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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. >

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).
    - joshuahedlund 11y ago
      > 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. I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.
- talmand 11y ago
  It's a common tactic, attack the source of data to avoid discussing the data.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    In theory, we should all be able to evaluate the validity data on our own, so this tactic is dumb. In reality, we have no practical way of doing this. So, whenever we cite a source of data, we are implicitly saying "This is a credible source for the statement is making. You can trust that they have done the work to make sure they aren't just repeating their own biases." And in the case of some organizations and people, you actually cannot say that. If the American milk board makes a claim about the health benefits of milk, it is not a fallacy to be skeptical of that claim.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      In reality we have no practical way to take the DOJ's data table to find the number of black on white crimes? Let me introduce you to data science. First I'll read the numnbers in row 2 column 2 and row 2 column 5. Then I'll plug them into ipython: $ ipython ... In [4]: 4091971*0.137 Out[4]: 560600.027 Do the same for row 3 col 2 and row 3 col 4: In [6]: 955800 * 0.104 Out[6]: 99403.2 Looks like the article was right after all. Whew, that was hard. Took all the skills I learned in my math Ph.D. to finish the job. Just lucky I didn't have to break out Hadoop. If I wasn't a professional statistician I wouldn't have had a prayer.
      - ceejayoz 11y ago
        That's not data science, that's middle school multiplication. Data science would be trying to find out why and putting it into context, especially if there are variables in play that aren't shown by a cursory look. Which a white supremacist has little interest in.
        Nadya 11y ago
        Nobody wants to study why because they'd be labeled as racists and lose their job the moment any group of crybullies discovered what they were researching. So it goes largely untouched, which only does the actual racists more benefit because they can use and represent the data to fit their narrative because there is no other narrative because nobody wants to touch the data. It's a self-feeding loop.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  You can turn raw statistics into all sorts of false, misleading, or incomplete conclusions. A white supremacist doing a statistical analysis isn't going to reach all that hard for stats that might contradict or weaken the conclusion they're trying for. If they find one accidentally, there's a pretty decent chance they'll "forget" to mention it. I'm no expert in the field, but I'd wonder about things like encounter rates for the different populations, varying access to social services, things like lead paint being more prevalent in inner city housing, etc.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Lets back up. I claimed a white male might feel irrational fear of the disproportionately large number of black on white crimes, just as maaku claimed a black person might feel irrational fear of crimes that happened a few generations back. I linked to a source showing that the number of black on white crimes is disproportionately large. Perhaps this white supremacist organization did make arithmetic errors when multiplying row 2 column 2 by row 2 column 5. Did they? It's a bit surprising that with all this criticism, no one is actually claiming the number is wrong.
    - flubert 11y ago
      >It's a bit surprising ...(eyes roll). Anyway, on a completely different taboo topic, I wonder if you've read the Unabomber's manifesto... https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-TheUnabombersManifesto/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-theUnabombersManifesto_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-The...
- ebola1717 11y ago
  White on white crimes are 5x common than black on white crimes. It's obvious cherry-picking.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    And the lynchings maaku described are less common today than drowning in a swimming pool. What's your point? Note that I linked to it for the content of the first data table. My link is not an endorsement of every single viewpoint that someone at that URL might hold - I actually just spent 2 minutes googling for a fact I had seen before and pasted the first link that had the data table.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >White on white crimes are 5x common than black on white crimes. It's obvious cherry-picking. If there are twice as many whites as blacks or 10 times as many whites as blacks would vastly change how your figure could be interpreted.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    That isn't how they are being compared though - nor is it relevant. You want to compare black on white crimes to white on black crimes. Not white on white crimes. Across all races - they primarily commit crime against their own race. But some races receive more crime than they give. Adjusted for population (there are far more white people than black people) there should be about equal white on black crime as black on white crime per capita. That isn't the case and is precisely what the data reads. What is important isn't to jump to conclusions but rather investigate why. Which nobody wants to do unless they get labeled as a racist.
- EthanHeilman 11y ago
  The source of information matters. This is doubly true for statistical claims since: * statistics are often counter-intuitive, * they are easy to manipulate or misinterpret, * manipulation requires significant effort to discover, * they are sometimes correct in form but the data is biased, * bias in the data might have been mentioned by the initial data collectors but the analyzers may omit it (either intentionally or accidentally).
