To my Jewish friends and followers:
I’m grieving with you today. I know the neighborhood where Tree of Life synagogue sits – it’s a quiet, well-off, slightly Bohemian ‘burb with a lot of techies living in it.
I’m not Jewish myself, but I figured out a long time ago that any society which abuses its Jews – or tolerates abuse of them – is in the process of flushing itself down the crapper. The Jews are almost always the first targets of the enemies of civilization, but never the last.
But I’m not posting to reply only with words.
Any Jew who can get close enough to me in realspace for it to be practical and asks can have from me free instruction in basic self-defense with firearms and anti-active-shooter tactics. May no incident like this ever occur again – but if it does, I would be very proud if one of my students took down the evildoer before it reached bloodbath stage.
One of the places I learned of this was Facebook, in a thread with the types of comments one could expect on Facebook.
One comment I read interested me, because it was a claim I cannot easily check. It was that towns in the Wild West had a rule of requiring inhabitants to check their guns. How true was this? It seems wildly unnecessary, given how many towns I know in the modern day had plenty of guns within town limits and almost no crime to speak of, but the Wild West is not the modern day, and in any event, I find history fun to think about.
>It was that towns in the Wild West had a rule of requiring inhabitants to check their guns.
Sometimes. Could work in small towns with a strong sheriff, but was not the rule.
It might have worked better if not for the obvious game-theoretic failure mode – the more cooperative most people were about disarming themselves, the bigger was the advantage to a minority of armed defectors. “Always cooperate” is neither a stable strategy nor a defection-minimizing one; tit-for-tat with an initial default to cooperate is.
On the other hand in some areas of the West it was actually a legal mandate that all men carry arms with them. For example in Lubbock, Texas for a long time it was required for all men to bring arms with them when going to church on Sundays. This was due in part to the frequency of Native Indian attacks on centralized locations such as churches at the time.
That is an interesting example and it seems likely to me that there has been a law along those lines somewhere. Unfortunately, I wasn’t easily able to find a reference. Do you know of one? I’d like to look into it further.
copied from the Active Response site of Greg Ellifritz I referenced below
Not a law, but here in Bleeding Kansas, there’s a church founded by abolitionists who knew they had to defend themselves against the pro-slavery agitators coming over from Missouri. It’s known as the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” was their famous motto.
This makes an interesting counterpoint to the Southern folk armed against slave rebellions. The abolitionists armed themselves to prevent the spread of slavery into Kansas. We arguably started fighting the Civil War here well before Ft. Sumter.
.
In Kennesaw, GA, currently, all adult residents are required to be armed, but I don’t think they’re required to carry. The crime rate in Kennesaw is extremely low.
Eagerly awaiting your analysis of the Jemel Roberson incident.
>Eagerly awaiting your analysis of the Jemel Roberson incident.
I don’t have enough facts to do an analysis, but my instant reaction is that it sounds like a case of lethal stupidity. Cop runs in all high on cop adrenaline, sees a guy with a gun and pops off without thinking.
Even in the towns with what you’ve generously termed a “strong sheriff” such rules often only applied to specific classes of people in specific places. Usually something like “non-residents who are in the saloon district must leave their weapons with their horse.”
And even this, seemingly reasonable rule was occasionally abused by corrupt sheriffs. For example there is quite a bit of debate about whether the OK Corral shootout between the Earps and the Clantons was actually law enforcement or just straight-up murder under color of law. The accounts of the shootout are contradictory, but the Earps being horribly corrupt is well known, as is the Clanton gang refusing to pay a cut of their cattle-rustling take as tribute…
Wild West is somewhat of a wide range, in historical period and in locations. There was wide variation in rules enforced from place to place.
Town is also a term that might have a wide range of definitions.
I could easily believe that a location where all the local businesses had a single owner could require that customers put their firearms away before they started drinking.
I recently saw blogged a visit to a museum hotel whose handouts claimed that during a certain period the place advertised that customers were not to shoot the waiters, or the waiters would kill them.
I hope it suffices to say that the historical US had wide variations in laws, levels of peace, etc., and that any one short explanation would not do the truth justice.
In some jurisdictions gun control seems to have primarily served the purpose of permitting officials to have a plausibly deniable way of lynching people they felt needed to be made example of.
Enforcement of gun control was wildly impractical in many areas for a great deal of time. Perhaps still so.
>In some jurisdictions gun control seems to have primarily served the purpose of permitting officials to have a plausibly deniable way of lynching people they felt needed to be made example of.
Especially blacks. Post-Civil War “gun control” laws were passed under the convention that they would never be applied to whites, even poor whites. They created a lethal dilemma from for blacks; disarm and be prey for nightriders, or bear arms illegally and be jailed – or shot while resisting confiscation.
And Antebellum gun control was mainly in the parts of the south away from the frontier, for the purposes of preventing slave rebellions.
They lynched carpetbaggers and scalawags also. There’s an argument that it was politically motivated, to suppress the Republican Party, not racially motivated. I’ve recently heard that lynching were significantly disparately vicious, which undermines that argument. I should study that more. However, up through the twenties and thirties, Blacks voted heavily for the GOP (which lost the support through taking it for granted), so Blacks might have been the one lynching target that neither had family ties to local Democrats nor distant relatives that could have the political pull to get the national Republican Party to intervene. Not that there were so many options for intervention after Posse Comitatus. Certainly some of the legitimating narrative in the south was of the evils of the GOP.
The modern legitimating narrative that claims that the violence was purely racially motivated, and that political violence can be set loose against one race without spilling loose on other races is certainly incorrect. I think it is important to stress that no political minority is safer than the most acceptable target, that intrapolity violence sponsored by political factions is never safe or entirely controllable, and that reasons that may seem worth it can help hide results that are not. Most of us aren’t going to be significantly changing our sense of ethnic identity, but we are all going to be political minorities at some point.
Keep in mind where some of the populations in the less settled areas were from. There was effectively a moving frontier, and a lot of people moved with that frontier. When the frontier was Appalachia/IIRC the Ohio valley, one of the frontier cultures believed that it was possible to opt out of permitting eye gouging in fights, but was unmanly to do so. There is an anecdote of a man who tried to condition his nails for gouging by using candles.
US culture was not (and is not) only the culture of long settled places Back East, like Boston. US culture was not and is not uniform.
Family lore leads me to argue that there were places where aspects of the Wild West persisted into at least the 1960s.
Aye, that last bit is certainly true. My father grew up in the 1960s, and was on his first cattle drive at 4 years old, placed in charge of one of the holding herds (unsupervised).
You get far enough away from the cities, and many of the cultural aspects of the old west are still present. When you live in an environment where there are things that will intentionally try to kill you on a regular basis (where your food and shelter comes from interacting with those things), not to mention the environmental dangers, you find certain modes of culture are naturally reinforced.
As phrased both true and false.
The key word here is inhabitants as opposed to out of towners.
See e.g. “On September 7, 1876 three men [James and Younger gang] entered the town of Northfield about 2pm. …..Several townspeople, some of them former Civil War soldiers, immediately recognized the look of a “guerrilla raid.” ….
…….Much to the outlaws’ surprise, the people of Northfield not only refused to cooperate with the robbery, they shot back. A lot of them shot back. With deadly accuracy”
followed by:
“Cole Younger was serving a 25-year sentence for his part in a bank robbery attempt [Northfield Minnesota in fact]. From his prison cell he warned young people against a life of violence and crime, but his Dalton cousins [see e.g. A Dynasty of Western Outlaws] would not listen. These former Coffeyville residents were interested in the new bank for reasons quite different from those of Luther Perkins. Bob Dalton planned to outdo the James boys by using the town as the setting for a spectacular double bank robbery. The robbery ended, however, with four of the five outlaws dead. Coffeyville became famous all over the country as the “town that stopped the Daltons.”
The famous, partly because rare and unusual, gunfight at the O.K. Corral was in part an effort by residents to enforce the local rule on non-residents.
“Effective April 19, 1881, Tombstone City Ordinance Number 9 states:
To Provide against Carrying of Deadly Weapons
Section 1. It is hereby declared unlawful to carry in the hand or upon the person or otherwise any deadly weapon within the limits of said city of Tombstone, without first obtaining a permit in writing.
Section 2: This prohibition does not extend to persons immediately leaving or entering the city, who, with good faith, and within reasonable time are proceeding to deposit, or take from the place of deposit such deadly weapon.
Section 3: All fire-arms of every description, and bowie knives and dirks, [bowie knives and dirks are vaguely defined but the intent is weapons as opposed to tools] are included within the prohibition of this ordinance. ”
In the wild west as it was never known at the time, the maximum number of shootings in one year was 5 – reached once in Dodge and once in Ellsworth during the peak years of the Kansas cow towns. Chicago today has notoriously strict gun laws with much less effect.
Would somebody please point me to a list of currently working formatting tags? WordPress shows only using their text editor so far as I can google. Some tags I am accustomed to using work and some don’t. Obviously I’d like to properly format long comments such as the one above.
“Would somebody please point me to a list of currently working formatting tags? “
Never could find a list, but figured out on my own that ’em’, ‘strong’, and ‘a’ work as expected. Not sure otherwise.
Also “<blockquote>the quoted material</blockquote>” works. (It’s how I got the above.)
It should be pointed out that some of the robbery gangs were Confederate veterans, who were nominally raising funds to prepare for another civil war, and this was part of the reason that citizens in some localities tolerated or collaborated with them. Arms caches have been found. More generally, the ACW involved a great many people, some of whom had criminal tendencies, and probably contributed to the later violence.
Entire towns have been burned to the ground. (I can only cite one example, which was Prohibition era, IIRC the ’20s, but I also think most histories look at Prohibition too narrowly in terms of period. Carrie Nation was an anti-Saloon vigilante in Kansas, which was not licensing the retail sale of alcohol at the time.)
I tend to think that a lot of historic areas of peace in the US are because most people had the judgement to realize that they would be killed for starting too much trouble. Where it wasn’t the case that they would be certainly killed, we see trouble started.
In the wild west as it was never known at the time, the maximum number of shootings in one year was 5 – reached once in Dodge and once in Ellsworth during the peak years of the Kansas cow towns. Chicago today has notoriously strict gun laws with much less effect.
We must remember that – as much as Chicago might, in some of its suburbs, a more violent culture than Dodge and Ellsworth – those places are much, much smaller than Chicago is.
Dodge City had a population of 1,200 in 1876, and while that presumably grew significantly before the boom ended, we can assume, say, no more than 12,000 people that year when five people got shot.
Chicago Metro (the shootings don’t happen in the City proper!) population is 9.5 million.
The comparable rate for 5 in 12,000 in Dodge City would be about 4,000 people a year; it never reaches even a thousand!
Wrong again. The shootings do happen in the City proper.
By Daniel Kay Hertz New Republic June 9, 2014 Total numbers of shootings within the city limits of Chicago have indeed reached well over three thousand and approached four thousand though fatalities have lagged. The same number of shootings in the 19th century in Kansas would have produced far more fatalities as shootings today are far more survivable.
One comment I read interested me, because it was a claim I cannot easily check. It was that towns in the Wild West had a rule of requiring inhabitants to check their guns.
Last year I listened to an audiobook of The Last Gunfight…which centered around the OK Corral business. Apparently Tombstone was one of those towns; you were supposed to check your guns in (typically at a hotel) when you came into town, and pick them up when you were leaving. (The definitions of “coming in” and “leaving” were a pretty flexible, though, so the newcomer might be in town with his weapons on quite a while–at the time of the gunfight, if I remember, the Clantons were “on their way out” but taking their time about it, and running their mouths too much; and the Earps’ stated intent was to disarm them.)
I stay this to say: that since that particular fight has outsized notoriety, the policy in that one town (along with the movie Unforgiven) may have an outsized effect on people’s impressions of what went on generally. But I don’t have the knowledge to say how common this was.
(…and I see I missed a comment above where someone quoted the actual ordinance.)
For whatever it’s worth, my great, great, great grandfather was working in a saloon that made up one of the sides of the OK corral at the time of the shootout and was an eyewitness to the fight, and to his dying day his opinion was that the Earps straight-up murdered the Clantons. To the point where when my grandmother brought Wyatt Earp’s autobiography home from the library he very nearly burnt it as a “pack of lies.”
The rumors around the town at the time were that there was a bit of a feud going between the two groups over the Clanton brothers’ refusal to cut the Earps in on their cattle rustling profits, and that the Earps decided to make an example.
Respect for making the offer. I hope some take you up on it.
Given the number of recent incidents of houses of worship being targeted, and Jews in-particular too often being high on target lists, that they had no security of any kind seems amazing.
Maybe us gun-totin’ Southerners are special, but most every church I know of has some form of on-site security now. To do otherwise seems … negligent.
I keep hearing of “No guns in churches or other places of worship” laws, and “CCW permits not valid in churches or other places of worship” rules. Every time I do, I wonder: Never mind the Second Amendment; why aren’t these laws hammered flat as being blatant violations of the First?
In some circumstances as Sikh daggers there is a first amendment issue.
The more general answer to the question posed is that, Hugo Black to the contrary, the application of the Bill of Rights to non-Federal authorities is unclear and certainly incomplete. Municipal, county and state laws are tested differently than national laws against the Bill of Rights.
The better answer is as Newt Gingrich answered Dr. Pournelle when Jerry asked why it took a constitutional amendment to give us Prohibition and yet today national authorities exercise far broader powers. The times they are a’changing.
Jurisdictions vary widely on this.
In Arkansas, churches broadly fall under the same rules as private businesses (i.e. they can decide for themselves whether to forbid possession, usually accompanied by a “no guns” sign at entrances).
Why anyone would do so is a question with no satisfactory answer. But the law has never been required to be logical or sensible.
While some states prohibit carrying guns in church – mine was one until recently – most of those “no guns” rules come down through the church hierarchies. What happens if you get caught with one anyway depends on state law. As for using one… they’d rather see parishoners violently dead than have someone peacefully armed.
I know a couple of people who decided to do their worshiping at home after finding every church they tried didn’t respect their safety or Constitutional rights.
I hope that JPFO membership, not gun control protests, will get the greatest boost from this sad event.
JPFO went into decline some years back, and SAF bought their name and membership list and maintains their circa-1995 web site. I don’t have any particular problems with SAF, but it’s not Aaron Zelman’s JPFO.
There were various former members who couldn’t be arsed to keep the organization from going under, but seemed to have plenty of time and money to condemn the SAF. Some of them have decided “extremer is betterer” and moved off into crazyland.
The best thing about JFPO was their logo. Everything about it is designed to produce maximum REEEEEEEE! from the communists.
Eric, I share your sympathy and concern for the innocent lives taken in Pittsburgh today, and also your desire to help prevent future recurrences by direct personal action. That is both human and admirable, and an example to us all. Yet today’s catastrophe is a rarity that draws sharp notice (also a normative human reaction), whereas year-after-year hundreds are callously murdered in Chicago alone and the repetition has worn down public outrage into near indifference. Why are a dozen killings in an upscale suburban neighborhood more noteworthy and deserving of reaction than the annual slaughter of hundreds in the poorer backwater ghettos of Chicago?
>Why are a dozen killings in an upscale suburban neighborhood more noteworthy and deserving of reaction than the annual slaughter of hundreds in the poorer backwater ghettos of Chicago?
Because we’ere used to that. Another South Side gangbanger going down doesn’t require a change in our risk models. That’d change right quick if they started exporting violence out of their hellhole.
Yes, I understand that sentiment. Was it Stalin who said that one death is a tragedy, whereas a million deaths is a statistic? And I agree with you that better self defense preparation and skill is the only realistic mitigation for these types of horrific crimes. Public disapprobation of the slaughter of innocents is feel good for most of normal society, but it won’t keep you safe from a crazed random murderer any more than public disgust of the Chicago murder rate has motivate any change in their policies. If we treat the Pittsburgh killings solely as an outrage, that emotion will wither over time. But if we regard it rationally as a potential bellweather of future chaos, then we will purchase a firearm and get proper training on how to use it.
I feel like this should be priced into the risk model already. Attacks on places of worship – at comparable levels of notoriety – are occurring at the rate of something like once per year in North America. Some of these are motivated by ethnic hatred (Dylann Roof confessed he hoped to spark a race war with his 2015 attack on a Charleston church), and some by antagonism toward the religion (Devin Patrick Kelley didn’t survive to explain his motivation, but from what is known about his militant atheism and antagonism toward Christianity, it seems a reasonable inference that these underlay his 2017 attack on a Sutherland Springs church). Others have been ascribed to conflict over correlated characteristics (Alexandre Bissonnette’s 2017 attack on a Québec City mosque was an attempt to kill refugees in furtherance of his nationalist beliefs). Whether one should primarily think of Jews as members of an ethnicity, religion, or nationality is less clear than the cases of blacks, Christians, or refugees, but however you look at this it’s not as if it’s a new development.
Relatedly, I don’t think it’s justified to exclude the other attacks I mentioned and consider these victims “the first targets of the enemies of civilization.”
>Relatedly, I don’t think it’s justified to exclude the other attacks I mentioned and consider these victims “the first targets of the enemies of civilization.”
I had in mind that totalitarianizing barbarians – Nazis, Communists, and Islamists in particular – always find the Jewish combination of higher average IQ and transnational loyalty to the Jewish tribe peculiarly threatening, putting Jews high on the target list.
Other mercantile minorities such as Armenians and diaspora Chinese attract persecution disproportionate to their numbers for similar reasons, but the Jews have always been top of that list.
In my neck of the woods, it has been about a hundred years since the most recent massacre on the scale of tens to hundreds that I am aware of. I trust local politicians very little, because I know state political history and how recent state government has been complicit in covering up that massacre.
I interpret local policies as representing a will by state voters that such massacres be so costly that few will pay the cost to commit them. That may entirely be projection on my part. People disagree about what the effect of those policies is.
I know a local liberal man who says he is concerned about the murders in Chicago, and I do not have evidence he is lying. I am confident we would mostly disagree about policies that would change things, but have not confirmed that. I don’t like the murders in Chicago, would prefer different policies there, but think the root cause is the same as in my state back in the day, and can only be addressed by voters in the same way. My state improved only when voters were willing to consider candidates of more than one party, and significantly weakened the ability of corrupt factions to stay in office year after year.
My state has severe issues. We didn’t get anywhere near rooting out all of the corrupt factions before one of the national parties “lost its everloving mind” and became much less competitive locally. Some of the factions are probably depraved enough to do horrible things. I have security concerns about my state for that reason.
But for policies and outcomes, I compare my state and Chicago and reflexively ask if they want to be murdered. I have very significant differences in policy preferences with Chicago voters, and I live in an area where voters share many of those preferences. One of the purposes of the US is to minimize fighting between local groups by permitting them decisions about local policies. This means that local policy variation causes local violence variation, but if total nationwide policy uniformity causes endemic interlocality violence stopping endemic intralocality violence, it probably wouldn’t be worth it.
“Why are a dozen killings in an upscale suburban neighborhood more noteworthy and deserving of reaction than the annual slaughter of hundreds in the poorer backwater ghettos of Chicago?”
I don’t think they are. I see plenty on the Right who routinely call out the hypocrisy of wanting to ditch the constitution over a “mass” shooting of 4, when that many die daily in Chicago (which already has ditched the constitution).
But put that aside, as I think a less partisan-sounding answer is sufficient…
To “do something” about the killings in Chicago, at minimum, you would need to:
– Replace all the incompetent, corrupt Chicago politicians with competent, non-corrupt politicians. Impossible.
– Replace the entire corrupt police force with one that is determined to stamp out crime but do it in a non-corrupt, non-discriminatory fashion. Impossible.
– Replace all the corrupt, incompetent Illinois politicians with competent, non-corrupt politicians. Impossible.
– Fix the laws of Illinois and Chicago so the non-criminal and non-violent could push back against the violence. Impossible.
The fixes, to whatever extent they exist, are impossible.
I think this a quote from Fred Reed, but can’t seem to find it: “That which would work is politically impossible; that which is politically possible won’t work.”
I think it is simpler than that. The root cause of Chicago’s problems right now boil down to Michael Brown. Due to this and various similar incidents the Chicago PD are taking the attitude of “well if going in not only endangers my life but also my career, then let the animals kill each other.”
Just recently a Chicago Police officer was convicted of murder (and honestly looking at the video, probably rightly so.) But that has just exacerbated the situation.
The situation in Chicago is the fruit of the insane political correctness and victimology that has been growing in the US society. Like most government programs it goes like this “black people of America we are going to help you by doing X. X sounds really good but is utterly insubstantive, and in fact has the opposite effect of making the group’s situation worse. Since the situation is worse then OBVIOUSLY the only solution is to do a lot more of X.”
I am hopeful that the victims of this mess, mainly black people, will turn a corner this election. There seems to be signs of this. But, we will find out in a couple of weeks.
> The root cause of Chicago’s problems right now boil down to Michael Brown.
WAY too recent.
The root cause of Chicago’s problems go back generations.
William: Correct.
There are a lot of people who aren’t indifferent, but it’s an intractable problem as long as the street gangs have representation on the city council. And while the political party that has run Chicago almost forever has a vested interest in maintaining and increasing black poverty.
Dog bites man is not news. Man bites dog is.
I suspect you will not get very many takers on your offer.
It seems the Jewish community largely considers shooting back a bad idea. I can understand that. Historically, oppressed minorities that tried shooting back did not fare well. IIRC, the Jews never did try to take up arms, and they are still here. So, it has worked so far.
It is not that Jews do not want to defend themselves. When they are the majority in power, they are as martial as everyone else.
There are quite a few armed Jews here in the US.
One of my longer term friends is one. He’s fat, out of shape, but carries a Glock. He believes he will shoot you if you cause sufficient problems.
There is also JPFO–Jews for the Protection of Firearm Ownership.
You are right that–at least in the US–aren’t much for protection, but they also tend to be progressive and trust in the Powers That Be to protect them. From my .sigtext file:
That seems a rather confused comment. But this whole thread has a fantastic overtone.
It’s Eric doing his best to help (and maybe not reading that the guy who shot two black people at the Kroger in Kentucky tried to enter a Black Church fifteen minutes earlier.) I am simultaneously proud of Eric, but also amused* and appalled.
* Maybe “bemused” would be the better word.
>the guy who shot two black people at the Kroger in Kentucky tried to enter a Black Church fifteen minutes earlier
In fact I didn’t know of that one.
But it is also the case that if a black person came to me and said “A bigot just shot up a black church. If that happens near me I want to be able to shoot back” would get my attention and approval.
That is not to say I consider the two cases exactly equivalent. Of course evil and bigotry are involved in both, but blacks aren’t a canary in the civilizational coal mine in quite the way Jews are. The sequel to bigoted violence against blacks is more bigoted violence against blacks. Persecution of Jews, on the other hand, a history of leading to planetary-scale radical evil and the bloody collapse of empires.
“Persecution of Jews, on the other hand, a history of leading to planetary-scale radical evil and the bloody collapse of empires.”
I think you’re mistaking the behavior for the people, or maybe vice-versa. Consider, for example, the unhappiness in Sri Lanka stretching back to the 1950s. Any sensible person could have told you that the behavior of the Sinhalese towards the Tamils wasn’t heading anywhere good, and it doesn’t require Jews to explain why, (though any American Black or Jewish person could have diagnosed the problem instantly!)
And I’d assume that you have noticed that under Trump the rate of prejudice towards Jews is heading upwards just like prejudice towards Blacks – this isn’t a competition, they’re both symptoms of the same disease.
I applaud what you’re trying to do here, but brother, you’ve got a lot to learn, particularly if you’re interested in heading off the civil war towards which we appear to be careening. Essentially, there are two issues here, and you’re addressing only one of them. Yes, abuse will be lessened if everyone is well-able to defend themselves. But you can have a civil war between two well-armed parties that aren’t willing to compromise or agree that each party has equal rights and equal rights to defend their right. The long-term solution is the second one, because historically speaking, well armed opponents fight all the time!
