Many will know that some news sources have gone as far as falsely claiming that the three assailants Kyle Rittenhouse shot were Black. Such lies or errors are easily dismissed as bad or bad faith reporting. But recently Quillette published an essay entitled The Rittenhouse Trial: A Legal Scholar Responds which quite accurately lays out the case that according to the Law relating to self-defense Kyle Rittenhouse was Not Guilty. This is not the issue, but rather that the article also went on to claim a belief popular in many segments of American society ‘that this is yet another example of white people manifesting their privileged status in America—so privileged that they can kill with impunity. They punctuate this argument with claim that if Rittenhouse were black, he would have been convicted.’ I thought given the frequency with which this claim is now made, it bears further examination.
I would contend that this statement is both true and false- true on the surface at the level of the veneer of looking at raw numbers, but for the most part false when one digs down into the causes of disparities within the criminal justice system. In beginning to examine the evidence we need only look to a 2012 study on the percentage chances of someone being placed on death row when not guilty- for either procedural reasons or because they truly were innocent of the crime committed.
The headline figure is 4.1%- an alarming percentage at face value, but when looking at the African American demographic some have argued that this figure is closer to 10%. But what accounts for the discrepancy? Well, if we look at the demographics of relative poverty in America, part of the answer becomes clear. The poor don’t get adequate counsel in America- it shows with the fact that they are far more likely to be convicted of a crime than their more affluent counterparts accused of the exact same offense. 22% of African Americans are below the relative poverty line, compared to 9% of whites, and in terms of history recent enough to be included in the study, this figure was worse.
But accounting for poverty and inadequate counsel doesn’t explain all of the disparity. Some of this figure relates to historical racism- because the study drew from data over several decades. Nonetheless, we cannot be sure that even though most of Americas troubled past with racism has been removed from the system, that this process is anywhere near complete. If such prejudice still exists we can be sure that its influence is nebulous and difficult to pin down, because of our society-wide conscious efforts to remove racism from courtrooms- at least when its influence is overt and obvious.
So we look for more data. Perhaps the most convincing source comes from COMPAS, a case management and decision support tool which is used by courts to assess risks of future offending and potential for recidivism. It uses data-driven algorithms to help judges make fairer decisions. But here’s the rub. First, it found that the algorithm driven system was better at predicting risks than Judges- humans trained to remain impartial- especially in matters of race. Second, although the system went a long way towards removing incorrect risk assessments influenced by race, the data-driven system found that African Americans were statistically more likely to reoffend.
We could blame structural racism for this higher rate of recidivism and no doubt it would be a factor. But for better data on the disparity we need to look to Norway’s reform-based prison system. A while back I was investigating the claim of their 20% recidivism rate. Was it true? Well, it depends upon both how one measures the recidivism (re-arrest, charging or conviction) and how far one looks for patterns of recidivism (2, 3, 4 or 9 years). Across this broader range of variables recidivism rates in Norway can be shown to be between 13% and 53%- with a fairer assessment looking over a longer range, but still maintaining that recidivism should at least be measured by actually being charged with a crime, recidivism rates in Norway are closer to between 30% and 40%- which is still impressive when one compares Norway to places like the US or the UK.
But what does this have to do with a data-driven statistical bias towards African Americans? Well, the Norwegians themselves have admitted that their reform-based system doesn’t work as well with the gang involved as it does with other criminals or former criminals. They haven’t been forthcoming with data in this regard, but it is an all-important factor when we look at relative rates of gang membership by ethnicity in America. The algorithms are either coded for, or are picking up, different proportions of gang membership within the population by race.
In a grim way, the recidivism rates makes sense. Few can compete with Hasidic Jews in the jewel trade because they don’t need the expense of most (internal) security- in addition to any criminal sanctions they may face, they will lose their community forever, if caught stealing. With gang membership this dynamics is reversed, creating a powerful obstacle to reform-based systems. Any attempts at implementing a reform-based strategy in criminal justice should be mindful of this fact- and even draw upon the experience of former gang members as well as cult deprogramming experts to look at ways of breaking the cycle of gang involvement and recidivism.
More generally, we should challenge the natural assumption that bias on the part of judges is the result of racism or implicit bias- it may well be such in terms of effect, but is not racism in terms of cause. Put simply, humans are great at assessing the possibility of risk, but terrible at assessing the extent of said risk. When judges pick up more individual cases within a group where risks exist, then this means that those individuals within the group will disproportionately be affected by the overcompensation for an inflated evaluation of risk, and this will be found at the statistical level.
For proof of this very human tendency to exaggerate the likelihood of risk, we only need to look at the vast sums of money spent on tackling the threat of terrorism, when a more rational and empirically driven approach would have saved more lives by deploying the resources to other areas of the criminal justice system. This overcalculation of risk is sure to persist in an era where our moral panic has turned to an overinflated belief in the risks of White Supremacist terrorism. Regardless, this tendency to overestimate risk is probably better categorised as structural racism (or disparity) only- rather than a clear indicator of racism or implicit bias- in the same way that the brain software we develop to identify faces is specific to particular ethnicities, as those who have not grown up around a particular ethnicity lack the software to distinguish faces on the basis of criteria such as hairline, or nose thickness rather than just size and shape.
But I digress. How does this bear upon the claim that a Black man in an equivalent situation to Kyle Rittenhouse would have been found guilty? Well, much as it may dismay conservative readers, it does present something of an indictment to the American Criminal Justice System. Because although many judges now have access to software which helps them overcome the biased tendency to overestimate risk, so such facility is available to jurors. Let’s consider a young Black teenager from a poor high crime neighbourhood wrongfully accused of a crime.
He will wear the same types of clothing and hairstyle as gang members in his neighbourhood, because its a form of camouflage to avoid being bullied or beaten up by the gang. If he like most male teenagers he is also likely to be desperate to get laid. He will be all but indistinguishable from gang members in terms of speech, gait and mannerisms. People who live in the neighbourhood might possess the discerning eyes to differentiate the non-gang involved, but do we really expect a jury of 12 average Americans from a broad range of backgrounds to make the same distinctions?
Unfortunately, most Western countries are still struggling to overcome the ways in which matters of culture become inextricably linked to matters of race and lead to stereotypes which are unjustly applied. If our hypothetical young Black man has a decent lawyer, we can have a reasonable expectation that this obstacle will be overcome. He will be at pains to emphasis the lack of gang involvement (which opens up the possibility of rebuttal, if the claims are false). He might draw upon witnesses from the local community that despite appearances he is a nice young man, respectful to his elders.
He might even expound upon a great attendance record at school, occasional participation in church activities, or draw upon examples of the young man carrying groceries for the elderly. But all of this is contingent upon having a reasonable competent lawyer with time on his hands, and many public defenders have case loads which prohibits this bare minimum of due diligence. America may seem like a classless society, but when you are at the bottom of society and can’t afford an adequate lawyer, I imagine class feels very real. It should concern all Americans that poor people can be falsely convicted of crimes, if for no other reason than occasionally these false convictions can act as a shield to the real (and sometimes dangerous) culprits.
If we want to examine the claim of bias in America’s Criminal Justice System, let’s acknowledge that the problems of bias and class are a little more nuanced than we might expect and look at potential solutions. First, let’s hypothesis a system in which all African American defendants are entitled to trial by an exclusively Black jury. Second, let’s imagine a system where every defendant in entitled to a defence attorney with roughly equivalent experience and ability as the prosecutor.
