitable, the obsession with unicorns tends to come from people who are deeply aware of the partisan positions but find the obvious conclusions horrifying. Unicorns represent the hope for a peaceful, reasonable, and commonsensical return to normalcy.Report
Scratch an internet contrarian and find a guy who writes white supremacy polemics under pseudonyms including for Taki’s Magazine: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/richard-hanania-white-supremacist-pseudonym-richard-hoste_n_64c93928e4b021e2f295e817
“Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.
A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.
HuffPost connected Hanania to his “Richard Hoste” persona by analyzing leaked data from an online comment-hosting service that showed him using three of his email addresses to create usernames on white supremacist sites. A racist blog maintained by Hoste was also registered to an address in Hanania’s hometown. And HuffPost found biographical information shared by Hoste that aligned with Hanania’s own life.”Report
Harper Collins is publishing his book on September 19th. If you check the Harper Collins Twitter page, it’s full of people posting that link as a response to anything they tweet (including retweets from other accounts entirely).
It doesn’t look like Harper Collins will withdraw publication.
The closest thing to an employer that Hanania has is his publisher and his substack. Neither seems to be in the process of dropping him.Report
Was he as influential as Eric Stewart? If he was then it should be a big story. If he wasn’t, then this should:
https://nypost.com/2023/08/04/professor-fired-for-faking-data-to-prove-whites-want-longer-sentences-for-blacks/Report
For anyone interested in Hanania:
“The revelation of my anonymous writing clears up what some consider a mystery, which is why such a large portion of my current work involves attacking right-wing collectivism and illiberal beliefs….The truth is that part of it is self-loathing towards my previous life. I all too clearly notice the kind of sloppy thinking, emotional immaturity, and moral shortcomings that can lead one to adopt a quasi-fascist ideology, and am hard on others because I’m hard on myself for once holding such views.”
https://quillette.com/2023/08/07/my-journey-out-of-extremism/Report
We pegged him as a racist based on his new writings, even before his old ones surfaced.
He recites all the same talking points about black people and crime, using the essentialist argument which is the premise of racism itself.Report
Called it.Report
We understand him perfectly.
But if you want, go ahead and explain for us his Substack comments about black crime. I mean, he talks about it a lot, like all the time.
Specifically, explain for us why black crime rates are so high. Surely he (and you) have a good explanation for it.
Let’s hear it.Report
Literacy rates.
Schools that have lower literacy rates are less likely to make employable graduates. If there are fewer employable graduates, crime becomes more appealing… both due to innumeracy as well as there being fewer options.
I mean, there are a ton of reasons.
But schools are definitely one of them.Report
Is this Hanania talking or you?Report
Does that matter?Report
Yes because if its Hanania we can all just read for ourselves and see if your interpretation matches ours. If its you, then we can only react to what you yourself say.Report
Ah, well. Let’s see if it’s possible to collapse the waveform.
Go and read his stuff.Report
So I’ll just repeat the question: Why are crime rates so high in black neighborhoods?
It seems weird that no one wants to actually address it despite the fact that it is a theme repeated endlessly in conservative media.Report
I would say that it obviously correlates to literacy levels and stuff like the SAT.
Since Black neighborhoods are underserved by their schools (deliberately? benign neglect? side effect of corruption in the school districts with relatively high funding per student?), it results in higher crime later in life for reasons I’ve already stated.
It’s weird that no one wants to actually address it.
You wouldn’t believe how much pushback there is against criticism of school districts without a *SINGLE* proficient student.Report
I think there are lots of people and organizations which have a lot to say about how to improve low and underperforming schools.
But this is why I asked who was speaking. Your position is a fairly mainstream one.
Since there was the assertion that we liberals just “don’t understand” Hanania’s evolved and enlightened viewpoint, I would like someone to explain his theory of why black neighborhoods have higher crime rates.
Can someone explain it, or better, refer me to where Hanania himself explains it?Report
I think there are lots of people and organizations which have a lot to say about how to improve low and underperforming schools.
Yeah, they’ve been saying it for decades.
I remember complaining that there were six schools in Baltimore that had zero proficient students.
We’re up to over 20!
What are you not understanding about how this is contributing to crime and criminality?Report
I’m agreeing with you.
I’m searching for someone to explain to me what Hanania thinks is causing crime.Report
I googled “richard hanania crime” and here’s what popped up.Report
It was this writing of his which prompted my question in the first place.
Nowhere in the essay does he explain WHY there is so much crime.
He spends paragraphs telling us that no one wants to address the high crime rate, then more paragraphs documenting the high crime rate, and then more paragraphs telling us how no one wants to talk about the high crime rate, then finally a paragraph telling us that we need to increase government power too arrest and surveil black communities.
Hanania (and his defenders) steadfastly refuse to explain why black neighborhoods have a higher crime rate.Report
I would say that it obviously correlates to literacy levels and stuff like the SAT.
Since Black neighborhoods are underserved by their schools (deliberately? benign neglect? side effect of corruption in the school districts with relatively high funding per student?), it results in higher crime later in life for reasons I’ve already stated.
It’s weird that no one wants to actually address it.
You wouldn’t believe how much pushback there is against criticism of school districts without a *SINGLE* proficient student.Report
I’ve said before that I don’t think any school district is getting substantially less from their schools than the parents want or expect. It seems to be that diagnosing everything that interacts with black culture as being broken makes less sense than diagnosing black culture as broken.Report
And what would you point to as the forces “breaking” it?Report
Breaking or keeping it broken?
I’d say failure to address failing schools beyond screaming “JUST INCREASE THE FUNDING!” is one of the things keeping it broken.
Remember when Zuck gave Newark schools $100,000,000 that was contingent on being matched by other donors? So, like, Newark got $200,000,000?
Well, Vox did a deep dive on what happened.
The argument is somewhere between “it worked, test scores went up” and “I’m not sure that it worked that well”.
Here’s the nut:
Weakening tenure protections and charter schools.
Huh.Report
fascinating how no one wants to talk about why/how/whether this is actually broken, but whether solutions are functional. To a problem no one want to discuss the origins of.Report
I think that the number of schools without a single proficient student is going *UP* is an indicator that solutions are not functional.
Like, that seems pretty evident. I’d need to see evidence of someone else saying “no, they’d work”.
Maybe that’s the point of the people screaming for more funding…
“These solutions would work if only we got more money!”
“Why is the number of schools without a single proficient student going up instead of down?”
“Um. Republicans.”
“In Baltimore?”Report
I commented less than an hour ago. I’m not avoiding talking about this, and I’ve never avoided talking about it. I’ve often cited Black Rednecks and White Liberals as a great starting point for understanding the problem. Its argument is that the redneck culture of northern England and Scotland made its way to the American South, which made its way into the black culture which migrated north and overwhelmed the old American North (or English South) black culture. The same traits that you hate so much in Southern white culture exist across American black culture. Bravado, emotionality, displays of wealth, violence, lack of interest in education and long-term improvement, et cetera.Report
For the record, I agree with this diagnosis.
But I have to continue asking- Is this Hanania talking or you?
I keep being told that we just don’t understand Hanania, yet no one can seem to explain his ideas to us.Report
Oh, yeah, crazy level of insight there. I’ll donate a nickel to your favorite charity.Report
Libertarians wonder why so many non-Whites, women, and LGBT people stay away from their movement despite many possibly being quite open to arguments about the minimalist state but the sort of just asking questions type of racism/sexism/homophobia or sometimes just pure hatred that you can find in the movement.Report
In before the usual suspects proudly chime in with own-goals admitting that they don’t understand the difference between this and the opinions he expresses now.Report
Care to lay out what you see as the differences?Report
From the Quillette piece:
“The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races. My mistake in a previous life was assigning collective guilt based on certain undeniable facts. Leftist suppression on these issues has clearly backfired, and we have to work towards getting to a place where we neither deny reality like much of the political establishment does nor react to their power and influence by adopting a mirror image of woke ideology and its doctrine of collective guilt. Again, as with how to run an economy or ensure the peaceful transfer of political power, classical liberalism is the only plausible answer I can see to this dilemma. There’s been a long stream of young right-wingers who have recently been exposed for having once held extreme views on race and gender, and it’s an easy trap to fall into given the absurdity of liberal lies on these topics. I want to help others avoid doing so.”Report
And yet his current writings under his actual name don’t seem to be moving away from those perspectives, or the racist policies he advocates for. As InMD notes below, He seems to believe in racist public policy, and isn’t willing to address the systemic aspects of it. Which mean she may be less strident, and less vociferously extreme, but no less racist.
And I love how Brandon doesn’t have to answer for himself around here.Report
To be clear, Hanania is a conservative, and I don’t think expecting him to accept progressive theories of systemic racism is realistic, or even necessary. But at a certain point he ought to be able to concede that having police following around black people in particular for no reason other than broader, aggregate, univariate crime statistics is not something we can tolerate, if for no other reason than its tendency to single out and mistreat totally innocent people because of their race.Report
Brandon is free to comment as he sees fit. It’s lunch hour, and I read and linked to the Quillette piece, so I didn’t think it’d be a problem if I copied a paragraph from it.Report
If I don’t answer you, it’s because I have better things to do, not because I don’t have an answer.Report
Again, if he followed his own advice I think it would be maybe a little easier to forgive youthful racist trolling. Note, I say easier, even if not necessarily easy. But at some point you do need to vocally make that case for classical liberalism, including the classical liberal case against operating based on racial and demographic statistics with respect to something like crime and policing, as opposed to individual conduct.Report
“I used to be worse” may be true, but it isn’t much.Report
Instead of race, consider the relationship between sex and crime, since most people find that easier to think rationally about. Men commit much more crime than women, especially violent crime, and especially homicide. In general, people are able to handle this fact in
a reasonably sane manner. Barring the odd lesbian separatist, essentially nobody is calling for the elimination of men, or for the systematic oppression of men just for being men.
On the other hand, the media, academia, and activists aren’t all gaslighting us on this the way they are on race. Even though 95% of people killed by police are men, men’s rights activists aren’t out setting stuff on fire over this. We don’t attribute the overrepresentation of men in prison to systemic misandry. We understand that cracking down on crime will necessarily involve arresting and incarcerating more men, to a much greater extent than women. People who point out the fact that these things can be explained by men committing more crime than women are not smeared as sexist by leftists with piss-poor critical thinking skills.
To the best of my knowledge, what Hanania has been saying for as long as he’s been on my radar is analogous to the latter, not the former. I don’t read everything he writes, so it’s possible that I’m wrong. But given that there has been a longstanding, remarkably consistent pattern of leftists disingenuously and/or stupidly conflating these two things when it comes to race—and given that I caught Chip doing exactly this with Hanania specifically just a couple of months ago—claims to the contrary from the two of you are worth nothing to me.Report
There has been a lot of good research into why men are more violent than women.
So we can say with reasonable assurance that yes, men are essentially more prone to violence, even when all other factors are weighed. Essentialism in this case is wholly justified.
Is essentialism justified with race?Report
Well, there is one thing that we still haven’t hammered down.
Are there different amounts of violence between races?
Maybe white people are just underpoliced and there are just as many homicides in the ‘burbs as appear to be happening in the slums.
Here’s a story from 2017 where a white guy shot another white guy.Report
That’s possible, but for the moment lets just stipulate Hanania’s contention that there is a higher rate of violence in predominantly black areas.
Can someone here explain Hanania’s theory for why this happens?Report
His essay didn’t go into it.
But I know that I, personally, have witnessed people arguing against policing *AT ALL* in areas of higher crime.
I’ve seen people arguing against policing of property crimes, theft, and, get this, *GUN LAWS*.
The justification for that seemed to be that the hammer of the law would fall disproportionately on the people who populate high crime areas.
So I’d say that there would be more crime in areas that are insufficiently policed.Report
But again, this doesn’t explain any of Hanania’s statements or positions.
Which is weird because he has been making the same statement (that there is more crime in black areas) since he was an admitted white supremacist.
And weirder still, the people who find him to be a reasonable person can’t seem to explain his statements either.
They are adamant that there is a totally not-racist explanation for it, but darned if they can put it into words.
That’s weird, right?Report
I figured out what bugs me about this.
It has to do with the new morality where there are things more important than True or False.
There is a Proposition. Let’s call it Proposition P.
Proposition P is formulated in such a way that it is either True or False without being ambiguous.
Proposition P can also be interpreted as being Racist.
If Proposition P is True, a very good way to argue against Proposition P is to call Proposition P “Racist”.
EVEN THOUGH THIS DOES NOT MAKE PROPOSITION P FALSE!
If resolving a problem entails acknowledging the unsavory truth of Proposition P, focusing on how Proposition P is actually racist is a great way to prolong the problem.Report
The best way to demonstrate the truth of Proposition P, unsavory or not, is to demonstrate its truth.
Has anyone demonstrated its truth?Report
Are there different amounts of violence between races?
Like, if there are, could this be demonstrated to your satisfaction with statistics?Report
Lets start with a thesis then see what data and empirical evidence is required to support it.
State your thesis.Report
Is this going to result in you calling Proposition P “racist”?
Here’s the murder stats for 2018 from the FBI.
What does this data/empirical evidence give us confidence to say?
Anything?Report
If you can’t even say what you are trying to prove, how can anyone respond?
What are you trying to prove?Report
See, Chip, part of the problem is that my suspicion is that you are playing the “Calling Proposition P ‘Racist’ is a trump card!” game.
So you’re waiting for me to say something that you can call “racist” and then declare victory.
I have no desire to play that game.
I would rather play the game where we establish whether it’s possible to reach (tentative) conclusions from data and then, from there, make statements that are either true or false.
So. There’s the data. Have you looked at it?
If so, do you believe that the data would allow someone, in theory, to come to a (tentative) conclusion from it and make a statement that is True?Report
If all you have is a single statistical survey, then no, we can’t come to any conclusions at all.
But obviously you have come to a conclusion, so maybe stop stalling and say what it is.Report
Okay. So FBI crime data counts as a “single statistical survey”. Which means that you can’t use it to come to even a tentative conclusion.
I’m going to guess that there are no statistics that would meet your high standards.
Which means that there is no such thing as a Proposition P that is either True or False without being ambiguous that is based on anything. Because there is no data that you will accept.
Does that about sum it up?Report
Yes, the FBI crime statistics are in fact merely one set of statistics. Like, that’s the very definition.
