Racist Mob Beats Victims; Lede Buried

By Rod Dreher • May 2, 2012, 1:04 AM

Forster and Rostami’s story has not, until today, appeared in this paper. The responding officer coded the incident as a simple assault, despite their assertions that at least 30 people had participated in the attack. A reporter making routine checks of police reports would see “simple assault” and, if the names were unfamiliar, would be unlikely to write about it. In this case, editors hesitated to assign a story about their own employees. Would it seem like the paper treated its employees differently from other crime victims?

More questions loomed.

Forster and Rostami wondered if the officer who answered their call treated all crime victims the same way. When Rostami, who admits she was hysterical, tried to describe what had happened, she says the officer told her to shut up and get in the car. Both said the officer did not record any names of witnesses who stopped to help. Rostami said the officer told them the attackers were “probably juveniles anyway. What are we going to do? Find their parents and tell them?”

The cops didn’t care, in other words. But wait, there’s more.

The officer pointed to public housing in the area and said large groups of teenagers look for trouble on the weekends. “It’s what they do,” he told Forster.

Could that be true? Could violent mobs of teens be so commonplace in Norfolk that police and victims have no recourse?

Could it be true? the white newspaper columnist wonders. In this country? Really? This happens?

But wait, there’s even more.

The next day, Forster searched Twitter for mention of the attack.

One post chilled him.

“I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light,” wrote one person.

“I don’t,” wrote another, indicating laughter. “(do it for trayvon martin)”

Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen, died after being shot by a community watch captain with white and Hispanic parents, George Zimmerman, in Florida.

Forster and Rostami, both white, suffered a beating at the hands of a crowd of black teenagers.

Nineteen paragraphs into the column — nineteen paragraphs! — we learn, and for the first time in the local newspaper, that a black mob dragged two white people out of their car near downtown and beat them so badly that they had to miss a week of work.

Well, at least it’s out now. I’m sure the national media will be quick to pick up on this story, for what it says about racial violence in America today. Yes, I’m sure this will happen.

(H/T: Steve Sailer).

91 Responses to Racist Mob Beats Victims; Lede Buried

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celticdragonchick says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:31 pm

What amusing, is the perverse lengths. liberals will go to, even this thread to defend, justify and minimize any Black crime and atrocity no matter how heinous or unprovoked. Blacks are like some holy demigods in the liberal mind, total incapable of evil and worthy only of perverse, over the top adoration. They have unlimited moral license, says the left.

Your strawman needs a little extra filler.
Daniel says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:34 pm

Elli, when I see conservatuve outlets spending half the time decrying the “degraded culture” of men, and warning about how dangerous they are and how they should be avoided, as they do about blacks, then I’ll consider that a valid comparison.
Chatham says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:37 pm

Daniel is right, if you read the local paper there are often suspicious deaths of black males that come up that don’t make the national news. As there are deaths of white males, parents killing children, etc. We are a country of 300 million, and there’s more news that happens than can be reported nationally.

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-04-04/news/31283015_1_official-police-version-grand-jury-cops

A 68 black marine veteran who was ill accidentally set off his LifeAid device at 5 am. Police were sent over to check on him, but he told them he was fine. They demanded he let them in, and he refused, so they broke down the door, tased and shot him, and he died. One of the officers is heard shouting racial epithets at him on tape.

This happened last November, and has only received very limited reporting recently, since the Trayvon Martin case. Was this case ignored at first because of some media conspiracy? Is that why there’s still such limited coverage? Or is it possible that the media just happens to fixate on certain stories, and it doesn’t have some overarching racial motives?

“While I believe Derbyshire went too far, if one is black, white, or otherwise, and driving through Baton Rouge, one would be foolish not to be nervous around large groups of young black men.”

If I see a group of young black men in suits leaving a church, and a group of tattooed and disheveled white men on the corner wearing hoodies and drinking alcohol, which group should I be more afraid of? If we can agree that the image one gives off is more important than their race, then there’s no need to even bring up race. It may have been true that male Catholics were proportionally more involved in crime than Protestants in 1920′s New York, but saying something like “be careful around Catholics” would be silly.
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:38 pm

Rod, I could write a Derbyshire-esque article claiming that being from a southern state make you statistically more likely to be a criminal as southern states have the highest overall crime rates. I could then claim that northerners should avoid the degraded culture of southerners while maintaining a few southern friends to show they aren’t prejudice.