Hard as it may be for those with activist inclinations to believe, the latter system would likely result in far more removal of systemic unfairness than the former. But we don’t need to speculate, because such a system already exists across the Pond, here in the UK. There is still some lingering complaint over the extent to which controversial policing measures are disproportionately applied against Black British citizens- but these complaints fall apart when we look at the disparities of crime by community the police are policing, and weigh the evidence that regardless of whether a Black or White is stopped by police, the chances of a search revealing illegal materials such as knives or drugs is exactly the same- with a roughly 30% hit rate for white people and a 30% hit rate for Black people. 16,000 knives were confiscated last year, although many would be better categorised as machetes or self-made short swords 1.
Equally, although there have been shown to be sentencing disparities by race, upon further examining almost all of the disparities evaporate. An overwhelming amount of the difference stems from the fact that minorities in the UK are less likely to trust their legal counsels and the Criminal Justice System in general and are thus less likely to avail themselves of the discounts available for pleading guilty. This is cause for concern and should be remedied by action to help establish trust in the system, but can hardly be held up as example of racism, structural or otherwise, when it within the defendants power to disabuse themselves of the provably incorrect notion that the system is rigged against them.
But the final evidence is proof of a manifestly more just system. We offer every convicted criminal not only the right to appeal, but also a highly expert team of investigators ranged from experienced former detectives, to forensics and legal experts. All they have to do is pass a lie detector test which either shows that they didn’t commit the crime or shows an inconclusive result. Contrary to the opinions of many, a lie detector administered by an acknowledged expert is 90% accurate and in cases where the read is inaccurate, it only shifts the results by one category- from either guilty or innocent to inconclusive. We are so confident of our ability to determine innocence or guilt in our courts, so convinced that miscarriages of justice are exceedingly rare exceptions, that we are willing to use taxpayer money to exonerate the innocent or wrongfully convicted.
On a separate note, the claim that an African American man would not have received a fair trial in circumstances similar to those of Kyle Rittenhouse falls apart on other grounds- the flimsiness and implausibility of the counterfactual presented. First, had Jacob Blake been white the scenario of the police shooting would have played out exactly as it did. If a white man broke into a woman’s house, sexually assaulted her, fought with police, and then made his way to the passenger footwell to retrieve a knife he would have been shot by police- no question. We know this because for every case of police brutality which has occurred the exact same circumstances and results have happened to white people. In the case of George Floyd, we even know the name of his white counterpart- that of Tony Timpa.
It might have made the local news, but it wouldn’t have caused protests, for the simple reason that mainstream media has been deliberately ignoring and de-emphasising instances of the use of force by police against whites to present people with a deeply flawed availability heuristic and a completely false narrative- the lie of racist cops targeting Black bodies in a systemic fashion. So there never would have been a daytime protest or nighttime riot.
Second, we don’t need the strawman of an armed Black man at a Proud Boys event. We have better evidence of armed BLM activists at 2A protests. We can even see a white guy holding up a handwritten sign, highlighting the case of Duncan Lemp, a white man shot in circumstances quite similar to Breonna Taylor. But in order to establish a far more accurate counterfactual roughly equivalent to the Kyle Rittenhouse case, we would have to posit a Black man protecting property from a largely white mob intent upon burning down Black businesses.
This counterfactual doesn’t even deviate that much from what we know of the events of summer 2020. If, like me, you have seen any of the footage of the night in question, you will have been struck by just how many of the nighttime ‘protestors’ were white. Contrast this with the verifiably peaceful protests which occurred during the day, and we can see a marked discrepancy. Peaceful protestors during the day who were mainly Black and ‘protestors’ at night who were mostly white.
The image is slightly more muddied than that- there have doubtless been many older more laudably liberal white protestors who have shown up during the day to support BLM, and there have been notable instances of African Americans intent upon looting- an activity endorsed as a form of reparation, an encouraged by many mainly white journalists- yet more white people intent on destroying poor Black commercial districts . But generally when we examine the roughly $2 billion in damages caused by arson, I would suggest that we have been lied to in two ways. First, the damage has been caused overwhelmingly in poorer African American neighbourhoods, to businesses which were in many instances Black-owned and, whilst insurance may cover some of the expenses and loss of business which is incurred in such circumstances, but there is no way to compensate for the uphill struggle, immense labour and emotional demands of having to recover from such a devastating loss.
Second, when riots happen and result in arson, and as they did in Kenosha, I would posit that the arsonists are far more likely to have been white than anybody realises. In these circumstances, if we imagine a Black man defending a Black property from white arsonists, I don’t think a jury would convict if he had to kill two white people and injure another in order to protect his own life, or the lives of others. In fact, I don’t think that he would have even been charged in such a case.
America needs to start looking at its racial problems in terms of class, not race. Because just as surely as being at the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum without a father makes one vulnerable to gang grooming, we can be sure that when real racism rears its ugly head it is because stereotypes have a way of being applied more broadly than is just. Similarly, given that we know that white critical social justice activists are far more likely to be university educated and come from wealthier families, do we really want to put them in the same category as far more laudable martyrs to a just cause, especially when their actions often fall far short of the standards of behaviour we expect?
To me the kids of wealthy white people burning down the life’s work of mainly hardworking Black people isn’t laudable, if we were to place it on a moral spectrum it would be on the other side of good. But this is part of the problem of ideological possession- at least some of the instigators of Arson in 2020 were Antifa with a communist ideology. To this deluded philosophy, any business operating at a profit is extracting wealth from the community. To them they deserve to be burned down. Far better to have a community non-profit arranging food- even if the local residents are less likely to be enthused by locally grown seasonal veg at an extortionately high price, rather than goods more to their liking.
Many might doubt the news source of Black pastor Corey Brooks writing an opinion piece on a Conservative website, but the fact that Black-owned businesses have suffered in South Chicago is indisputable. And the fact that all three of Kyle Rittenhouse’s assailants were white speaks for itself. One was a known arsonist…
Many of us are already familiar with many of the lies which have been propagated about the Kyle Rittenhouse case, and the subject of police brutality and BLM more generally- but we will never know all of the media’s lies, just as we will never know just how many of the Black businesses burned down in 2020 were set fire by the hands of wealthy white kids born with silver spoons in their mouths. We may be familiar with the rabbit hole, but we will never know the true extent of the warren of nefarious half-truth, lies and omissions the corporate media employs to keep America divided and support their Democrat friends in DC in Office.
On a final note, if you doubt some of my assertions have a look at the photograph at the top of this essay. Do most of the ‘protestors’ in the background look white?
This is an absolutely fantastic post, Geary. As an American with an extremely multiracial family, I agree with everything you have written. I will even add that not only would a black Kyle have been found not guilty, I seriously doubt he would have been even charged. A black kid defending minority owned businesses from looting and rioting white Antifa troublemakers would be proclaimed as a hero. He would be Time's Man of the year, he'd probably win a Nobel Peace Prize and be paid to come on every talk show and news program for the next ten years. He would have statues built in his honor, and might even get discussion started on earning his own named holiday.
America can’t come to grips with the reality of having one racial grouping having violent crime and murder rates so many multiples higher than all the others. We can do lots of things to improve our criminal justice system, but nothing we do can counteract this discrepancy.
I think if America is to ever overcome this hurdle there needs to be major compromise between Left and Right. The Left needs to recognise that many of their solutions haven't helped or only made things worse, and the Right needs to recognise that however much one expounds about the virtues of values and personal responsibility, it can all be for nought without the right materials to build strong communities.
This is why I consistently bang on about vocational training for those who don't do well at school. I'm convinced that the only way to remedy the situation is to match people to economic opportunity. With a higher rate of responsible, reasonably well-paid young men in blue collar jobs it would be all but inevitable that rates of fatherhood would recover. Young women might sleep with a good looking guy- even have his baby- but they simply won't settle with him unless he does his share as a provider. There needs to be a 'stepping stone' generation to bring African Americans up to the point where they can compete fairly with whites.
