Lawrence Auster was gracious enough to post one comment I sent to him. He never fixed his comment system after Movable Type broke (moving to Haloscan seemed to work out for Gene Expression) and so the only way to comment is to email him. To see my responses after the first, you’ll just have to read this blog.
After Auster said that “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: modern liberal society is a factory for producing young white female murder victims.” I responded:
The stats do not support your contention:
http://mangans.blogspot.com/2007/11/new-york-homicides-at-lowest-since-63.html
It is actually a factory for producing criminal murder victims. That’s why whites and ESPECIALLY females have such low victimization rates.
LA:
I’m not talking about statistics or some huge epidemic of murder, I was not saying that there is a vast number of white murder victims. In fact I’m not talking about statistics at all. I’m talking about what we see happening every week in the news. I’m talking about human beings. Each of these crimes matters and happens for certain reasons. There is a distinct pattern to these crimes, the Eloihood on one side, the predatory quality on the other, and so on, which I’ve shown over and over. It’s as though a pre-set process keeps resulting in these very similar murders, which keep occurring steadily. And that’s what I mean by a factory. Further, these crimes express something about us, as people, as a society. This is what I’m interested in, I’m interested in the mindset and beliefs and behaviors that make these murders possible, along with the systematic ignoring of this phenomenon by society.
I know that talking about the lives and deaths of individual human beings as moral actors and as representative of their society, rather than just looking at overall statistics, will seem strange to a Darwinian, who are only interested in macro changes occurring in a whole population, and has no interest in human being as moral actors.
As for your comment that society is really “a factory for producing criminal murder victims,” we would expect criminals to be murdered more than anyone else. Disordered, violent people tend to die in disorderly, violent ways. That’s normal, that’s to be expected, and it’s no loss to society. What is not normal, and what is a terrible loss to society, is what we have under liberalism, with white victims, particularly females, repeatedly putting themselves like sheep in situations where they are murdered by nonwhites. As I’ve said, the mentality that leads to this phenomenon is part and parcel of the mentality that is leading to white Western suicide. That the West is committing suicide, as all serious conservatives agree, and that modern society is a factory for producing white female murder victims, are two aspects of the same overall event.
I don’t have much of a problem with generalizing from a subset of people to society more broadly. If I did, I would not be interested in statistics, because that is precisely what statistics are all about. It does crucially rest on the belief that the more something happens the more representative it is. Without that, we would have no basis in claiming that homicide is more typical of African Americans than whites or of males than females, or that the Great Sixties Freakout was any more murderous than the placid 50s that liberals love to hate (except for its lack of economic inequality).
Yes, we would expect criminals to be murdered more than anyone else. We would expect an automobile factory to produce many automobiles. On that basis we would call the building a factory for producing automobiles. People may also make sandwhiches in the factory on their lunch-break and even take a few home that they don’t eat, but I wouldn’t call it a factory for producing sandwhiches (no matter how similar the pattern of sandwhiches is). Here you may be upset that I am talking about sandwhiches as if they were murders, but my point is not to make any point about the relation of murders and sandwhiches but merely what makes something representative. If we do not care what makes murder more or less prevalent that will merely mean more ACTUAL HUMAN BEINGS whose lives are snuffed out.
The Talmud says that whoever saves one life, it is as if they had saved the world. In keeping with that, I would say that saving ten lives must mean saving at least ten worlds. Those ten saved worlds we don’t see should demand as much attention as the one we do.
Mexicans are another area where I think it is very important that we pay attention to statistics. Open-borders enthusiasts sometimes point out that immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. This is true. What nobody other than Steve Sailer and others will point out is that 1. The national average includes blacks who far and away have the highest homicide rates and 2. It is only the first generation of Mexican immigrants that have the low crime rates. Their children and grand-children have very high ones. Pundits simply assume that later generations will assimilate to middle class norms, just like their grand-parents at Ellis Island (great-great-grandparents in my case, I think). The data says they get worse. Every pundit talking about the magical powers of assimilation should be required to read Generations of Exclusion, which they certainly can’t dismiss as the product of Jared Taylor & his minions. This has great relevance for things like birthright citizenship, benefits to children of illegal immigrants, and whether amnesty sets off immigrant baby-booms. I’ve had some thoughts on how I would prefer immigration policy be set up here, though I think you might find them overly reductionist, materialist and consequentialist.
There is a liberal who for some time has run an anti-Sailer site. One of his running schticks was to bang the drum on the problem of white conservative male criminals (who he claims to believe are fans of Steve driven to commit crimes by his writings or something). The stories he highlights seem to generally be real and I’m not going to dismiss the real victims. But is he right to say that we need to be very worried about the danger of conservative white men? No, and so we answer him with statistics.
