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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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It may be important for conservatives to talk openly about it because it pits “systemic rape” against “systemic racism”

Who actually talks about “systemic rape”? Maybe I’ve seen it in the context of genocide. I don’t think it has nearly the mindshare of systemic racism, probably because there are fewer sympathetic cases getting labeled “rape.”

"Rape culture" is probably the term he was groping for. Though come to think of it, I haven't heard much of that one in quite some time.

The conservative take is that the whole "systemic" framing is a sham.

Conservatives don’t talk about systemic anything and don’t want to.

In any case the explanation for this is almost certainly that white women are much more attractive than black women.

TLDR: THERE THERE THERE

Sociopathy is a mostly learned behaviour complex. If you are raised in a desperate or violent enviroment and/or without a strong positive parental involvement, you are much more likely to develope sociopathic tendencies. This is known.

Demographically black folk are more likely to belong to an honor culture with no institutions in America. Because the institutions of the dignity culture that subculture exists within historically did not serve them and actively subverted the creation of their own institutions. Honor cultures can exist with relative "lawfullness" if there are cultural or governmental institutions. For example the South operated on an honor culture pre-civil war, not a dignity culture. But they had total institutional control, including the institutions of the black slave's family and the black slave's church.

"Family" counts as an institution and so does church. So black churches and family should be supported by the prevailing dignity culture as a partial solution to the issue at hand. Institutional capture should play a role as well. The obvious goal should be to bring those black folk trappped in an institutionaless honor culture into the fold of a dignity culture supported by strong institutions.

Another observation. Black folk in America have very strong in-group bias compared to white folk in America at the popultion level. Though certain white demographics might buck this trend. So yes, it's racism agianst white folk. Not surprising at all. This is one of the reasons CRT is damaging to progress on racial relations. We must acknowledge black on white racism as racism begets racism.

There are other observations (such as Eastside urban pollution, war on drugs/over policing, racism etc effect on black family structures) that can help account for the increase in sociopathic behaviour in certain black communities. But I feel like I am beating a dead horse.

But to understand why white folk might be disproportionately targeted by black folk's criminality in-group bias should be the starting point. I would add to that white folk make better targets (more money, not part of the community). In regards to rape black men in America grow up inundated by images of beautiful white women. We all know there is some issues in some black communities between the sexes over this. Black women in America grow up feeling bad about themselves because beauty and whiteness are seem synonymous in a majority white culture. (I am a white man married to a black women for a quater of century so I can attest that 1st: this really fucks up black women's self esteem and 2nd: black women are the most beautiful creatures to ever grace this earth ;)

So to end my meanderings I am not even sure I am responding to valid statistics. Perhaps there is no there there in OP's article. I can't be bothered to read it. My entire point is that if there is some there there there is more than enough known, supported thereness in the "left-wing" position to dismiss any HBD arguement or whatever the point of posting this link was. I would find it trivial if it is true that black rapist disproportionately target white women. Lord knows if I was a rapist I too would avoid black women. They'd kick my ass.

Lord knows if I was a rapist I too would avoid black women. They'd kick my ass.

If we're taking this terse top-level post seriously at all, this is an element I think could be explored.

A significant amount of the differences in interracial crime is as you say - due to in-group bias (and, in parallel, out-group bias/racism).

How much of it is the perception that whites are ineffectual and weak? My personal belief is that white folks are softer targets on average. If anything, the past few years of the culture war have made this more pronounced, though the folks who train with firearms and carry at one end of the bell curve exist too.

OT - here’s an African Development blog seems rather new but there’s a few interesting posts. I was struck by this article asking why there are so few African mining billionaires. It does seem like one of the easier businesses to get rich in - establish some amount of political control/monopoly on violence and dig things out of the ground sometimes with foreigners help. The two richest are South African. One white and one black (SA has had a law a mining license needs 26% black ownership maybe that helped)

Another article had me thinking about why Africa was so sparsely populated until recently.

For the most part it uses a traditional development economic arguments. Reading these articles had me thinking a lot about Garrett Jones arguments.

https://kenopalo.substack.com/p/natural-resources-and-economic-underdevelopment

It does seem like one of the easier businesses to get rich in - establish some amount of political control/monopoly on violence and dig things out of the ground sometimes with foreigners help

The 'digging things out of the ground' part is highly technically complex. You also need to purchase and maintain all the expensive equipment.

It's really quite daunting.

Economically speaking you can hire people for that. It’s not like inventing a new thing. The Saudis when they went from Western taking the money still used western for a while to do the drilling.

It depends on why the discrepancy exists. If it’s genetic, then you can only contain the damage by limiting opportunities to rape (I don’t buy this as the best theory). If it’s poverty, fix the poverty. If it’s culture, change the culture.

My suspicion is that we’re looking at a cultural difference in which white men are taught to seek long term mutual supportive relationships with women. The goal is at least a companion if not a marriage. The goal for black men seems to be bedding a woman, or preferably multiple with no intention of forming a long term relationship at all. If this is the cause, the solution it to change the culture to being more like the white men in seeking out long term mutual relationships, rather than simply notching the bed-posts. You can do this (at least in a thought experiment) by forbidding arts and media from celebrating easy sex, among other cultural bad habits. You can also purposefully inject more useful memes into the culture to promote marriage, sobriety, and industriousness. I think the Christian sect that Kanye is in is a sort of answer. Promote the idea of keeping the law as a practice, which naturally includes not raping people, working hard, being a family man, being sober, and so on.

Same thing “we” have always done.

Rape is still awful. I don’t really care who’s doing it to whom. Kirke does, because he’s running off a very different sort of tribalism.

What’re the actual rates he comes up with? In a perfectly race-blind America, I’d expect 8-9x difference purely due to population sizes. But the error bars are going to be enormous.

Edit: as @benmmurphy observes, naive population numbers aren’t the right figures. In the race-blind, perfectly random hypothetical, we’d expect any category to match the demographics. White people would be 58% of victims and perpetrators alike. Then

12% Bp 58% Wp
12% Bv 1.4% 7.0%
58% Wv 7.0% 34%

In reality, we see something more like

10% Bp <1% Wp
18% Bv 1.8% 4.2%
82% Wv 13% <1%

(Both tables are missing columns, so the percentages are going to be weird.)

The ratio of black-on-white vs. white-on-black rapes is still a poor way to investigate this, though.

i guess it depends on what you mean by rates. if you compare the ratio ([W rapes W] / [W rapes B]) against ([B rapes B] / [B rapes W]) then you would expect the ratios to be out of whack. but if you compare (W rapes B) against (B rapes W) then these should be the same numerically because it takes 2 to tango so the ratios in the final equations are the same but just ordered differently. but i guess if you doing something like dividing (W rapes B) and (B rapes W) by population numbers of the offender (or victim) then you are going to get ratios that are out of whack because the numerators should be the same but will have different denominators. but i'm not sure what the justification for doing this division would be...

A worked example:

Using this population ratio:

A: 3/4

B: 1/4

Where the population is made of of 50% rapists who rape from the population randomly:

A_r: 3/8

B_r: 1/8




A_r_A: 3/8 * 3/4 = 9/32

A_r_B: 3/8 * 1/4 = 3/32


B_r_A: 1/8 * 3/4 = 3/32

B_r_B: 1/8 * 1/4 = 1/32

BrA is 3x more likely than BrB

whereas

ArB is 3x less likely than ArA

but A_r_B == B_r_A

Doesn’t that estimate totals instead of rates?