There is no such proposition about anything in the world, that can be proven by a single set of statistics.
This is why we need replication and corroboration before anyone can draw any conclusions about anything.
Sorry, this is just how logic works.Report
Do aggregated statistics become something more than one set of statistics when you aggregate them?
Or is it like water? Like, you pour two glasses of water into one big glass and it’s just one glass of water now?Report
I can’t tell if you’re pulling my leg or if you really don’t understand the scientific process.Report
Please assume that I don’t know the answer to the questions.
Do aggregated statistics become something more than one set of statistics when you aggregate them?
Or is it like water? Like, you pour two glasses of water into one big glass and it’s just one glass of water now?Report
Aggregated statistics do become something else. Both a larger data set, and generally a smoother data set wherein outliers become harder to spot because there’s so much more data.
Aggregated data is not, however, time series data per se. the FBI crime statistics over multiple years or multiple decades are time series.Report
So if I found FBI stats from different years, would *THAT* count as data?Report
No, because:
1. Data collected by the same source over time, may just be a case of the same people making the same mistakes over and over. This is called “replication” where other, different sources need to collect data which shows the same results;
2. Any sort of data needs to be compared to other types of data and empirical observations; The famous measurement of the lengths of shadows in Athens and Alexandria didn’t prove the earth was round; this had to wait until someone could empirically circumnavigate the globe. This is called “corroboration.”
About the only thing we can conclude that there are THIS many crimes reported here by this sort of people, and THAT many crimes reported over there by that sort of people.
Any larger conclusion is not possible.
What you are doing here is called “argument by implication” where you take a single data point and imply that it has larger conclusions.
But it fails because you haven’t addressed, much less ruled out any of a million alternate theories.
But here’s the thing. Even you yourself aren’t using the FBI crime stats to draw conclusions.
You already had drawn a conclusion long before you ever saw those stats. The stats are just what you flash at people to make your conclusion sound rigorous and objective.
So why not just be honest and tell us what your conclusion is, and why you arrived at it?Report
So why not just be honest and tell us what your conclusion is, and why you arrived at it?
My tentative conclusion is that this isn’t about discovering what is true but about performative morality where there is a more important set of properties than “Truth/Falsity” to any given Proposition P (specifically “Racist/Not Racist” (or sexist or homophobic or fatphobic or Sinophobic or whatever)).
It is easier to wrestle with whether one’s interlocutor is “bad” than whether they are “wrong”.
And a good way to deal with that is to categorically deny that they have any sufficient evidence at all for their True/False position but you have all the evidence you need for you to reach the conclusion that your interlocutor is Racist.
That’s my (tentative) conclusion.Report
I’m not calling you “bad”.
I’m calling you “illogical” and “poorly reasoned”.
And now you are compounding the illogic by playing the victim of ad hominem attacks, in an effort to avoid having to support your contention.Report
No, Chip. I’m not saying that you’re calling me bad.
I’m saying that you’re stacking the deck as part of a setup to do so.
I can bring you reams of aggregated data from all over the country but it would be insufficient.
I think that there is no data that I could bring you that would convince you of any given Proposition P. It’s not data that would change your mind.Report
“You refused to draw broad conclusions from a single strand of data so therefore I refuse to show you my totally convincing proof which is in my back pocket”.
*Waves my hand, Jedi style*
This is not the killer argument you are looking for.Report
You expected different?Report
CJ, could you provide a quick breakdown of what counts as “evidence” for a court of law?
(And, if you have time, what can be waved away out of hand by the defense/prosecution because it’s so obviously *NOT* evidence?)Report
No, I couldn’t. It would take too long and nobody would read it. And it wouldn’t help you answer the question you’ve been asked many times but refuse to answer.Report
I’m not refusing to answer it! I just want my questions answered first!
And I have answers.
All of the statistics we have available are insufficient to reach any conclusions about. We do not have enough data.
Therefore, I can’t make any Propositions that stand upon data. Because there isn’t any.
(But I do think that there is stuff that counts as “evidence” in a court of law.)Report
I do have a few minutes so:
Federal Rule of Evidence 401
Evidence is relevant if: (a) it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence; and (b) the fact is of consequence in determining the action.
Federal Rule of Evidence 402
Relevant evidence is admissible unless [otherwise provided].
Two things jump out. First, admissibility is a very low bar to clear. Second, and more important, you can’t clear that low bar unless you are presenting some proposition that the evidence makes more or less probable. Nothing is evidence in and of itself.
If, but only if, you are advancing some identified and understandable proposition, the FBI survey would be admissible in court if it had any tendency to support that proposition. It doesn’t have to be very good evidence in support of the proposition to be admitted, but it does have to have something to do with some identified and understandable proposition.
You’ve been asked for one. You won’t say what it is. Therefore, the FBI study would be inadmissible no matter how good a study it is.
Outside of court, there is no question of admissibility, but evidence or data still need to be connected to some actual proposition to move any kind of discussion forward.Report
So, like, let’s say that my proposition was “According to the FBI, 2018’s murder stats show that there were 6570 murders”. And then something like “According to that 2018 table, of the murders where the race of the offender was known, 3011 of those murders were committed by white people, 207 were committed by ‘other’, and 175 were committed by persons whose race was unknown.”
And then probably something like “the difference of 6570 and 3393 is 3177.”
Before we got to Proposition P, would all of that be within acceptable tolerances?
Because, if it were, we could come up with similar counts for 2017, 2016, and back a ways. As many years as the FBI has numbers for.
And, from there, come up with some observations about relative percentages. Like, is the relationship between white, other, and unknown pretty consistent to the number of murders (within a particular error band)?
Because if the next statement is something like “Data collected by the same source over time, may just be a case of the same people making the same mistakes over and over” or some other variant of “we don’t know that your data is any good”, I’m not sure that we should bother looking at all.
Maybe go back to the original premise of “We don’t know what is or is not True, but we do know what is or is not Racist”.
So I’ll ask you: Are the FBI numbers pretty good? Like, could I admit them as evidence for stuff like “how many murders were committed by whites”, “how many murders were committed by other”, “how many murders were committed by unknown”, and “how many murders were there total”?
Or would we say that we don’t know enough to know if the FBI’s stats can be trusted?Report
So you completely missed the point. And I don’t think it’s my fault.Report
Well, for me, the point remains that Chip considers the FBI data to be flawed to the point where I shouldn’t use it.
I’m asking you if it’s flawed to the point where I couldn’t use it that way in a court of law.
Perhaps I should just use that one question:
If the Prosecution/Defense wanted to argue that the FBI’s numbers shouldn’t be admissible because we don’t know whether the data is any good, would that be upheld by the judge?Report
Your argument with Chip is not my business. You asked a question about the admissibility of evidence. I answered it. Your new question suggests that you don’t understand the answer. I’ve done the best I can.Report
Here’s the problem.
I believe that you were offering Chip a bit of a hand after he made a statement that, seriously, you would *NOT* have made.
That’s my assumption.
Like, I think that you think that the FBI stats are good enough, as these things go… they may not be 100% accurate, but they’re 98% accurate, as these things go, and so they’re “good enough”.
Like if someone wanted to argue “in 2018, there were about 3000 murders committed by white people” and use the FBI stats as evidence for this, you wouldn’t argue with the point.
You *KNOW* that the numbers are pretty good and, yeah, you’re willing to run with how, in 2018, about 3000 murders were committed by white people.
Chip comes in and starts making some *SERIOUSLY* erroneous statements.
So if you’re going to give him a hand, you have to take a different tack.
I see Chip as stacking the deck in the ways I laid out above. I see the FBI stats as good enough. And you’ve already agreed that the FBI stats are likely to be admissible (as admissibility is a very low bar) and if my Proposition P were:
“White people committed more murders in 2018, in absolute numbers, than any other category”, that this would be accepted as the FBI survey supports that proposition.
Of course, that doesn’t get us any closer to whether the FBI numbers themselves are good…
But I’m sure if I asked you if you thought that the numbers that the FBI provided were good, you’d find a way to avoid talking about it and instead say something about me. But let’s find out.
Do you think that the FBI numbers are good enough (defined as probably being accurate within a narrow error band)?Report
Since your assumption is wrong, I won’t address what you think follows from it. And if you want to recruit me in your squabble with Chip, I decline the appointment.Report
According to my assumption, you’ve already been appointed.
So I will ask again: Do you think that the FBI numbers are good enough (defined as probably being accurate within a narrow error band)?Report
I don’t work for you. I address things that interest me. Your squabble with Chip doesn’t. I’ve already spent too much time answering a question you asked me. If the answer didn’t meet your needs– and I thought it wouldn’t but I answered it anyway — that doesn’t create an obligation on my part to participate in your squabble with Chip.Report
I agree that you don’t.
I agree that you do.
I disagree that it doesn’t.
Thank you for your time.
I believe that it did. Thank you.
Do you think that the FBI numbers are good enough (defined as probably being accurate within a narrow error band)?Report
” I address things that interest me. Your squabble with Chip doesn’t. ”
buddy
did you forget the part of the conversation where you walked into it and started shitting on JaybirdReport
The FBI is definitely the wrong source, because their stats are known to be incomplete, especially the stats on the demographics of homicide. Not just because homicides sometimes go unidentified or unsolved, but because reporting is voluntary and many jurisdictions don’t participate. Also, FBI counts most Latinos as white, regardless of degree of European ancestry. So in theory they could either overestimate or underestimate the number of homicides committed by white people, but in practice they underestimate.
For a more complete accounting of homicide, you want to go to the CDC, e.g. Deaths: Final Data for 2018. Near the bottom of table 8, we see that there were 5,460 non-Hispanic white homicide victims in 2018. Assuming that about 70-80% of those are intraracial, we get about 3,800–4,400 homicides committed by non-Hispanic white people.Report
The problem is that I’d like to use something as close to actual numbers for the perps as is possible.
If we use CDC data, we have to assume that 70-80% are intraracial.
If we use FBI data, we can content ourselves with the categories of white, Black, other, and unknown.
Hell, we can even assign every single “other” and “unknown” to “white” (for the sake of argument).Report
Unfortunately, there’s really no good way to do this. One option for napkin math is to use FBI ratios and apply them to CDC totals, but a problem with this is that clearance rates are substantially higher for white homicide victims (and likely offenders) than black homicide victims, due to a variety of factors (more homicides to solve in heavily black precincts, gang warfare vs. robbery vs. domestic/personal issues, disincentives for witnesses to talk to the police, etc.). This means that black homicides get underrepresented in the FBI’s offender/victim crosstabs, so we can’t even trust the ratios. For example, note that according to FBI’s expanded homicide table 6, there were more white + Hispanic than black homicide victims in 2018, but the CDC data I linked above shows the opposite.Report
Then use the FBI data, talk about error bars, and acknowledge that the FBI data is the floor.Report
The data is the data but there are open questions about what one concludes from it. It seems to me that you can get to some pretty crude, reductive takes, in which the kind of racial profiling-as-policy that Hanania seems sympathetic to is really just mirror image Kendi-ism, i.e. that all disparate impact is ipso facto racism. Identifying it one way or the other may be a decent way to call partisan opponents hypocrites but neither is particularly bright or convincing under even limited scrutiny.Report
At this point, I just want to know whether it’s possible to look at the data and say *ANYTHING*.
Because, and I’ll say this again:
Report
Well I don’t subscribe to the new morality so I guess it’s hard for me to say anything other than that the data, as best as anyone can tell is true.Report
So being somewhat unstuck, I think I can move on to the next part:
Can we establish whether it’s possible to reach (tentative) conclusions from data and then, from there, make statements that are either true or false?Report
But you know what he’s actually asking, right?Report
Sure. I agree you can conclude (maybe deduce is a better word) things from the data. And assuming accuracy of the data that the data is not in itself racist.Report
I was just doing a mental exercise about this, following your comment last night about “Do you sometimes wonder if that distinction would pack more of a punch if it weren’t a conspiracy theory a couple of days ago?”. I thought that if we’re on the usual schedule, we should be a few days away from the Hunter Biden investigation being labelled racist. So, how would that work? Simple: an attack on Hunter is intended to cripple Joe, and Joe speaks for the marginalized.Report
Black people are 13% of the US population. They are 38% of the prison population. White people are are 64% of the population but 30% of the prison population. That’s our baseline.
Why is that?Report
I would say that it obviously correlates to literacy levels and stuff like the SAT.
Since Black neighborhoods are underserved by their schools (deliberately? benign neglect? side effect of corruption in the school districts with relatively high funding per student?), it results in higher crime later in life for reasons I’ve already stated.Report
so that’s it. Nothing else comes to mind?Report
It certainly seems to be doing the heavy lifting.
Now, I’m not suggesting that fixing the broken schools would be a Silver Bullet. Heaven forfend!
There are no silver bullets.
But if you want a major cause of criminality, there you go.Report
So what if the school issue isn’t academics per se but disparate treatment? Like black students are “over policed” in the classroom the same way black men are in society? They do we have an education problem still?
https://news.stanford.edu/2020/06/18/school-systems-make-criminals-black-youth/Report
How would over-policing in schools manifest in Baltimore?
What would switching to an under-policing in schools model look like?
Phonics?Report
Read the stanford piece . . .Report
Here’s something that caught my eye:
So do you think that that is what is going on in those Baltimore schools?Report
I think its as likely to be occurring there as anywhere else.
I think Baltimore has some real economic challenges for its inner city residents independent of the schools since it has lost nearly all of the industrial base that used to employ them.
I think the use, abuse and sale of drugs as an economic activity and a self-treating activity impairs a lot of success.
I think the Baltimore schools will never have enough money to churn out kids who can overcome these non-school factors.
And to tie it neatly in a bow I think Richard Hanania’s belief in racial profiling as policy in these areas will only make all these confounding factors worse.
You may disagree. You likely will. Brandon certainly does. Unlike you – but more like him – I’m willing to state clear concrete positions on these issues. You should try it sometime.Report
So you think that these schools have the issue where teachers are ignoring the black kids in the classroom and calling on the white kids? You think that these schools have situations where the white kids are committing infractions and it’s ignored and the black kids are punished?
Girls of color who are trying to participate are getting debilitating responses, while white kids who are not raising their hands are getting more attention and rewards?
