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Notes -
Here's the original definition of the Chinese Robber Fallacy, from Alyssa Vance:
My steelman of the Jim Crow position (and note I'm not a Jim Crow supporter!) is that they are making this argument instead:
To prove them wrong you could provide a single example of a white guy filming himself doing a hate crime and then prosecutors dropping charges for restorative justice.
The OP specified "elderly black victim" but in my view you'd certainly prove your point if the black victim was a pregnant woman, in a wheelchair or whatever. I would not consider you to have proved your point if the victim was a fit young man in a gang or if it was some crazy situation like that Jewish guy with a brain tumor who faked 100 antisemitic bomb threats, however.
I am not aware of any such incidents but I'm also not all that interested in the WN stuff.
Here is where the moving goalposts happened:
The OP argued that "we do not live in an equal society."
Now, that's a rather vague statement. On the face of it, it's obviously true (no society has or could ever be "equal" in any absolute sense), but what the OP was clearly implying (in the context of his other posts, as he's stated as much) is that laws basically don't apply to black people. Black people can commit crimes, white people can't. Black people commit almost all the crimes and are not prosecuted for it. (If forced to steelman this, I'm sure he would say obviously it does in fact happen that black people are prosecuted for crimes, as this obviously happens every day, but the position he's taking is essentially that we live in a dual legal system where black people are prosecuted much less frequently and much more lightly.)
That is the argument I rejected.
Then the second OP came in with a demand for "dueling anecdotes" and the specific case of a black person who committed a hate crime and wasn't prosecuted.
If we started out with a specific assertion like "Hate crimes are politicized and more often applied to white people committing alleged hate crimes on black people than the other way around," I would probably have agreed. But that wasn't the starting point. So pointing at an example of a black person committing a particular crime and not being prosecuted isn't refuting what I was arguing.
That's without even digging into the details of the specific case, which I'm not going to, because there are always a lot of variables in cases like this that make good ClownWorld/LibsOfTikTok-style outrage-fodder. What exactly was the crime, why was the decision made not to prosecute? Charges get dropped or reduced all the time, for a lot of reasons; without any evidence or actual stats beyond "The defendant was a black person," an anecdote has no weight or meaning. Am I sufficiently motivated to go read up on this one item just to "rebut" a point I wasn't arguing against in the first place? Supposedly to prove my case I then have to find an exactly equal and opposite anecdote. So just finding black people charged with hate crimes won't be sufficient, I have to find an exactly equivalent opposite case.
That's not a serious attempt to support the much stronger original assertion, that's just playing games. No, I will trade anecdotes with the person who has a long list of terrible crimes committed by black people to "prove" that black people are terrible.
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