Poverty and Violent Crime Don’t Go Hand in Hand

Many analysts, along with the general public, believe that poverty is a major, if not the major, cause of crime. But a new study from a Columbia University research group should remind us of something that history has consistently shown: that the relationship between poverty and crime is far from predictable or consistent.

The Columbia study revealed the startling news that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of New York City’s Asian population was impoverished, a proportion exceeding that of the city’s black population (19 percent). This was surprising, given the widespread perception that Asians are among the nation’s more affluent social groups. But the study contains an even more startling aspect: in New York City, Asians’ relatively high poverty rate is accompanied by exceptionally low crime rates. This undercuts the common belief that poverty and crime go hand in hand.

Asians had consistently low arrest rates for violent crime—usually lower than their proportion of the population, lower than those of blacks and Hispanics, and in one category (assault), even lower than that of whites, who, as a group, are far less often impoverished.

Using NYPD data, I calculated the arrest rates for violent crimes of each social group, accounting for the population size of each.

At 1.2 per 100,000, Asian murder arrest rates were nearly one-ninth of black rates. If poverty were the principal cause of crime, we would expect Asian rates to be as high, if not higher, than those of blacks. That the Asian rates are relatively low illustrates what I call the “crime/adversity mismatch,” a recurring phenomenon. As I observe in my history of crime: “Throughout American history, different social groups have engaged in different amounts of violent crime, and no consistent relationship between the extent of a group’s socioeconomic disadvantage and its level of violence is evident.”

When it comes to violent crime—murder, assault, robbery, and the like—history tells a complicated story. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impoverished Jewish, Polish, and German immigrants had relatively low crime rates, while disadvantaged Italian, Mexican, and Irish entrants committed violent crime at high rates. This crime/adversity mismatch also seems to be a global phenomenon. In Great Britain, for instance, a criminologist observed that “all of the minority groups with elevated rates of crime or incarceration are socially and economically disadvantaged, but some disadvantaged ethnic minority groups do not have elevated rates of offending.” There, too, it was the case that Asians were more disadvantaged than blacks, but the latter had much higher offending rates.

Why is it that poverty is not consistently related to crime? A major reason is that crimes of violence are usually motivated by quarrels, personal grudges, perceived insults, and similar interpersonal conflicts, not by economic necessity. Consequently, a decline in one’s financial condition is not likely to cause violent criminal behavior. This explains why an economic recession or depression does not invariably produce a crime spike. In the second half of the 1930s, for instance, violent crime declined, even though the country experienced some of the worst years of the Great Depression. Likewise, during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, when the economy tanked, crime fell.

https://www.city-journal.org/poverty-and-violent-crime-dont-go-hand-in-hand

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New York issues its first gender neutral driver's licenses allowing motorists to mark 'X' as their sex instead of M or F

New York state has begun issuing gender neutral driver's licenses that allow motorists to mark down 'X' in the category for sex.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles announced the move on Friday, touting it as a 'historic day' and saying the very first gender neutral photo IDs had been issued.

The new policy is being implemented in accordance with the State's Gender Recognition Act, which officially goes into effect on June 24.

Governor Kathy Hochul praised the move, saying in a statement: 'As we prepare to celebrate Pride Month in a few days, I am excited to announce this historic change that represents another victory in our fight to help ensure equality and respect for the LGBTQ+ community.'

'Every person, regardless of their gender identity or expression, deserves to have an identity document that reflects who they are,' added Hochul.

'My administration remains committed to ensuring that New York is a place of value, love and belonging for members of the LGBTQ+ community,' said the governor, a Democrat.

Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Mark J.F. Schroeder said: 'Perhaps more than any other state agency, New Yorkers directly engage with their government through the DMV, so offering identity documents that are representative of all New Yorkers is a significant milestone.'

'We are thrilled to implement this new option that we know will have a positive impact on the lives of so many of our customers,' he added.

Former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo signed the new law mandating gender neutral IDs prior to resigning in disgrace last year.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10862157/New-York-issues-gender-neutral-drivers-license.html

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What The Army Is Letting Woke Soldiers Do is a bad augury for military effectiveness. Does America need an army of wimps?

The US Army is circulating a draft policy tweak that would allow soldiers to request to move if they feel state or local laws discriminate against them based on gender, racism(?), or abortion.

The policy, dubbed “compassionate reassignment” will permit soldiers to request a transfer to a different base if they feel state or local laws discriminate against them due to their gender identity.

In effect, it would allow soldiers to declare certain states to be too racist or homophobic for them to live there.

