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The assailant is on tape saying "I got that white girl, I got that white girl" as he walks off the train after the attack. Maybe he was mentally ill, maybe he was motivated by racial animus, or maybe it was a bit of both? Perhaps interviews with the assailant will reveal more, but right now Trump and the FBI are really trying to downplay the racial angle and make it about cash-free bail and repeat violent offenders. They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.
From a broader perspective, this incident has highlighted some awkward realities of inter-ethnic crime rates that have largely been banished from mainstream discourse. Twitter is no longer a representative sample of mainstream opinion... but it's the now the incubation chamber for right-wing messaging, and the Overton window there has significantly shifted in the last few days. The video is really powerful, I would put it above the George Floyd footage in terms of emotional impact. Or course it won't have the same amplification, given how national media coverage appears to be grudging at best. The NYT article on the topic is absolutely ridiculous - they try to equate honest reporting on a serious crime to fabricated reports of crimes leading to a riot in the 1800s:
Definitely a stretch in the raw legal terms of it, but I like the idea.
Murder in the US is overwhelmingly the result of strained interactions between males 18 - 34. If a man gets murdered, they're very likely to have known their killer and to have had a recent dispute around drugs, money, respect / social esteem, or a woman via love triangle. For women who get killed, the stats are even crazier - something around a 90% chance their killer was a previous or current romantic partner.
Random acts of lethal violence like this one truly are rare and shocking. I like the idea that, for such cases, we ratchet the punishment up to eleven. This isn't to say that we should shrug at "normal" murders. "Murder stay murder," to quote the Wire. But I like throwing a terrorism or federal level hate crime charge in there. I know deterrence theory for criminal punishment is one of the wobbliest concepts out there in terms of efficacy, but if a random act of violence gets a no-buts-about-it life sentence with no parole, I have to imagine that would have an effect...For those in control of their faculties.
Which brings up the point about the culpability of schizophrenics, drug addicts etc. There's a lot of landmines here in terms of personal liberties and the slippery slope power of the State to lock people up for being cooky, but the alternative (and current) situation is that sane society carries around this socialized risk of literal death that is also quite obvious and easy to mitigate; DeCarlos Brown had a decade long rap sheet, which included prior armed robbery and assault. Jordan Neely (of the Daniel Penny incident), IIRC, had been arrested over 100 times in NYC. The stats are almost a pareto distribution; "top" 1% of criminals are responsible for 63% of convictions per NIH - it's darkly ironic that that's being published by the National Institute for Health. When these big red alarms keep going off, eventually it rises to the level of a literal public health issue to not intervene with these individuals.
Deterrence Theory of Punishment works exceptionally well, if there is a high certainty of punishment. It's not necessarily the severity of the potential punishment that matters, though of course life in prison for shoplifting would probably reduce the shoplifting rate for the week it would take SCOTUS to strike the law down as an 8th Amendment violation, but the certainty of punishment that matters. Quoting part of a journal article here that jives with my own understanding of the matter:
Page 4. The article goes on to list a few different studies that have come to this conclusion, which I won't bore you by repeating because to the best of my knowledge this is not particularly contentious. To provide an n=1 personal anecdote, there's a section of road I used to drive that had a speed limit of 35mph. This was perceived as a ridiculously low speed limit. A driver could very easily go 55 safely, and indeed many, many people did, because why not? There were no intersections, no red lights, no stop signs, no school zone, no earthly reason for the speed limit to be 35 that anyone could see. Presumably there was some very good reason for it to be so labeled, but it was not immediately apparent as to why so most people went much faster. The county (presumably) installed a series of speed cameras along the road. For a few weeks, the road went at a very sedate pace because everyone knew that if they went over 40mph they'd be getting a ticket in the mail. This lasted until everyone knew where the cameras were, at which point traffic began to slow down approaching a known camera location, and then immediately speed back up after. A measurable change in criminal(ish) behavior due to certainty of punishment. It didn't matter that the fines were relatively minor, perhaps $40, nobody wanted the hassle.
So all this to say, while treating random acts of lethal violence far more seriously may reduce the incidence rate of random acts of lethal violence, it won't do so as long as people think they can get away with it, or aren't thinking about the consequences at all. Certainty of punishment breeds compliance.
