Tuesday, July 07, 2020



Black Lives Matter protests have sprung up in dozens of countries. Leaders of the movement speak out about the changes that need to happen now

The above heading, from a current article in Newsweak, promises more than it delivers.  Most of the article is a large catalog of people who have suffered at the hands of police.  Because minorities have on average suffered more than whites, it is assumed that the police are wrong in some way -- more racist, in particular.  That minorities might be more prone to criminal behaviour is not considered or that minorities might be more aggressive, unco-operative and hostile to the police is not considered or even mentioned 

Such a one-eyed article is unlikely to offer any real information but there are a couple of paragraphs in the article that do set out what changes black leaders want.  I have reproduced them below.

The first quest is almost amusing.  The author wants research directed to understanding why racism persists in Britain and how it needs to be addressed.  I can assure him that there has been a great deal of academic research on that question already. I have quite a few articles in the journals on that topic myself.

And the major finding of that reseach is that racial discrimination emerges very early in life -- even in babies. So whether you think  intolerance of difference is inborn or not the challenges it poses are much the same.  It runs deep in the human psyche and is very widespread even in educated adults.  Most adults in current society learn not to express their adverse judgments openly but actions such as "white flight" reveal that their deep-down attitudes and judgments are little different from what we have seen in most of human history -- which is open derogatory judgements of minorities.

However you look at it, the possibility that more  research will reveal anything liklely to bring about change is vanishingly small.  What existing research tells us is that "racism"  will always be with us.

The second proposal for change below is more reasonable: a reallocation of police tasks.  Libertarians have long argued that too much of human behaviour has been criminalized.  They would like to see all drug use made legal everywhere for instance.  A huge amount of police work is devoted to drug crime and often leads to severe abuses.  "No knock raids", for instance are almost entirely devoted to seizing evidence of drug use before that evidence can be destroyed in some way -- by flushing drugs down the toilet, for instance. 

Taking drugs out of the purview of the police would free up lots of police  time that could be devoted to a more patient approach to challenges.  Many police-involved deaths are of mentally ill people and a more patient approach to them would often remove the need for a bullet.



What Oke would like Britain to do is use this moment to tackle the issues laid bare by George Floyd’s death and dedicate substantial resources and funding to understanding why racism persists in Britain and how it needs to be addressed. She seems to be, at once, both optimistic and skeptical about the likelihood of success. “We hope this is a movement of genuine social change across our nation,” Oke said. But, “we feel almost nervous to believe in what the longevity could be of the change.”

Black Lives Matter co-founder Cullors is an advocate of defunding, which redirects money typically budgeted for law enforcement to other community-serving initiatives, including education, healthcare, mental health services and social services programs. “This is a watershed moment,” Cullors told Newsweek. “And we need bold and courageous approaches.”

Already, in the U.S. and in Canada, the idea is taking root, with city council members in Minneapolis voting to dismantle the police department implicated in Floyd’s death and replace it with a new community-based public safety system. Meanwhile, officials in Toronto are discussing a motion seeking to slash that city’s police department budget by 10 percent.

“A significant re-allocation of resources away from ineffective or harmful police approaches and toward programs that demonstrably reduce crime could actually improve public safety,” said Paul Hirschfield, an associate sociology and criminal justice professor at Rutgers University. “Much of what the police do—random patrols, patrolling schools, traffic enforcement, and drug enforcement—do far too little for public safety to justify the enormous expense.”

More HERE 





Exposing the Lies of Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was established in 2013 by a trio of self-identified Marxist revolutionaries. Striving to make white Americans “uncomfortable about institutional racism” and the “structural oppression” that allegedly “prevents so many [black people] from realizing their dreams,” BLM contends that blacks living under America's “white supremacist system” are routinely targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes.” That claim has become an article of faith for the millions of American leftists who dutifully parrot BLM's talking points. The remainder of this article is dedicated to providing hard data which exposes BLM's worldview as nothing more than a mountain of malicious lies.

Debunking BLM's Claims About Police Use of Force

A major Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report in 2001 examined incidents where police in the United States used deadly force to kill criminal suspects between 1976 and 1998. During that 23-year span, 42% of all suspects killed by police were black – a figure that comported precisely with the percentage of violent crimes committed by African Americans during that same period. This is enormously significant because we would expect that in police forces not plagued by systemic racism, officers would shoot suspects of various racial or ethnic backgrounds at rates closely resembling their respective involvement in the types of serious crimes most likely to elicit the use of force by police. And indeed, that is exactly what the evidence shows.