Take a random victim, ignoring race. Selecting a perpetrator at random, there’s 12% for a black rapist or 58% for white. If the OP is suggesting black men are unusually likely to rape white women, then that’s the figure he’d be comparing against.

God help me, I’ll check the article.

P(BrW) = 23.5/181 = 13%

P(WrB) = 1.65/39 = 4.2%

So the first number is right around what I’d expect from the hypothetical, and the second is really low. This gives his mismatched ratio.

I think you’re right that my 8-9x number was the wrong stat.

yeah. obv there is something not normal between the rate of rapes between the two races but i think a lot of articles from the 'pro-white' perspective exaggerate the discrepancy because if you have a model of perpetrators selecting random victims then blacks are going to naturally commit more rapes against whites per population. however, in the article emil does make the case that victim selection is not random and perpetrators tend to target victims that they have access to and there is a lot of racial segregation so its a lot more complicated. this 'random' model might not be appropriate.

there seems to be two things

  1. blacks are committing more rapes than whites per population and this seems to be undeniable

  2. blacks are targeting whites more than some kind of 'normal' model of rape would predict. this seems much harder to prove mostly because wtf is this normal model of rape. it seems like some random model of rape is inappropriate due to neighbourhood distribution. so how do you come up with some 'normal' model of rape.

Is that the same Emil Kirkegaard as this Emil Kirkegaard?

Who is safe from Pakistani groomer gangs?

Me! I’m pretty sure I’m safe from Pakistanis, groomers, and gangs. Even all at once.

This is not what we are looking for in a top level post. And is boo outgroupish. One day ban.

Edit after the fact (14 hours later):

I have seen a pattern happen before where a single troll posts a dumb question. We don't moderate it very quickly and the top level posts following the troll post also become low quality. There could be many reasons for that. Maybe the troll is setting the tone, maybe people think 'well if thats allowable, then surely my post is fine too', or maybe they are trying to be helpful and just knock the troll post from the top of the discussion list.

I wanted to short-circuit that whole downward spiral, but I was also about to leave for a few hours, and then would probably need to go to bed afterwards. I saw my options as: act quickly and stop the downward spiral with little explanation. Or leave it until morning and potentially have a lot more cleanup to deal with. Bad posts sometimes create good discussion, but they just as often create bad discussion (I've already had to go back and ban someone else for one of the sub-conversations that popped up from this).

I am always willing to offer explanations of my moderator actions, but because things tend to spiral so fast here, I can't promise I will always offer those explanations in the exact moment of moderation. Expect it within 24 hours if someone asks for it. If I know I don't have the time or energy to explain myself later I just add my report to the pile, rather than moderating the comment.

This top level post had something like 8 reports. I thought it was obvious that it was a bad top level post. It pattern matches a low effort trolling attempt. I am surprised that people were surprised by this moderation.

What the actual fuck

My original comment has been edited to add explanation

@cjet79's reason was good enough (it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith), but in addition, @bigtittygothgf is a ban evader, so the ban has been made permanent.

No, the reasoning wasn't good enough. If you want people to respond to moderation, you need to give specific feedback. "This is not what we're looking for." is not remotely specific.

Also, since it's perfectly obvious, can you tell us exactly how you were sure that this was a trollish shit-stirrer and not a terse poster asking a question in good faith? Since it's obvious, it should be no trouble, to both cjet79 or you, to say what exactly was obvious about it and how apparently-similar posts that aren't by trollish shit-stirrers are clearly so instead.

Look, you're the mods. You make judgement calls, and our continued presence on this site is evidence that we respect those judgement calls at least enough not to throw our hands up and storm off collectively. But please recognize when you are making those judgement calls and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next." If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post and, well, obviously do not find it obvious what is going on, then perhaps it is not actually obvious.

and don't just fall back on heavy implications of "It's obvious, and if it's not obvious to you, then clearly you're also a trollish shit-stirrer and probably a ban-evader, so stop asking questions or you might be next"

This has never been implied. You have been around plenty long enough, and lobbed enough brickbats at the mods yourself, to know better than accuse us of threatening to ban people for questioning or disagreeing with a mod decision.

If multiple members of the community are not reacting the way you are to the post

Quite often a low-effort shit-stirring comment will nonetheless start a decent discussion. That doesn't validate the comment after the fact.

Doesn’t it “validate” it after the fact? It seemingly proves that the comment was useful from an instrumental perspective. I take your use of the word “decent” to suggest quality not quantity.

Doesn’t it “validate” it after the fact?

No.

I take your use of the word “decent” to suggest quality not quantity.

Yes.

Can you explain? Basically, I imagine we want moderation to improve themotte (ie increase quality conversation and decrease non-quality conversation). If a statement increases quality conversations, why are we trying to remove?

I guess one could imagine where it directly increases quality conversation by X and indirectly decreases quality conversation by X+N but that seems like a rather big leap.

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I can only speak for myself, but maybe votes will show that others concur.

I appreciate that the comment fell egregiously short of our standards, both codified in rules and informal but clear in the culture of the place (very low effort and low volume together with provocative phrasing, mainly), and personally don't like having that user around, due to history of what seems to me to be bad faith (and almost invariably low-effort) comments.

I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions. You don't need to litigate every call but it'd be less jarring if you cited the specific grievance, like «Too low-effort for a top level, bad track record, 1 day ban» instead of the imperious «not what we are looking for». Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion (despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses) was also a bit much to me.

it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith

You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.

My original comment has been edited to add explanation

I believe that the crux of the problem is one of attitude, that mods do not justify their decisions.

Usually I do. But sometimes we don't have a lot of time to write a long explanation of a fairly straightforward decision, we're just doing some jannying, and when we come back to people angrily demanding why we modded someone expressing tribal CW bait that made them clap, we are not going to satisfy them with any explanation and usually aren't inclined to try.

I also am not going to step in and speak for @cjet79.

Rapidly escalating to permaban on a unverifiable accusation of ban evasion

You are just going to have to accept our judgment on ban evaders, because for reasons that should be obvious, we aren't going to tell you everything that informs our decisions in that regard.

despite the semi-consistent policy, one you have explicitly professed too, of tolerating ban evaders unless they jump on their previous hobby horses

I am not sure where you got that idea. We are not tracking people who were banned on the old sub. If you get banned here and come back with an alt, you're definitely getting banned again.

You don't have to imitate Hlynka either.

Your pattern-matching is broken.

IMO we need something like the BLR back so people can drop interesting things without the expectation they write a whole essay about it to clarify their basic reaction of "I think this is bad.", "I think this is ridiculous.", "I think this is a good thing.", etc. or get the banhammer for booing the outgroup or whatever. I get the ideally that goal of this community is to solicit the essays but I would rather have a place that highlights 70% of recently interesting things with only 75% of them having extended commentary on them versus a place that highlights only 30% of recently interesting things with 95% of them having extended commentary on them, especially since multiple people in the comments will often pick up the extended commentary duty.

Personally, I'd rather hear about interesting new information concerning interracial rape rates (and, yes, not just because I'm racist against blacks, as I'd want to hear about it if it were in the opposite direction too) even if I'm not going to get the fair and balanced perspective on top about how it can be interpreted in some manner that is neutral for the raping demographic, larping as some future historian totally disconnected from present issues. Sure, I wouldn't want every post to be "Science CONFIRMS that BLACKS = RAPE" or it would just turn into heterodox /r/science or /r/politics but I think there needs to be some more intelligent way to balance this out (like multiple different feeds accomplishes).

And yes moderation communication here is also often terrible. But all productive suggestions in that area have been ignored from day one so oh well.

