urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
5d ago
I don't believe that the neurotic Hermione type or the autistic programmer paralyzed and terrified at the thought of making a faux pas with a woman are of the same classification as these very laidback, very casual guys.
I don't either, but you supplied two characteristics ("neurotic" and "autistic") and a whole general category of person ("rapist") that suffice to explain a whole lot of difference before we start talking about 'breeds.' And your point isn't even demonstrated by the evidence you presented: these guys are perfectly capable of thinking of consequences -- they can perfectly well conceive of the potential negative consequences to themselves, including "people might catch us" and "we might get HIV."
You're interpreting a deflection under interrogation ("you don't think about what might happen after, you don't think about the consequences") as though it overwrites the existing discussion of self-interested consequentialism, a test which I doubt many white people would pass. That's a pretty startling level of credulity towards the statements of a literal gang rapist; you're arguing he's a habitual pattern-follower incapable of abstract reasoning, but you take his statements about his own psychological state at face value? I can find you a thousand white guys with the same mindset, it's just that they're in prison or dead in a ditch. You're simply illustrating that habitual gang-rapists aren't willing to think about the consequences to their victims, which is not an original insight.
I'm not even a racial progressive and I oppose third world immigration, it's just that your takeaway here makes no sense.
I'm not actually making the argument here that populations don't differ, and I'm certainly not making the argument that South African men are identical in temperament and disposition to British men. We don't even need to talk about those things to conclude that your comment was, at best, very, very silly. 100% of South Africans could be in a constant state of raping and your comment would still not make sense.
I'm actually making a much more narrow argument: you presented a clip as evidence that the South African men shown do not naturally think about consequences, when in fact the clip is saturated with thinking about forward-looking and non-immediate consequences, like possible punishment or an STD infection.
What it also has, and the part from which you extracted the "not naturally thinking about consequences" idea, is a statement, under repeated pressure to relate to the position of a victim from an obviously-angry foreign journalist, that when you rape someone you don't think about the consequences. I mean, yeah? "I wasn't thinking" is the thing that people the world over say when they get caught with their hand bloodied in the cookie jar; that certainly doesn't make it true.
You claim that he has no reason to lie, because of course he's already spilling the beans on his gang rape, but you've conveniently forgotten the most obvious and immediate person a violent criminal would want to mislead as to his motivations and capacity for choosing another way: himself. I can't read his mind, but neither can you, and since you made the claim that this reveals something fundamental about his cognitive architecture, you're the one for whom mind reading makes the least sense.
We could talk about the consequences of gabbing about gang rape to a foreign journalist all day, but anyone who's ever thought about their own misdeeds can well understand that the consequences of admitting to yourself that you've done something wrong in a way that directly harmed another human being are more frightful than a hundred lashings. Something, anything, to stop from believing oneself to be the antagonist in someone else's life story. You're accusing him of being a different model of human, but self-protective cognitive biases and self-deception are part of the basic trim package across the whole model lineup.
And his willingness to talk about his gang rape to a foreign journalist has an immediately-accessible and quite evident sociocultural explanation that comes before any need to discuss race at all. In fact you name it, yourself! You wrote:
But what's funny to me about this is that you've put the cart before the proverbial horse here, and you've assumed the causation flows from "South African men rape a lot" to "South African men aren't in prison." Is it possible that, you know, they're doing all this raping because South Africa doesn't prosecute them for it? And, moreover, is it possible that both the high rate of rape and the lack of effective prosecution of rape could be downstream from predominant sociocultural attitudes in which rape victims don't matter -- unless of course one is related to her -- and men can take what they can grab?
That's a parsimonious argument, and to me the null hypothesis. You haven't substantiated any reason why someone should view things the other way around, certainly not with your argument about (lack of) consequentialist thinking. In fact, more statistics from the Jewkes study which you reference demonstrate my point: the study claims that only one out of every 25 rapes are reported to police. No wonder they're not in prison if none of them are prosecuted!
This argument also is very well-behaved, in that it doesn't flatter either side of the debate over third world immigration: it's just as bad if an immigrant rapes you because of some deeply-ingrained sociocultural disregard for rape victims as for some deformation of breed. You don't need to make the essentialist claim to make the political claim you're aiming to make, which means you're forcing your argument to become radioactive without improving its function. Unless, of course, the function is to create a hierarchy of status based on inherent characteristics that places oneself at the top, in which case it seems suited to the purpose. It's only a pity your core claim makes no logical sense regardless.
And that's my central point: none of this touches on the actual point I was highlighting, because those aren't claims you initially presented. You added those as a part of your retreat to the motte, and even when presenting your motte you've ignored some obvious alternative (and quite parsimonious!) explanations of the phenomenon. You're not reasoning from evidence to a conclusion, you're reasoning from a conclusion to what the evidence must therefore say. Gesturing wildly in a direction is not civilization-tier reasoning.
And in that connection, you decided that a rapist's defensive claim intended to deflect from naming his impact on his victims -- an almost textbook self-protective act of ego defense for whom the target is the self and the journalist is just witnessing it -- was somehow a revelation of cognitive architecture concerning consequences, in direct contradiction to the actual cognitive architecture he was displaying, in which consequences to him and his buddies are very, very important.
And moreover you turned an argument about antisociality into an argument about cognition, somehow, like the problem with the Zodiac was that his puzzles weren't clever enough. Your point wasn't even "Africans are antisocial" or "African men don't think about the consequences of their actions towards women." You could have said those things, and we could discuss them. But you didn't. You wrote:
I especially note the "they can but they don't" part -- which is where I think you realized what you shared didn't support what you were saying, and tried to hedge it, as you're doing now. You're retreating to a different argument, which is a claim about population rape statistics, while hemming and hawing about consequentialist thinking because it's very, very clear that your initial comment's claims about cognition don't hold water.
We're not even talking about the political dispute at this point, or even about race, really, I'm just standing in a kind of stilted awe at how you got from A to B. "Does not want to think about consequences of his actions to victims" simply does not equal "does not naturally think about consequences." It certainly doesn't inherently equal "habitual pattern-followers," for God's sake!
If you're going to make an argument that some population of people are different models of human who don't think about consequences, you damn well need to make sure that your bat cracks like thunder when you hit the ball. Your claim doesn't meet that standard, not by a long shot. Whatever kind of thinking this is, I would not describe it as "high performance."
On that note -- if you hadn't had breakfast this morning, how would you feel?
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