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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Segregation and "unequal treatment" (we have equal treatment now?

Yes.

Lets play dueling anecdotes.

My turn: black attacker, elderly asian victim, racial slurs used, charges dropped.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-Bayview-attack-Second-suspect-surrenders-to-15098296.php

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9437615/Two-teenage-girls-accused-car-jacking-killing-Uber-Eats-driver-reach-plea-deal.html

Your turn: white attacker, elderly black victim, racial slurs used, charges dropped.

My turn: black attacker, elderly asian victim, racial slurs used, charges dropped.

Did you read the actual articles or just go off the headlines?

In the first case Grayson (the person whose charges were dropped, but did not touch the victim) was the person videoing and the DA claims the victim expressed an interest in restorative justice for him and the charges were dropped, while the actual attacker WAS charged with robbery and elder abuse, his case is still pending. Charges were not dropped against the actual attacker. So this does not meet your own expressed criteria. Grayson was a racist asshole I would suggest but did not attack the victim. So we have black attacker, elderly asian victim, racial slurs used (though not by the attacker), charges not dropped (against the attacker).

**"According to the District Attorney's Office spokesman Alex Bastian, Grayson is not being charged for now and will instead be placed in a restorative justice program, at the victim's request.

Jonathan Amerson, 56, appeared in court Tuesday on charges of robbery and elderly abuse in connection with the attack on the unidentified 68-year-old man in front of a housing complex on Osceola Lane who was hauling large bags of recycled material."**

Charges were not dropped in the second case, as pointed out in the article and indeed the title(!). A Plea deal is not the same as charges being dropped. Indeed they both received the maximum sentences as noted below given they were juveniles.

**"A 15-year-old girl will be held in a youth detention facility until she turns 21 for a D.C. carjacking with another girl that left a Virginia man dead.

The girl received the maximum sentence in juvenile court Friday after pleading guilty last month to felony murder in the death of Mohammad Anwar, a Virginia man who was working as a delivery driver.

The second perpetrator, a 13-year-old girl, pleaded guilty Thursday to second-degree murder. Under the maximum sentence, she also would be released once she turns 21. "**

So given the charges were NOT dropped in your examples we just have to find a single case where a white attacker, racially motivated attacked an old black man and then charged to establish equal treatment by YOUR own standard, no?

Timothy Caughman 66 was killed by James Jackson 28 in New York because:

"Jackson also stated that the killing was intended to start a race war in a manifesto written by him: "The racial World War starts today. This political terrorist attack is a formal declaration of a global total war on the Negro races."

To be fair we don't know if he used a racial slur at the time given no witnesses, but the motivation seems clear.

If I can suggest that the lesson here is to pick your examples so that they actually match your contention? Because here, if nowhere else someone is likely to actually check.

Just to point out I am not condoning the behavior in the articles here, but if you are going to use dueling anecdotes (and this is a good example of why we probably shouldn't), you should at least make sure you are well armed. Check and clean your pistols carefully, before you consider issuing the challenge.

Murdering a black man: life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Murder while black: receive the maximum sentences for a lesser crime that the prosecutors gave them the option of pleading guilty to. No possibility of prison time but a few years in "youth care".

If you think that's comparable, I don't know what to tell you.

if you think that's comparable, I don't know what to tell you.

I don't (though of course neither are the specifics of each crime as in one was a premeditated murder, the other was felony murder by juveniles while trying to steal a car) but that wasn't the claim you made. You said charges dropped. If you want to pivot to a different argument then feel free. But if your evidence does not support your specific claim then do better at writing your claims or picking your evidence.

Dueling anecdotes is a bad debating technique for a number of reasons, but if you are going to use it, you have to be very very tight on making sure your examples match your claims. Otherwise you will get bogged down in defending the specifics of each case. It can be rhetorically powerful but it is very difficult to use correctly. If you don't use it properly it hurts your argument because it looks like you are either over-claiming on what your evidence shows, or were just googling headlines that kind of matched your thesis. You should then expect to get called out on that. Or you can be aware of that in advance and construct better arguments, which leads to better engagement.

Lets play dueling anecdotes.

No. Also, you've been told to change your username. Do it. The only reason I am not banning you right now is so you don't whine that I did it in the middle of a thread where I was a participant, but the next time you post with this username, you will be.

Yes, this nic was apparently bad only after I called the mods out on tolerating ilovenonasianminorities69, but banning bigdickpepe1488. I missed it because your message was sent on thanksgiving. Sorry about that.

Noted that you are unable to find a single comparable case of prosecutors letting white criminals get away with the kind of thing they routinely let black criminals get away with. But we definitely have "equal treatment".

What you can note is that I'm not interested in playing bad faith games like "dueling anecdotes."

I do not think that you claimed that we had factual equality in good faith. I do not think that you actually believe that hate crimes committed by black people are given the same degree of attention and seriousness as hate crimes committed against black people (despite the relative numbers and severity of these two categories), and I think that you are dismissing this claim as being in bad faith in bad faith yourself.

Can you tell us what would convince you that there is not, in fact, equal treatment of black and nonblack criminal behavior? If you were given another similar incident, or another five, or another dozen? How about if you were shown a statistical gap between the amount black people were prosecuted as a group and the amount of crimes that they committed?

