We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Take the roiling absurdity outside America since the death of George Floyd. What does the death of a foreigner killed by a foreign policeman in a foreign land say about the state of Britain? The facts of the Home Office’s homicide index are clear enough. Between April 2016 and March 2019, 500 whites, 45 blacks and 38 others were convicted in England and Wales of murdering 583 white victims.
Over the same period, 81 blacks, 11 whites and nine others were convicted of murdering 101 black victims. Roughly 3 per cent of Britons are black. The idea that there is a racial tsunami of murder in this country is monstrous, let alone — “hands up! don’t shoot!” — one waged by our unarmed police. We are being asked to fight against a fantasy.
– The Critic Magazine
Might I suggest people subscribe to this new very high quality magazine, a fine antidote to the debased opinion makers of yore.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I followed the link and The Critic is correct: the right isn’t losing the culture war, it’s not even fighting it. This has to change before we on the right are totally annihilated. Politically, I’m in a bind, as I’m a British citizen currently living in the US, but I want to do my bit. Any suggestions? Seriously.
It says quite a few people in Britain were looking for an excuse — any excuse. Just like the USA, and God alone knows how many other countries.
Ha! I’m an American citizen, and your opinions and preferences probably count more heavily than mine, specifically for that reason.
I’m a stakeholder – an OWG American – and so my voice is the voice of the entrenched, grasping patriarchical/colonialist/racist dying power structure desperately trying to keep our hold, and so I may be ignored.
As a non-citizen – even better, as a bloke from the progressive UK! – you start out from a position of being listened to, at least initially. You’re on the most favored nation list (“not the USA”) for the woke. It’ll usually be assumed that you’re a progressive.
So, for you more than me, just talk to people.
Fantasies are safe to fight.
Especially when everyone agrees with your stated premise, even if they question whether that is actually your sole objective.
So in a country with only 3% blacks, roughly four times as many white people are killed by blacks as vice versa. On a per capita basis, that means whites are in the region of 1000 times more likely to be killed by blacks than the other way around. I can’t see this new magazine surviving for very long if they persist in publishing such hate facts.
You cannot destroy with fact or reason an evil group that repudiates both.
The scum of the left must be purged and punished. But BlueLabour esp Jellyballs Johnson are making it clear they are part of the problem.
If we want our old lives back again–we are going to have to take them back from political scum. And every mask-wearing idiot is one more on their side. Being willing to co-operate with those seeking to destroy you means you ARE the enemy also.
Proposed QOTD, Mr Ecks at 7:43am:
“You cannot destroy with fact or reason an evil group that repudiates both”.
I tried to think of one word to change in that to improve it…I can’t.
A modest suggestion – Sometimes SQOTDs kinda pile-up – sometimes there are more than one each day. It can get confusing. Might it be an idea to title them in a way that identifies them individually?
NickM (June 28, 2020 at 1:30 pm), I and others have suggested that posted Samizdata Quotes of the Day be given distinguishing titles whenever recent prior SQotDs still have active comment threads, so that comments on them can be distinguished. On the rare occasions when I post one, I follow that rule.
This interesting article on The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness agrees with you statistically but notes that it is not always impossible.
It is less hard to reduce the numbers of their “useful idiot” helpers with reason and fact and tact or shock tactics as the case requires and/or one’s talents allow.
Because what is going on has very little to do with one black man being murdered by one cop. It is really the coming together of many, many different threads, massively exacerbated by the frustration of being under house arrest and in an artificially crashing economy, and then George Floyd lit the blue touch paper.
Do Americans say “lit the blue touch paper” or is that a British thing? I think it comes from fireworks boxes — you set off the rocket by lighting the blue fuse paper sticking out the bottom…
It is all about the election really, and the British apparently want rid of Trump as much as the Americans do.