Sources with direct knowledge of the plans said the updated guidance was drafted in response to several state laws – but before a draft of a possible Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade was leaked.

Here’s what Military.com reported:

The guidance, which would update a vague service policy to add specific language on discrimination, is far from final and would need approval from Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. But if enacted, it could be one of the most progressive policies for the force amid a growing wave of local anti-LGBTQ and restrictive contraception laws in conservative-leaning states, where the Army does most of its business.

The policy would ostensibly sanction soldiers to declare that certain states are too racist, too homophobic, too sexist or otherwise discriminatory to be able to live there safely and comfortably.

“Some states are becoming untenable to live in; there’s a rise in hate crimes and rise in LGBT discrmination,” Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America, an advocacy group, told Military.com. “In order to serve this country, people need to be able to do their job and know their families are safe. All of these states get billions for bases but barely tolerate a lot of the service members.”

Remember last year when the US Army released a recruitment ad targeting gays and kids of gays? This is the same US Army that just lost a war to 10th Century barbarians and left them $80 billion in US weapons.

Maybe they need to refocus their priorities?

https://thepatriotnation.net/what-the-army-is-letting-woke-soldiers-do-explains-why-weve-lost-so-many-wars/

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The Mass Shooting and Liberal Utopian Society

In the last two weeks, there have been two mass shootings in the United States, and the second took place this week at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. These shootings have reignited the regime’s already intense desire for a disarmed populace. Even before the bodies of the dead children had been removed from the school, our mentally diminished President spoke to the nation, demanding that rifles (which he is not even able to accurately describe) be confiscated across a 330 million person country spanning an entire continent. This despicable man, and the legion of sociopathic ghouls arrayed behind him, are clearly overjoyed that there is a classroom full of young children lying dead in Texas. They don’t actually care about the anguish of parents who will never see their child grow up. Their deaths are merely a political prop for the most evil people on the planet.

It is hard to fully comprehend just how totalitarian such designs are. But these are the very same sadistic freaks who successfully locked those 330 million people in their homes for weeks or months, and then (mostly successfully) restricted their ability to provide for their families if they refused to get an extremely dangerous mRNA injection that does not even accomplish its intended purpose. All you are to them is a guinea pig or a rat in a social experiment. You do not matter. Your children do not matter. You only exist to provide them with power.

You must understand that school shooters and other mass shooters are an extremely acute symptom of the disease that horribly afflicts the American nation. You live in an incredibly sick society, and since you are born into it and live in it every day, you go about your life mostly unaware of just how dreadful things really are. It is imperative for the people who manufacture the inversion of reality that you perceive everything through the lens of the now. This is why “The Current Thing” has such memetic power: it attacks reality distortion at its source, where obsession over what is, right now, cuts you off from any sense of historical perspective. In the case of mass shootings, the exclusion of historical perspective keeps the masses from noticing that mass shootings are a very recent phenomenon and that decades ago, when the United States had vastly more liberal gun laws, and anyone could even purchase fully automatic submachine guns in the mail, this never happened. The question you should ask is, why not? What exactly was different about America 90 years ago compared to today?

The answer to that question is fairly obvious. Modern American society is a factory for psychopaths. The young man in the North American Continent is planted in a field fertilized by atomization, loneliness, and hopelessness. Many have never met their father, and most do not have anything remotely close to a “good relationship” with him. Most have no meaningful connection to the community in which they live, nor even the nation they inhabit. In school, they are social outcasts, driven to niche internet communities for the only semblance of human interaction in their lives. They are marinated in hardcore pornography from before they have even reached pubescence. They know (or at least perceive) that they will never know the love of a flesh-and-blood woman. They are on the kind of pharmacological cocktail that any premodern society would only ascribe to witchcraft and demon possession. They have nothing to live for and no one who loves them. Given how many young men our nation is producing like this, the question we ought to be asking is not “why does this happen?” but rather “why does it not happen a lot more?”

America is an incredibly sick nation. There is a spiritual sickness that pervades everything like a dark cloud. The people who dominate every institution in our nation have held this power for at least sixty years. For these sixty years, they have treated this nation as a grand social experiment. They have made the natural family, the very bedrock of human civilization, an antiquated, outdated institution that we have progressed beyond. They have financialized and commodified all of human life, uprooting people from their homes and extended families, and making them mercenaries chasing after a rapidly devalued dollar. They have exported the industry of the nation impoverishing the heartland of the country and leaving them to languish in despair. They actively cheer the deaths and replacement of the hated population, while at the same time denying this was ever their intent. They have introduced racial and ethnic strife, and in the chaos actively undermined rule of law. Sixty years of full-spectrum control by utopian social engineers have transformed the most affluent society in human history into hell on earth.

