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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ultimately it's going to come down to whether it's worth more for employers to have employees in the office or for employees to be able to work from home. Contrary to histrionic lefty rhetoric, employers can't actually force people to do anything. Employers that require working in office have to compete with employers who allow full-time WFH, which means that they'll have to pay enough of a premium to overcome workers' preference to work from home. And they'll only do that if they think it's actually worth paying the premium.
Yes, fine, but the government is the exception here, not the rule. Private-sector employers are not able to seize a cut of the profits of commercial landlords and restaurateurs, and have no incentive to spend money to prop up those industries.
Plus if everyone really does work from home then what do we do with all the empty offices and the businesses that serve them (the dry cleaners, lunch cafe’s etc.
Why would employers care about that? If they could maintain the same level of productivity, they'd love not to have to renew the leases on their offices. And why would they care whether dry cleaners or restaurants make money?
Sure, the building owners care about being able to rent out their office buildings, and restaurant owners care about having customers, but they're not the ones making the decisions about whether white collar workers can work from home.
It's a bit histrionic either way---though no more than what we see from the left---given that OSHA does not in fact regulate home office chairs (see example 5 here), but supposing for the sake of argument that it were true, it makes more sense if you think of it as an illustration of the extent of the reach of government regulation, as opposed to a specific thing that all on its own is intolerable.
The federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate most purely intrastate issues, and the blatant disregard of jurisdictional limits by both parties really is a very serious abuse of power.
When I was a kid, I lived in a Miller Lite household. One time my dad let me have a sip when I brought him a can. I'm not sure whether this was good or bad parenting, but the result was that I decided that that was enough beer for me. Now I live in a water household.
Olivia Buckley is the only Buckley composer listed in Wikipedia who was born before the time this comic was published. She does seem to have written one opera.
I would like to point out, since it took me years to get the joke, that the site's name is intended to be arχiv, χ being the Greek letter "chi," which is used for various purposes in math and science.
So despite the X, it's still pronounced "archive."
I would absolutely support compensation for any surviving subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis study who were harmed by withholding of diagnosis or proper treatment, and possibly to their children; probably not to their grandchildren, though I'm open to non-stupid arguments about why they should. There are tricky questions about how long these kinds of debts should persist, as the indirect harm to subsequent generations is greatly attenuated over time. Should I get compensation from the British on account of my partial Irish ancestry? I don't think there's any reasonable argument that I should.
The key difference here is that the Tuskegee subjects were harmed by the research, and Henrietta Lacks was not. I'm not an oncologist, but I'm pretty sure that leaving more cancerous cells in her body would, if anything, have worsened her chances of survival. There seems to be a general consensus, even among those pushing for "compensation," that she was treated according to the standard of care of the time.
Well what about all those black people who were harmed by unethical research? My evaluation of a particular case depends on the actual facts of the case. If the facts are different, my evaluation is different. It seems that you have a more narrative-driven approach, which I find somewhat worrying, given that you claim to be a scientist.
To the best of my understanding, there is no evidence that Lacks was harmed by the use of her medical waste, nor, AFAICT, is there any question of her having been given substandard treatment. If she had been offered $50 in exchange for the rights to conduct research on said medical waste, she almost certainly would have taken it, because it was literally less than worthless to her, and made valuable only by the expertise, efforts, and investments of others.
It's not entirely clear to me what her value over replacement was. What percentage of cancers have the same ability to replicate indefinitely in vitro as hers? 90%? 10%? 1%? It's a shame that she died so young, of course, but the idea that her family is entitled to any sort of compensation is insane, and emblematic of how far off the rails this race hysteria has gone.
Also, was there supposed to be a link in this post?
That's not how I remember it. I was explaining how Pinky's observation that non-MSA areas have lower crime rates than MSA areas can be reconciled with the fact that there are more small cities than large cities among the highest-crime areas. Broadly speaking, I think Pinky was more correct.
An apolitical digression on "snowflake": I first remember seeing it used as an insult in the form "special snowflake" on video game forums circa 2010. When people were complaining about the difficulty of optional content that yielded desirable virtual rewards for successful completion, they were accused of wanting to get the rewards just for being "special snowflakes," i.e. like a sort of participation trophy that kids get because everyone is special and unique, like snowflakes.
I'm not entirely sure how it went from that to denoting fragility. One theory I have is that it came by association to refer to those who couldn't deal with difficult tasks, and thence fragility. Alternatively it could have arisen independently from the fact that snowflakes actually are pretty fragile. But my money's on the first.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/7/2023”
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.
"
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.
"
If I don't answer you, it's because I have better things to do, not because I don't have an answer.
"
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.
"
Called it.
"
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.
On “Zoom To End Full Time Work From Home. No, Seriously”
Ultimately it's going to come down to whether it's worth more for employers to have employees in the office or for employees to be able to work from home. Contrary to histrionic lefty rhetoric, employers can't actually force people to do anything. Employers that require working in office have to compete with employers who allow full-time WFH, which means that they'll have to pay enough of a premium to overcome workers' preference to work from home. And they'll only do that if they think it's actually worth paying the premium.
"
Yes, fine, but the government is the exception here, not the rule. Private-sector employers are not able to seize a cut of the profits of commercial landlords and restaurateurs, and have no incentive to spend money to prop up those industries.