I have been thinking about the long term consequences of this, and let me offer you a vision of November 3rd. Armed gangs outside many, many polling booths to “ensure black votes are counted”. An emasculated police force that can’t do anything about it. Polling places where there are long lines trying to close at the designated time but being forced to stay open by armed gangs and the lovely, civic minded, generally older folks managing the polling stations being powerless to stop it. Gangs busting in to the polling stations and destroying all the republican ballot papers. Gangs only allowing black people to vote in preference to whites to “right past historical injustice.” People having to run the gauntlet to vote, or people being stopped by raging mobs before they go in to check that they are voting the right way. Republican election judges having ten protesters screaming in their face for hours to prevent them doing their job. And the cops, too afraid to do anything because they don’t want riots or an actual gun battle outside polling stations parking instead on the highway giving out traffic tickets, since, they figure, you can’t give them a murder one conviction for that.
Oh, and after the election? Trump and his family, Bill Barr, Betsy Vos, and lots of other people who worked for Trump up on various criminal charges to satiate the masses. The founder of BET has just proposed 14 trillion dollars in reparations. Two months ago that would have been nuts. But, after we have been tossing trillions around like twenty dollar bills it absolutely could happen.
My feeling? We are heading towards being Venezuela, and I am not at all convinced there is anything we can do to stop it.
Please, don’t be so naive to think that that cannot happen in the United States. It absolutely can, and it can happen VERY quickly.
to Frasier Orr at 12:18am…sounds like Second Amendment time: form militias, guard the polls. And not using stupid, in-the-street “I’ve got a gun intimidation”, but with more effective tactics. Take them out before they see the gun.
I’m watching the world disintegrate. Everyone in the center and to right of center in America is just giving up. And I’m more concerned about the COVID response than how people have been duped into being sympathetic to a violent felon’s death. Not the government response around the world, but the public’s compliance with COVID lockdowns. If I knew how to insert a link I would, but google “Uncommon Knowledge”, Peter Robonsin’s show and his interview on June 18 of Dr. Scott Atlas. It’s amazing. (youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=kZqGSnVt8c8&feature=emb_title).
The acquiescence of the public to the most heinous public policies ever. Maybe not giving up as much as not realizing they are in a to-the-death fight. Soon it will be too late. Maybe it already is?
This is past politics: “You cannot destroy with fact or reason an evil group that repudiates both”. But I will arm up and guard my local polling place. The CHAS/CHOP Commies in Seattle are not the only Washingtonians with a right to open carry. Not that my little town’s polling places will have BLM/Antifa thugs present (I live on the east side of WA). I probably need to help our my like minded brethren in Seattle?
We are headed to where bullets will decide the outcome. Maybe–they will certainly change the players on the stage by removing many.
Someone please tell me I’m wrong and why. In the meantime, I’m buying another shotgun (Mossberg 88 with 9 round magazine; 12 if you use “shorties”).
Please permit me some pedantry about the start of your comment, as a peg on which to hang my own.
If I rephrase you as follows …
… am I guilty of any inaccuracy?
An astonishing number of people resist the goal of this narrative, yet write in a way that explicitly or implicitly concedes its starting claim. I’ve seen some write the unchallenging and factual “died while in police custody”, but if anything they are the minority.
Unlawful police killings happen in the US and the UK and elsewhere, but as “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” should remind us, the narrative often chooses to go most all-in on accusations that are gradually and comprehensively revealed to be fakes. Time will tell what this one will prove to be.
At the end of this old post, I quoted a US pundit:
I think we should be truthful in our fight back – and I think there are no benign mendacities in the latest narrative.
So if my summary is unsafe, please tell me. If not, please consider avoiding unsafe summaries.
(Yes, I get that ‘unsafe’ can have two meanings here. 🙂 )
Your summary is unsafe. The policeman can clearly be seen standing on someone who is complaining (with good cause, given he died) that he can’t breath properly. This is even after the suspect has been restrained. I think this BLM bollocks is just that, bollocks, but I’ve seen the video and that’s not kosher police work.
