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Actually white heterosexual middle class males can totally appreciate these things. Imagine what it is like to be white/asian in a country where a disproportio

Actually white heterosexual middle class males can totally appreciate these things. Imagine what it is like to be white/asian in a country where a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by black men and where black on white crimes are 5.6 times more common than white on black crimes [1]. Imagine what it is like to be Christian when a disproportionate number of terror attacks are committed by Islamic types. My father feels unsafe (on my behalf) when he watches various Islamic terror attacks on the news. I was in Amsterdam last week, which is sort of near Paris and Brussels (though the Dutch seem to integrate their Muslims far better), and he was worried about my safety. In reality I'm far more likely to die from drinking Belgian beer, eating a space cake and then falling into a canal. I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way? [1] http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race-and-violent-crime/ http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race...

SolaceQuantum 11y ago
I'm asian. I don't feel threatened by black crime when it's also shown that police target black people for arrest more than whites and that the system is often stacked against black people. I'm more uncomfortable that white males are shooting up schools in my country several times a year because there's nothing being done pointing this demographic out. Your experience doesn't reflect the experience of all others.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  What gives you the right to invalidate my father's feelings? You don't understand his lived experience (he was present at a major Islamic terrorist attack) at all! I believe that's the standard social justice retort to your claims. Being a more logically minded person, I'll instead invert it; your retort to my comment is that one person in the aforementioned demographic (e.g. a white/asian male) doesn't agree with me. If I could find one person in your aforementioned demographic (e.g. a black female) who didn't agree with you, would that be a valid retort against your comment?
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    I don't understand why you are dismissing claims as social justice and then trying to claim you are a more logically minded person. How is the claim that not all asian people agree with your father or had traumatic experiences with terrorism also invalidating experiences your father had? You claim to be a logical minded person but I'm not following the logic that your father's experiences are invalidated when someone says they don't share that view.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Perhaps I misunderstood your post - I thought you were disagreeing and attempting to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps you were just randomly sharing your feelings for no reason?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
        I'm saying in a time where you are taking the experiences of your father and attributing it to all white/asian middle class people, that isn't necessarily great.
        yummyfajitas 11y ago
        ...attributing it to all white/asian middle class people... I never did this.
      - dang 11y ago
        Not cool. That crosses the line into incivility. I know you like to stay as close to the line as you can get without crossing it—which is far better than crossing it—but I wish you wouldn't. Your posts would be much better if you would show readers the respect of simply taking that edge out. They're literally edgy, and this acts as a low-grade provocation even when you're not technically saying anything abusive. This is not the way to bring the best out of your interlocutors and fellow users, and it's still a toxin in HN's environment, even if it's below the legal level. Instead, you should optimize for overall thread quality, which I'm sure you could do if you wanted to. There's some variant of the principle of charity in here somewhere.
- PedroBatista 11y ago
  That's why there is something called Statistics and they show that you are objectively wrong. Now, about your feelings and uncomfortableness it's up to you.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    > there is something called Statistics And there's a reason there's a famous book titled "how to lie with statistics".
  - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
    Statistically speaking, police stop and look for crime disproportionately to minorities. no? http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nypd-targets-minorities-stop-frisk-report-article-1.1075037 http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nypd-targets-minorities-...
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      That's completely irrelevant. The data cited comes from the NCVS. It's based on a phone poll. "Have you been the victim of any crimes in the past year?" "Who committed the crime?" The purpose of the NCVS is to track crimes and their characteristics without relying on (often biased, and frequently manipulated) police reports.
- xiaoma 11y ago
  Living in Asia, I've seen a lot more news about "white males shooting up schools" than I have about other violent crime in the US, except perhaps police brutality. It's on major news pages / channels. Admittedly, most of what I find is through social media (US and Chinese). Where do you get most your news?
  - talmand 11y ago
    Could be that one is more common than the other, therefore not as newsworthy. It's a sad state of affairs, but it seems most news is about sensationalism for purposes of generating revenue.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    The news, even in America, vastly under reports minority murders, especially in high crime urban areas. 400+ people are murdered every year in Chicago, with black men being the victims at more than 10x the rate of white people in general, and more than double the rate of all other racial groups combined. Most of this is gang related, and goes almost entirely unreported, even in Chicago itself. This trend is not unique to Chicago, either
EthanHeilman 11y ago
Linking to a post on the website of a White Supremacist organisation such as AmRen (American Renaissance) will probably hurt your argument more than help it. >Jared Taylor founded The New Century Foundation[0], a self-styled white supremacist think tank known primarily for American Renaissance, its online journal. The journal promotes pseudo-scientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies. - [1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Foundation [1]: http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrorism/c/extremism-in-america-jared.html#.UvUKhoVhuSo?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=2&item=taylor http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrori...