This did not happen by accident. These people are motivated by a deep hatred of humanity. Like the geriatric that currently occupies the Oval Office who well represents them, they simply do not care how much people suffer. You might think the progressive is merely mistaken, deluded by ideology. This is not the case. They have had more than sixty years to see the full extent of human misery their ideology produces when applied to the healthiest and most prosperous conditions. They know what they are doing.

https://news.gab.com/2022/05/27/the-mass-shooting-and-liberal-utopian-society/

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The feminist case for marriage

Louise Perry

I regret to inform you that your kitten heels and morning suits will probably not be seeing service this wedding season: once again, marriage rates are down. In fact, this year the rate for heterosexual marriages is the lowest on record.

What’s more, fewer than one in five of these marriage ceremonies are religious, in keeping with a downward trend of several decades standing.

As a wedding guest, I slightly regret this turn towards the civil ceremony, only because the secular liturgy is so oddly anaemic. Seeing someone from the local council officiate on this most solemn of occasions, I can’t help but be reminded of the Simpsons episode in which a Las Vegas casino worker marries Homer and Marge with the words ‘by the power vested in me by the state gaming commission I pronounce you man and wife.’

But then everyone knows that the modern wedding is a bit of a farce, particularly since April of this year, when no fault divorce was introduced in this country. For the vast majority of couples, swearing an oath before God doesn’t mean much anymore, and the legal bond itself is now easier and quicker to wriggle out of than a bank loan. The only requirement for a divorce in England and Wales is that you must have been married for at least one year (I’m sure my husband and I weren’t the only couple to joke on our first wedding anniversary that the traditional gift of paper could very well include divorce forms).

When the wedding ceremony itself is increasingly drained of meaning, couples must cast around for another way of adding a sense of importance to the day. Thus, over the last century, the proportion of average household income put towards a wedding has doubled, and the extravagant receptions that were once confined to high society are now common among the middle and working classes. That only adds a further incentive for couples to hold off on getting married until they can afford a big do.

It used to be that the most crucial few minutes of the wedding ceremony were the most consequential minutes of most people’s lives, since they produced a profound and (almost) irreversible change. Those rare couples who sought out a divorce in the period before the Divorce Reform Act of 1969 must have desperately wanted to be rid of their marriages, since they had to work so very hard to get divorced, and could then expect to be marked with stigma for the rest of their lives.

The sexual revolution’s liberalisation of divorce law has consigned this stigma to the past. In the decade following the Divorce Reform Act, the number of divorces trebled and then kept rising, peaking in the 1980s. Since then there has been a slight decline in the divorce rate, not because of a genuine return to marital longevity, but rather because you can’t get divorced if you don’t get married in the first place, and marriage rates have not stopped falling. In 1968, 8 per cent of children were born to parents who were not married; in 2019, it was almost half. The institution of marriage, as it once was, is now more-or-less dead.

Of course, some marriages should end. Although married women are not at greater risk of domestic violence than unmarried women – the opposite, in fact – it is obviously better when abuse victims do not face legal obstacles in trying to leave their spouses. There are some couples who really should divorce and, before the reforms of the mid-twentieth century, they often couldn’t.

At the same time, only an ideologue could fail to recognise that a culture of widespread divorce has its casualties. There are, of course, the adults who later feel that they made a mistake: between a third and a half of divorced people in the UK report in surveys that they regret their decision to divorce. But just as importantly – more so, I would say – there are the children who are harmed by their parents’ divorce. Several studies in recent decades have revealed that children suffer more from the effects of a divorce than the death of a parent.

The outlook is similarly grim for those children whose parents were never married in the first place. Unmarried parents are about twice as likely to split as married ones, and children then find themselves either in a single parent family, or living with a stepparent – in practice, usually a stepfather.

Despite the often valiant efforts of single mothers, the data clearly shows that, on average, children without biological fathers at home do not do as well as other children, with higher incarceration rates for boys, higher rates of teen pregnancy for girls, and a greater likelihood of emotional and behavioural problems for both sexes. This is because single mothers are obliged to take on the almost impossible task of doing everything themselves: all of the earning, plus all of the caring, socialising, and disciplining of their children.

Meanwhile, less than two thirds of non-resident parents in the UK – almost all of them fathers – are paying child support in full. A perverse consequence of half a century of feminist opposition to marriage is that deadbeat dads are now protected from the consequences of their fecklessness.