>And I’d assume that you have noticed that under Trump the rate of prejudice towards Jews is heading upwards just like prejudice towards Blacks
But the implication is wrong. Trump isn’t the cause, but a consequence. The cause is the steady fractionation of America by decades of tribalizing identity politics. See my advice to Democrats just after the 2016 election. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
To make it a little more obvious…. In American politics, which is the party of Farrakhan, Sarsour, and the only anti-Jew race riots in the US that I can think of?
Clearly the problem started with Trump.
I think the problem here is Reagan’s removal of the fairness rule. If any radio/TV station has to offer an opposing viewpoint, it does provide everyone with a reality check. I’m not saying this as a Liberal cheering Liberals, but simply noting that we have two parallel systems, neither of which is receiving negative feedback, and as Heinlein noted, a system without negative feedback will eventually run amok. (It happens to be a current accident of history that Conservatives current require much more negative feedback than Liberals, but that doesn’t change the reality that it could was easily be the other way around.)
The fairness rule just meant that the networks were able to shift the Overton window in tiny increments by *slightly* leaning left.
The Non-Left [1] had, and still has a very hard time getting it’s voice heard in mainstream media outlets because those are *still* controlled largely by progressives (MSNBC, NY Times, LA Times, etc.) and democrats (almost all the others). On those networks/news sources they often either find someone who is barely to the right of their chosen position, or they pick someone who has a room temperature IQ to represent the opposing view.
That’s leaving aside the notion that the federal government was allowed to meddle in free speech or freedom of the press. Which the Left used to champion about 2 seconds after it realized it had enough control to start shutting out opposing voices.
[1] Using the term “right” is problematic because y’all don’t recognize the difference between actual fascists (who are economically socialist, and for strong central authoritarian governments like the rest of the left), Conservatives (who are not in favor of central planning economically, at least mostly), Constitutionalists who just want the rules followed, and Libertarians.)
Well of course: the press keeps reporting that Trump is a racist sexist homophobic antisemite, so those fringe elements were emboldened.
You almost have to pity Saturday’s shooter. The press assured him that finally, at long last, there was a President who shared his views. And then Trump shows up with a Jewish daughter and son-in-law whom he gives a prominent position to. And moves the embasy in Israel. And turns out not to be against legal immigrants, or Jews, or gays, or blacks, or…. Why, this is the most disapointing racist sexist homophobic antisemite ever.
No wonder he went on a rampage.
No, it isn’t. The press is just talking about it more.
The disease is that the Democrats are losing and the only strategy they know is to class and race warfare.
“The disease is that the Democrats are losing and the only strategy they know is to class and race warfare.”
That is how many white men see it.
Majority Of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination
Blacks and whites see racism in the United States very, very differently
Non-white people seem to perceive the situation completely different. As do most women.
How Black Americans See Discrimination
Poll finds at least half of Black Americans say they have experienced racial discrimination in their jobs and from the police
But contrary to whites, black people can back their claims up with real data, see e.g.:
For People Of Color, A Housing Market Partially Hidden From View
>And I’d assume that you have noticed that under Trump the rate of prejudice towards Jews is heading upwards
I thought this assertion smelled fishy when you posted it, but I didn’t know it was wrong until I tripped over this: Correcting the ADL’s False Anti-Semitism Statistic.
TL:DR Violence against Jews is down year-over year by 47%. The study the ADL is sighting changed its reporting categories in way that would encourage false positives. And the ADL is misrepresenting the study results on top of that.
It would take a fscking idiot to believe that Trump, with his Jewish-convert offspring, his Jewish grandkids, and his speech pattern obviously and heavily influenced by New York Yiddish speakers of his young adulthood in the 1960s, is any kind of model for anti-Semitism. But there are lots of disonest partisans out there willing to talk like idiots for their left-wingery, and apparently the current head of the ADL is one of them.
Definitely not a good report, then. Thanks for the correction.
On the other hand, we had three terrorist incidents inside a week; one aimed at Blacks, one aimed at Jews, and one more generally aimed at people and entities thought of by MAGA types as Trump’s enemies. I’m not happy about this and anyone who thinks this is pointing in a good direction is a fool, (though I hope it will all calm down after the election is over.)
After two years of Kathy Griffin holding a bloody Trumps head, twits putting a Trump assassination into a Shakespeare play, Representative Steve Scalsie being shot, Paul Ryan getting attacked, Republicans being driven out of restaurants by mobs, Hitlery Clinton saying that civility in America can only begin again if Democrats win back the House or Senate this fall, Maxine Waters encouraging people to harass Trump supporters, Randy Peters (GOP candidate in California) being attacked with a switchblade at a political event, dozens of “elites” on the left calling for violence, several *Democrats* justifying it. Police chiefs ordering their police not protect conservative/republicans during *legal* rallies.
You have the fucking chutzpah to worry about what happens when three nutcases do something crazy, only one of which can be even *loosely* tied to Trump.
You’d best start worrying about the plank in your own eye before the dust motes in mine.
How many buildings did the Tea Party trash? How many cars burned and city centers trashed?
Now how about Antifa?
Yeah, you democrats keep this kind of s*t up and you’re going to find out ALL ABOUT the threefold law the Wiccans keep going on about.
For the record: the Tea Party was noted for leaving the areas where they staged protests far cleaner than when they started.
What is confusing? Eric offers Jews “free instruction in basic self-defense with firearms”.
I understand that a large majority of the Jewish community in the US is opposed to carrying fire-arms in the synagogue. They seem to prefer stricter gun control over armed self defense by a large majority..
Well, this bit for a start. Might be worth reading a bit of relatively recent history.
“Well, this bit for a start. Might be worth reading a bit of relatively recent history.”
You mean like blacks fighting back in the US South before 1968?
Or, even blacks carrying fire arms in the South today?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Philando_Castile
It does not even have to be a fire arm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_John_Crawford_III
Philando Castile was shot in Minnesota; which has never been part of the US South. When you can’t even get basic facts right, why should we give weight to your opinions?
Historically, gun control has been proposed, implemented, and exercised in the United States and in the Several States as a method of oppression of minorities. You will note that Philando Castile was shot and killed attempting to comply with the requirement that he disclose his lawfully-carried and concealed firearm to a police officer; an example of a “well-meaning” gun control law that instead got someone killed.
“When you can’t even get basic facts right, why should we give weight to your opinions?”
No one here cares about my opinion as they consider it poisonous to the True Creed. But I do not think your problems are with my opinions, but that you do not want to give weight to the FACTS I offer. In general, I see “Shoot the messenger” and “Gotcha” as conclusive signs that the speaker feels he has run out of valid arguments.
” You will note that Philando Castile was shot and killed attempting to comply with the requirement that he disclose his lawfully-carried and concealed firearm to a police officer; an example of a “well-meaning” gun control law that instead got someone killed.”
No, Mr Castile was shot by a police officer for carrying a weapon. The fact that he told the PO that he was carrying should never ever have been a reason for a PO to shoot him. On the contrary, it should have been a reason NOT to assume he had bad intentions.
“No, Mr Castile was shot by a police officer for carrying a weapon. The fact that he told the PO that he was carrying should never ever have been a reason for a PO to shoot him. On the contrary, it should have been a reason NOT to assume he had bad intentions.”
I’ll agree with that – but will point out that the police officer would never have known about the firearm if Mr. Castile hadn’t notified the officer; as I believe the law required at the time. (I could be mistaken, I don’t keep track of which states require notification as I don’t currently carry).
The US has a terrible problem with policing, in that for a number of different reasons many police departments hire and retain individuals temperamentally unsuited to the job.
Philando Castile should not have been shot. The officer was charged for his actions, and fired for them. Though he was acquitted of the charges. Since I wasn’t on the jury, I won’t opine as to why the jury felt they couldn’t convict.
“I’ll agree with that – but will point out that the police officer would never have known about the firearm if Mr. Castile hadn’t notified the officer; as I believe the law required at the time. ”
Still, the problem was not with the law but with the PO and the system that keeps hiring and employing them.
Problem with both?
Required notification leads to adrenaline dumps, which are amplified by poor police candidates. WE can more easily change the law than change the police culture, EVEN THOUGH we should be changing both. Also, changing one does not preclude changing the other…
“The US has a terrible problem with policing, in that for a number of different reasons many police departments hire and retain individuals temperamentally unsuited to the job.” True enough and often enough it makes no difference in the end. Then again sometimes it makes all the difference.
Say rather that policing is terribly difficult as embracing quite different tasks in opposition to each other. In the trade these are often called door kickers and peace makers Each is necessary but when the door kicker is assigned an open door and of course the reverse bad things follow inevitably.
There’s a man alive today because with a rifle in his hands he encountered a friend of mine and not me. I reviewed the case file for the defense and asked my friend why the perp survived? I would have shot him. My friend assured me that he could have killed half a dozen more people than he had and the shootings would have been righteous by all the procedures. But he was willing to take risks to avoid killing people because his personal rule was is this necessary not is this in accord with training and procedure.
I can show you people who follow what I might call Tucow’s Law and people who will hesitate just as Books won’t.
In most other rich countries, the police kill only a small fraction of the number of people killed by US police. Examples are the UK, Japan, and Germany.
I think the differences are largely in recruiting, training, and enforcing rules.
> It is not that Jews do not want to defend themselves. When they are the majority in power, they are as martial as everyone else.
I’m assuming you’re referring to Israel. Consider that the Jews who moved there probably had on average a different personality than those who did not. So the example of Israel might not generalize.
It’s been three or four generations since WWII. There are aspects of personality which seem heritable, but a population with a first generation selected for certain personality traits will see a lot more variation in later generations. Differences are more likely a matter of culture and experiences.
There are Jews, first generation Americans, who came to the United States not because they oppose self defense, but because they think Israel is a lousy strategic position.
More generally, American Jews are probably better understood in terms of American cultural influence. One, huge range of variation in cultural influences, because American cultures have huge differences that aren’t obvious if you only spend time in one, or if you are getting your picture of the cultures through a straw. Two, Jewish cultures tend to value education, which translates into a tendency to assimilate to mainstream American intellectual culture. Mainstream American intellectual culture pays attention to official written history. Mainstream American culture focuses on oral history, with pockets of oral history and written history. There is a less mainstream American Jewish culture that has a deep background in the oral and written history of the Holocaust. The official history leaves off certain incidents and trains of analysis that would embarrass the funding sources. So, mainstream American intellectual culture has an attitude of “but that can’t happen here.” Mainstream American culture has some awareness that very bad things can happen here, plus bits and pieces of oral history from every civil war in the world since WWI. Jews who haven’t assimilated to mainstream American intellectual culture know very damn well that however much gentile Americans may provide herd immunity, and may not be particularly motivated to kill Jews, the cost of exterminating Jews is always going to depend on how high they make it, personally.
Israel is a country with PTSD written into its constitution, so to say.
And most of the families there have pictures on the wall of people killed for being Jewish. So “never again” has a continuous presence in their minds, and that’s why a single missile scratching up some unused Israel landscape will invariably lead to some Palestinians being killed.
The problem is that Israel’s view of how to make “never again” happen is a one-trick pony. While I wholly agree with the idea of “never again” I think their strategy sucks; they learned all the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
Absolutely. Instead of trying to heal wounds caused by 70 years of conflict while acting from a position of strength, they continue to make enemies of every following generation of Palestinians.
You’re either ignorant of what has transpired in the last 35 years, or you’re out of your f*king mind.
Israel provides more real aid into the PT than any other country.
They have *ROUTINELY* offered the Palestinians the olive branch, only to have the Palestinians try to beat them with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_rocket_attacks_on_Israel
Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are *at all* interested in peace with Israel. Neither accept the validity of the Israeli government and both wish it destroyed–mostly along with the jews who live there. Hamas changed it’s public position in 2017, but how much of that was a change of heart, and how much of that was having Trump in the Whitehouse? I mean if he’s willing to remind North Korea that if they f*k up there is MASSIVE nuclear retaliation waiting what would he do about Israel killing a few terrorists over a rocket attack on their territory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_Hezbollah
BTW, there already IS a Palestinian Homeland. It’s called *JORDAN*. Ask yourself why the Jordanians do less to help their people than Israel does. Oh, and Yasar Arafat was an Egyptian.
Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_Covenant
Hamas and Hezbollah are NOT the Palestinian people, just like the NSDAP was NOT the German people.
But making enemies of the latter feeds the former.
What’s disturbing is of course the election victory of Hamas in the Gaza strip. That was a declaration of war by the people in Gaza, obtained in a democratic process. They now reap what they sowed.
“BTW, there already IS a Palestinian Homeland. It’s called *JORDAN*.”
Like the “homelands” of Apartheid, aka, Bantustans?
The Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are not Jordanians. They are the native people of what is now Israel, that is why they are called Palestinians. The claimed historical “roots” of the Jewish Israelis are not even in Roman Israel, but in 1st century West Bank.
Btw, the Palestinians have offered a swap. The Israelis get back their historical homeland, ie., the West Bank, and the Palestinians would get what is now Israel. The Israeli government declined. They wanted both.
Yes, they really need to give up on their strategy of constantly pulling their punches when provoked by the Hamassholes, Hezbullies, and other head-chopping, goat-fucking savages who want to wipe them out.
The best thing Israel could possibly do for the Palestinians is to kill their dictators and let the Palestinians get on with building a viable society.
“It seems the Jewish community largely considers shooting back a bad idea. I can understand that. Historically, oppressed minorities that tried shooting back did not fare well. IIRC, the Jews never did try to take up arms, and they are still here. So, it has worked so far.”
A fallacy of composition combined with historical ignorance. Since IIRC it’s convenient for you swing by Prinsengracht 263-265 Amsterdam, Netherlands and count the resident Jews still here for us. Also those still here in much of the Middle East and North Africa e.g. Tunisia and for that matter relative population movements in Western Europe.
When an individual is attacked however unjustly the community may prefer the individual take the hit rather than provoking a more general attack. See e.g. Cossack attacks on the population, pograms, combined with a government position of forced reliance on the government in the manner of a protection racket. Where community pressure is otherwise, e.g. Warsaw, taking up arms has been common. Out of roughly a quarter of a million people processed through Sobibor a minuscule fraction escaped. They too merit remembrance
report to Berlin:
Rashke, Richard. Escape from Sobibor . Delphinium Books. Kindle Edition.
Then on the issue of “never did take up arms” consider Masada both as an armed camp and as an inspiration even today in the 21st Century. Like the well known, in some circles, last letter from Travis or the last message from Wake Island forlorn hopes may leave inspiration for many generations.
“Since IIRC it’s convenient for you swing by Prinsengracht 263-265 Amsterdam, Netherlands and count the resident Jews still here for us.”
Everyone in Europe tried shooting back at German soldiers. That did not work until the Russians got involved. The Russians were the only country large and resourceful enough to effectively counter the German Armies. Everyone else who did not surrender and put up an armed resistance got murdered to the last man standing. The British only were able to resist because of a global empire and considerable US help.
In practice it meant that if you shot a German soldier, they would kill all male inhabitants of your village, or a considerable number of males in your neighborhood. They killed all people if necessary.
A lot of myths are going about WWII are going around in the world. But it is a simple fact that almost every country fought back against the German invasion and simply lost the war. The Germans had the superior army and superior arms.
PS, even many Jews did not know what happened to the deported Jews. They knew it was bad, but not how terribly bad. If you think you are going to prison, you are not going to risk the life of yourself and your family.
Quite right about the ignorance. I’ve heard Elie Wiesel say that his then well off family was offered hiding places even country homes. The family in ignorance believed they could survive the remainder of the war without putting their righteous friends and connections at risk. Mr. Wiesel correctly in my view blamed FDR’s (and others) antisemitism for not simply saying on the BBC and the Voice of America Don’t go. The camps are death camps
Quite wrong about the superiority of the German army and arms [see e.g. The Chieftain from World of Tanks about the Fall of France and the relative quality of WWII tanks and other weapons] and equally wrong about how general the German reprisals were. Lidice and Oradour sur Glane were seldom if ever repeated. It’s almost impossible to do a playable game of Fall Gelb because with rational play and disregarding matters of morale France can’t lose.
It is true that frex the Danish claims of successful resistance were greatly exaggerated.
That acknowledged it was the Nazi leadership in Demark that was responsible for moving the Jews to Sweden as the safest way to leave Denmark free of Jews.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/160607/denmarks-real-miracle-rescue
The Germans had the superior army and superior arms.
Actually, they had neither when they started the war. This is one of the great tragedies that Churchill points out over and over again in his memoirs: how many missed opportunities Britain and France had to stop them early on.
If every Jew had fought back, even losing ten to one, a loss of 600K Nazi minions would have greatly hastened Hitler’s demise. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto certainly proved able to punch well above their weight.
>Actually, they had neither when they started the war.
Half true. They did, arguably, have the superior army for two reasons:
(1) Their tactical and operational doctrine was better matched to the capabilities of the weapons and transport systems of 1939 than any of their opponents had managed.
(2) They’d trained their NCO platoon leaders really, really well. Your average Wermacht feldwebel at the start of the war well outmatched an average allied first looie in tactical skill and resourcefulness. This made them more resilient against incompetence further up the command chain.
Agreed in general but this being the Internet let me disagree in detail.
See e.g. Jodl at Nuremberg on the state of German armed forces in 1939.
Germany used the period of the Phoney War for sustained intense training and so were much the better trained forces when the war of maneuver resumed. But IMHO not until then.
On the other hand in terms of material we often compare late allied war material after development with early German as deployed. And as deployed knocks back a great deal of German effort that might have become competitive after development but were never meaningful as deployed. The T-34 was eventually a dominant tank. At Barbarossa the T-34 was nowhere near what it eventually became.
Arguably given the same resources the German material would have shown up better. With high octane gas late in the war the allies ran much more boost and higher intake pressures improved performance gaps for the airplanes and so it goes.
But this says nothing about active shooters in the United States or even about saving lives. We can see that and have discussed that a Red Flag law – go to the door and round them up – will cost a lot of lives see e.g. recently in IIRC Maryland. Given that resources aren’t infinite I’d worry more about fire control than gun control.
“Then on the issue of “never did take up arms” consider Masada both as an armed camp and as an inspiration even today in the 21st Century.”
It was seen as a lesson on what happens to those who take up arms. The whole uprising marked the end of clasical Israel. Nowadays, they might be seen to be heros. But they and their families all died, leaving nothing behind.
I asked on Facebook about the level of security at synagogues.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10213372950820702
As might be expected, there’s a lot of variation, but a good many synagogues do have security and I expect more will be added after Pittsburgh.
“Persecution of Jews, on the other hand, a history of leading to planetary-scale radical evil and the bloody collapse of empires.”
This could be plausible (there’s something wrong with a culture which is viciously frightened of a harmless and useful minority), but I’m not sure how well it holds up. WW1 was bloody and led to the collapse of empires, but I don’t think it had much to do with anti-Semitism. WW2 led to the collapse of the Nazi empire, but also a number of empires that I think weren’t especially anti-Semitic.
The Spanish empire collapsed three centuries after Spain was notably anti-Semitic. It would be an interesting AH if Spain was in better shape as a result of not expelling its Jews and was therefore able to stand up to Napoleon, but this is guesswork.
The Russian Revolution was preceded by aggressive anti-Semitism, and there might be some connection.
For a useful resource try http://www.activeresponsetraining.net/church-security-resource-compilation?
It’s not true that I – and others – feel less for Chicago than for the suburbs. It is true that for Chicago I have no suggestions.
Chicago is a useful example of the Democratic Party machine moving with the times. That is replacing an alliance with the declining Black Church by an alliance between political leadership and gang leadership. It is hard indeed to climb back up a slippery slope. When I lived in Chicago – first Hyde Park then Back of the Yards – I worked gun shows for the NRA/Illinois State Rifle Association. I’d say an agonizingly slow process but arguably as likely to change things as any individual effort.
Given a thoroughly corrupt system without even hypocrisy as a tribute to virtue I see no pathway to good government. Perhaps G-d will gift the people of Cook County with good government. Probably shortly after a day of rage.
A couple of posters above have mentioned JPFO. All good. But I’d also like to call attention to The Zelman Partisans.
http://zelmanpartisans.com/?page_id=2
http://jpfo.org/
“the knowledge to say how common this was.” Not sure what “this” is. But I think “this
came to be quite common eventually as a matter of form. This implies, as I believe, that discretionary enforcement and application against the “other” was the norm.
The first version of the ordinance in Tombstone, like the New York – wild East – Sullivan Act was a bar on concealed carry. “Lawman Bat Masterson, a friend of Sullivan’s, criticized the [Sullivan] law as “obnoxious” and said that he questioned Sullivan’s mental state of mind over the law.[3] ^ a b DeArment, Robert K. (2013). Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masterson’s New York City Years. University of Oklahoma Press. p. 90. ISBN 978-0-8061-8909-3.
This from Wikipedia this date: [blockquote]The Sullivan Act is a gun control law in New York State that took effect in 1911. The law required licenses for New Yorkers to possess firearms small enough to be concealed. Private possession of such firearms without a license was a misdemeanor, and carrying them in public was a felony. The act was named for its primary legislative sponsor, state senator Timothy Sullivan, a notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall politician.
For handguns, the Sullivan Act qualifies as a may issue act, meaning the local police have discretion to issue a concealed carry license, as opposed to a shall issue act, in which state authorities must give a concealed handgun license to any person who satisfies specific criteria, often a background check and a safety class. [/blockquote]
Tombstone promptly amended its law as cited above to a ban on carry be it concealed or not. Idaho by statute law frowned on concealed carry for many years. When it became an issue and Californication was on the verge of leading to enforcement Idaho law was written to allow concealed carry by most anybody most anyplace. Idaho makes provision for permits for purposes of reciprocity but not much otherwise. Idaho people into this century may put on a handgun with their pants but often open carried in a gun belt. I mostly put on a handgun with my shoot me first vest. [blockquote]By common law in North Carolina, it is unlawful for a person to arm himself with any unusual and dangerous weapon, for the purpose of terrifying others, and go about on public highways in a manner to cause terror to others. The N.C. Supreme Court has said that any gun is an unusual and dangerous weapon for purposes of this offense. Therefore persons are cautioned as to the areas they frequent with firearms.[/blockquote] IIRC Texas and many other states shared this notion of leave it vague and up to a jury by common and statute law. For many years Texas was unusual in that concealed meant concealed and being made as by printing was punished as “brandishing” with criminal intent presumed however accidental the exposure.
My observation is that references such as quoted by the OP are in line with and in furtherance of the argument made in Arming American. [blockquote]Clayton Cramer, a historian, software engineer, gun enthusiast and early critic of Bellesiles, later argued that the reason “why historians swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well… Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right.”[4] Historian Peter Charles Hoffer, an advocate of gun control, lent support to Cramer’s charge when, in a 2004 examination of the Bellesiles case, he noted that influential members of the historical profession had “taken strong public stands on violence in our society and its relation to gun control.”[5] For instance, the academics solicited for blurbs by Bellesiles’ publisher Alfred A. Knopf “were ecstatic in part because the book knocked the gun lobby.”[6] [/blockquote] Wikipedia this date again.
Again from family lore I’d have to ask one my Aunts who ended up with the family heirloom chest of drawers that has a bullet hole from Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence but I wouldn’t have to ask anybody about the family always being willing and able to shoot back.
@clark e myers –
You have to use actual angle brackets < and > to get your blockquote markup to work, not square brackets.
Also, there should be a preview block when you leave a comment – you can check your markup and other formatting there.
Thanks for the information–I was referring to “check your guns” laws in the “Wild West”….I had heard that there were limitations on concealed carry in the east; a long time ago I saw an Alabama case on the subject from before 1850 (the court was admitting the legislature had the power to limit concealed carry), though I don’t have broader knowledge .
The Sullivan Law comes up in some of Damon Runyon’s fun stories, generally as something one of his characters is breaking…
FYI Operation Blazing Sword (http://www.blazingsword.org/ ), which was set up after the Pulse Nightclub event to train the LGBTQ crowd, has a similar offer
From Facebook
I would recommend that anyone who is willing to volunteer time to train others on firearms usage consider signing up with them
Disclosure: OBS’ founder Erin Palette and some of the others involved are on-line friends of mine
The shootings will continue until either the 2nd Amendment or the Democrats are destroyed.