I wouldn’t because the evidence is pretty clear that wealth makes you less likely to be a victim or perpetrator of violent crime. For example the New England states have the country’s highest median household income, while the Southern states have the lowest.

This is also likely the reason why New England comes out ahead in other social metrics as well.
Don Quijote says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:45 pm

A simple solution to a basic problem:

37.18% of the population of Mississippi, 31.98% of Louisiana, 30.02% of Georgia, 28.48% of South Carolina & 26.38% of Alabama is African-American. If we could convince the African-Americans living in the other 8 states of the confederacy to move to the 5 states mentioned above, African-Americans would become the majority in those states and Whites would move out.

No more black on white crime since there would be no whites in the Black States and vice versa…
Franklin Evans says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:45 pm

Elli provides an excellent summary of the logic here:

Men commit violent crimes about eight times as often as women do. Most people think it is morally acceptable for me to be more wary of men.

Blacks commit violent crimes about eight times as often as whites do. Why do many of the same people who think it is morally acceptable for me to be more wary of men think it is morally wrong for me to be more wary of blacks?

To which I would personally add: I am much more likely to die in a smoldering twisted mass of metal being tailgated at 75mph than at 35mph, and no one can fault me morally for staying off the highways.

But I stated it differently. Put some actual numbers in there instead of proportions, and relate them to a control.

Hypotheticating to illustrate: In a population of 100,000, 8,000 violent crimes were committed by men and 1,000 by women. This fits the “8 times” logic, but also points out its flaws. Shouldn’t we all routinely stay away from every man we encounter? Extending the hypothetical, 40% of the men were black. That still leaves us with 4.8 times as many white men as women. Is 4.8 low enough not to raise the same concerns as 8?

Put that way, doesn’t it make the initial logic just a little bit ridiculous?
Rod Dreher says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:48 pm

Rod, I could write a Derbyshire-esque article claiming that being from a southern state make you statistically more likely to be a criminal as southern states have the highest overall crime rates. I could then claim that northerners should avoid the degraded culture of southerners while maintaining a few southern friends to show they aren’t prejudice.

See what you’re doing here? You’re confusing categories to make it sound like I was making an unreasonable statement. I specifically, and carefully, did not say that all blacks are criminals, and that black culture is degraded. I said that if you wanted to reduce your chances of being the victim of violent crime in Baton Rouge, especially if you yourself are black, statistics indicate that you should avoid groups of young black men who live in (or, I should have added, indicate by their dress and manner that they come from), certain sections of the city — that is, the inner city. Violent crime rates are vastly more concentrated among young black males in that part of town. I presented to you a newspaper story quoting people — mostly black people — who deal with this stuff, who talk about the role poverty and poverty culture plays in conditioning young males to violence. The kids in those parts of town really are condemned to grow up in a degraded culture. Read the story.

The comparison you make re: Southern states only makes sense if I was making blanket statements about all black people, which I certainly was not doing.
Mike W says:

May 2, 2012 at 12:53 pm

It still amazes me to read posters here that have simply refused to read the evidence regarding Zimmerman/Martin. They are stuck on the initial media lie that Zimmerman shot Martin, either in cold blood or at the least un-provoked.

Overwhelming evidence indicates to the contrary. Zimmerman was on his back, getting his pounded into the pavement (photographs prove the existence of the wound) when he popped Martin in the gut with his gun. He had every right to do that, regardless of Stand Your Ground.

Regarding this latest hate crime – they have become so common that they are starting to blur together. You must have situational awareness in all aspects of public life. I am not blaming the victim as some people appear to be doing. I am simply saying that when you are in bear country in Montana, you keep on your toes. The same applies to many neighborhoods in America.
Sands says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:11 pm

“I wouldn’t because the evidence is pretty clear that wealth makes you less likely to be a victim or perpetrator of violent crime.”

That’s something for policy makers to consider, not average folks looking for a safe place to live. For most people it doesn’t matter if violent behavior is genetic or cultural, they just want to be safe.
Dave D. says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:12 pm

Reading more statistics, New England has the lowest crime rates, for both violent and property crimes. New England also has the lowest homicide rates in the country. Yippe!