This is very insightful, thank you.
I am reminded of listening to Rafael Mangual on Coleman Hughes' podcast. The stat he related (which made me literally rewind the podcast) was that the average state / federal prison inmate (not jail) already has over six felony convictions before they are incarcerated. They went on to discuss how this is a direct result of more lenient probation and deferred sentencing / alternative sentencing "reform."
But, as your article points out, think of the incentive and messaging we're sending to criminals. You can learn the robes of armed robbery, drug dealing, even assault, and you get to play on easy mode the first half dozen times. Of course this is going to backfire.
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Which is the strategically correct move if you assume Trump’s actual goal is ‘punish democrats’ and not ‘eradicate the blacks’.
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Honestly if you watch the George Floyd footage there's enough in there to support a reasonable take that Chauvin was an asshole but didn't ultimately kill Floyd. Chokeholds do not work like that, positional asphyxiation may potentially work like that, a highly stressful situation plus some positional asphyxiation plus a lot of drugs in the system is the most likely causatory factor in Floyd's death
Floyd was alive when he got the hospital, a fact that was ruthlessly suppressed until years afterward.
Do you have a source for that?
Yes.
You can't collect antemortem blood from a dead man.
So I'm open to this but I don't think that's how that works. Any blood collected before a doctor pronounced him dead counts as antemortem if I understand correctly. Would need much more than this to change my position.
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It never was, it was way more warped to the other side, if anything it's more real now. Absolutely nothing stops the bluecheck tribe from participating and swaying the mass twitter user opinion, but they don't have the manpower.
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I saw that line too and I don’t deny it complicates things. It could point to racial animus, or it could just be the ravings of someone severely mentally ill who latched onto the most obvious descriptor in the moment. Either way it’s very distasteful to see people scoff this off like a manufactured right wing story when a refugee was brutally murdered on a train.
The full video is miserable to watch—this young woman grasping at her throat, terrified, and then collapsing into a pool of blood. It’s one of the most viscerally awful things I’ve seen online, and it should have been covered as such: a shocking act of violence against someone who came here seeking safety.
I had a whole post, but I don't want to get banned, so I'll let Norm say it for me.
I'll expand. There are at least four other people in the frame that he could have attacked, all of them are black. He said, twice, I got that white girl.
Given these two pieces of information, the obvious assumption is that he saw a white girl he could prey on, and did. If you dispute this, you need some affirmative evidence, because without it you're just grasping at straws.
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Old white man shoots young black guy, it's assumed to be racial animus. Black guy stabs white refugee, possibly not animus. Black guy shoots white family, supposedly not animus. Black guy shoots white kid, supposedly not animus.
It doesn't take Golf Course Guy to notice a particular degree of deliberate blinkering and incredible assumptions of charity in the mainstream regarding what is allowed to be called animus.
Only in one direction is there a grisly history of racially-motivated lynchings. I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.
We do in fact have a history of racially-motivated killings of whites by blacks, such as the Zebra murders. Are they on the same numerical scale? Certainly not. But I don’t know why the question of historical scale would necessarily impact your priors about the likelihood that any individual was motivated by racial animus. (Particularly given the documented fact that this individual did, in fact, draw attention to race literally immediately after committing the crime.)
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What is the punishment for the crime of being white in the wrong place? I submit the theory that a significant percentage of the black-on-white murder rates are, in effect, racially motivated lynchings.
I think that's a defensible argument, but it's a claim about what's happening today. I was talking about historical precedent. Priors, in Bayes-speak.
At least since the 1950s.
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Well, what's our cutoff point for historical precedent versus today?
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That's completely ahistorical and the perception thereof is the result of media and prosecutorial bias on the topic.
There's an order of magnitude or two fewer such events than the reverse, so they're more likely to be racist? That's a bold argument.
What's your claim, here? That lynchings weren't a thing? Or that there is some equally-widespread history of black-on-whites lynching that has been suppressed? When? Where? (And don't say South Africa or something. I mean where in America, which is what we're talking about here.)
That "so" is a strawman. My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.