Though it's not nearly as bad as it was at times on Reddit, some mods here are definitely starting to get a bit too active and trigger-happy again (with modding this post probably not necessarily being the worst or even a bad example of it, but still). It seems to me when this place migrated from Reddit, they were very hands-off in its initial phase (which seems to me to be an implicit admission that the capricious and heavily-involved moderation they engaged in at times on Reddit would have strangled the baby in the cradle, which you might think would also make them rethink it in general but maybe not) and things were better than ever. Now they seem to be starting to believe that they have enough of a captive audience that they can begin to return to their old ways though. It's disappointing.

I get that not every post here is great but for the most part some random red-named post popping in occasionally going "No bad little boy don't do that!" (which is only a mildly satirically exaggerated version of how the mods here often chastise people) or throwing out random bans is about as effective as TSA security at the airport. It may occasionally find a knife, but it also misses a lot of knives, throws out a lot of non-knives or things that are maybe knife-shaped but probably not actually that dangerous, and in general annoys people and causes more contention than its benefits can justify. (Of course, this is describing the active behavior. The implicit background threat of moderation is certainly necessary, but that can be achieved while rarely if ever using it.)

Something like the BLR, but maybe 'must give two-sentence summary' + 'mods can, and are expected to, delete bad posts if they have a vibe that they're bad posts even if they technically comply with the rules'?

Sure with the second part applied very rarely if at all. If you're going to have a lower-effort queue, let it be lower-effort.

It depends on the content, though. If the second part was rarely applied, we'd just get the same old BLR, which I mostly found annoying and the mods decided to nuke.

I specifically remember /u/greyuniwave, now suspended, posting a ton of shit in the BLR, usually about covid or conspiracy stuff. Quite a few of his posts were heavily upvoted despite me calling them shit, so my opinion is a minority - but BLR posts often were, and despite that the mods considered it low quality enough generally to be removed, so eh.

Picking a specific BLR thread ... the content just seems uninspiring? Half is awful, whether it's grayuniwave's 10 posts or others (this did get warned, but 45 points?)

[–]cantbeproductive 45 points 1 year ago [link] This is the fifth church burning in Canada since the internationalist and atheistic Canadian press decided to blood libel Catholics with implied claims of mass child murder without real evidence.

But even most of the 'good posts' read like the second page of the NYT. "Matthew Yglesias Responds to Ross Douthat on CRT, the 1619 Project and Public School Curricula."? "On May 24, 2021 the United States State Department imposed a “Level 4: Do not travel” advisory on Japan, the highest level used to advise US travelers against traveling—in effect, a quarantine."? "French lesbians and single women to get IVF rights"? Who cares? (clearly, readers did).

Compare this to an ACX monthly linkspost, or the better parts of HN or /r/ssc, or our toplevel posts, which are just more interesting.

The toplevel effortpost restriction seems to serve as a content restriction preventing the worst of 'random news item that could be replaced with gpt-3 output' or 'JUST IN: corporate racist democrats hate christians.', even when the posters/readers still find the former interesting, and absent explicit content discrimination to balance out the lack of implicit discrimination, the BLR would just suck again.

A BLR without mods removing lots of stuff would still be fine, and I'd still speedskim it, but reluctantly.

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But all productive suggestions in that area have been ignored from day one

False. We just don't take up the suggestions that people who want to wage unrestrained culture war would like us to implement.

Now they seem to be starting to believe that they have enough of a captive audience that they can begin to return to their old ways though.

It's fascinating that this is how you model our thinking. Though I'm not sure I believe you sincerely believe this.

throwing out random bans is about as effective as TSA security at the airport

We don't ban randomly, and banning bad actors is quite effective.

I should have saved you guys openly saying that the light hand was there to encourage engagement until you thought you had enough of an audience to keep the place going. How else are people supposed to read that other than adding the obvious "then we can crack down and shape the contributors however we want"?

Alas, dissolving the people and electing another is not a realistic option here

False. We just don't take up the suggestions that people who want to wage unrestrained culture war would like us to implement.

That you immediately imply that any possible suggestion that might have not been taken seriously enough by the mods here would only come from "people who want to wage unrestrained culture war" (the type of veiled insult pretty much all mods here almost always throw out in response to any suggestion that they may not be as open to suggestions as they claim, which I guess you don't seem to realize kind of proves the point), as if there is no possibility that the mods here could have ever dismissed a valid suggestion (I guess you're perfect oracles of what's a good suggestion or not, no mistakes ever?), is a great example of the terrible mod communication I was talking about. Thanks for proving my point with your arrogant and dismissive tone.

Anyway though I'm not going down this rabbit hole since I've seen where it leads: frustration and zero results for those who try to take the whole "moderation here is driven by user sentiment" stuff seriously (as you've proven by starting off the conversation with nothing but passive aggressive sneering).

It's fascinating that this is how you model our thinking. Though I'm not sure I believe you sincerely believe this.

I do sincerely believe it. The difference in moderation immediately going from Reddit to the new site was obvious. Maybe it's not something you implemented consciously but it sure happened.

Just keep in mind that with this new site you still need us more than we need you. An independent enterprise is always on shakier ground.

That you immediately imply that any possible suggestion that might have not been taken seriously enough by the mods here would only come from "people who want to wage unrestrained culture war"

No. I was talking about you and your suggestions. Some people have made valid suggestions, some of which have, in fact, been implemented, some of which were acknowledged as good suggestions but were not implemented for various pragmatic reasons.

Just keep in mind that with this new site you still need us more than we need you.

Nobody needs anything here. This isn't a business, and we're not your employees. We do want to attract and keep members because we all believe in the purpose of the Motte, but that doesn't mean that every individual member gets what they want or that all demands are legitimate.

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The ruling was fair and righteous but the exection was performed with a dull axe.

But executed nonetheless, and thus fair and just.

Everyone here should be capable of looking at that post and seeing the pattern of "drop steaming statistical turd, ask 'what do you think guys?' while offering no opinions of their own" and targeting the non-existent left membership.

Consensus building! Ban he!

In all seriousness, yeah. The post was probably bad faith, the user ought to be punished for it, and we can still have a decent discussion in the comments. That’s before any ban evasion which may not be obvious.

It's obviously a low effort post that doesn't meet the standards for what we're looking for in a top level post.

I agree that mods could do a better job of elaborating on that though, in cases where they do feel the need to intervene.

If OP had a few paragraphs summarizing the article and comparing it to the views of the "left-leaning people", it probably wouldn't have been banned. Toplevel posts aren't supposed to be three sentences!

The top-level post was terrible, that's the exact kind of post that drives discussion and newcomers away from this place. It's not like it's insightful at all either.

Mate, we make an effort to ban people for that kind of behavior. If you choose to leave anyways you only contribute to the evaporative cooling effect; we're doing what we can to prevent it.

Is it truly this difficult for you to collapse bad top level posts?

Love your username.

Information about racial disparities in crime is only useful if you're trying to combat the claim that racial disparities in incarceration is due to systemic racism. For that purpose, this information isn't useless, but it doesn't do anything that the broader "13/52" stat doesn't already do.