Tell you what, I’ll drop you off in Bridgeport, CT after dark, and you tell me how good those statistics make you feel.

I’m a New Englander too, and those statistics have a lot to do with our declining populations and the prevalence of wealthier, gated communities than anything. Or the fact our rents are so high and jobs are so limited we really don’t have the critical mass of poor people to have those stats: instead we export them to other, cheaper states.

If you drive around in New England, and get out of the rich people towns and bubbles, it’s really no different than the southern states.
James says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:15 pm

MH,

You are forgetting one statistic:

http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html

New England’s black population is around 5%. Compare that to the South’s.
Mitchell Young says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:19 pm

“poor white people can be attacked out of the blue”

Uh, that’s exactly what happened here.

“flunk statistics”

I really hate flame wars, but Tumarion, I’d put my knowledge of statistics, both frequentist and Bayesian, up against yours any day. That goes double for my knowledge of the epistemology of social research. Indeed, your limits seem to be a couple of tired cliches (‘the plural of anecdote is not data’, ‘correlation is not causation’)

But I’ll help you out, T’, ‘cuz I’m white like that. You can start your education by reading an article called “Degrees of Freedom and the Case Study” by Donald Campbell. Also see Ragin and Becker’s book “What is a Case”. You should also learn (relearn?) the concept of conditional probability, and review the Bayesian notion of continually updating your subjective probabilities as new data become available.

You see, not all epistemologically sound, generalizable knowledge comes from large-N samples. Even from a frequentist perspective, most introductory quantative analysis books have (or used to have) T-Tables to enable inferences from fewer than 30 data points. Also you might want to review a bit of the public policy/economic literature on what happens when officials are ‘incentivized’ to meet statistical targets.

Further might want to review your reading skills. I nowhere implied that MH was being dishonest. I merely followed his logic to its obvious, non-absurd conclusion, that if we shouldn’t call attention to this sort of incident because crime overall is dropping, then we shouldn’t call attention to Martin-Zimmerman incidents.
Irenist says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:20 pm

I think the larger issue is “underclass” violence. I’m familiar with some public housing estates in Ireland that I’m quite wary of visiting for fear of criminal violence, and every resident is white. In the U.S., as it happens, many of our poorest people growing up in degrading conditions are black.

Large concentrations of young men are often violent, and large concentrations of underclass young men are often especially violent. I wouldn’t want to get out of my car and confront a mob of young male public housing residents that had just thrown a rock at my window no matter what ethnicity they happened to be. And if I lived in Baton Rouge, I’d stay away from the projects, too–even if every resident was white or Latino instead of black.

In brief: given the history of the U.S., race correlates with underclass criminality. But it doesn’t cause it. So what can we do to limit underclass crime? My opening suggestion is to end the drug war and get underclass men out of prison and back into communities where they can be fathers and husbands.
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:20 pm

Rod, I don’t think you were being racist, and I was trying to show how easy it is to slice things a different way. I read the story and agree that poverty leads to hopelessness which leads to criminality. But poverty seems to be the key issue here not race or geography.
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:49 pm

Dave D, New England’s population is not declining, it increased 3.8% between the 2000 and 2010 census. We are growing more slowly than the rest of the nation which is why people sometimes think population is declining. We must have more of the rich people towns and bubbles because our statistics are different than the southern states.

Sands, the rank and file should look at crime maps and avoid living in hot spots if they can. If you are not poor then odds are high you can afford it.
Red Phillips says:

May 2, 2012 at 1:53 pm

“Except, of course, they weren’t because then you wouldn’t know about it.”

Mike, I know about them primarily from reading about them in the conservative press including my own blog (click on my name) where we covered the phenomenon. If it was a meme it was a meme in the conservative press only with the mainstream press doing their best to look the other way. I’ll post some links that support my contention when I’m on a different computer. The one I’m on won’t allow me to cut and paste.
Elli says:

May 2, 2012 at 2:39 pm

Daniel, while conservatives tend to decry the high levels of black violence and ignore male violence, liberals tend to do it the other way around, in news features and editorials and scholarly articles and works of fiction and acts of law, i.e. the Violence Against Women Act. It’s pervasive, but neither the conservative nor the liberal focus changes the reality of who commits more violence – men more than women and blacks more than whites.