Although I don't agree with liberal convictions about blaming circumstances for crime, I think it's everyone's responsibility to take the lesson and try to prevent such circumstances from ever happening. Police are janitors in this process, cleaning up the mess which society creates. The courts have become a surrogate for a decent solution. And unlike in previous decades for the past few years it has become clear that skilled blue collar workers are what the economy needs more than it needs overqualified baristas.
The great thing about vocational training placements is that it can double as male mentoring- people become the product of those who they have around them- it's why those of us lucky enough to have good people around us should feel truly blessed...
Although he's my "ex" and I'm not fond of many of aspects of his personality, my ex husband provides job opportunities and supports people who want work. He hires young drop outs and puts them on the road to getting their qualifications as electricians if they have the chops. Otherwise plenty of work doing other related stuff on his jobs. He's a pretty brutal task master but many have gone on to found their own firms and are making better money than I am as a marketer in financial services. Several are running his various jobs and contracts around the City. Two of these I know were criminals and substance abusing high school drop outs. He's not running this as a project, it just seems to happen. He serves as that father figure now to so many young men, without an ounce of patronizing. Maybe that's the secret of his success. He teaches them how to pull their own weight and they gain self esteem (and a solid income) through achievement.
What you ex is doing seems very laudable- but people are complex bundles and it's often difficult to sift the bad from the good. In the UK we call electricians sparkies. They have some of the best workplace hazing routines of all the trades. Many a young apprentice has felt his heartrate soar of his boss being 'electrocuted', only to find that it was a wind-up. We used to have a really good chortle over videos of that one in the office of the factory where I used to work.
We used to do mock forklift 'preliminary' driver training, with one of the supervisors getting the poor lad to simulate driving a forklift on foot, making signals and sounds to imitate the forklift. We would be peering over the mezz floor, and would always erupt in laughter as the guy made the 'meep, meep, meep' sounds while reversing.
I used to have a mocked up tdf laminate with a plastic spoon on the drawing. Every April Fool's Day I would send one of the new young lads off to central stores with a copy in one hand and a clear bag of broken spoons in the other, emphasising that he had to stand his ground when he complained. Helpfully, the drawing was clearly marked 1/4 for the stores person to point to when the young lad had gotten himself suitably argumentative. The stores guys always used to eagerly await the next victim in the run-up to the day.
"the right materials..." - That starts with the family. I believe that at least 75% of the ills of society are due to the breakdown of the family - an intentional result of left wing policies.
"Circumstances" happen and that will never change. The family is where people should go to respond to those "circumstances". No amount of government spending and no government policies will ever even approach the effectiveness of families in building resilience in communities.
I agree- vocational training is the thing best guaranteed to aid stable family formation and unlike much of the bloated university system (from which funding can be partially removed) it turns out to be a net positive economic investment. In 2019, there were 7 million blue collar jobs vacant, most of them reasonably well-paid, and many sectors, such as housing construction, were significantly underfilling demand.
If it were simply a matter of values then liberal elites should be the least likely to get married and stay married, but despite their scorn for monogamy and matrimony, they have some of the highest rates for both- live Right, vote Left- but with a tonne of hypocrisy thrown in!
I am more cynical about their motives. The elite leftists want to breakdown much of society so that their offspring have less competition. They are the ones who see economics as a zero sum game, because they don't understand what an economy really "is". An economy, in my opinion, is a vehicle for converting resources (including thought and labor) from one form to another, more valuable, form. Under this definition, economics is most certainly not a zero sum game.
Yep, they really don't believe you when you tell them that trades in the market mean that everyone ends up with more. I usually explain it by talking about two sisters who want to have a birthday party- one is much better at making cakes, the other at making lemonade- guess which way the government would allocate their labour!
and yes - vo-tec training is way, way, way undervalued! If I had a teenager these days, I would tell them they will get a much better ROI on their investment in vo-tec education, they would be better suited to survive a severe economic down turn, and can more quickly build a financial buffer for risk.
A while back I watched Richard Thaler at the Oxford Union. He joked that the British Working Classes were emancipating themselves. Back in 2008, we had around 1 million people shift to self-employed. Some were dog walkers, dog groomers and the like- but equally there were a huge number of trade professionals who shifted from working for big employers to working for themselves.
You can save yourself a fair amount of money if you know guys who can fix all the shit that goes wrong around your house. Don't get me wrong- there is plenty of stuff I can fix myself, but equally there are other jobs I wouldn't want to touch. It's always the ones who are stingy to fix the guy a cup of tea or coffee who ends up paying the higher price! My main guys are mates anyway.
(1) Black jurors tend to have anti-white, pro-black bias, but white jurors have minimal bias. (If true, this constitutes a strong reason against the all-black juror suggestion which you rightly rejected.)
Do you have a post in which you've written about the evidence in favor of the hypothesis that blacks are more likely to be convicted due to their relative poverty?
Well, generally public defenders and privately hired criminal defense lawyers perform equally well- although obviously as the amount one is able to spend increases the quality of the legal defense is likely to increase, so poorer people commissioning their own criminal defense attorneys are likely to receive worse counsel.
But the real problem tends to stem from publicly funded court appointed defense lawyers. In this Philadelphia: study https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1105_8izvsf8m.pdf , four out of five defendants received court appointed lawyers, as opposed to one in five who received public defenders and this was assigned randomly.
Obviously, given the national data on relative poverty, we can reasonably infer from this that African Americans are more likely to receive publicly funded court appointed defense lawyers. A 19% lower conviction rate and 24% reduction in sentence may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, especially when allowing for the 0.8 multiplier, but if this was a measurably inferior cancer drug, would you want the less good option?
The meta-study used mock juries using trial summaries on the first source I looked at which would tend to eliminate bias from the process. It also showed that the strongest overall relationship emerged for socio-economic status, which goes to my point about class, rather than race. I'm familiar with the literature on crimes rates and arrest rates and we clearly agree upon this factor.
For some reason, I couldn't access the Ohio study, but thanks for the links and I will clearly have to look into the meta-study in greater detail when I have the time. I am always open to criticism and value the knowledge gain which comes from pushback. On the subject of the Philadelphia study a little further reading shows that much of the the discrepancy relates to public defenders being more adept at negotiating the plea system. I am likely to look into the incentives of publicly funded court appointed defense lawyers as a result.
Recently, COMPAS and other risk assessment software has come under attack, but when one drills down into the mechanics of the studies performed we see that they eliminate the human bias of in-person courtrooms. Here is a study on the subject: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz0652 .
Thanks for that- I will have to go away and think about the research you've made me look at. Most studies look at the empirical data from a particular perspective- they don't really get to the three dimensional complexity of a particular phenomenon.
What can I say Geary. One of your best. Great coverage and opens up many avenues of thought on this topic, many that are seldom looked at with any objectivity. I lack the word-craft and depth of knowledge to convey much of my thought, yet see so much of it coming to life in your words. There’s little point rehashing anything that you’ve said, so I’ll add more to what you intended for us to think about. Class.
The one thing that stories like this latest Kyle Rittenhouse one do and that is intentionally promote race division whilst very careful attention is paid in not mentioning anything about class division or to correlate and distinguish what is the less visible identifier of division as a whole. Blackness becomes the one thing we can look at and see and focus on. I imagine a newspaper editor looking to further promote more of the same and omitting with extreme bias any story that neutralises or flies in opposition of purpose, even if only because inflamed sensationalised stories sell better.