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  I don't understand - a white supremacist took a quantity from the DOJ, then took a percentage from the DOJ, and multiplied them together to get a new quantity. Does multiplication become invalid when a white supremacist does it? Or do DOJ stats become false when a racist cites them? Please, I would like to understand your logic. I do find it a bit scary that when I google "black on white crime", only racist sites show up. Why are only white supremacists willing to discuss this data? (Or perhaps they are all just super good at SEO.)
  - kohanz 11y ago
    You don't understand why when you google a complex topic such as "crime" and then apply a narrow, racial lens to it, mostly racist organizations show up? The term "X on Y crime" is suggesting that the relevant information about people who commit crimes and are victims of crime can be summarized by the color of their skin. That's as racist of a notion as it gets.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Correct. There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. The point is not that it can be perfectly summarized by skin color, the point is that there is clearly something happening and it would be great to find out what. Of course, as it relates to my original post, the only relevant fact is that indeed there is something happening that a white male might have reason to feel irrational fear of. (The table shows that most crime is intra-racial, not inter-racial) Let me remind you of the original point: various people are feeling irrationally large amounts of fear but that fear is of a real thing (either historical, as in maaku's case, or real but exaggerated things in the case I described).
czep 11y ago
You just cited a blog which has this on their About Us page: "If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people." Instead of allowing your father to fear for his and your safety based on his irrational and bigoted views, perhaps you could educate him not to accept data from fringe sources. Your reproduction of these titilating facts, completely removed from context, taken from a blog which has a White Power political agenda, is a curious tactic. Do you use this "evidence" to lend credence to your father's views? Do you think this justifies his ignorance? If you truly recognize his views as irrational, then you should not be dredging up wingnut blogs which are merely trying to incite hatred and divisiveness. Please, educate your father so that his ignorance and bigotry do not permeate through to the next generation.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  See my reply to EthanHeilman. Specifically, are you claiming the DOJ stats cited by this source are false, or that they made an arithmetic error when multiplying (# victims by race x) x (% of offenders of race Y)? As for my father's feelings, it's really not cool to suggest he's bigoted. He's not - he's the epitome of a NY liberal and far more left wing than I am. E.g., he mostly accepts the tribalist fascism of the modern left, in comparison to my individualism. He's just unable to rationally assess the risk of low probability events that get lots of media coverage. (He's hardly the only one. See, for example, this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655349 )
- cthalupa 11y ago
  This is a logical fallacy that is unfortunately rampant on here. It's an ad hominem - the source may be a bunch of shitty people, but if we're arguing that we shouldn't accept something, attack the actual content of the message. It's generally quite easy to do so when the source of information is biased, so dismantle the message if you want to argue about how it's incorrect. It looks like these numbers posted were very low effort and lacking any real context whatsoever, so it shouldn't be too hard to rebut them. Edit: In fact, unprepare does so quite well in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655743
unprepare 11y ago
From your link: >These data cover all violent crimes except murder, but the number of murders is tiny compared to other violent crimes. So, we've started by cherry picking our data, a really strong start. Next we go on by comparing apples and oranges. You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people, but the data you linked shows otherwise. While 13.7% of violent crimes against white people were committed by black people, 56% of violent crimes against white people were committed by other white people. You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by a white person than a black person, if you are a white person. So if you are afraid of being attacked by a black person, you must be 4 times more afraid everytime you see a white person (that is, if you are being logically consistent, rather than using confirmation bias to support a worldview of racial superiority, though your link suggests otherwise) In this light, it is completely irrational to have anywhere near the fear of black people (or any other race) than you do for white people. Further, if you are of a race other than black or hispanic, you are more than twice as likely to be violently attacked by a white person (40.3%) than a black person (19.3%). The only thing damning against black people these statistics show, is that black people are vastly more likely to be violently attacked by other black people than by any other race. This is the same case for all the other races included. People of any given race are much more likely to have a crime committed against them by someone of their own race, than by someone of any other race.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  The data source is the NCVS, a crime victimization survey. The reason is that we aren't relying on racist cops to tell us who the perpetrator is, we are just asking the victims. The survey methodology also allows us to detect unreported crimes. One unfortunate drawback of the survey methodology is that you can't track murder. You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people... I've reached the conclusion that you didn't read my post. Try again. If you get confused, look for words like "completely irrational and entirely his problem".
  - unprepare 11y ago
    >I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way? Oh, so you think being 4 times more likely to be killed by another white person, means that you have a similar cultural experience to the subjugated minorities who are complaining across university campuses. And because you have a white supremacy blog that tells you that you have it just as bad as everyone else, you have decided to write off all the actual concerns of real people by saying they are just complaining too much? Its really a fascinating argument. Good luck convincing anyone else who does not already agree with it.