The modern-day balance of one type of crime versus the other is an entirely different factor, which may or may not alter one's weighting of the historical precedent. Though I think the balance is confounded by so many things that it doesn't tell you much about motives. For example, I'm fairly sure black-on-black crime also dwarfs white-on-black crime, so the facts would be perfectly consistent with the view that blacks are more likely to commit violent crime whatever the victims' race, with the whiteness of some percentage of victims being incidental.
To the extent that this Bayesian argument makes sense, it is pretty much useless for any analysis of this incident or incidents similar to this one, because in no actual incident we're talking about, are we dealing with a prima facie situation where literally the only thing we know about the murder is the races involved. Notably, the races involved, by themselves, provide so little information about any given incident in comparison to readily available information about the incident just from observing it that to call it rational to consider this specific almost-as-crude-as-possible Bayesian analysis to be meaningful would be rather absurd.
As such, your judgment below is suspect:
It is irrational to rely on such a crude method of Bayesian analysis to land at a conclusion when there are many far more precise, far more specific pieces of information that offer far more information on motive than looking only at the races. Now, it's possible that there's a silent "prima facie" in that sentence, which is perfectly cromulent and makes it more defensible. However, if such a hidden term were in there, it would also render it entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, as the discussion is about a situation (and generally, multiple situations) where prima facie doesn't apply due to just mountains of information surrounding the incident and the individuals involved.
People aren't talking about what the Platonic form of a journalist would do in a spherical vacuum, they're talking about how real-world journalists are really behaving when given lots of information that has irreversibly destroyed their ability to be in a prima facie state and, as such, using extremely crude Bayesian reasoning of this sort is irrational.
However, it's not odd, given what we know about the biases and behaviors of most mainstream journalists in most mainstream outlets. I suppose that's one form of Bayesian thinking that's justified in this case.
The crudeness of such spherical-cows Bayesianism did form part of my point. This is exactly why I said that I "would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence". I think falling back on any Bayesian pattern-matching in this sort of case is largely illegitimate, whether that's assuming that a black man stabbing a woman can't possibly have been racially-motivated, or its converse of readily assuming that eg a white cop shooting a black man has to have been an unmotivated racist hate-crime. There was indeed an implicit hidden term in the "but it doesn't seem odd or irrational…" but it wasn't just "prima facie"; it was "but if you're going to do this stupid thing at all, which you shouldn't, then prima facie…".
I think our remaining disagreement here is in how useful the currently-available details might be. I do think we're largely in prima facie land. We'll be in prima facie land until the suspect is interrogated, or at the very least, a background investigation is made into his life based on people who knew him before the incident. The information we have now is woefully insufficient to assert much of anything about the killer's mens rea. (I'll grant you that the "I got the white bitch" remark isn't nothing. But neither does it say very much unless you already have priors weighted towards black-on-white killings having a strong likelihood of being racially-motivated. If a crazed killer who's just killed a red-headed woman crows that he "got that ginger bitch", I wouldn't conclude that he killed her because he has 19th-century-peasant levels of prejudice against red-haired people per se.)
Ergo I think it's much too early to make any kind of cogent statement on the murder. But journalists have to try to spin more than the bare objective facts out of this, it's what they're paid for. So they fall back on extremely loose pattern-matching. This pattern-matching is dumb, but I argue that any pattern-matching would be dumb and the particular heuristic they're applying ("white-on-black murders are more often racist in nature than black-on-white") doesn't seem like a terrible heuristic as these things go, heuristics just don't get you very far.
OK, but then that changes the meaning of the statement fully. Because doing such an obviously stupid thing is irrational. Which makes your statement mean something like, "If you're committed to being irrational by falling back to Bayesian pattern matching, then it's not irrational to land at this conclusion." Fair enough, 100% true and defensible. Also doesn't contradict or challenge at all the notion that journalists are being irrational in being quicker to label white-on-black killings as racially motivated than to label black-on-white killings as such.
Yeah, no. You need zero priors weighted towards that. Entirely unprovoked murder on a random stranger followed by commentary on that stranger's race doesn't need one to have a prior leaning in one way in order to conclude racist motivations.