I went into some detail on this in other posts where I addressed the fact that prosecution is often politically motivated and that some prosecutors do in fact go easy on certain classes of criminals (including, sometimes, black people).

There is a vast gulf between "Sometimes people receive unequal treatment, depending on the circumstances of the case," and "Laws don't apply equally to black people and white people," let alone "Laws don't apply to black people." If the argument was simply the former, I would say "Yes, that's true, it shouldn't be the case, but our legal system is too political for it not to be." But the argument you are making is the latter. "Dueling anecdotes" is not how you prove that one way or the other, it's just a bad faith game played by people who will move the goalposts (as has happened several times in the course of this thread).

What's bad faith about asking for a simple existence proof?

The Chinese Robber Fallacy wouldn't be a fallacy if you could literally not find a single non-Chinese robber.

Proof of what? Proof that there are non-Chinese robbers? Proof that Chinese people who rob are frequently convicted? Proof that the law does not treat Chinese robbers and non-Chinese robbers differently? Note that we've gone from "Black people are criminal by nature, thus Jim Crow laws are justified" to "Well, see, sometimes black people aren't prosecuted for hate crimes, this proves hate crimes only ever apply to white people."

"A Chinese robber robbed an elderly white person using a crowbar and their charges were dismissed. To disprove this, you must not only find a non-Chinese robber, you must find a non-Chinese robber who robbed an elderly Chinese person with a crowbar and their charges were dismissed. Details of the case don't matter, but if you don't find a non-Chinese robber who robbed an elderly Chinese person with a crowbar and got their charges dismissed, it proves that Chinese people are robbers and also laws don't apply to them. If you do waste your time looking for a non-Chinese robber who robbed an elderly Chinese person with a crowbar and got their charges dismissed, I'll pull out the next example of Chinese robbers I've collected and demand another one-for-one match."

Here's the original definition of the Chinese Robber Fallacy, from Alyssa Vance:

The Chinese Robber Fallacy is where you use a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even though other groups have the problem just as much (or even more so).

[...editing a bit out, which you can find via above link...]

“But don’t non-Chinese rob people too?”

“Maybe, but if so, that doesn’t make the Chinese any less guilty, does it? First we should deal with the Chinese criminal problem, and then if we’re successful, maybe we can move on to other types of theft.”

My steelman of the Jim Crow position (and note I'm not a Jim Crow supporter!) is that they are making this argument instead:

“But don’t prosecutors let white people get away with murdering vulnerable people while using racial slurs too?”

“Nope, not even once. At least not since the globohomo cuck regime took over. RETVRN!" (Since this is a steelman, I'm assuming they know about Bombingham, Emmet Till and the 2'nd klan and are restricting their claims to the past decade or two.)

To prove them wrong you could provide a single example of a white guy filming himself doing a hate crime and then prosecutors dropping charges for restorative justice.

The OP specified "elderly black victim" but in my view you'd certainly prove your point if the black victim was a pregnant woman, in a wheelchair or whatever. I would not consider you to have proved your point if the victim was a fit young man in a gang or if it was some crazy situation like that Jewish guy with a brain tumor who faked 100 antisemitic bomb threats, however.

I am not aware of any such incidents but I'm also not all that interested in the WN stuff.

To prove them wrong you could provide a single example of a white guy filming himself doing a hate crime and then prosecutors dropping charges for restorative justice.

Here is where the moving goalposts happened:

The OP argued that "we do not live in an equal society."

Now, that's a rather vague statement. On the face of it, it's obviously true (no society has or could ever be "equal" in any absolute sense), but what the OP was clearly implying (in the context of his other posts, as he's stated as much) is that laws basically don't apply to black people. Black people can commit crimes, white people can't. Black people commit almost all the crimes and are not prosecuted for it. (If forced to steelman this, I'm sure he would say obviously it does in fact happen that black people are prosecuted for crimes, as this obviously happens every day, but the position he's taking is essentially that we live in a dual legal system where black people are prosecuted much less frequently and much more lightly.)

That is the argument I rejected.

Then the second OP came in with a demand for "dueling anecdotes" and the specific case of a black person who committed a hate crime and wasn't prosecuted.

If we started out with a specific assertion like "Hate crimes are politicized and more often applied to white people committing alleged hate crimes on black people than the other way around," I would probably have agreed. But that wasn't the starting point. So pointing at an example of a black person committing a particular crime and not being prosecuted isn't refuting what I was arguing.

That's without even digging into the details of the specific case, which I'm not going to, because there are always a lot of variables in cases like this that make good ClownWorld/LibsOfTikTok-style outrage-fodder. What exactly was the crime, why was the decision made not to prosecute? Charges get dropped or reduced all the time, for a lot of reasons; without any evidence or actual stats beyond "The defendant was a black person," an anecdote has no weight or meaning. Am I sufficiently motivated to go read up on this one item just to "rebut" a point I wasn't arguing against in the first place? Supposedly to prove my case I then have to find an exactly equal and opposite anecdote. So just finding black people charged with hate crimes won't be sufficient, I have to find an exactly equivalent opposite case.

That's not a serious attempt to support the much stronger original assertion, that's just playing games. No, I will trade anecdotes with the person who has a long list of terrible crimes committed by black people to "prove" that black people are terrible.