What makes you think either will stop the shootings?
And why focus on *shootings* rather than *killings*?
On your second question, I would say intent vs outcome. If someone shoots me, I don’t want them absolved just because I had the good fortune to have within close reach an ambulance, hospital, and skilful emergency team.
You missed the emphasis in my question.
They claim to be worried about violence, but it’s only the guns they care about. That was the point.
Any thoughts on the whole Gab thing?
“It was seen as a lesson on what happens to those who take up arms”
I doubt this is what happens to people who take up arms was the whole of the lesson Moshe Dayan was trying to teach when he instituted graduation ceremonies at the Masada site for people taking up arms.
There are similar graduation ceremonies at other sites including prisons – symbolic for non-natives serving – where once upon a time things did not go well and yet people remember Masada.
Canada has a rather effective display for This is defeat. Avoid it. Children in Texas schools learn Travis’s letter and the lesson intended and drawn is not to avoid taking up arms.
May the Second Amendment help us all to defend ourselves against such evil men. And may good and wise men and women consistently and unashamedly defend our Second Amendment.
Another fallacy of composition if you will. The shootings in both Dodge and Ellsworth were as noted in the days of the Kansas cow towns – cue the theme from Rawhide – involving mostly non-residents.
Similarly Chicago has neighborhoods with lots of shootings and neighborhoods with few shootings. The last year I lived in the Back of the Yards (there’s a connection there to cow towns, the local bank in Chicago was Drover’s) there were 5 deaths by gun shot within a one block radius – that is one block in any direction including north across the street a robbery, west across the street a drive by, southeast corner of the same block apparently a music critic who objected to a whistler and so it went. Despite amazing population density in The Back of the Yards when something happened and everybody poured into the street the relevant populations were more nearly comparable than total population numbers imply.
Today’s Chicago Tribune:
The horrific killings in Pittsburgh have resulted in a huge media spasm of outrage and notoriety, but that type of attack is still largely a rarity in modern life. Yet, as your article references, similar carnage is routine in Chicago and yet it gets hardly a peep of attention on the national news radar anymore. Is that kind of disparity morally justifiable? In the abstraction, are we in essence saying that some citizens are more worthy than others?
“…are we in essence saying that some citizens are more worthy than others?”
No.
This has already been answered up thread.
The killings in Pittsburgh are preventable with readily available resources.
The killings in Chicago are not preventable by any available measure.
If Chicago could be fixed, there are no shortage of capable people who would do so.
It is considered wise to not spend worry time on things you cannot influence.
“The killings in Pittsburgh are preventable with readily available resources.
The killings in Chicago are not preventable by any available measure.”
Those are assertions. Perhaps you can elaborate with facts to support them.
I agree with Eric that personal protection (firearm ownership and training) is the only realistic mitigation against a crazed random killer. It seems to me that that policy can apply everywhere.
Also, there are many large cities in the US with poor black neighborhoods in which routine murder carnage is absent. What is unique about Chicago that makes it unsolvable (impossible in your words)? As I recall, Rahm Emanuel was the mayor there for many years. What prevented him from making the necessary changes?
“It seems to me that that policy can apply everywhere.”
Of course it could. But it won’t. Because no one is willing to do so. And this shows no signs of changing.
“Rahm Emanuel was the mayor there for many years. What prevented him from making the necessary changes?”
Thanks for the laugh. Truly.
What prevented Rahm is Rahm. And everyone like him.
Zebras don’t change their stripes and Chicago has been Chicago since way before living memory.
I’d really, really like to be totally wrong about this. Please prove me wrong.
You asked me to elaborate with facts. Fair. But are there any facts on the ground at all to suggest Chicago is changing for the better – or ever will?
The only “fact” I care to argue is Newton’s first law, this body in motion won’t change direction without external force and I see no such thing likely to happen.
I beg to be wrong.
Do you know *anything* about Chicago?
“What prevented him from making the necessary changes?”
Short version- the fact that the people doing the killing are a vital part of his constituency.
https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2012/Gangs-and-Politicians-An-Unholy-Alliance/
Chicago is governed by a political machine, and gangs are a part of what keeps the machine functioning. The beneficiaries of the machine are not about to break it.
> Also, there are many large cities in the US with poor
> black neighborhoods in which routine murder carnage
> is absent.
Really?
Which ones?
> The killings in Chicago are not preventable by any available measure.
Yes, they are.
> If Chicago could be fixed, there are no shortage of capable people who would do so.
The problem isn’t insoluble, it’s that too many people are profiting off it, and the solution flies in the face of the people who buy their bandwidth by the terabyte.
Right. That’s exactly what I mean when I say “any available measure”. The fix may exist, but it isn’t available to anyone willing to apply it.
Actually, this was a terror attack, that is, pure terrorism
(replace white anti-semite with muslim attacker and you see).
Terror attacks always garner more press time than simple crimes. The fact that white alt-right attacks are rarely labeled “terrorism” is politically motivated. But they are still perceived as terror attacks.
I wouldn’t call the killings in Pittsburgh horrific. Sad even tragic but like the Laughing Policeman, I’ve seen worse and I wouldn’t trivialize horrific. Similar carnage is common in many places.
October 24, 2018 5:16 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
It’s not a matter of worthy lives, it’s a matter of as some say “First rule of media club: do not talk about violence without blaming Republicans.” WSJ
In sum I join in asking
Tony Katz Today
Carry a gun so you’re hard to kill and carry a tourniquet whether you carry a gun or not.
Although I read this blog often, I comment very rarely. I want to say thanks for this post.
When this sort of thing happens, I try to encourage other Jews to remember that there is a distinction between (1) a sort of functional, normal person who has anti-Semitimic beliefs in conjunction with his other beliefs and (2) a crazy person who has latched on to anti-Semitism as his outlet, but would just have easily chosen any number of other things. It’s not always easy to distinguish between them, but I think it’s important to think about it nonetheless, because it’s the former that is much more dangerous in the sense you mentioned. My personal experience is that American Jews slightly overestimate (1) with respect to (2), and that Americans as a whole underestimate the absolute levels of both – especially with respect to attitudes abroad.
Of course, even if I’m correct in my distinction, if there is an upward trend in (2), it probably tracks with an upward trend in (1); so any visible, violent event should be troubling regardless (beyond the tragedy itself).
I rarely admit it, because a lot of people act like I’m crazy for saying it, but a significant part of what I’ll call my experience-prompted-reasoning behind my lifelong support of firearms ownership and early adoption of libertarian political philosophy is that I don’t want my family to be murdered because of my heritage.
A reactionary blogger had a very good take on it: http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=13168
“Obviously, my resistance to antisemitism is not based in ignorance of the material or fear of the morality police. The real issue for me is that anti-Semites taste Jews in their sandwich. They are like a man who has only mastered how to use a hammer. He sees every problem as a nail. In the case of anti-Semites, everything is blamed on the Jews to the point of absurdity. It seems to me that in order to be an anti-Semite, one has to commit their life to it, like joining the priesthood or a religious cult. It must define one’s life.”
Indeed. I see Anti-Semitism very easily becoming a kind of a stupidity spiral. This is why I kind of mourn for voat.co – having an anti-Reddit dedicated to free speech without political correctness censorship sounded like a good thing, but it became the place where every analysis ends at “it’s (((them)))” or when someone points out the late Andrew Breitbart or the Israelis who offered firearms training to Boer farmers the predictable answer is “(((they))) are playing both sides”. It is just frustratingly dumb.
I even agree with this. Anti-antisemitism is a litmus test of stupidity.
If you learn that a person is an anti-semite, you know for sure that he or she is a fool, probably incorrigibly* so.
*Not certain about this. I have seen credible reports of Anti-Semites who came to understand it’s stupidity.
“Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools.”
(I’d include, as an appendix, “Socialism is the foolishness of smarter people”.)
Thinking aloud. Owning and carrying guns is typically that sort of thing where the optimums lie on the extremes, not in the middle. Either you are very successful, Japan-level successful at suppressing them. Or enough people carry them, at all times, everywhere, that at any place where people come together, there are 5-10 who can shoot back. The kind of thing Europe is doing that it is technically illegal yet the Bataclan shooters managed to smuggle them in is not working. The kind of thing subsets of America are doing, that it is technically legal yet in many cultures-subcultures people don’t want to carry, or don’t want to carry them precisely to the kind of places where an attack is most likely (where many people come together), is not working either. No middle way. The middle way is the worst. This isn’t like drugs, where some people doing them may be an acceptable compromise between many people doing them and nobody. This is different. Many or none are the only optimums.
“The kind of thing Europe is doing that it is technically illegal yet the Bataclan shooters managed to smuggle them in is not working.”
With inner city murder rates below the US national average, there is no indication it is not working. Even with the Bataclan horrors, Europe has way lower rates of mass shootings than the USA.
But then, Europe has way lower traffic deaths, preventable medical deaths, and murder rates than the USA. Gun control is just part of a larger public health effort to reduce preventable deaths which does involve enforcing safety rule from DUI to health care access.
Until you control for race, all American-European comparisons should be presumed confounded.
“Until you control for race, all American-European comparisons should be presumed confounded.”
Which is the mark of racism.
> Which is the mark of racism.
So basically you’re saying that it is UNPOSSIBLE that while there is CLEARLY a genetic component to psychopathology, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, Autism and depression, there can’t possibly be one between IQ, Time preference and violent behavior?
And that ANY investigation into that is THOUGHT CRIME!
It is next to impossible to control for (for want of a better term off the top of my head) culture, race + zip (postal) code is as good a proxy as you’re going to get.
There is a demonstrable link between the culture of Americans of sub-Saharan south African descent and the culture of the Scots-Irish (see https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XRDBYE/). This culture has always been violent and is NOT good for either African Americans or the Scots-Irish. It likely does not exist on the continent. The closest you’ll get (until about 20 years ago) is the Roma, and we know how THEY are treated in Europe.
Well, some of us do. But that’s different, right?
When you compare European “inner cities” with American “inner cities” you see *murder rates* are much lower regardless of the implement used. You also see MUCH more cultural and racial homogeneity. Where you don’t have that homogeneity you start to see higher levels of violence. This means that guns are irrelevant to the problem.
There is also a question of just how accurate the statistics are–We see from places like Rotherham, England and Miami Gardens (Flordia, US) how politically correct policing can both skew statistics AND lead to worse problems.
It is a difficult to compare statistics across regulatory regimes. For example in the US poverty rates are determined by income *exclusive* of most forms of government aid, while in Europe it’s *inclusive* of many of those. This gives very different numbers.
I looked up the definition of racism:
“The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.”
The comment by Eric stated that racial differences between the USA and Europe were important in comparing murder rates. That was not a research question, but a statement of fact. I cannot interpret this otherwise than that it is taken as a given that some races are more prone to violent crime, e.g., mass shootings, than other races.
This matches this definition of racism perfectly, assuming that shooting is a superior/inferior characteristic.
I refuse to take the fact that mass shooting in the USA are predominately performed by white people as conclusive evidence that white people are inherently predisposed to mass-murder.
The other comment was from “Erik” with a “k”.
My bad
Winter, try reading what I wrote, rather than what you imagined I wrote so you could get your preen on.
I read:
“Until you control for race …”
What does race have to do with crime and murder? Unless, of course, you consider different races to be different?
> “The belief that all members of each
> race possess characteristics, abilities,
> or qualities specific to that race, especially
> so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior
> to another race or races.”
That only works if you take out the “especially so as” and replace it with “in order to”.
“Sub-saharan Africans have more melanin in their skin which provides additional protection from UV rays.”
“Sub-Saharan Africans are more likely to have sickle-cell trait than non-SSAs. Sickle-cell trait is protective against malaria”.
“Northern Europeans lack melanin, and this lack enables them to more efficiently use what sunlight they do get to produce vitamin D. ”
Again, not a racists statement because they are *objective* facts that provide reasonable predictions and outcomes. I can predict that a swede that moves to Nigeria will either need MORE protection from the sun, or will be MORE LIKELY to develop certain sun related skin conditions. Additionally a Nigerian moving to Milwaukee would be well advised to take supplemental vitamin D.
Now, we all agree that the majority of non-brain things–skin color, eye color, hair color, muscle fiber development, femur length, etc. etc. are linked to genetics.
I *don’t* think that those of primarly Sub-Saharan African descent are more likely to commit certain times of crime *because* they are SSA. I think that certain sub-cultures promote certain kinds of behavior, and because race is strongly correlated with those sub-cultures (see “asian tiger mom”, “Jewish American Princess”, “Rednecks” etc.) it winds up getting used as a proxy.
There is reasonable evidence for a cross pollination between freed slaves and poor scots-irish during the reconstruction period. The descendants of these American Blacks moved north and west during the depression and *especially* during WWII for factory work. This is (in part) why cities that had large war based labor forces (Oakland, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis etc.) have larger black populations *and larger social problems* than cities that did not.
Sorry, but high melanin in the skin is not limited to people whose ancestors originated in sub-Saharan Africa. And the genetic causes of Sickle cell anemia are not shared by all people originating in SSA.
Biological race is simply non-existing in humans (the supposed exception are very marginal communities). And community level genetic differences in human behavior are fiction.
>Biological race is simply non-existing in humans ”
That’s an idiotic claim.
If you are a medical doctor, and you fail to act on the information that American blacks are genetically much more prone to hypertension than Americans of Euro descent, you are committing malpractice that might kill a nontrivial number of black people.
That is not “race”. Ancestry is not race. Ancestry gives handles on a host of genetic problems, but race is something much more extensive. Race divides people into groups that ALL differ on a large number of genetic markers, with insignificant or no intermediates. That is not found in humans, with possibly just one marginal exception.
> Race divides people into groups that ALL differ on a large number of genetic markers, with insignificant or no intermediates.
A definition of “race” used by no person, ever – not even racists. Nice strawman.
“A definition of “race” used by no person, ever – not even racists. Nice strawman.”
That is the definition used by biologists. It is the only definition that makes sense if you try to link genetics to race.
What you say is that you use a social definition meaning “looks or behaves different”. That is the only sense in which Jews and Africans are a race. It is also the definition used by racist, because the biological definition does not help them discriminating against those who look different.
Btw way, there are many racists who motivate their racism by equating human populations with dog breeds. Dog breeds are defined according to the definition I gave.
The problem here (and this is addressed to both Eric and Winter) is that there is both a genetic answer (in which Eric is right) and a cultural answer (in which Winter is headed in the right direction, at least) Ideally we want to erase cultural ideas about race, which tend to be very damaging, while preserving genetic answers about race, which might be of immense help to medical people.
The problem comes when people assume that their cultural ideas about race are reflected in the actual genes – I think this falsehood is one of the essential issues of racism.
The problem comes in trying to go both ways simultaneously; the balancing act is more difficult than it looks!
>Ideally we want to erase cultural ideas about race, which tend to be very damaging
I only want to erase cultural ideas about race that are false-to-fact. To the extent that “cultural ideas about race” are true-to-fact observations about differences in allele distribution, I’m happy to let them be.
Example: “East Asians are hard-working and intelligent.” This is a cultural idea about race that is true, and underpinned by their distribution of IQ and time preference. Can’t think of any reason I should want to erase it.
Oh, but you’re talking about negative stereotypes. You know, I can’t think of any good reason to erase true negative stereotypes either. If “Group X averages lazy and stupid” is observationally true, and we can identify a genetic substratum of low average IQ and high time preference, there is no more warrant to “erase” that idea than there would be to erase the idea about East Asians.
Note: I am neither proposing nor defending any particular negative stereotype here. Just pushing back against what I consider dumb, reflexive thinking.
The problem here is that people want to equate genetic differences between people that run in communities with historical ideas about “race” that have no basis in biology.
The black people with SSH roots that reach Europe are considered by racists to be the same as those that descent for USA slaves. However, genetically, they are an extremely diverse lot. Blacks in the USA alone have around 17% of European genes (a small fraction of “Blacks” in the USA has less than 2% of African Ancestry, cf., Blacks in Brazil close to 25%). In Africa, Eritreans and Ethiopians are more closely related to West-Asian people than to Bantu people, etc.
USA
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929714004765
South America
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929717303907
It is all nice to claim to use “genetic facts”, but then you should stick to “genetics” and not try to use Procrustes’ bed to cut all people who Americans call “Black” to the same size. Different communities have (slightly) different genetic make ups, but these have nothing at all to do with “Race”. That is why people who actually work in and on human genetics do not use this muddled “Race” classification. Its much, much worse than useless.
In short, if you want to use arguments from genetics, stick to genetic science instead of Voodoo racial superstition.
See also:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/biologically-race-only-skin-deep
Back in the 19th century it was understood that race means ancestry, and you can zoom in and out on mankind’s family tree as you wish. It was entirely common, for example, to call a nation a race. The last usage of this kind I remember was Sir Winston Churchill’s book on British history title The Island Race.
After that things got really murky. Some accepted only the most zoomed-out taxa, the few major races. Another interesting twist was when racial categories were introduced not to discriminate against minorities but precisely to help them. The US and UK governments did this, for example, for me it was surprising that I had to enter my race into a UK university application form. But this is not really meant as “what is your family tree” but more like “have you been discriminated against by people who see you as an X, hence qualifying for some compensatory goodies?”
This particular sense of race is obviously socially constructed, with the classic example being “Hispanic”, which includes whites, Amerindians and blacks, as long as their ancestors came from Latin America or at least they think they did. While the central example of a Hispanic person is a mestizo, this is not at all strongly defined, there are white and black Hispanics. The only possible logic behind such a category is precisely the opposite of racism as usually understood, an attempt to identify victims of racism. Well, or political tactics. This and only this aspect is socially constructed.
While the family tree is real. The correct usage of race, if we ignore the political bullshit about it, is any (zoomed in or zoomed out) part of the human family tree, any group of people more related to each other than anyone else.
In the past it was fairly simple because most people married locally. Same town or county. Recently it got seriously complex, with the age of migrations. However it seems people are reluctant to marry outside their ethnicity even if they are moving around all over the globe. Random example: Japanese people lived in Brazil for over 100 years, yet only 28% of them have some non-Japanese ancestry today.
The problem with this reasoning is that people are claim scientific consequences to follow pre-scientific classifications. They claim that their pre-scientific classification of races supports their to make (pseudo-)scientific conclusions on social problems.
The slave holders and Jim Crow supporters did not use “Race” in the “family-tree” sense, but in the Apartheid (and worse) sense. They considered black people a different race in the way we consider the Neanderthal people a different race, or even Homo Erectus (which is generally considered a different species). And if you listen to the modern alt-right, they consider all non-white races in the same Neanderthal (or Homo Erectus) versus Cro-Magnon sense.
And even in the Family Tree sense, native Sub Saharan Africans are not a single “race”.
>They considered black people a different race in the way we consider the Neanderthal people a different race, or even Homo Erectus (which is generally considered a different species).
No, they didn’t. Slaveholders found black women sexually attractive and kept them as mistresses. QED.
I’m not defending the practice, but I am pointing out that slaveholder racism was a more complex phenomenon than you, in your usual invincibly self-assured historical ignorance, assume. Slaveholders knew blacks were human; what they believed was that blacks were congenitally inferior humans whom God had made to be dominated and used by superior humans.
And, as I’ve written in prior comments, the racialist explanation of slavery didn’t fully take hold until quite late in the history of the “peculiar institution”. I’ve even seen an argument, which on the timing of the primary sources I cannot immediately dismiss, that it finally solidified as a reaction to the Abolitionism of the early 1800s.
“No, they didn’t. Slaveholders found black women sexually attractive and kept them as mistresses. QED.”
Cro-Magnon interbred with Neanderthal, most of us still carry the genetic results. QED.
I hope I do not have to go into details about what men historically have used to satisfy their needs.
>Cro-Magnon interbred with Neanderthal, most of us still carry the genetic results.
And your evidence that Cro-Magnons thought Neanderthals weren’t the same species as them is… ?
About slaveowners we don’t have to guess. We have their own accounts describing their beliefs.
Do you believe that West Africans are statistically superior to Europeans at playing basketball? Note that individual Europeans are quite good at the game, but statistically, African Americans, who comprise just under 1/7 of the US population, command the vast majority of NBA roster spots. Is noticing that fact racist? If not, why?
To me, it’s racism when one reasons from the group to the individual, and then rejects, say, a Larry Bird because he’s white, and “whites are inferior”. It’s not racism to recognize group differences, so long as it’s not then used to justify pre-judging someone based on group membership rather than individual characteristics.
>Do you believe that West Africans are statistically superior to Europeans at playing basketball?
I’m in a mood to be cruel to bullshit-mongers, so let’s tighten the screw here.
The same sort of combination of historical performance with a polygenic but heritable trait justifies the proposition “Europeans are inferior to West Africans at playing basketball” also justifies the proposition “West Africans are statistically inferior to Europeans at theoretical mathematics.”
Winter, are you going to deny one claim? Both claims? If just one, I expect to be greatly entertained by your attempts to explain how the evidentiary bases for these claims are different.
/me gets popcorn.
“The same sort of combination of historical performance with a polygenic but heritable trait justifies the proposition “Europeans are inferior to West Africans at playing basketball” also justifies the proposition “West Africans are statistically inferior to Europeans at theoretical mathematics.””
Roma are historically bad at both theoretical mathematics and basketball. So were children of North England mining communities. And the Dutch are good at Olympic ice-skating, but bad at Olympic skiing.
What deep conclusions can be drawn from these facts? What “Races” can we define here?
PS, some Dutchmen are playing in the NBA. https://basketball.realgm.com/national/teams/17/Netherlands/nba_players
That is probably because the Dutch are one of the tallest people on earth.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36888541
>Roma are historically bad at both theoretical mathematics and basketball.
Nice evasion, better than I was expecting. So, am I to take it you think the West African superiority over Europeans at basketball is all culture and environment, nothing whatsoever to do with height and distribution of fast-twitch muscle fiber?
>That is probably because the Dutch are one of the tallest people on earth.
Ohhhhh. So, they’re good at basketball because of a polygenic trait that can be stunted by poor early nutrition but not increased past a ceiling controlled by the sum of a whole bunch of weakly plus or minus alleles. Culture is barely involved at all except to the extent it tends to prevent that poor childhood nutrition.
Now, where have we seen that pattern before?
Which is all a just so story. You can pile up all the just-so-stories you want. To get at a “story” based in genetics, you will have to come up with genetic data and data that tells us how these genetic profiles interact with diseases and nutrition.
>To get at a “story” based in genetics, you will have to come up with genetic data and data that tells us how these genetic profiles interact with diseases and nutrition,
Yeah. That’s called a separated-twin study, fool.
“Yeah. That’s called a separated-twin study, ”
And that comes from a person who did not understand what “heritability” means.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7268&cpage=1#comment-1797125
Just in case, here is a repost of some links:
http://psych.colorado.edu/~carey/hgss/hgssapplets/heritability/heritability.intro.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability
And for those who think that the “nurture” in the USA must be at its human possible ceiling:
Height, Health Care and I.Q.
https://blogs.plos.org/retort/2010/11/01/height-health-care-and-i-q/
>And that comes from a person who did not understand what “heritability” means.
You are still obfuscating the difference between phenotypic traits that have almost symmetrical response to environmental factors and those that do not. And then accusing me of not understanding heritability? It is to laugh.
Despite you most fervent wishful thinking, separated twins still revert towards the average IQ of their genetic parents after puberty.
“You are still obfuscating the difference between phenotypic traits that have almost symmetrical response to environmental factors and those that do not.”
But then you have to supply the data that shows this is actually the case. What I never see is actual data about genetic responses to environmental differences. If you look at the last link I posted, there they have data that shows that length will equalize if the environment is optimized. The genetic differences are mostly caused by differential responses to non-optimal environments.