The same BJS report found that in nearly two-thirds of all justifiable homicides by police during 1976-98, the officer’s race and the suspect’s race were the same. When a white or Hispanic officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually (63% of the time) white or Hispanic as well. And when a black officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually black (81% of the time).

The BJS report also examined the rate at which officers killed suspects of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. In 1998, the “black-officer-kills-black-felon” rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers, more than double the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed black felons (14 per 100,000). That same year, the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed white or Hispanic felons (28 per 100,000) was much higher than the “black-officer-kills-white-or-Hispanic-felon” rate of 11 per 100,000.

In 1999, criminologists Geoffrey Alpert and Roger Dunham confirmed once again that police officers were more likely to use force against suspects of their own racial group, than against suspects from another racial group.

A 2011 BJS study which covered the period from 2003 to 2009 sheds further light on the issue of police use of force against people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Of all suspects who are known to have been killed by police during that 7-year time frame, 41.7% were white, 31.7% were black, and 20.3% were Hispanic. It is also worth noting that during the 2003-2009 period—when blacks were 31.7% of all suspects killed by an officer—blacks accounted for about 38.5% of all arrests for violent crimes, which are the types of crimes most likely to trigger potentially deadly confrontations with police. These numbers do not in any way suggest a lack of restraint by police in their dealings with black suspects. On the contrary, they strongly suggest exactly the opposite.[1]

In 2015, a Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than their white colleagues to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect, and Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely to do the same. That same year, a study of the New York Police Department by criminology professor Greg Ridgeway found that black officers were 3.3 times more likely than their white peers to discharge their guns in the course of their work. So much for the notion of trigger-happy white cops.

In any given year, a mere 0.6 percent of black men report that physical force of any kind – including mild actions like pushing and grabbing – is used against them by the police. The corresponding figure for white men is approximately 0.2 percent. Though both figures are infinitesimally small, critics of the police are quick to complain that the figure for blacks is three times higher than the figure for whites. But as National Review points out, that disparity is fully accounted for by the fact that “black men commit violent crimes at much higher rates than white men,” as evidenced by data from the annual National Crime Victimization Survey.

The available data indicate that a mere 0.08 percent of black men and white men alike are injured by police in any given year. This figure includes injuries sustained as a result of police actions that are legally justified, and often necessary, in order to thwart criminal behavior.

In a 2018 working paper titled “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is African American, reported that police officers in Houston were nearly 24 percent less likely to shoot black suspects than white suspects. In a separate analysis of officer shootings in three Texas cities, six Florida counties, and the city of Los Angeles, Fryer found that: (a) officers were 47 percent less likely to discharge their weapon without first being attacked if the suspect was black, than if the suspect was white; (b) black and white individuals shot by police were equally likely to have been armed at the time of the shootings; (c) white officers were no more likely to shoot unarmed blacks than unarmed whites; (d) black officers were more likely to shoot unarmed whites than unarmed blacks; and (e) black officers were more likely than white officers to shoot unarmed whites. There is no evidence of anti-black racism in any of these findings, though some of them do seem to suggest an anti-white bias.

A 2019 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. “In fact,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald, the study found that “if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians.” Specifically, Mac Donald adds, the authors of the study compiled a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 and found that 55 percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic.

Each and every year, without exception, whites who are shot and killed by police officers in the U.S. far outnumber blacks and Hispanics who meet that same fate. In 2017, for instance, 457 whites, 223 blacks, and 179 Hispanics were killed by police officers in the line of duty. In 2018, the corresponding figures were 399 whites, 209 blacks, and 148 Hispanics. And in 2019, the totals were 370 whites, 235 blacks, and 158 Hispanics. There is not a hint of anti-black racism anywhere in these figures.

When we compare black rates of violent crime, with the rate at which blacks are shot and killed by police officers, we find that blacks are represented among those shooting victims at rates significantly lower than we would have expected in light of their crime rates. For example, in 2017, blacks were just 23.6% of all people shot dead by police, even though they were arrested for 37.5% of all violent crimes. The following year, blacks were 26.3% of those fatally shot by police, even as they were arrested for fully 37.4% of violent crimes.