Very few liberals go so far as to tell women to avoid men – short of cloistered convents or lesbian communes it’s almost impossible to do. Normal familial relations preclude it – close relationships between the sexes are an essential part of human society, but relationships between the races are non-essential, because societies exist which are only one race, or ethnicity, or tribe. We are a multi-racial country and racial isolation is not possible but many people of all ethnicities seek out self-aggregation or even segregation, to be in a sub-society that is comfortable for them.

Race and sex are two factors in judging personal safety – there’s age and clothing and numbers and demeanor and surroundings and proximity and circumstances and degree of acquaintance – if I’m walking on the canal path my mental reactions are going to be different if I’m approached by an elderly couple of any race with a small dog, a black male bicyclist in racing gear, a black male bicyclist in street clothes, a white male bicyclist in street clothes, a Hispanic father and sons with fishing poles, three young Hispanic men with no fishing poles, and the very large black man I know from volunteer work. And it will be different yet if I encounter anyone knocking at my door or on the street or in the supermarket. Race is as valid a factor as any other in the equation – I never said it should dominate – I say it is valid and moral.

Franklin, no one cares about relative risks if the risks are very small. One in a hundred million, one in a billion, what’s the difference? But when my daughter went to college in Baltimore, where one young black man in three is currently under supervision of the criminal justice system (not all for crimes against persons of course) I gave her a Derbyshire-style talk about the dangers of young black men, young black women and black neighborhoods in Baltimore. And I appalled her, because we didn’t raise her to be racist. We raised her to be non-racist, to take people as individuals.

Except that we did it in a town with very few black people, because when we lived in the city, there were enough aggressive young black men to make the streets and public transportation uncomfortable with sexual harassment and territoriality. The crime rate was much higher there, and the great majority of violent crimes were committed by young black men. I like it much better where we live now.
James says:

May 2, 2012 at 3:11 pm

Dave D,

No jobs? The unemployment rate in Greater Boston (4.5 million people) is 5.7%, in Massachusetts 6.5%, in Vermont 4.8%, New Hampshire 5.2%, even in Maine (the poorest New England state) 7.2%.

Regarding poverty and violence, it seems to be more about culture. Maine has one of the nation’s lowest murder rates, and Rhode Island (an outlier in New England with 11.1% unemployment) has a murder rate well below the national average.

No, I don’t think the minority sections of Hartford or Bridgeport or New Haven are very safe. But have you seen Gary or Newark or Baton Rouge lately?
Mr. Patrick says:

May 2, 2012 at 3:16 pm

Elli wrote:
“Except that we did it in a town with very few black people, because when we lived in the city, there were enough aggressive young black men to make the streets and public transportation uncomfortable with sexual harassment and territoriality.”

And this is why I tried my level best not to go berserk on the Derbyshire talk. Because it was basically sound, if appalling, advice from the perspective of one who lives on one side of a de facto segregated environment going into the other side.

But from personal experience, if you don’t live on the right side of the segregated environment, you still have to give a talk. Only it changes a bit, from a perspective that safety is in avoidance, to the perspective that safety comes from prior and ongoing engagement. You may get beaten to a pulp if you aren’t aware of where you are and who you’re with, but if you take precaution and forge alliances beforehand, this becomes a lot less likely. If everything goes wrong, God forbid, the person pulling you out of the vicious pile is likely to be a black person you know, trust and depend on, and who places the same faith in you. If you allow racial assumptions to keep you at standoff distance from most of a community in which you travel, your danger level increases.

The point is not to make cynical, token friendships, it’s to be known and knowable to the people around you. Find me a place in America or in this world where you’re as safe or safer for avoiding that, besides those atomized, segregated suburbs?
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

May 2, 2012 at 3:22 pm

James said “You are forgetting one statistic: New England’s black population is around 5%. Compare that to the South’s.”

True, but sociologists can control for independent variables such as race and wealth when comparing regions with different population makeups. Once they do it is possible to determine the impact of each variable on issues such as crime. But that is beyond my ability.

I do know that the violent crime ‘race gap’ has narrowed over the past twenty years, which leads me to believe race is less important than other factors.
Chatham says:

May 2, 2012 at 3:32 pm

“Race is as valid a factor as any other in the equation – I never said it should dominate – I say it is valid and moral.”

