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26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

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Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#211
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a citation for that? It’s not what we’re talking about – no one is being criticized for actual science – but the coverage I saw didn’t support that claim at all.

A citation ? I shudder at the idea of lending an air of academic gravitas to Bill Maher's Real Time , but yes it's clear that jumping on the “that’s racism” bandwagon, as the gp put it, is exactly what Affleck did. He was so angered by the statement, " We have been sold this meme of Islamophobia, where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam get conflated as bigotry against Muslims as people. It is intellectually ri…

Re:Affleck, again, that’s not the claim being discussed. Nobody is being criticized for scientific study – this is just a bunch of rich elite men talking about politics.

That said, it also doesn’t match the claims you’re making. Affleck wasn’t saying that no bad had ever happened with Islam, but rather that it wasn’t good to make such broad claims about a huge and diverse population — note that each of the things mentioned are also true of Christians but we are far less likely to treat such blanket statements about them as useful or accurate.

> Take a look at what evolutionary psychologists and biologists have been facing over the past decade.

I’m well aware of that and you’re misrepresenting it. They’re not being criticized for actual science but for unsupported claims which aren’t supported by the scientific evidence but are conveniently close to existing political beliefs.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#212
post #98
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not being uncharitable. I am asking whether the poster has analyzed the number of studies in the USA, structured as carefully as this one, and found that they are in fact labelled racist more than 50% of the time. And if so, by whom. I don't think the poster needs charity. Clarity is more like it.

> I am not being uncharitable. I am asking whether the poster has analyzed the number of studies in the USA, structured as carefully as this one, and found that they are in fact labelled racist more than 50% of the time. And if so, by whom. What you're asking is not just uncharitable, it doesn't even make sense (even if it was possible). It's also irrelevant to what the parent said, which is not a quantified claim th…

No one is asking for a specific "hard 50% +c". Just more than 50%. "Usually" most emphatically does not mean "often" or "a lot of times." This sort of dumbing down of dialogue and tossing about of opinions is the opposite of what HN should be.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#213
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the US it's declining. It's just much higher. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0... (I suspect from the places named that the more corrupt the police are the more violence is present, but have no evidence for that).

It has nothing to do with police corruption, and everything to do with the pull back in policing due to anti-police media/BLM narrative. But don’t take my word for it, just ask the people that live there and who are the victims of such crime: https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents... A particularly powerful quote from the article: On whether the community wanted police to back off after the deat…

I thought I'd researched Baltimore recently, and found my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16281512

Higher death rate than a tanks-and-carbombs national emergency? Police routinely planting toy guns on kids they've murderd? Something is deeply, deeply wrong there and the rest of the US should stage an intervention.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#214
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, and this is precisely what I find troubling -- that you misunderstand them and miss the actual problem they point out. Obviously, I can't vouch for everyone , but since I haven't seen any behavior of the kind you refer to (certainly not among more-or-less mainstream figure), I can safely assume it's not done by "lots of people".

Just have a look at the public discourse in Sweden and you'll soon find out your position is untenable. While you are right in stating that the majority of the population will not find [these assertions] racist (or xenophobe, islamophobe, etcetera) there is a big discrepancy between what people think and what they can state out loud for fear of being called just that. This is due in part to the fact that the media -…

> While you are right in stating that the majority of the population will not find [these assertions] racist

That's not what I meant. What I meant is that the left, even the radical left -- as an intellectual movement -- does not find this kind of statements racist in and of themselves.

> This is due in part to the fact that the media - print and broadcast - are very active in disavowing such standpoints and putting those labels on people who hold them.

But this is different, and I would agree with the viewpoint that such discourse is racist, and precisely what I meant by saying that the point is misunderstood. The left does not consider a factual statement such as "muslims carry out a disproportionately large number of terror acts" as itself racist. On the other hand, such constant discourse is racist because its subtext is to instill the idea that terrorism is innately muslim (factually false) or that Muslims are somehow intrinsically drawn to terrorism (also false). If talk shows were to constantly talk about the temperature of the sun, that would also mean that there is something going on beside the desire to educate the public of a scientific fact. I.e., there is a difference between some fact and the action of repeatedly talking about that fact in contexts that aren't really about statistics.

It's like that famous story of a man who escapes the insane asylum and, intent on not being taken back, decides to only speak the truth so he won't be considered crazy, and he goes around telling everyone he sees "the Earth is round." It's not the fact itself that is crazy in this story. Because I work in the tech industry I have come across quite a few people in the course of my carreer who are on the autistic spectrum, and some of them were simply unable to understand how a statement and the constant repetition of that statement are different acts and may have completely different meanings.

> I can all but guarantee that you would be an outcast among your peers if you even hint to having such opinions.

You are absolutely wrong about that. Like I said, there is a big difference in subtext between constantly bringing up some fact and stating that the fact itself is racist. The facts I mentioned are a statistical description of some current (and transient) historical conditions; frequently bringing them up is a sign of a (racist) political sentiment.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#215
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the US it's declining. It's just much higher. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0... (I suspect from the places named that the more corrupt the police are the more violence is present, but have no evidence for that).

It has nothing to do with police corruption, and everything to do with the pull back in policing due to anti-police media/BLM narrative. But don’t take my word for it, just ask the people that live there and who are the victims of such crime: https://www.npr.org/2017/12/31/574824963/baltimore-residents... A particularly powerful quote from the article: On whether the community wanted police to back off after the deat…

> media provocateurs and the liberal journalists

Please don't post ideological boilerplate to HN. This is not a site for ideological battle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#216
post #18

>Persistence in violence was associated with male sex (OR 2.5), personality disorder (OR 2.3), violent crime conviction before age 19 (OR 2.0), drug-related offenses (OR 1.9), nonviolent criminality (OR 1.9), substance use disorder (OR 1.9), and major mental disorder (OR 1.3). It sounds like we need to invest more in mental health.