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Clearly multiplying "number of white victims" by "percentage of white victims with offenders who are black" is easy to manipulate and misinterpret, as well as counterintuitive. And detecting an arithmetic error would require significant effort. I'd have to open up ipython, copy&pasting the numbers, remove the commas and other formatting, and then press enter. Um, ok.
  - jazzyk 11y ago
    But the original source of the information is the DOJ. Government statistics may not always be perfect, but are you implying that the government is guilty of purposefully manipulating data? Why?
- danans 11y ago
  The problem is that they are highlighting a far less significant phenomenon (cross racial violent crime) to further their white supremacist agenda. The vast majority of homicides (which the DOJ data excludes) committed against whites are committed by whites, and the vast majority against blacks are committed by blacks. The number of cross-racial homicides are an order of magnitude less in either direction. Don't take my word for it, look at the diagonal at the top left of this table: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/... According the DOJ data you posted, 44% of the victims of white offenders are not white. Should they all be terrified of white people? Probably not. So the situation in the data is more complicated than the white supremacists would care to admit. But more importantly, people's perception of safety is not a direct reflection of the data, but instead, a reflection of the way the data is presented, either by the mass media, or by choose-your-own-agenda websites like the kind you linked. It also tends to be heavily skewed for the local crime situation in which they live, rather than national crime stats.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Should they all be terrified... Where did I advocate that anyone should be terrified? This is what I said about such fears: "his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem."

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).
  - joshuahedlund 11y ago
    > 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. I think there are fairly straightforward explanations, simply deducing from books I've read about urban crime... Most crime is intra-racial because it occurs between people who know each other or live near each other and tends to be concentrated in areas of poverty which tend to be demographically homogeneous. Overall, blacks commit crimes at higher rates than whites, which partially correlates with higher poverty rates, but it's not distributed equally because it's also highly concentrated among small numbers of urban street gangs/groups who commit enormous amounts of crime (of which there's no poor white rural counterpart). These groups are mostly surrounded by blacks, so most of their victims will be black, but there are enough whites near them that the whites who are victims of these groups contribute to the black-on-white numbers being higher. Part of the irrationality and bigotry comes from interpreting these numbers as some kind of targeting going on specifically to whites because there's no reverse equivalent instead of understanding that it actually comes from an urban dynamic that overall causes black victims to suffer even more than whites.
talmand 11y ago
It's a common tactic, attack the source of data to avoid discussing the data.
- afarrell 11y ago
  In theory, we should all be able to evaluate the validity data on our own, so this tactic is dumb. In reality, we have no practical way of doing this. So, whenever we cite a source of data, we are implicitly saying "This is a credible source for the statement is making. You can trust that they have done the work to make sure they aren't just repeating their own biases." And in the case of some organizations and people, you actually cannot say that. If the American milk board makes a claim about the health benefits of milk, it is not a fallacy to be skeptical of that claim.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    In reality we have no practical way to take the DOJ's data table to find the number of black on white crimes? Let me introduce you to data science. First I'll read the numnbers in row 2 column 2 and row 2 column 5. Then I'll plug them into ipython: $ ipython ... In [4]: 4091971*0.137 Out[4]: 560600.027 Do the same for row 3 col 2 and row 3 col 4: In [6]: 955800 * 0.104 Out[6]: 99403.2 Looks like the article was right after all. Whew, that was hard. Took all the skills I learned in my math Ph.D. to finish the job. Just lucky I didn't have to break out Hadoop. If I wasn't a professional statistician I wouldn't have had a prayer.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      That's not data science, that's middle school multiplication. Data science would be trying to find out why and putting it into context, especially if there are variables in play that aren't shown by a cursory look. Which a white supremacist has little interest in.