In what scenario? You see a group of young black males in business suits walking down the street and you’re more cautious than if they were young white men? Or you see a disheveled and disturbed white man stumbling around, but you are more relaxed around him than if he was black? I’ve traveled a little, and seen high crime areas with different races. I’m not going to feel relaxed in Filipino slums just because the people there are Asian.

As people have pointed out, groups of thuggish looking people hanging around street corners in general are something to be cautious about. In Ireland these groups are going to be mostly white while in America there will be more blacks, in Peru more hispanics. I think everyone agrees that it’s OK to be cautious around such groups.

The question is, why bring race into it at all? Thuggish people in slums tend to be dangerous the world over, regardless of race. Trying to bring race on it will naturally lead people to believe that you have some other motives.
Dave D. says:

May 2, 2012 at 3:51 pm

Yeah, and Louisana it’s 7.1.% We aren’t talking these massive statistical gaps here attributable to any form of culture-California, RI, CT, and CO rank higher than many southern states in unemployment, with NY hitting 8.5%. And our crime rates vary heavily by area: the rich bubble towns usually have very little, everywhere else and the big cities tend to overrepresent. The only outliers in my home state are the rural towns that are isolated enough to where even the criminals don’t want to stay there.

MH, adjust it by age. You’ll find that most New England states have massive brain drain to the southern ones due to cost of living and tax burdens. Compare Maryland and Delaware for example. I’ve lost most of my family to other states for just that reason, and I’m not alone here. Really in my area the only growth has been from immigrants willing to take low-end jobs .
Mitchell Young says:

May 2, 2012 at 4:54 pm

“In what scenario? ”

Well, to start with, in the scenario described in the article, where the young black chaps see you as a proxy for one G. Zimmerman.
Franklin Evans says:

May 2, 2012 at 5:08 pm

Elli,

As the father of two daughters and a son, born and raised in Philadelphia, you get no argument from me on any count. The thing that gets my dander up — perhaps to quickly, ’tis true — is the use of statistics that are out of context while reading them in the reputable source that collected and analyzed them. I’m referring to the precis they publish, not the details, but which is all anyone sees via the journalist “reporting” them.

The local conditions are paramount. I applaud your daughter’s reaction of appalled, if only because it shows that she thinks critically even when the source is her own parents. You don’t mention explicitly, but I assume she at least understood your motivations and saw the rational basis for them.

Perspective is all. Living where we do, there is nothing racist about cautioning our children (and visitors!) about the local fauna and flora, as it were. The other side of that coin is providing a rational balance to the horror stories they get, along the lines of “Of course you need to be aware of your surroundings, but paranoia is definitely overboard.” People forget that body language and circumstances will usually give clear signals, easily distinguishing between a random passerby and someone out for trouble. If we preconceive this, we fail to see the signals.
JonF says:

May 2, 2012 at 5:54 pm

Mitchell Young,
I did not say that Baltimore has eliminated all crime and that we are now living in the Peaceable Kingdom. I said that the city cracked down on attacks by flash mobs of “wilding” (mainly) black youths. The incident to which you refer was not of that sort at all.
To give some more detail the Mar 18 incident occured in a large, multi-racial croad hanging out near the Power Plant, an entertainment venue that often attracts large (and mixed) crowds. For some incomprehensible reason (there was apparently no exchange of angry words or anything) an inebriated white guy was cold-cocked by an inebriated black guy, and the crowd then stripped the white guy of most of his clothing. Later, the black guy turned himself into the police and went on TV to apologize (and he sounded genuinely contrite) claiming he had no idea what got into him (though we can guess: alcohol, maker of idiots).
For the record we also had a shooting downtown last summer, and up in Mt Vernon there was an ugly case in which an off-duty cop (black) shot and killed another guy (also black) who hitting on his woman– but that shocker notwithstanding Mt Vernon is also safer after the city closed the hiphop bottle club* in the basement on the Belvedere which brewed up a lot of nasty teen trouble too.

