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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.

Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.

Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.

Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s.

I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.

And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.

Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.

I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.

We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.

Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated

And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them.

People will kill for their pets.

Somebody harming our pets is a sick and severe crime to most of our moral systems.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

Those people are going to be in harms way, there’s no two ways about it.

I predict that zero Haitians in Springfield will be murdered by someone who is angry about pets.

We’ll see, hopefully not.

But, I don’t think a person has to be murdered to have been dehumanized either.

Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?

Can you imagine being a Haitian in Haiti?

In 2023, kidnapping jumped 72% from the first quarter of the previous year.[228] Doctors, lawyers, and other wealthy members of society were kidnapped and held for ransom.[229] Many victims were killed when ransom demands were not met, leading those with the means to do so to flee the country, further hampering efforts to pull the country out of the crisis.[229] It is estimated that amidst the crisis up to 20% of qualified medical staff had left Haiti by the end of 2023.[230]

In March 2024, Ariel Henry was prevented by gangs from returning to Haiti, following a visit to Kenya.[231] Henry agreed to resign once a transitional government had been formed. As of that month, nearly half of Haiti's population was living under acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme.[25]

I don't think being treated in a dehumanizing manner is anywhere near as bad as what they fled from. They come from literal starvation to a land where there are pets aplenty and delicious wild geese are running around, why not take advantage of the free meat? If there was an endangered elk or buffalo running around Springfield, they'd carve it into steaks too, there's no question about it.

The question isn't about whether racism is an issue, it's about the Springfield community's ability to absorb these people without suffering any deleterious effects. If they assimilate and go to eating packaged precut chicken breast and cheez-wiz, good for them. But you have to prepare for the eventuality that one of them goes 'wait a second, why would I do that when meat is running around for free'?

Can you imagine being a Springfielder already close to poverty who suddenly has to deal with wages dropping and car insurance rising because the government imported tens of thousands of foreigners to your backyard and de facto exempts them from laws?

Can you imagine being a Springfielder with a third of your town suddenly replaced by foreigners - your schools swamped with ESL kids, your car insurance tripling - because your mayor wants to bilk the feds out of craptons of money on his shitty apartments?

I am a white man, so I can imagine it, since white men have been dehumanized for years now by various people.

Can you imagine being a Haitian in Springfield right now?

It must be horrible. They should be given a new residence in Martha's Vineyard, where they will not have to suffer such vile bigotry.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

By analogy you've just placed responsibility for the assassination attempts against Trump on those Democratic politicians who called him an existential threat, just like the Trump campaign itself has. However, even granting that arguendo, it's STILL not dehumanizing them.

I agree you can also promote violence against someone by making Hitler comparisons or similar.

it's STILL not dehumanizing them.

What would be required to dehumanize somebody?

I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.

What would be required to dehumanize somebody?

The classic example is calling them "vermin". Or literally "subhuman".

I feel that trying to paint someone as a pet snatcher and eater because of their ethnicity is pretty close.

It is not.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats. The press coverage of the Trump assassination attempts is good for transparency and public discourse, but does have costs.

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats.

We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.

I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them

Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.

This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.

Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that

Source?

I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.

Would you accept a European source, or would you say it's irrelevant to the conversation you're having in America?

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

But yes you can post it.

Didn't have time to do this earlier. Here's a spreadsheet (I tested it from a few browsers - it should be persistent) with the data from table 7.2-T03 (page 91) of the report ("Non-German suspects by nationalities – total offences excluding offences against foreigners’ law"), and table 12521-0005 from the German statistics office (for total population sizes for 2020).

Might do the same with the data from your study, if it has this level of detail.

UPDATE: Oh shit, I fucked up!

I didn't notice that the % share of suspects the report provided is the % share of non-German suspects, skewing the overrepresentation numbers pretty massively. Though not changing the conclusion that certain minorities are still waaay more criminal than the Germans / other minorities. The spreadsheet is updated, and here's the screenshot with the updated correct numbers:

https://www.themotte.org//images/17268257393208947.webp

Here's the old screenshot for historical purposes:

https://www.themotte.org//images/17267681316119363.webp

@Jesweez, @quiet_NaN , Just so no one misses the correction, I'm adding this as a comment. The broader point is unaffected, but I originally overestimated the numbers by a lot.

I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.

From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.

France is a close economic ally and Germany has a few big joint ventures with them, so I would expect most of the French in Germany are not drug mules or the like. Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.

For immigrants from European countries much poorer than Germany, my priors would be that higher prosperity attracts a lot of small-time criminals. Breaking and entering is likely more lucrative in Germany than in Romania. I would also assume that Switzerland has more small-time German criminals than their native base rate for exactly the same reasons.