I’ve mentioned before that in India that high class people will avoid darkening their skin at any cost, if they do venture out in the sun then they’ll undoubtedly hide under umbrellas. One will often witness a sign of prestige in high class men as being overweight, another identifier. The darkest, the untouchables need to work hand to mouth in the midday sun. Yet they are the same race. There are huge attempts made by the more elite to distinguish themselves visibly as superior.
It isn’t just India where this happens, it’s all of Asia and it’s white Europe and America and Australia; all of the west. We whites like our sun-tans. The darker the better up to a point. We look far more prominent after a holiday; more exotic, travelled, educated, wealthier and of course the one thing we admit to, healthier. Yet I doubt it’s health that features strongly in our desire to inflate ourselves by a change of appearance. I doubt it’s health that makes my Asian wife avoid darkening her skin, when in fact it would actually do her some good to actually spend more than two minutes per year under the sun. To her she’s dark enough, to whitey he’s not exotic enough and for the black man he can’t adjust the tone. But who wants to change their race? Very few. We can’t change our race anyways and it would be futile thinking to attempt to try, but we can attempt or enjoy looking exotic and of a higher status. Something the black man can do little about appearance wise and up to a point and certainly visibly it associates him with the worst side of ourselves that we seldom will admit and that is that we see too much blackness as a visible identifier of poverty, poorness, rank, prestige, class.
Of course societal construct, its history and actual real integration can dispel such visible associations. We can also say that such issues as racism would not exist if all nations were purely indigenous or we could say that if we mix all races together then all the racism would disappear and this would happen. In fact if we were all coffee coloured right this second then the identification of all the other issues would be seen in a true light.
I find it of the utmost interest that generally as people become more wealthy they feel less threatened or bothered by other races and that race itself does not really make any difference. Being a deplorable is what matters; the threat being the masses that must be set squabbling amongst themselves over visible identification labels that together as a tribe are much easier to control if the deplorable tribe are in-fighting over what is visibly apparent.
Racist speak spreads the discord fastest and at the same speed as class division when peoples anger about society hasn’t a correct pathway. Our focus is misdirected by current events and the propaganda that promotes it because huge effort is placed on promoting differences in race rather than similarities of situation. The good new is that most people don’t buy the race argument, nor the CRT stuff from their own experiences. The bad news is that they buy so much of the engineered propaganda.
Good comment. I was watching John McWhorter the other day. He highlighted something I didn’t know- apparently the discrimination in housing which is now known as redlining had more people who were white classified into redlined districts, although obviously as a proportion of each population the policy was far more unfair. It makes me wonder whether we might have lowered the drawbridge on race, but neglected to do it on the basis of class, other than with the predictably very rare exceptionalism which is common in Anglosphere countries.
The greatest symbol of this is Hollywood, where everybody votes for no walls on their borders, but simultaneously make sure they have high walls on their own property.
Friend, it is world-wide. The great divide is income or wealth. Even at med school, which you’d think would be a great social equalizer, my nephew sees friends with lux plans, lux cars and freedoms afforded to students through wealthy families vs those who scraped to get there and thats where you see the social divide.
Was talking about England in another post. I found social mixing was better there (i grew up there and lived for 10 years as an adult ) than it is here in canada. Canada -despite its rep- is a nation of puritans and elitists who virtue signal liberally but clutch their pearls and call their local politician if (god forbid) a group home is proposed for their neighbourhood or CRT gets practised at ThEIR childs school Stay at home moms being exemplars of the characteristic.
Funny how the NIMBYs are all for change, when it doesn't apply to them, their kids or their property values. When Katherine Birbalsingh set-up her inspirational Michaela Community School, she had Black British women turn up at the meetings desperate to get a decent education for their kids, and middle-class white women trying to disrupt the meetings...
Strange values. The Michaela school was all about teaching the RRRs i thought? youd think anyone would be happy — kids come out with knowledge and not just indoctrination :)
Well, thankfully the Tories are willing to hold her up as an example- even if some people disagree with her approach- she was recently named a government advisor for social mobility.
I know that traditionally in Britain if you were of the correct character, one could cross class barriers. The upper class had little problem of allowing this. Now everything seems to be about money and power and credentials. At the top end it seems that power and credentials are the potent force above and beyond any morally just character.
Now it's as if money equals entry to a club of sociopathic elitists, but that power is the class distinction. The hierarchical ladders that defined effort, character, standing, grace, morality, intelligence etc., have been greased up so that only snakes can climb them.
Yes you can do better in life, but the hurdles are growing quicker than the dividends.
The middle class is being raped and looted. We can live it for now, but we're being pushed down quicker than we can climb. When one does get to the bottom of the next rung there are feet there and slithery tails.
'Now it's as if money equals entry to a club of sociopathic elitists, but that power is the class distinction. The hierarchical ladders that defined effort, character, standing, grace, morality, intelligence etc., have been greased up so that only snakes can climb them.'
My view is a little different. I think there are plenty of areas where one can still get to the top through hyper-competence, but if you're vocation somehow strays into the cultural sphere then they will expect you to mouth the right platitudes, like a good little apparatchik.
I'm more than a little conscious of the fact that when I get around to writing my sci-fi novel, I will face an additional uphill battle getting it published- publishing is famously progressive or politically correct- they may not have cancelled JK Rowling, but a woman who was a lesser known children's author who said roughly the same common sense, non-transphobic things which didn't align with gender ideology was cancelled, her upcoming book consigned to the dustbin of history, never going into print.
When I used to subscribe to indigo and chapters I would get notifications of ideas for good reads and they’d be stuff you’d eventually see on the book her list or some award or other. Now what you see are dreadfully crap recommendations by some amateur writer who happens to be part of an identity group, and brownie points if they have a victim narrative. So yes I agree the industry is altered. So sad - you used to be able to know anything that was up for an award would be a good read.
My view is a little different. I think there are plenty of areas where one can still get to the top through hyper-competence, but if you're vocation somehow strays into the cultural sphere then they will expect you to mouth the right platitudes, like a good little apparatchik.
You mentioned to me before how you'll be very careful not to get involved in deep debates about certain politicised subjects. For example someone like myself can talk about Muslims freely(I'm still always careful to not condemn Muslims as a group and to break it into Islamists causing issue). The point is mate that as a writer you appear to have free reign to speak. But you don't. In fact you have to be constantly cautious that what you write can come back at you further down the line. That must be incredibly difficult when writing fiction because I'd imagine it's exactly where you'd wish to place some odes of our time.
I agree that people get to the top if they're hyper competent, the emphasis being on hyper, but it requires either great pretence or a willingness to become everything that is now part of being politically correct. Once again a hard act, but maybe just being in such surround would influence the same change in one that so many have simply embraced. Like a witches spell that allows such entry but only if one gives up part of who they are. The trick would be knowing how to pretend to being politically correct when one actually waits and hopes it'll revert back to true character.
'For example someone like myself can talk about Muslims freely(I'm still always careful to not condemn Muslims as a group and to break it into Islamists causing issue). The point is mate that as a writer you appear to have free reign to speak. But you don't. In fact you have to be constantly cautious that what you write can come back at you further down the line.'
Well, I've been a constant curry house enthusiast for years, mate! I have a lot of friends through my experience and can even fix a mean Balti, which is probably closer to the Brummie experience and I do buy-in the naan from my local takeaway.
In this vein, my view is this- I try to imagine what I would say to someone in-person on a particular issue. So as I Christian I can empathise with the types of attacks which seem deliberately calibrated to create hurt- but at the same time one of the core fundamental principles of the West and a factor which contributes greatly to our wealth, is the concept of value pluralism along with freedom of expression.