* A bottle club is a party place that has no liquor license but allows BYOB.
JonF says:

May 2, 2012 at 6:05 pm

Mike W,
I am trying to stay out of all Zimmerman debates since the matter is being treated as (IMO) it should: the authorities are now giving it their full attention, and Zimmerman will have his day in court. If he really did shoot in self-defense then I hope he gets off– though I still him a fool for inviting needless trouble when he could have simply reported to the poilice something suspicious (a kid he didn’t know in the neighborhood) and let it go. He was the neighborhood WATCH after all, not the neighborhood KGB. However being a fool is not against the law or else Congress would be legislating from behind bars.
I do get rather tired of being told the evidence is “overhwleming” when I find it distinctly underwhelming (mainly a lot of solo he-say reported by hearsay– there being no second witness still alive to tell the other side). I am waiting for the forensics which should speak volumes.
Chatham says:

May 2, 2012 at 6:09 pm

“Well, to start with, in the scenario described in the article, where the young black chaps see you as a proxy for one G. Zimmerman.”

Yeah, I can see how racial profiling would be useful here. A large group of rough people hanging out on the street hurl a rock at my car. Now I should go to see what race they are. If they are black, the violent mob that just assaulted me could be dangerous. Better stay in the car instead of confront them like the man in the article. If they are white, well, I’m sure if I go out and confront the violent mob they’ll thank me for teaching them morals or something.

Again, in what situation would taking into account the race of the person actually matter?
Sean says:

May 2, 2012 at 6:25 pm

Mitchell,

Well, to start with, in the scenario described in the article, where the young black chaps see you as a proxy for one G. Zimmerman.

Funny, and I thought racial profiling was a good thing in the minds of race-realists. Zimmerman apparently saw Martin as a proxy for blacks who actually are criminals, and you’ve defended that explicitly.

After all, black kids know that they could just be walking down the street and a lone white man could think they’re up to something and kill them, then be released almost immediately by police. By the logic of race-realism, they were behaving rationally.
MH - secular misanthropist says:

May 2, 2012 at 6:50 pm

Dave D, I live in the greater Boston area and conditions are different here, but you have to have skills in either defense, high tech, medicine, finance, or education. Not necessarily a college degree in those fields, but some sort of skills. While there is out migration, there’s also a steady stream of in migration driven by colleges and these fields.
Mont D. Law says:

May 2, 2012 at 9:37 pm

I will point out that there was a racially motivated killing recently that didn’t cause protests, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson didn’t put in an appearance and the press didn’t go wild. It got some brief national coverage becaue of the debacle in Flordia. But the two white guys that killed three random black people and wounded two others were pursued and arrested. The story faded.

If liberals were looking to get outraged about something this would be a perfect case. Five random shootings, three black people dead and two wounded for simply for taking a walk while black. The attacks were unambiguously racist almost comically so.

If all these conspiracy theories about deluded but powerful liberals and their race hustling allies are fact then why did they not work their evil magic on this case. Obviously the two highest level race hustlers are not there, the liberal media are not talking about it at all. There was a local protest on April 10th because the accused were given a bond, I couldn’t even find a report on how many people showed up. There were three editorials written on the case. Needless to say none of them were in the New York Times.

This is pure fantasy.
Turmarion says:

May 2, 2012 at 9:51 pm

Actually, Mitchell, What is a Case is on my Amazon shopping list, along with many all too many other books I’ve not been able to buy yet. It looks fascinating. The article you mention also looks interesting. After I’m through grading finals, I’ll read it.

You seemed to be intimating that on the basis of one incident of a white man getting set on fire out of the clear blue (one incident–talk about small N-samples!) that therefore it is likely that random, heinous, out-of-the-blue black-on-white crimes will occur with some frequency. If that’s not what you mean, it sure sounded like it.

I’m more a number theory kinda guy; I don’t use statistics that much, and it’s quite possible that you are more proficient at them than I am. That doesn’t ipso facto make your perspective right (or mine, either). However, I’m quite familiar with conditional probability and Bayesian methods. I use lay language, and yes, even the dreaded clichés—which after all are often true, even if compressed and simplified—in general since I don’t know the mathematical background of my interlocutor. The snark on flunking Stat 101 was unnecessary on my part, admittedly, but I think the point is valid.

What I find interesting is that you implicitly are saying that sociological studies are at best to be taken with massive amounts of salt or at worst bogus (with which I’d actually agree, by and large)—you strongly imply that by the reading suggestions, the statement about incentives to meet statistical targets (having worked in various government-funded jobs for nearly a decade in toto, I am well aware of such incentives), and the implications that the crime studies MH cited are bogus. In short, without saying so explicitly, you seem to be saying that all those squishly libruls—at least the few smart enough to understand statistics—are deviously using slick, questionable statistics to hide from us the fact that blacks are basically stupider and more violent than whites, in the name of PC hoohah. Now if that’s not a fair statement of your position, say so, otherwise I assume it is.