  1. I am not sure that this is exactly news.

  2. Some of the discrepancy is because white women make up a greater pct of possible victims. Eg: If a city of 1000 people is 80% white and 20% black, and blacks are twice as likely to commit a crime as whites (say, 10% of whites commit a crime each year, versus 20% of blacks), and victims are chosen at random, then whites will rape 64 white women and 16 black women per year, while blacks will rape 32 whites and 8 blacks per year. Of course, most rapes are intra-racial, but OTOH, if you look at page 4 here, the average white person lives in a neighborhood that is about 10% black, while the average black person lives in a neighborhood that is about 30% white. And, I am pretty sure that the average black person is far more likely to work in a heavily white area than the average white person is to work in a heavily black area. So, while the article says that "For Blacks to attack Whites, they would have to go out of their way to some White (or Asian etc.) area," that seems actually to be more true for whites.

  3. I don't see a source for the data in the linked article, but some of the data looks very odd. For example, the number of white victims of robbery went from 195,000 in 2004 to 267,000 in 2005, while the number of black victims of robbery dropped? Then, from 2006-2007, the number of white robbery victims dropped more than 25%, while the number of black victims rose 10%? There are similarly strange numbers for rape from 2001-2002 and 2005-2006

Edit: I would also note that the linked article cites evidence that "White men particularly don't find Black women attractive" as a partial explanation for the disparity.

I am not sure that this is exactly news.

I think it's an interesting item to have people look at and then see what their response is. The one thing that usually stands out to me is that a lot of the responses don't couch this as an issue to be solved, unlike many other items of a similar nature with differing races. Gun control, for instance, only exists as a solution when you look at shootings as a problem to be solved. But that's not the response these items ever get. It's always in the vein of 'why is this here' or 'the author is racist'. The item itself is seen as a problem to be solved. Not the actual reality that it represents.

2.

I don't understand the point being made. Some of the discrepancy is because of X. OK. How much? And what about the rest of it? Obviously blacks rape a lot. So here we can either do HBD or roundabout justifications for why the white folk are just reaping what they sowed. Or is there a third position?

I don't understand the point being made. Some of the discrepancy is because of X. OK. How much? And what about the rest of it? Obviously blacks rape a lot. So here we can either do HBD or roundabout justifications for why the white folk are just reaping what they sowed. Or is there a third position?

The third position is that neither of those is relevant. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he didn't say "because of my genes" nor "because the banks are reaping what they sow," but rather, "because that's where the money is."

White women are where the pussy be, in this case? That doesn't make sense for explaining the difference in rates.

Please review the section of my comment to which the other commenter was responding.

I mean the obvious explanation is that rapists are at least partly motivated by lust and white women are more attractive than black women to a statistically significant average.

Both of those things seem obvious to me.

Your disposition towards the topic seems very similar to what I described in my earlier post.

I don’t understand what that means.

You could also have the culturalist explanation that a lot of mainstream conservatives still hold to- black culture is just dysfunctional, produces very high rates of criminality and other bad outcomes, and that if black kids were raised by, say, chinamen they'd turn out to be much like chinamen.

That's true in a sense. Though I always found culture explanations to just be environmentalism with its roots cut off. Existing more in the realm of 'how do we solve this immediate problem' rather than being a theory on why the problem exists in the first place.

I'm pretty far left, but the author doesn't really give much of a reason to think much of anything. He opens with a weakman, demolishes it, and then proceeds to loosely related speculation. In particular, he doesn't do anything to establish that rape behaves differently than other violent interpersonal crimes. Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board, a fact that is much more reliably established using better reported, less heterogeneous types of crime.

No, normie lefties seem to legitimately believe that whites victimize blacks at much higher rates than vice versa and that normie blacks live in fear of being victimized by whites.

That this belief is stupid and obviously wrong doesn't stop them from holding it.

Pretty much everyone knows that blacks victimize whites at far higher rates than vice versa across the board

I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.

I don't think this is true. Try talking to some normie lefties. They'll tell you that crime stats are biased and you're racist for even considering blacks might be more violent.

This, I think, is where the trail veers into the weeds of expressed belief vs reasonable knowledge vs patterns of action and so forth. I think I've encountered the view you reference, as a genuine belief in every sense, in the wild, but AFAICT it's uncommon in my neck of the woods. I have yet to see the extreme version @hydroacetylene (isn't that just ethane?) claims, but presumably it occurs. More often people will express that point for signalling purposes when advantageous, only when they are not in the business of making factual predictions about the world.

In reality it's hard to know for sure, though. If you start spouting racial crime stats at people then you look like a racist weirdo. People will fight you even when they know you're right.

Can't find it on mobile, but 2020 was the first year that white liberals started claiming that blacks are less violent than whites on surveys. It was a sharp, sudden drop when the command went out.

Discussions are increasingly impossible due to leak-proof echo chambers destroying any common factual common ground.

In the followup tweet showing laziness stereotypes, you can literally see the 2013 great awokening dive starting.

It was a sharp, sudden drop when the command went out.

If you are going to make a claim as partisan and inflammatory as "white liberals all simultaneously began believing a counterfactual thing on command," you are going to need to do better than "I saw it somewhere but can't find it on mobile."

https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1565810798236155904

I can never remember if Zach is berg, ing, stein, or if I'm entirely mixing his last name up with my accountant.

Setting aside any problems with study design…I was kind of expecting more for a “sharp, sudden drop.” Is the 1990-95 gap also an example of the “command” going out?

A 4 year drop almost as great as the one that previously took 24 years is an example of "going woke slowly, then all at once," yes.

Ah, I mixed it up with the 1990-2020 intelligence chart further down.

More comments

The question is, what do we do with this information?

i dunno/trick someone who you hate to post it on social media so they get banned

What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here and would argue something other than "all rape should be investigated and the culprit found"?

It's a question about sanewashing, I guess. You see a lot of that here from people explaining away extremist positions from people on their side.

99% of any sanewashing going on is going to be for the right in this forum. The natural demographics skew that way.

The natural demographics may work that way, but the ground-level issues being discussed work overwhelmingly the other way. Progressive ideology generates most of the controversies we discuss here, and often does so in ways that are quite challenging to effectively defend. Sanewashing is one of the more effective techniques for defending the indefensible, so if one side's positions are generally less defensible, you'll see more sanewashing from them.

I think you are missing the flow of argumentation that drives lefties into anti-white corners.

Why do blacks rape a lot? Because of poverty. Why are blacks poor? Because whitey made them that way.

It's not that anyone goes out there and says 'whitey gets raped and that's good'. Or at least not any notable person since George Jackson, though there are probably a lot who share his black activist sentiments chirping on twitter right now. It's more that this is an ugly truth derived as a consequence of lefty priors.

It's very similar to 2nd Amendment arguments that flare up when the topic of mass shootings pops up. I don't think any gun control advocate would rest their case against a 2nd Amendment advocate who says that 'all mass shootings should be investigated and the culprit found'. That's not really a relevant answer. The relevant answer would be to a question of why people should settle for this as a status quo. How many mass shootings do we need before we do something about guns? How many white victims of black crime to do we need before we do something about blacks?

How many white victims of black crime to do we need before we do something about blacks?

I reject the framing. The focus on race can be useful when talking about why people commit crime, and perhaps even where you do your policing, but the fundamental goal is to go after all criminals. The demographics of crime should not alter the goal. I think this is somewhat of the foundation for how a leftist would respond, but I acknowledge that they're fully aware of the politics surrounding talking about disparity in black-on-white vs. white-on-black crime.

see how the conversation would go towards "actually maybe we shouldn't investigate too much".

But the fact that we don't see that suggests that leftists aren't interested in that. The argument about disparate impact of lower standards in Title 9 has penetrated discourse for a while now, I even saw it years ago in a left-wing dominated place.

What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here

TBF you could leave the question there.

Curious, open-minded, and confident?

