What Other Explanation Could There Be ??

What other explanation can there be besides systemic racism? What other explanation indeed. In fact, the statistics are so obvious there’s no real reason to even suspect that there might be another reason, and certainly no reason to consider the issue and look. People have been taught that the criminal justice system and America itself has been built on racism and so why even bother to look for other possible explanations?

The claim is that blacks are disproportionately exposed to the justice system, that blacks and whites are treated differently and that systemic racism is the only explanation. Prison statistics are often used to support this argument, with the percentage of black male prison inmates being higher than might be guessed by looking at their distribution in the general population. But a good demonstration of why this may not be the best example is that the prison population is about 94% male and 6% female even though women are close to 50% of the general population. No one is suggesting that sexism is the cause of this, and so there may be other factors involved.

The evidence of alleged police bias runs all the way from jay walking arrests through police involved shootings. The focus here will be on the more minor transgressions that we are all guilty of.

Ordinarily at this point, I’d ask someone to get me a piece of paper and pencil so I could produce a really good sketch explaining the example, but since my computer graphic arts talents are limited I’ll have to try prose instead.

Imagine that you’re the Police Chief of Anytown USA. Anytown is of fair size. It’s in the shape of a square, and five miles on a side. That’s twenty five square miles. The streets are all laid out as a square grid with major streets at each mile. You budget has enough money to allow you to have twenty five officers on duty at any given time. When you first planned out your assignments you put one patrol officer in each grid figuring that they could support each other as necessary.

But Anytown is just like every other town, and it has a high income side, with the country club and fine gated homes, and it has the industrial side where lower income people live. In between there is a spectrum of neighborhoods roughly laid out by income, from low to high, or from high to low depending on which way you’re driving.

Now as Police Chief you’ve noticed that there seems to be more property crime in the lower income neighborhoods. This shouldn’t be too surprising. You rarely hear of fights breaking out at the country club bar, but it’s a regular occurrence on the other side of town. So, in order to more effectively protect all of your citizens from the criminal element you shift some of your officers away from the high income part of town and toward the lower income part of town. It makes perfect sense.

Now, what do police officers do all day? They answer radio calls regarding people who need help, and they hang out at donut shops. They give presentations and provide security in schools. And when they’re not doing those things they’re sort of hanging out waiting, patrolling. And of course while they’re waiting they’re writing tickets. And because there are more police in the low income part of town where people are more likely to be walking, they’re going to see more people jay walking. More jay walking tickets. And since they’re in the lower income part of town there will be more older cars with signal lamps burned out, and owners who don’t have the money to just run down to the auto shop and have them fixed. More minor equipment tickets. They will see and stop more speeders. Simply because there are more police on the low income side of town, they will see there more of every offense that there is.

This example pretty clearly illustrates how lower income residents of Anytown will have more contact with police, and be issued more citations and it doesn’t involve race in any way. Imagine if you will that all of the residents of Anytown are black, or Asian, or Hispanic. The logic is the same and holds in any case.

But that’s just what an average guy thinks.

Munk Political Correctness Debate

I recently stumbled across the video from one of the “Munk Debates”. You can get more information about what those are here at Munk Debates Info , and go to the particular debate referred to here at Political Correctness Debate.

In general, the affair was to be a discussion of political correctness, and if or how it stifles open public discussion. The thesis of the debate was “be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress”. There were two teams of two participants who would argue in support of the premise, and against it. The team making the supportive argument was made up of Michael Dyson and Michelle Goldberg, while the opposing team was composed of Stephen Fry, and Jordan Peterson.

It’s rather long to take in unless you’re in a comfortable chair (I wasn’t) and I have no interest in trying to recount the whole business here. But there is one point that Ms. Goldberg brought up that I’d like to comment on.

She mentioned that during the 2016 presidential campaign, as a journalist, she had had the opportunity to attend many Trump rallies all over the country and had used that opportunity to ask fellow attendees why they supported Donald Trump. Being tired of all of the political correctness, she said, was often mentioned. However when asked to specify examples most of her subjects could not. I thought about this for a bit and decided that it was quite understandable for an average person talking to a reporter not to be able to recall any specifics. I couldn’t immediately come up with anything myself. So I set myself to thinking, and came up with the idea that political correctness doesn’t produce major wounds. It’s more like a death from a thousand cuts, as it is meant to be.

The idea, of course, is that if you change the language that people use then you can change their perception. You can actually change the way people think. Linguists, politicians, and social engineers have been aware, and Orwell warned us of this in his book Nineteen Eighty-four.

In any case, even though people may not be able to easily articulate their feelings on the matter there are many examples. At one point we were told that we were no longer to use the term “Miss” when addressing women of unknown marital status. It was dismissive we were told and there was no masculine analog and so it was inherently sexist. It had to go. And then we were told that we were not to use the word “girl” to refer to young girls either as this was also dismissive. These are women, we were told. At one point we saw a female United States senator berate a high ranking military officer for answering a question “yes ma’am” just as he would have used “yes sir” to her male counterparts. It was stupid and petty, and she pretended to take offence for the benefit of a television audience even though no possible disrespect could have been implied. It was a minor annoyance, but it left a scar.

In my life time (not that I’m so aged) I have seen the reference go from “colored people” to “Negros” to “blacks” and finally to African – Americans. Of course the National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People (NAACP) won’t change its brand. The very purpose of a hyphen is to associate two things while keeping them separate. It’s an annoyance.