But when researchers as competent in statistics as you or I, and probably much more so, tear race-realist faves like The Bell Curve to shreds for its bad stats, race realists get all huffy. Apparently people like Murray are speaking truth to power against the evil Librul Establishment so their stats are sound; but anyone bamboozled by all this “diversity” stuff must ipso facto be mathematically delilnquent.

The point is that you can’t have your statistical cake and eat it, too. If sociological statistics are suspect in general, then that’s as true for “race realist” stats (which, sorry to tell you this, are produced by people with their own set of incentives) are, too. Puts us back to square one, huh?

I guess we could start getting various sociological and criminological studies to support our various views and start sending them back and forth, but that would be rather tedious, IMO. I’ll be simpler—I think there are lots and lots of factors involved in crime, race relations, and such, and frankly I think anyone who thinks they have a grand overarching theory that explains it—whether he’s on the left, the right, or anywhere in between—is full of it. The fact that neither side seems to have been able to solve the problems seems a good indication of that for me—all the Bayesian analysis, statistics, mathematical models, theorizing on heredity, environment, etc. that you like seem to have been roughly worth squat in solving our sociological problems in this area and many others.

Further might want to review your reading skills. I nowhere implied that MH was being dishonest. I merely followed his logic to its obvious, non-absurd conclusion, that if we shouldn’t call attention to this sort of incident because crime overall is dropping, then we shouldn’t call attention to Martin-Zimmerman incidents.

Maybe I’m not the one that needs to work on his reading skills. If you read what MH actually said:

I don’t think we should ignore either incident. The intent of my comment was to counteract the mistaken impression that crime is on the rise in the US, and trying to fit both incidents into that false narrative.

he is clearly not advocating “not calling attention to” this type of incident, as you say. Rather, he is, correctly in my view, pointing out that your narrative, without stating it in so many words, is that crime really is increasing, or at least not decreasing; and by putting forth a “not-absurd conclusion”, you are implying that MH is wrong in his assertion that crime is decreasing; and thus you are indeed implying that either he’s dishonest or deluded.
Turmarion says:

May 2, 2012 at 10:27 pm

rod, I got the links screwed up in the earlier post. Please discard it and post this, if you would.

At the risk of being obnoxious by too many posts too close, let me make two more points for you, Mitchell.

From that noted bastion of liberalism (sarcasm alert!) The American Spectator, with my emphasis:

There are certain ideas about race that are popular among liberals — that cases like Trayvon Martin’s aren’t isolated tragedies but routine occurrences in racist America; concerns about crime, especially black crime, are necessarily racist; white racism explains the overwhelming majority of black social problems; voter ID laws aren’t much different from poll taxes and Bull Connor; the racial attitudes of the Jim Crow South remain commonplace among white Americans — that are to many Americans obvious nonsense.

A small but growing number of people on the right seem to be embracing the idea that if these liberal observations are false, then the exact opposite of them must be true: interracial harmony is effectively impossible; affirmative action harms whites in exactly the same way Jim Crow harmed blacks; the era that gave rise to the civil rights movement wasn’t that bad; we are all at imminent risk of being attacked by predominantly black flash mobs; white racism doesn’t exist (proponents of this last bit seem divided on the question of whether it should exist). Needless to say, these views are also obvious nonsense.

It will be hard for us to live together as Americans if we constantly believe the worst about each other.

Now if a publication as right-wing as the Spectator can say that, all I can add is, ‘nuff said. Or maybe you don’t think we ought to live together as Americans and that believing the worst of each other is just hardnosed honesty. You’re entitled to your opinion—and those of us, including the conservatives at the aforementioned Spectator—who disagree are entitled to call it out for the hooey it is.

On another note, I think you’ve expressed “race realist” views on IQ around here in the past. here and here are nice takedowns of the idea of the so-called general intelligence factor, g, and the race-realist ideas on heritability and malleability of intelligence, written by a <a href=”http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/professor of statistics. I notice on his homepage a link to a paper he co-authored critiquing the use of Bayesian statistics in regard to the philosophy of science, especially in terms of how such analysis can be wrongly used. Hmmm….
Mitchell Young says:

May 3, 2012 at 12:30 am

Tumarion, American Spectator is a neocon organ. Those statements are an old rhetorical technique of putting words in your opponents’ mouthes, and anytime somebody says idea ‘x’ is obvious nonsense, you can bet they don’t have an argument to counter the idea (at least the idea as truly expounded by the opponent).

