Comments

1
hi damosa.
2
Right, you wish i wrote this. I wouldn't have been soo subtle.
3
no wishing, it's you. And ever so creative as usual.
4
There aren't enough grammatical errors for it to be a true Damosa.
5
excellent point.
6
Is this interesting? The same boring, name-calling arrogance we've heard from the left for 20 years. Blacks are victims, America sucks, etc. Get a life.
7
I always knew the race war would start with an unfortunate incident regarding "soccer tennis".

8
0/10
9
When people visibly described as "black" allegedly attack people visibly described as "white" in Portland, apparently the white-supremacist bat-signal goes up around the Internet and the story (and Blogtown) starts getting the attention of those "special" individuals who start posting under the main story and now here about how "the blacks" are out of control, and even a separate, inferior species who are about to destroy Portland.
These people are increasingly weak and desperate for a place to spout their nonsense, as even many right-wing forums will ban someone who openly espouses blatant racism.
And yes, if you're up in arms about "black on white" crimes but unconcerned about comparable "white on black" crimes, then congrats, You're Racist! Crime is basically crime. "Black on white" and "black on black" crime are racist sensationalist media constructs, considering that they rarely mention "white on white" crime. Drunk, violent white people typically are not described by race in the press, but if some teenagers who are black get drunk and violent, then of course the description is "black teenagers." A good journalist wouldn't use such descriptions because racial designations by sight are vague, unreliable, and irrelevant in terms of treatment of their alleged offenses. Justice is supposed to be "blind" (neutral) in this country.
10
Look, geyser, I don't think criminality as such varies much by race, but (probably due to fewer opportunities for white-collar crime) blacks are disproportionately represented among violent criminals. This is a serious problem for the black community, since everyone but lefties-in-denial (as I was for many, many years) acknowledges these facts, and law-abiding black men are routinely treated with suspicion, fear and hostility because of the reality-based correlation between crime and blackness.

This isn't right; for one thing the media totally overhypes all sorts of threats all the time (c.f. my comments on the rape blog posts) so people are disproportionately afraid, and moreover, as you mention, we ought to treat people as individuals.

But that is way, way easier said than done. Expose people to daily news reports of black violence and they will--will--develop what the experts have taken to calling "implicit racism." I think it's unfair to label people racist under these circumstances, and it certainly gives more heat than light regardless.

I hate to be a downer, but my point is that the sort of denial you espouse is silly, unrealistic and just leaves the problems to fester. We've seen the results of liberals' unwillingness to confront how entrenched these problems are in a string of policy failures, specifically bussing and Section 8; Affirmative Action may be effective for building a black middle class but has left the core of black poverty and trauma very much intact.

So I find the sort of "it's crime, let's not read too much into it" attitude wrong-headed. We need to treat these incidents as calls to really think hard about what it might take to improve the situation of poor African-Americans, given what we've learned over the past 40 years.

Frankly, all too often it seems like we liberals don't care about black people as such, we just like to call our political opponents racist.
11
@ 3,

What makes you soo convinced it's me who wrote this?
12
@10 "blacks are disproportionately represented among violent criminals. This is a serious problem for the black community, since everyone but lefties-in-denial (as I was for many, many years) acknowledges these facts..."

Bullshit -- there's a lot of disagreement among researchers and the general public about studies that show such a correlation. It seems to me that crime is tied far more closely and directly to income level than to race. Race is a concept with no real scientific merit or precision, so it's highly problematic to introduce it into a criminological study, especially one that is supposed to tell us anything about causation.
13
I take it back, geyser pointed out it isn't your style
14
No I didn't, and leave me out of all that.
15
woops, it was geo. lol
16
Trolllllolololololol
17
So, looking here http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/c…

and scrolling down to table 40, we see, essentially, that the high levels of "completed violence," which I presume are barfights and other instances of male stupidity, and are very evenly distributed across races, hide (in the headline) the high levels of robbery by African-Americans. But these data do permit other interpretations.

Scrolling down to table 46, to same table for "multiple-offender" crimes, naturally things start looking worse for the race-doesn't-matter argument, with above-expected rates for basically everything, and very high rates for robbery.

One of the really interesting things that pops out at me on these tables is that whites tend to be more likely to "attempt to take property" "with injury" i.e. they suck at mugging people. After looking at these data, I'll be relatively relieved to be mugged by black assailants, since they can probably do it without whatever brand of stupidity seems to lead to more injury from white muggers.