May 1, 2009 at 9:45 am
Selected anecdotes have the property of being non-refutable yet prejudicial, which makes them good propaganda ordnance. Telling a guy like Auster (that wants to give everyone a specific brainworm and extract most others) to stop using them is like telling a Chess player to stop using his bishops.
May 1, 2009 at 10:00 am
An interesting question that wouldn’t interest Auster: have inter-racial vs. intra-racial crime rates changed (in any disproportionate direction) following the emergence of modern liberal society (which we might date from 1960 or 1965)? It might prove complicated, since racial populations haven’t grown at parity.
Auster’s reasoning is foolish.
May 1, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Here’s an interesting take on Lawrence Auster and immigrant/interracial crime:
http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2009/04/lawrence-auster-and-killer-immigrants.html
May 1, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Zomg, I guess I should let Auster speak for himself when he has time, but I don’t believe he thinks in anything like those terms. He could use statistics to push his points but he thinks in terms of salient, sympathetic narratives instead. I don’t read him that much, so it could be that he dose use stats and I’m just unaware.
Chip, one notable form of interracial violence that has changed is lynching. The Inductivist has some stats on how that changed over time, though as he notes there it was pretty minor even by the mid-20th century. That’s extra-judicial killing. I wonder how it would look if we included on-the-job shootings by police.
Paulie, that’s quite a story.
May 3, 2009 at 11:02 pm
That is a case of the kind of disingenuousness that Iwrote about earlier.
(Going from Crime victims => Female murder victims)
May 5, 2009 at 9:54 pm
The host of this site has corresponded with me and his comment have been posted at my site under the name “Albert Nock,” but for some reason he uses the absurd name teageegeepea here at his own blog. I decline addressing him by such a ridiculous name, and will continue to address him as “Albert Nock.”
I take Mr. Nock’s point that overall crime statistics matter. But he entirely misses and dismisses my point. We have a clearly defined, repeated phenomenon in front of us, consisting of: (1) white women are being regularly raped and white people of both sexes are being regularly killed by nonwhites—by blacks, by illegal aliens, by Muslims; (2) the white victims themselves, because of the “see-nothing-bad-about-nonwhites” propaganda that runs our society, keep putting themselves into situations with nonwhites and particularly blacks where they get killed; and (3) the society ignores this racial rape and murder of whites and covers it up, because the society only recognizes white racial sin against nonwhites, and refuses as a matter of principle to recognize nonwhite hatred and violence against whites.
I’ve posted numerous accounts about these racial murders at my site. I’ve pointed to this phenomenon, I’ve shown its characteristic patterns. I’ve said, “Here is something that exists, something that matters, something we need to be aware of, something that society ignores.”
But, because such rapes and murders are not many compared to the total number of murders, Nock dismisses them. Nock, being a reductionist materialist, does not see or care about anything other than statistics. So he is of zero help in defending our society, and particularly in defending whites from anti-white violence. As he said to me at VFR last year, he likes our civilization, but doesn’t personally believe in the things that make the society possible, such as religion, and therefore he sees himself as a free rider.
However, in this current exchange, he’s not just being a free rider on our society, which is bad enough, He is actively trying to dismiss discussion of the ongoing race war against whites.
May 6, 2009 at 12:44 am
I’ve been going by TGGP for a lot longer then I’ve been using the nock email account, but you can call be by whatever name you wish.
We have a clearly defined, repeated phenomenon
See my point about the “pattern of ‘1’s”. A lot of things happen repeatedly, like lotteries being won by somebody. Those ‘1’s, murders and lotto winners are all real and I don’t want to dismiss them. But what do we mean when we say it constitutes a pattern?
white women are being regularly raped
I will certainly agree with you that women are the main victims of rape (though NOT violent crime generally). But as you can see, incidents of rape fluctuate greatly rather than being a steady (is that what you mean by regular?) pattern. Among women, whites are among the least likely to be raped. My guess is that for thousands of years every single year multiple white women were raped. Under some definitions that might constitute a regular pattern of white women being raped but as patterns of crime go that’s a weak claim.
by illegal aliens
You’re primarily referring to Hispanics here, and as I pointed out above it is vital REJECT the emphasis you place on immigrant hispanics as opposed to hispanics more broadly, because it is the later generations that have SIGNIFICANTLY higher crime rates. Rather than saying crimes committed by “illegal aliens”, just say “hispanics” and in the context of immigration point out that their children and grandchildren will have much higher crime rates. This defeats any dodge others might make along the lines of “People said the same things about immigrants to Ellis Island and look how well that turned out”.