Mechanics can no longer have “pin up” calendars in their work spaces as it creates a “hostile work environment” for any women that happen to be there. It’s an annoyance.

Children are sent home from school for having “bubble guns”; for nibbling toaster pastries into the shape of a gun; for pointing their finger at a classmate as if it were a gun; for invoking the powers of a magic ring in a threatening manner; for kissing a classmate; for having the wrong snack or packed lunch, or for picking up a brass shell casing off the ground and taking it to school. It’s an annoyance.

We don’t refer to homosexuals as homosexuals any longer, now they’re “gay”, and they’re seemingly everywhere. If someone is uneasy seeing public displays of affection between same sex couples, or if they aren’t totally supportive then they’re immediately tagged as homophobes, haters, and bigots. It’s an annoyance.

I had never heard the term “wet back” until my family moved from the city to a more rural environment in the Midwest. It wasn’t really used as a pejorative, it was just a matter of fact. It described a Mexican citizen who had come to the U.S. without the benefit of passing through the immigration apparatus. No one really cared much that I can remember. They were minding their own business working on local farms and ranches. They weren’t a drain on social services because there weren’t that many social services to drain. Of course all of that has changed in the last few decades. Now “illegal aliens” can apply for and receive a number of social services. Students can receive “resident” status at whatever university they might want to apply to, and have access to well-endowed scholarship funds while citizens have to struggle to pay “out of state” tuition. You see them on the news reports marching, carrying the flags of their native countries, demonstrating against the laws of the country they have chosen to squat in. And the twisting of the language is fairly obvious in this case. The description went from the legally precise illegal alien to illegal immigrant to undocumented immigrant to undocumented citizen in some places. Suffrage for illegals is now being considered in some localities. Rights and privileges which do not exist are demanded. It’s an annoyance.

We were exposed to the “Piss Christ” and most of us were offended. Even the atheists among us. Even those who routinely worked in and around the offending liquid. Although certainly allowed, it was an unnecessary, provocative insult to Christians everywhere. We were told that we had to accept it as an artistic expression, and begrudgingly we did. Now fast forward thirty years (yes, it’s been that long) and we’re told that we may not criticize Islam. We may not be concerned about a radical minority or Islamists who have sworn to, and do on occasion, kill us. If we do express our concern, we’re labeled as Islamophobic. If we have reservations about supporting unlimited access to the country by and the provision of benefits to economic refugees, political asylum seekers and their extended families we are labeled as hysterical haters and bigots. And if we produce any sort of likeness of the Profit Muhammed we are accused of making an unnecessary, provocative insult to Muslims everywhere and we have no right to be surprised and no redress if someone tries to kill us for that. It’s an annoyance.

Free speech and expression are under attack. On many college campuses you can’t pass out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day without a permit, and then only from the confines of the designated “Free Speech Zone”. Students require “trigger warnings” so that they can cover their ears or get up and leave before they hear anything that would make them feel uncomfortable, regardless if they have a need to know it or not. They need puppy rooms to help them cope with the stress of a pampered life. They are excused from exams and passed regardless so that they may participate in social activism. Some of this activism is spent protesting the high cost, and low value of a college education. The irony here is almost too rich. They borrow money (essentially from the government) fail to learn anything useful because they spend too much time out of class and then protest that they should owe so much and have no useful skills to sell in order to pay back the cost. That they fail to see the irony is pathetic. It’s an annoyance.

Halloween costumes are no longer allowed as they require too much thought. Animals and inanimate objects are all that’s really left. You virtually cannot fart without culturally appropriating someone’s culture, or micro aggressing someone. Any sufficiently imaginative plaintiff can find fault with anything you say or do. It’s an annoyance.

We are told, and expected to believe, that men and women are interchangeable and that any perceived differences are the result of cultural indoctrination by the male patriarchy. Outside of their biological differences that have developed over five million years they’re exactly the same. As if you could swap men and women’s brains en masse and expect a good outcome. People know this intuitively to be false even if they can’t quite express it. And yet we are still bombarded with the idea that it has been the “patriarchy” and not five million years of evolution that has shaped our existence. It’s an annoyance.

In short, the complaint about political correctness isn’t about one word, or two, or even a list of words. Political correctness is an assault on our rationality. It’s a progressive attempt to tear the fabric of our lives so that it can be resewn in a form more to the liking of some academic and political elite. It’s an attempt, through language, to control the way we speak and thus think. People can feel this in their guts. Taken one at a time these things are just annoying. Added over a lifetime they have become a potent political issue.

But that’s just what an average guy thinks.

The Two Minutes Hate (George Orwell)

“The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared. The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure…

Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard — a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party — an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life…

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically. … But what was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the pitiful rubbish that they were — in spite of all this, his influence never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State…

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston’s hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true. At those moments his secret loathing of Big Brother changed into adoration, and Big Brother seemed to tower up, an invincible, fearless protector, standing like a rock…

…

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother, black-haired, black-moustachio’d, full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen. Nobody heard what Big Brother was saying. It was merely a few words of encouragement, the sort of words that are uttered in the din of battle, not distinguishable individually but restoring confidence by the fact of being spoken. Then the face of Big Brother faded away again, and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"

George Orwell