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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
Following your argument about Blacks being more likely to be criminals, I think you misspelled Anti-Non-Black, as these policies would affect Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans just as much.
I think you can, and in fact the US criminal justice system mostly does, I would argue. There is no affirmative action in prison, where we sentence the odd Asian criminal to terms ten times longer than e.g. a Black criminal so that the incarceration rates of different races match the population rates. Race-blindness is very different from equality of outcomes. This could be due to HBD, or economics (I am sure poor Whites commit more crimes (in prison-years) than rich Whites), or more exposure to lead during childhood or whatever. While left-wing people might argue that some of the disparate incarceration rates are due to selective enforcement of laws based on skin color, I think that this is not the case for more serious crimes like murder. There might be the odd case of a corrupt police department deciding to frame the odd Black gang member for a murder to increase their clearance rates, but the median murderer you find in prison is there because they did indeed commit a murder.
Another aspect which Walt did not mention is if the HBD crime hypothesis is true, then the biggest victim in all of it is the Black community, because the lion's share of crime is intraracial. I am a utilitarian. I do not particularly care for the race of a rape or murder victim. Most Blacks are not criminals, and they do not deserve to be raped or murdered any more than a white person. Hell, not even criminals do deserve to be raped or murdered.
Take trigger-happy police shooting unarmed Black men. Utilitarianism to the rescue again. What we want to minimize is the number of innocent fatalities from both cops and innocent civilians. So we want to adjust police trigger-happiness to the point where the first derivative of the total death with respect to the trigger-happiness is zero.
Let us assume a two person interaction. A cop stops a car with a civilian. He has a certain level of suspicion that the person in the car might shoot him based on heuristics such as race, type of car, neighborhood etc. If he shoots and is wrong, one innocent (the civilian) dies. If he does not shoot and the civilan shoots him, he dies with some probability q because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. If p is the Bayesian probability that the civilian will try to shoot him, and f(p) is the probability that he shoots first given that evidence, the total amount of innocent lives lost in the interaction is:
T(f, p) = f(p)(1-p)+q(1-f(p))*p
Then the first derivative is dT/df = (1-p)+q*p
If we set this to zero we get the point p=p0 where we are indifferent between the cop shooting and not shooting. (1-p0)+q*p0 = 0 p0=1/(1+q)
The optimal f(p) would thus be a step function which is zero for pp0.
Crucially, p=p0 is the point where a cop is just as likely to die from not shooting first as shooting an innocent civilian. Most innocents die at this point, the case where p is almost zero (a cop stopping a woman who is shopping with some small kids) or almost one (cops stopping the getaway vehicle of a bank robber) are unlikely to result in the deaths of innocents because a cop made the wrong call with regard to shooting.
I also think it is fair to ask that cops should act in a way which protects their lives not more or less than the lives of innocent civilians. (If you don't want to put your life on the line for civilian lives, get job at Walmart.)
Let us stretch our assumptions a bit and assume that p is roughly constant in frequency in that region of death near p0. (This is kind of a big assumption. It may very well turn out that most cops getting killed in traffic stops are getting killed in events where there is no warning sign and p is one in a thousand, far below p0 which is at least 0.5.)
In that world, a well-calibrated police force would carry as many cops shot by Black men as innocent Black men shot by cops to the morgue from traffic stops. It also provides an excellent incentive structure. If you shoot an innocent, the price is not that that you lose your job or spark race riots or anything, but that your police force will be made to behave less trigger-happy to the point where that will kill one of your fellow cops, maintaining the balance.
Under these circumstances, and with the relevant statistics provided by the police department, I as a proud grey tribe utilitarian would be totally fine with innocents of one race or gender getting more frequently shot than a different race or gender, just as I accept the fact that I am more likely to get shot by a cop when I get stopped at 2am in a run-down car in a bad neighborhood than I am if I get stopped at noon in a upper-middle-class car in a rich neighborhood.
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