SolaceQuantum 11y ago

I'm asian. I don't feel threatened by black crime when it's also shown that police target black people for arrest more than whites and that the system is often stacked against black people. I'm more uncomfortable that white males are shooting up schools in my country several times a year because there's nothing being done pointing this demographic out. Your experience doesn't reflect the experience of all others.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
What gives you the right to invalidate my father's feelings? You don't understand his lived experience (he was present at a major Islamic terrorist attack) at all! I believe that's the standard social justice retort to your claims. Being a more logically minded person, I'll instead invert it; your retort to my comment is that one person in the aforementioned demographic (e.g. a white/asian male) doesn't agree with me. If I could find one person in your aforementioned demographic (e.g. a black female) who didn't agree with you, would that be a valid retort against your comment?
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  I don't understand why you are dismissing claims as social justice and then trying to claim you are a more logically minded person. How is the claim that not all asian people agree with your father or had traumatic experiences with terrorism also invalidating experiences your father had? You claim to be a logical minded person but I'm not following the logic that your father's experiences are invalidated when someone says they don't share that view.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Perhaps I misunderstood your post - I thought you were disagreeing and attempting to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps you were just randomly sharing your feelings for no reason?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - SolaceQuantum 11y ago
      I'm saying in a time where you are taking the experiences of your father and attributing it to all white/asian middle class people, that isn't necessarily great.
      - yummyfajitas 11y ago
        ...attributing it to all white/asian middle class people... I never did this.
    - dang 11y ago
      Not cool. That crosses the line into incivility. I know you like to stay as close to the line as you can get without crossing it—which is far better than crossing it—but I wish you wouldn't. Your posts would be much better if you would show readers the respect of simply taking that edge out. They're literally edgy, and this acts as a low-grade provocation even when you're not technically saying anything abusive. This is not the way to bring the best out of your interlocutors and fellow users, and it's still a toxin in HN's environment, even if it's below the legal level. Instead, you should optimize for overall thread quality, which I'm sure you could do if you wanted to. There's some variant of the principle of charity in here somewhere.
PedroBatista 11y ago
That's why there is something called Statistics and they show that you are objectively wrong. Now, about your feelings and uncomfortableness it's up to you.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  > there is something called Statistics And there's a reason there's a famous book titled "how to lie with statistics".
- SolaceQuantum 11y ago
  Statistically speaking, police stop and look for crime disproportionately to minorities. no? http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nypd-targets-minorities-stop-frisk-report-article-1.1075037 http://m.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nypd-targets-minorities-...
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    That's completely irrelevant. The data cited comes from the NCVS. It's based on a phone poll. "Have you been the victim of any crimes in the past year?" "Who committed the crime?" The purpose of the NCVS is to track crimes and their characteristics without relying on (often biased, and frequently manipulated) police reports.
xiaoma 11y ago
Living in Asia, I've seen a lot more news about "white males shooting up schools" than I have about other violent crime in the US, except perhaps police brutality. It's on major news pages / channels. Admittedly, most of what I find is through social media (US and Chinese). Where do you get most your news?
- talmand 11y ago
  Could be that one is more common than the other, therefore not as newsworthy. It's a sad state of affairs, but it seems most news is about sensationalism for purposes of generating revenue.
- cthalupa 11y ago
  The news, even in America, vastly under reports minority murders, especially in high crime urban areas. 400+ people are murdered every year in Chicago, with black men being the victims at more than 10x the rate of white people in general, and more than double the rate of all other racial groups combined. Most of this is gang related, and goes almost entirely unreported, even in Chicago itself. This trend is not unique to Chicago, either

EthanHeilman 11y ago

Linking to a post on the website of a White Supremacist organisation such as AmRen (American Renaissance) will probably hurt your argument more than help it. >Jared Taylor founded The New Century Foundation[0], a self-styled white supremacist think tank known primarily for American Renaissance, its online journal. The journal promotes pseudo-scientific studies that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies. - [1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Century_Foundation [1]: http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrorism/c/extremism-in-america-jared.html#.UvUKhoVhuSo?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=2&item=taylor http://www.adl.org/combating-hate/domestic-extremism-terrori...