by Muslims
Muslims have among the lowest crime rates of the religions in the United States. If you go to judicial-inc.biz you’ll hear story after story of crimes committed by jews (or gentiles that they claim are really “crypto-jews”, but that’s beside the point), but it wouldn’t persuade anyone who wasn’t already a believer because it’s just common knowledge that jews have very low crime rates. So what you’ve established is that a low crime-rate group still contains criminals. I’d be shocked if that hadn’t been the case. You are picking out the ‘1’s I spoke of.
the white victims themselves, because of the “see-nothing-bad-about-nonwhites” propaganda that runs our society, keep putting themselves into situations with nonwhites and particularly blacks where they get killed
You are correct that blacks have far and away the highest homicide rate, although the victims are still mostly black and hispanic males. Are whites generally unaware that there are significant racial differences in crime rates? Even if they’re not acknowledged in public, I highly doubt that’s the case. Even Jesse Jackson acknowledged he behaves differently around different races and so many people quote him on that because it’s widely recognized as accurate. Ex post I would expect to find that the victims of crime behaved less cautiously than average. Ex ante how likely would it be that a similar person in a similar situation (as far as the victim knew at the time) who behaved that way would be victimized? That’s what we’d have to estimate in order to say anything about whether there’s irrational or ignorant behavior that would benefit form our enlightenment. If Jesse Jackson crosses the side of the streeth with the ghetto black youths and winds up getting knifed by the rare Korean hoodlum we can hardly call him foolish without the benefit of hindsight.
Have you never heard of “missing white woman syndrome“? Society does not ignore crimes against white women. You may often hear people claiming the criminal defense system is racist by pointing out that it is less punitive when the victims are black compared to white. What they neglect to mention is that because the majority of crime is intra-racial the result is that white criminals are MORE heavily penalized.
But, because such rapes and murders are not many compared to the total number of murders, Nock dismisses them. Nock, being a reductionist materialist, does not see or care about anything other than statistics
I don’t think there are never cases in which non-whites out of racial hatred attack whites. The Zebra Murders are clearly such an instance. Unlike liberals, I’m not especially concerned with “hate crime” because 1. I treat all murders the same (I don’t dismiss any as “not counting” or something) and 2. only a miniscule percentage of murders are racially motivated, and so it is implausible that we will ever reach the point of diminishing returns at which it is worth focusing on hate crimes rather than crimes more broadly. I care about statistics because statistics is how you get the most accurate picture of murders. To the extent that a person rejected statistics as the way to analyze murder my guess would be that they’re not really that concerned with murder. I honestly don’t see what you’re holding forth as superior to statistics (I explicitly states that I consider news reports inferior but it’s not clear that you disagreed with that) in analyzing the issue which could just be an indication of poor communication and understanding between us.
So he is of zero help in defending our society, and particularly in defending whites from anti-white violence.
My honest guess is that neither you nor I will have any detectable effect on that. Mark Kleiman might. If you’ve got an idea that seems as workable as the HOPE project, I’m all ears.
the ongoing race war against whites
There are more white women murdered by white men than blacks, illegal aliens & Muslims. I don’t believe there is a “gender war” and I don’t think you do either. When you use that kind of hyperbole you are gong to get dismissed by people with less free time and patience than me.
May 6, 2009 at 2:13 am
Come on TGGP, just tell us your Christian name. Why do your torture us?
There’s this image (we might go so far as to call it a model) – the image of an innocent white girl who allows herself to be victimized by a predatory black man because she has absorbed “white guilt” and ignored her instincts. It’s a powerful image for the race war crew, but I’m not sure it has any empirical support.
Good call on the Missing White Woman Syndrome. I haven’t seen any academic papers on that, though.
An abstract from a paper in the American Journal of Criminal Justice:
Existing research suggests that juries are more likely to condemn murderers to death when offenders are black victims are white. It remains to be seen, however, whether these decisions reflect broader racial prejudices in society that are imported into the jury room. If they do, then insuring equity in capital sentencing may be beyond reach. Accordingly, this study uses factorial design methodology to examine whether members of the general public are more supportive of capital punishment when asked to rate a vignette describing a murder involving a white victim and black offender as opposed to other victim-offender racial combinations. Our analyses suggest that the race of the offender, but not the victim, has a significant influence on support for capital punishment. Thus, procedural safeguards alone may be unable to eliminate racial bias in capital sentencing.
Full text here.
May 6, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I’ll consider telling my real name when you explain what part of the world the Y clan hails from and why you were given the name Sister!
May 6, 2009 at 2:16 am
That’s me above.
May 6, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Textbook case of stupid dismissal of statistics here.
May 9, 2009 at 2:32 pm
[…] surface for other economists even bother refuting. Not only does he support my prejudices regarding statistics vs anecdotes, he also fits with my hierarchy of evidence regarding formal vs informal economic theorizing in Two […]