What are you driving at? Do you want to imply most left-wingers aren't this way?

I wouldn't expect to see it here, but advocacy for black men raping white women is not a completely foreign concept in the left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldridge_Cleaver

Soul on Ice (1968)

"In the most controversial part of the book, Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired, motivated by a genuine conviction that the rape of white women was "an insurrectionary act".[4] When he began writing Soul on Ice, he unequivocally renounced rape and all his previous reasoning about it.[1][2]"

And before we dismiss this as the ravings of a criminal psychopath (which Clever most assuredly was), "Soul on Ice" was on the bookshelf of my not-particularly-radical Midwestern parents. You can find lesson plans online for teaching it, presumably to high school kids.

Except your own excerpt says he renounced rape entirely. If I trust your excerpt, it actually sounds like okay - the author is explaining his own beliefs at the time, not continuing to believe those going forward. I would be leery about a child having to read it, but it's not literal advocacy for rape any more than an ex-fascist's description of why they believed in fascism once is advocacy for fascism.

Could a white supremacist who was a serial rapist of black women be rehabilitated in the public eye? Would his books be studied in school? No, of course not. Why not? Because the left, which controls the educational apparatus, believes that black on white crime is less serious than the converse.

But this has no bearing on whether reasonable people could come together and agree upon the book's inclusion in school plans.

Remove the object-level details, and you're left with the question "If a criminal publishes media that explains why they thought their crime was acceptable at the time, but currently does not avow that reasoning, is there something wrong with teaching kids the media?" I suspect the answer is not a unanimous "yes", and questions of the left and right wouldn't even enter the discussion.

"Could a white supremacist who was a serial rapist of black women be rehabilitated in the public eye"

I'm pretty sure that despite the best efforts of my fellow wokists, we still cover Thomas Jefferson in school fairly positively.

There's a conundrum with that one on the left, I believe.

Is MLK still left-coded at this point? I suppose it's a conflict between the MLK kinds and the newer versions.

Things like civil rights laws are based on the Constitution, and the idea of 'democracy'. They still call themselves 'Democrats'.

It would be somewhat awkward to acknowledge that all of the Founding fathers that wrote the Constitution -that all of the current corpus of laws used to bash right-wingers with are based on- were white supremacists.

The United States of America were founded on an explicit, European and Christian nationalist basis.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (1 Stat. 103, enacted March 26, 1790) was a law of the United States Congress that set the first uniform rules for the granting of United States citizenship by naturalization. The law limited naturalization to "free White person(s) ... of good character", thus excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved people, free black people, and later Asians, although free black people were allowed citizenship at the state level in many states. The courts also associated whiteness with Christianity and thus excluded Muslim immigrants from citizenship until the decision Ex Parte Mohriez recognized citizenship for a Saudi Muslim man in 1944.

I'm sure the left will finally cut that umbilical cord at some point, but it's still somewhat awkward for now.

Why should anybody even bother tolerating all of these other people that the left want us to tolerate, if we do away with the historic mythical essence of the country, which is already pretty hollowed out? The 2nd Amendment doesn't need to be written on a piece of paper to have a value, after all

You specifically presented this as "advocacy for black men raping white women", though, when it is - within context - the exact opposite of that.

Yes, you are right. It's more nuanced. It's more like

"Criminal rapes white women for leftist reasons".

"Criminal admits he was wrong"

"Criminal is celebrated by other leftists for his amazing personal journey".

Clearly, mainstream leftists were not advocating for rape here. But they are also clearly apologizing for it if the demographics fit the right profile. Overall, second most disturbing book I found on my parent's bookshelf after "Naked Lunch".

I mean, there IS a strain of leftist who advocates for a form of 'racial justice' that allows oppressed groups more leniency for criminal acts, particularly when it is only damage to property involved.

There's also a much more common strain that blames criminality on poverty and inter-generational trauma and thus advocates for an approach that addresses socioeconomic inequality rather than harshly punishing offenders.

I think the question is would the leftist acknowledge the racial disparity, what would they attribute it to, and how would they suggest is should be addressed? Because investigating all rapes would, after all, end up with a racially disparate outcome in incarceration.

What would this discussion achieve? I dunno.

There's also a much more common strain that blames criminality on poverty and inter-generational trauma and thus advocates for an approach that addresses socioeconomic inequality rather than harshly punishing offenders.

Is there any way to know how common this strain is?

To within some degree of uncertainty.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/progressive-left/

If reciting 13/52 didn't have whatever effect you're shooting for, going for something that's harder to prove with a smaller disparity certainly isn't going to, particularly when Kirkegaard is the guy doing the legwork for it.

Technically this is a different argument than 13/52, given that the vast majority of the 52 is other 13s. This is a much older argument - that black men are disproportionately aggressive towards non-blacks, and thus that non-blacks should stereotypically fear blacks more than other races just because of their skin tone (perhaps in conjunction with other class markers).

I would expect that this argument would be significantly less likely to gain traction among leftists than 13/52, because it pattern-matches more directly to cartoon-evil-stereotype KKK racism, and thus is more-easily cut-off as beyond the pale, regardless of whatever evidence may be deployed in service of it.

The only thing I ever "did" with the information from interracial crime statistics was have the ratios for rape and murder permanently seared into my brain. They're pretty effective blockers against taking BLM slogans as anything other than pathetic mockeries of reality.

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.

Not to disparage your comprehension skills, but the points he's making are fairly simple:

Even if the research is spot on, what can be done?

This is not new, here's a study from 1994 that has similarly ugly conclusions, but there is no will to do anything about it.

The conclusions of the research were not unanticipated. In fact the motives behind the results have been understood for centuries.

Power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that hurt people you don't like look like they occur naturally.

To solve the problem people need to admit they were wrong. They would rather keep searching for a solution that doesn't exist, rather than admit that the research shows what they think is unfavorable (in this case, black criminals prey on whites, and this has a direct correlation with white flight).

You can come up with all the facts you want, but there is no way around the problem that people understand the will to power.

To wit: they have now responded. If I were to be uncharitable thier more plain language version sounds more like mien kamph than rationalist. Peel back another layer and we might get there. But I am being charitable. They are right that "straw folk" ...i mean "woke folk" ignore statistics and don't seem to have anwers. But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order. That's what I wanted them to more articulately express so no one can misunderstand.

  • -12

This subthread was a shitshow, and you racked up an impressive number of reports.

You need to speak plainly, and avoid making inflammatory accusations with little evidence.

5 day ban

Thanks for providing an example. Since you have been molded by those efforts I describe, your conclusion is to pattern-match me to Hitler while handwaving away the mendacity of egalitarians like mere good-natured statistical ignorance and chortling about strawmen – rather than pattern-match their conspicuous denial of harm their policies cause to a hostile conspiracy, and dismiss alarms going off at me.

It's funny that you contrast the «white nationalist» reading to a «rationalist» one. Rationalists deal in hypotheses and adjustment of priors. Do you think you are being a better rationalist?

People's beliefs are determined by attractors built over years of indoctrination, so the word vomit they spew is largely post hoc rationalization for what they already can't not believe. Like I say:

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 …

Like you say:

They are right that "straw folk" ...i mean "woke folk" ignore statistics and don't seem to have anwers. But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order.

Oooh, you caught me. It's right there. We can't have that, can we? I mean, repelling Section 8 or, G-d forbid, legalizing nonviolent race-exclusionary communities that you don't have to be rich or nonwhite to get into would be the worst, right right? Tearing that down in South Africa is a great success story, correct? Some fucking whiteys are still resisting, but it's clearly not acceptable and will be made unsustainable.