It's funny, if you present the option and say, yes, it might be possible to create blasphemy laws and even some form of Sharia civil court system, but it also probably lead to a pay cut of 30% for everyone, they might suddenly be less keen on the idea- it's pretty useful to have an economy where non-Muslim women work!
Of course, it is not actually a conversation I've ever had. In person, it's important to just ask and keep up with the basic stuff- how's business, how's your family, etc. But it is a conversation I could imagine myself having, so it is something I am willing to put to paper.
At the moment I am content to work on my craft- although my writing is getting better, I need to work on telling a story with my essays. In the meantime, I try to avoid taking hyper-partisan positions and attempt to work-in a few concessions, for the simple reason that I don't want to eliminate the possibility of working as a bridge builder. In the short-term a more polarised approach might see me building my readership faster, because anger economics draws clicks, but I don't think it would be healthy in the long-run.
I don't really want to be part of a political tribe. Think about all the jip we got over the housing issue. Most problems are like this- neither side has all the answers, but both sides have good ideas which could contribute to workable solutions. Being in one camp fully or the other means that one can never really be a part of the compromise.
It's funny I really do sympathise with millennials- but not because of the victimhood saga or because of a looming climate apocalypse which will never happen (although climate change is real and a long-term problem)- but because they've been well and truly shafted by a housing sector (at least in the UK) which is geared to expand mortgage debt as an asset class.
At the moment I am content to work on my craft- although my writing is getting better, I need to work on telling a story with my essays. In the meantime, I try to avoid taking hyper-partisan positions and attempt to work-in a few concessions, for the simple reason that I don't want to eliminate the possibility of working as a bridge builder. In the short-term a more polarised approach might see me building my readership faster, because anger economics draws clicks, but I don't think it would be healthy in the long-run.
Yeah I've recently come to this conclusion within forum identity. One really needs to not let the flow take you. Regarding the Muslims. Well yeah I'll place the worst of criticism against the worst of Islam, but there's context. I've had my bacon saved a few times by Muslim friends. It's not a one sided debate. I can paint it both sides as well as anybody. Yet ask me about my years of travel and I'll be able to tell you hand on heart that some of the best and most interesting and real characters I've ever met belong right in the middle of this faith.
I'll be the first to buy your book when you get it published. Hope it's signed. X
Frank Herbert is an all-time favourite. The Hyperion Cantos is great. I loved the Terry Pratchett Long Earth collaboration. From more recent authors, I like Richard Morgan, Peter F. Hamilton and Jack Campbell- particularly the Stark's War trilogy. I recently read a great book on Kindle Unlimited- The Peacemaker's Code by Deepak Malhotra. Unfortunately, it's his only sci-fi...
Another good one man! I am teaching the intro to social sciences course this year, and we are discussing the Rittenhouse trial, policing and race right now. I shared a few of your posts with them, today, including this one. Hopefully some of them end up following you or commenting (hint hint, students).
Well thanks for spreading the news, buddy! I don't do much in the way of social media list most writers, so I am heavily reliant on word of mouth recommendations :)
Exactly- but I wanted to create a contrast with a system which had dealt with most, but not all, of the issues. Although the British legal aid system no longer covers civil or minor criminal offences- it still does a reasonably good job of making sure that competing barristers are equally in most respects. It also helps that there is more of a firewall between police and the Crown Prosecution Service. In the old days the police would prepare the case and fax the details through to the CPS- insuring that the lawyers don't become invested earlier on in a particular theory of the crime...
> the data-driven system found that African Americans were statistically more likely to reoffend.
People are very good at pretending they don't know what they know, but it is going to be interesting trying to teach political correctness to AI.
> Few can compete with Hasidic Jews in the jewel trade because they don’t need the expense of most (internal) security- in addition to any criminal sanctions they may face, they will lose their community forever, if caught stealing.
There's jewelers in my family. That culture probably started with the Jews but it extends far further. It is jaw dropping, the level of trust within the trade.
> For proof of this very human tendency to exaggerate the likelihood of risk, we only need to look at the vast sums of money spent on tackling the threat of terrorism, when a more rational and empirically driven approach would have saved more lives by deploying the resources to other areas of the criminal justice system.
Yabut being murdered by a jihadi or a Nazi is not the same as slipping in the bathtub. The latter is part of life, the former is not. Clinical evaluations of numbers entirely miss the point. Terrorism does far more than rack up a body count, it strikes at civilization itself.
> This overcalculation of risk is sure to persist in an era where our moral panic has turned to an overinflated belief in the risks of White Supremacist terrorism.
But that inflation is just part and parcel of wokeness, no? That is to say, I doubt 'calculation' comes into it, hating WS is part of the performance of hating whitey in general.
> Unfortunately, most Western countries are still struggling to overcome the ways in which matters of culture become inextricably linked to matters of race and lead to stereotypes which are unjustly applied.
Stereotypes are hyperboles and they serve the same function, namely to 'magnify' something so that it is paid attention to. There will never be an end to stereotypes, but any given stereotype will die of starvation once it is simply wrong. Remember the 'Drunken Irish' trope/standing-joke? Gone, but very much with us in the past. And we say 'Paddy wagon' to this day.
> This counterfactual doesn’t even deviate that much from what we know of the events of summer 2020. If, like me, you have seen any of the footage of the night in question, you will have been struck by just how many of the nighttime ‘protestors’ were white.
My brother was in a riot once and he confesses how much fun it was. You can let your inner ape out of his cage with anonymity and even a sense of ad hoc tribal brotherhood-in-arson. Everyone has a good time.
During the day, on average, whitey feels more of the constraints of the civilization that his ancestors built for his enjoyment, but after dark we have a better indication of the real measure of racial differences vis a vis tendency to revert to the jungle and as we see, the 'gap' narrows considerably. Whiteness is a social construction, but a good one, it helps remind folks to keep up appearances. And appearances are most of reality.
> First, the damage has been caused overwhelmingly in poorer African American neighbourhoods,
“ But all of this is contingent upon having a reasonable competent lawyer with time on his hands, and many public defenders have case loads which prohibits this bare minimum of due diligence.”
This is so true. Many public defenders are spread very thin.
This is an absolutely fantastic post, Geary. As an American with an extremely multiracial family, I agree with everything you have written. I will even add that not only would a black Kyle have been found not guilty, I seriously doubt he would have been even charged. A black kid defending minority owned businesses from looting and rioting white Antifa troublemakers would be proclaimed as a hero. He would be Time's Man of the year, he'd probably win a Nobel Peace Prize and be paid to come on every talk show and news program for the next ten years. He would have statues built in his honor, and might even get discussion started on earning his own named holiday.
America can’t come to grips with the reality of having one racial grouping having violent crime and murder rates so many multiples higher than all the others. We can do lots of things to improve our criminal justice system, but nothing we do can counteract this discrepancy.
I think if America is to ever overcome this hurdle there needs to be major compromise between Left and Right. The Left needs to recognise that many of their solutions haven't helped or only made things worse, and the Right needs to recognise that however much one expounds about the virtues of values and personal responsibility, it can all be for nought without the right materials to build strong communities.
This is why I consistently bang on about vocational training for those who don't do well at school. I'm convinced that the only way to remedy the situation is to match people to economic opportunity. With a higher rate of responsible, reasonably well-paid young men in blue collar jobs it would be all but inevitable that rates of fatherhood would recover. Young women might sleep with a good looking guy- even have his baby- but they simply won't settle with him unless he does his share as a provider. There needs to be a 'stepping stone' generation to bring African Americans up to the point where they can compete fairly with whites.