“separated twins still revert towards the average IQ of their genetic parents after puberty.”
Given the shared pre-natal (and often post-partum) environment and the skewed environments where separated twins get into does not allow you to draw conclusions about the genetics of the features. What separated twins allow you to study is the effect of specified environmental factors on phenotypes given shared genes. But that is exactly what is not done in the IQ studies.
> What I never see is actual data about genetic responses to environmental differences.
Separated-twin studies actually do what you are describing, despite your denials. But what’s the point of arguing with you? You’ll just refuse reality and substitute your own.
“Separated-twin studies actually do what you are describing, despite your denials.”
Except that it is consensus that there is an interaction between genes and environment and that the separated twin studies on IQ did nothing to actually evaluate the relevant environmental factors. What then follows in your reasoning is goes very far beyond sound thinking:
0 IQ tests are free of cultural bias and measure inherited intelligence. We most definitely ignore the Flynn effect and the fact that every IQ test has to be normalized to mean 100 and sd 15 for every population it is used in
1 IQ differences have a genetic and environmental basis, lets forget the environment part
2 There are differences in average IQ between different communities in the USA, lets focus on skin color and ignore the rest.
3 People of different skin colors have different ancestors, and are genetically not closely related. So lets simply assume all Black people are the same and all differ from White people in the genes relevant to IQ
Conclusion:
a) Black people are less intelligent than white people because they differ genetically from white people.
b) As the difference is based in genetics, nothing has to be done about it.
“There is a demonstrable link between the culture of Americans of sub-Saharan south African descent and the culture of the Scots-Irish (see https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XRDBYE/). This culture has always been violent and is NOT good for either African Americans or the Scots-Irish. It likely does not exist on the continent. The closest you’ll get (until about 20 years ago) is the Roma, and we know how THEY are treated in Europe.”
And what is the relation with “Race”? Cultures can be very violent. And violence can increase and decrease. The color of one’s skin, ancestry, or religion, are only important as long as society makes it important.
> And what is the relation with “Race”?
Race/ethnicity is used (generally) as proxy for culture and behavior.
In the US those of SSA ancestry make up less than 15 percent of the population, and the “poor inner city” blacks are a *significant* portion of that–the *cultural* distribution of SSAs is much more narrow than that of European whites.
> The color of one’s skin, ancestry, or
> only important as long as society makes
> it important.
I am confident enough of that assertion to allow it to be rigorously tested. First to test it we need to gather *accurate* data against which to test hypotheses.
My suspicion is that it will be like IQ. There is *some* link, but a not particularly deposition one. (Actually I suspect that as we do more genetic research we will find a strong genetic component to “time preference” or “executive function” which is more developed in people with genetic links to environments that demand long term planning and punish high time preference).
But if someone suggests a testable hypothesis–that the presence of those with SSA ancestry in inner city areas can be linked with higher crime rates, you IMMEDIATELY assert that they are racists and that such a thing is preposterous.
It either is, or it isn’t true. Now, the hypothesis as stated is problematic (“inner city” and “crime rates” are both location and culturally dependent, sometimes along a couple vectors), but this is also a blog, not a Masters Thesis.
And even if it IS true, it doesn’t mean that *race* is involved. The Scots-Irish are a good example–many of them (lore has it) immigrated from the counties between Scotland and England–a set of counties that were involved in the wars between Scotland and England for about 15-20 *generations* (1300s to 1600s, off and on.), and it is theorized that selected for certain genetic traits and built certain cultural artifacts that people from that area took with them when they went to Ireland, and then to the US where they largely settled in Appalachia and parts of the antediluvian south. They tended to be poor share croppers and were the *almost* bottom rung on the hierarchy.
They had many of the characteristics that are applied to inner city SSAs today–drug and alcohol overuse, promiscuity and a tendency to respond violently. However they were not a “race” in the way we normally think if it, but more a twig on the tree that is humanity. But one could consider living in a place that rarely went more than a couple decades without a battle being fought in the general vicinity (with the concomitant abuses of the local population that happened in wars during that era) you can see where selection pressures *might* select for that IF IT IS SELECTABLE.
> religion, are
You must not be particularly religious.
Religion is *INCREDIBLY* influential in culture. If you’ve been raise your entire life to believe that Protestants are the only ones getting into heaven and Catholics are the tool of SATAN, then refusing to hire Catholics, using their daughters as cum dumpsters (willing or not, after all they’re all whores) and even killing them on occasion isn’t that big a deal.
It should have penetrated even your rather blinkered world view that when Yugoslavia fell apart people who’d been neighbors for a couple generations were very soon at each others throats, and that the schism largely fractured along religious lines (which were also ethnic lines, but in that area there was so much interbreeding over 100s of years that I doubt there was much ‘racial’ delineation left)
“It is a difficult to compare statistics across regulatory regimes. ”
But a dead body is a dead body.
“Natural causes” is pretty easy to rule out when there are bullets or knives involved. Murder rates are quite insensitive to regulatory regimes between Europe and the USA.
“Murder rates are quite insensitive to regulatory regimes between Europe and the USA.”
No. Because authorities have been systematically covering up crimes committed by immigrants and POC.
I don’t trust crime stats from Europe or anywhere politics takes precedence over truth.
“I don’t trust crime stats from Europe or anywhere politics takes precedence over truth.”
Evidence, please. “Race” was not (and often still is not) recorded in crimes. That has various legal reasons. But these crimes were still recorded and are in the statistics.
So, what is the evidence people were murdered and these murders were kept out of the statistics for political reasons?
And their families and friends kept quiet, and the media kept quiet too. The North European countries do not have many pro-government media, if any. Most media are anti-government by default, irrespective of the government.
This all sounds too much like Pangloss:
My countries is the best possible country and anyone who points out another country does something better must be lying.
“Evidence, please.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerscruton/2014/08/30/why-did-british-police-ignore-pakistani-gangs-raping-rotherham-children-political-correctness/#2a90d012754a
This is the most egregious example I’ve heard of. But there are many reports in the media of (e.g.) rape not being reported or investigated because the police feared being called “racist”. They said so.
Now this isn’t murder. But that misses the point.
The point is that once you know they are willing to cover up crime for political reasons, you can no longer believe anything they say. And those examples reported in the media are, by definition, only those we know about.
That is why we talk about murders. Dead bodies are difficult to ignore.
“Most media are anti-government by default, irrespective of the government.”
Balderdash.
In the US, when the leftists are in power, the media act as their PR arm. Old Pravda would be proud. In 8 years of the Obama presidency there was never any substantive criticism of his administration even tho there were plenty of scandals to make hay with and sell advertising.
When the lefts are in power over here, they are lambasted by all the media. When the right is in power, they are lambasted by all the media. If the center is in power, they are lambasted by all the media. Actually, we do not trust any media outlet that is NOT critical of those in power.
This is true also in Germany and other North-West European countries.
I know it is different in the USA, e.g., Fox News is to the GOP what the Pravda was to the Communist Party of the USSR.
“Fox News is to the GOP what the Pravda was to the Communist Party of the USSR.”
You’re so fscking dishonest, I have no idea why anyone here even bothers to respond to you.
You pick the one solitary example of a somewhat sorta right-leaning news media and equate it to Pravda.
But every other news outlet (counted in the dozens – hundreds) are the Pravda of our age. They are the cheerleaders for the approved narrative.
Fox News, to whatever extent they represent a counterexample, are weak and pathetic and no-one but you would think they could be equated to the Official Mouthpiece of the Communist Party.
Could you send me some of whatever drugs you’re on.
@Michael,
I picked the ibe example, also the meda outlet with the most viewers, that nobody here ever mentions.
Also,
> Murder rates are quite insensitive to
> regulatory regimes between Europe
> and the USA.
Proving once again you know f*k all about what you speak.
At what point in the investigation is a death labelled “accidental”, “misadventure”, “suicide”[1], “natural causes”, or some variant of “murder”?
Do you log it as a murder when you find the body with a hole in the head? Or when it is determined *why* the hole was put there (suicide[1], accident, murder etc.)? Or when someone is arraigned (more formal than “arrested”.
Different jurisdictions have different notions of when this goes “on the books”.
In the US we have several different categories (depending on who has jurisdiction) of criminal homicide ranging from Manslaughter to First, Second and Third degree murder. Justifiable Homicide (which is NOT a crime most of the time), And “Felony Homicide” in which someone dies during the commission of a felony (maybe even one of the criminals) and the remaining criminals are charged with “murder”. In some cases if you sell a junkie heroin and they die from it, you can be prosecuted for murder.
This DOES vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction–in the US the DoJ “normalizes” this data for the US, but I’ve not seen *anyone* attempt to regularize this across regulatory boundaries.
And this assumes that the denizens of that area trust the police enough to even call them. Do you REALLY think that the more hardline muslims in Hamtramack or the Paris suburbs call in the police when someone commits suicide[1] by dating the wrong guy? Or falls off the roof because he was dating the wrong guy?
As noted we have SEEN what political correctness does to crime investigations, reports and statistics. It’s not hard to believe that in places where bureaucrats hold even more power that people won’t go shining flashlights into dark corners.
[1] Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying ‘Got rocks in your head?’ to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful.”
He’s persistent and shameless, I’ll grant him that.
I had this discussion, on this very blog, with him a few years ago, about murder and other crime statistics in the UK.
The takeaway is that even when they’re honest they work very differently from ours so comparison is apples to oranges.
And even then, it was a known but not widely publicized fact that the books were being cooked by authorities with a vested interest in crime appearing to be lower than it actually is.
So much so that a second, completely separate system of collecting crime statistics was instituted. (That gives much higher figures, surprisingly.)
That was some time ago. Little reason to believe anything has improved.
“Do you log it as a murder when you find the body with a hole in the head? Or when it is determined *why* the hole was put there (suicide[1], accident, murder etc.)? Or when someone is arraigned (more formal than “arrested”. ”
When a body with a hole in it is found, this is homicide. The statistics that are of interest are those where a person dies at the hand of someone else. The “degree” of the murder is irrelevant for these statistics.
For it to be suicide, the victim has to be killed by his own gun, at very short range, in his own home, without witnesses. It is quite a stretch this misclassification could explain the 5-fold higher murder rates in the USA. And gun accidents in countries with few handguns are not really an option either. The same with self-defense.
Furthermore, in every country these statistics are collected by several independent bodies. The results match over a wide range of countries (including Japan and Australia) and institutions. There is zero evidence our murder rates are twice or three times as high as reported, which would be needed to come even close to the numbers seen in “safe” places in the US.
Only right wing Americans claim that our murder rates must be higher than those of the USA. And they do so without any knowledge of Europe (or Japan, or Australia).
Just learn to live with reality:
The USA are the most murderous of the rich countries.
Can you elaborate on this notion please? Who are these independent bodies, where are they getting their raw data, etc.
“Who are these independent bodies, where are they getting their raw data, etc.”
These would be the official statistical bureaus that are generally kept at arms length from the politicians (see https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/about-us/organisation), European level statistical organizations (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/about/overview), the universities, various public type of associations/consumer organizations, and newspapers.
Data are collected either from official statistics (e.g., death certificates), “on the ground” from local entities (e.g., county police), or nationwide polling (call centers etc.). Some data come from insurers (theft, burglary etc.).
Official statistics are constantly cross validate with polling data.
I’m just having trouble wrapping mind around how essentially all the raw data doesn’t originate with the local police departments, is all.
There seems to be a strong believe in the US that all data are manipulated. I have yet to see any evidence for that over here (I cannot speak for the USA).
There are many different parties involved in data generation. We have the central statistical bureaus and registries, local police offices, doctors who give off death certificates, insurance companies who receive claims, university researchers who cross-check different sources and who also interview people, consumer associations, unions and the like who collect data for their members, newspapers and TV shows who keep track of crime among their audience (mostly national in the Netherlands).
Manipulation at any single site would result in unexplained discrepancies. None such discrepancies have been reported. Explained differences are plenty, e.g., many petty crimes go unreported, say, small theft or discrimination etc., because the victims do not see how reporting would help them. These discrepancies are studied in their own right.
Another point would be the motivation for manipulation. The parties involved have very different aims, say doctors writing death certificates versus insurers. If there is one single overarching motivation that drives most parties, from victims and their families, to newspapers to political parties (of which we have dozens), it would be to inflate the crime numbers. Many newspapers, police officers, and politicians have build a career on warning for rising crime numbers. For example, it is fairly easy to check that every murder is published more than once in newspapers around the country.
To summarize, there are many parties involved in generating and collecting data, all with non-aligned motivations, that all try to check the others for errors. It is therefore difficult to envision a way how to hide a large number of murders in most (North-West) European countries.
reply to Winter, since you specifically mentioned Australia for some reason:
I live in Oz and work in my state’s department of justice so I get a daily email summarising crime stories in the media. It’s been quite instructive to me to see how many of those stories, quoted from Murdoch-owned papers, I cannot find in left-leaning publications such as Fairfax-owned ones. I don’t mean they’re not on the front page: I mean searching their sites doesn’t find them at all. These aren’t stories about minor break-ins either. They do however tend to feature certain minorities. I’m much more open to accusations of media narratives these days.
“It’s been quite instructive to me to see how many of those stories, quoted from Murdoch-owned papers, I cannot find in left-leaning publications such as Fairfax-owned ones.”
But you get to see them. It is not that a large part of the homicides in Australia are completely hidden from view and from official statistics.
As for bias in newspapers. Newspapers and media cater to the tastes of their audience. Not everyone wants to read about every single crime in the country or every single gory detail. Some media outlets will dwell more on some crimes than others. In the end, all media cater to their audience.
You shifted the goalposts. The discussion was on media narratives, not volume. Of course not every crime can be reported: that’s why minor break-ins, as you noted, are very rarely mentioned. I happen to work in a job where I find out about these stories. But what about all the other readers of these papers? I _know_ this group of papers, despite their boasts of independence and quality reporting (sadly, these boasts were true once), is systematically suppressing certain stories. Other readers, unless they step over to the dark side once in a while, won’t. Does it ever occur to you to check what stories your favored sites aren’t reporting?
“You shifted the goalposts. The discussion was on media narratives, not volume. ”
The discussion was about the validity of crime statistcs. People here claim time and again that Europeans (and everybody else) hide murder statistics to make politicians look good (or the USA look bad). My point was simply that this is next to impossible for murders.
The other point, about media being partisan, you narrative, depends on the country you are in. Fox News is the Pravda of thr GOP. Some media are worse, e.g. Bretibart, others are better, e.g. the Wall Street Journal. In other countries, the situation is better. But in all countries, the media cater to an audience.
But everywhere, crime is a multi headed monster. There is no one true narrative. And in societies like Australia or the UK, violent crime is so low that most people hardly have personal experience with it and have other priorities.
Not at all. Homicide–at least in most US jurisdictions–is the *deliberate* and *unlawful* killing of another human being.
And that is exactly my point there are a LOT of ways a human being can get a .9cm hole in their head.
Yeah, maybe want to spend more time hanging around either police or real criminals.
What is the difference (on scene) between a gang banger committing suicide because he was despondent over his GF leaving him, and a gang banger being shot at close range by a family member over some boolshit?
This is not a hypothetical. It happened. I know the guy who saved a rather shocked and horrified mother from a long investigation for something she was already sick over.
> which would be needed to
> come even close to the
> numbers seen in “safe”
> places in the US.
Funny thing is, using official statistics you find that places in the US that are primarily settled by people from $COUNTRY (where that ethnicity is distinct enough to matter) tend to have crime rates comprable with $COUNTRY
> Just learn to live with reality:
> The USA are the most murderous of the
> rich countries.
Only if by “rich” you also mean “predominately white”
https://mises.org/wire/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-developed-countries
Last I checked, some European countries only throw a death in the “murder” bucket if a perpetrator is caught, tried, and convicted. Otherwise it goes in its own bucket under a much less inflammatory name, no matter how much it looks like a murder.
So no, the numbers aren’t directly comparable without doing more research into just how the categories are defined, and that’s without paying any attention to the claims that in some places the government deals with the rising crime rate by simply looking for ways to prosecute the reporters until people stop calling them in. (Not that there aren’t places here in the USA that don’t do the same thing, but it’s usually good to pull in things like the NCVS results and other resources not directly collected by the government.)
I don’t want to get into this debate because debating with Winter isn’t particularly productive, I just want to mention one thing: Roma criminal profiles are very different. As far as I can tell, US black on black murder tend to happen in gang wars over drug trade turfs. Often coming from fatherless families, basically very alienated, have no social structure in the ghetto other than the gang, they basically have no kinship structure that would help to resolve such differences peacefully. The Roma are the literal opposite, strongly clannish, a tightly knit and complicated social structure (e.g. once a Roma musician complained to me he is not respected in Roma society because he does not come from a musician family), with community elders resolving disputes. Thus Roma-on-Roma murder is rare, Roma-on-Nonroma murder typically comes from a mugging gone wrong.
This clannishness is more similar to the Scots-Irish (after all that is where the word “clan” came from) But the similarity ends there.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Roma culture is that once a man gets money, he is socially obliged to spend it on basically throwing a party and eating and drinking with his male kin and friends. Not doing so would be seen as a failure to share, a big taboo. This, according to some researchers, comes from a strong culture of egalitarianism, saving money would lead to differences in wealth and basically a disrespect shown towards the kin, trying to get richer than them instead of sharing. But it is fairly obvious why this does not work well in a society with weekly or monthly wages and leads to crime. Some enterpreneurs who pay ditch-diggers and similar workers more or less under the table anyway told me they switched to paying them daily and it worked well for stuff like keeping to show up on the job.
BTW now that Winter mentioned traffic accident deaths I looked it and was surprised that the US has worse stats in this than even Greeks who drive like crazies on crack, tearing down a one-way street in the wrong direction at high speed without wearing a seatbelt and the kids jumping around on the back seat is entirely common. Pedestrians are careless too. How is it possible for the US to get even more traffic deaths than Greece? Is it also related to specific subcultures, races, or regions?
I have no clue what Roma have to do with this whole discussion. They are a strongly suppressed people who face horrible discrimination in many countries. But they indeed have a very strong identity and social structure. As such, their situation has aspects in common with classical Jewish communities.
But I really do not see what this has to do with race? Sinti and Roma are Indo-Aryan people.
A lot of what gets called “race” is actually culture. Culture is not just “strong identity and social structure” but the values they communicate from generation to generation. A culture that says you have to piss away any money you make on frivolous status competitions won’t do as well as one that teaches frugality and investment in capital goods that enhance productivity.
Actually, all of what is called race is actually culture. The use of “Race” in the USA is almost the same as that of “Caste” in India.
Then why do you oppose fixing the broken cultures, and insist that every attempt to do so is “racist”?
“BTW now that Winter mentioned traffic accident deaths I looked it and was surprised that the US has worse stats in this than even Greeks ”
You see, arguing with foreign people leads to surprising insights.
“Not doing so would be seen as a failure to share, a big taboo”
I’ve read of an somewhat similar culture in Australian aborigines. In at least some tribes, anyone who acquires some assets is expected to give them all away. In one 30 year old text I read, the aborigines were furious that the (white) researcher did not put her 4WD at their disposal. One can see the utility of this ethos for subsistence level hunter-gatherers, but I have to wonder how much of the abject poverty of many aborigines today is due to the fact that they’re surrounded by moochers.
>“Not doing so would be seen as a failure to share, a big taboo”
>I’ve read of an somewhat similar culture in Australian aborigines.
A similar problem (the second you have wealth you’re expected to share it with your family, even ne’er do-well fourth cousins) is endemic in SSA cultures too. Makes even staying non-poor difficult, let alone capital accumulation. It’s a major reason enterprising blacks often migrate to another region or country to start a business.
More than a trace of this remains in U.S. ghetto culture.
I don’t have confirming data, but I suspect you’ll find this same pattern everywhere the population is genetically prone to higher levels of time preference than Mediterranean Europe.
Dumb question: when there is a maladaptive cultural norm which isn’t inherently fatal, how might it go away?
The only case I know of for large-scale change was the Icelandic? case where there was essentially a vote and everybody became Christian overnight. Otherwise, it usually involves a war. Or death, which we prevent with welfare, etc.
For poor people without access to banks, a culture of sharing is a matter of life and death.
> Either you are very successful, Japan-level successful at suppressing them.
Great. Start four centuries ago, and build a hive culture.
> Or enough people carry them, at all times, everywhere, that at any
> place where people come together, there are 5-10 who can shoot back.
You only need one to shoot back, but you need one to shoot back effectively a SIGNIFICANT percentage of the time AND you need national coverage where the person shooting back is lauded for doing so.
Great. Start four centuries ago, and build a hive culture.
And about three centuries later, please keep it the hell away from China.
I wonder what would have happened had Japan not caused Chiang Kai-shek to try to do a deal with Mao the Murderous.
Nothing really good. Only less bad.
You have to remember Chiang was a deeply corrupt leader of a Socialist party. Yes FDR seemed to think highly of him. The same FDR who thought Mussolini was great. And also was married to his cousin who was a Communist.
Sun Yat-Sen had been dealing with the Soviets, and was responsible for their funding of the Kuomintang. That Soviet influence in the KMT is largely responsible for the rise of Mao, and ability of the KMT and the CCP to outlast all the other Chinese socialist parties that weren’t foreign funded. Also, per Chung and Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story, it was a Soviet agent in the KMT that set off the chain of events that lead to the Rape of Nanking. Chiang Kai-shek went so hard anti-communist because a) he had seen the Soviet Union in person thanks to Sun making those foreign friends b) his son went to the USSR, married a Russian woman, became a Trotskyite, then went to the Gulag when Trotsky became unpopular. The son’s freedom was bought from the Soviets by rehabilitating Mao.
Mr. Raymond, sent you an email concerning this post.
Did it get through?
>Mr. Raymond, sent you an email concerning this post. Did it get through?
I don’t see it. What was the Subject line?
Squirrel Hill Shooting/Firearms Training
No joy?
[popping out of indent]
On the other hand, we had three terrorist incidents inside a week; one aimed at Blacks, one aimed at Jews, and one more generally aimed at people and entities thought of by MAGA types as Trump’s enemies. I’m not happy about this and anyone who thinks this is pointing in a good direction is a fool, (though I hope it will all calm down after the election is over.)
I hope / suspect things will settle down after the election as well.
In general, judging the direction on this type of thing is extremely difficult, because people disagree on the vector. Data is often scarce, which means it’s hyper-sensitive to whatever is actually collected – it’s like if we tried to profile supervolcano explosions and the only one we have is Krakatoa.
Or, said data is cherry picked. While we have attacks in a synagogue and a black church, we also had one at a Republican HQ in the last week (which might have been incidental – it’s still being investigated) and a definite shooting at a Republican baseball game a few months ago, along with another shooting at a Republican office during the 2004 election (in TN, I believe), and then all those Antifa attacks I keep seeing when I dig for them.
WordPress seems to be really hating long posts. Eric, can you nuke my post above, as I’m having trouble posting the other two parts. (Probably for the better, BTW, as I’m rereading it’s more of rant than it should be.)
If the midterms lean D it will settle down until they lose again.
If the midterms lean R, or heavily R it will blow up, and like a known communist sympathizer shooting a Democrat president it will be the Republicans fault for the climate of hate.
https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/landscape_928x523/2017/05/screen_shot_2017-05-30_at_1.47.48_pm_-_h_2017.jpg
“Chicago: 43 Shot, 5 Killed Over Weekend — 2,530 Shot, 469 Killed So Far This Year”
https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/chicago-43-shot-5-killed-over-weekend-2530-shot-469-killed-so-far-year
Not all of the victims were low-life gangbangers that can be dismissed with a “good riddance” attitude. The killings in Pittsburgh are unlikely to be repeated any time soon, but the above carnage has been repeating year-after-after with no end in sight. I still don’t understand why the former is trivialized and the latter is cast as a seminal outrage.