Peel back another layer and we might get there.

I appreciate the self-confidence.

But I am being charitable.

That too, but you know, I can take a bit more beating. Be my guest.

Oh this is fun! I've been banned from reddit so many times I finally gave up three years ago. Everytime for calling out the "woke left". Do you even know what they are? I can educate you as a "leftwinger" and we can circle jerk about what cucks they are and that sounds hot. But I am suspecious that you might think I am gay.

My self confidence about your trajectory is confirmed by this very comment. Socratic method works!

I really don't need to say anything. You have said what I wanted you to say.

  • -18

I think you misunderstand the «Socratic method», but you're welcome to keep going. (BTW, is the typo in your flair intentional?)

OP was using obtuse languge to say something they were afraid to say in plain language. In plain language I asked them to clarify.

Your success at this would be logically inconsistent with the premise of my being afraid to speak plainly. Now, how about you speak plainly, without bald assertions in the style of

sounds more like mien kamph than rationalist

But the implication that they push, and it's right there, is that some white nationalism is in order. That's what I wanted them to more articulately express so no one can misunderstand.

and self-congratulatory vague bullshit like

My self confidence about your trajectory is confirmed by this very comment.

I really don't need to say anything. You have said what I wanted you to say.

I was well aware of what they were saying. I wanted them to say it plainly so they couldn't hide what they really felt behind flowery, obtuse pseudo intellectual languge.

You appeal to forum rules and culture. There's a norm here against darkly hinting and insinuating, and also against building consensus. If you believe your conclusions are so self-evident that none could misunderstand, you clearly can afford to spell them out while you're at it. Running victory laps high on your own supply is pretty cringe.

Lol. I'm 8 deep. All I keep saying is that you can keep talking. I encourage you to keep talking. My goal is to hear you talk. I like talking to you. I want to hear you. You are seen and heard. This is me speaking plainly. I want to hear you. But you are not so good at being heard.

What do you think are my motives? Do you believe I have an agenda? By what mechanism are black folk different from white folk such that the only solution is segregation or some such?

You are loved.

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You missed the point of my comment. I was well aware of what they were saying. I wanted them to say it plainly so they couldn't hide what they really felt behind flowery, obtuse pseudo intellectual languge.

Then say that?

Not to disparage your reading comprehension but that should have been obvious by the words I used. I was just being diplomatic and charitable as peer the forum's culture and rules.

  • -13

This is hilarious; the entire apparent point of your comment chain was to get someone else to speak plainly. But for you it's okay to be arch and clever and whatever.

My mistake. I assumed you were making a request in good faith. I won't make that mistake again.

One of the rules here is to speak in plain language. OP was using obtuse languge to say something they were afraid to say in plain language. In plain language I asked them to clarify. My motivations for doing that are irrelevant. It is the socratic method. Something promoted on this forum all the time. It is part of civil discourse and completely inline with this forum's culture. You might as well criticize me for asking a question that you have no good answer to...which is exactly what you are doing.

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?

Si

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.

I thought murders have gone down across the board until recently? I thought decreased exposure to lead leads to decreases in putting lead in a 3P.

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

"Imprisoned criminals are less likely to murder, than if they were allowed to be free." is a possible explanation, which requires policies (prisons still existing) supported, until recently, by all but the most radical leftists. It certainly doesn't required non-leftists to hold any significant power, as long as centre-left still believes in at least temporarily separating rapists, murderers, and thieves from normal people.

Sure, almost everyone supports imprisoning criminals, but there's still a sliding scale as to how readily a society will imprison people, how long the sentences are etc. and those are generally left-right issues.

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.

Probably not. Though I guess the order of magnitude is about right for such a trick.

or things like potential offenders just staying inside to smoke weed and play violent computer games

You know that part of the reason is them staying, but not exactly home. Sailer likes to return to this point. His other favorite example of things that work – in the exact period in question –is the tough-on-crime New York city policing. And yes, sure: this goes to show that liberal hegemony is not total.

On the other hand, such «triumphs» of forcefully managed diversity only reinforce the impression which I claim is the goal: that only an overbearing police state can solve the problem of black crime. NYPD is an army unto itself. What was that Madison's quote about standing armies?

It still is rather more important whether people are actually getting murdered or not than what the actual ethnic ratios of the murderers are.

Not sure. Technically people are always getting murdered so you mean «less often», but sure, lower murder rate is desirable. On the other hand, murder (and other sorts of violent crime such as rape) is, while terminally bad, already a very unlikely risk in the lives of most people (except black men of prime age, I guess), far below suicide and health problems. So I'd say it's up for debate whether the racially motivated gaslighting of the overwhelming majority is rather less important than the exact size of the very small minority that does get murdered. People fear death and violence, fear appearing to support murderism, and can be blackmailed into approving any absurdity, tolerating any indignity if it seems to mean less death and violence. There should be some resistance to this exploit.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd rather live in a place with 4-5ish murders per 100k but fewer cops and CCTVs than in London or Moscow or Chennai or NYC. And less gaslighting, please.

I imagine many black people would, if educated to think about this seriously, prefer a different point on the Pareto frontier – either an even laxer one, or one radically less liberal. I think both me and them should be free to explore those options, but not at the expense of others who don't subscribe to our philosophies.

in the manner of policing (medium, somewhat protects blacks) and state-mandated upbringing (very hard, actually helps them).

Also

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.

theyarethesamepicture.jpeg

You are against the latter because it's attacking the civil liberties of the White majority in the name of curtailing the threat posed by the Black minority. How is it different from attacking the civil liberties of the non-criminal majority of Blacks in the name of curtailing the thread posed by the criminal minority?

First, I reject the symmetry. Whites have built that country; whites and non-blacks overwhelmingly maintain it. Whites as living heirs to this culture do have a priority in deciding its rules, and are entitled to demand assimilation from those who want equal treatment; you do not get to demand equal liberty if you want to belong to an assabiyah which does not value that liberty and does not contribute to its preservation. Oranians have found that few are interested to join on those terms

Prospective residents are vetted and must have no criminal record.

"It's like going into a marriage," said Strydom, a 28-year-old born in the southeastern province of KwaZulu-Natal.

Would-be residents must "share the values and subscribe" to the town's goals, he said, insisting Orania was not "racist" or a "desperate grasp back to apartheid".

Boshoff said there was nothing stopping any non-white Afrikaners from applying -- only no-one ever did.

"We haven't found anybody," he said.

(This reminds me: in Stephenson's Diamond Age, a white thug contemplated joining a Boer neo-tribe but decided against it).

Second, they are indeed the same picture, in that something always restricts our liberties and modifies our behavior. Questions are: who, whom, how much and to what end. Right now, the behavior of both whites and blacks is being modified by disparately acting stimuli like this one, which encourage guilt, self-hatred and undue tolerance in whites and unmerited indignation and racial pride in blacks. The broader structure does little to buck those trends. This begets problems, which call for solutions of the type that I would like to have abandoned.

If instead blacks were vigorously (I cannot know the optimal degree of that) pressed into church-going and other easy forms of prosocial networking, provided with schools that focus on rote learning and unambiguous discipline, systemically shamed for dysfunctional family structures and criminality, dissuaded from what our friend calls «honor culture», denied opportunities to build antisocial status hierarchies and endow them with externally validated prestige and capital, etc., or even just not encouraged to be delusional, there would be less of a problem. I believe that a separate Black America would have had a decent chance to independently arrive at this strategy and eventually become more successful (assuming continued economic interaction with the US) than the current black population of the US. This would entail some sacrifice on part of those prosocial blacks who want to have it all, white standards of living and black culture and no police state. Such is life: something has to give, in this case the «black culture» has to develop adaptations to co-existence with non-blacks, at the very least being willing to meet them halfway.

