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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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What do we do? We marvel at the fact that Emil's up on Twitter and his website is not given the Kiwifarms treatment.

Interracial rape is understandably a great cause for flame war in the US, and also not something I care about. My model is mainly that black people are all-around more impulsive, more criminal, more violent and more tribal; the specific distribution of the impact of those differences is downstream of contingent factors like relative population densities, laws, housing, policing etc.

That said, @Gdanning's analysis (Kirkegaard's sources discuss the question too) reminds me of another politically incorrect and statistically literate author, La Griffe du Lion, whose website is even more of a marvelous fossil. He has developed a model of ghettoization/white flight based on selective victimization of non-blacks by blacks. It seems to comport with anecdotal reports like that man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas and with the graph in Emil's piece.

Anyway, Crime in the Hood, November 1999:

… However, as a neighborhood turns black, this factor could increase black-on-white violence at most by a factor of 3, and then only when a neighborhood is virtually all black. The observed level of white victimization is much too high to blame on general tendencies of blacks to be violent. A more important reason is simply that blacks prefer white victims.

The best and most complete evidence comes from the Justice Department. Its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) canvasses a representative sample of about 80,000 Americans, from roughly 43,000 households. From this survey, a picture of crime is painted by its victims. The last full report of the NCVS was issued in 1994. From it we learn that blacks committed 1,600,951 violent crimes against whites. In the same year, whites committed 165,345 such offenses against blacks. Despite being only 13 percent of the population, blacks committed more than 90 percent of the violent interracial crime. Less than 15 percent of these had robbery as a motive. The rest were assaults and rapes.

The asymmetry of interracial crime goes still deeper. More than half the violence committed by blacks is directed against whites, 57 percent in 1994. Less than 3 percent of the violence committed by whites is directed against blacks. Population and NCVS statistics reveal that in 1994 a black was 64 times more likely to attack a white than vice versa. In the city, the races live mostly apart from one another, so that the most convenient victims of thugs are others of the same race. Only a hunter's mentality could account for the data. Given a choice, a black thug will select a white victim. Ironically, so will a white thug.

[…]    Equation (4) gives the probability that John will be victimized by a white in a given year. It shows that to a high degree of approximation, the risk John faces from whites is not only independent of neighborhood size, but also neighborhood composition. The probability that John is attacked by whites in a given year is the same no matter where he lives. It is simply equal to the per capita number of violent incidents perpetrated by whites in a year. We tested this approximation, setting N = 1000 and pW = 0.0279, the value obtained from the NCVS. Over most of the range of racial composition, the approximation, Φ_W_ = pW = 0.0279 agrees within 2 figures with the accurate expression (3) as seen in the table below.

[…] We have modeled violent victimization of whites in a racially mixed neighborhood. Our model is based on data collected by the Justice Department and reported in the NCVS. It paints a bleak picture for whites. As a neighborhood turns black, violent victimization of its white residents begins immediately. At first the risk is small, not much different from its previous all-white level. However, by the time the neighborhood reaches the half-black point, every white family of four has better than a one in three chance of being victimized within a year. Two factors account for black-on-white violence. 1) Blacks are 3 times more likely to commit violent crime than whites, and 2) black thugs prefer white victims, selecting them 64 times more than white thugs choose black victims. Most of the risk faced by whites, results from the predilection of black thugs to prey upon whites. As a neighborhood becomes overwhelmingly black, the risk curve for whites rises to ominous heights. In the last stages of transformation, the likelihood of a white being victimized within a year becomes a virtual certainty.


The measure of «systemic» power that progressives like to talk about – systemic racism, patriarchy, etc. – is an ability to make outcomes that hurt your outgroup look like they follow from natural, inevitable processes, long in motion through no living person's fault. Some things are genuinely this way; others are only made to assume this form. For example, by making unwarranted promises of miracle solutions, and suppressing public awareness of and interest in more feasible alternative routes for so long that they become technically obsolete or politically unfeasible.

