Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

There is almost nothing that bothers me more than the control of information.

At least with this issue, however, the reasoning as to why data is being manipulated is so abundantly clear that there is actually virtually no loss of information for the time being. The reality is that Asians largely constitute a problem for the prevailing narrative around racial and ethnic power dynamics. Indians, for example, despite being "brown," and despite being from a "developing" country, are overwhelmingly overrepresented in upper economic echelons. This holds true not just when compared to natively born Americans, but also when controlling for immigration and starting economic conditions. They're also extremely underrepresented in violent crime statistics. Many of these figures remain consistent across the board for Asians living in the US, despite living in a system "designed to explicitly benefit white men." The"model minority myth" is a pathetic manipulation of information in an attempt to account for the narrative-breaking statistics regarding Asian immigrants.

When it comes to violence against Asians, there are multiple reasons to muddy the waters, because there are multiple reasons why statistics cause problems. For one, it has been well established that the "racial" group that is overrepresented in violence against Asians is not "white" people. This is clearly a large problem on its own, but it isn't the only problem. The other problem is seeing how disproportionately low violent crime is within the Asian community, even when controlling for economic factors.

TL;DR this is unacceptable, but at least for now, completely predictable. In a decade or so, however, the information we had a year ago could be considered out of date, and narratives can be shielded from data.

> "For one, it has been well established that the "racial" group that is overrepresented in violence against Asians is not "white" people."

Its a typical tactic of the media and the globalist. Find a problem, but instead of dealing with the real cause, find some way to turn it towards attacking the desired group.

They did it with "black lives matter" except its summertime and every weekend for a decade you could find black people being murdered in record numbers in places like Chicago and Baltimore by other black people without so much as a peep from them. For some reason the 1% of deaths outweigh the 99% because the race of the shooter is ultimately what matters, not the fact that black people are dying.

I think the point of BLM was to draw attention to the police violence against black people.

I’m sure they’re aware. They’re missing the part where a lack of police accountability erodes the community trust in policing perpetuating a vicious cycle.

I have no issue with bringing attention to police violence against any citizen. The problem is that not every instance of police violence or killing is unjustified, which is the way it is portrayed by BLM and the media. In fact, most of them are justified based on the circumstances.

Nor does it make sense to call your organization or movement "black lives matter" when you literally ignore the everyday violence in black communities that kills 99% of black people.

It feels a bit wrong to frame many things from the point of view of ethnicity, although that definitely has it's place too.

If you look at these groups, you should see that many immigrants from Asia were already well off enough to immigrate, so in some sense mid-to-upper class of their societies.

This is not by far the case for native Americans and African Americans, who have been oppressed for generations in America.

To view things from the perspective of race just seems to miss a lot of essential substance.

Many Indian subpopulations have been oppressed for multiple times longer than the United States even existed, yet don't have the same problems. Why do you have such low expectations for a population with 5x the murder rate?

And do you think the most oppressed had the chance to immigrate to America?

Your point is very valid considering the caste distribution of Indian Americans. However,

The homicide rate of India proper is 2.9 cases per 100,000 population. That of Asian Americans is about the same.

The rate for African Americans is around 18

I bet you could find a subpopulation of India that is responsible of most of the homicides in the country. I bet you'd also find a lot of poverty, systemic oppression and alienation from society in that group. Then you'd start to perhaps understand the issue more broadly than by the color of skin.

However, if you are motivated by ... other things, I'm sure you can just jump to conclusions and tell us all the statistics you have about African Americans.

> I bet you could find

It seems you base your beliefs on things you imagine instead of facts.

Yeah, it read like an article of faith rather than an analysis. It simply must be so.

There are many examples in history where it was the privileged class/race/ethnicity/group that was the most murderous one.

Spartiates, Normans, elites of Renaissance Italy, even Nazis (see: The Night of Long Knives).

In your examples the murdering was done in a systemic fashion, i.e., driven by the state. It is not relevant for the discussion here.

Not necessarily, e.g. the Normans had a well-deserved reputation of being extraordinarily violent on their own. Even Norman bishops were known to travel armed and get into fights. (And the state back then was far too weak to prevent such behavior even if it wanted to.)

Also, gangs can be seen as proto-states, and a lot of today's criminal violence is gang-related. There isn't really that much difference between, say, drug cartels and the kind of violent packs of future nobility that raided and terrorized Early Middle Age villages in the post-Roman world.

I'm very sorry, but I have difficulties relating this post to the earlier discussion. I'm sure you are factually correct, but the examples start to be so far removed (and in some sense not terribly relevant even as edge cases) from the earlier context that I simply can't add anything without sounding terribly rude.

Ok, here's a proof for you: Take the sub-population of only consisting of murderers in the country. You will not find a consistent pattern of well doing middle class people.

I cannot find evidence Dalits in America (recently only 1.5% of immigrants) are committing crimes above the baseline rate in the USA; it's hard to search because most information is about them being victims of crime.

I think you're still missing a key point: a person who immigrates is (on average) more motivated, more wealthy and more educated than their peers. This also applies to a Dalit person immigrating to America.

And very importantly for this discussion, an immigrant has no criminal record. So the people who have commited crimes are already filtered out in this process.

> many immigrants from Asia were already well off enough to immigrate, so in some sense mid-to-upper class of their societies

For recent migrants, sure. For others, we spent over a century putting them in ghettos, rail gangs and concentration camps. Broadly speaking, I see no gain for anyone, minorities the least, in creating a caste system of victimhood in America.

Not sure what your point is, but it sounds to be in line with mine: ethnicity/race is perhaps a too rough categorization of people to be used outside of a very specific context.

Edited to please the pedantic among us.

I think the caste system of victimhood revolves around race, not ethnicity. Race, as we all know, is a social construct and thus provides the context.

> If you look at these groups, you should see that many immigrants from Asia were already well off enough to immigrate, so in some sense mid-to-upper class of their societies.

There are actually many reasons why immigrants cannot be directly compared to native populations. A huge one, for example, is that you're not just selecting from those who are typically filtered according to some meritocratic criteria, but you're also filtering people who are motivated enough and sufficiently risk averse so as to upend their whole lives and move somewhere. This is what I meant by controlling for these factors.

In regards to viewing things from the perspective of race, I agree completely. I think that making decisions on the basis of race is functionally the core of racism. That being said, the people whose narratives I'm combatting are racial identitarians, they make arguments in terms of racial populations, and have to be addressed in such terms. i.e. if they say that America is a horribly racist country whose systems are dictated by white supremacy and patriarchy, the only way to tease these arguments apart is by pulling out racial statistics.

Many Asians aren’t well off. In 1989, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians had similar to higher poverty rates than African Americans, because they came here as refugees: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1990/.... For Cambodians it was dramatically higher. Today, Vietnamese and Laotians have lower poverty rates than the national average, and Cambodians are only modestly higher.

I’m Bangladeshi, and we are about 20 years behind in that curve. Still higher poverty rates than average (90% immigrated after 2000), but moving rapidly toward parity. Also, being upper class in “old country” doesn’t mean coming here with money. My family was upper class in Bangladesh. But a Bangladeshi college degree is worthless here. My dad came here with a job from a US company, but we were the exception. Most of my aunts and uncles work retail and service jobs.

There's more to being well off than immigrating with lots of money. For example social capital in the form of stable families, support networks and education (useful even if you can't get a job directly with it). Furthermore, immigration filters out people with criminal record.

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