Frankly, because BLM in UK is such utter bollocks, it is a mistake to try and minimise the brutality bit of this pretty evident bit of foreign police brutality on a foreign criminal in a foreign country.
The important fact here for people in the UK is not that this was brutality but that it was foreign. At least police brutality in Hong Kong is foreign brutality somewhere the UK is a signatory to a treaty that has something say about Hong Kong’s affairs. Minneapolis is not such a place.
@Koyapig
The figures for who the perpetrators and victims are in cases of interracial crime, while they appear striking, don’t really tell us much at all.
If I, whatever colour I may be, go out onto an average street in an average UK town or city and start killing random strangers, then I’ll kill more whites than blacks simply because there are more whites than blacks on the average street in the average UK town or city. So it would be astonishing if it weren’t the case that black people are far more likely to kill white people than the other way round.
The statistic that matters is how much more likely a black person is to kill anyone. And regardless of one’s views on why that is the case, that’s the statistic that tells us that there is a problem.
Help me out here, Perry. I’ve just taken taken the time to watch the securitycam video, the park police cam video, the passing bystander video and the activist’s video. I am quite capable of missing things. Where does a policeman stand on Mr Floyd? Kneel, yes; stand, I’m managing to miss.
He complains that “My face is gone” (crosswalk video – knee is already on neck) and (final video) “Please man! I can’t breathe!” … “I can’t breathe. Please! The knee on my neck! I can’t breathe s**t” … “My knee! My neck!” … “I’m claustrophobic. My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts.” … “Get some water or something. Please. Please. I can’t breathe officer.” … “They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me man.” By two minutes into the final video, Floyd is groaning but no longer speaking words AFAICS. About a minute after that, you can hear the standing officer say, “He’s talking. It’s hard to talk–” (interrupted by bystanders). About a minute after that, Floyd’s breathing slows, and he is no longer moving and groaning; he now seems unresponsive.
Floyd had good cause to sound distressed. The question is whether that good cause was:
a) the police restraint
b) fentanyl’s well-known ability to cause “life-threatening respiratory arrest”.
c) Mr. Floyd’s “underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease.” (from the Hennepin County Coroner’s autopsy)
or
d) the combined effects of some or all of the above.
My suggested summary to Fraser was intended to avoid the ‘unsafe’ claim that any one can be known to be the cause at this time. It particularly noted that either you dispute the coroner’s report or else you accept that to claim (a) would be more than just unsafe.
The official charge against PC Chauvin says (d). It quotes the preliminary autopsy:
and continues
As regards
I agree entirely. Indeed, never mind foreign: it would be a mistake for Trump and Republicans to minimise the evils of left-Democrat-controlled city governments. If one can justly argue that the left-wing Democrats who control Minneapolis appointed as Hennepin county coroner some eager accomplice of racist murderers who deliberately concealed evidence proving the narrative’s claim that Chauvin straight-up asphyxiated Floyd, by all means let’s say so. But if it is instead lesser and/or other charges against them that are the true ones, let’s leave exaggerations and falsities to the narrative, and take care not to echo it.
Just my 0.02p. If you can give me a video and a time-from-start for the ‘standing’, I will watch and learn.
“The policeman can clearly be seen standing on someone who is complaining (with good cause, given he died) that he can’t breath properly. This is even after the suspect has been restrained.”
There’s been no conviction in court, the case for the defence has not been presented, the presumption of innocence applies.