Anyway, this is national crime victim survey data, since I figured there were confounding factors with using arrest data. Honestly, I did not anticipate the high levels of "simple assault" and "completed violence," which are very uniform across races and strongly drown out the more "salient" crime, robbery. You may recall that I first got really interested in these numbers back when there was a lot of noise how hate crimes are committed by "white trash," but once the numbers were adjusted for the racial makeup of the population the "opposite" turned out to be the case. It looks like this isn't as true for the above classes of crime, but as I said, my interpretation is that these are "stupid male" crimes: barfights and road rage bullshit.

The rates of robbery, which get more media attention and are "scarier" by being less avoidable and more predatory, have massive over-representation by African-Americans. We have 13% of the population responsible for 50%+ of these crimes...

So I would say that race is a genuine predictive factor for crime, especially crime committed by "forces lurking in the dark to strike at unsuspecting innocents." As for whether race has any biological meaning, not much, sure, but even as a pure social construct race is incredibly powerful. I think my take-home on this would be that there is enough correlation in the data that just saying "race doesn't matter" is a bad argument, that the data support the idea that crime and race are linked, and so my other points hold about how denying these facts is wrong-headed.

It seems like there is some motivation on the left to essentially say that race doesn't matter, probably because once we allow that it does we "open the door" to prejudice, but I think we've gotten to the point where the bigots are going to run with whatever facts they can, and playing dumb just makes their job easier.

I'm also looking over this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crim… , which seems interesting.
18
"I take it back, geyser pointed out it isn't your style."

Uhm, I pointed out to you that it wasn't my style. Geyser already denied as such, so you really should leave him out of it. It's ME you should be worrying about.
19
Oh and Jamdox, i'm sure you mean well but you'd have to be a real nerd to actually read through a several page-long pdf doc. just to prove a point.

Bad form, sir.
20
@19 Translation: "I don't want to have to read anything, so you shouldn't either. Can we talk about me again now?"
21
zzZzzz
22
I am proudly a real nerd. Fuck all y'all hipsters. Also, control-F for "find"...
23
The pasty lefties are out in force trying to apologize and bend over for minority criminals. What's really funny about all of this is these same pasty liberals do this out of sheer boredom because most of Portland is white. They want so badly to earn their street cred. They just don't ever have a chance to declare war on whitey (being white themselves, this is hilarious) unless black people or minorities do something criminal and white people call them out on it. And they call rednecks backwards? hahahaha...
24
Have you read a damn thing I've written, you retard?
25
40 black teens flash robbed troutdale albertsons

4-5 black teens assault cop in Gresham

In the last 24 hours

How "weird"!
26
LOL yes damosa. I am so worried about you. Terrified in fact. Sweating bullets. I find you a horrifying vision of nightmares from your internet words.
27
Wow - trolls get a real rise outta geyser.
28
Geyser is the Meg Griffin of the IA commenters
29
"40 black teens flash robbed troutdale albertsons

4-5 black teens assault cop in Gresham

In the last 24 hours

How "weird"!"


And in other, far more redundant news, yet another White man was arrested today in his tiny one-br flat for having tens of thousands of images on his computer depicting abuse of children.

White man arrested in German internet cafe on suspicion of murder, necrophilia, and cannibalism. The suspect, a homosexual believed to have ties with online Nazi group, had allegedly video-recorded his crimes and up-loaded video on the internet.

MADNESS, i tell you!
30
do you like sit and drink coffee until you're ready to explode and then go 'fuck i need to read the mercury so i can type stroke-like ranting on i,a?'
31
Don't we ALL do that? Isn't that the point?
32
@29

Those things didn't happen in Portland.
33
So that means they're not relevant?
34
@28: I don't know shitty tv shows too well but I think you just made the One Tree Hill of analogies.
35
Rahowa, 'zat you?
36
YOU would know about some Rahowa, wouldn't you?
37
This is the "She's The Sheriff!" of blog comments
38
Trollolling at your dumb asses.
39
@iceprez, you have made my day. Laughed my ass off, thanks. I think we can all agree this anon is not serious, but for some reason the Mercury decided to publish this obvious troll job.....might have been a slow day, or the coke and Urban Outfitters coupons ran out.
40
just sayin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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