Because the solutions for the former involve a good hard look at how re-distributive programs have destroyed the black family. How unrestrained immigration by third worlders has depressed wages *mostly at the low end*, making it hard for certain classes get started in entry level jobs, which has had a disparate impact on “minority communities”. How cash hungry local politicians have used fines to increase their budgets largely at the expense of the poor.
Crime is heavily correlated with drug and alcohol use. Drug and alcohol use *drop* when people have relatively meaningful jobs to go to. But to hold relatively meaningful jobs you need to start with less meaningful ones and have a reason to stay with them. When you can make 10x dealing dimebags, or when you don’t see *anyone* in your community moving up the job path (because as soon as they get over $X a year they move the f*k out because of crime and s*tty schools) you wind up with a feedback loop that utterly destroys the culture.
Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 26, 2014
Yes, everything you have written above is true and critically germane. And if the rest of us continue to ignore it’s significance and do nothing because “evil journalism”, then the cancer will continue to spread and ultimately kill us all.
And why don’t the rich White people who hire illegals ever get put in prison? If ICE dedicated a single year and all their agents to arresting and prosecuting the demand side, illegal immigration would simply stop.
If you’re an employee and you ask for higher wages and the boss says “Shut up and get back to work. I can get an illegal to do your job for half what I’m paying you” what do you do?
For a good number of people, it’s because the paperwork and overhead involved would make the whole exercise prohibitively expensive.
> And why don’t the rich White people who hire illegals ever get put in prison?
Depends on what you mean by rich. Because it *does* happen:
https://www.dairyherd.com/article/michigan-dairyman-sentenced-prison-hiring-illegal-immigrants
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-01-22/is-ice-finally-targeting-employers-of-illegal-workers
Of course sometimes it’s just a fine:
https://cis.org/North/Its-About-Time-Employer-Hit-96-Million-Penalty-Hiring-Illegal-Aliens
As to why it doesn’t? Lots of reasons. Companies can plausibly deny they knew the people were illegals. They are only required to make a “Good Faith Effort” to verify that a person is legal to work here. If they have a SSN and a name that don’t get flagged when they are input into the I-9 (??) system there is no way for the employer to verify where they were born, and in fact discrimination laws make it almost impossible for them to do so. So if they present valid ID, the employer *has* to assume they are allowed to work here.
We don’t citizenship papers *yet*, which is something that the left adamantly opposes for voting and *getting* a job, but all of the sudden wants employers to intuit by looking at someone while ignoring their skin color, accent, and every other feature about them.
Secondly they don’t get thrown in jail because of diffuse responsibility. Currently if I need janitorial service and I outsource it *I* am not responsible for who they hire. They are. But often the *documented* HR practices of these outsourcing companies suggest verification (see above) and it’s the local managers that don’t do that. So instead of a CEO or whatever who has made the rules clear, it’s a mid-level manager who’s just trying to make his numbers that slips a little. Heck, it could even be someone who is an illegal immigrant with *good* papers hiring friends and family who don’t have good papers.
It is also *illegal* to say “hire Americans only”, even if you can sort them out. Guess what, this is true *even* for Top Secret stuff. If a illegal passes the background check (which could in theory happen) you can’t discriminate against him UNLESS you can prove he’s illegal. Which is hard to do legally (assuming he has created enough documentation that a background check doesn’t throw flags).
That depends on whether there is a D or an R in the White House.
If it’s a D, try to find another job that pays better and go on with your life because they don’t give a s*t about whether you have a job or not, after all you can always survive on the largess of the government if you get fired. If it’s an R in the White House go find another job, and then when he hires an illegal as a replacement, tell ICE, they may raid the place and fine the snot out of the guy.
Because the residents of Chicago make no effort to change the environment that enables a shooting every few hours and a death twice a day.
“Snitches get stitches” and “I dindn’t see nuffin” is rampant and the Racial Grievance Industry has gone to great effort to hamstring the PD at every turn.
Why should we care when the residents of Austin, Garfield Park, and Englewood don’t?
“Because the residents of Chicago make no effort to change the environment that enables a shooting every few hours and a death twice a day. ” Not true at all of the residents. It is true of the power structure and has been for a long long time. Many of the residents who do seek change have goals and use means that are unrealistic and counter-productive but such as Bill Ayres and his wife do believe in changing the environment. So do most people resident and non-resident.
“Snitches get stitches” and “I dindn’t see nuffin” is rampant and the Racial Grievance Industry has gone to great effort to hamstring the PD at every turn.” And properly so. Notice above that the gangs and the power structure are in cahoots to keep the residents down. The Chicago police department by rights ought to be hamstrung and even hung by the heels. Again the Chicago police department is a tool of the power structure and otherwise allowed free rein in dealing with residents. My own experience is typical. I was parked not moving when the car in front backed into me. The responding officer in the course of soliciting a bribe assured me that he would write me for following too close, excessive speed, inattentive driving and so on to include doing a felony level of damage. He said I could spend 3-4 days in jail before a chance to see a judge or I could buy my way off at increasing prices down to just sign the ticket and surrender my bail card. The witnesses were highly amused at this typical Chicago display but were in the end kind enough to assure the officer that his charges were unsupported and he might ultimately be embarrassed. One of the material handling companies bought 50 cheap Autocar trucks built for small open pit mining that were oversize and overweight empty then put big transit mix bodies on them. The Cook County/ Chicago power structure had no problems but the owner had to sneak the trucks to Joliet for maintenance because outside of Cook County the laws applied.
“Why should we care when the residents of Austin, Garfield Park, and Englewood don’t?” They do. That’s one of many reasons the population of Chicago within the city limits is declining. See also schools and real estate values.
There is a difference between caring which I do and tilting at windmills which I don’t. For my money make the world a better place is hubris followed by tragedy. Make the world around you a better place is good sense and a moral obligation.
Bad governance is a vicious cycle. Corrupt politicians induce corrupt policing which begets a cynical citizenry that results in the election of evermore corrupt politicians. Neither the persistent carnage in Chicago nor the occasional Pittsburgh killing tragedy will likely change the status quo in any meaningful way. We had a few days of national outrage following Pittsburgh, and its too bad this notoriety wasn’t used more often to promote personal self defense as a reasonably effective mitigation. Instead we got feel good virtue signalling and then nothing.
I’ve been thinking about the Pittsburgh shooting and come to the conclusion that Bowers (the shooter) is one more white dude who lives in terror, caused by fear-based grifting about America’s upcoming demographic transition.
Let’s break this down a little more. What do I mean by “demographic transition?” I mean that within the next couple decades we’re going from a country which is majority White to a country where Whites are simply one more minority. In fact, the largest-growing demographic in the U.S. is currently “mixed.” If this trend continues we’re a couple generations away from a time when “mixed” becomes the largest minority in the U.S. (There will be no group which is the majority.)
“Demographic transition” is a huge issue for racists. They believe, that there is a plot on the part of non-whites to outbreed White people, and to mix the White race with other races, thus weakening European dominance. And once everyone has a brother/sister/child/nephew/cousin who married a Hispanic, Asian, Black or Jew, what happens to racism as a source of political power? Gone, I suspect.
And what do I mean by “fear-based grifting.” I’m talking about “Those scary immigrants. Those horrible Muslims. Those damned Jews. Those dangerous Black people. You can’t elect a Hispanic to the city council, they’ll try to take money from White schools!” I’m talking about TV/radio shows which revolve around the idea that White People are in terrible danger, either physically or politically and should buy lots and lots of guns because those bad, scary people are coming for you – all this mixed with advertisements for dodgy investment plans and Hair Club For Men.
So when you put it all together, there’s this racist white guy in Pittsburgh, and he’s so ridiculously terrified of immigrants that he arms himself and shoots up a synagogue, because they’re involved with a program to help refugees.
From the NYT:
On one hand, you can truthfully call Bowers is a lone wolf. But what motivated him? We saw thirteen political killings last week, plus a bombing campaign, all aimed at Liberal/Progressive/Democratic targets, all motivated by fear and a President who calls seven thousand refugees “an invasion.” This is not how our politics should work!
So much handwringing about skeery mooselimbs and foreigners, when the real face of terrorism in America is white, male, homegrown, and conservative.
That’s probably a little exaggerated. White, male terror is certainly the largest demographic in terror in the U.S., and probably even the majority of terror in the U.S., but not ALL of it by any means. And note that Sayoc was Asian.
The real problem is that our current right-wing politics in the U.S. is a politic of fear, and it’s created by a sort of fear-based grifting. There have been some good pieces about this, and I’d definitely recommend the links I provide below:
https://splinternews.com/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blowing-up-in-t-1793944216
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
Ultimately, this is all about what fear, coupled with an egregiously false presentation of facts, is doing to our country. Fear-mongering has become an ordinary feature of our political climate, and we have grown accustomed and acquiescent to being manipulated by fear. Regardless of whether you are Liberal or Conservative, this is a shitty state of affairs, and allowing fear to rule our politics is to our country’s ever-lasting shame!
Fear replaces science. Fear replaces basic human decency. Fear replaces education. Fear replaces verification. Fear replaces hope. Fear replaces the ideal of progress. Our current politics involves breathing fear like it was oxygen.
Don’t be afraid. Track down the original sources and read the real numbers, and ask yourself, “Is all this panic really justified?”
In Kentucky, we have the Kroger shooting, scared White dude vs. Black people. He wanted to shoot up a Black church, but the church was closed, so he settled for a couple Black strangers in a Krogers. Then we have Cesar Sayoc,** who’s so frightened of the president’s enemies that he sends out a dozen bombs, to everyone from George Soros to CNN. (I think they’ve discovered a few more since I first wrote “a dozen,” but those might be copy-cats.)
** The current Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, ran Indymac, the bank that repossessed Cesar’s home. Maybe Cesar was too damn scared to even recognize the right target for his ire? (Obviously I’m not recommending that anyone perform an act of violence, but Cesar was missing the point of his own story – badly!)
>That’s probably a little exaggerated. White, male terror is certainly the largest demographic in terror in the U.S.,
Even that’s not true. You can only make it approximate being true, historically, by treating the FALN as a “white” terror group, which would be just as bogus as labeling George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic” was and for exactly the same reason. Even if you included FALN you’d have to delete the WTC bombings or contrive some measure of threat level that effectively ignores body count to make your assertion both true and non-misleading.
There’s a lot of misinformation about this going around – people playing definitional games to inflate the category. But the reason lone nutcases like the Tree of Life shooter and Dylann Roof have the prominence they do is because the organizational apparatus for “white terror” doesn’t exist in the U.S. And hasn’t since the 1980s; there were at one time “white terror” groups that could have been quite dangerous, but the few that still exist are essentially prison gangs with basically no reach outside the slammer.
I speak from knowledge, not conjecture; my wing chun instructor is a counterrorism consultant for the Feds, and what he can tell me about classified sources when I ask him matches the results of my own research. The FBI has become extremely good at infiltrating groups of would-be domestic terrorists. Hooking up with those organizations is a good way to get short-stopped before you can actually do anything sanguinary; the Dylann Roof types get to the point of massacre precisely by not doing so and thereby flying below the FBIs radar.
I asked sifu once how many “white supremacist” terrorists there are in the U.S. He got that retrieving-data-now expression on his face and replied “About thirty.” This is a guy who I’m pretty sure has access to the Palantir network – his contracts would require it – so that’s a hard number.
If you believe there aren’t more than 30 active jihadists in the U.S. I’d say you are breathtakingly naive.
This actually ties into the border-wall issue in an unexpected way. At least one Islamist group – Hezbollah – is known to be actively trying to get large numbers of low-level sleepers across the Mexican border into the U.S. Smart move for them; they can train a bunch of grunts for a few months each, have most fail to get through, and still have footsoldiers in place to be run by somebody really hard-core and trained that they take more care about infiltrating.
You’re only counting those who can be plausibly classified as “terror soldiers.” If you count all the lone wacko mass shootings as “terrorism” rather than as “spree” or “rampage” killings, then you can get to “White, male terror is certainly the largest demographic in terror in the U.S.”
Once you do that, you can then play motte and bailey with “white male” and “racist white supremacist male.”
I would say that the sub-culture (“race”) of the terrorist is rather irrelevant. We can better try to determine the motive, which is much more relevant.
However, the claimed motive is often a ruse. “Running amok” in the name of some higher cause is more like a way to commit suicide, if it is not a case of mental illness. For all I know (which is little in this case) the Squirrel Hill shooter might just be under the influence of paranoid delusions.
>You’re only counting those who can be plausibly classified as “terror soldiers.”
That is correct, intentional, and derives from what I know about how professional counterterrorists think.
The professionals (and I) know that psychotic lone wackos are a different problem from terror soldiers, that needs to be addressed in different ways. People who claim that white terror dominates the statistics are, OTOH, generally making the claim that white terror as a political phenomenon dominates the U.S. incidence (and nowadays this claim is generally followed by a ritual chant of “Orange man bad!”).
That claim is unambiguously false, with no motte-and-bailey qualification required.
Whether its organized terror or lone nutjobs, no public policy can take the threat risk to zero, and it is dangerously stupid to think otherwise. Conversely, personal self defense via firearm ownership and proper training will always be of value in the rare event that you encounter either situation. This used to be common sense instead of a political football. Those who advocate for their fantasy of a public policy solution and demand the disarmament of law abiding citizens are the real and present danger in society, not some boogeyman they contrive.
Public policy can reduce the number of dangerous incidents, but it cannot reduce them to zero. Both public policy and self-defense are parts of the big picture.
The problem here is essentially one of communication. You have a very different model of how White/Conservative terror works than most of the Left does.
The model you use (I apologize, I’m probably phrasing this poorly) expects there to be an organization with an ideology, and that this organization makes plans and reacts to events. This model expects that someone has a social/political desire and is willing to use violence to gain that political desire. The models expects that there is some kind of underlying cause for the actions, such as Sinhalese oppression of the Tamils. (Note that the “underlying cause” may or may not be historically accurate.) Your model expects some kind of logistical arrangements and expects all, or most of the ideology/action to be under one umbrella.
Under your model, there are very few White terrorists.
People on the Left talk about White terrorism using a distributed model that’s a little different than the definition of terrorism that insists all the ideology/action be under one umbrella. Maybe we need a new word to describe this kind of violence – the Left likes to say “Stochastic Terrorism” but I’m not in love with the phrase.
Dylan Roof is a good example of the Left’s model in action. General propaganda is provided by the Conservative Media. The “underlying cause” was provided specifically by the Council of Conservative Citizens, in their posting online of a list of Black on White murders, which Dylan read, (did not evaluate statistically,) and took for gospel. The general ideology was provided by any number of White Supremacists. The logistics were provided by Dylan Roof as he armed himself under the 2nd Amendment. The social/political desire was to kill some Black people, both to reduce their numbers and take vengeance for Black on White murders… but there’s no obvious, single, umbrella organization at work. Nonetheless, nine people were killed and there are multiple identifiable actors.
(Note here what’s interesting about the Council of Conservative Citizen’s list of Black on White killings – the CCC did not provide any statistical understanding of how these numbers stacked up against the total number of deaths annually in the U.S., or against White on Black killings, or against murders in general – all the stuff you’d want a grasp on before you decided whether to do something about the problem. I’ll leave it to someone else to put all these numbers in perspective, but I’d bet good money that once the numbers are put into perspective, there’s nothing to feel either afraid of or vengeful about, and that the “problem” of Black on White killings is essentially an illusion.)
What a leftist theoretician would argue is that there are multiple ways to get society to terrorize Black/Brown/Asian/Jewish people. What if you have a media that does the following, sometimes in multiple separately owned institutions, all of which are very chummy with each other, and the end result is dead people:
1.) Incites fear against Black/Brown/Asian/Jewish people? (Examples: Stormfront, the Alt-Right, Donald Trump, Fox News, Breitbart and the KKK.)
2.) Provides multiple general “conspiracy theories” that are attractive to people with poor mental health? (Examples: Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Qanon.)
3.) Provides horribly inaccurate data about the “problem” of Black/Brown/Asian people? (The Council of Conservative Citizens. Richard Lynn.* Many others.)
4.) Suggests that White people must own guns for “protection?” The “White” and “Brown” in the guns/protection equation are unspoken, but very much understood. (The NRA, the Republican Party, and every gun nut with a blog.)
5.) Attaches to a particular political party? (Republicans, and to some extent Libertarians.)
6.) Links prejudice to religion? (The Christian Identity Movement, plus any number of Churches.)
7.) Claims that White people, the richest and most politically powerful people in the U.S. are horribly at risk if a Black/Brown/Asian person wins even a city council seat? (Any number of Republican candidates in the last electoral cycle, the KKK, the Alt-Right, Breitbart, etc.)
8.) Makes no changes in their practices and takes no responsibility for their behaviors even after a White person goes crazy and kills a bunch of Blacks or Jews? (Everyone on the list above, with the possible exception of the CCC, which took down their list of Black on White murders after the Roof shooting. (I’m not going to dig to see if they’ve put it back up again.))
Note that any of the actors here could fix the problem via any number of actions, from erecting firewalls to publicly denouncing some of the other actors, to exposing the ugly behaviors of other actors (if you’re a news organization) to throwing out members who misbehave… and none of them do it. Instead they’re all being very chummy. A Breitbart manager joins a Republican Presidential Campaign, works at the White House for a few months, spends time as a talking head on Fox News and other Conservative media, then meets with a lot of White Supremacists during the current election cycle – and nobody on the Right bats an eye; it’s business as usual.
So maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s not “terrorism,” but I’d bet you good money that plenty of Black and Jewish people are very, very frightened right now in a way that they weren’t two weeks ago.
You can call it whatever you like, but in the U.S. White people who perform social/racial/political killings (and note that I’m not counting cops) have won the corpse count in 17 of the last 20 years. But they weren’t “Terrorists,” they were just “lone wolves” who were inspired by some subset of the groups I mentioned above. We’ve known (at the very least) since Timothy McVeigh that the combination of media/social forces was toxic, we just haven’t done anything about it.
* Your confidence in people like Richard Lynn are the main reason you’re frequently mistaken for a racist; guys like Lynn (or the CCC) provide the “excuse” that gives people like Roof or Bowers license to open fire.
>the Left likes to say “Stochastic Terrorism” but I’m not in love with the phrase.
Oh, I am way ahead of you on this one. I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about what you might call “stochastic” conspiracies; I call them “prospiracies”. I’ve been affiliated with one or two myself. I know how they operate because I’ve cranked that handle.
The jihadi terror network actually fits this “stochastic terrorism” idea pretty well.
The actual tiny white-supremacist network does, too, but you could fit all those clowns into a short bus and they can’t so much as can’t fart without a report landing on an analyst’s desk in DC. On the other hand, despite your attempt to weave them into a paranoid uber-narrative, white lone wackos don’t fit.
Why do I say this? Because I can easily project what reality would look like if the general run of white lone wackos did operate like a prospiracy – we see it in an extreme form in racist prison gangs. Like ISIS, these guys have a shared mythology, a pantheon of heroes, and a rich set of symbolic memes that they bounce off each other. Prison gangs reflect this, on an extreme form, in tattoo art.
Look up, as an example, the significance of the number “14” and “88” in prison tattoos. Think of it as a sort of warped, evil equivalent of a couple of random tropes from the Jargon File. For a jihadi equivalent, consider the Black Flag of Khorasan. In a functioning prospiracy, a lexicon of common memes does most of the coordination that a command network would do in a conspiracy.
I mean I’ve actually applied this model. What do you think the Jargon File was but an attempt to craft a prospiracy? I’ve been very open about that motive.
If white lone wackos were the kind of prospiracy driven by common propaganda that you suppose, they’d quote each other – and the propaganda – a lot more. You’d see it in the rantings they leave behind after self-destructing. They’d have a collection of symbols and ur-texts they keep referring back to.
We see this kind of reference density among (for example) neo-Nazis, but not among lone wackos. Their ravings are froth over a void of crazy – it may attract isolated signifiers that you would recognize, but the structure – the semiotics of a prospiracy – that, is absent. You don’t get lone wackos swearing allegiance to Christian Identity the way Tashfeen Malik swore allegiance to ISIS. There’s no ur-text – which is a more interesting datum because there have been obvious attempts to create one; “The Turner Diaries” is probably the leading example.
No, the Great White Stochastic Terror Prospiracy doesn’t exist. Again, I know this because I know what it would look and how it would function if it did. There might be an alternate universe in which an exceptionally evil version of me created it by bricolage out of existing materials, the way I bootstrapped today’s hacker culture. But I doubt it. I had the advantage that I could identify a large population of sane people who wanted what I was constructing, even though they didn’t know it yet. But evil-me almost certainly couldn’t do that because lone wackos are crazy.
You can’t make a prospiracy out of actually crazy people for the exact same reason you don’t recruit them into your terror-soldier network. They’re brittle and unreliable; the only thing they really follow is the voices in their heads.
Ironically, the way you describe leftists thinking white-guy “stochastic terror” operates is pretty exactly how the Gramscian prospiracy actually works. They’re mythologizing based on the structure of the influence network they half-sense around themselves. Because they’re not crazy, just canalized in a way resembling religious belief. They can be effectively used.
UPDATE: Another way I know the Great White Stochastic Terror Prospiracy doesn’t exist is that if it did, it would colonize civilian gun culture. I would no more be able to miss the signs of that than a burning cross on my front lawn. It ain’t happening.
I’m going to ask you – in your incarnation as a social manipulator – to notice something, then I’m going to ask your opinion:
Notice Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter, and his similarities with Dylan Roof. Like everyone else, Bowers (who shot up the Pittsburgh temple) heard lots of bizarre propaganda about the “gigantic caravan of illegal immigrants, heading north.” But everything he heard about this “invasion” was wildly inaccurate, or maybe “accurate but without useful context” (just like the information Dylan Roof got from the CCC.) I’ll put the exact information about why the “caravan” news is unreliable in a another post – the WordPress gods are angry today – you’ve probably already done the math! *
With these inaccuracies in mind, the similarities between the Bowers case and the Roof case should be obvious. Bad information, handed out irresponsibly, thoughtless amplification of the bad information, all the same suspects (except the CCC is not involved and Trump is involved) with all the same interconnections… amplification by everyone from Fox News to Breitbart to Stormfront, wild conspiracy theories about Jews, a completely irresponsible media, and by some totally unexpected, really weird coincidence a crazy, right wing White guy killed a bunch of people.
So here’s my question for you. If it’s not terrorism, what is it? If it was pure craziness, you’d expect violence in roughly equal numbers between the right and left and that’s definitely not the case. Paul Brinkley’s post above identifies all the major bits of left-wing violence in the U.S. since 2000 and Bowers alone leaves them all in the dust (and I haven’t even mentioned Timothy McVeigh.)
So speaking as a social manipulator, what is happening on the right, and how do we stop it?
Minor thought:
It could be that the broad political leaning will impact how people choose to address issues they view as intolerable. Notably, those on the broad political left seem to be responsible for most of the rioting/sit-ins/property destruction which occurs.
The first world has converged on two general solutions:
1) Severely restrict the conditions under which firearms may be purchased, owned, and carried.
2) Regulate speech, up to and including the criminalization of hate speech, to staunch the meme flow that leads to the development of violent, radicalized prospiracies.
Neither is politically viable in America, especially with a conservative Supreme Court.
Sorry not to have posted the rest of it. The WordPress gods are angry today. I’ll try again when I get home.
>With these inaccuracies in mind, the similarities between the Bowers case and the Roof case should be obvious.
And they are, yes. I was thinking that myself. Bowers, like Roof, is a would-be terror soldier that never found a network. You do remember that one of Roof’s complaints was that he couldn’t find any real racists to hang with?
Supposing a real right-wing terror network of any size existed (that is, as opposed to a tiny heavily infiltrated joke), it’s an interesting question whether it would have tried to recruit either Roof or Bowers. They might have been judged too borderline-crazy and obvious. I think if I were the monster-master I would have steered well clear of Roof but considered Bowers a possible.
>So here’s my question for you. If it’s not terrorism, what is it?
I was going to say it’s something else – a different diagnostic category – that we don’t have a good label for. But I thought about it for a while and we sort of do.