You think that that’s happening in these schools that don’t have a *SINGLE* proficient student?Report
No, this is not actually true. What little evidence has been found suggests that men merely tend to act in a _more varied_ manner, whereas women act more average. Men are more likely to be at the extreme ends of the behavioral spectrum.
There’s no indication they are more violent on average, what is happening there is that having lower than average violence (Which men are also more likely to have!) isn’t actually observable, at least not in any official statistic, whereas having over average violence will often get people arrested.
That may seem a minor quibble, but it’s actually kinda important as to how we think about things, especially since it’s pretty easy to see a way that such a thing could be due to behavior regulation of women by the patriarchy…aka, maybe women are just taught to fit into the norms better. And even if it is some biological different, it’s important we understand this is a fact that impacts all male behavior, not just violence.
It’s also worth pointing out that testosterone doesn’t have anything to do with this, as no one has managed to find correlation between testosterone and violence. Like, at all. After a lot of looking.Report
Maybe women are better at being sneaky and setting men up and getting them arrested under false pretenses. Like in Gone Girl.Report
Logic would suggest that if sneakiness is a specific behavior (Which I’m not sure it is) than it should show the same variation…there should be more men at the sneakiness extremes. The amount of men very good it should be higher, and the amount of men very bad at it should be higher.Report
Men’s logic?Report
Much like only extra violence is measurable, because it has a lot more repercussions than a reduction in violence…the extra lack-of-logic is extremely noticeable via the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means there are a lot more men than women who are convinced they are really good at logic but are not.
It’s worth pointing out that this is probably all nonsense. The reason that women have less varied behavior is almost certainly that they have been taught that way, to fit in.Report
I suppose that that’s why “narratives” are so very powerful.
If someone has a story that explains everything, it might not even matter if the data doesn’t support it.
What does “data support” mean, anyway? It’s just numbers. Numbers don’t explain things!Report
Here’s the problem. Even Hanania’s substack writing, of which I have read a decent bit, all tends to come to a conclusion in support of racial profiling as public policy. It’s bad writing and highly unpersuasive in that it fails to ever deal with the constitutional and statutory issues with this, to say nothing of the ethical problems, as pretty convincingly raised from a conservative perspective by Tim Scott.
Now, I used to think that this shortcoming of Hanania’s was more of a matter of him just not being quite ready yet for primetime as a writer. But now that this has come out? Well it seems like he really does just have a soft spot for racist public policy, which is kind of crazy when a lot of his analysis of left wing insanity on race, sex, and ‘gender’ could be read as weighing against that sort of thing. I think this is a shame, especially because he is way more insightful on the pathologies of the conservative movement (i.e. less fascist, revanchism, more startlingly low IQ conformity and weighed towards coddled old people) than most pundits. However this really is a permanent credibility problem for him and I think he has to be taken way less seriously in light of it.Report
The premise of racism is essentialism; That there is just something essential in different races that produces the outcomes we see.
Like, Jews are just essentially good with money, Asians are just essentially good with math, and black people are just essentially violent.
A century or so ago this became eugenics, which Hanania proudly supported.
Nowadays that sort of stuff gets laughed off as imbecilic and morally bankrupt.
So people like Hanania have to use codewords or implication and innuendo to make the same argument. Like veiling it all in talk about IQ, or just chanting statistics about black crime, without ever saying outright what they mean.
Because when you actually engage them and start talking about why there is so much crime in black communities, they eventually have to either make the essentialist argument out loud, or throw in the towel and admit the outcomes are the result of other factors which rely on individual human choices.Report
“White people are racist”Report
I can see where you’re going with that, and there’s a certain kind of tu quoque rejoinder one might respond with to adherents of pop anti-racism. But at a certain point a person either rejects this way of thinking or they don’t, and that goes as much for Hanania as it does for Ibram Kendi or Robin DiAngelo or Disney’s director of DEI, or whoever else.Report
Hey, I’m cool with “It’s not intrinsic to white peoples’ alleged race, it’s just intrinsic to their culture”.
And then seeing where we wander from there.Report
I’m not one to say those kinds of conversations are off limits. I am one though to ask what sense particular arguments make. Especially when they suggest, for example, that the demographics of Baltimore’s homicide problem mean that we should be having the police trailing the black dentist or postal worker or whoever driving around and minding their own business.Report
One of my former clients was a kidney transplant surgeon, black but otherwise utterly conventional in appearance, who drove a BMW. In law enforcement circles in Westchester Country, this passed for probable cause. Fortunately, nothing worse than delay, embarrassment, and insult resulted from his multiple stops.Report
I am not a fan of projecting race/racism into every little issue, tension, and aggravation. But there is a point where you have to ask what the goal is and whether the methodology makes sense for achieving it. Sometimes there may be some merit, but when it’s just some crude use of statistics to justify harassing random members of racial minority groups? Well, in the parlance of this site, fish that.Report
I am not a fan of projecting race/racism into every little issue, tension, and aggravation.
My client wasn’t either. But it wasn’t up to him.Report
I can agree with this statement, I think it gets to the crux of an ongoing disagreement around OT – what the goal is for modern policing. The goals given lip service form the right would seem to be antithetical to these sort of stops, but the stops persist. Which tells me the goal isn’t what we are told it is.Report
I’ve been thinking about this. While this sort of essentialism is a big part and parcel of racism, many activists on our side also engage in a sort of essentialist thought with non-Whites varyingly defined has seen as having a Special Way of Being (TM) that is much closer to nature and superior simply by virtue of being non-White and even potentially non-Asian. A lot of the academic scholarship I see on identity issues seems essentialist in a similar way to what Hanania is doing but positive rather than negative like gawking about how Native Americans have a sense of deep time.Report
A couple of issues with this comment:
1. Racial differences in crime rates are not explained by economic factors. They just aren’t. I know everyone says they are, but none of those people has bothered to subject that claim to even basic sanity testing. Asians have similar poverty rates to whites (actually a bit higher), but commit much less crime. Hispanics are economically similar to blacks, and commit much less crime. And the black-white gaps in criminal offending are larger than can be explained by differences in SES. Homicide in particular is not even close to being explained by economic factors.
2. Hereditarianism is not essentialism. For example, Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, significantly more intelligent than gentile whites. An essentialist would conclude, on this basis, that Bernie Sanders must be more intelligent than I am. After all, he’s Jewish, and I’m just a dumb gentile. A hereditarian, on the other hand, would only say that—since polygenic intelligence scores are moderately positively correlated with degree of Ashkenazi ancestry—a random Ashkenazi Jew is fairly likely to be more intelligent than a random gentile, but that there is also a substantial chance that the gentile is more intelligent. Especially when the Jew in question is the notoriously dim-witted Bernie Sanders.
There are also cultural explanations, which are neither hereditarian, essentialist, nor socioeconomic determinist. Sometimes groups adopt self-sustaining maladaptive cultural norms for random or path-dependent reasons. I don’t think that’s the main thing that’s going on with racial crime gaps, but it may explain some of the gaps, and in any case it’s a popular hypothesis among people who rightly reject essentialism and socioeconomic determinism, but unthinkingly accept the ridiculous idea that hereditarianism is racist.Report
OK lets call it “hereditarianism”.
Is this Hanania’s explanation for black crime rates, that blacks are genetically predisposed to crime?
I think it is, based on his writing. But I’m told I misunderstand his writings.Report
Richard, is that you??Report
This isn’t a question of terminology. Essentialism and hereditarianism are totally different things. Importantly, essentialism is racist and unscientific, while hereditarianism is not racist, and has a lot of scientific support.
Talking about whether “blacks are genetically predisposed to crime” betrays a facile understanding of the issue. Some black people are, and some black people aren’t. So are some white people. Genetic factors that predispose people to criminality in the context of modern society are very likely weakly to moderately positively correlated with proportion of recent African ancestry, and weakly to moderately negatively correlated with proportion of recent East Asian ancestry, but there is a great deal of overlap between races.
That’s the difference between essentialism and hereditarianism. Hereditarianism for highly polygenic traits deals with continuous and overlapping distributions, not with categorical claims about entire races.
That’s me talking, not Hanania. Here’s Hanania:
Whether he believes that there’s a genetic component to racial gaps in criminal offending, I don’t know. I think he probably does. It would be hard for an intelligent person to take a serious, honest look at the evidence and not come to that conclusion. But he seems to be less interested in the cause than the solution.Report
“Genetic factors that predispose people to criminality ” sounds like alchemy masquerading as science.Report
Proving once again that science denialism and anti-intellectualism are bipartisan phenomena. There is an entire field of science dedicated to the study of the genetics of behavioral traits, and like most of the issues on which you’ve formed strong opinions, you know virtually nothing about it.
The regularity with which virtually every behavioral trait examined turns out to be governed more by genetics than by upbringing is such that in 2000 Erik Turkheimer—a left-wing behavior genetics researcher—proposed it as one of the three laws of behavior genetics:
1. All human behavioral traits are [genetically] heritable.
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
3. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.
Note also, from the linked paper:
So your default assumption here should be that it’s very likely that genetic factors predispose people to criminality to greater or lesser degrees, because that’s almost always the case. And in fact there are numerous studies on the heritability of criminal offending and related behaviors and traits, almost all of which find substantial genetic influences.
In accordance with the fourth law of behavior genetics (“A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability”), the actual genetic architecture of behavioral traits extremely complex, and beyond our ability to decipher at this time, so we cannot accurately predict criminality via genome sequencing, but the convergent evidence from different study methodologies (twin, adoption, family, GWAS) allows us to be quite confident that genetic factors do play an important role, even if we don’t yet know exactly which genetic factors.
To head off your bad-faith dismissal of solid science on the grounds that we can’t precisely predict crime from genome sequences, I would like to point out that the left’s unwarranted confidence in the idea that parental SES is the primary driver of crime is entirely undiminished by the fact that crime cannot be precisely predicted based on parental SES.Report
Is your view the generally accepted view among behavioral scientists and geneticists?
No, it is not.
See, I’m never impressed by people quoting statistics which aren’t backed up by observable results, or supported by a generally accepted consensus among experts in the field.
This is because despite your reading of Turkheimer’s writing, you really don’t understand it. Not on the level which would allow you to spot any errors.
Basically, you found a guy with impressive initials after his name, you liked his conclusion, and now you go around quoting it and using sciency-sounding jargon that you really don’t understand.
If his view were something that that majority of experts in his field agreed upon, well, I would be a lot more receptive.
But it isn’t.
The generally accepted view, and one supported by empirical observation, is that there are criminals at all levels of society.
But as you go lower on the SES scale, the criminals tend to use violence more often.
The generally accepted view, also supported by empirical observation, is that low SES families tend to reproduce themselves.
But this is where it kind of ends. the idea that this is genetically based is still a minority view and not well accepted by the field.Report
Even Hanania’s substack writing, of which I have read a decent bit, all tends to come to a conclusion in support of racial profiling as public policy.
Can you point to specific posts that you think back this claim?
A lot of people are making dumb assumptions based on a single sentence: “We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.” In context, this was clearly about disparate impact of cracking down on crime in general, not racial profiling:
This is undeniably true. There are huge racial gaps in criminal offending, especially for homicide. Cracking down on crime will necessarily result in arresting and incarcerating more black people, to a much greater extent than white people (and to a much, much greater extent than Asian people, but we don’t talk about that, because the idea of racial disparities in incarceration being a product of white supremacy really turns us on). And policing high-crime neighborhoods more intensely will necessarily result in more surveillance of black people.
In isolation, you can read that one sentence as an endorsement of racial profiling for the sake of racial profiling, but when it’s immediately followed (and preceded) by a mention of disparate impact, and how our culture is totally incapable of dealing with it in a rational and mature manner, it’s pretty clear that this is talking about the unavoidable effects of a race-neutral anti-crime policies in the context of a society with vast racial gulfs in rates of criminal offending.Report
And it’s a great example of Hanania sounding authoritative but talking out of his ass. If you want to have this conversation in a meaningful way you need to be ready to delve into Stop and Frisk in NYC and the court cases where it was ultimately held unconstitutional. Contra what Hanania is saying here, NYPD was shown in court to have systemically targeted black and hispanic men for Terry Stops. Analysis showed that a significant majority of the searches (something like 70%) did not produce evidence of a crime. So you’ve got Hanania pontificating off of an apparent lack of knowledge of basic well publicized issues, namely the incorrect assertion that post civil rights era we don’t have the stomach for disparate impact, and that these kinds of measures will produce meaningful reduction in crime.*
Now, as I said, when I read that post, I thought it was just sloppy work, or maybe a play to the commenters at his substack, many of whom are clearly racists, but not necessarily racism on Hanania’s part. People engage in bad analysis all the time on the internet. But now that we know he was apparently posting as an anonymous racist he loses that presumption of good faith. It’s one thing to make an honest error, it’s another to write for outcomes that just so happen to be consistent with previously expressed, extremely ugly ideologies.
*Criminologists of course continue to disagree on whether this was effective. Even if we put aside the constitutional concerns (which we shouldn’t) 30% hit rate isn’t nothing, even in a vacuum, and especially if it’s getting illegal weapons off the street. But it has to be weighed against numerous other factors and diminishing returns, including the creation of a hostile relationship between law enforcement and the public they are supposed to serve. Hanania of course touches on none of this despite it being core to the issue.Report
Tierra Allen’s road home from Dubai may have just gotten more difficult.
https://news.yahoo.com/rental-car-company-now-demanding-184346340.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=0_00
“Radha Stirling, a UK-based human-rights advocate helping Allen with her case, wrote in a press release that Dubai police amended the complaint because of widespread international media attention and that police now alleged that Allen “slandered and defamed” staff at the car-rental company.”
Sure, keep digging the hole…. best advice in the comments:
“The family in the United States need to pipe down and let diplomacy take its course. This part of the world is about saving face and if the families continue, it will only get worse. And remember the outcome isn’t going to be fair. If you don’t like it, don’t go to the UAE. ”
Def not on my destination list.Report
I have no idea why any woman would travel to that part of the world.Report
While I don’t doubt that many Middle Eastern countries are very sexist, this particular thing sounds more like a foreigner-targeted grift than sex discrimination.Report
Perhaps, but why give them the chance?Report
.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/08/opinions/florida-advanced-placement-psychology-controversy-young/index.htmlReport
They should only be banning algebra!Report
Contrary to media gaslighting, the Florida government’s criticisms of the AP African American Studies curriculum were reasonable. It absolutely was pushing a political agenda that was totally inappropriate for public schools, and that was a big part of the curriculum.