"
Plus if everyone really does work from home then what do we do with all the empty offices and the businesses that serve them (the dry cleaners, lunch cafe’s etc.
Why would employers care about that? If they could maintain the same level of productivity, they'd love not to have to renew the leases on their offices. And why would they care whether dry cleaners or restaurants make money?
Sure, the building owners care about being able to rent out their office buildings, and restaurant owners care about having customers, but they're not the ones making the decisions about whether white collar workers can work from home.
On “Does Office Chair Ergonomics Explain The Claremont Strain of Trumpism?”
It's a bit histrionic either way---though no more than what we see from the left---given that OSHA does not in fact regulate home office chairs (see example 5 here), but supposing for the sake of argument that it were true, it makes more sense if you think of it as an illustration of the extent of the reach of government regulation, as opposed to a specific thing that all on its own is intolerable.
The federal government has no constitutional authority to regulate most purely intrastate issues, and the blatant disregard of jurisdictional limits by both parties really is a very serious abuse of power.
On “Waiting to Get into the Telephone Booth”
Who was Briggs' F.W.B?
On “Weekend Plans Post: In the House of Charles Entertainment Cheese”
Yeah, that's what set me off. I distinctly remembered that as a Chuck E. Cheese slogan.
"
I just learned that Chuck E. Cheese was founded by Nolan Bushnell. Also, apparently it went bankrupt in 1984 and merged with Showbiz.
This is how conspiracy theories get started. It's all connected, man.
On “Making Love in a Canoe”
When I was a kid, I lived in a Miller Lite household. One time my dad let me have a sip when I brought him a can. I'm not sure whether this was good or bad parenting, but the result was that I decided that that was enough beer for me. Now I live in a water household.
On “Weekend Plans Post: In the House of Charles Entertainment Cheese”
Maybe you can still get out of this. Did you sign a contract?
On “The Buckley Overture”
Olivia Buckley is the only Buckley composer listed in Wikipedia who was born before the time this comic was published. She does seem to have written one opera.
On “Weekend Plans Post: In the House of Charles Entertainment Cheese”
Not sure I understand the RFID thing. Does that mean that the games are free play for a fixed hourly rate?
On “Mini-Throughput: Floaty Rock Edition”
bioRxiv makes it more obvious, because that's clearly a χ in the logo, but Wikipedia confirms that it's the same for arxiv.org.
"
I would like to point out, since it took me years to get the joke, that the site's name is intended to be arχiv, χ being the Greek letter "chi," which is used for various purposes in math and science.
So despite the X, it's still pronounced "archive."
On “70 Years of “HeLa” Cells Debate Ends in Settlement For Henrietta Lacks Family”
I would absolutely support compensation for any surviving subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis study who were harmed by withholding of diagnosis or proper treatment, and possibly to their children; probably not to their grandchildren, though I'm open to non-stupid arguments about why they should. There are tricky questions about how long these kinds of debts should persist, as the indirect harm to subsequent generations is greatly attenuated over time. Should I get compensation from the British on account of my partial Irish ancestry? I don't think there's any reasonable argument that I should.
The key difference here is that the Tuskegee subjects were harmed by the research, and Henrietta Lacks was not. I'm not an oncologist, but I'm pretty sure that leaving more cancerous cells in her body would, if anything, have worsened her chances of survival. There seems to be a general consensus, even among those pushing for "compensation," that she was treated according to the standard of care of the time.
Well what about all those black people who were harmed by unethical research? My evaluation of a particular case depends on the actual facts of the case. If the facts are different, my evaluation is different. It seems that you have a more narrative-driven approach, which I find somewhat worrying, given that you claim to be a scientist.
"
To the best of my understanding, there is no evidence that Lacks was harmed by the use of her medical waste, nor, AFAICT, is there any question of her having been given substandard treatment. If she had been offered $50 in exchange for the rights to conduct research on said medical waste, she almost certainly would have taken it, because it was literally less than worthless to her, and made valuable only by the expertise, efforts, and investments of others.
It's not entirely clear to me what her value over replacement was. What percentage of cancers have the same ability to replicate indefinitely in vitro as hers? 90%? 10%? 1%? It's a shame that she died so young, of course, but the idea that her family is entitled to any sort of compensation is insane, and emblematic of how far off the rails this race hysteria has gone.
Also, was there supposed to be a link in this post?
On “No, I Will Not Try That or Even Go to Your Small Town”
Trashy.
"
That's not how I remember it. I was explaining how Pinky's observation that non-MSA areas have lower crime rates than MSA areas can be reconciled with the fact that there are more small cities than large cities among the highest-crime areas. Broadly speaking, I think Pinky was more correct.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Batchin’ It Again”
Someone on the King's Quest III team must have had a cat.
On “No, I Will Not Try That or Even Go to Your Small Town”
An apolitical digression on "snowflake": I first remember seeing it used as an insult in the form "special snowflake" on video game forums circa 2010. When people were complaining about the difficulty of optional content that yielded desirable virtual rewards for successful completion, they were accused of wanting to get the rewards just for being "special snowflakes," i.e. like a sort of participation trophy that kids get because everyone is special and unique, like snowflakes.
I'm not entirely sure how it went from that to denoting fragility. One theory I have is that it came by association to refer to those who couldn't deal with difficult tasks, and thence fragility. Alternatively it could have arisen independently from the fact that snowflakes actually are pretty fragile. But my money's on the first.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.