It’s running amok. There are differences in cultural expression from the Malay archetype but the underlying psychopathology is clearly the same. The big difference is that when a Westerner runs amok, he has a tendency Malays seem not to have: to choose a rationalization – which may, but need not necessarily, restrict the victims he targets.
If you conflate it with terrorism, you will miss the huge difference in the epidemiology. Terrorism is a pathological social behavior, amok a solitary one. The Wikipedia article is pretty good at capturing the nuances, I think. Sane people don’t run amok even in an environment of bad information – they form terror networks or militias instead.
> If it was pure craziness, you’d expect violence in roughly equal numbers between the right and left and that’s definitely not the case.
You’d get equal incidence only if “right” and “left” populations aren’t differentially stressed. You shouldn’t assume that without evidence. Given the slant in our media environment I sure wouldn’t.
>So speaking as a social manipulator, what is happening on the right, and how do we stop it?
In fairness, you should also be asking what we can do to stop more James Hodgkinsons from shooting more Steve Scalises (and had it not been for alert armed security his body count might have been higher than Bowers’s). This is not a thing that is happening only on the right.
I don’t know how to stop this. I’m good at recognizing, creating, and reinforcing prospiracies, but I’ve never had to disrupt one – and a bunch of guys running amok is not a prospiracy anyway, as I think I previously established.
I do think that if you specifically want fewer white guys to run amok it might be smart to stop constantly bombarding them with the message that they’re the source of all the evil in the world. A poorly integrated personality might start to feel tempted to live up to that.
I’m going to take this wider below. I think you’ll be very interested in our areas of agreement
If you think 14-88 is confined to prison gangs, you’ve got another think coming. I learned what it was from Reddit. These guys have been exchanging memes on the outside since the 90s at least, probably a lot earlier. They used to use shortwave radio to spread their poison far and wide; in more recent years they’ve gone to the internet. Yes, the Feds have infiltrated the major groups, which means the thought leaders switched to dogwhistling sometime in the mid-90s.
This actually ties into the border-wall issue in an unexpected way. At least one Islamist group – Hezbollah – is known to be actively trying to get large numbers of low-level sleepers across the Mexican border into the U.S.
Nonsense! This goes back to the silly John Birch idea from the sixties that China would try to infiltrate agents through Mexico. It was such a an obvious piece of whack-job thinking that Shea and Wilson satirized it in the early seventies in the Illuminatus trilogy. (And as crazy as it was at the time, that scenario made much more sense as a method of Chinese infiltration than your current scenario – at the time we didn’t have diplomatic relations with the Chinese and they probably needed a work-around. Someone from the Muslim world doesn’t need to work nearly as hard.)
The problem in your beliefs about this lies in the practical problems involved. The easy way to get someone into the U.S. is to get them a Saudi passport and then a student visa (other U.S. allies in the Arab world, such as Jordan or Egypt would be just as useful for providing a passport/visa.) Once trained, you send the agent to college in the U.S. and you can keep them in-country for up to ten years (if they’re getting a Ph.D) without even having to change their visa type. This is the easy way, and I’d imagine that it’s the method used by most people who want to infiltrate agents to the U.S… Join our cause, learn English, get a college degree, and when you’re done, come home and enjoy your new sophistication, or maybe get a job in the U.S. and continue to draw a salary from us! (If we activate you, no worries, we’ll make your family rich.)
On the other hand, if you want to infiltrate someone (as current right-wing propaganda holds) via a caravan of refugees coming through Honduras, you need to find a Arab terrorist who speaks fluent Spanish, or you must teach them Spanish. Then you have to educate them in the particular accent, phrasing, and slang of the particular brand of gutter Spanish used in the slums of Tegucigalpa.* After that, they must be transported to Tegucigalpa and given a Honduran ID which will pass muster with ICE. While they’re doing this, they must carefully tour Tegucigalpa so they know the landmarks and features of the city, and study enough Honduran History to understand everything from local geographical references to the Soccer War. After that, your agent must make an unnecessary and dangerous trip, on foot, through Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, and never, ever give themselves away as not being Honduran – because if they do someone with street smarts will trade your agent to ICE in exchange for a visa. Getting an Arab agent into the U.S. through the Southern Border is very, very complicated; just about the hardest possible way to manage it.
If anyone is telling you that this is happening, they are certainly drunk on some kind of weird, rightwing Kool Aid.
* Obviously Tegucigalpa is an example. It could as easily be Guatemala City or Managua.
>Nonsense! This goes back to the silly John Birch idea from the sixties that China would try to infiltrate agents through Mexico.
The problem with your dismissal is that Hezbollah itself believes it’s doing this, and intelligence disclosures about its belief have been slowly filtering out. I suppose they could be creating an elaborate legend about something they’re not actually doing, but what would the point of that be?
Why they’d do it this way is easy: it’s what you do if you want to put illegals in place for which the U.S. government has no paper trail tying them back to an Arab country. Student visas are inconvenient that way. Yes, it’s an expensive and lossy and slow process, but you aren’t short of either money or cannon fodder.
Some of your objections are cogent. Part of the M.O. seems to be to enculturate the sleepers further south – Venezuela is frequently mentioned, and I believe that because they can either get political cooperation from the Chavez regime or just bribe someone in that failing state. I’ve lived in South America; I know first-hand that the range of phenotypes produced by Spanish/Indio admixture is sufficiently varied that no Mexican trafficker is going to look twice at…a Syrian, say, who speaks gutter Spanish. Just another descamisado from the sticks in a country he doesn’t know…
The alternatives for mass infiltration aren’t very promising. Your sleepers would be damn conspicuous on the Canadian border, and there aren’t any nearby barrios full of really large numbers of undocumented brown people for them to fade into there – the Arab populations in Minnesota and Michigan aren’t large enough to hide in. Yet.
I suppose they could be creating an elaborate legend about something they’re not actually doing, but what would the point of that be?
It’s an easy memetic hack against the U.S. intelligence systems; there was a previous group of U.S. paranoids who had a similar belief, so push that narrative as an easy way to get the enemy to waste resources and look the wrong way.
…it’s what you do if you want to put illegals in place for which the U.S. government has no paper trail tying them back to an Arab country.
The easier thing is probably to infiltrate your agents using student visas and then give them better paperwork once they’re on site. (I doubt that anyone is particularly concerned with the paperwork someone uses to leave the country, so it’s probably not difficult to show that someone has departed the U.S. when in fact they have not.)
>It’s an easy memetic hack against the U.S. intelligence systems
Not buying it – doesn’t fit Hezbollah’s MO. The Soviets thought in that maze-of-mirrors way; jihadists have never shown so much subtlety. Besides, this has the smell of black-site intel and it’s difficult to plant that kind of legend through people undergoing interrogation unless they themselves believe it.
If the interrogation was “enhanced” that makes the intel more suspect, not less. A tortured captive will tell his torturers anything he thinks they want to hear if he thinks it will make them stop.
Bingo. Sounds like the interrogator (if it is black site intel) had some old-school nutcase beliefs and got a detainee to confirm them under duress.
>A tortured captive will tell his torturers anything he thinks they want to hear if he thinks it will make them stop.
This is true but misleading. I know a professional interrogator and he has told me entertaining stories about how he has broken criminal suspects. One of their core job skills is telling when their subjects are lying.
If one has that skill, torture, can be quite effective; you just have to know how to filter noise from signal. Not that I’m advocating torture – I’ve made my stance against it very clear. But the notion that it can’t produce useful results is pious humbug.
I’m definitely some variety of American paranoid.
I know a gentleman who mainly strikes me as Californian. I’m not sure how much of his life was spent there, but he was born in South America to Middle Eastern parents. I know him mainly because we have broadly similar academic interests. So it totally couldn’t be happening is not an argument I credit much. The gentlemen is so far from being my primary reason for being concerned about this vector that learning about his history changed nothing.
Learning that the John Birchers were concerned about it, on its own is mainly motivation to look into something more closely. The Birchers were wrong about the communists, but among the well known schools of their day they were least wrong.
My main reason for being concerned about border security? I know the media is lying to me, and capable of covering up significant things. There is no denying this after the public admission of the Weinstein cover up. So I treat media as unreliable, and pay attention to rumor. That there is at least some volume of drugs moving over the border is probably not something that could be made up from nothing.
The obvious delivery methods for a nuclear device are rocket, plane, and smuggling. Iran will likely have something deliverable by way of smuggling before they finish the engineering for a plane or rocket. The organizational culture of Iran’s nuclear security force is probably not going to wait for plane or rocket delivery, or for a reliable deterrent. I don’t know how the other borders and pathways are being inspected. I, perhaps unjustly, presume competence on the other borders and pathways. Since because of the drug traffic I can be pretty sure the southern border is weak, I figure the most viable smuggling path is driving a device over the southern border.
As for lower volumes of people being killed in the Southwest… One of the reasons I objected to Trump during the primaries was that he was a skilled deceiver and a New Yorker. I have doubts of the sincerity of his sympathies with the security concerns of people who live closer to the border. I am not sure whether he is actually trying to fix things, or is simply grandstanding.
If enough people are determined to bring a war to the Southwest, there will be a war. It will probably go poorly for those who bring it. I think most people fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of the relative peace currently being experienced in the United States. (Yes, relative peace, even with the Democrats pulling their Copperhead stuff again.)
You are ignoring the possibility that the fear is justified. Let’s just say experiences with “diversity” so far are not reassuring. And it is not just crime and not jobs. There are also political ones. Consider the one of the most important discoveries of Indian sociology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votebank – votebanks are identity groups who vote overwhelmingly on one political party, come what may. Democracy is based on an assumption of individualism: that each and every voter considers the good of the country or at least their own personal interests. If this individualism goes away, if it becomes normal that if you belong to X group you vote for Y party no matter what, it is dangerous from many possible perspectives. It is in this context where the idea of whites becoming a minority is actually really scary. Multicultural societies are likely to develop such votebanks, and if there will be basically a white party and a nonwhite party, and the white party has no chance of winning an election because of numbers, and of course the nonwhite party will likely enact policies that violate white interests (e.g. large-scale rich to poor redistribution is likely to be a net cost to whites and net gain to most but not all nonwhites), this is a very dangerous situation.
LMFTFY:
> large-scale rich to poor redistribution is likely to be a net cost to whites and net gain to cronies of the party doing the redistribution
Here’s what’s wrong with your idea. In a sanely run society, it’s commuters vs. truckers, environmentalists vs. builders or fast-food restaurant owners vs. public health advocates… or Some Need vs. Some Other Need. It’s a rational conversation about how many resources we allocate towards wild space vs. how many resources we allocate to build new homes. These are healthy conversations and useful compromises are possible.
But if you always make politics about race or tribe, or religion, plus how you feel about race/tribe/religion, then you will get vote banks or something like them. As far as I can tell, Republicans are worried about race. They’re worried about illegal immigrants. They’re worried that they will be defenseless against the Brown Hordes because someone will take their guns away. They’re worried about sending their children to public schools because little Johnny might bring a Black friend home or learn about science. They’re arguing that the U.S. is a Christian Nation (despite the first amendment.) In short, every Republican politician, more than anything else, is worried about who is In The Tribe and Who is Not In The Tribe, and what shall we do about this Huge Emergency of Tribal Membership!
Plus, Republicans want to cut taxes for their rich friends – big fucking surprise, right?
You want vote banks? This is exactly how you get them! Make everything is about money, race, tribe and religion and you’ll see people lining up to vote for their money, their tribe, their race, and their religion!
You might not like the Democrats, who are worried about health insurance, Russian interference with U.S. elections and Global Warming, but even if you disagree with every Democratic position ever, consider this: The Democrats are at least considering major public policy issues and trying to figure out how to handle them. They’re not fear-mongering crazies trying to refight the Civil War!
The Democrats say “Let’s talk about the problems with Health Care.”
The Republicans say “Fuck you! Let’s talk about how Obama is a Mooslim Terrorist. Let’s all chant “Lock Her Up!””
Regardless of your position, one conversation is worthy of a civilized nation, and the other isn’t!
I see the reaction against GOP tribalism will most productively be “We are all Americans”. That is what helped O’Rourke to narrow the gap with Cruz.
>Plus, Republicans want to cut taxes for their rich friends – big fucking surprise, right?
There’s a signal-noise problem here. The tax burden in the U.S. now falls so heavily on the relatively wealthy that any tax cut at all can be demagogued this way.
“The tax burden in the U.S. now falls so heavily on the relatively wealthy that any tax cut at all can be demagogued this way.”
That is very reasonable, as the wealth and income in the USA also predominantly burden the wealthy in the USA. The top 25% of income make 67% of all income and owns close to 90% of all wealth.
Is that income tax or all taxes?
>Is that income tax or all taxes?
Income, capital gains, and property taxes.
Sales taxes may be different. I’d have to research that.
At least in California sales taxes are applied equally regardless of income. I don’t know if there is a “luxury tax” on big-ticket items such as yachts.
But I’d like to find out. ;)
Interesting. Too often when people quote figures like that online it only refers to income tax, in my experience.
I should look up the Australian situation, we have lots of luxury taxes.
Blacks voted almost 90% Democratic this election. (You can thank Lyndon B. “We’ll have those n****rs voting for us for the next 200 years!” Johnson for that.) Hispanics 72% Democratic. They’ve been doing better under Trump than ever, and they still voted majority Democratic.
Tell me more about how it’s the Republicans building vote banks.
I don’t think Republicans are worried about race. I do think they’re worried about people who “always make politics about race or tribe, or religion, plus how you feel about race/tribe/religion” and want the government to help their race/tribe/religion by hurting others’.
So there’s no problem with limited legal immigration of people who want to learn English, aren’t of the Islamist sort of belief system that wants to impose Sharia law in enclaves like Dearbornistan, and are otherwise unlikely to self-ghettoize. Sure, the first generation might remain a bit out of place, but their kids will grow up to be fairly typical Americans, who work in productive jobs and don’t get in trouble with the law or elect politicians to make trouble on their behalf.
We love immigrants like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brigitte Gabriel, who are quite a bit darker than say HRC or even She Guevara.
WRT Jews, we generally like them for the above reasons. Sure, some of ’em wear funny hats, and have weird dietary rules, but even that works out fine. I prefer Hebrew National dogs precisely because I know that Kashrut rules really do constitute A Higher Standard™ than the run-of-the-mill Wienermacher follows. And they don’t complain if I eat bacon.
The Jews we don’t get along so well with are mostly the non-practicing sort, who are blessed to be among the cognitive elites and use that position to push Marxist nonsense in the Info-Edu-tainment Complex and government. That is to say that we don’t like the fact that they’re Jewish, we don’t like their behavior orthogonal to their ethnicity. Among the people who dislike them the most are Jews who fall in the conservative and libertarian quadrants of the Nolan Chart. Somehow, they too are deemed “anti-Semitic”, but the Leftist Jews who oppose them aren’t. I wonder why.
Russian interference in US elections has been going on for a very long time. Current outrage is selective. It is specific to the case of Trump beating Clinton. The evidence that Kennedy won in 1960 thanks to white supremacist terrorism is by far much stronger. If we apply the current tentative standard to the Cold War era, most Democratic victories after a certain point are due to Soviet interference. Furthermore, taking strict measures to ensure that foreign governments cannot spend even small amounts of money buying ads related to US elections is inconsistent with not taking strict measures to ensure that foreign governments cannot send foreign nationals to vote in US elections.
The logic of AWG points towards mass murder. Plans to address it that do not include mass murder are probably pointless or futile. If the evidence is not sufficient to justify mass murder, it is not sufficient to justify the misery and deaths that come with economic impact. If the evidence does not conclusively rule out all options that do not include mass murder, it does not conclusively rule out all options that do not include government coercion.
Health insurance through government intervention cannot help being the coupling by force of costs and services of individuals. Health includes mental health, and mental health issues can be described as tendencies to make very bad decisions of one sort or another. Decisions have an impact on progress of illness, and hence on cost. Coupling costs between people weakens the incentive towards better decisions that minimize cost. Simply throwing money at the mentally ill can be a bottomless pit. Whatever bureaucracy oversees the insurance program will get some of the responsibility for cost minimization that is no longer an individual responsibility. If this is a federal bureaucracy, it will either be too large for the voters to control, or each bureaucrat will be responsible for the healthcare decisions of too many people to care about as people. These are exhaustive but not mutually exclusive. If this is a federal bureaucracy, the imbalance of power would make a t4 style medical cost savings program fairly easy to implement.
And here is where the Jews enter the conspiracy theories of the alt-right, or just, Right.
Because someone has to be blamed for the civil rights movement in the 1960s, as well as the emancipation of women and lgbt and the upcoming demographic transition, the influx of latinos, and the rise of migrant workers and refugees in Europe. That is, the influx and rise of non-WASP. and lgbt in society.
That somone can only be the Jews. Because history always blamed Jews for whatever went wrong. At least in the conspiracy drenched minds of the losers aka, racists and anti-semites, that encircle the alt-right.
It is far more logical to blame liberals, whatever their race, as policies based on liberal views are directly, demonstrably and even rather obviously responsible for all this. I think the root issue is twofolds. First, liberalism became a default position among the elites. And default means less visible, due to lack of contrast. In fact, as you know, the word liberalism is used in this sense only in the US, we don’t really have any term to describe this set of views in Europe other than “mainstream”, or “default”. Given that everybody from the left to Merkelian centre-right basically denies that nationhood would have anything to do with ethnicity, for example, and the Salvini and Orban and other rebel types are sort of keeping the issue murky rather than being open about ethnic nationalism or ethnic nationhood. This is why instead of “liberal” murky terms are used like “globalist elites”. Another example: “far right” Geert Wilders is basically a liberal about every issue except that one. His views on women, gays or race are not controversional at all. Yet, it is true even in America that liberalism in this sense became the default position and thus not really visible due to lack of contrast. Many conservatives accept many aspects of this, this is why the alt-right named them cuckservatives.
I tracked down this “defaultism” to James Burnham’s 1964 Suicide of the West. Burnham found that most US college professors already in 1964 had basically the same opinion about everything than say the Newsweek had. Yet the new thing was that they could not really define their ideology. They did not have a liberal equivalent of the Communist Manifesto to point to. This was very weird. Burnham basically went to work and collected 39 questions from which it could be determined who is a liberal and who is not. And the reaction of the professors was surprising: they said EVERYBODY they know agrees with these questions. So it is not useful for telling liberals from nonliberals, everybody is in that sense a liberal. It is just the default view. For example, one question was if racial discrimination is unacceptable. The professors thought this is something everybody agrees with, not just liberals. Now, the book was published in 1964. So the work was done say 1962-63. Mostly before the Civil Rights legislation in the US, when de facto racial discrimination was still widespread. Yet, from the professors viewpoint, nobody agreed with it. Plain simply some rural school board was not part of their definition of everybody. They did not matter. Already in 1963 or so.
So long story short, while this was caused by liberalism, liberalism is hard to see due to lack of contrast as it seems “everybody who matters” is a liberal.
And this is one reason the less intelligent folks basically just say Jews. They need something more clearly visible than standard, default liberalism. I mean consider that from the viewpoint of Trump, even W Bush is a liberal. And Trump is not an ethnic nationalist. Bannon is to the right of Trump, and he is a civic nationalist. Not ethnic. So from the viewpoint of the ethic nationalist or racist even Trump is a far liberal and the actual liberals are so far they are not even visible. It is just the establishment. The default position of elites. They needed a more visible enemy. Hence Jews.
The second reason is that we know from evolutionary psychology that human groups are organized around unfalsifiable, not-even-wrong ideas. Like religion or most ideology. Because, by definition, they won’t be falsified by an unexpected turn of events. Hence enduring. “It’s the Jews” is one of these, because of the wide spectrum of Jews, some liberal, some conservative, some very visibly Jewish, some, like Trump’s Stephen Miller, have a generic white face and name and are basically invisible as Jews. This makes “it’s the Jews” a fully generic explanation of everything that is hard to falsify. Hence, it makes a functional platform for engineering group cohesion.
“It is far more logical to blame liberals, whatever their race, as policies based on liberal views are directly, demonstrably and even rather obviously responsible for all this. I think the root issue is twofolds. ”
If anti-liberals kill Jews this must be blamed on Liberals?
That is like saying that the Holocaust must be blamed on the Americans.
No, but “the civil rights movement in the 1960s, as well as the emancipation of women and lgbt and the upcoming demographic transition, the influx of latinos, and the rise of migrant workers and refugees in Europe. ” should be blamed on liberals, not Jews.
“No, but “the civil rights movement in the 1960s… ”
I missed that part, sorry. But indeed, my point was that the Jews were blamed for changes in society, whatever the causes.
Btw, I have my suspicions that the influx of migrant labor was not a “liberal” driven policy as much as an employer driven policy to recruit low wage migrant laborers in industries that could not compete using all-American labor. Especially in agriculture, where the bulk of the cheap migrant labor ended up, I have not seen much affection for “Liberal” politics.
>Btw, I have my suspicions that the influx of migrant labor was not a “liberal” driven policy as much as an employer driven policy to recruit low wage migrant laborers in industries that could not compete using all-American labor.
True, until the early 2000s.
Then the Democrats developed the grand strategy of replacing their lost support among the white working class with a “coalition of the ascendant” including both legal and illegal immigrants. A key marker was the book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” in 2002. It’s easy to find statements in support of strong border controls by prominent Democrats before that year; afterwards the party’s position shifted rapidly towards open borders.
If that was the case, they why did the Democrats f*k Reagan back in the 80s?
They made a deal with him (nutshell)–if he signed a bill granting amnesty to a bunch of illegals they would pass *stricter* prohibitions against illegal immigration. He signed.
They didn’t bother trying to deliver.
This is not a case of either or, it’s a case of embracing the power of “and”. Businesses, especially those with seasonal requirements for manual or low skilled labor–want a supply of workers that lets them produce profitably[1], and the Democrats what a new supply of voters who will vote for big government/redistributionist policies.
Precisely, just look at what was agreed to in 1986 and which side failed to live up to their part of the bargain.
The Democrats had only started to hemorrhage white working class votes under Reagan and were still caught between two strategic optima. Only once they got mopped by W did they say “screw it” and go all in on demographic shift.
Fun fact: Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American labor activist, wanted those fruit-picking jobs to go to citizens and legal immigrants. He used to send goon squads out to harass and beat up Mexican migrant workers. Protecting American jobs used to be a leftist issue because you’re right — illegal immigration was championed by big corporations looking to cut labor costs.
Now that the Republicans have taken a hard line stance on immigration under Trump, the left are for no immigration enforcement at all. Granted, in the current climate it’s hard to distinguish between legitimate immigration enforcement and illegitimate, possibly racist harassment. But the solution is to make permanent residency cheap and straightforward to obtain, while exercising strict control over the border. As far as I’m concerned, Trump can build his damn wall, as long as he simultaneously tears down the wall of red tape faced by those looking to enter legitimately.
But the left in America (such as it is) currently has no sense of values to stick to, other than orange man bad. As soon as Trump looked like he was giving the Saudis the benefit of the doubt in thr Khashoggi affair, we started hearing from left-leaning journalists about what bloodthirsty thugs the Saudis are and how they need to be stopped and how if we didn’t stop using Google and Facebook before, we really need to now because of how lousy with Saudi blood money the investments they took are. I thought to myself “If this keeps up, watch the Democrats agitate for war in the Middle East!” You know, the very thing they railed against for six years under Shrub.
But I don’t need to tell you that politics in the USA is highly, stupidly dysfunctional.
You mean like how the Democrats and the rest of the Left in the US blamed the killing of John Kennedy, killed by a pro-communist who had spent time in the Soviet Union–on the “climate of hate” that the Republicans had established in Dallas.
Burnham basically went to work and collected 39 questions from which it could be determined who is a liberal and who is not. And the reaction of the professors was surprising: they said EVERYBODY they know agrees with these questions.