However, I took a look at the curriculum for AP Psychology, and it had only a single, fairly anodyne bullet point about sexual orientation and gender identity—one of seven in the developmental psychology unit, which overall accounts for 7-9% of the test weight, which means that it probably accounts for 1-2% of the material in the class, if taught according to the curriculum.
Partisan hacks are going to try to equate these two things, but they’re really very different. The Florida BoE was right about AP AAS, but unless I’m missing something big, they’re way off base here.Report
It’s the College Board that claimed that Florida law would not permit full coverage of the AP content. At which point several Florida school districts decided on their own to drop the course (no reason to offer it if students couldn’t get the AP credit). Florida’s Education Commissioner said a couple of days ago that the given learning target can be taught consistent with Florida law.Report
Oh. Good catch. So the College Board was just straight-up lying?Report
Lying is a stretch, since you could make a colorable argument for their side.
“Interpreting” on their own, uncharitably, and then letting the media fit it into the overall narrative.Report
less “lying” and more “malicious compliance”, maybe.Report
https://archive.ph/Nsdbc
I found this Atlantic article quite interesting in that it seems to provide another data point that suggests that the more militant and revolutionary elements of the identarian left are ebbing (while liberals in general have embraced the stronger parts of its advocacy wholesale).Report
1. Britain is pretty TERFy. Watch Abigail Thorn’s video on her ordeal with NHS and getting spots at a gender clinic. Her primary physician outright refused to send her for a long time.
2. The Identarian Left has always been a fear of the chronically online more than anything else.Report
Britain has the upshot of legal abortion not being particularly contentious which fundamentally changes the stakes of the debate. No one in America is going to change sides on that subject over experimental treatments given to a statistically small number of children or questions of who can compete in elite womens sports.Report
But it’s not just Britain, there’s a big re-think and moderation going on across the EU on Trans matters. While I agree with you that the Identarian left is more salient only in the minds of the online and Republicans it remains a huge axis of right wing talking points. The more the subject cools down the worse it is for the right and it’s already proven to be a high heat, little light subject for them.Report
No, there is not. There are a few specific countries that TERFs have _also_ infiltrated and managed to do stupid things, but do not present that as some sort of normal ‘moderation’ that is just a bunch of rational people outside this discussion deciding on things slightly different.
But, this is actually pretty easy to check. Just…look for literally any evidence the produce for this supposed ‘change in the global consensus’, and then _google_ the person who did it, and, gasp, you’ll discover how they are working hand-in-hand with (usually UK) TERFs.Report
I am far from an expert in trans matters but just so I’m clear here, your position is that health authorities in not just the UK but also Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands all have moderated their positions on affirmative care for minors somewhat due to malign influence from UK TERFs?Report
Yes. Look, I’m not going to go into this all now, but here, have fun with one of them:
https://healthliberationnow.com/2022/11/18/fact-check-about-socialstyrelsens-decision-and-trans-care-in-sweden/
You will notice that Sweden, despite being clearly headed to one conclusion, abruptly with no real outside evidence decided to follow discredited UK studies and an overturned court case in, again, the UK. Instead of, you know, any rational thing.
There are political reasons this is happening, the problem is that it’s is _extremely_ hard to actually find anyone talking about them _in English_.
That’s just Sweden, I literally don’t have time to address anything else, but it’s basically the same.Report
Thanks for the insight.Report
Okay, back. So, the other two countries:
Finland actually never has had a very good history on trans rights, waiting until _this year_ to allow people to change their gender markings without evidence of sterilization. Meanwhile, they have slight broken from WPATH guidelines on the treatment of trans minors, but they weren’t previously following WPATH because they were some magical progressive country, they were following that because it was, and is, _literally the recommended medical treatment for trans kids_.
Presenting them as some sort of pro-trans country is nonsense. They were a country that was actually not that great, but followed medical guidelines, and now they do not, although pretending they have broken in a serious way is..odd. They still allow puberty blockers and hormones for minors, and it seems unclear if the new rules actually change much at all except forbid the extraordinarily rare surgical intervention, which WPATH discourages but does not disallow.
So, basically, this is a bunch of TERF nonsense also, where a lot of screaming has been done, but the actual medical recommendations haven’t changed much…and I’m not even sure whether those medical recommendations have the force of law.
And now to the Netherlands, which is often included in the list of ‘European countries changing their mind’, but, uh, hasn’t done anything whatsoever.
This is one of those things where newspapers like to repeat over and over in a general sense, vague ‘questions are spreading’, but the only country that seems to have actually really done anything is Sweden, who have their National Board of Health and Welfare get hijacked.Report
To supply some outside context, a month or so ago, New Zealand changed it’s gender identification laws to allow self-identification. This event caused approximately no controversy or outrage.
A lot of the TERF renaissance genuinely appear to be the English doing what the English do best – ruin things for everyone else.Report
Scientific Fraud, The Legal System, Etc:
Report
people like this in science really chap my a$$. They don’t need to make stuff up, and they aren’t entitled to compensation when they are caught doing so. One hopes said professor looses big time.Report
GOP and far right attempts to change the Ohio Constitution and make it hard to pass ballot initivatives are being rejected good and hard: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/us/ohio-referendum-constitution-abortion.htmlReport
People power. Now if only the good citizens of Ohio would reject the Republican politicians good and hard.Report
harder to do when gerrymandering is enshrined into law.Report
Delicious!Report
Conservatives: “Let’s return the issue of abortion to the states.”
Citizens: “OK, here’s a measure to guarantee abortion rights.”
Conservatives: “HOLD ON A MINUTE!”Report
Precisely.Report
The many scams of Truth Social and the Trump Supporters who do not learn: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/27/technology/trump-truth-social-ads.html
“Over time, the low-quality ads on Truth Social have irritated its own
users, who have complained to Mr. Trump after repeatedly seeing the
same disturbing images or after falling for misleading gimmicks.
‘Can you not vet the ads on Truth?” asked one user in a post directed at Mr. Trump. “I’ve been scammed more than once.'”
This has strong vibes of “If only we can speak to the Tsar!!”Report
Ain’t that the truth!Report
Remember the 7-11 robbery that got thwarted and the robber beaten?
Report
Oddly enough I agree that moral/ethical corruption in politics doesn’t ALWAYS require direct pay to play or fee for service corruption. But if the House is going to allege actual illegal corruption because Hunter Biden got paid well due to his dad’s name, they really need to examine how well Jared Kushner got paid right after he was white House Advisor – with way more access and way more influence.
To Wit:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/09/politics/house-oversight-republicans-hunter-biden/index.htmlReport
Man, I feel bad for those people in that mass shooting tomorrow.
Report
You realize that’s the same story being reported by a different outlet right? And that the Politico report – just like the CNN report – doesn’t say a darn thing about anything connecting Hunter to much of the money, much less to the President? Its all wink wink nudge nudge stuff. Which is certainly a morally corrupt thing perhaps, but probably not illegal. Which I suppose can play well in politics but not actual court proceedings.Report
I have *ZERO* intention of implying that I think that this is illegal.
Indeed, I think that it’s probably legal.Report
so what was your point?Report
That the optics are bad.
I MEAN NOT AS BAD AS TRUMP TRUMP TURMP
Not *THAT* bad.
But bad.Report
It’s like some Zen riddle.
What are the optics of Fetch?Report
Can we really say whether something looks bad?
Is there a perspective from which we can say that “THIS! THIS IS THE CORRECT PERSPECTIVE!”?
How do we know we are not a butterfly dreaming of being a man?Report
you need to consume just a little less of the wacky weed Jaybird.Report
Perhaps then I’d be inspired to talk about how, yes, it looks like this happened but it’s not illegal.
Do you sometimes wonder if that distinction would pack more of a punch if it weren’t a conspiracy theory a couple of days ago?Report
NO. It won’t pack more or less punch because its a distinction too many people see no benefit from.Report
“Do you sometimes wonder if that distinction would pack more of a punch if it weren’t a conspiracy theory a couple of days ago?”
For your statement to be anything other than a shockingly (and uncharacteristically) republican level of spin you would need to demonstrate either that this story demonstrates that President Joe Biden is directly implicated in participating in and benefiting from his failsons’ activities back when Hunter was out conning businesses and governments by (falsely) claiming to have access or else you’d have to find past examples of the Dems and media figures saying that Hunter Biden did nothing skeezy but technically legal and that Hunter Biden is pure as the driven snow.Report
North, I have already said that I have *ZERO* intention of implying that I think that this is illegal.
Indeed, I think that it’s probably legal.
But I also remember that, a few days ago, the idea that Biden was talking to Hunter’s business partners was a conspiracy theory.
Now we know that they only talked about the weather AND THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
It’s not illegal.
It’s just that the whole “everybody knows that Russia and Ukraine and others had sent $20 million to Biden family members!” thing was not, in fact, common knowledge until this week. Seriously.Report
I never said you indicated it’s illegal. I’m questioning your narrative that people were saying that Biden “spoke to Hunter’s business partners” was a conspiracy theory. I’ve seen people saying the idea that Biden was participating in Hunters’ schemes is an evidenceless conspiracy theory (and it remains such to this day). But simply that Biden never spoke to anyone Hunter scammed? That seems a reach.
And I will ask you specifically. We now know Hunter would call Joe Biden up and have other people around him and inform Joe after he picked up the call, that said people were present at which point he’d put Joe on speaker and Joe would then talk to them about the weather and such. You and I agree that is not illegal. I would allege that what Hunter did was abusive and skeezy but that what Joe did was both legal and also not at all morally dubious. I’m curious, do you think otherwise?Report
Do you actually expect a straight answer?Report
Yes.Report
But simply that Biden never spoke to anyone Hunter scammed? That seems a reach.
I heard that Biden had nothing to do with Hunter’s business partners.
Stuff like this:
That’s from April.Report
How is answering the phone, greeting everyone on it and discussing the weather (while also probably trying to gauge his son’s mental health status) being involved in his son’s business?Report
Indeed, and getting ambushed in a call and then talking about the weather with said people continues to meet the definition of not being involved in his son’s business dealings. Note that the witness -explicitly- said that no business was discussed what so ever- merely empty pleasantries.
Do you think Joe Biden was behaving immorally or in an ethically grey zone when he accepted phone calls from his unstable failson and then, when he found himself ambushed with his failson’s associates on speaker phone, spoke about the weather and similar pleasantries with them?Report
Do you actually expect a straight answer this time?Report
Yes.Report
Eh, I’m more thinking something about the whole “it ain’t the crime, it’s the coverup” thing.
WHAT BIDEN DID WAS NOT ILLEGAL AND I AM NOT SAYING IT WAS.
But I can totally see why Biden would want it to not come out that he talked to Hunter’s business partners about the weather. AND NOT BUSINESS.
Optics, man.
I mean, do you understand why Psaki was so adamant about the answers she was giving?
Because it looks bad when you say “I can get the VP to answer my calls.”
So, like, if money gets transferred to Hunter and then, a few days later, there’s a meeting between the person who transferred the money and the VP?
It can look bad. EVEN IF IT’S NOT ILLEGAL.Report
We already agreed it’s not illegal Jay.
I have seen no indication that Biden or his admin took any action to “conceal” that he took Hunters calls and sometimes got ambushed by Hunters associated in said calls. I agree they’d probably like to be able to honestly say that Joe never even spoke to Hunter or his skeezy friends- but they haven’t ever said that.
Do you think Joe Biden was behaving immorally or in an ethically grey zone when he accepted phone calls from his unstable failson and then, when he found himself ambushed with his failson’s associates on speaker phone, spoke about the weather and similar pleasantries with them? I believe Joe was not behaving immorally or unethically when he did this- what do you think?Report
I have to admire your optimism and persistence.Report
Jay and I go way back, he’s a good fellow.Report
Immoral? I don’t know that morality exists.
Ethically grey zone? Well, I do think that the perfect response is something along the lines of “Dang it, Hunter! I told you not to do this! Call me when it’s just you!” *CLICK* or similar.
Talking about the weather is not perfect, but it’s certainly not unethical, no.
So I don’t think that Biden was acting immorally or particularly unethically.
But I do think that the optics are *AWFUL* and if there were something like meetings happening following transfer payments being made that that would be something that you’d understand why people complained about Jared/Ivanka pulling it.Report
You and I agree the optics are awful. If I could project myself back into Joe’s Body for the event I’d do what you suggested or WORSE but I also wouldn’t give a damn if Hunter had fed himself a bullet up through the roof of his mouth while feeling low from having his Dad cut him off. Joe Biden, on the other hand, was extremely worried that if he cut his failson off that he’d shortly be a deadson and Joe Biden loves his son even though he’s a wreck of a human being.
But ethically I think Joe Bidens’ actual response, while not perfect, was nothing even approaching unethical.Report
What do you mean “from having his Dad cut him off”? Do you mean that there was some relationship between Joe taking calls from Hunter’s business partners and Hunter having an income stream?Report
Not at all. The only way for Joe to prevent Hunter from ambushing him with extra people would have been to stop taking Hunters’ social calls. That would have been the “cut him off” I’m referring to. And, as has been very extensively reported on, Hunter was a flaming trainwreck of a person and Joe Biden was very very worried that his only remaining living son was in danger of ending up dead from his own horrible decisions and demons.
Me? If I were somehow controlling Joe Biden at the time I’d have embarrassed Hunter in front of his cronies when he called me and then likely stopped taking his calls. I also would have cared, not even one fig, if Hunter had blown his brains out. Joe Biden cares for Hunter Biden a lot- I don’t. Joe Biden is a far more caring and loving individual than I am.
But I don’t think Joe Biden loving his son is an ethical failing, or a moral failing and it sure as heck isn’t a legal or moral problem for Joe Biden being President of the United States.Report
So why would Joe cutting off Hunter’s calls have led him to suicide?Report
The graveyards are full of mentally unstable people who ate a bullet because of the weather or because they didn’t like their sandwich, let alone offing themselves because their surviving parent stopped talking to them.Report
Probably fuller still of addicts whose parents kept enabling them.