It is hard or utterly impossible to implement within the same non-segregated society, especially a society that does not recognize the root of the problem.

anecdotal reports like that man who bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas

What possesses a man to do this? What drives a clean-cut, techno-optimist, science-tinkering Mormon with three kids to deal with arsonists (and arsonists). To be held at gunpoint. To interact continuously with thieves (and thieves, and intruders, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and thieves, and…I could go on), derelicts (and, and, and, …). To be assaulted by a zoning bureaucrat. To drive around a recently-purchased 220k square foot abandoned warehouse late at night. To livestream council sessions passionately deriding slow-moving approvals to apathetic council members, and to do it again, and yet to have no ready, coherent answer to the objection of building and zoning laws. To live in a house with contaminated water. And yet, despite all of this, to continue to persevere.

What possesses a man to do this?

Mental illness. We don't call it possession anymore. We often don't call it a mental illness either these days. Neurodivergence.

As former President Jimmy Carter enters hospice care, we are likely to soon see a huge number of stories concerning what an honorable person he was. But keep in mind that in 1971 Carter, then Governor of Georgia "proclaimed ‘American Fighting Men's Day" likely in support of First Lieutenant William L. Calley who had recently been convicted for his role in the Mỹ Lai massacre. The massacre involved the rape and murder of Vietnamese men, women, and even children.

I sort of wonder if that'd currently and indirectly draw any attention to the the complete farce which resulted in such idiots being accepted into the armed forces, namely Project 100,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000

Going from a dead wiki reference to Calley https://archive.is/ecrlE , he does come across as somewhat stupid in terms of being a community college dropout and screwing up a few jobs, but Project 100k was strictly about getting more enlisted- Calley caused as much harm as he did because he was an officer in charge of others. He was able to go to Officer Candidate School based on his ASVAB [standardized test score].

Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:

It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)

Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.

It did not go well.

Carter is probably vying with Nixon as the most demonised US president in the 20th century. Maybe Hoover would also qualify for the competition. Hoover seemed to be a fantastic human being but simply inept at the job (despite being highly intelligent). Nixon was likely demonised for ideological reasons with Watergate being the fig leaf. Carter is really the enigma. How much of the economic woes was even his fault, rather than the energy shock(s) that reverberated throughout the 1970s? He pissed off the Israel lobby with his "Peace not Apartheid" book, which didn't help matters for his post-presidential reputation.

Finally, to sell the Reagan revolution you need a bogeyman and Carter was it. I'm perfectly prepared to believe that Carter was a mediocre president, but I'm unconvinced he was as bad as his reputation.

One interesting aspect of his political career I've heard about is that it supposedly disproves the notion of the Southern Strategy. After all, when Carter was running for reelection, Reagan only barely won the Deep South states.

You're not cynical enough; American Fighting Men's Day will be suppressed or dragged up depending on how the Egregore feels about Carter. My priors are that few will really care enough to do so, there's little else to pin on Carter other than being kind of a lame duck President who is remembered for little.

Not only is he honorable, he has a proud (healthy!) in-group bias towards his own tribe’s warriors! Based Carter!

William L. Calley made all American warriors look bad. Forgive me for being superficial, but I'm betting that thousands of US soldiers lost the opportunity to have sex with US women because of the transferred disgust these women felt because of the massacre.

but I'm betting that thousands of US soldiers lost the opportunity to have sex with US women because of the transferred disgust these women felt because of the massacre.

This is telling me more about you than anything. And that your mind went in this direction. You have not been with many women?

Forgive me for being superficial, but I'm betting that thousands of US soldiers lost the opportunity to have sex with US women because of the transferred disgust these women felt because of the massacre.

You bet that way if you want, I'm betting that transferred "dangerous bad boy" vibes led to thousands of US soldiers getting more sex from US women.

The median woman loves a man in uniform, and not because she think he's making flower necklaces and rescuing puppies while he's wearing it.

hmm...a common narrative is that Carter imposed gasoline price controls, which backfired, but they were initially imposed by Nixon, and towards the end of his term Carter actually rescinded some of them, and the rest were rescinded by Reagan after entering office.

more info https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/07/a_short_history.html

Complicated by his awful relationship with his own party and Congress, it’s hard to say whether Carter achieved too few or too many of his goals. Reading this book review…could he have possibly done it? Were we spared from even worse policy?

I had no idea rail and air deregulation happened under Carter, not to mention home brewing. Thought that was later (and earlier, for brewing)

You may enjoy an ACX guest book review for his absolutely bizarre presidency.

Far more disgraceful is that as a person with a background in nuclear engineering, he failed to support the industry and was instead promoting coal and solar and such nonsense.

His administration also did not defend against a lawsuit that ended examinations for civil servants, thus helping ensure the worse quality of future bureaucrats.

Firstly, that happened late in his term, secondly...

Nothing bad really happened at TMI apart from a massive financial loss, because the design of the reactor was fundamentally sound.

Despite gross negligence, there was no radiation release worth mentioning, just some amount of contamination of the power plant. And this is one of the top 10 power plant disaster, ever.

Had it not been for operator error- a valve was closed off that should have allowed emergency feedwater into steam generators for extra cooling - the reactors would probably still be in operation.

It's darkly funny, as one of the reasons for the meltdown is possibly obesity. An operator did not notice the signal one that a emergency feedwater pump valves was closed because his fat gut blocked the view:

The valve position lights for one block valve were covered by a yellow maintenance tag. The reason why the operator missed the lights for the second valve is not known, although one theory is that his own large belly hid it from his view.[32] The valves may have been left closed during a surveillance test two days earlier.[33][34] With the block valves closed, the system was unable to pump any water. The closure of these valves was a violation of a key Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rule, according to which the reactor must be shut down if all auxiliary feed pumps are closed for maintenance. This was later singled out by NRC officials as a key failure.[35]

All in all, big fuckup resulting in nothing more than a 2 billion $ of damage.

Still, it does seem like people operating the plant weren't trained properly - e.g. allowing the design to run without back up feedwater pumps, when those are needed to avoid partial meltdown - seems like a very odd decision.

Now, there's plenty of designs that do not even require emergency core cooling systems, for various reasons.

I am going to do what I do every day, and that is not trust the New York Times or other institutional journalists

But keep in mind that in 1971 Carter, then Governor of Georgia "proclaimed ‘American Fighting Men's Day" likely in support of First Lieutenant William L. Calley who had recently been convicted for his role in the Mỹ Lai massacre.

Reading that article it doesn't sound like the day was in support of Calley. It was more to affirm the fact that Calley's actions and character were not representative of the us armed forces in general. That's much less objectionable.

If the newspaper doesn't come right out and say that Carter created the day for that reason, don't believe it. They didn't come right out and say it because they didn't have any evidence.

It seems to me that the work the Carter Center has done to eradicate parasitic diseases in Africa over the past 50 years (among other charitable work) would more than make up for once publicly supporting the killers of 500 Vietnamese civilians, from a utilitarian standpoint at least.

Agreed. He has been an excellent former politician.

