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Comment by d23 | Hacker News Reader

Here are a few threads you might find interesting:

* https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1654877506783137792

* https://twitter.com/hello__caitlin/status/165487177008270950...

* https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1655948197129494532

I'm having trouble finding another one I saw yesterday he tweeted basically implying black women were an order of magnitude more violent than white women.

Edit: ah, found it, along with a couple inane conspiracies to boot, which has become standard for him these days:

* https://twitter.com/maxberger/status/1655985143700389893

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The links you posted are inflammatory nonsense that try to draw a line between concern over mainstream media coverage of race and crime and "fascism". It's contrived at best.

Are the statistics wrong? Is it wrong to say that media coverage is slanted and focuses on the minority of racist white-on-black crime while ignoring the reverse? Seems like this is all fairly well documented. Slapping slurs on the posts that point that out and calling for the posters to be "cancelled" or suppressed by calling them "dangerous" - that, if anything, strikes me as fascistic.

> The links you posted are inflammatory nonsense

What? They are screenshots of his responses!

> Are the statistics wrong?

They have been purposefully stripped of context and misrepresented to imply that black people are more violent than white people. The author literally worked backwards from the originally expressed percentages to deceive! It's not the statistics that are wrong, it's the way they've been presented.

Over the last 10+ years on this site, I have mostly found this to be one of the higher quality places for discussion on the internet, but occasionally over the last few years I have questioned whether this is the right place for me. The responses to this have once again made me rethink whether this community is one I want to be a part of.

I am genuinely revolted.

Are you questioning whether this is the right place for you based more on quality of discourse or on the leanings of the views expressed?

I must confess the quality of discourse seems to have gone down over the last few years. Feels like we've had a migration from reddit.

> Are you questioning whether this is the right place for you based more on quality of discourse or on the leanings of the views expressed?

Both. I am uninterested in hanging out with the 13/52 crowd.

Having looked up what that means: am I missing something or is it the case that you don't want to interact with people who mention facts that can be used to support unpleasant narratives?

Because if so, that seems like a way of ending up with a very biased view of the world... while the murder ratio fact might be old news to you and something that shouldn't be dwelled on, there's bound to be one of the 10,000[1] just learning it for the first time and sometimes you'd be one of those 10,000 unless you cut yourself off from it.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/

You are missing that this is one of many racist signalers and memes white supremacists and nazis use to justify their hatred. They're based on incomplete and misleading statistics designed to manipulate people without critical thinking skills.

The best solution there seems to be teaching people critical thinking, statistics and how to look things up tbh... rather than cutting them off from these sorts of figures.

(I've personally been advocating that for a decade to anyone who'll sit still for a minute)

What does that have to do with phrenology? You could just say he is racist or whatever if you think so.

It's pseudoscientific bunk (in this case, statistics manipulated to deceive) designed push a narrative of a specific race being more violent. It is no more moral, intelligent, or useful than phrenology.

I think saying that it amounts to phrenology is a manipulation designed to push a narrative. I expected something completely different than what you’ve presented. I think you aren’t better than Elon Musk in that regard.

I don't know how warped you have to be to look at that and think this isn't the most bottom of the barrel racism there is.

If the worst racism possible is complaining about disproportionate media focus on white on black crime then I think we can safely declare the problem of racism solved. :)

To be a bit more constructive: looking at those links it seems obvious to me that the main point is about media focus, not the actual crime statistics.

Complaining about "disproportionate media coverage" is a thin veil for the delivery of the more insidious message the dishonest graphic is conveying: why aren't they covering the real problem of all these black people committing violence.

And I didn't say it's the "worst" racism. It's cheap, low effort, dishonest, unintelligent, and designed to manipulate morons, which brings me back to my original comparison to phrenology.

Well, from my somewhat uninformed un-american perspective, the question of "how can we fix the problem of violence in black American communities?" does indeed seem much more important than the one of "how can we fix the problem of white Americans doing violence against black ones?" due to its relative size. So I'm unclear on why the message you claim is being delivered is bad.

I just don't know how many times I have to post the same basic takedown of why this presentation is a problem: https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1655948197129494532

It's completely removing intra-racial statistics that would make the problem much more apparent, which is that there are far more white people in America than black people, and thus, there are far more white victims of crime than black victims. Expressing absolute numbers rather than percentages is a bald faced misrepresentation, and the creator of the graphic went out of their way to represent it that way (the cited source has the data correctly expressed as a percentage and includes intra-racial statistics too).

The fundamental problem: this is designed to mislead people like you and it works. And I'm struggling not to be rude here, but it is really hard for me not to see how someone with even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills couldn't look at a graphic like that and immediately see the red flags.

Uh... the big media narrative that Elon seems to be pushing back against is that there's a big inter-racial thing making white people attack and kill blacks. Showing that there is 10x more violence going the other way seems to directly address that by making people notice that they're being shown a non-representative slice of reality.

Also, if violence was randomly targeted irrespective of race you still wouldn't expect 10x as many black on white as white on black, you'd expect approximately the same absolute numbers (10x as many white violent people but only 0.1x as many victims being black cancelling out to 1x). This even holds true in a segregated society as long as black Americans and white Americans are equally segregated (e.g. 70% of whites only being around whites and 70% of blacks being around blacks).

So it's not actually that misleading a stat.

It's really rather disgusting seeing so many people here being so dedicated to sealion racist garbage.

Part of me wished I hadn't spent so much time responding to it on here, but I appreciate your response. It makes me feel a bit better.

It would be really interesting to meet you and see what you're actually like in person, the people who display this sort of incurious, black and white, us and them attitude I encounter online aren't possible to talk to and have an extended conversation with.

But I'd really like to know how you guys think... do you genuinely only look at the everything through the lense of "which political views does this fact support?" and "what type of people repeat this sort of fact? Are they outgroup?"?

Let’s disregard the comparison to phrenology, now it’s clear it was done in bad faith. But what exactly is your position? Do you think it is impossible to not be racist and believe in racial media bias at the same time? Is it an obvious dog whistle that someone has to be either stupid or autistic to misunderstand?

You said he promotes "what amounts to phrenology" and then linked to a tweet where someone calls Musk a white supremacist for commenting "wow" on a post about illegal immigration. That whole chain of justification looks to me like a total non sequitur.

That doesn't seem like phrenology to me. Yes, there's a lack of context, but the fundamental points about media (both traditional and social) amplifying certain things (to get more shares mostly) seems sound... I certainly have been exposed to at least 10x as many reports of USA whites killing blacks than the reverse.

Just add a bunch of political terms into your word block list. It helps make Twitter much more enjoyable.

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