If you’re a father and your son is addicted to crack and has no income source except “the illusion of access”, and he keeps calling you and putting you on speaker phone to talk about the weather, you’re as good as sending him bundles of twenties. That’s not necessarily loving. If the dad ever gets a cent of that money, even indirectly, that looks even less like love.Report
A parent’s love for a child is not always rational. Hunter is the sole link to Joe’s first marriage, which ended in tragedy.Report
Joe’s first line of defense was that nothing happened and his son is a fine person. His second and current line is that Joe wasn’t involved in anything. A lot of people are predicting that the third line will be that he crossed a few ethical lines while looking out for his son.
There’s no reason we should be talking about whether Joe loves his son unless the fight moves to the third line of defense. If you realize that you’re being set up, ask yourself now if it’s worth it.Report
I don’t really give a sh*t what Hunter Biden did or did not do. Was it skeezy? Most likely.
However, until each side cleans its own house first, I’m not really interested in hearing about the sins of one side from the other’s viewpoint.Report
“I can get my Dad to answer my calls”… is on the same level as “My mother thinks I’m cool.”
You and I continue to agree this looks awful for Hunter and makes Hunter look like an abusive crooked douche. I still don’t think it looks problematic for Joe Biden.Report
…if your mom can get a prosecutor fired who’s investigating a company you’re making a deal withReport
Only, of course, in this case the termination of said prosecutor was horrible news for the company in question.Report
Oh, just because I don’t think it is immoral or unethical doesn’t mean that I don’t think that it looks problematic.
I think that the whole Yelena Baturina thing does look problematic even if it was perfectly moral and ethical.Report
So I’m clear you’re referring to one of the people Hunter conned giving him a big bucket of money? I’d say it’s both horribly unethical, immoral and looks absolutely terrible… … … for Hunter Biden.
Man I’m glad Hunter isn’t the President.Report
While I would be happy to agree that the con looks awful for Hunter, I’d also say that it doesn’t necessarily present identically to a con.
I can see how it looks like it wasn’t a con.Report
Will fish, Jay, tell me how it isn’t a con!
But get in contact with Cocaine Mitch, DJT and Speaker McCarthy because they could really use some concrete evidence that it wasn’t a con and if you’ve got it and they’d surely pay good money for it. You and Maribou could get a second home in the Twin Cities and we could hang out and play board games!Report
Well, here’s how it looks like it wasn’t a con:
Money gets transferred
Meeting takes place
That looks like a quid pro something.
Is it illegal? Hell no! It’s not illegal, immoral, or necessarily unethical!
But it does have bad optics.Report
I had to go hunting for the peron you’re referring to. My google fu turned up a fact check wherein the GOP claims this lady gave a bunch of dough to Hunter and Hunter denies it.
https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e879bcfe-4b2a-4b4a-a823-8c6d512c4e5e
But what meeting are you referring to? With who? I’m assuming the meeting must be how Joe Biden gets roped into this scheme somehow?
Edit: Ok, I dug into the right-o-sphere a bit and Joe Biden showed up as Veep and talked about the weather at a dinner where they were present?Report
I saw RCP talking about it.
Report
Yeah thanks.
So the wrinkle is that Hunter is claiming he didn’t get dough for it at all. The link I put up shows that the money went to a company called “Rosemont Seneca Thornton” but
“Hunter Biden was a co-founder and CEO of the investment firm Rosemont Seneca Advisors. But Mesires said Hunter Biden did not co-found Rosemont Seneca Thornton. It’s not clear what connection exists between Rosemont Seneca Advisors and Rosemont Seneca Thornton.”
So, as usual, a big steaming incoherent mess that right wingers think is the biggest corruption since Iran Contra and left wingers think is a whole lot of nothing. But I agree the optics are crap.Report
Hey, so long as we agree that the optics are bad, then we are in complete agreement.
I can totally see why Psaki answered the way she did.Report
Wasn’t her first time at the rodeo, she did a good job.Report
If there is one word that needs to die in a fire, it’s “optics”.
It is a meaningless term used by Beltway hacks, entirely devoid of any sort of meaning. Its sort of up there with “people are saying” in its vapidity.
It carries the implication that it is synonymous with “Appears bad to the general public” but of course it doesn’t mean that at all.
Are there public opinion polls saying, yes this thing looks good or bad?
Ha ha of course not.
It is supposed to imply that the speaker has some sort of deep understanding of the public mood, a special read on it which isn’t apparent to the ordinary layperson.
One could say “The Hunter Biden issue is great optics for Joe Biden!” and be just as correct as if one said the opposite.
I know this because big husky men with tears in their eyes told me so.Report
I think that for those motivated to do so, it’s possible to come up with a plausible take on the events that absolves Joe of any wrongdoing here… but at this point it’s seeming much less likely. I mean, imagine you were hearing all this info about some politician you didn’t know or care about in another country. What would you be assuming about them now?Report
That an anonymous politician had a trashy son who traded on his Fathers last name? That said son scammed people into giving him money thinking he could get them political favors from his Father and he then delivered nothing?
I’d think said anonymous politician had a really shitty son and that some skeezy people got ripped off.Report
I think the honest answer is it’s not great. Hunter Biden is well established in the book of sketchy presidential family members that create embarrassment and raise questions about what exactly people with actual power knew or intended that 99% of the time are never answered.
The unfortunate, regrettable, but much honest-er answer though is that in the context of American politics this is grist for the mill of false equivalence. Maybe this will be one of the rare times they actually come up with something tangible, and if they do, so be it. But until that happens I just don’t know how anyone is supposed to take any of it particularly seriously.Report
However, you can take that entire situation/convo where the son calls up Dad and they “talk about the weather” and it’s really talking about a deal. There’s enough plausible deniability to make it work, and that would also be why Pataki was sticking to the script.
Not saying it went that way, BUT, if you’ve worked in and within the system for decades, a scenario like is is what you work for….smokescreens within smokescreens.Report
“IT’S BEEN TOO DRY AROUND HERE. I SURE HOPE IT RAINS!!! WE COULD USE AT LEAST THREE AND A HALF INCHES OF RAIN!!!”Report
I’ll certainly grant you that possibility. However I still think the rule of thumb on this needs to be production of tangible evidence. Not really out of principle so much as practicality. The alternative is an expectation that everyone is perpetually able to prove the negative which IMO isn’t realistic. FWIW I try to apply this rule on a bipartisan basis, despite where my general sympathies lie.Report
Indeed. I’m not saying that’s how it happened, but, if you were in a scheme to do what has been alleged, this is one way you could do it.Report
For any legal or impeachment action, definitely — no reason to think this will end up anywhere close to that level. But for our individual assessments and conversations, there’s plenty of room to suspect that Biden’s own hands are not 100% clean here.
I just worry that the eagerness for many to declare Biden guilt-free makes it a little bit easier in the long run for politicians and those in their orbit to do this kind of stuff, knowing that their own side will likely never hold them accountable.Report
That implies an enormous amount of faith in the guile and skills of Hunter Biden on your part which, I’d humbly submit, appears wildly unwarranted.Report
Oh, I agree. I’m not saying they did this, I’m saying it’s “fishy” and this is one way folks within the system know how to work the system. That’s the beauty of it. It’s totally fishy and totally not.Report
Imagine a world in which your local district attorney and the court system uses this standard for ordinary citizens, then recall my warning that freedom is never safe so long as any conservative holds power anywhere.Report
Well, fortunately for me, I guess, is that I live in a progressive state full of blue voters and a paradise to live in….if you don’t count major cities with terrible records of educating kids, terrible crime rates, and an ineffective mayor and city commission. But i live in the suburbs so WINNING!?Report
Not really. Washington is all about soft power. It functions like the mob. Never say anything on record, just go over and shake a guy’s hand at his daughter’s wedding and two days later there’s funding for a bridge. It’s designed to keep people of average intelligence out of prison.Report
Pity the GOP can’t find any return on all that weather conversation then.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/politics/michigan-fake-elector-arraignments/index.htmlReport
They really need a better spokesperson for this sort of thing:
Report
And likely not word one when it was happening to the border states…Report
Probably something about the poem on the Statue of Liberty.Report
Holy cow, this is Lady Gaga’s *DAD*!!!
Report
A fairly elegant solution.
You know, I think that this could also help solve the homeless crisis.Report
Subpoenaed document reveals that the FBI Richmond Field Office coordinated with MULTIPLE field offices across the country to produce a memo targeting traditional Catholics as domestic terrorists. Wray previously said that the actions were limited to “a single field office”.
https://twitter.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1689321215641493518Report
Ah yes, lets make sure we impugn everyone’s character while the Dear Leader is in trouble so that everyone looks like an a$$.
You do know that Wray – as FBI Director – can’t ever know everything that his people do? That he has to rely on them to do their jobs?
But sure – the FBI Director appointed by Trump is now a lying turncoat.Report
No, we can still talk about how Dear Leader is in trouble. (You know that Biden’s the Dear Leader now, right? Unless you’re an election denier.)Report
Someone is going to have to walk me through the process as to how this is different than the FBI would treat someone who joins a breakaway Islam sect association with reactionary politics. Perhaps it is, but I’m not actually seeing it.Report
My guess is here’s where I say that the FBI shouldn’t be investigating religious groups without reason, then you say they always do things like that. Then I’ll say, should they? So let’s skip ahead to there. Should they?Report
That ship sailed on 9/12/01. (probably before)Report
First of all, no one was ‘investigating’ this church, at least we have no evidence of that, they were merely speaking of it as a place that radicalization could happen. Also, why are we only _talking_ about this specific targeting?
Incidentally, if you want to know where this labeling is from, it’s from BLM, during which the FBI invented something called ‘Black Identity Extremists’, and had an internal assessment titles ‘Black Identity Extremists Likely Motivated to Target Law Enforcement Officers’ (Which actually sounds way worse than a church ‘presenting new migration opportunities.) and was eventually unable to find literally a single person. Which really seems like a thing they should have found before coming up with such a specific title and distributing it to everyone.
They then expanded the group to ‘Racially Motivated Extremists’, which let them lump in white supremacist violence while still including these imaginary Black people, and then expanding it to Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists.
Here’s the ACLU complaining about this 3 years ago:
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/2020.06.11_racially_motivated_extremism_foia.pdf
That’s the story so far, and the point anyone cared about it was apparently when some breakaway Catholic sect got mentioned as being some sort of _hypothetical_ place that people could be radicalized (With, again, no indication they are being investigated in any manner.), and not the absurdly slanderous attack on Black people and BLM that that was distributed across the country to law enforcement and was treated seriously as a thing that really might happen.Report
Everything in this story is stupid but maybe stupid funny: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/nyregion/mark-hotel-lawsuit-teenager.html
A teenager tried to buy alcohol at a posh Manhattan hotel with a fake ID. The hotel spotted it a mile away and said no. The teenager returned two years later on a smear campaign and now the hotel is suing him for defamation.Report
Good news, maybe.
Supreme Court Blocks Purdue Pharma Deal That Shields Sackler Family
Report
Such orders never do. The only way you’d know the breakdown, if it was other than unanimous, is if the dissenting Justices felt like writing something.Report
Oh, that’s good context. (Huffpo, man. Buncha hacks.)Report
Update:
After Racist Writings Revealed, Scholar’s Link to Texas Center Erased
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2023/08/10/hananias-name-gone-ut-austin-center-after-expose
A screen shot from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine showed him still on the Salem Center’s website Saturday, but now he’s gone. Neither University of Texas at Austin spokespeople, nor Carlos Carvalho, the Salem Center’s executive director, responded to requests for comment Tuesday or Wednesday
Here’s the funny part:
The University of Austin [ed. Not to be confused with UT- Austin]—a “freedom of inquiry”–focused nonprofit that says it seeks to become an accredited institution—also lists Hanania among its “Forbidden Courses” speakers this year, though the website doesn’t make clear when he’s speaking or spoke, and on what topic. The University of Austin didn’t return requests for comment Wednesday.
Forbidden Courses! I guess white supremacy and eugenics are now like the Lambada, the Forbidden Dance.
But hey, at least Hanania himself offers an explanation of his current beliefs:
“One of the most dishonest parts of the Huffington Post hitpiece is the argument that I maintain “a creepy obsession with so-called race science” and talk about blacks being inherently more prone to crime. I do no such thing, and ultimately believe that what the sources of such disparities are doesn’t matter. We simply need to come down hard on crime, which involves reforms like investing in policing and making use of DNA databases and facial recognition technology. ”
Oh.
So, actually, he doesn’t or can’t explain the statistical differences in crime rates. Which must be why no one here could explain his views on it either.Report
This one hits hard:
Report
That one hits hard in the BSDI realm.
1. There is a (statistical) material reality that black crime is higher than white crime.
2. There is a (statistical) material reality that black families have been suffering economic and educational disadvantages that have compounded through generations compared to white families.
3. There’s a material reality that statistics that are true in the aggregate cannot predict the behavior of a single individual.
What moral realities do each of these material realities support or disprove? Hanania wants to talk about reality number 1, and would gladly ignore realities 2 and 3. Others’ mileage might vary.Report
Seriously: I consider the “we” in there to be inclusive as heck.Report
Ya know, I’ve been following along with that conversation and had this thought: let’s posit that your #1 is true. What, then, do we do with this knowledge? No one above has addressed this, at least from what I recall.Report
This is what I keep asking.
I’ve found that when you keep drilling down, asking, “why” repeatedly, the logical conclusions lead further and further away from what Hanania wants to do.Report
InMD says that Hanania has policing recommendations. Jaybird calls for fixing the problem in education. I call for addressing it as a cultural problem. OT’s left calls for addressing it as an economic and/or systemic racism problem. A lot of us talk about the problem.Report
Thanks! Perhaps my statement was too broad.
Given what you’ve said, what new thing can we try? Obviously, we have a problem, and Lord knows we’ve thrown a whole bunch of money at it, seemingly to no avail. If we can’t even agree on what the root of the problem is, solving it is going to be impossible. Do you think accepting JA’s premises is a good start?Report
I think his second premise implies a causality: that is, that previous black educational and economic disadvantages are driving the current black educational and economic disadvantages. Now, I might just be being fussy here. If he said “increased” instead of “compounded”, this objection of mine would vanish. But I do think there’s an implied causality between J_A’s points 1 and 2.