Although I don't agree with liberal convictions about blaming circumstances for crime, I think it's everyone's responsibility to take the lesson and try to prevent such circumstances from ever happening. Police are janitors in this process, cleaning up the mess which society creates. The courts have become a surrogate for a decent solution. And unlike in previous decades for the past few years it has become clear that skilled blue collar workers are what the economy needs more than it needs overqualified baristas.
The great thing about vocational training placements is that it can double as male mentoring- people become the product of those who they have around them- it's why those of us lucky enough to have good people around us should feel truly blessed...
Although he's my "ex" and I'm not fond of many of aspects of his personality, my ex husband provides job opportunities and supports people who want work. He hires young drop outs and puts them on the road to getting their qualifications as electricians if they have the chops. Otherwise plenty of work doing other related stuff on his jobs. He's a pretty brutal task master but many have gone on to found their own firms and are making better money than I am as a marketer in financial services. Several are running his various jobs and contracts around the City. Two of these I know were criminals and substance abusing high school drop outs. He's not running this as a project, it just seems to happen. He serves as that father figure now to so many young men, without an ounce of patronizing. Maybe that's the secret of his success. He teaches them how to pull their own weight and they gain self esteem (and a solid income) through achievement.
What you ex is doing seems very laudable- but people are complex bundles and it's often difficult to sift the bad from the good. In the UK we call electricians sparkies. They have some of the best workplace hazing routines of all the trades. Many a young apprentice has felt his heartrate soar of his boss being 'electrocuted', only to find that it was a wind-up. We used to have a really good chortle over videos of that one in the office of the factory where I used to work.
We used to do mock forklift 'preliminary' driver training, with one of the supervisors getting the poor lad to simulate driving a forklift on foot, making signals and sounds to imitate the forklift. We would be peering over the mezz floor, and would always erupt in laughter as the guy made the 'meep, meep, meep' sounds while reversing.
I used to have a mocked up tdf laminate with a plastic spoon on the drawing. Every April Fool's Day I would send one of the new young lads off to central stores with a copy in one hand and a clear bag of broken spoons in the other, emphasising that he had to stand his ground when he complained. Helpfully, the drawing was clearly marked 1/4 for the stores person to point to when the young lad had gotten himself suitably argumentative. The stores guys always used to eagerly await the next victim in the run-up to the day.
My dad and ex were brits. I lived there 10 years. I miss living there. Only the brits could have come up with monty python.
Did you see John Cleese recently cancelled himself? Classic! https://www.joe.co.uk/news/john-cleese-cancels-himself-then-complains-about-cancel-culture-299228
Love it!
"the right materials..." - That starts with the family. I believe that at least 75% of the ills of society are due to the breakdown of the family - an intentional result of left wing policies.
"Circumstances" happen and that will never change. The family is where people should go to respond to those "circumstances". No amount of government spending and no government policies will ever even approach the effectiveness of families in building resilience in communities.
I agree- vocational training is the thing best guaranteed to aid stable family formation and unlike much of the bloated university system (from which funding can be partially removed) it turns out to be a net positive economic investment. In 2019, there were 7 million blue collar jobs vacant, most of them reasonably well-paid, and many sectors, such as housing construction, were significantly underfilling demand.
If it were simply a matter of values then liberal elites should be the least likely to get married and stay married, but despite their scorn for monogamy and matrimony, they have some of the highest rates for both- live Right, vote Left- but with a tonne of hypocrisy thrown in!
I am more cynical about their motives. The elite leftists want to breakdown much of society so that their offspring have less competition. They are the ones who see economics as a zero sum game, because they don't understand what an economy really "is". An economy, in my opinion, is a vehicle for converting resources (including thought and labor) from one form to another, more valuable, form. Under this definition, economics is most certainly not a zero sum game.
Yep, they really don't believe you when you tell them that trades in the market mean that everyone ends up with more. I usually explain it by talking about two sisters who want to have a birthday party- one is much better at making cakes, the other at making lemonade- guess which way the government would allocate their labour!
and yes - vo-tec training is way, way, way undervalued! If I had a teenager these days, I would tell them they will get a much better ROI on their investment in vo-tec education, they would be better suited to survive a severe economic down turn, and can more quickly build a financial buffer for risk.
A while back I watched Richard Thaler at the Oxford Union. He joked that the British Working Classes were emancipating themselves. Back in 2008, we had around 1 million people shift to self-employed. Some were dog walkers, dog groomers and the like- but equally there were a huge number of trade professionals who shifted from working for big employers to working for themselves.
You can save yourself a fair amount of money if you know guys who can fix all the shit that goes wrong around your house. Don't get me wrong- there is plenty of stuff I can fix myself, but equally there are other jobs I wouldn't want to touch. It's always the ones who are stingy to fix the guy a cup of tea or coffee who ends up paying the higher price! My main guys are mates anyway.
And look at this! https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/mobile/ontario-to-send-over-60-skilled-trades-recruiters-into-schools-to-combat-worker-shortage-1.5679154
A rare instance of government doing something useful for a change. But then again, there's nothing common about sense.
A few studies you might be interested in
(1) Black jurors tend to have anti-white, pro-black bias, but white jurors have minimal bias. (If true, this constitutes a strong reason against the all-black juror suggestion which you rightly rejected.)
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Do-they-matter-A-meta-analytic-investigation-of-and-Devine-Caughlin/16101e386734fd24f0dbaaf3ae3691a002960487?p2df
(2) Factoring for legal matters (such as severity of crime) eliminates the statistical significance of racial gap. (Study done in urban Ohio)
https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/07418825.2011.559480
(3) When you factor for crime rate, as measured by arrest rate, there is no racial sentencing gap (study done in Pennsylvania)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4111266/
(4) Another study showing that racial gap disappears when you factor for crime rate.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/449253
Do you have a post in which you've written about the evidence in favor of the hypothesis that blacks are more likely to be convicted due to their relative poverty?
Well, generally public defenders and privately hired criminal defense lawyers perform equally well- although obviously as the amount one is able to spend increases the quality of the legal defense is likely to increase, so poorer people commissioning their own criminal defense attorneys are likely to receive worse counsel.
But the real problem tends to stem from publicly funded court appointed defense lawyers. In this Philadelphia: study https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/1105_8izvsf8m.pdf , four out of five defendants received court appointed lawyers, as opposed to one in five who received public defenders and this was assigned randomly.
Obviously, given the national data on relative poverty, we can reasonably infer from this that African Americans are more likely to receive publicly funded court appointed defense lawyers. A 19% lower conviction rate and 24% reduction in sentence may not seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, especially when allowing for the 0.8 multiplier, but if this was a measurably inferior cancer drug, would you want the less good option?
The meta-study used mock juries using trial summaries on the first source I looked at which would tend to eliminate bias from the process. It also showed that the strongest overall relationship emerged for socio-economic status, which goes to my point about class, rather than race. I'm familiar with the literature on crimes rates and arrest rates and we clearly agree upon this factor.
For some reason, I couldn't access the Ohio study, but thanks for the links and I will clearly have to look into the meta-study in greater detail when I have the time. I am always open to criticism and value the knowledge gain which comes from pushback. On the subject of the Philadelphia study a little further reading shows that much of the the discrepancy relates to public defenders being more adept at negotiating the plea system. I am likely to look into the incentives of publicly funded court appointed defense lawyers as a result.
Here is the analysis, if you are interested: https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2771&context=facpubs . It certainly challenges the conventional narrative, and ties in with the data from the UK that where sentencing disparities exist, they are tied to defendants failing to plead guilty at different rates by ethnicity.
Recently, COMPAS and other risk assessment software has come under attack, but when one drills down into the mechanics of the studies performed we see that they eliminate the human bias of in-person courtrooms. Here is a study on the subject: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz0652 .
