Steve Gilliard shreds the jokers at Redstate who are still defending short-lived Washingtonpost.com conservative blogger Box Turtle Ben Domenech from charges of plagiarism, racism, misogyny and general idiocy.
Steve’s takedown of the “crime went down because black babies were aborted” fallacy uncritically endorsed by Ben is a thing of beauty.
steve is fantastic everyone should read it.
Damn. I love Steve. I don’t always agree with him and his tactics, but when he’s on, he’s on.
You call that a smackdown?
Fallacy?
Steve Gilliard shouldn’t touch statistics with a ten foot pole. His ‘refutation’ of Freakanomics wasn’t compelling. His core coompetence being accusations of racism, he should stick with that.
From the FBI stats Steve quoted:
From here Steve comments
Um, no. From Africanamericans.com::
And 26.8 percent of arrestees were black. Thus, blacks are slightly more than twice as more likely to be arrested than non-blacks. Thus, it does not logically follow that aborting white babies would reduce crime. With violent crimes, the statistics are even more damning:
Roughly three times.
Perhaps he skipped his math class or something.
core coompetence…
Doh!
Competence.
Tuomas, the hell?
On pure logic alone, if 70 percent of the crimes are committed by one group and 30 percent by another, the overall amount of crime will be affected more by culling the group responsible for the 70 percent of crimes than by culling the group responsible for the 30 percent of crimes. If you want to make a bigger impact, you cut the larger group.
It’s basic math.
And, of course, the fact that the arrest rates are higher for blacks than for whites does not necessarily reflect the actual proportion of crimes committed by either group.
Zuzu:
The groups are not the same size. If you want to cull crime, you target the group that commits more crimes in proportion to it’s size.
You know, that’s logic 101 too…
To clarify, let me break down Steve Gilliard’s post on Redstate to the three parts it consists of:
1) Any claim that blacks commit more crimes is racist to it’s core.
My response:
May be, but it is irrelevant to truth.
2) FBI data shows that whites are more criminal, thus, it should be white babies that would be aborted.
My response:
No, it does not, whites commit less crimes adjusted to number. Completely dishonest OR stupid of Steve to draw the conclusion he draws.
3) Human rights organizations claim that blacks are more easily arrested and convicted
My response:
Yes, I believe it is true, but I do not believe it explains the disproportional rates away completely.
Main problem is with point 2, but like Steve, you seem to be using point 3 (and perhaps 1) to enhance the point 2 and make it immune to criticism.
It’s a triple defense of “Blacks do not commit more crimes, but are still arrested more, and everyone who argues otherwise is a racist”. Dishonest.
So, what, you eliminate all black people and you get a 30 percent reduction in arrests? By that logic, you could accomplish an even greater reduction in arrest rates, 35%, by eliminating half the white people. Or, if you want to go the genocidal route, you could eliminate all men and see an enormous reduction in crime rates (not just arrest rates), since the vast majority of crimes are committed by men.
You’re confusing rates of commission of crime with arrest rates. The two are not at all the same.
Take drugs, for example: it’s well-known that middle-class white kids take and deal drugs but few get caught. Yet black kids get arrested for drug-related crimes at a much higher rate than white kids.
The fact that few middle-class white kids get arrested for drug-related crimes does not mean that they commit fewer drug-related crimes, proportionally, than black kids. It means only that they get caught less often. You can only quantify the racial breakdown of crimes once someone is caught, and black people are far more likely to be caught than white people, because of the widespread perception that black=criminal. You saw it in the photo captions after Hurricane Katrina, where pictures of white people walking through floodwaters with food were described in captions as “finding” food while pictures of black people doing the very same thing were described in captions as “looting.” You see it in the fact that while meth is a largely white, rural issue, there’s no hysteria about the country being a dangerous place full of white criminals like there was with crack, inner cities and black people.
By the way, the aborting-black-babies-makes-crime-go-down thing IS a fallacy. First off, the author of Freakonomics has stated that the legalization of abortion resulted in fewer unwanted children and fewer children born to mothers who were not in a position to raise them. He also did not make a racial argument at all; that was added later by people like Bill Bennett.
Moreover, white women get abortions, too, meaning that plenty of white fetuses were aborted along with black ones. And crime went down in their absence as well.
Of course he didn’t put the racial angle in to it (what, and commit a career suicide?). But the racial angle can be hypothized: Blacks are more likely to be poor and less likely to afford unwanted children.
Just saying it IS a fallacy does not make it so.
I do not argue for genocide (when I say ‘target’, I mean more police and possibly better education. And cultural change: “Blame the white man” ain’t working. The police thing is where some leftists disagree, by claiming that those blacks commit crimes because the ‘fascist pigs’ oppress them).
As for the whites getting away with crimes… The obvious solution is to make sure that whites do not get away with crime, not letting blacks get away with crime. Furthermore, IMHO the War on Drugs is ill-executed and somewhat futile.
So how do you explain the reduction in the crime rate in light of the abortion of all those white babies?
Eh, unwanted babies. Point is that probably the too poor to have a baby — abortion, is probably more prevalent with blacks on the average. But of course, some whites are poor too, so it has reduced crime in that way too. It’s not either/or, but both/and.
And oops, we shouldn’t talk about babies (I blame Steve), these are embryos and feti we’re talking about.
Jesus, Tuomas–what the fuck? I can’t believe anyone not wearing a hood is defending the aborting black babies comment.
Zuzu’s right–you can’t tell shit from arrest rates. It should be noted that Bill Bennett, who was the original one who fantasized openly about eliminating black people through genocide, was the drug czar under Reagan. With horrible racists like him in charge of law enforcement, it’s no wonder black people are arrested way out of proportion. Because Bennett can’t actually have his fantasy of eliminating all black people in a generation, he obviously preferred to disempower black people by getting as many as possible thrown into jail, preferably with a felony that would get their right to vote revoked.
There’s always going to be a poorest person in the country.
There’s always going to be a poorest 25% of people in the country.
It doesn’t matter who you get rid of, there’s always going to be a poorest 25% (or 10%, or 40%, or, given the way the economic divide is widening, 80%) in the country.
Until Tuomas and his cotheorists show awareness of this, I don’t seem much point in continuing to have these discussions.
Well, Amanda. Here you (all) are cheering the comment:
That is based on lousy statistics, see comment #3. And #6, just in case.
At least the black babies -comment is based (on very simplistic view, that does not take into account all the possible variables) on statistics. But perhaps you favor the “you are either with us or against us” -logic. I do not favor genocide (black or white) — collective guilt is barbaric — but I will call bullshit on atrocious use of statistics.