42 Comments
Nov 24, 2021Liked by Geary Johansen

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.

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Nov 24, 2021Liked by Geary Johansen

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?

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Nov 25, 2021Liked by Geary Johansen

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.

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Nov 24, 2021Liked by Geary Johansen

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).

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Nov 24, 2021Liked by Geary Johansen

Cogent discussion, per usual Sir Geary. But blacks adjudicated by all-black juries is racism, is it not?

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Nov 30, 2021Liked by Geary Johansen

So clear-headed it brings tears to one's eyes. But why adopt the woke microaggression of writing 'white' and 'Black'?

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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.

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“ 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.

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