Thanks for that- I will have to go away and think about the research you've made me look at. Most studies look at the empirical data from a particular perspective- they don't really get to the three dimensional complexity of a particular phenomenon.
What can I say Geary. One of your best. Great coverage and opens up many avenues of thought on this topic, many that are seldom looked at with any objectivity. I lack the word-craft and depth of knowledge to convey much of my thought, yet see so much of it coming to life in your words. There’s little point rehashing anything that you’ve said, so I’ll add more to what you intended for us to think about. Class.
The one thing that stories like this latest Kyle Rittenhouse one do and that is intentionally promote race division whilst very careful attention is paid in not mentioning anything about class division or to correlate and distinguish what is the less visible identifier of division as a whole. Blackness becomes the one thing we can look at and see and focus on. I imagine a newspaper editor looking to further promote more of the same and omitting with extreme bias any story that neutralises or flies in opposition of purpose, even if only because inflamed sensationalised stories sell better.
I’ve mentioned before that in India that high class people will avoid darkening their skin at any cost, if they do venture out in the sun then they’ll undoubtedly hide under umbrellas. One will often witness a sign of prestige in high class men as being overweight, another identifier. The darkest, the untouchables need to work hand to mouth in the midday sun. Yet they are the same race. There are huge attempts made by the more elite to distinguish themselves visibly as superior.
It isn’t just India where this happens, it’s all of Asia and it’s white Europe and America and Australia; all of the west. We whites like our sun-tans. The darker the better up to a point. We look far more prominent after a holiday; more exotic, travelled, educated, wealthier and of course the one thing we admit to, healthier. Yet I doubt it’s health that features strongly in our desire to inflate ourselves by a change of appearance. I doubt it’s health that makes my Asian wife avoid darkening her skin, when in fact it would actually do her some good to actually spend more than two minutes per year under the sun. To her she’s dark enough, to whitey he’s not exotic enough and for the black man he can’t adjust the tone. But who wants to change their race? Very few. We can’t change our race anyways and it would be futile thinking to attempt to try, but we can attempt or enjoy looking exotic and of a higher status. Something the black man can do little about appearance wise and up to a point and certainly visibly it associates him with the worst side of ourselves that we seldom will admit and that is that we see too much blackness as a visible identifier of poverty, poorness, rank, prestige, class.
Of course societal construct, its history and actual real integration can dispel such visible associations. We can also say that such issues as racism would not exist if all nations were purely indigenous or we could say that if we mix all races together then all the racism would disappear and this would happen. In fact if we were all coffee coloured right this second then the identification of all the other issues would be seen in a true light.
I find it of the utmost interest that generally as people become more wealthy they feel less threatened or bothered by other races and that race itself does not really make any difference. Being a deplorable is what matters; the threat being the masses that must be set squabbling amongst themselves over visible identification labels that together as a tribe are much easier to control if the deplorable tribe are in-fighting over what is visibly apparent.
Racist speak spreads the discord fastest and at the same speed as class division when peoples anger about society hasn’t a correct pathway. Our focus is misdirected by current events and the propaganda that promotes it because huge effort is placed on promoting differences in race rather than similarities of situation. The good new is that most people don’t buy the race argument, nor the CRT stuff from their own experiences. The bad news is that they buy so much of the engineered propaganda.
Good comment. I was watching John McWhorter the other day. He highlighted something I didn’t know- apparently the discrimination in housing which is now known as redlining had more people who were white classified into redlined districts, although obviously as a proportion of each population the policy was far more unfair. It makes me wonder whether we might have lowered the drawbridge on race, but neglected to do it on the basis of class, other than with the predictably very rare exceptionalism which is common in Anglosphere countries.
The greatest symbol of this is Hollywood, where everybody votes for no walls on their borders, but simultaneously make sure they have high walls on their own property.
Friend, it is world-wide. The great divide is income or wealth. Even at med school, which you’d think would be a great social equalizer, my nephew sees friends with lux plans, lux cars and freedoms afforded to students through wealthy families vs those who scraped to get there and thats where you see the social divide.
Was talking about England in another post. I found social mixing was better there (i grew up there and lived for 10 years as an adult ) than it is here in canada. Canada -despite its rep- is a nation of puritans and elitists who virtue signal liberally but clutch their pearls and call their local politician if (god forbid) a group home is proposed for their neighbourhood or CRT gets practised at ThEIR childs school Stay at home moms being exemplars of the characteristic.
Funny how the NIMBYs are all for change, when it doesn't apply to them, their kids or their property values. When Katherine Birbalsingh set-up her inspirational Michaela Community School, she had Black British women turn up at the meetings desperate to get a decent education for their kids, and middle-class white women trying to disrupt the meetings...
Strange values. The Michaela school was all about teaching the RRRs i thought? youd think anyone would be happy — kids come out with knowledge and not just indoctrination :)
Well, thankfully the Tories are willing to hold her up as an example- even if some people disagree with her approach- she was recently named a government advisor for social mobility.
I know that traditionally in Britain if you were of the correct character, one could cross class barriers. The upper class had little problem of allowing this. Now everything seems to be about money and power and credentials. At the top end it seems that power and credentials are the potent force above and beyond any morally just character.
Now it's as if money equals entry to a club of sociopathic elitists, but that power is the class distinction. The hierarchical ladders that defined effort, character, standing, grace, morality, intelligence etc., have been greased up so that only snakes can climb them.
Yes you can do better in life, but the hurdles are growing quicker than the dividends.
The middle class is being raped and looted. We can live it for now, but we're being pushed down quicker than we can climb. When one does get to the bottom of the next rung there are feet there and slithery tails.
'Now it's as if money equals entry to a club of sociopathic elitists, but that power is the class distinction. The hierarchical ladders that defined effort, character, standing, grace, morality, intelligence etc., have been greased up so that only snakes can climb them.'
My view is a little different. I think there are plenty of areas where one can still get to the top through hyper-competence, but if you're vocation somehow strays into the cultural sphere then they will expect you to mouth the right platitudes, like a good little apparatchik.
I'm more than a little conscious of the fact that when I get around to writing my sci-fi novel, I will face an additional uphill battle getting it published- publishing is famously progressive or politically correct- they may not have cancelled JK Rowling, but a woman who was a lesser known children's author who said roughly the same common sense, non-transphobic things which didn't align with gender ideology was cancelled, her upcoming book consigned to the dustbin of history, never going into print.
When I used to subscribe to indigo and chapters I would get notifications of ideas for good reads and they’d be stuff you’d eventually see on the book her list or some award or other. Now what you see are dreadfully crap recommendations by some amateur writer who happens to be part of an identity group, and brownie points if they have a victim narrative. So yes I agree the industry is altered. So sad - you used to be able to know anything that was up for an award would be a good read.
Booker ( not book her).
My view is a little different. I think there are plenty of areas where one can still get to the top through hyper-competence, but if you're vocation somehow strays into the cultural sphere then they will expect you to mouth the right platitudes, like a good little apparatchik.
You mentioned to me before how you'll be very careful not to get involved in deep debates about certain politicised subjects. For example someone like myself can talk about Muslims freely(I'm still always careful to not condemn Muslims as a group and to break it into Islamists causing issue). The point is mate that as a writer you appear to have free reign to speak. But you don't. In fact you have to be constantly cautious that what you write can come back at you further down the line. That must be incredibly difficult when writing fiction because I'd imagine it's exactly where you'd wish to place some odes of our time.