As you can note, this article is over 23 years old. People not yet born then have formed strong political opinions. We haven't progressed even on talking points. So I don't think there's much to «do» about it all. Like Yevgeny Ponasenkov said 8 years ago: «If you couldn't do it in a 1000 years, what are 20 more to you? Look, Russia can develop normally and it's not about 20 or a 1000 years, a lot can be done in a single year, if there's a honest admission that we were making mistakes here and there, and now will follow another path. Okay? Only – not «our special path», in the ditch, with empty shops and towards 1937. There exists the history of Civilization, everything there has been tried, conclusions proven, we are buying everything from there now – cars, phones, clothing, food… and all mistakes are also on display there, you only have to not replicate them. That's all. So we need to admit: yes, we were mistaken, no, we will no longer search for our special path that doesn't exist, we're going forward, in the correct, Western, so to speak, direction». You know what Western direction we took.

None of this was exactly unanticipated before La Griffe either. Black impulsivity, criminality and tribalism are factors that have been known for centuries; the intuitive solution is: high priors for black proclivity for antisocial behavior, therefore unequal treatment, either by segregation (cheap, only protects whites) or in the manner of policing (medium, somewhat protects blacks) and state-mandated upbringing (very hard, actually helps them).

But after a few generations grow up on a steady diet of mocking the very premise of the problem, it doesn't matter what facts you show them: their thought trajectories cannot exit the basin where this problem can be divorced from white people problems and where solutions which do not amount to doubling down on total society-spanning surveillance exist. «All rape should be investigated and the culprit found», indeed. We have a discount on CCTV systems with integrated gait recognition!

I read this twice. I have pretty good reading comprehension skills. You have tested those skills. Can you summerize your comment in plain and non-flowery language what you feel about about the artical OP posted? I'm sure if you summed it up in a few sentences it would help us all avoid a misunderstanding.

My point, if you will, is that the intellectual core of the left-wing political project, such as there is, has been well aware of the evidence for extreme black criminality (both in general and in this specific white-targeting sense) for many generations, probably 2+ centuries, and abundantly well aware in the last few decades. That making unwarrantable promises about possible rectification of the issue, moving from desegregation to stigmatising white flight to forced integration, suppressing evidence of the futility of attempts to rectify the issue, censoring and harassing people who propose workable solutions, encouraging and valorizing antisocial blacks, and other leftist stratagems have been at least partially rational. (Partially, because I assume that the overwhelming majority of rank and file have been sincerely deceived people, emotionally manipulated useful idiots and just conformists).

That the outcome of this approach is a society where neither workable solutions nor even crude measures like a return to segregation are politically possible, because the doctrine of equal treatment has been burned into people's minds, but the problem exists and prompts people to support genuine policy preferences of that intellectual core that have been unchanged at least since H.G. Wells and Stalin sympathizers, namely: increase of the power of the centralized state, more political propaganda in state-mandated education, prohibition of guns, blanket surveillance, and other steps towards disempowering laymen in favor of a political priesthood that determines the angle of propaganda and otherwise guides state efforts.

Likewise for other aspects of the racial issue and superficial leftist egalitarianism.

Is that plain enough?

And yet, throughout those years, the black homicide offending rate (used here as a proxy for extreme criminality - rape rates are notoriously hard to define since they depend not only on how often the crime is committed but also on how often it is reported, since it is so dependent on actually being reported) has gone down, indeed gone down considerably.

Clearly something must have happened, whether that is a result of left-wing policies, right-wing policies (but if it's the result of successful right-wing policies, it would be evidence that leftist hegemony in society is not quite as firm as claimed), or things like potential offenders just staying inside to smoke weed and play violent computer games (but even then the legality of weed and comparative lack of regulation for violent games have been policy issues in themselves). The issue is being partially rectified, and that's what counts, no? It still is rather more important whether people are actually getting murdered or not than what the actual ethnic ratios of the murderers are.

Wait, that spike in the white homicide graph in 2001... It can't be that they threw 9/11 under "homicides by whites," surely?

Rates are now back up to 90s levels, although not yet quite as bad as the peak of the "crack wars" that saw the highest murder rates in US history. Wikipedia for some reason hasn't chosen to update its graphs for 6 years to show this.

It seems like an issue can go from "partially rectified" to "spiralling out of control" in a matter of months, raising the concern that whatever policies caused the drop were just papering over an unsolved problem.

Wait, that spike in the white homicide graph in 2001... It can't be that they threw 9/11 under "homicides by whites," surely?

Why wouldn't they? It was, indeed, homicide, and it was, as a matter of fact, performed by people whom the official government racial classification scheme classifies as whites. Sure, this is a huge outlier, but I don't see why should this require us to treat it specially.