“It will be hard for us to live together as Americans if we constantly believe the worst about each other.”

So?
Red Phillips says:

May 3, 2012 at 12:45 am

Mike,

Here are a couple of the links I promised. The first is some clown admitting that the Chicago Tribune deliberately downplayed the racial aspects of the flash mobs and defending the practice.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/chi-race-and-the-flash-mob-attacks-20110608,0,1883170.story

Here that frothing at the mouth right-winger Walter Russell Mead notes the obvious suppression of the racial aspect of the flash mobs by the MSM.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/08/07/american-tinderbox/

There’s more if you want it. But why are we even having this conversation? That the MSM treats these stories differently is obvious, and you are embarrassing yourself and damaging your credibility trying to deny it. As I said above, you PC grandstanders are simply pathetic. We get it. We really really do. You’re an oh so pristine rightthinker and no stray wrongthink every sullies your oh so virtuous mind. Now since we get it, could you please go away so the rest of us can have a serious conversation?
Mitchell Young says:

May 3, 2012 at 7:36 am

“But the two white guys that killed three random black people and wounded two others were pursued and arrested. ”

Actually, it was an American Indian (shooter), and a white guy. The Indian guy’s father was killed by a black man about a year ago. No one likes a complicated Narrative.

“the liberal media are not talking about it at all.”

Searching for “Jake England” — the guy that went on the warpath — gets two hits on the New York times site, 114 times on the LA Times site, 335 on cnn.com, and 95 times on the Guardian (UK) site.

Contrast to the case under discussion here, where there was zero news coverage, even in the local press, until this editorialist published this piece. Even then the racial nature of the attacks were, as Rod Dreher says, buried two thirds of the way through the piece.
Turmarion says:

May 3, 2012 at 7:41 am

Sigh–for some reason the links still don’t work. The one to The American Spectator is this: http://spectator.org/blog/2012/04/09/beyond-john-derbyshire
and the other two are http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html and
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

Sometimes I hate HTML….
Mitchell Young says:

May 3, 2012 at 7:41 am

Chatham, if you really don’t think that the white reporter faced extra risk of racially motivated attack in this case, above that which he would have faced from, say, some unruly white kids in Southie you are just plain deluded.
MH - Secular Misanthropist says:

May 3, 2012 at 9:25 am

I think the reason people latch onto race realism is that it is a comforting narrative. Race is concrete and visible factor, much more so than amorphous social factors like poverty or discrimination. Race is also more actionable because you can literally see who to avoid, while poverty is a pervasive aspect of the human condition that anyone* can fall victim to with a run of bad luck. Besides not knowing how to deal with poverty, it provokes a nagging subconscious fear. So it is natural to seek a mechanism to pretend it can’t happen to you. The best way to engage this denial is to choose a property of the other that you don’t have. It can be race, religion, geography, it really doesn’t matter.

* I know that there is also a learned culture of poverty, but your children will fall victim to that.
Mitchell Young says:

May 3, 2012 at 9:49 am

“The Indian guy’s father was killed by a black man about a year ago.”

To be clear, I don’t mean to imply Jake England’s killing and wounding random black people in ‘revenge’ was in any way justified.
Turmarion says:

May 3, 2012 at 10:17 am

Thank you, MH. I think that’s got it about right. God forbid life should be complicated.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

May 3, 2012 at 1:06 pm

When all is said and done (a great deal has been said here, pointing to darn little that might be done), the ONLY relevance of race is that those inclined to be thugs use race as a cover, and those inclined to a peculiarly paralyzing brand of liberalism aid and abet that, instead of calling it for what it is.

If someone throws a rock at me, I don’t care what “race” they are. I will choose to fight or run based solely on the odds. If they have buddies in the vicinity, that’s part of the odds. An interesting development in some of the more recent wilding episodes is that an increasing number are committed by multi-racial crowds of youth. The merger of black and white underclasses seems to be a new trend, and one which promises no diminution of violence.