According to Heather Mac Donald: “The per capita rate of officers being feloniously killed is 45 times higher than the rate at which unarmed black males are killed by cops. And an officer’s chance of getting killed by a black assailant is 18.5 times higher than the chance of an unarmed black getting killed by a cop.”

Debunking BLM's Claims About Interracial Crime Against Blacks

In 2012 and 2013, blacks in the U.S. committed an annual average of 560,600 violent crimes (excluding homicide) against whites, while whites committed a yearly average of 99,403 violent crimes against blacks. In other words, blacks were the attackers in about 85 percent of all violent crimes involving blacks and whites, while whites were the attackers in 15 percent.[2]

When white offenders committed crimes of violence (excluding homicide) against either whites or blacks in 2012-13, they targeted white victims 95.8 percent of the time, and they went after black victims a mere 4.1 percent of the time. By contrast, when black offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks in 2012-13, they targeted white victims a whopping 48.5 percent of the time, and they went after black victims 51.4 percent of the time.[3] If we factor into the equation the relative sizes of America's white and black populations, we find that, statistically, any given black person in 2012-13 was about 27 times more likely to attack a white, than vice versa.

In more recent years, the disproportionate prevalence of black-on-white crime has only gotten worse. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2018 there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites in the United States. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90.4 percent, while whites committed 56,394 of them, or about 9.5 percent.

When white offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks in 2018, they targeted white victims 97.3 percent of the time, and they went after black victims 2.6 percent of the time. By contrast, when black offenders committed crimes of violence against either whites or blacks during that same year, they targeted white victims 58 percent of the time, and they went after black victims 42 percent of the time.[4]

City Journal reports that according to Justice Department data, blacks in 2018 were overrepresented among the perpetrators of offenses classified as “hate crimes” by a whopping 50 percent—while whites were underrepresented by 24 percent.

The facts presented above can lead us to only one possible conclusion: BLM's claim that African Americans are routinely targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes” is a monstrous lie. The purpose of the lie is to cause Americans of all races to detest their own country, so as to promote a desire to raze the nation's traditions to the ground, and to then erect a new Marxist utopia upon its ruins.

SOURCE 





Culture Comes For Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg held a virtual town hall with employees last week to address concerns about the massive advertiser boycott the company is experiencing from “woke” brands. This boycott is being led by none other than the ADL, the notoriously anti-free speech organization.

While the ADL has openly admitted that “hate speech” is constitutionally protected, they have spent years lobbying Congress and tech companies to censor what they deem to be “hateful” speech online.

The great irony here is that Facebook has been “partnered” with the ADL since at least 2017 in order to “fight online hate.” Apparently the vast amount of censorship that Facebook has implemented since then isn’t enough for the ADL.

This advertiser boycott is serious business, costing Facebook an estimated $7 billion with top advertisers like Verizon, Unilever, and others pulling out of Facebook’s ad ecosystem.

As ReClaimTheNet pointed out on Gab, advertisers had already planned to dramatically reduce ad spending this quarter due to the coronavirus anyway, so it appears they seized the opportunity to virtue signal in the process.

This should be a lesson to any company that thinks they can appease the mob and Thought Police mafia of the ADL. Unless and until the ADL has full control over the content on Facebook–and everywhere else on the internet—they are not going to stop in their quest for censorious power. They will not show mercy because they know that politics, and thus power, is downstream from discourse.

Gab has been under attack from the ADL for years now. We have refused to bend the knee and paid the price for it.

For what it’s worth, Mark Zuckerberg claims that the company is not going to change their policies because of this boycott.

‘We’re not gonna change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small per cent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue,’ said Zuckerberg, according to The Information.

While Zuckerberg’s refusal to bend the knee to the mob may be noble, his employees are the ones who are writing the algorithms and banning conservatives. Facebook moderators have even been caught on camera bragging about deleting pro-Trump content and implementing anti-white policies.

The end result of this inevitable chaos is the acceleration of the balkanization of social networking–and indeed the internet itself.

SOURCE 






Now the racist stormtroopers target a mermaid
  


It will be incidents like this that will eventually do in Black Lives Matter and the mob witc- hunters looking to sniff out “racism” wherever it hides — or anyone thinks it.

The “Little Mermaid” statue in Copenhagen, depicting Hans Christian Anderson’s beloved little girl sitting on a rock, fins and all, was vandalized with the epithet “racist fish,” according to Danish authorities.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here
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