This simply does not pass the sniff test. The idea that EVERYBODY a college professor knows agrees on 39 important points about politics is simply not possible. Either Burnham is lying, (most likely) or he cherry picked the questions very, very carefully (much less likely, as it can sometimes be difficult to get two college professors to agree that the sky is blue.)
As TheDividualist said:
“[Put] simply some rural school board was not part of their definition of everybody. They did not matter.”
> Jews enter the conspiracy theories of the alt-right, or just, Right.
There you go. Anyone who opposes you is an anti-semitic crazy conspiracy kook. It’s not enough that they have kooky conspiracy theories that no sane person would entertain. Oh, no, those conspiracies must target the victims of the most infamous genocide in recent history, as a reminder that the perpetrators of that genocide have been deemed “right-wing” by the Establishment, in order to forever link opposition to the Left as inherently genocidally racist.
And why wouldn’t you do that? It’s worked pretty well for a few generations now. Entire Oppressed Groups have been programmed to believe that “They’ll have y’all back in chains” (or gas chambers, as the group may be).
Well guess what? That’s how you get Trump. And Brexit, and Orbán , and every other “Extreeeeeme Right-Wing Nationalist” Bogeyman. The more you keep this crap up, the more of that you’ll get, because you have cried “Wolf” too many times, and people no longer care whether you call them those names.
That means that when there are actual White Supremacists in our midst, there’s no longer a name for them that means “No, really, these people literally believe they’re the Master Race and want to exterminate the Untermenschen” because you’ve used it up on people who just don’t want to pay so much tax as you’d like to take from them, to pay for counter-productive social programs that leave the Oppressed Groups worse off than before (and ensure their dependence upon the State for their existence).
For decades, people in the USA who have proposed sensible government regulation of markets to prevent predatory behavior and protect the poorest and most vulnerable have been called “commies”, “pinkos” and worse. Don’t be surprised when the left (such as it is) picks up the weapons you leave lying around and uses them against you, putting us where we are now, where “alt-right” has no real meaning outside of being a snarl word for “people who don’t take intersectional feminism seriously”.
The world has gone mad. I completely agree with Jeff Read. .. Damnit!
(Joking mostly, it happened once before, in 2016)
One caveat, though: One of the hallmarks of today’s tribalism is evident in your first sentence. And make no mistake, it’s done by both sides. Emphasis was added my me:
I have little doubt that you were sincere, and this was a pretty minor and benign instance of the pattern I am highlighting.
The issue is this: by framing your sentence as you did, you have pre-assumed:
1.) that the regulations were sensible ( implication: opposing the regulation is not-sensible )
2.) that the behavior trying to be stopped is predatory (implication: opposing the regulation makes you a predator or on their side ).
3.) the regulations were to protect the poorest and most vulnerable ( implication: you don’t care about those people if you oppose )
—
And like I said, the right does it all the time, too. Hell, I do it all the time, and get called for it. It’s very difficult to avoid. Glass houses for everyone.
The regulation in question has been in the Communist Party platform, so it’s honest to categorize it that way, whereas policies diametrically opposed to fascism/Nazism/racism are routinely called those names.
Bernie Sanders is literally a Socialist, and She Guevara is a “Democratic Socialist”. For some reason, “socialist”/”communist” are not widely seen as the unmitigated evil that “fasist”/”Nazi” are, despite running up a far more impressive body count. The obvious difference is the racism that’s been tied to the latter, but has been associated with the former as well.
Mostly I think it’s that the Left does not want to recognize that there’s a “too far” on that side. Instead, they just keep insisting “That wasn’t real socialism. We’ll do it right this time.” No one says that about fascism/Nazism.
I don’t entirely agree, mainly because standards evolve, but you do have a good point.
The important thing to remember is that you can (frequently) judge the sanity of a politician by noticing how frequently they engage in this kind of exaggeration. If you assume that politics is an interactive process in which you will need to frequently work with your opposition and make compromises, insulting your opponents is not a great idea.*
The place where I disagree with you is that standards change. In the late 1960s you’d never have imagined calling the animators who made Disney’s “The Aristocats” racists. By 1990s, it was obvious that the scene with the Siamese cat playing the piano was about as ugly a bit of racism as could be imagined. From today’s view of racism that scene is literally off the charts; not so much racist as “did the animators forget to take their medication?”
* I blame Newt Gingrich.
I’m going to “show my work” here on why the caravan reports were inaccurate. This was supposed to be posted as part of my reply to Eric above, but the WordPress Godz were angry this morning and wouldn’t allow a second long post. Anywhere, here’s the Big Footnote:
First, the caravan was/is traveling on foot and is a thousand miles away. I mean that literally. The caravan is a thousand miles south of the U.S. border. It will be a month before it arrives here (if it really exists.*) Second, nothing illegal (per U.S. law) has been done by anyone on the caravan, including illegally crossing the U.S. border. (There’s absolutely no need to fear the caravan if you imagine several thousand people politely lined up to apply for asylum.) Third, many on the caravan are fleeing the horrific gang violence in El Salvador or the dictatorship in Honduras, so it would not be surprising to discover that many on the caravan are actually eligible for asylum under our laws, which were established with exactly such issues in mind. We may not give everyone involved refugee status, but we should make the effort to consider their issues and make a good decision. Since no U.S. laws have been broken until someone crosses the borders without permission and the caravan is full of civilians, fearing an invasion is quite silly. (Several of my ancestors arrived in the U.S. fleeing pogroms; I’ve got a certain sympathy!)
But the soothing noises above are just a warm up! Let’s look at the actual numbers via the Washington Post:
Notice that these numbers have consequences which should be soothing to a terrified White Supremacist. A “caravan” of 100,000 people would be less than a tenth of the difference in falling annual arrest rates between 2000 and 2017, and the total number of participants in the caravan isn’t anything near 100,000. As of October 22nd, the count of caravan members was 7200. But let’s build the number up, and imagine 10,000 people actually making it to the U.S. border. That would total 1/100th of the difference between border arrests from 2000 to 2017. (Since arrests at the border have been falling constantly from 2000 onwards, we’ve had many, many illegal immigrants who did not, in fact cross the border. I haven’t seen a year-by-year breakdown, but I’d guess that in excess of ten million people didn’t ever cross a border who otherwise would have crossed given conditions between 1990 and 2000.)
In short, there was and is no “invasion.” The “caravan” represents a tiny uptick on a graph which has been steadily trending downwards. The Really, Really Accurate News – which Bowers apparently didn’t get – is that illegal immigration from Mexico resulted in 80 percent few arrests in 2017 than in 2000, and that’s an ongoing trend!
“The caravan” is also a very ugly example of the fear-based grifting I described above. The right-wing policy of sowing fear to low-information voters is generating some real ugliness – in one week we had two Black people killed (by a guy who couldn’t get into a Black Church,) 11 Jews killed, and more than a dozen letter bombs, one of which was aimed at a Jewish survivor of World War II. (Soros was a child in Hungary during the Nazi Invasion.)
This is not good.
*We have some panicky chatter and video of people walking down the road in Mexico, whether there’s anything remotely like a Caravan is not something we can depend on on.
It’s running amok. There are differences in cultural expression from the Malay archetype but the underlying psychopathology is clearly the same. The big difference is that when a Westerner runs amok, he has a tendency Malays seem not to have: to choose a rationalization – which may, but need not necessarily, restrict the victims he targets.
I spent a fair bit of time in Indonesia and Malaysia back in the 1980s and when I read what you wrote… I got chills. I think we’re about half-way to understanding this on a very deep level. I suspect, BTW, that the Malay does have his reasons, but their culture is much less communicative about the whole thing. (They seem to be a “guess” culture, not an “ask” culture.)
Note with special attention the definition of “beramok” from the Wikipedia article on the subject, particularly the bit I bolded:
The bolded part particularly resonates. Sayoc had lost his home, but his bomb-sending is not anyplace near a classical amok, so maybe he’s an outlier. Bowers and Roof were very much a classical amok, but the Kroger shooter is not (or at least not as much) and the loss of power definitely seems to be a major issue in all three cases. Obviously White people are losing immense power in our demographic transition, which has to be emotionally difficult (the fact that our demographic transition is both being mishandled and turned into a constant source of political fear-mongering doesn’t help at all.) But also note that Bowers was a trucker. If he’s been paying any attention at all to modern technology, he has to know that his job is next up for automation, so we have “loss of power” and “loss of job” plus the “brooding” discussed in the description of “beramok.” (Bowers’ neighbors reported “never seeing him, even when he was home.” I wonder if he was in his house staring at a wall or something.)
Reading his Wikipedia page, Dylan Roof is a classic example of the guy who’s going to go amok. Go look. ‘Nuf said.
On one hand, the Kroger shooter, Gregory Bush doesn’t look like a candidate for amok, or at least not the traditional Malay variety. His biographical information makes it clear that he was delusional, probably off his meds, and a self-described paranoid-schizophrenic – much more the American model of “going postal” or something similar. On the other hand, he is divorced, (his ex-wife is Black!?) was probably on the verge of losing visitation rights to his son (if he hadn’t already,) and his parents didn’t want him around, so there’s lots of loss involved, plus he might be shallow enough to blame his marital problems on his wife’s Blackness… I’d tend to say he wasn’t going Amok, but someone could definitely make a reasonable counter-argument.
The paranoid side of me is wondering about some MK-Ultra-like experiment into weaponizing crazy people…
All that said, I need to think more about this before writing further on the subject, but I think you’ve put us on the right track.
In fairness, you should also be asking what we can do to stop more James Hodgkinsons from shooting more Steve Scalises (and had it not been for alert armed security his body count might have been higher than Bowers’s). This is not a thing that is happening only on the right.
It’s happening much more on the right. I don’t think it’s a matter of the Right being worse people, but do think it might be due to differences in the kinds of media to which various political groups are exposed.
Right-wing media loves cops and the military and promotes violent or threatening solutions to problems like Iran and North Korea, while actively noting the ways Whites are losing power/money/jobs and are in personal danger from The Other. Note the causes of amok, particularly beramok, and consider how the Right Wing media discusses these issues in exactly the fashion likely to lead to amok. I don’t think this is with the intentional cause of stimulating violence, but more a matter of “just the way they roll.”
The U.S. Left, on the other hand, tends to espouse an ideal of peaceful change – we can be fairly aggressive politically, but we’re personally non-violent. We’re happy to meet people from other cultures, we idolize Gandhi, and we’re also not terribly worried about money, so U.S. leftwing media reflects all this. I’d guess that a leftist who is feeling loss of power/job/money is given less aggressive thought patterns by their media for handling such a loss. (This is not necessarily a good thing, IMHO. Frequently leftists aren’t aggressive enough about life’s little problems.)
I’m guessing that the net result of all this is that a Left-wing person who is experiencing loss of power/job/money is more likely to do something self-harming, and a Right-wing person more likely to do something other-harming. Note that this isn’t a value-judgement aimed at either side, just an observation, (because harm is harm, even if you do it to yourself.)
>Reading his Wikipedia page, Dylan Roof is a classic example of the guy who’s going to go amok.
You’re doing a good job of expressing exactly why, if I were a monster-master for a Right terror network, I wouldn’t touch Roof but might consider Bowers recruit material.
>Left-wing person who is experiencing loss of power/job/money is more likely to do something self-harming,
You mean like cracking somebody’s skull with a bicycle lock? Or attempting a mass killing of Republican legislators with a rifle? Or committing vandalism and arson against a Republican district office? Or near-fatally stabbing a Republican candidate days before an election? Or breaking a Congressman’s ribs? Or assassinating policemen from an improvised sniper hide?
Not buying it. The Left media is promoting violence just as hard – and about as successfully – as any Right media. I think the only reason the results look different is that right-wing nuts are on average better armed.
Also, there’s something you have wrong about this “loss of power” thing. It’s not some hypothetical loss of power (with “over others” implied) that working class-whites fear, it’s loss of security, autonomy, and pride – constantly being bullied and threatened and demonized by the State and the overculture on behalf of the victim group of the week. This is a damaging stress on them and you will not grasp the problem if you dismiss those real pressures as right-wing propaganda inventions.
I’m not in that SES myself, but I can see what that shit is doing to them from where I am. The analogy to beramok is very exact here.
Working-class white populations in the U.S. have historically derived their security, autonomy, and pride from their social superiority over other races and ethnicities. This dates back to the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion, in which the governors of Virginia offered a superior position to the “white” plantation workers over the “black” plantation workers, in exchange for their cooperation.
It’s a classic divide and conquer strategy, which is still being used today exactly as Troutwaxer described. Use disinformation to stir up fear of immigrants, racial or religious minorities, or the “Other” of the month in order to keep the working class distracted from what the elites are doing and prevent the underclasses of all races from uniting in a way that will result in said elites being ousted from their positions of power.
There was even a line in the movie The Big Short about this:
>Working-class white populations in the U.S. have historically derived their security, autonomy, and pride from their social superiority over other races and ethnicities.
Bullshit.
I’m going to give a proper answer to your other post above after my coffee kicks in, but I’ll note two things: First of all, that I’m halfway between you and Jeff on the issue of “…white populations in the U.S. having historically derived their security, autonomy, and pride from their social superiority over other races and ethnicities.” To me Whiteness was one of the causes of white “security, autonomy, and pride” and a minor one at that, when times were good.
But Whiteness was not the only cause of “security, autonomy, and pride”. A couple decades ago, a working-class father – a welder perhaps – could have said to his kid, “No, we don’t have much money, but I helped build that bridge, and I got paid well for the job” or a miner might have said, “your great-grandfather, your grandfather and I all dug that mine, and we provided coal for powerplants across the Eastern Seaboard. And all of us were Union men,” the ultimate piece of pride being, “…and that’s how I fed/clothed/housed my family.” *
But a lot of those infrastructure/mining/manufacturing jobs have been exported abroad, automated, or don’t exist any more for various reasons and the combination of personal pride, Union pride, and pride of being a builder/creator doesn’t exist any more for these people. Being White is the only thing they have left any more, so all the assaults on the human dignity of these people sort of symbolically become assaults on Whiteness.
I think in a way “Whiteness” has become a sort of shorthand for everything the rust-belt types have lost in the last generation. You may imagine me as an Obama-loving Commie/Liberal type, but he lost the rust-belt for a generation when he forced GM into bankruptcy in 2008 and killed pensions/healthcare/contracted pay rates for a million GM workers. The United Auto Workers union was a couple billion dollars away from becoming self-insuring when Obama forced the company into bankruptcy. It’s something I can’t forgive, and it says a lot about why the rust belt went for Trump and are vulnerable to the kind of racist/prejudiced thinking being pushed by the right.
* I got a tiny piece of that feeling when I worked for the Riverside City wifi provider and drove a bucket-truck as part of my duties. I took my son with me – he was nine at the time – and let him stand on the corner to watch as I went up in the bucket to replace a piece of networking gear. And when I was done he ran up to me and said, “Wow Dad! You’re one of those people who make stuff happen!”
>Being White is the only thing they have left any more, so all the assaults on the human dignity of these people sort of symbolically become assaults on Whiteness.
>I think in a way “Whiteness” has become a sort of shorthand for everything the rust-belt types have lost in the last generation.
I think you’re almost to grasping the matter. You may get the rest of the way when you reconcile the contradiction between the implications of those two statements.
I’d explain it, but I’m trying to climb out of a week-long system-administration disaster right now
> I’d explain it ….
May I respectfully submit that Eric has in large part explained it before.
I suspect he will want to amplify these remarks for the present conversation.
I didn’t participate in the “Servant Problem” thread because the top post pinged my bullshit meter so hard there was no way I could be polite about it. I’m willing to wade into a political discussion and call bullshit, but when it gets so deep I’d need Scuba gear… I’m gone.*
That being said, the particular post of Eric’s you’re pointing to is exactly on point for a variety of reasons. My ancestors were either Iowa corn farmers (descended from Menonites who were fleeing religious persecution,) or shopkeepers and factory workers** (descended from Jewish refugees who were fleeing religious persecution,) so I definitely get what Eric is talking about here, and he’s right: Obama was a terrible disappointment who failed to support the lower-middle and middle-middle class on a number of fronts, (mainly IMHO because he was the puppet of moneyed special interests and lacked the necessary spine to arrest bankers or war criminals.) The real problems with Obama weren’t talked about by Democrats because they didn’t want to alienate the Black vote, and weren’t talked about by Republicans because they were busy laughing over pictures of Obama-as-baboon or trying to convince the rest of us that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim Terrorist/Socialist. ***
* Genetics doesn’t work that way, at least not over the 3-4 generations Eric was posting about. Essentially the problem (as Eric conceived it) doesn’t exist.
** One of my collateral ancestors died in a famous gangland killing. His death wasn’t famous, but the other guy? Abbie Loeb.
*** The Republican Congress of the time is equally at fault here. The idea that after an election you all work together to run the country didn’t count for shit with those people, and I think they were probably the worst Congress we’ve had since the Civil War era. (Note Mitch McConnel’s very ugly comment about how “every time he met with Obama he lost votes.”)
Sorry you’re having system administration problems. I hope you get the problem fixed ASAP.
Part of Trump’s victory coalition was labor voters. They were sold a bill of goods about the USA as a jobs program, and welfare smoothing out all the hiccups. The underpinnings of this bill of goods have become increasingly obviously flawed, but that didn’t matter, because ‘Republicans hate poor people’. Then Obama stabbed them in the back on jobs, and Hillary made it obvious that she agreed with him, and would continue those policies. Even labor voters are numerate enough to work out that bringing in a vote and work force from the third world, paying them off the books to avoid labor laws, and supporting the immigrants with welfare is not going to make their personal financial situation better. Obama and Clinton were clearly espousing War on Some Poverty, exclusive of traditional labor voters, and so they jumped to Trump, who was basically promising to make the US a jobs program ‘again’, like the Democrats of Old.
But yeah, all those disgruntled former Obama voters are motivated purely by racism. Killing people who are not white is the be all and the end all of their purpose in life. That they are so dedicated that they regularly give up their lives to kill more people who are not white. Sure the FBI crime stats don’t reflect that, but that is because the FBI is originally a criminal conspiracy* to cover up white supremacist terrorism.
*There is actually some evidence of this last, but if it was so corrupt that the crime stats were manipulated to the former degree, there are a lot of subtle signs we would expect and do not see. Hoover was the formative influence on the FBI, and had willingly done secret police work for the white supremacist Wilson. Wilson was complicit in at least one white supremacist massacre of hundred victims. FDR had an early role in the funding of the FBI, and owes the margin of victory in one of his elections to states where Southern Democrats had used white supremacist terrorism to squash the Republican parties. JFK, twenty years later, knew enough of what the white supremacists did for Democrats in presidential elections that he promised that the Catholic Church wouldn’t make him end segregation.
I think you are wrong about this. Read this, written by a nonwhite man: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-utility-of-white-bashing/566846/
“One reason I’ve been disinclined to take this sort of talk seriously in the past is that it has so often smacked of intra-white status jockeying. It is almost as though we’re living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites. Note that to be “upper” or “lower” isn’t just about class status, though of course that’s always hovering in the background. Rather, it is about the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation. ”
“One straightforward way to demonstrate that you are Harvard material might be to denounce Harvard as racist, provided you’re careful to do so in a way that flatters rather than offends those who run the university and are invested in its continued success. For example, you might reject the notion that affirmative action is the problem while arguing that Harvard shouldn’t endeavor to increase representation of rural and working-class whites, on the spurious grounds that all whites are privileged. That you’ll make these claims even though you yourself are hardly among the most downtrodden is immaterial: The important thing is to be interesting. What better way to demonstrate that you’re not a humdrum worker bee, afflicted with a lackluster personality, than to carefully and selectively express the right kind of righteous indignation?”
So: the lower-whites are not simply misperceiving something else as an attack on whiteness. Whiteness, lower-whiteness actually gets attacked by upper-whites (and some nonwhites), for careerist, status-climbing reasons, and not only shitting on them but apparently actually violating their interests, as in, calling lower-whites privileged means universities adopting policies that pretty much ensure they have hardly any chance to get in the best universities.
These are real actual attacks, not imagined. It is not a shorthand. They are noticing real white-bashing and real disadvantages of lower-whites BECAUSE they are whites (I mean, not getting the natural advantages, actual privilege of upper-whites nor the policies that help nonwhites so they are the last in the queue), while you are not. And Reihan Salam is seeing it happening his whole life. Why don’t you?
I was about ready to make some concessions, but then I read about Tom Metzger and his advocacy of “Lone Wolf” tactics. I’ll give you the wikipedia page, but you’ll have to do the rest of the research yourself – I don’t want to give Stormfront or similar sites any links, (and I’m assuming that you’d prefer to avoid links from your blog to Stormfront or similar.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(terrorism)
Or you could paste the following into Google, including the quotes. It should give you a link to a very interesting and pertinent Stormfront discussion (for people who are not self-employed like Eric, DO NOT paste this into your work computer, or a computer for which the use of a “problematic” search term might have negative consequences):
“infiltrating the institutions of our enemies. WN Teachers, Police officers”
Anyway Eric, ask your contact about Tom Metzger-style “lone wolf” terrorists and see what he says. If I were a racist I’d see lots of utility in that position. In the Stormfront discussion above, it is not merely suggested that people become “lone wolf” terrorists. It is also suggested that people infiltrate the police, military, healthcare and education as obvious “places to be” if you want to inspire the next generation of racists (or make sure that a Black kid is discouraged from attending college.)
The most significant quote from the “link” I gave you, in terms of our discussion, is the following:
This would strongly suggest that Bowers, at least, “made sure his timing coincided with an enemy group’s endeavor.” (That is, he attacked the synagogue, which worked with a group settling refugees, at a time he imagined would be very effective – during the refugee “caravan’s” trip to the U.S.)
And the behavior of entities like Fox News or Breitbart look very different if they know that there are armed/crazy lone wolves out there “making sure their timing coincides with an enemy group’s endeavor.” Some of what we see may be deliberate attempts to rile up the Tom Metzger style “lone wolves.”
But as for the rest of it:
>>> You’re doing a good job of expressing exactly why, if I were a monster-master for a Right terror network, I wouldn’t touch Roof but might consider Bowers recruit material.
We have no disagreement on Roof vs. Bowers.
>>> You mean like cracking somebody’s skull with a bicycle lock?
I don’t disagree that the left does sometimes engage in violence, but note how far back you had to go to find the complaint about “assassinating policemen from an improvised sniper hide?” And note that the guy was (if anything) an Islamic terrorist, and leftist ideals disagree considerably with Muslim extremist thought. (The left doesn’t see much structural difference between Muslim terror and Right wing terror – they’re both about religious fanaticism and fear of the other.)
I could find more right-wing violence in the last year than the whole ten-year scope of your paragraph above. Right-wing killers make left-wing killers look like amateurs, and detonate about ten times as frequently!
>>> Also, there’s something you have wrong about this “loss of power” thing.
See my reply to you below for more on this. I’ll note that I don’t see the “…bullied and threatened and demonized by the State and the overculture on behalf of the victim group of the week” like you do. The problem that’s (hopefully) being addressed in what others see as “bullying and threatening” is the issue of “what happens if we blow our demographic transition” and nobody on the right is willing to consider this any terms other than the fearful. We could have a (real) civil war over this, or institute the same rules South Africa instituted over the same set of fears… or we could all agree that America is, first and foremost, a group of people with a shared set of ideal and ideas; not a race, a tribe, or a particular demographic and actually act that way!
Just because Tom Metzger thinks he’s running a prospiracy doesn’t mean he actually is. I’ll believe it when I see his “lone wolves” behaving like one, and not sooner.
Bowers would probably be a good example. Posts on racist sites, but otherwise keeps quiet. Not previously on anyone’s radar, but when he perceives an “emergency,” that is, the coming “caravan,” he acts against Jews who support refugees! (His timing coincided with an “enemy endeavor,” as noted above.)
And don’t forget another part of what’s becoming obvious; people like Bowers and Roof are killing due to false information, or true information which is provided without context.