Do we? How do you draw that conclusion from the data? Personality disorders seem to be fairly resistant to treatment/therapy, and certainly more than 1% of the population has issues with mental health, yet they don’t seem to commit crimes at such an alarming rate. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t think your conclusion is directly supported by this study.

You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's an abuse of this site, regardless of which ideology you're promulgating, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity which the site is for.

Since (a) the site guidelines explicitly ask you not do this; (b) you've ignored our recent request to stop doing this, and (c) you've been using multiple accounts to do it in this thread, we've banned this account.

Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would work but incarceration is an unscalable solution. Some CA stats: - $71k/person/year - 130,000 inmates - 135% of capacity - highest rate of incarceration in the world We're maxed out - and all this doesn't even solve the root issues of mental illness and poverty. We need alternative ideas with better ROI.

Sure. But what are these alternatives? 1% of the population are psychopaths and no one knows how to make them not be so. What else can we do but put them away?

The easy solution is prison but its also crazy expensive both in terms of raw cost and societal cost (broken up families, addiction, developing gang ties in jail, recidivism, opportunity cost of taking a working age person out of the job pool).

IMO there is no politically easy solution or we would have already done it. Society has to change how it views criminals and invest resources in the things that increase the likelihood of crime. For example, rich psychopaths commit a lot less violent crime than poor psychopaths. Social services, addiction counseling, education, etc help. But its extremely hard to convince people more resources should go to helping criminals vs punishing them.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#218
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's call it poetic justice, or taste of their own medicine.

You sound just like the people you condemn.

And yet only one side (between me and the people I condemn) actually controls what the law is like and helps inflict pain and harsh conditions upon millions of people serving time.

So what I "sound like" is quite irrelevant. Except if you believe that people who cherish revenge and punishment of inmates will one day replace the people population based on my wish.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#219
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just have a look at the public discourse in Sweden and you'll soon find out your position is untenable. While you are right in stating that the majority of the population will not find [these assertions] racist (or xenophobe, islamophobe, etcetera) there is a big discrepancy between what people think and what they can state out loud for fear of being called just that. This is due in part to the fact that the media -…

> While you are right in stating that the majority of the population will not find [these assertions] racist That's not what I meant. What I meant is that the left, even the radical left -- as an intellectual movement -- does not find this kind of statements racist in and of themselves . > This is due in part to the fact that the media - print and broadcast - are very active in disavowing such standpoints and putting…

The left, and in particular the radical left, has no issue having such constant discourse in regards to men. Even in this article the politics of our day shows that gender is acceptable to call out but not race.

This article shows the issue of doing so. The subtext from much of left literature is to instill the idea that violence is innately male (factually false) or that men are somehow intrinsically drawn to violence (also false). Even if averaged it out to a whole 2% of the male population, the other 98% are not. The association to the male sex is similar to the association to race or the association between Muslims and terrorism. An other word for it would be correlation.

The article has an issue with calling out race, and it should because its a very small portion of non-native swedes that do violent crime. It has no issue to call out males, even though the association is weaker. That is politics, and a very specific one at that.

Re: 26% of violent crime convicts account for 63% of violent crime conviction (2014)

#220
post #219
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While you are right in stating that the majority of the population will not find [these assertions] racist That's not what I meant. What I meant is that the left, even the radical left -- as an intellectual movement -- does not find this kind of statements racist in and of themselves . > This is due in part to the fact that the media - print and broadcast - are very active in disavowing such standpoints and putting…

The left, and in particular the radical left, has no issue having such constant discourse in regards to men. Even in this article the politics of our day shows that gender is acceptable to call out but not race. This article shows the issue of doing so. The subtext from much of left literature is to instill the idea that violence is innately male (factually false) or that men are somehow intrinsically drawn to violen…

> The left, and in particular the radical left, has no issue having such constant discourse in regards to men.

Why would there be? The point of view is not one of describing some hypothetical world but our concrete world. If in our concrete world the position of, say, white men and that of blacks is different, why would you even assume that the two should be treated the same in discussions of society? No sociologist, anthropologist or historian would say that social issues in an imaginary world where blacks and whites have equal power should be studied in the same way as in a real world where they don't. Statistics are studied in their appropriate context; otherwise, they're misleading.

> The subtext from much of left literature is to instill the idea that violence is innately male

No, violence is usually male, but I don't think we consider it innate in the sense you seem to allude to (i.e., as the main cause or as a sign of an inability to change). In general, we don't like talking about innate qualities for several reasons. 1. The science is vague and weak at best -- even when innate qualities are found, their respective strength is unknown and the effect size is usually far too small compared to observation, which suggests that in many cases innate causes have weak explanatory power, and 2. innate causes make for very bad excuses when it comes to calls for changing behavior; innate biological capabilities explain 100% of humans' inability to fly, yet that hasn't stopped us from wanting to and succeeding in building airplanes. In fact, if you find any subtext in leftist thought particularly emphasizes any innate uncontrollable trait, then I'd say you've either found something quite unusual or you've completely missed the mark. The general tendency not to focus on innate "essentialism" is among the left's most distinguishing marks. It's not that we deny the possibility of strong innate forces, but we think that even when they are overwhelmingly strong -- such as the case of flying and airplanes -- they are often overcome, and such a focus is often used as a reactionary stance against change even though that does not follow even from the claimed innateness.

> The association to the male sex is similar to the association to race or the association between Muslims and terrorism.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that both are indeed correlations. No in the sense that men have been subjugating women almost everywhere almost constantly for many centuries if not millennia, while Islam has become abnormally overrepresented in terrorism only very recently, correlated with decline, not rise in its power.

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