Since I’m being pedantic, let me add that if any two statements A and B are both true, there are four possibilities:
A caused B
B caused A
X caused A and B
there is no causal relationship between A and B
Another thing, and seriously, pardon the pedantry – if the parties can’t agree on the root of the problem, they can still potentially solve it, each addressing a different possible cause and fixing that problem. If the parties directly disagree on the root, however, they’ll be recommending opposite actions. And I think that’s where we are today. Those of us who argue that there’s a problem in black culture would want the country to stop focusing on race, while those who argue that there’s a problem in our institutions would want the country to focus on race more. Where we don’t conflict, we can each move our proposed solutions forward, but where we do, one side is going to be dominant, for better or worse.Report
Assume that there is a problem in black culture.
Explain for us what the problem is.Report
You’re so funny — you keep begging for someone here to say something that will let you call them RACIST. You don’t really seem to care about actual individual Black people, you just get off on judging people in your outgroup.Report
See? The game is so very transparent.
Nobody else’s data is legible.
Their behavior? LEGIBLE AND RACIST.
Problem solved.Report
This kind of nyah, nyah is beneath this site. (Hopefully)Report
Are you familiar with the game of “isolated demands for rigor”?
Like, when someone else makes an assertion, they have to provide a source, then a summary of the source, and then excerpts from the source?
But then a different person makes an assertion and requests for something to back it up are seen as ungentlemanly?
Well, if you haven’t, I suppose the analogy I’d be about to make won’t make any sense.Report
I never asked for backup.
I just asked for someone to assert what the problem in black culture is.
For what its worth I’m willing to assert what I see as the problems with white culture.
I’ll even provide backup, free of charge.Report
I know you didn’t. You didn’t have to.
And you’ve received multiple answers.
And now you’re here demanding answers again.
But I would *LOVE* to hear what you see as the problems with your culture. (Do you feel that you exemplify the problems of your culture? Alternately, do you feel that you are an exception from the average member of your culture?)Report
I’ve received multiple answers??
Where?
What is the answer to Pinky’s assertion of there being a problem in black culture?
Point it out to me.Report
Would you accept FBI crime statistics as evidence of there being a problem?Report
Pinky’s assertion is that the problem with black culture is that there are a lot of crimes reported to the FBI involving black people?
Is this really it?Report
Yes, I accept that …
1. There is a (statistical) material reality that black crime is higher than white crime
It is a material, and statistical, reality, that no one can deny, without denying reality. It is also so statistical that the word “statistics” is included in the question.
Now, assuming that it is also true that:
3. There’s a material reality that statistics that are true in the aggregate cannot predict the behavior of a single individual
What do we do with and about those statistics? I think that is the moral question that needs to be addressed.
Hanania’s response is (or has been described as being) to ignore the third material fact and to “police the hell out of every black man, woman and child, from senators and surgeons to loose cigarette sellers, because, “statistically”, you kill catch more criminals that way.
Of course, policing every black person to hell, statistically impacts negatively their educational and economic circumstances, at least compared to those that are not being policed in the same way. I’d rather, you know, not have to wait for a life saving surgery because the surgeon has been stopped by the police asking why is he driving a Range Rover in that nice neighborhood.
So, would you accept that material fact 2 is also true, and should also be addressed?Report
I think one could look at this much more simply. It’s completely factually possible for black people to have higher rates of crime and for black people, the vast majority of whom are not criminals to be impermissibly and unfairly targeted by law enforcement. In that regard the matter of demographic crime rates isn’t particularly responsive to the question. After all, no innocent person is going to suddenly feel better about having their car or person searched by being provided with the FBI statistics. The 4th Amendment is an individual right not a group right.Report
Again: I would *LOVE* to hear what you see as the problems with your culture. (Do you feel that you exemplify the problems of your culture? Alternately, do you feel that you are an exception from the average member of your culture?)Report
You’re alllllmost there.
Keep going with this line of logic.Report
Chip, you said “For what its worth I’m willing to assert what I see as the problems with white culture.”
I’m waiting on what you see the problems as being.
I’d also like to know if you see yourself as having these problems. (Or if you see yourself as an exception from having them.)Report
I normally try not to comment on this stuff, because half the people in the conversation aren’t really interested in having a conversation. But this was like the eighth time in the last 2-3 days that Chip has posted this sort of transparent invitation to give him a bat to clobber you with.Report
You keep telling us we aren’t willing to talk about the problems, but it looks like it is you guys who really don’t want to talk about it.Report
LOL, you’re not fooling anyone.Report
Pinky – This is a result of black culture.
Chip – please clearly state what part of black culture drives this?
Ken – That’s cute. We don’t want to answer you because you will club us over t he head with it.
Jay – Boy, its gotta be the schools.
Brandon – Black criminality is caused by black culture and maybe black genetics.
Chip – Again – WHY is black culture so much more likely to cause black criminality?
That’s about where we are.Report
I just keep repeating it in response to people incredulously pretending that we’ve never discussed this sort of thing before.
Because, seriously, we have discussed this before.
But I’m also apprehensive about the whole dynamic of the new morality seeing the Racist/Not Racist dynamic as being more important than the True/False dynamic and, as such, I’m hoping to establish the ground rules for talking about Matters of Fact.
Which, of course, turns into repeated demands for all-encompassing narratives.
There’s crime.
There’s the schools.
There’s the “marshmallow test” thing (and, yes, I know the whole “do you trust the authorities?” question is as important, if not more important, than the whole “JUST EAT THE FREAKING MARSHMALLOW” issue… but the JETFM issue is also there).
Out of curiosity, have you ever seen this interview with Krayzie Bone?
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Why do you see Racist/Not Racist as something separate from True/False?
Let’s be real – there are millions of Americans (including some who used to post here at OT) who sincerely believe that Joe Biden didn’t win the most recent presidential election. Likewise, there are millions of Americans who believe that because I’m a leftist-progressive I’m not a “real American.” No amount of fact-based truth will sway them from those beliefs. And I (and Chip and Slade and Chris and the rest of the lefties) are expected to just accept this. Yet when we discuss issues of black criminality (which has racial elements in as much as our nation has chosen to call Black people a different “race”) there’s this hugh rigamoral about what’s true and what isn’t. That comes of as avoidance of the question.Report
There are thousands of American Security Personnel who know that Joe Biden didn’t win the most recent presidential election in any way that doesn’t involve the Supreme court. Mostly because a lot of them helped.
Did Joe Biden win? Yes, if you can count the decisions made by craven men in wigs. This is NOT “Gore Won Florida” (which the free market determined after the fact, and paid out for).
“Issues of Black Criminality” would exist even if we didn’t call them a different race. We could say something like Evangelical Christians (or Muslims) are more likely to be criminals, and it would be true as well.
I doubt there are millions who believe you aren’t a “real American.” There are probably about a hundred thousand people who believe you aren’t a real human, sure, but they’ve got decent data to back up their conclusions.Report
The rigamarole about “what is true and what isn’t” manifests in such ways as “you cannot trust the FBI crime stats”.
Why do you see Racist/Not Racist as something separate from True/False?
Because I see them as orthogonal.
Like, “True” or “False” can be made and can be measured. (It can be disputed, of course… but “that’s False!” is a pretty good refutation of “this is True”.)
“Racist/Not Racist” has a lot more of the whole “socially constructed” magic dust sprinkled all over it.
Person makes a statement. “That’s Racist!”
Not “that’s false”. Not “that’s false and racist”. Just a leap to “that’s racist”.
If the statement is true, pointing out that it’s racist is like saying “that’s blue!”
It may be blue. It may not be blue. But “that’s blue” is not a refutation to it being true.
Unless the racist/not racist distinction is more important than the true/false distinction.
“Oh, give me an example of a true statement that is racist!”
“Are FBI stats okay?”
“Um, no. Statistics have multiple problems. You shouldn’t trust numbers from only one source.”
“I see.”
“Why doesn’t anyone want to talk about this?!?”Report
I don’t recall anyone saying that FBI statistics are untrue – I do recall people saying that they often lack context and require additional information to be understandable. But that isn’t about their veracity.
Facts by themselves are not morally anything. It’s the conclusions drawn from them that are morally things – like racist or not. I can see how that’s problematic when you think Truth leads to Morally “right” choices.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of “Facts” that were and still are accepted that lead to morally reprehensible policy outcomes.
A really egregious example is that fact that Jews in early Europe became bankers and money handlers because Christians of the day read the Bible to prevent them from charging interest. Not because Jews were inherently more capable or more trustworthy or more anything with money – just that Christian “authorities” deemed it immoral for Christians to charge interest or do many of the other things that make money handling (Including banking) profitable. Centuries hence – in present day – this has led to the unshakable (but not factual ) “Truth” for many people at Jews control global finances. Which means Jews should be punished for individual and collective financial failings – like the imposition of strict reparations on Germany after WWI.
If you look around – really look – you will find this sort of thinking all over the place relating to people who aren’t white and Christian. In nearly all cases you really have to get back to the origin of a thing – the “Truth” of it to understand why it exist today and why the statistics surrounding that thing seem to lead to pernicious outcomes. And that’s tough to do.Report
You can see what Chip argued here.Report
“…because I’m a leftist-progressive I’m not a ‘real American.'”
You’d think someone sensitive about that wouldn’t be so quick to call people “alleged Christians”.Report
As Phillip pointed out, “Schools” is Jaybird’s idea.
Brandon has stated its something about heredity.
Pinky hasn’t said what his idea is yet.
And as you can clearly see below, Chip is willing to ascribe it to “cultural values”.Report
For the record, I see “schools” as one thing of many.
I deliberately pick it because we’ve argued about it before and there is no way to blame Baltimore’s schools that do not have a single proficient student on anybody but Baltimore leadership.
(But I also see culture, crime-as-infectious-disease, and the whole issue of how “the left” sees more to be gained by prolonging the problem than by resolving it as part of the reason that there is so much going wrong.)Report
For the record I agree with you about schools.Report
OK, that’s pretty wild. Has this ever been corroborated? Asking the Googs returns a bunch of conspiracy stuff.Report
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Congress by a 70-30 margin. Since then measures intended to enact it have been actively resisted by various parties. I would hold that ignoring race, in light of the several centuries of prior injustice, is closing your eyes to the problem.
However, I will accept your premise that black culture, whatever that might be, has a problem. What is the plan for assimilation? How do we get black people to the point where they enjoy the same rights and privileges as white people in this country?Report
We disagree. That’s fine. People do.
But the question you ask at the end isn’t entirely fair. (Sorry, that sounds whiny. Let me explain.) You state your Position A. You then tentatively accept my Position B, but ask how does it address Position A? My answer is, it doesn’t. It’s not Position A.
That’s my problem with your comment described generally. My specific problem is that I believe that black people enjoy the same rights as whites, and while the term privileges is nebulous enough that I might accept the idea that black people don’t enjoy the same privileges as whites, I don’t think that your framework would lead to an improvement.
An analogy: unhealthy people think about their health all the time. Most healthy people don’t. Some people with slight health problems obsess on them to the point that it makes them miserable. I see the state of black America as more like the obsessed generally healthy person than the sicky one.Report
Why do you hold this to be true?Report
There’s an essay that I think lays out the argument really well, but I’m not going to tell you what it is or where it can be located. J/K. I cite it every time. See above.Report
The thing is I don’t have a framework. If I could develop one I would surely share it with the world and let the world run with it to see where it goes.
I think there’s general agreement here that the black America has a problem. Whether it’s a problem of their own making or one thrust upon them is where we disagree, if I am reading this discussion right.
In living memory, civil authorities have loosed police dogs on and aimed firehoses at their fellow citizens for daring to assert their right to vote. Today, we have Southern legislatures openly defying federal court orders to apply existing law to their voting structures, which are aimed at excluding blacks from public life.
Until come to a consensus regarding the state of the problem, and its roots, we’re just going to talk past each other, and that’s not healthy for anyone in this country.Report
Dang it, forgot to close my tag.Report
You have some framework. I mean, we’ve been discussing whether the main problem faced by the average black person in the US is economic, cultural, educational, legal, or genetic, and during that conversation you’ve brought up rights repeatedly, so you have an implicit ranking of at least some of those possible explanations. If you’re willing to say that my position constitutes closing my eyes to the problem, that means you have a framework.
I think your framework is wrong. That’s not going to stop either of us from trying to implement our preferred solutions. I don’t even agree that it’s unhealthy for us to disagree. Generally when everyone in a country starts agreeing on racial matters something horrible follows.Report
I think we’ve all acknowledged there’s a problem. What’s causing the problem is where we disagree.Report
I tried to get at it in my response to Brandon this morning. We have tried what Hanania is advocating and the result, at best, has been really muddled, hard to quantify trade offs. Why he appears not to know that is a discredit to his writing on the subject.
However, I’m not convinced either #1 or #2 are remotely as important as #3, which seems to me to be the only legitimate way for the state to look at this issue under the existing constitutional order. If Hanania were a classical liberal as he now claims to be it seems to be that would be his focus. It also just so happens to be the only viable path in light of the realities of #1 amd #2.Report
I think Colucci’s anecdote about his surgeon client is telling. We’ve heard too many similar stories just hand wave it away as an isolated police mistake. If we’re going to hold minorities to a higher standard of conduct, we’re going to have to require authorities who interact with them to hold to the same standard.Report
The answer to this question is so obvious that I have to suspect bad faith here, but once again:
We calmly and maturely acknowledge the fact that the overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system is attributable to differences in rates of criminal offending, not to a white supremacist conspiracy. We do not riot. We do not set things on fire. We do not go on unhinged rants about racial differences in incarceration rates proving that America is a white supremacist nation. We do not decide to stop enforcing laws because arresting black people is racist.
How are you not seeing how much absolute batsh!ttery arises from the assumption that there are no racial gaps in criminal offending? I get that Chip and Philip, and maybe you, want so, so badly for the answer to be “We round up all the [black people] and throw them in jail preemptively.” But outside of a few literal Klansmen, nobody actually wants to do that. Those of us in the reality-based community just want the rest of you to stop responding to disparate impact of fairly enforcing laws in the stupidest way imaginable.Report
Here’s a story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Personally, I think that locking up these 1,000 people is likely to solve about 30% of the crime problem in Atlanta.
No, not all of it.
But that’s a pretty good bang-for-your-buck.
I do not know what the racial makeup of these 1000 people happens to be but I also do not care. If all 1000 were white, that’d be great to throw them in jail. But if half were white and half were black, I get the feeling that we’d have discussions about how black people only make up a small percentage of the population and there is disparate impact.
