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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Do you have any competing memes? I'd like to see them.

A single incident in a country of hundreds of millions is not data nor does it form a basis for consistent policy

You wouldn't like the data, either. The data say that blacks are something like 50x more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks. The data say that rich blacks are more murderous than poor whites, and that black women are more murderous than white men, despite the incredible share of all violence committed by men.

The data say the same thing as the anecdote, you just don't like what either one says.

I am actually not particularly interested in collecting trite propaganda, but I'm confident I could find a lot of material denigrating white men in like 30 minutes of looking. However, this is not rDrama, and so posting those would not be any better than what the parent poster did.

murder data

I did a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations with some 2019 data I found, and given that the male:female murder rate seems to be about 10:1 in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men. Either way, we're talking about tail events; even for black men, the same calculation said that fewer than 0.5% ever murdered even under generous assumptions (and most of those are probably locked up or socially segregated in a way that makes this hardly relevant for day-to-day choice of neighbours and interaction partners).

Be careful of proving too much: very similar figures tend to turn up as lower bounds of how much more likely men are to be rapists (based on sex offender registrations, inference from victim counts, etc.). If you think that a 0.5% percentage of murderers in one visible demographic is grounds to agitate for its complete removal from public life in a country - on a rationalist-adjacent forum, rather than the screeching pit of public politics, no less! - then you will have a hard time rejecting the bulk of hardcore feminist stances on principle, which generally does not seem to be an outcome right-wingers like. If the monkey's paw offers that you get to treat blacks as murderers but have to accept that men will be treated as rapists, do you take the deal? On that matter, it's probably not that hard to find some other correlate of being murderous in America that's at least as good as "is black". If such a correlate is found, do you support the removal from society of everyone who meets it?

in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men

...why would you say any of these things as though they favored your point?

it's basically a wash between black women and white men.

I wouldn’t call it a “wash” exactly.

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it's basically a wash between black women and white men

Which is mind-bogglingly high given the male propensity for violence.

the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same

Also completely insane given one is >5x more populous than the other.

Both of which support my assertion and refute yours.

Either way, we're talking about tail events

First you complain about anecdotes, so I bring data. Now instead of complaining about anecdotes, it's about tail events. Yes, murder is rare, and therefore a tail event. Quit eliding the point, because the patterns don't change when you start following the tail back to the body.

You know another outlier minority? /pol/ users. They are surely less than 10% of the population of the internet, but have a well over 0.5% rate of engaging in heat-over-light, culture warring and other conversational behaviour that degrades the quality of any forum way below what we are aiming for here. What do you say if we ban them on sight?