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Comment by schemy | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing simpler than misusing statistics.

The right wing does it all the time.

53% of all prisoners are black, ergo blacks are criminals.

Homosexuals represent 70% of all HIV infections, ergo homosexuality is inherently risky and should be treated the same way as hard drugs.

Now Thomas Sowell doesn't say any of those things himself. His points are much more interesting ... to people who have been only exposed to the liberal side of the story for their whole lives.

To someone who has read the original red in tooth and claw conservative talking points from the 80s his books are just a rear guard action and a not very interesting one at that.

Which is why the success of Thomas Sowell with people who have gone to university and then exposed to the real world is entirely the fault of the people who cancelled racism/sexism in the 80s/90s and are trying to do it again today.

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> There is nothing simpler than misusing statistics

Lining up strawmen and knocking them down, maybe.

You're projecting your bias into the causation.

Most conservatives I know understand that disproportionate black crime has nothing to do with race and everything to do with disproportionately adopted negative value systems in the black community.

Specifically, fatherless homes and lack of appreciation for education. These variables have the same impact on people of all races.

Unfortunately, instead of correcting the problem, movements like BLM think the idea of two parent families needs to be "disrupted".

> lack of appreciation for education

Have you ever been to a Black public school, like actually attended one as a student? I promise you the #1 problem isn't lack of appreciation for education.

>fatherless homes

Except this actually has a pretty pinpoint time when it began to cultivate and it overlaps with the War on Drugs and the stagnation of Black middle class growth in the 80s. The modern situation is accumulation of these effects, not their cause.

The rate of non-marital births steadily increased for Blacks and Whites from 1950-1995 (although Blacks did start from a higher baseline). From 1995 until now it has mostly levelled off.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_F...

"Disruption" of the "nuclear family" comes from the Marxist view that a monogamous family unit leads to the holding of property. In earlier non-monogamous societies, only the women knew for sure which children were theirs. That meant that property tended to accrue to communities formed around matriarchs, rather than single families.

As a father, if you didn't know who your child was, you protected them all, and had to cede property to the matriarchs.

Engels wrote that this was why "the patriarchy" should be fought and "dismantled" because it led to property ownership, and sensitivity against redistribution. Therefore, this remains a core value of modern Marxists, to move society back to fatherlessness so that establishment of redistribution mechanisms is more palatable.

Seems like a fairly horrific goal to me. Property rights have led to the single greatest increase in standard of living for all of Western civilization. Seems like we would want more people joining the system than tearing it down.

Wow, you made a lot of maxist angry.

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