And if we therefore threw the 500 white people in jail and only 100 Black people for equity reasons, we’d now have a problem with the 400 who aren’t in jail but were responsible for 12% of Atlanta’s crime.
Like, what is the problem we’re trying to solve here?
It sure as hell doesn’t seem to be crime.
It’s like the BLM rallies. “Hey, my part of town was peaceful.”Report
Bookmarking this comment as a receipt for the next time someone asserts that nobody can ever answer the question of why we should care about this.Report
I agree with this. My guess is that unless you want to appear as an open racist, people really don’t like to talk about what to do with #1 if is true because it makes them look and sound horrible.Report
The problem is that jumping to “therefore it is false” is not going to help and will, instead, prolong the problem.
If it is true, that is.
No statistics, please.Report
A healthy society sometimes requires looking the other way or even pretending things that may be true are false. American society had a long period where everybody who wasn’t White, varyingly defined, was considered guilty until proven innocent with no possibility of doubt. When different white ethnic groups stopped getting the guilty until proven innocent treatment, the social problems seemed to have gone away. Maybe we should try that with African-Americans.
Whenever people talk a lot about “Black criminality”, I either get the impression that they are looking for an excuse not to confront the history and reality of racism in the United States, and I am far from a pay reparations type advocate, at best or are actively looking to commit massive acts of persecution and human rights abuses at worse. It is looking for a reason for malign neglect or active harm against African-Americans.Report
A healthy society sometimes requires looking the other way or even pretending things that may be true are false.
Hey. Sure. Maybe there *ARE* higher virtues than Truth/Falsity.
Maybe Racist/Not Racist are among them.
Man, if you come across another culture where people see Truth/Falsity as more important, though… well, you’re going to have a culture clash.Report
No, this is false. For one, it is not true in general that economic and educational disadvantages compound through generations. When the causes are purely exogenous, they attenuate rather than compounding. This is why many formerly disadvantaged ethnic groups (Jews, Asians, Irish, Italians) were able to catch up with no special help. In order to keep a group below its natural level of achievement, it’s necessary to reapply the oppressive forces every generation.
Basic causal confusion aside, in the specific case of black Americans, we do not observe any kind of compounding of disadvantage. The black-white SES gap has been fairly stable for decades, and has shrunk over the past 3-4 generations; if disadvantages were compounding across generations, it would be growing.
On what basis do you make the claim that Hanania would gladly ignore the fact that “statistics that are true in the aggregate cannot predict the behavior of a single individual?”Report
How would you interpret Jim Crow, the continued over policing of black men, and the continued over disciplining of black children in schools class rooms in light of this statement?Report
Jim Crow ended 2-3 generations ago. Ctrl-F “hysteresis” for some discussion of why your assumption that that’s still a major factor in Millennials and Gen Z is not tenable.
Claims about over-policing of black men and over-disciplining of black children are based primarily on ass-pulled assumptions that there are no racial differences in criminal offending and disruptive behavior.
Incidentally, on the topic of overpolicing, I myself have been stopped and frisked over ten times in my life. While I’m opposed to this in principle, in practice it’s been nothing more than a minor annoyance. It has had no long-term detrimental effect on any aspect of my life. Do you know why? Because I’m not an idiot. I don’t carry contraband, and because I behave in a manner consistent with the fact that I don’t want to give the cops an excuse to give me crap.Report
I’ve had the same thought myself many times. If your commitment to liberalism and opposition to racism is so weak that you have to deny the huge, extremely well-documented racial gaps in criminal offending—or even the possibility that these gaps might have a genetic basis—in order to convince yourself that you’re a good person, you are a motherfishing child. You’re starting from feelings and assuming the truth of whatever facts are necessary to justify those feelings. You don’t have a problem with racism—you have a problem with reality.
Real liberalism is strong enough to withstand inconvenient facts.Report
Correlation is not causation.
Black educational, economic and criminal statistics do not arise in a vacuum. They are a result of the history of black’s in America. We keep trying to place that set of statistics in historical context and tease out why and how that history is influencing today’s outcomes. You – and Hanania – seem to think that history doesn’t matter.
Real Conservativism ought to be able to withstand that analysis.Report
Correct. The fact that low SES is correlated with crime does not mean that low SES is the main cause of crime. The fact that people with low earnings tend to have children with low earnings does not mean that parental earnings are the main causal driver of one’s earnings in adulthood.
You’re quite happy to assume that correlation is proof of causation when it would support a causal model to which you’ve made ideological precommitments, so it’s pretty rich for you to presume to lecture me on this point. I don’t even know what correlation you think I’m taking as proof of causation. My causal claims are based on studies using methodologies that actually allow for causal inference, not just naïve assumptions about correlational data.
We’ve been over this before. History matters in some sense, but not in the manner, or to the extent, that is necessary to justify the claims you’re making. You’re starting from your desired conclusion and just assuming whatever facts are necessary to justify those conclusions, which is profoundly unscientific.
Low SES is not, in general, strongly intergenerationally sticky. Studies of the US find about 0.4 rank-rank father-son elasticity for earnings, and only a part of that is a true causal effect of parental SES, the rest being due to heritable factors. Raj Chetty’s work shows that, intergenerationally, black men regress towards a lower mean SES than white men, which is exactly what we would expect to see if the cause were genetic, and not at all what we would expect to see if the cause were historical disadvantage (in which case black and white men would regress towards the same mean SES).
Twin studies show that academic achievement is highly heritable, with shared environment accounting only for a small percentage of the variation, not nearly enough to explain the black-white gap. In fact, the black-white educational achievement gap is larger, in standardized terms, than the black-white SES gap. This is consistent with educational achievement driving the SES gap, rather than with SES driving the educational achievement gap.
The hysteresis-driven model you’re proposing here simply doesn’t work. The contradictions can only be avoided with an extremely shallow analysis that begins with the observation that there was oppression in the past and is low achievement in the present and ends with a glib post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
I’m quite certain I’ve laid out at least some of this for you in the past, but you keep repeating the same basic talking points without demonstrating any awareness or understanding of the serious problems I’ve pointed out with this ultra-simplistic “analysis.”
No, you don’t. You just say “history matters” and drop the mic. Apologies if I’ve missed it, but I have no recollection of you ever providing any credible arguments for why we should believe that history has the specific effects you’re claiming it does, especially in light of the objections I’ve raised above and elsewhere.
When I said real liberalism, I meant actual liberalism in the sense of equal rights and civil liberties and such, not “liberalism” as a euphemism for leftism. I was describing my own ideology, not concern-trolling about yours.
My point here is that I see no conflict between the idea that racial achievement gaps are driven largely by genetic factors and the idea that people should be judged as individuals and treated as equals before the law. When liberalism is not contingent on particular answers to purely empirical questions about the causes of racial achievement gaps, there is no need to moralize those questions.Report
This is all good and well, but I’d be surprised if it moves the needle much on the conversation — seems like a high-vs-low decoupler situation.Report
So, did Italian’s and the Irish have a giant change in their gene pool the moment they stopped being massive discriminated against, or is it just a coincidence that the moment that having the names Liam and Roberto stopped you from getting good jobs, the violence of those ethnic groups collapsed?Report
Do we actually have any good stats on this, or are you just making assumptions based on stereotypes? I found some sources suggesting that Italian immigrants actually committed less crime than native-born Americans, while Irish immigrants committed crime at moderately elevated rates (55% of arrests in NYC, while making up a third of the population), but I don’t know how reliable those claims are. Furthermore, how confident are we that people with Irish ancestry don’t still commit more crime than WASPs today? How much of a reduction has there actually been, in relative terms? We’ve almost entirely much stopped paying attention to achievement gaps between different European ethnicities because they’re dwarfed by racial gaps.
So I’m not at all sure that your premise here is correct. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is. This actually supports a genetic explanation. The basic model you’re proposing here is that people who are shut out of legitimate occupations by harsh discrimination turn to crime, and when discrimination relaxes, crime plummets.
The thing is, discrimination against black Americans has declined tremendously, and crime hasn’t really followed. Sure, the black homicide rate is down a bit from the highs of the 80s and early 90s (possibly driven by lead and/or the crack wars), but it plateaued around 2000 and then skyrocketed after the Racial Reckoning™.
There was a recent resume field study finding that resumes with distinctively black names got a 10% (e.g. 18% vs. 20%, not 10% vs. 20%) lower callback rate when submitted for jobs with low educational requirements. Yeah, sure, that’s crappy, but on an individual level, that isn’t even noticeable. Having to submit 10% more resumes to get a job is statistical noise, not something that shuts you out of legitimate occupations.
And that’s for jobs with low educational requirements. For jobs with high educational requirements, I strongly suspect that discrimination goes the other way because of the pressure on those industries to diversify and the shortage of qualified black candidates. But for obvious reasons, nobody seems to want to do those studies. And in terms of actually getting those credentials, there’s strong and well-documented discrimination in favor of black students. Did you know that black students get college degrees at about the same rate as white students with test scores half a standard deviation higher? No, that doesn’t mean tests are biased, because they don’t get better college grades than score-matched white students, it’s just that they’re as likely to attend and power through.
The fact that black Americans continue to have high rates of criminal offending and low average academic achievement long after a dramatic reduction in discrimination suggests that discrimination is not the issue here. And for reasons I outlined in my reply to Philip’s comment just above yours, a hysteresis-based model is not plausible, either.Report
By popular demand, here is what I see as the uncomfortable truths about white culture that no one dares talk about:
White culture tolerates, and even venerates, a culture of dysfunction and lawlessness.
We see it in the rural areas of the south, or the Appalachian regions, or the rural Midwest, and even the inland valleys of the West Coast.
It is a culture of exaggerated ego and pridefullness, of aggression and violence, where a simple act of disrespect ends with a body on the floor.
It is a culture that scorns education and success, and as a result, its inhabitants live in squalor and ignorance, in a world passed by by modern progress. They in turn become bitter and cling to their Bibles and guns, and seek solace in backward religions which are intolerant of modern secular culture.
The FBI in fact has documented many cases of domestic terrorism by these groups.
Now please understand. I am not saying all white people live like this. Certainly, there are many white people, evenwhite people from these dysfunctional cultures who escape and live happy productive law abiding lives.
But too many are accepting of the dysfunction, and as mentioned, there are celebrities like the Blue Collar Comedy troupe who celebrate the culture of backwardness and ignorance.
We must first come to grips with the existence of the problems in white culture, and fearlessly address them.Report
Are you an exception from this part of the culture?Report
You missed the joke.
The joke is, that every culture in every nation all around the world, since the dawn of humanity, with no exceptions whatsoever, harbors within it a dysfunctional, broken culture of failure and criminality.
Period.
There are no exceptions to this rule, and it has and always will be true, always and everywhere.
The only variance is how the more successful dominant segment of society responds to the broken segment.
As we saw from the hysterical responses to Obama’s “bitter clinger” comment, the answer is “not well.”Report
I don’t see how you get from there to “therefore crime isn’t a problem”.
Or “crime isn’t a bad enough problem that we need to change the status quo”, anyway.Report
I don’t see how either, which is probably why I never said such a thing.
For example, the FBI is currently investigating domestic terrorism among religious extremists.
I fully support this tough on crime change to the status quo.Report
Oh, domestic terrorism among religious extremists?
Is that really a problem?Report
Also, this seems relevant:
How many of those things do think are based on knowable fact, and how many are just accepted truths which aren’t empirically testable but still “rights”? And do you see places where minority culture deviates from these assumptions as “wrong?”Report
“Based on knowable fact”?
I’m not sure I understand the criticism.
I think that many of those things are great tools to have in your toolbox if you are hoping to get ahead. They’re useful for zero-sum conflicts but they’re also useful for a growth mindset.
“Empirically testable”? Like… how would you test “hard work is the key to success”? “I knew a guy who worked hard and he didn’t get ahead!” would be a good counter-argument, I guess. I’d say that all of the people I know who got ahead were people who worked hard, though. We can get into “Necessary but not Sufficient” and that sort of thing here, I guess.
“Plan for the future”
“Delayed gratification”
How in the world would this qualify as “knowable fact”?
For what it’s worth, I think that both of these things are good and both of these things are tools that will help you (or anybody) succeed.
Even the BIPOC.
And do you see places where minority culture deviates from these assumptions as “wrong?”
No, not wrong. Just different. Perhaps even likely to get ahead in different games than what gets called “the rat race”.Report
Many people – including people here – see deviations from these assumptions as wrong, especially when those deviations occur within non-white communities.Report
For what it’s worth, I think that both of these things are good and both of these things are tools that will help you (or anybody) succeed.
Even the BIPOC.
Can I play?
Husband is breadwinner and head of household
Wife is homemaker and subordinate to the husband
Are these also tools that will help anybody succeed? Will white culture be doomed if we allow children to share bedrooms? Is it a sign of how low whites in America have fallen that the only Protestant Justice in the Supreme Court is a black woman?Report
How many white households do you know where the husband is breadwinner and head of the house and the wife is homemaker and subordinate to the husband?Report
Me? I didn’t post the thing, I didn’t say it was relevant, I didn’t say:
For what it’s worth, I think that both of these things are good and both of these things are tools that will help you (or anybody) succeed.
I just wondered if whoever wrote that thought that THOSE TWO were the only two things that were good, and the rest was a boatload of stupid cliches, or if that person thought that the rest of the post had other things that should be treated as, what did someone called them: moral realities, perhaps?
Whoever posted that thing can tell you what he meant when he posted it. You should ask him. He’ll be happy to explain it to you.
Me, I’m just asking questions to that guy. What other pieces of wisdom and common sense are in the poster? I’ll let you know if the guy answers. He’s cool so for sure he’ll make sure there’s no doubt about what he meant. He probably hit POST too soon. It happens to the best of us.Report
There’s *TONS* of good stuff in the poster.
Like, stuff for everybody. It kind of makes me think “this is… this is White Stuff?”
Like you know how there is periodically discussions about Conservative Entertainment? “How come there aren’t any Conservative movies?” and then people start making suggestions and others point out “NO THAT’S NOT CONSERVATIVE! THAT’S A UNIVERSAL VALUE! EVERYBODY LOVES THEIR LIFE PARTNER!” or the same?
Well, I kinda think that we’d have something similar with White Supremacy Culture.