      - Nadya 11y ago
        Nobody wants to study why because they'd be labeled as racists and lose their job the moment any group of crybullies discovered what they were researching. So it goes largely untouched, which only does the actual racists more benefit because they can use and represent the data to fit their narrative because there is no other narrative because nobody wants to touch the data. It's a self-feeding loop.
ceejayoz 11y ago
You can turn raw statistics into all sorts of false, misleading, or incomplete conclusions. A white supremacist doing a statistical analysis isn't going to reach all that hard for stats that might contradict or weaken the conclusion they're trying for. If they find one accidentally, there's a pretty decent chance they'll "forget" to mention it. I'm no expert in the field, but I'd wonder about things like encounter rates for the different populations, varying access to social services, things like lead paint being more prevalent in inner city housing, etc.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Lets back up. I claimed a white male might feel irrational fear of the disproportionately large number of black on white crimes, just as maaku claimed a black person might feel irrational fear of crimes that happened a few generations back. I linked to a source showing that the number of black on white crimes is disproportionately large. Perhaps this white supremacist organization did make arithmetic errors when multiplying row 2 column 2 by row 2 column 5. Did they? It's a bit surprising that with all this criticism, no one is actually claiming the number is wrong.
  - flubert 11y ago
    >It's a bit surprising ...(eyes roll). Anyway, on a completely different taboo topic, I wonder if you've read the Unabomber's manifesto... https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-TheUnabombersManifesto/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-theUnabombersManifesto_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/IndustrialSocietyAndItsFuture-The...
ebola1717 11y ago
White on white crimes are 5x common than black on white crimes. It's obvious cherry-picking.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  And the lynchings maaku described are less common today than drowning in a swimming pool. What's your point? Note that I linked to it for the content of the first data table. My link is not an endorsement of every single viewpoint that someone at that URL might hold - I actually just spent 2 minutes googling for a fact I had seen before and pasted the first link that had the data table.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  >White on white crimes are 5x common than black on white crimes. It's obvious cherry-picking. If there are twice as many whites as blacks or 10 times as many whites as blacks would vastly change how your figure could be interpreted.
- Nadya 11y ago
  That isn't how they are being compared though - nor is it relevant. You want to compare black on white crimes to white on black crimes. Not white on white crimes. Across all races - they primarily commit crime against their own race. But some races receive more crime than they give. Adjusted for population (there are far more white people than black people) there should be about equal white on black crime as black on white crime per capita. That isn't the case and is precisely what the data reads. What is important isn't to jump to conclusions but rather investigate why. Which nobody wants to do unless they get labeled as a racist.
EthanHeilman 11y ago
The source of information matters. This is doubly true for statistical claims since: * statistics are often counter-intuitive, * they are easy to manipulate or misinterpret, * manipulation requires significant effort to discover, * they are sometimes correct in form but the data is biased, * bias in the data might have been mentioned by the initial data collectors but the analyzers may omit it (either intentionally or accidentally).
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Clearly multiplying "number of white victims" by "percentage of white victims with offenders who are black" is easy to manipulate and misinterpret, as well as counterintuitive. And detecting an arithmetic error would require significant effort. I'd have to open up ipython, copy&pasting the numbers, remove the commas and other formatting, and then press enter. Um, ok.
- jazzyk 11y ago
  But the original source of the information is the DOJ. Government statistics may not always be perfect, but are you implying that the government is guilty of purposefully manipulating data? Why?
danans 11y ago
The problem is that they are highlighting a far less significant phenomenon (cross racial violent crime) to further their white supremacist agenda. The vast majority of homicides (which the DOJ data excludes) committed against whites are committed by whites, and the vast majority against blacks are committed by blacks. The number of cross-racial homicides are an order of magnitude less in either direction. Don't take my word for it, look at the diagonal at the top left of this table: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2013.xls https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/... According the DOJ data you posted, 44% of the victims of white offenders are not white. Should they all be terrified of white people? Probably not. So the situation in the data is more complicated than the white supremacists would care to admit. But more importantly, people's perception of safety is not a direct reflection of the data, but instead, a reflection of the way the data is presented, either by the mass media, or by choose-your-own-agenda websites like the kind you linked. It also tends to be heavily skewed for the local crime situation in which they live, rather than national crime stats.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  Should they all be terrified... Where did I advocate that anyone should be terrified? This is what I said about such fears: "his feelings are completely irrational and entirely his problem."