I agree that people get to the top if they're hyper competent, the emphasis being on hyper, but it requires either great pretence or a willingness to become everything that is now part of being politically correct. Once again a hard act, but maybe just being in such surround would influence the same change in one that so many have simply embraced. Like a witches spell that allows such entry but only if one gives up part of who they are. The trick would be knowing how to pretend to being politically correct when one actually waits and hopes it'll revert back to true character.
'For example someone like myself can talk about Muslims freely(I'm still always careful to not condemn Muslims as a group and to break it into Islamists causing issue). The point is mate that as a writer you appear to have free reign to speak. But you don't. In fact you have to be constantly cautious that what you write can come back at you further down the line.'
Well, I've been a constant curry house enthusiast for years, mate! I have a lot of friends through my experience and can even fix a mean Balti, which is probably closer to the Brummie experience and I do buy-in the naan from my local takeaway.
In this vein, my view is this- I try to imagine what I would say to someone in-person on a particular issue. So as I Christian I can empathise with the types of attacks which seem deliberately calibrated to create hurt- but at the same time one of the core fundamental principles of the West and a factor which contributes greatly to our wealth, is the concept of value pluralism along with freedom of expression.
It's funny, if you present the option and say, yes, it might be possible to create blasphemy laws and even some form of Sharia civil court system, but it also probably lead to a pay cut of 30% for everyone, they might suddenly be less keen on the idea- it's pretty useful to have an economy where non-Muslim women work!
Of course, it is not actually a conversation I've ever had. In person, it's important to just ask and keep up with the basic stuff- how's business, how's your family, etc. But it is a conversation I could imagine myself having, so it is something I am willing to put to paper.
At the moment I am content to work on my craft- although my writing is getting better, I need to work on telling a story with my essays. In the meantime, I try to avoid taking hyper-partisan positions and attempt to work-in a few concessions, for the simple reason that I don't want to eliminate the possibility of working as a bridge builder. In the short-term a more polarised approach might see me building my readership faster, because anger economics draws clicks, but I don't think it would be healthy in the long-run.
I don't really want to be part of a political tribe. Think about all the jip we got over the housing issue. Most problems are like this- neither side has all the answers, but both sides have good ideas which could contribute to workable solutions. Being in one camp fully or the other means that one can never really be a part of the compromise.
It's funny I really do sympathise with millennials- but not because of the victimhood saga or because of a looming climate apocalypse which will never happen (although climate change is real and a long-term problem)- but because they've been well and truly shafted by a housing sector (at least in the UK) which is geared to expand mortgage debt as an asset class.
At the moment I am content to work on my craft- although my writing is getting better, I need to work on telling a story with my essays. In the meantime, I try to avoid taking hyper-partisan positions and attempt to work-in a few concessions, for the simple reason that I don't want to eliminate the possibility of working as a bridge builder. In the short-term a more polarised approach might see me building my readership faster, because anger economics draws clicks, but I don't think it would be healthy in the long-run.
Yeah I've recently come to this conclusion within forum identity. One really needs to not let the flow take you. Regarding the Muslims. Well yeah I'll place the worst of criticism against the worst of Islam, but there's context. I've had my bacon saved a few times by Muslim friends. It's not a one sided debate. I can paint it both sides as well as anybody. Yet ask me about my years of travel and I'll be able to tell you hand on heart that some of the best and most interesting and real characters I've ever met belong right in the middle of this faith.
I'll be the first to buy your book when you get it published. Hope it's signed. X
sci-fi! who are your fav authors in the genre?
Frank Herbert is an all-time favourite. The Hyperion Cantos is great. I loved the Terry Pratchett Long Earth collaboration. From more recent authors, I like Richard Morgan, Peter F. Hamilton and Jack Campbell- particularly the Stark's War trilogy. I recently read a great book on Kindle Unlimited- The Peacemaker's Code by Deepak Malhotra. Unfortunately, it's his only sci-fi...
Deepak M! Thanks I will try Some of these authors.
Another good one man! I am teaching the intro to social sciences course this year, and we are discussing the Rittenhouse trial, policing and race right now. I shared a few of your posts with them, today, including this one. Hopefully some of them end up following you or commenting (hint hint, students).
Well thanks for spreading the news, buddy! I don't do much in the way of social media list most writers, so I am heavily reliant on word of mouth recommendations :)
Cogent discussion, per usual Sir Geary. But blacks adjudicated by all-black juries is racism, is it not?
Exactly- but I wanted to create a contrast with a system which had dealt with most, but not all, of the issues. Although the British legal aid system no longer covers civil or minor criminal offences- it still does a reasonably good job of making sure that competing barristers are equally in most respects. It also helps that there is more of a firewall between police and the Crown Prosecution Service. In the old days the police would prepare the case and fax the details through to the CPS- insuring that the lawyers don't become invested earlier on in a particular theory of the crime...
So clear-headed it brings tears to one's eyes. But why adopt the woke microaggression of writing 'white' and 'Black'?
It's like sleep-walking. One sees it so often it becomes second nature. I will make more effort to capitalise White!
Excellent as always Geary. A few comments:
> the data-driven system found that African Americans were statistically more likely to reoffend.
People are very good at pretending they don't know what they know, but it is going to be interesting trying to teach political correctness to AI.
> Few can compete with Hasidic Jews in the jewel trade because they don’t need the expense of most (internal) security- in addition to any criminal sanctions they may face, they will lose their community forever, if caught stealing.
There's jewelers in my family. That culture probably started with the Jews but it extends far further. It is jaw dropping, the level of trust within the trade.
> For proof of this very human tendency to exaggerate the likelihood of risk, we only need to look at the vast sums of money spent on tackling the threat of terrorism, when a more rational and empirically driven approach would have saved more lives by deploying the resources to other areas of the criminal justice system.
Yabut being murdered by a jihadi or a Nazi is not the same as slipping in the bathtub. The latter is part of life, the former is not. Clinical evaluations of numbers entirely miss the point. Terrorism does far more than rack up a body count, it strikes at civilization itself.
> This overcalculation of risk is sure to persist in an era where our moral panic has turned to an overinflated belief in the risks of White Supremacist terrorism.
But that inflation is just part and parcel of wokeness, no? That is to say, I doubt 'calculation' comes into it, hating WS is part of the performance of hating whitey in general.
> Unfortunately, most Western countries are still struggling to overcome the ways in which matters of culture become inextricably linked to matters of race and lead to stereotypes which are unjustly applied.
Stereotypes are hyperboles and they serve the same function, namely to 'magnify' something so that it is paid attention to. There will never be an end to stereotypes, but any given stereotype will die of starvation once it is simply wrong. Remember the 'Drunken Irish' trope/standing-joke? Gone, but very much with us in the past. And we say 'Paddy wagon' to this day.
> This counterfactual doesn’t even deviate that much from what we know of the events of summer 2020. If, like me, you have seen any of the footage of the night in question, you will have been struck by just how many of the nighttime ‘protestors’ were white.
My brother was in a riot once and he confesses how much fun it was. You can let your inner ape out of his cage with anonymity and even a sense of ad hoc tribal brotherhood-in-arson. Everyone has a good time.
During the day, on average, whitey feels more of the constraints of the civilization that his ancestors built for his enjoyment, but after dark we have a better indication of the real measure of racial differences vis a vis tendency to revert to the jungle and as we see, the 'gap' narrows considerably. Whiteness is a social construction, but a good one, it helps remind folks to keep up appearances. And appearances are most of reality.
> First, the damage has been caused overwhelmingly in poorer African American neighbourhoods,
Black Businesses Matter.
Love the BBM bit at the end! :)
“ But all of this is contingent upon having a reasonable competent lawyer with time on his hands, and many public defenders have case loads which prohibits this bare minimum of due diligence.”
This is so true. Many public defenders are spread very thin.