“Rigid time schedules”.Report
Then you’ve answered your own question. It wasn’t that difficultReport
“Cause and effect relationships”Report
The emphasis on the scientific method doesn’t seem to square with how many White Americans insist in Biblical literalism or are into more ecumenical forms of woo.Report
None of it squares because it’s obviously stupid and nonsensical.Report
I can’t tell if this poster was designed to make fun of people who believe in this sort of stuff or was made by somebody who believes in this sort of stuff. Poe’s Law is a harsh task master.Report
It’s based on the ‘white supremacy culture’ work of Tema Okun. She is an old white lady with I believe a degree in PE. For some reason she is influential in the DEI movement. So influential that poster or something very much like it was displayed in the Smithsonian during the height of the madness in 2020.Report
I can’t tell if this poster was designed to make fun of people who believe in this sort of stuff or was made by somebody who believes in this sort of stuff.
One of my favorite comedy bits is to use language that was common among fans of Social Justice within recent memory.
“Check your privilege” is a good one.
“Social Justice”, for that matter.
“Latinx” is probably the best recent example.
When I use “Latinx” among my progressive friends, they usually wince.Report
The basic problem with all political conversations on any issue, this becomes especially clear if two or more sides are talking to each other and there is an audience, is that nearly every group has something that they really believe but don’t dare say because they know it sounds bad and will make them look bad. So you get these weird dances where it becomes clear what somebody means but nobody really just wants to come out and say it.
To use an example from the liberal side, promoters of multiculturalism never come out and say that multiculturalism or DEI really does mean food, festivals, and fabrics with a bien-pensant upper middle class code of behavior. I really don’t think that anybody could honestly come to different conclusion based on how things are presented but multiculturalism obviously doesn’t mean that the people who come from a culture more comfortable with being touchy-feely get to be touchy-feely or that when dealing with people whose culture has more concrete ideas on how social superiors and inferiors should interact like the Japanese you need to respect that even outside Japan. Nobody can just come out and say it and everybody looks really mealy-mouthed.
The one virtue of outright racists like Hanania is that they come out and say what they mean. What they mean is bad or even evil but there isn’t a doubt about their position. Everybody else is just not willing to come out and say it.Report
I’ve argued right here several times in favor of an etiquette, a form of conventional norms and mores which would center in what is at this moment the liberal middle class norm.
And in truth we have it. In almost all of our culture, from movies to novels to HR regulations, there is an assumed bien pensant “right thinking” set of norms and people who exist outside it get subtly or not so subtly mocked and derided in an effort to bring them back into orthodoxy.
These sorts of norms arise spontaneously, in a feedback loop of status and aspiration.
The important question is how tolerant the dominant culture is of transgressors, and what transgressions can be accepted versus which are taboo.
Like the white trash or ghetto cultures we all are talking about without wanting to talk about. What parts of these can we accept as merely “colorful cultural variation” and what parts need punishment in order to curb?Report
I’m not talking about you in particular. There are plenty people on the liberal side of the aisle don’t really want to come out and say that the conventional norms and standards should be centered on liberal middle class norms even though many of them mean it. My guess is because this means that transgressive behavior from groups that they like or care about would get policed or punished just as much as those from the ones they don’t care about. The Anglophone Left’s fondness for some forms of visible disorder also gets in the way here.
There really isn’t an easy way to determine these are the permissible transgressions and these are the impermissible ones that must be smacked down because a lot of it depends on emotion rather than logic. To use one example, Mardi Gras/Carnival. The entire point of those celebrations was that people could break lose and do things that you weren’t supposed to traditionally. This included engaging in some non-verbally authorized touching because the point was to get lose and if you participated you were basically seen as silently giving ascent to a certain amount of naughty behavior. Hard to square this with the current beliefs about consent and bodily autonomy. Do we just ban any sort of holiday based on this sort of wild abandonment? There are logical reasons to do so.Report
That’s kind of what I am thinking about, the “permissible transgressions” that are contained and bounded.
Mardi Gras ends strictly on Wednesday morning when the police come down the street clearing out the revelers.
A modern secular version, lets say a BDSM club, contains the transgressions behind a barrier of rules about consent.
What is most intriguing is all the articles written about “political correctness” and “Wokeness” and “cancel culture” which argue that this is, wait for it, a new religion policing the acceptable boundaries of public behavior.
I’ve said before, we aren’t in a battle over liberty versus order, we’re in a battle over whose order will be adopted.Report
It doesn’t matter that Mardi Gras last one day though. If the rule is that consent must always be spoken and could never be implied than any event where this can’t be followed is impermissible.Report
I don’t think that even traditional Mardi Gras allowed truly nonconsensual transgression, unless it obeyed the laws of class, i.e., a higher class person trangressing against a lower class person.
I am not aware of a tradition where say, a black man was allowed to grope a white woman during Mardi Gras.
Which I think is kind of the point of erecting boundaries around transgression- A traditional Mardi Gras or modern club might advertise itself as a wild, unfettered boundary-free environment, but there were, and are, actually a lot of rules and boundaries.
But I think you have a point about how the bourgeoisie norms can be deadening to the human need for freedom and the occasional revelry.
Particularly since this is the theme running through most of our great works of literature.Report
Maybe not in the United States but possibly in other places. You could probably cup a feel a lot in Mardi Gras celebrations in ways you couldn’t in real life that would be considered not good these days
The issue is whether you believe if something is bad on Monday and Wednesday, it should also be bad on Tuesday or whether it isn’t because Tuesday is a carnival.Report
Practically, this is the underlying thinking behind nutpicking. I can’t prove you’re crazy, but I can cite someone who thinks one thing similar to you and demonstrate that he’s crazy. That’s an unfair way to argue.Report
Kevin Williamson got there first.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/Report
This article made recall this great joke:
A blind Irishman walks into a bar. Hearing that Jesus is at one of the tables in back, he says to the bartender, “Draw me a Guiness and send one to Jesus while you’re at it.”
A few minutes later, a wheelchair-bound African-American guy rolls in. He sees Jesus and tells the bartender to get him and whiskey and send one back to Jesus.
Next a redneck in a neck brace enters, buys himself a Budweiser and sends a can over to Jesus.
On his way out, Jesus stops to thank each man. He touches the Irish guy, curing him of blindness. “Thank you Jesus, now I can see!” Then he touches the African-American man, who rises from his wheelchair, now able to walk. He approaches the redneck, who backs away saying, “Please don’t touch me. I’m on disability.”Report
Holy cow. SBF’s bail has been revoked:
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This is entirely unsurprising given what his reported personality is.Report
Whose, SBF’s or Judge Kaplan’s? From what I’ve seen of them (I’ve appeared before Judge Kaplan many times), it could well be both.Report
SBF’s – because this is really a witness tampering story:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/11/business/sam-bankman-fried-bail-hearing/index.htmlReport
Then Judge Kaplan is pretty much the last judge SBF would want to f**k with.Report
Another potential cause: Malnutrition.
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Editorializing? In *MY* headlines? It’s more likely than you think!
Crime is so bad near S.F. Federal building employees are told to work from home, officials said
For one thing, the announcement didn’t mention crime!
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If only San Francisco had some sort of organization empowered to deal with crime as it’s happening in the street.Report
This, but unironically.Report
Hang on, it does! They even have a website and a phone number!
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/Report
They’re not empowered to deal with crime, though.Report
What does that mean? SFPD is not allowed to arrest anyone? That seems pretty far fetched.Report
It’s the term that *YOU* introduced!
But “deal with crime” presumably means more than “arrest”. I assume it also means “put on trial” and if found guilty of a sufficiently bad crime, imprisoned.
I’m not seeing how they’re empowered to deal with crime as it’s happening on the street.Report
Arresting suspects is all they’re empowered to do. It’s the first step in “dealing with crime”. Without that, there’s no dealing.Report
Eh, there have been injunctions preventing cops from doing a buncha stuff.
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The tweet deals with an injunction against removing a homeless person’s tent. I didn’t see any mention of removing drug dealers, or other malefactors.Report
They keep mentioning stuff like “the open drug market” on the streets. Here’s an article from just last month.
It’s enough to make you wish there were some sort of organization empowered to deal with crime as it’s happening in the street.Report
I’m not a subscriber, so you’ll have to summarize the salient points.Report
Just do a ctrl-A. You’ll grab the article. Put it into notepad. (That’s what I do.)
Here are a couple of excerpts:
Report
Here’s another one:
It started with a dispute over illegal firework sales and ended with a rampage in a San Francisco restaurant that in under 60 seconds left five innocent bystanders dead, and 11 injured.
…
The killers made it back to the Pacifica apartment without pursuit, where they stayed up all night discussing the massacre, before breaking down the weapons and dropping them into the Bay near San Francisco Airport the following day.
The city was stunned and Chinatown became ghost town at night, but a code of silence took hold of the terrified residents. No arrests were made and the violence didn’t stop.
The SFPD grew frustrated at not being able to identify the killers. Chief Charles Gain criticized the Chinatown community for its silence and “abdication of responsibility” due to “the subculture of fear” of reprisals.
The police were helpless! Completely unempowered to control crime!
The city became a ghost town, I repeat, GHOST TOWN as fear and mayhem gripped the community!
Wow ,this is terrible.
Or, I should say, it WAS terrible, since it happened in 1977.Report
Those 2 passages stood out to me, as well. How do you think they support your contention that SFPD is doing their part to curb the trade?Report
Even if we set aside the issue of whether safety is getting better or worse, the article makes it pretty clear that the SF government is being responsive in addressing the problem.
Which of course leads to the issue of what solutions should be attempted, other than what is already being done.
What’s interesting is to highlight, not the differences, but the similarities in the suggestions from OT’s liberals and conservatives.
Jaybird and I agree that improving schools is a necessary step.
Almost everyone here agrees that drastically increasing the supply of housing is necessary.
And I think more than a few of us agree that an increased ability of the government to mandate treatment for addicts and the mentally ill is needed.
And Pinky and I both agree that a bad dysfunctional culture of failure needs to be curbed and bounded by societal norms of behavior which emphasize education, cooperation, and subservience of the self to the community.Report
For sure, SF is definitely not going to arrest itself out of the problem. And from what I read, the SF municipal government can be a little bananas at times. Like they can’t even get out of their own way to deal with problems in their own city.
The original discussion was how the streets around the Pelosi Federal Bldg. (when did we start naming things after living people) were so unsafe the feds were recommending WFH for its employees. I made a snarky comment about SFPD laying down on the job, and Jaybird cites a piece, perhaps in refutation but I’m not sure, with a couple of anecdotes of the police doing just that. I’m really not sure why he brought it into the discussion, unless it was to highlight the dysfunction in that city, which really needs little more evidence.Report
Which, if true, makes the decades-long drop in crime even more remarkable.
San Francisco is safer, cleaner, and more orderly now than it was when Dirty Harry walked the streets.Report
If that’s the case, it makes no sense that FedGov is telling its workers to telecommute!Report
Those two facts in no way contradict each other.
Again, if you want to argue against the established fact of the long decline in crime, go right ahead.
What I think is more pertinent is why you seem to want to.Report
Hey, the established fact that I am pointing to is that FedGov told its workers to telecommute instead of coming into the office because of the “conditions” at the building.Report
Of course you point to that.
When you are cornered, all you can do is just repeat the same point endlessly.Report
I see it more as “changing the subject back to what I was talking about after you tried to change it to what you wanted to talk about”.
The point that you want to make is that crime is going down, is it?
When crime was higher, did FedGov give advice to the employees at this building to not come in?Report
Your post had no subject.
You noted that the workers were told to work from home.
Period.
End of sentence.
There is no subject here, no point to be made, merely one factoid, like “Rubbish collection hours will change starting Monday.”
Did you want to create a subject?Report
I also included this excerpt:
“The conditions”.
Maybe he means “how quickly crime is going down might make your heads spin and we don’t want dizzy people in the office”.
I’ll ask this again:
When crime was higher, did FedGov give advice to the employees at this building to not come in?Report
Did they do their work via Zoom in 1975? Um, no I don’t think they did.
Here, let’s stay on the subject of federal officials fearing for their safety:
Violent threats against public officials are rising. Here’s why
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/12/1193463117/violent-threats-against-public-officials-are-rising-heres-why
It is figures on the political right who are primarily fueling this hostile environment, says Katherine Keneally, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Strategic Dialogue, although their vitriol isn’t just directed against Democrats and public officials.
“What I think is important to note is that Republicans are also being threatened by members of their own party,” she says, often due to perceptions of being insufficiently loyal to conservative principles or figures.Report
From the article that I linked to above:
So you think that the appropriate baseline to compare San Francisco 2023 to is San Francisco 1975?
It’s shocking that the workers would even imagine complaining, then.Report
Truly, the world is coming apart.
Chaos, pandemonium, mass hysteria-
WARNING: Graphic and terrifying video of dogs and cats living together!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_cATnNsQ1k&t=1sReport
Chip, this may not have sunk in but this isn’t a person on the street threatening to vote for a recall of the DA saying “People shouldn’t go into the office!”
This is the Federal Government recommending not going into the office for Federal employees.Report
Would you accept FBI crime statistics?
Seriously, you keep contradicting yourself.
Yesterday you are demanding we draw our conclusions from crime statistics, but when presented with statistics demonstrating conclusively that crime is on a downward trend, you resort to anecdotes and “feels”.Report
Chip, this is *NOT* “FBI stats”.
This is the Federal Government sending guidance to its San Fran branch at this building saying “don’t come in to work”.
Crime going down in Topeka is great but that doesn’t change that FedGov is telling these people to telecommute due to the situation around the building.
(Quite honestly, I don’t see how pointing this out contradicts anything. Well, maybe the narrative about unreported crimes going up indicates that crime in general is going down.)Report
https://www.reuters.com/legal/starbucks-board-wins-dismissal-shareholder-lawsuit-over-diversity-policies-2023-08-11/
“If the plaintiff doesn’t want to be invested in ‘woke’ corporate America, perhaps it should seek other investment opportunities rather than wasting this court’s time,” he [Chief U.S. District Judge Stanley Bastian] said.Report
If the anti-woke and anti-ESG folk believe these are bad for corporations, they should have the courage of their convictions — if they are convictions — and put their money where their mouths are, investing in companies that follow what they say they believe are better policies. If they’re right, they’ll make money and the “woke” companies will lose.
Why do they hate the free market?Report