Also note that a lot of “lone wolf” examples wouldn’t be obvious. They’d be the otherwise “cool” teacher who discourages the Black kid from going to school, or the cop who frequently charges Black people who (if white) would have received only a traffic ticket with “resisting arrest.”
“Obviously White people are losing immense power in our demographic transition, which has to be emotionally difficult (the fact that our demographic transition is both being mishandled and turned into a constant source of political fear-mongering doesn’t help at all.)”
Sorry, but is not the reason. There has been a shift of power from employee to employer. In the 1960s and 1970s, an employee could wield power because he was needed for shops to actually run. Nowadays, an employer can simply hire someone else, outsource, or move off-shore if employees demand something, anything.
That hits hardest on white men as all the other demographics never had any power anyway.
Obviously, employees are not blaming this loss of power on their bosses, or the politicians who actually made this possible (the GOP), but they blame it on those below them on the SEC stairs. That is why women and non-whites are blamed for their loss of power, or Jews. Everything but to admit it was those in power who brought it on them.
This is age old. When high taxes, rents, and bad harvests lead people into debts and hardship in the late middle ages, they did not blame the aristocracy or king who collected the taxes, rents, and usury. No, they blamed it on women (witches) and Jews (who lend out the money of the aristocracy).
Likewise, when tax and economic policies lead people into debt and hardship in modern day USA, they do not blame the employers and politicians who actually made this happen. They blame the poor immigrants who were displaced by the same kind of hardship in their own country to move to the USA.
But the ancient strategy of “divide and conquer” is still very much alive. It’s not just that “There has been a shift of power from employee to employer.” It’s also that the political organs of that employer are spending immense amounts of money and time blaming immigrants, Black/Hispanic people, and Democrats for the problem. That “Kenyan Mooslim Terrorist/Socialist” stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum!
I totally agree. The current PotUS is the incarnation of Divide and Conquer.
The shift of power really did happen, but why should employees blame their employers? If the same product is made in China much cheaper, and if the employer does not buy it, he gets outcompeted by someone else who does. There isn’t really a choice there. You just cannot have strong unions, or high costs of labor in a globalised age.
And similar it means less and less being able to afford a social welfare state and suchlike. And you know what is weird? That the only possible way to fight this is high tariffs, shifting this cost to consumers, and that is precisely what not only the libertarian economists but also the left leaning Krugman to Stiglitz types don’t recommend. Weirdly, the mainstream left wants redistribution and worker protecting policies and free trade at the same time which is a huge contradiction, it is one or the other.
Same thing in the EU really, internal free trade means if production can be moved to Romania, the Dutch worker has to accept Romania level of quality of living to be competitive, or go on unemployement but if the production is outsourced how can taxes finance it? And yet you don’t see the Social Democrat parties of Europe railing against internal free trade.
This is a very illogical contradiction. If you want free trade, be a libertarian about the whole economy. If you want roughly leftist policies, put a huge tariff on cheaper foreign production and force consumers to suck it up. Nothing else is possible: free trade basically equalizes labor costs hence the quality of living of the working class over the whole free trade area, which for the richer countries means a drop in the quality of living.
One may hope only temporarily, China is getting more decent wages now so they are outsourcing to Africa, maybe there will be a point when the world just runs out of dirt cheap labor and the standards of living begin to rise globally. But until that if you free trade with Romania, the worker gets to live like Romanians, if you free trade with Vietnam, the worker gets to live like the Vietnamese. (Talking about workers with minimal skills of course.)
And there is no point in blaming employers for outsourcing if their other option is having a competitor do it and go bankrupt.
Blaming it on foreign workers, that may not make a lot of sense either because it is a mechanism, not a choice, but people are people. Blaming specifically on illegal immigrants working under the table, well that makes sense from the angle that they actually broke a law to undercut the domestic workers, although of course their employers too. Mechanisms are mechanisms but it makes sense to demand that at least don’t do it criminally.
But you see economic anxiety is not the only thing. Immigration really can make neighborhoods less safe, for staters. Lower class white neighborhoods are really transformed by it and not in a good way. And then there is this white-bashing I linked an article about upstream.
“There isn’t really a choice there. You just cannot have strong unions, or high costs of labor in a globalised age.”
Both Sweden and Germany have both strong unions and high wages. They are still highly competitive economies which compete in advanced industries. So, there is a choice.
What is missing in the “unions and high cost of labor” argument is that you do not only compete on price, but also on productivity and quality. As the old saying goes, “If you peanuts, you get monkeys”. Low wages only attract low skilled workers with little education and low vocational skills. Sweden and Germany, among other things, spend a lot of money and effort to educate and train all their workers.
It seems to me that the USA is a lot like the UK where manufacturing has been neglected and there is nothing that can compare to the focus on vocational training (and re-training) in Germany. That might explain why Germany is a big exporter of high margin industrial products to China.
The UK could learn a lot from Germany’s long-term industrial strategy
A combination of long-termism, social obligations, vocational education and state support are what keep German manufacturing so healthy
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/mar/30/the-uk-could-learn-a-lot-from-germanys-long-term-industrial-strategy
More details in:
Why is Germany so Strong in Manufacturing
https://manufacturingpolicy.indiana.edu/doc/insight/Insight%20March%202018.pdf
We are living in a cheap > good age. Even in software.
For example, basically every Western nation are importing programmers from India in large numbers. Now the older generation, who are now 35-40+ were decent, because Indian universities still had standards. Right now they have shit for standards:
https://defiantthinking.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/the-h1b-scam/
“According to a 2017 skills assessment of graduating Indian software engineers conducted by Aspiring Minds, an Indian skills assessment company:
Out of the 2 problems given per candidate, only 14% engineers are able to write compilable codes for both and only 22% write compilable code for exactly one problem.
Only 14.67% of engineers are employable for IT Services company, while a worryingly low percentage of 2.47% are observed to be employable in IT Product company.
Amazingly, just 2.21% of candidates are able to write functionally and logically correct code.”
Needless to say, our HR departments are not able to shift through haystacks of 100 people to find that 2-3 we want. We always relied on universities for heavy pre-filtering, our ones used to deliver that, Indian ones used to deliver that, now they stopped. To a certain extent, even Western universities stopped that pre-filtering and are letting people with shit-tier skills graduate.
So we get crap software. But cheaply.
Advanced, high quality manufacturing cannot be done with cheap labor. That is why countries like Germany ao can compete and still have high wages.
>Advanced, high quality manufacturing cannot be done with cheap labor. That is why countries like Germany ao can compete and still have high wages.
Foxconn would like a word with you.
If this were actually so, the Asian Tigers would still be dirt-poor and backwards. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a good thing that you can build iPhones with cheap labor, but it’s definitely a thing.
Most of the work at Foxconn is low-skill.
The Chinese do make most of the industrial stuff in the world. However, the advanced machines that they use to do so are imported. For instance, most of the worlds phones are made in Chine, but the wafer steppers needed to make the chips that power these phones are made in Europe (Eindhoven, the Netherlands to be precise). There are clean rooms in China, but the stuff needed to keep them clean are constructed in Germany, etc.
> Advanced, high quality manufacturing cannot be done with cheap labor.
I think there’s an assumption that cheap labor == unskilled labor == low quality, and high quality == skilled labor == expensive labor behind that assertion. As Eric points out, Foxconn has shown quality can be built with cheap labor. Foxconn has been in this game a long time (I recall seeing their logos on the components of 486 motheboards I salvaged in the late 90s). I suspect at least a few of their workers have developed some skill over that time, even if Foxconn isn’t paying them much more. I’d go further and state that in the past 20-some years, Foxconn has probably managed to iron out their processes and materials supply chains.
Process and materials matter, and I’d argue moreso than labor. As another example, I submit Celestion (makers of loudspeakers for musical instrument amplifiers). Originally, all Celestion speakers were made in their factory in Ipswitch, England. In the mid-late 00s, Celestion moved production of most of their speakers to China. Queue the cries of drop in quality from guitarists. Chinese-built speakers sounded horribly bright and tinny, and were incapable of sounding as good as English-built ones. Nevermind that Celestion said that the speakers were made on the same machines with the same materials. Nevermind that more experienced people pointed out that nearly *all* brand-new guitar speakers sound horribly bright and tinny until broken in. Nope, guitarists *knew* that the Chinese speakers were intrinsically Bad.
Some fellows on one of the music gear forums I used to haunt put this to test. A fellow found he still had a new-in-box, never used English-built speaker. He bought a Chinese-built speaker of the same model. After submitting both speakers to the same break-in process and mounting them in enclosures, multiple guitarists could not tell the difference between the English speaker and the Chinese one when playing through them.
Well, the people who built the Chinese speaker were paid a lot less by Celestion than those that built the English one, but somehow, the speakers sounded the same. Maybe Celestion was telling the truth about using the same machines and materials in their Chinese factory.
Maybe old-time Atari Democrats[0] like you and me fit this description, but Antifa is a thing, it’s growing in size and voice, and its idea of “direct action” is acting directly against your opponents with fists and weapons to achieve your political aims. If this doesn’t worry you, it should. I don’t think you’d be one to cheerlead the recent mob assault against Tucker Carlson, for instance, however you may feel about Mr. Carlson himself. You can say this is a response to right wing terrorism. And you’d probably be right. But you’d be as right as the kid who pointed to his little brother and said “But he started it, Mom!”
I’ve had a “road to Damascus” recently about the SJW thing, because of the recent Sokal Squared affair, in which a trio of leftist academics successfully pranked gender- and race-studies journals with obviously bogus (and some downright monstrous) papers. I think it’s one thing to be a person on the left and advocate for policies which protect the marginalized, and quite another to wrap yourself in this ideological bubble in which anyone not quite so extreme as you becomes the hated enemy and any action against them is justified.
[0] I am not a registered Democrat and I voted Green in 2016.
I apologize if this has been asked and answered. I skimmed and searched and came up empty.
Why would I come to you, specifically, for anti-active-shooter training, Eric? What special knowledge or training do you have, here? My local police offer training, for example, also free. I suspect that it would differ in substantive ways from yours, but I do not know for sure of course.
And, if I may, a followup question, can you give a thumbnail sketch of what such training, from you, might look like?
>Why would I come to you, specifically, for anti-active-shooter training, Eric?
Because I’m an experienced firearms instructor and martial artist who has been taught basic counterterrorism doctrine by a former SpecOps guy.
>I suspect that it would differ in substantive ways from yours, but I do not know for sure of course.
I don’t know either.
>a thumbnail sketch of what such training, from you, might look like?
I’d get you to basic competence level with a pistol. Then I’d teach you how professionals behave in an active-shooter situation and why they behave that way. Movement, using cover, avoiding looking like another tango to possible police snipers, that sort of thing.
Take something akin to the Stop The Bleed course. In that type of environment, exsanguination is the most critical treatable problem.
Eric, off topic, the comments section is very hard to read on mobile due to the nesting of comments and only one word per line is displayed on the deeply nested comments. Can you offer a simplified view for mobile devices?
> Can you offer a simplified view for mobile devices?
Ask the WordPress developers. I don’t know any way to do this.
Eric, you can use CSS media queries to adjust the borders/padding just for the mobile screen sizes.
https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp
But the logic for displaying flat chronological comments instead of nesting may require tampering with the WordPress PHP code or using some plugin, since it won’t make sense to display comments without showing as nested if they are logically arranged as nested.
I’ve fiddled around with this in Firefox’s development tools. AFAICT, it’s an interaction between how the nesting is described with the HTML & CSS, and how the browsers interpret said CSS. In my clumsy hacking on the CSS, I can get rid of the nesting by messing with or outright deleting the padding and the margins, but then it looks like someone has been clumsily hacking on the CSS.
@hari –
@Jeremy –
Quod Erat Demonstratum.
I should be more clear and less snarky.
WordPress is an amazing product, but…
It’s written in PHP, and has had hundreds (thousands?) of people hacking on it, and on its themes and other add-ins. Net result is, the codebase is crufty, and the underlying language doesn’t help any. I’ve looked at some of this (both in trying to help Eric with his blog, and for my own), and it’s not something that can be easily fixed.
“The amazing thing about the dancing bear is not that it dances so well, but that it can dance at all.”
Interesting – I shouldn’t be surprised that WordPress is written in PHP, but I never really looked. And it explains so much, given what I’ve read about PHP over the years. (Never worked with it, and I’d probably have to be paid a lot to pick it up.)
Which reminds me. I know Nancy Lebovitz has lobbied on SSC for an online forum package that emulates the old trn of Usenet days. I also found that paradigm to be the best I’d ever read forums in; better than Slashdot, Reddit, Facebook, PHPbb, Quora, Medium, Disqus, you name it, if I’ve heard of it, I probably know of something in it that trn had beat.
And yet, no one seems to have ever implemented Usenet’s distributed backing store, or trn’s front end, to the modern day, AFAIK. And I keep wondering why. Is there something technologically making it impossible? Or is it a case of good enough being a superior enemy to better? (Or am I drifting into old fart territory without realizing it?)
I think the problem is simple. Eric is using blogging software, not forum software, and with the larger and longer set of replies to each post the blogging software isn’t keeping up the way it needs to. What Eric really needs is blogging software which acts like forum software. My current favorite place in technical terms is called “Ask A Manager.” Comments are nested and stuff there seems to “just work.”
Charlie Stross’ blog was my old favorite, and comments were not nested, but were numbered, and each post potentially had a link at the top which read:
“Troutwaxer replied to /Link/ this post by Eric Raymond /End Link./
You could click the post to read the earlier comment. This worked really, really well until the ability to successfully click that link and see the earlier post stopped working (due to a broken upgrade, I think.)
> … until the ability to successfully click that link and see the earlier post stopped working (due to a broken upgrade, I think.)
Huh. I read Mr. Stross’ blog daily (64-bit Chromium under Ubuntu and now Devuan). No issues with the “threading” links in the comments.
???
(Edited to add – I had taken your original remark to mean “upgrade on Charley’s site”, not “upgrade to my software”, so I may be talking through my hat….)
Somewhat tangential: I’ve heard that vigilante hit rates are better than police rates, suggesting that fear of armed citizens “wild firing” and hitting innocent bystanders is not justified if one’s argument is that only police should go armed. But I’m having a hard time finding a citation when the question came up today. Guncite doesn’t seem to have one; and overall, LEO hit rate data seems to be hard to find (according to PolitiFact). Does anyone have any handy pointers? Is it somewhere in _Point Blank_, maybe?
Also, what the hell? What’s the speculated cause for this? “Trained” should mean “better shot”. It’s a hit rate, so the fact of greater exposure to criminal activity shouldn’t matter, either. Is there an incentive to be more careful among civilians? Something else?
>Is it somewhere in _Point Blank_, maybe?
Yes, though I don’t have a page cite. IIRC Kleck said the ratio was 5:2 in the civilians’ favor.
It’s not complicated: the civs are better shots. A cop with a gun carries and uses it because he has to; many don’t train more often than they need to to stay qualified and that can be as little as one range visit a year. A civ with a gun, on the other hand, almost certainly likes shooting and trains in it more carefully and intensively than the average cop.
Nah, many people carrying guns *suck* at shooting. Most civilians buy a gun, put *maybe* 2-3 boxes of ammo through it, and then get bored with the whole process.
The difference is that civilians *generally* are close when things go wrong. We have to wait longer for certainty, and that generally means we’re smelling their last meal on their breath.
Police often have more distance, and as noted mostly shoot to qualify. This has two effects–one is they aren’t good shots, two is they know it and make up for their lack of ability by pulling the trigger more.
>Nah, many people carrying guns *suck* at shooting.
Yes, but. A guy who organizes shooting tournaments in my are told me he has to have separated divisions for police because they’re not competitive against the civs.
I suspect that the civilians who carry all the time, or close to it, are exactly the ones who are likely to be trained and approach the whole affair with a martial artist’s dedication (emphasis on “martial”).
Then again, anyone who has achieved proficiency in the practical shooting arts (and not just marksmanship; I’m talking presentation, movement, stoppage clearing, etc.) as opposed to mere familiarity is already way ahead of the curve.
Earlier this year the US Supreme Court upheld the qualified immunity of an officer involved in a shooting. Unless and until “good Samaritan” civilians are granted a similar legal defense [or this doctrine is discarded altogether, not that I expect that to ever occur], this decision will certainly encourage less caution among uniformed officers when compared to civilians in otherwise identical circumstances.
> Somewhat tangential: I’ve heard that vigilante hit rates
What?
Vigilante?
You want to start *that* fight?
Good on you, Eric. The day of the shooting, I noticed a police car parked outside the synagogue nearest my house, Congregation Beth Jacob of Redwood City, CA (which, just like Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life, is a synagogue following the Conservative Judaism tradition), and so wrote a letter that day to the rabbi introducing myself as president of the Sons of Norway lodge that meets regularly a couple of blocks away, and as a friendly gentile who not only shares their deep sense of grief, but who also wanted to they to not feel isolated, and who moreover would put body and soul between his congregation and harm, if that were ever necessary.
This got me a new friendship with Rabbi Nat, plus an invitation to Shabbat services the following weekend (my first ever; enjoying the bitter herb at innumerable Passover dinners being not at all the same). It turned out, I was hardly the only local gentile community leader who’d made a point of reaching out: Rabbi Nat near the end of the service acknowledged many of us who’d made a point of attending, and asked if we goyish visitors would stand up: It turned out, we were half of all in attendance. (And, I have to say, the local AME minister sang “L’cha Dodi” pretty well, rather better than I did with my rusty tourist Hebrew.)
Am Yisrael chai!
Hoo boy…I’m not getting into another one of ‘these’ threads.
I’ll just presume Winter has contributed the requisite effluent.
Good times, good times ;)
Yes, how dare Winter derail libertarian fantasyland discussions with facts and logic.
“I’ll just presume Winter has contributed the requisite effluent.”
Just use the Find function and enter “Winter”.
I am an admirer of Karl Popper. You only get closer to the truth if you keep challenging your believes.
On the subject of Jews as bellweathers, we might consider the similarities between the current U.S. and Weimar Germany:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/11/14/1812938/-The-World-They-Lost-The-Golden-Years-of-Weimar-Germany
(I know that Daily Kos is not a popular site with Libertarians and Conservatives, but this particular author nailed it!)
Highly relevant:
http://www.unz.com/article/west-bank-settler-and-american-patriot/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-mass-shooters-russia-public-shootings-thousand-oaks-mercy-hospital-chicago-1121-story.html
This is relevant to the discussion.
On this note, I’m going to try to find the research in question. Want to take a closer look at the underlying assumptions.
Follow up on John Lott for numerous books and publications in his own right and an equal number of attacks. I’d say his research has gotten better in recent years as he has reacted to attacks on his research by the gun grabbers. Time was the gun grabbers thought to defend Bellesisles by attacking Lott. Wright-Rossi from many years ago did a literature survey with followup that is a good place to start. Clayton Cramer’s work is absolutely sound on the subject and related.
The chief takeaway from the current article cited is that defining to include or exclude political terrorism and such is the common technique to steer the conclusion in a preferred direction.
It takes a lot of deemphasizing head count to justify an only in America and only by right wing neo-Nazi white men but folks have done that and proclaimed their own success to their own praise.
John Lott has a sockpuppet problem in his past, and has done some sloppy-in-his-favor research as well.
(I wish he didn’t, because I agree with his conclusions). Gary Kleck does tighter research, IMO.
“On this note, I’m going to try to find the research in question. Want to take a closer look at the underlying assumptions.” Assumptions is an interesting way to phrase a key question. Going back many years Wright Rossi acknowledge that their result surprised and did not much please them. See also Restricting Handguns the liberal sceptics speak out with not much more recent of much quality. I maintain that Clayton Cramer’s published research is absolutely sound. In part because he limits himself to questions that do have an answer and research can find that answer. To the big question we can only say that if there were no guns there would be no gun violence and if every and only crazy had a gun there would be more gun violence. Everything in between is a gray area. There is no definitive answer. Like Murphy, like The Gods of the Copybook Headings the law of unintended consequences is not mocked.
The specific publication is at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3289010
Extended discussion at the author’s captive research tank: https://crimeresearch.org/2018/11/new-cprc-research-mass-public-shootings-are-much-higher-in-the-rest-of-the-world-and-increasing-much-more-quickly/
I’d question the use of per capita and nation states as the most relevant approach. Perhaps no great harm done by lumping Idaho with Chicago to increase the capita number and so reduce the per capita number; perhaps it obscures more than clarifies.
I know people in California who have partied at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County California. These people, hoplophobes indeed, think that public safety now demands that I in Idaho should give up my guns faced with confiscation under threat of death.
Without Chicago and a few other mostly coastal cities the mass public shooting rate of the United States would be much lower. At the same time in a smaller nation mass shootings in a city can give a higher per capita because that city is not associated with nearly so many people in their own hinterlands. In fact today big cities have far more in common with each other than any of them have with their own hinterlands.
Published research in areas of controversy, (and in general see e.g. /. and other sources for discussion of how much research can’t be reproduced) is amazingly indeterminate. Among other things I think John Lott long ago used regression techniques in the interests of argument when the assumptions of regression – which are demanding but often evaded when regression was the limit of our calculating ability – were not met.
Further as I hinted above in this controversial area raw data is hard to find and easy to cherry pick.
a) I’ve discovered that when you compare the actual paper and its claims to what the popular press reported (not necessarily the author’s fault, the editor may have gone over it) there are often enough significant differences.
b) Over the years I’ve developed a certain degree of mistrust of “research” in the various “soft sciences”, i.e. psychology, sociology, political science, etc. It’s overwhelmingly junk science of the worst sort.
Given the above, it’s best to carefully scrutinize any given publication in that space, paying careful attention to source data and methodologies, before giving it any credence.
For instance the opposing article:
Emphasis added. IMHO this article not only conceals its data it first massages the data then uses inappropriate technique to reach an unwarranted conclusion. But here it is for something from the other side to which John Lott has responded.
As I keep hinting the best article on violence in the United States in general and applicable to the coasts and to fly over country alike is one that concludes peak violence goes along with Scotch Irish heritage – notice not descent but tradition and heritage. There is a certain type some call Jacksonian. In the United States usually associated with the South East regardless of genetic heritage.
“Emphasis added. IMHO this article not only conceals its data it first massages the data then uses inappropriate technique to reach an unwarranted conclusion.”
So, what statistical methods should they have used? In other words, why is “Negative binomial regression” inappropriate on this data set?
Winter
Sir: Lest there be any doubt I consider our respective beliefs and choice of facts to be so incongruent as to preclude reasonable conversation on controversial issues.
For the paper in question the author Lankford says
That is the study associates effects in earlier years with presumed causal association in later years. Further many of the values are associated, if linear then colinear and so easily confounded. I suspect that many influences carry across national boundaries – copy cat actions can carry across boundaries just as terrorism both by intent as ISIS calls for action in the homelands of their enemies and by imitation – and so are doubly confounded.
More specifically I intended an observation that since all time series are correlated regressions are a weak choice compared to Markov chain based techniques of Box Cox, Box Tiao and Box Jenkins and such in most current forms. If in fact the regression relationship is more nearly correct the matrix x matrix x matrix will collapse to the simpler form; if not then not.
Finally the assumptions of regression include linear relationships and Gaussian distribution. These may apply but I doubt it.
In fact few things are Gaussian; if Gaussian it’s standardized or normalized or otherwise massaged with higher central tendency/numbers and tails that are effectively cut off and pretty rapidly.
When regression was about as complicated or advanced technique as we could easily compute there was a strong tendency to push regression. If not linear then linear over the important range or maybe log linear or…….. as we struggled to fit a curve that was smooth uniform well behaved and everywhere differentiable to data that wasn’t.
Properly in my view Lankford should begin with theoretical arguments for his conclusion – in effect give a Bayesian value – then run his regression and say that the conclusion is not thereby refuted and so bump the Bayesian value.
Gary Kleck also mentioned above and a number of other people have also attacked this and related work from Lankford. Data, method, aims and means have all been criticized.
My bottom line for purposes of this conversation is that we have the adversarial system at work here. Folks can choose a priori or a postiori.