yummyfajitas 11y ago
I don't understand - a white supremacist took a quantity from the DOJ, then took a percentage from the DOJ, and multiplied them together to get a new quantity. Does multiplication become invalid when a white supremacist does it? Or do DOJ stats become false when a racist cites them? Please, I would like to understand your logic. I do find it a bit scary that when I google "black on white crime", only racist sites show up. Why are only white supremacists willing to discuss this data? (Or perhaps they are all just super good at SEO.)
- kohanz 11y ago
  You don't understand why when you google a complex topic such as "crime" and then apply a narrow, racial lens to it, mostly racist organizations show up? The term "X on Y crime" is suggesting that the relevant information about people who commit crimes and are victims of crime can be summarized by the color of their skin. That's as racist of a notion as it gets.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Correct. There is clearly something interesting happening in the data - it's very far from what you'd get by random chance. That seems to be worth studying, yet no one seems to be doing it. The point is not that it can be perfectly summarized by skin color, the point is that there is clearly something happening and it would be great to find out what. Of course, as it relates to my original post, the only relevant fact is that indeed there is something happening that a white male might have reason to feel irrational fear of. (The table shows that most crime is intra-racial, not inter-racial) Let me remind you of the original point: various people are feeling irrationally large amounts of fear but that fear is of a real thing (either historical, as in maaku's case, or real but exaggerated things in the case I described).

czep 11y ago

You just cited a blog which has this on their About Us page: "If whites permit themselves to become a minority population, they will lose their civilization, their heritage, and even their existence as a distinct people." Instead of allowing your father to fear for his and your safety based on his irrational and bigoted views, perhaps you could educate him not to accept data from fringe sources. Your reproduction of these titilating facts, completely removed from context, taken from a blog which has a White Power political agenda, is a curious tactic. Do you use this "evidence" to lend credence to your father's views? Do you think this justifies his ignorance? If you truly recognize his views as irrational, then you should not be dredging up wingnut blogs which are merely trying to incite hatred and divisiveness. Please, educate your father so that his ignorance and bigotry do not permeate through to the next generation.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
See my reply to EthanHeilman. Specifically, are you claiming the DOJ stats cited by this source are false, or that they made an arithmetic error when multiplying (# victims by race x) x (% of offenders of race Y)? As for my father's feelings, it's really not cool to suggest he's bigoted. He's not - he's the epitome of a NY liberal and far more left wing than I am. E.g., he mostly accepts the tribalist fascism of the modern left, in comparison to my individualism. He's just unable to rationally assess the risk of low probability events that get lots of media coverage. (He's hardly the only one. See, for example, this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655349 )
cthalupa 11y ago
This is a logical fallacy that is unfortunately rampant on here. It's an ad hominem - the source may be a bunch of shitty people, but if we're arguing that we shouldn't accept something, attack the actual content of the message. It's generally quite easy to do so when the source of information is biased, so dismantle the message if you want to argue about how it's incorrect. It looks like these numbers posted were very low effort and lacking any real context whatsoever, so it shouldn't be too hard to rebut them. Edit: In fact, unprepare does so quite well in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655743

unprepare 11y ago

From your link: >These data cover all violent crimes except murder, but the number of murders is tiny compared to other violent crimes. So, we've started by cherry picking our data, a really strong start. Next we go on by comparing apples and oranges. You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people, but the data you linked shows otherwise. While 13.7% of violent crimes against white people were committed by black people, 56% of violent crimes against white people were committed by other white people. You are 4 times more likely to be violently attacked by a white person than a black person, if you are a white person. So if you are afraid of being attacked by a black person, you must be 4 times more afraid everytime you see a white person (that is, if you are being logically consistent, rather than using confirmation bias to support a worldview of racial superiority, though your link suggests otherwise) In this light, it is completely irrational to have anywhere near the fear of black people (or any other race) than you do for white people. Further, if you are of a race other than black or hispanic, you are more than twice as likely to be violently attacked by a white person (40.3%) than a black person (19.3%). The only thing damning against black people these statistics show, is that black people are vastly more likely to be violently attacked by other black people than by any other race. This is the same case for all the other races included. People of any given race are much more likely to have a crime committed against them by someone of their own race, than by someone of any other race.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
The data source is the NCVS, a crime victimization survey. The reason is that we aren't relying on racist cops to tell us who the perpetrator is, we are just asking the victims. The survey methodology also allows us to detect unreported crimes. One unfortunate drawback of the survey methodology is that you can't track murder. You've reached the conclusion that as a white male you should be afraid of black people... I've reached the conclusion that you didn't read my post. Try again. If you get confused, look for words like "completely irrational and entirely his problem".
- unprepare 11y ago
  >I'm sure most of us agree that his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem. So why aren't the irrational fears held by various student groups treated the same way? Oh, so you think being 4 times more likely to be killed by another white person, means that you have a similar cultural experience to the subjugated minorities who are complaining across university campuses. And because you have a white supremacy blog that tells you that you have it just as bad as everyone else, you have decided to write off all the actual concerns of real people by saying they are just complaining too much? Its really a fascinating argument. Good luck convincing anyone else who does not already agree with it.