A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals. Especially with crimes where no party has an incentive to report them, like the drug trade, police reports are only the tip of the iceberg. If you want to know how much people are using, analyzing the wastewater is much more reliable. Murder is a good tracer, by comparison, because most murders get detected (unless they get misclassified as a natural death or stuck at the level of disappearance because no corpse surfaces) and solved.

Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.

Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault. Of course, IT-shy justice system is likely utterly incapable of aggregating the convictions for crimes committed in 2015 by nationality.

I am a bit amazed by Italians and French, there, with crime rates 4.75 and 5.91 times the German citizens ones.

From a US perspective, we are all close neighbors, it would be like if people from Utah committed crimes in California at five times the rate of the natives.

If you tracked interstate migration the same way each country in the EU tracks their migration, patterns like these might very well show up, though personally I'd be more suspicious of Californians rather than the Utahns.

As for the French, they have their own high-crime minorities, fully equipped with French passports, thanks to their colonial past. I can't tell you what is the deal with Italians, though.

Heck, they are more over-represented than Russians.

Russians have a long way to travel, and are not part of the Schengen Zone, so that's hardly surprising.

A general caveat with police statistics is that they generally tell you about the activities of the police, not the criminals.

I'd be more than happy to limit the data to crimes with incentive to report, like murder, assault, rape, etc. I even remember some internet autist going over the German crime by nationality stats. I don't know if that's something they used to publish but stopped, or he had to FOIA them to get it, but if you click on the pdf from my other comment you can see they present the numbers on each type of crime, as well as on suspects by nationality, so they very clearly do have the data on the activities of criminals, they just choose not to aggregate them in a way that would be useful to this conversation. This has nothing to do with them being "IT-shy", European governments can hardly be described this way to begin with, and you can rest assured all this data is already stored in a digital database, and it's only a question of writing the right GROUP BY statement. Most likely this information is not published deliberately, for the exact same reason Germany hasn't published the full crime report since 2020.

Another caveat is that while offenses against the foreigners' law (which Germans can mostly not commit) are excluded, that law might still be the initial reason for investigation of non-EU nationals.

  1. And this is why I came out against "uh, source?" and "data would be what we use to see if that intuition is correct or not" in my other conversation with Jesweez, and why I think Rationalist movement is either a complete failure, or a deliberate effort to sabotage sense-making. You can play these sorts of games forever, and no one who insisted that the data showing immigrants are less criminal than American citizens should be taken as-is, will ever show up here to criticize you for looking for an out in the unpublished parts of the data.
  2. Yes, it could be that the police is finding other crime while investigating illegal immigration, but what you've left out is that it could also be the opposite - the police doing their best to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, but inevitably running into it in the process of investigating violent crime. Which leads me to:
  3. I'm not saying things are quite as bad as the opposite side of the spectrum I outline above, but if you think Germany, or any other country in the EU, is in crack-down mode against illegal immigration qua illegal immigration, you're posting from a parallel universe.

Oh, and the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person.

Nah. I'll take "convicts" over "suspects", but the length of conviction is a silly metric, if you know what they've been convicted of. Especially given certain European judges proclivity to let gang-rapists off with a slap on the wrist.

the correct metric to measure criminality would be average conviction length per person, not 'number of suspects'. If most of the French suspects are accused of crossing as pedestrians on red, that paints a very different picture from them being accused of aggravated assault.

Doesn't this start having issues if judges have different levels of leniency for different demographics of offenders, or other confounders that vary between demographics (like age or wealth)?

I think you'd want to instead do it by the average sentence length for the crime they were convicted of, regardless of what they were actually sentenced to. That should eliminate the confounders while maintaining a relative scoring that roughly maps to society's view of the crimes' severity.

If you're worried that those numbers don't match up, that there are crimes that carry a sentence of 5 years but no one's ever given more than 6 months, you could instead use the average actually-given sentence length for all people convicted of that crime.

The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.

There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.

In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.

It's actually quite similar. Pre-selected immigrants generally have unusually low crime rates, free and in particular illegal immigrants have unusually high crime rates. This is true for both europe and the US. It's just that a mexican in europe is more likely than not legally pre-selected, highly educated and highly conscientious, while the opposite in the US. It's vice versa for other groups, such as eastern europeans.

The Germans used to have a "crime by nationality" chapter in their annual crime report, where all the stereotypically criminal minorities turn out to be actually criminal. Though the last in year for which the full report seems to be available is 2020.

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

I think this was true in the past moreso than it is now, though obviously you have different nationalities coming over, which might have it's own impact.

This feels super online. The battle isn't trying to score debate points with the moderator. It's trying to get people to NOTICE.

A 4000 word think piece in the Atlantic is just not going to move public opinion. The whole cats thing got regular people to notice how deeply fucked up things have gotten.

Imagine explaining all this to a gas station clerk. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with.

Illegal immigration is deeply unpopular and becoming more so. The pet thing didn't massively polarize people in favor of immigration. Maybe you're traveling in unrepresentative circles.

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