My reason for disliking Carter is that even though he (a Navy-trained nuclear engineer) understood what was going on during the Three Mile Island accident and could have told the nation that there was nothing to worry about, he apparently didn't want to upset anti-nuclear activists in his own party. While that was only a small part of the PR disaster that TMI was, in my mind that makes him partially to blame for why the US abandoned the adoption of nuclear power for electrical generation, which in turns make him partially responsible for global warming (very partially - it's not like Carter is responsible for what China and India have been doing or will continue to do in the next century).

If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.

It's not a surprise that France, the only country that continued to basically directly control nuke reactors via the gov't were the only ones to continue to really build them. Ironically, in a situation where a New Dealer like Hubert Humphrey was POTUS, nukes might've been better off.

Didn’t we just have high interests rates which could admittedly be a problem.

But our economy funds many long term projects in deregulated industries. I’d like to see what your actually referring to but the best I’m guessing it’s based on receiving variable pricing.

Here's a Twitter thread to peruse - https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1625095305694789632

Ok so this isn’t deregulation bad. It’s nuclear was not economical unless government gave them pricing power.

And ignore that a big reason why nuclear got super expensive is excessive regulation after 3 mile/Chernobyl.

That can't be true, since the cost of nuclear energy actually increased over time - primarily due to regulations that complicated construction. The US for instance had the capital cost of a plant rise enormously. See figure 7.11: https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

The difference between $1000 and $4000 (or even $8,000) per kilowatt of capacity is massive, more than any deregulation effect. There is no such effect in South Korea or India - this proves it must be a regulatory issue.

See the ridiculous regulatory constraints imposed on US nuclear power plants further in the article.

An example was a prohibition against multiplexing, resulting in thousands of sensor wires leading to a large space called a cable spreading room. Multiplexing would have cut the number of wires by orders of magnitude while at the same time providing better safety by multiple, redundant paths.

Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.

A forklift at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory moved a small spent fuel cask from the storage pool to the hot cell. The cask had not been properly drained and some pool water was dribbled onto the blacktop along the way. Despite the fact that some characters had taken a midnight swim in such a pool in the days when I used to visit there and were none the worse for it, storage pool water is defined as a hazardous contaminant. It was deemed necessary therefore to dig up the entire path of the forklift, creating a trench two feet wide by a half mile long that was dubbed Toomer’s Creek, after the unfortunate worker whose job it was to ensure that the cask was fully drained.

The Bannock Paving Company was hired to repave the entire road. Bannock used slag from the local phosphate plants as aggregate in the blacktop, which had proved to be highly satisfactory in many of the roads in the Pocatello, Idaho area. After the job was complete, it was learned that the aggregate was naturally high in thorium, and was more radioactive that the material that had been dug up, marked with the dreaded radiation symbol, and hauled away for expensive, long-term burial.

The new rules would be imposed on plants already under construction. A 1974 study by the General Accountability Office of the Sequoyah plant documented 23 changes “where a structure or component had to be torn out and rebuilt or added because of required changes.” The Sequoyah plant began construction in 1968, with a scheduled completion date of 1973 at a cost of $300 million. It actually went into operation in 1981 and cost $1700 million. This was a typical experience.

It's basically racketeering:

Instead, the nuclear companies themselves pay the NRC for the time they spend reviewing applications, at something close to $300 an hour. This creates a perverse incentive: the more overhead, the more delays, the more revenue for the agency.

If you actually look at nuclear development, electricity deregulation made it impossible to do the long-term funding to build nuclear reactors, because the time to get your money back is such a long tail.

Depends on whether you look at the cost before or after the government imposed regulations that make it impossible for nuclear to be cheap, specifically the "as safe as possible" standard (as opposed to "meet X bar of safety as cheap as possible").

https://postimg.cc/PLQH3hdn

It's perhaps worth contemplating who was president at the time of the price spike.

I wonder how much better our nuclear power would be if we had continued to develop it. Seems like 50+ years of development, with billions of dollars poured in per year, would lead to much safer, more consistent, cheaper, and more powerful reactors. China and India would certainly switch to nuclear if it were actually the economical option. If we could even get nuclear close in price to coal we could bribe them to switch over by subsidizing the costs. Seems highly plausible to me.

There has been quite a bit of development of reactor technology, even just within what are now seen as the boring, old and busted design of Pressurized Light Water Reactors. So-called Gen III+ Reactors have substantial improvements in safety and operational efficiency (how much time they spend generating electricity (and thus $$$) vs. time spent shut down for maintenance).

The main way to subsidize costs would be guaranteed zero- or low-interest loans, combined with some reduction in red tape; the main thing that makes nuclear cost-prohibitive right now is the ridiculous amount of time it takes to go from "we're thinking about building a nuke plant here" to "actually generating electricity". The NRC safety certification process is important and shouldn't be circumvented, but what needs to be stopped is every single anti-nuclear organization being able to file NIMBY-lawsuit after NIMBY-lawsuit that keeps the project tied up, with loan interest accumulating the whole time.

Other more advanced reactor design concepts are interesting but PLWRs have 70 years of design and operational experience behind them now, which makes them quite hard to dislodge from their dominant market position.

China and India would certainly switch to nuclear if it were actually the economical option

Do you mean like this?

from here - At least as of 2021, china's use of nuclear power isn't much larger than its use of other alternative energy sources. They're investing in it, but solar and wind are growing more rapidly.

There's something weird about it, because the chart with absolute numbers shows higher nuclear than wind production, while the relative chart is showing the opposite (and a ridiculously small proportion of gas power for some reason).

If you take the numbers for their planned expansion from my article, and the absolute numbers chart, nuclear production would nearly double. But I guess there's the question of how long it will take them, at what cost, etc.

I think you have it set on 'world', when I click 'change country' in your chart and click 'China' I get this with wind=655 and nuclear=407

Oops, I thought it kept the settings.

Ok, so they're planning to 5x their nuclear production, which would put it above where even hydro is at the moment. Of course the question of will they pull it off remains, and wind and solar will probably grow in the following years as well.

But my original point stands, it certainly looks like they are (at least planning on) switching to it.

China and India would certainly switch to nuclear if it were actually the economical option.

I have no reason to doubt this, but it does seem odd to me to suggest that the lack of a green lobby means a country will default to pragmatism when it comes to energy. Do China and India not have their own set of political challenges (say a fossil fuel lobby) when it comes to nuclear or is really as straightforward as nuclear failing on one or all of cost/skill/payoff?

Of course someone who knows these countries can tell me I'm wrong and I'll accept that, but I worry that the reasoning is along the lines of 'because they don't have the same problems as the West, they don't have a problem', where the 'problems of the West' are the only things we would think to look for.

Not sure about energy policy in those countries in general, but I would be shocked if they had fossil fuel lobbies.

China at least already seems to use more nuclear than us, so my read is that they are already defaulting to pragmatism. Less sure about India I guess. My read in general is that somewhat poorer countries have less qualms with this sort of thing but I could be wrong.

To be clear I was saying less "If we had fewer qualms they would have fewer qualms" and more "they seem to already have few enough qualms that the cost/skill/payoff trade is all that matters"

A lot of Nixon- and earlier-era funding for nuclear power research was kinda spending good money after bad: the institutional views of the major players were focused on a number of specific assumptions (limited uranium availability, funding preferring large single reactor sites, high concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation from power plants) that lead to some really goofy focuses (eg, anything involving molten salt reactors, incoherent positions on breeder reactors, multi-gigawatt PWRs are a mainstay despite decay heat issues).

That said, not turning civil development into a mindfield would have probably allowed far greater private research and development along saner lines. Which I think is far greater an issue than Carter's PR approach to TMI.


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