The monogamous marriage model had many flaws, and the sexual revolutionaries were correct in pointing them out. But this model is also the best solution yet discovered to the problems presented by the asymmetrical investments that men and women make in the process of reproduction.

For all of its trade-offs, there was wisdom in the traditional model. The father was primarily responsible for earning money; the mother for caring for children at home. Such a model allows mothers and children to be physically together and at the same time financially supported. In an age of labour saving devices like washing machines and gas boilers, it has become less time consuming to run a household, and thus more feasible for mothers of young children to do paid work outside of the home – as most of us do. But attempting to play the traditional roles of mother and father simultaneously – as single mothers are forced to – is close to impossible, particularly on low wages.

Despite all of these costs – to poor women, and even more to poor children – some people still consider the death of marriage to be a good thing, and many of those people are feminists. Opposition to marriage was a common theme in much of the writing of the Second Wave, with feminists of this era describing their goal as ‘women’s liberation’. Womankind was in chains, they said, and those chains had to be broken.

‘Liberation’ was always a gnarly feminist goal. The reductive feminist analysis of marriage sees it as a method used by men to control female sexuality. And it does do that, of course, but that was never its sole function. There is also a protective function to marriage, but it’s one that makes sense only when understood in relation to children.

We are a sexually dimorphous species with distinct reproductive roles and substantial differences in size and strength between adult men and women. What’s more, there is also plenty of good evidence for some innate psychological differences between the sexes, including higher average male sex drive and greater desire for sexual variety. This empirical finding may be controversial in some quarters, but it should not surprise anyone who has eyes and ears.

In a world of sexual asymmetry, you cannot simply press the ‘more freedom’ lever and expect men and women alike to joyfully ascend to some new utopia. Not when one half of the population are far more physically imposing, are much more interested in pursuing casual sex, and will never be able to get pregnant, while the other half of the population bear (literally) the consequences of a sexual encounter that goes awry. Our biology is such that, when sex unexpectedly results in pregnancy – as it still often does, despite modern contraception – it will always be the woman left holding the baby.

The task for practically minded feminists, then, is to find a way of protecting the vulnerable from the problems presented by sexual asymmetry. Our current sexual culture does not do that, but it could. In order to change the incentive structure, we would need a technology that discourages short-termism in male sexual behaviour, protects the economic interests of mothers, and creates a stable environment for the raising of children. And we do already have such a technology, even if it is old, clunky, and prone to periodic failure. It’s called monogamous marriage.

Many feminists who lived before the 1960s knew this better than we do now. They looked at the asymmetries inherent to heterosexuality and they concluded that the male libido needed containment not liberation. Which was why two of the thirteen chapters in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women were devoted to bemoaning the lack of chastity in men: the sex with the higher sex drive, and thus – to Wollstonecraft’s mind – the greater responsibility for containing their passions. ‘Votes for women, chastity for men’ was a real suffragist slogan, now forgotten.

But perhaps we are on the brink of rediscovering such ideas. My friend Mary Harrington has written in the Spectator’s American edition of a coming ‘sexual counterrevolution’ as young people brought up in our hyper liberal culture react against the principles of sexual liberation. The same trend is evident here in the UK, as whispers of discontent among young women grow louder and louder on social media platforms like TikTok. Earlier this year, the Guardian announced that Gen Z was ‘turning its back on sex-positive feminism.’ This ideology is, according to the New York Times, ‘falling out of fashion.’

At times if feels as if young people are reaching towards the traditional notions of marriage without quite realising it. Take the group of American students who set up the ‘Affirmative Consent Project’ and marketed a ‘consent kit’, containing a condom, two breath mints, and a contract stating that the undersigned had agreed to have sex. Couples were encouraged to take a photo of themselves holding the signed piece of paper. (‘Why not invite family and friends to witness the signing?’ joked some. ‘Why not hire a professional photographer? Dress up? Make an event of it?’)

Or consider the feminist commentators who responded to the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade with the suggestion that men ought to be somehow legally bound to the women they impregnate and compelled to provide, not only financial, but also social and emotional support. Vice magazine recently announced a ‘new type of relationship’ called ‘radical monogamy’ that sounds very much like an old type of relationship. ‘Radical monogamy will offer a totally new portal to a joyful, healthy, magical kind of love’ promises one of its clueless proponents.

For all of its flaws, it seems that marriage as an institution has a way of reinventing itself. For better, for worse.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-feminist-case-for-marriage/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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