If person X killed ginger Y, and one of the only specific pieces of information we knew about the motive was X muttering "got that ginger bitch," we would absolutely be justified to conclude tentatively (as is the case for all conclusions we're talking about here) that he was motivated by some sort of bigoted hatred against gingers. It wouldn't be a particularly strong conclusion, one that could and would change as more information came in, but it absolutely would be the correct conclusion based on the available evidence.
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My claim is that this is "mostly peaceful protests" all over again and you're special-pleading that for ideological reasons, a subset of murders that are Officially Expert-Guaranteed Biased are substantially and meaningfully worse than murders that are probably but not officially biased.
Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?
I disagree, in the same way I am generally disinterested in the debate around fascism versus authoritarianism. Murder is murder. Mass murder is mass murder. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Gerrymandering the border to forgive one's own totalitarian or otherwise bigoted impulse while attacking another is not useful.
Not since the 1930s. First few years of the graph are also interesting.
I don't particularly feel like digging up the graphs for black-on-white murders, but your perception is downstream of this invention of a special category of murder, just like the power+prejudice definition of racism was created so that racism couldn't be committed against certain people.
You have zero proof for this.
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
The defining characteristics of lynchings is that they had social approval. Where there were lynchings, there was, by definition, a critical mass of the local white population who was at best unwilling to interfere with racist murders. Therefore, the existence of lynchings raises the likelihood for any one white local being racist and potentially murderous much more than the existence of lone racist killers does. How relevant the bigoted opinions of people three or four generations back still are today is a different question, but I maintain that "lynching" is a meaningful category with salient characteristics that set it apart from other racially-motivated hate crimes.
I mean, my assumption is that race matters a lot less than people say it does, and I'd like to go back to a more race-blind form of public discourse. This is, I fee it is worth pointing out, pretty far the mainstream press's position. It is worth distinguishing again between what I think, and what I think of what Blue journalists think. My position is that if you're going to try to pattern-match racial dynamics onto individual murders it's not prima facie absurd or disingenuous to assume white-on-black attacks are more likely the product of racism; but also I think you mostly shouldn't try to look at random killings as having anything to do with racism unless the facts of the case specifically support it.
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The full video, part one (backup link), part two (backup link). NSFL, obviously.
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If the equivalent footage was played with a white homeless male saying anything akin it'd be complete journalistic open slather.
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The crowd watching it don't care, either. The obvious defense is that they're in fear for their lives, but that isn't it; they follow the killer off the train past the victim bleeding out.
I mean, bystander effect is a well known phenomenon. I don’t see any reason to assume this case is unique in that respect.
The bystander effect is a fake and gay meme.
The only valid presumption to be made by anyone who has watched the murder in question is that every single person there outside of the victim is a subhuman. Maybe they were born that way, maybe they were radicalized by media, or maybe it's a combination of both! But the display speaks for itself.
Does it? This is a pretty poor argument for such a broad generalization- yes, yes, I'm sure you only meant those exact people on that particular train.
This whole thread is full of people who really, really want to trot out their favorite race-war talking points. Some are doing so more or less calmly if unkindly, some are just throwing heat and flashing gang signs and boo lights. This response falls into the latter category. Knock it off.
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I feel like the uptick in mental illness and drug-motivated public transport stuff means that frequently the best move is to just not move, since you're not dealing with a rational actor.
Yes, somebody should have assisted the woman in the clip but generally on public transport when confronted with the irrational people just freeze.
They literally abandoned her and followed the killer out of the bus. Two people from the front of the bus later come over to help her, but the ones closest to her just noped out.
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The inevitable result of diversity.
This is so low-effort it provides no argument, just a hiss. Other people are making actual arguments, including the one you are hissing in the direction of.
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I’m not so sure. I noticed that once the guy had walked off the train, people were moving a lot faster. One guy runs over and says oh my god. I’m reluctant to judge bystanders but it is sad that nobody jumped to her aid immediately. Clearly it took some time to set in exactly what he had done
It sure would have been nice to hear all these sorts of justifications for why things ain't quite so bad as they appear, oh I don't know, 5 years ago...
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