There are other possible causes for the death. Floyd had severe heart disease. He had lots of drugs in his system. He resisted arrest. He started complaining about not being able to breathe before he was on the floor. A feeling of breathlessness is a recognised symptom of a hearth attack. He was talking throughout (i.e. he was clearly breathing). People being arrested commonly say all sorts of things, many of which may be untrue, in an attempt to escape, annoy, cause legal trouble, gain sympathy, or otherwise get an easier time, and so police will necessarily not take their word for it. The police apparently had medical concerns, and had called an ambulance, but were also concerned about excited delirium (it was explicitly mentioned by one of the officers), which was reportedly why he was being held in that position (medical guidance recommends restraining someone with excited delirium as allowing violent activity and exertion while having a heart attack usually reduces survival). The neck hold has two forms described in the police manual, one where pressure is applied (causing unconsciousness in betweeen 15 seconds and a minute), and the other where it is not (the knee rests lightly on the back of the neck ready to act, but not pushing). Strangulation causes burst blood vessels in the skin and eyes (petechiae) in 70-90% of strangulation deaths, and there were none in this case. Although there were abrasions to the face and lips, there was no bruising of the neck muscles, larynx, or throat. There is no physical evidence that pressure was applied, or that Floyd was strangled or asphyxiated. He apparently died of cardiac arrest while being restrained. Whether that cardiac arrest was caused by the drugs, the stress of being arrested, the struggle while they tried to get him in the car, or the restraint is, so far as I can tell, unknown and unproven.
Not knowing how the police are trained to react, I can’t tell whether the police’s actions were in accordance with regulations and guidance, but it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that when he showed signs of medical distress and heavy drug use they called an ambulance and restrained him using an approved technique without applying any pressure while they waited for it to arrive, and he died of a heart attack that was already in progress before he was restrained.
And it must surely take a notably bold copper to consciously murder somebody on a crowded city street in front of numerous unfriendly witnesses while being filmed and recorded by multiple cameras, including their own police department body cams! In a Democrat-run criminal-friendly district, no less! Surely a time for playing it by the book, if ever there was one?
Are we not entitled to expect that *everyone* should be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a fair trial?
Here is Philadelphia’s 2016 Homicide Report (none have been published since – I wonder why?). Philadelphia is 44% Black, 38% White. Shooting offenders: 269 Black, 62 White. Shooting victims: 1,051 Black, 220 White.
Just for a check that Philadelphia is not some exception, here is the New York City 2019 Enforcement Report. NYC is 43% White, 24% Black. Every page from 7 to 16 is a screaming indictment.
And according to this Reuters-verified gem, in 2013 in the US 2,245 Black people were killed by Black people, and 189 by White people.
You draw your conclusions.
Sometime i must get around to watching the videos. Haven’t done so because in this period i do not feel the need for more emotional upset.
Just wanted to add that i recently re-read Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow trilogy, and in the 2nd book (Palace of Treason) there is an incident in Moscow, in which two FSB officers swarmed the CIA Moscow Chief of Station and “tackled him facedown in the mud, their knees on his neck, their hands wrenching his arms behind him.”
Palace of Treason was published in 2015. Knee on neck is not a new method.
The Chief of Station survived to be mildly tortured for a few hours, then expelled from the country. (Mild spoiler: it was a net gain for the CIA that he was expelled, as he was an imbecile. But at least he did not reveal anything under torture.)
@AFT
The interesting thing is if you assume there is no difference in bias in selection of victims by race between races and the murder rates are the same then the total numbers of A kills B should be equal to the total numbers of B kills A. So even if the ratio of A to B is 10_000:1 you should still expect the number of cross racial killings to be equal.
The maths shows this:
rateX = rate of killings by X
popX = fraction of population that is X
deaths_A_by_B = (rateB * popB) * popA
deaths_B_by_A = (rateA * popA) * popB
= deaths_A_by_B if rateB = rateA
@bennmurphy
Absolutely, because the scarcity or abundance of potential perpetrators of either category would be cancelled out, so to speak, by the corresponding scarcity or abundance of potential victims. But while the numbers would be equal in such a scenario, the likelihood that a minority perpetrator’s victim would be from the majority group remains higher than the likelihood that a majority perpetrator’s victim would be from the minority group (and I’m not suggesting that you’re saying otherwise).
Sorry for harping on (although it’s possible that nobody will even see this) but I think it’s important to knock something on the head. The fact that a white person is far more likely to be killed by a black person than vice versa is frequently cited as ‘evidence’ that black people hold greater racial animus towards white people than white people do towards black people. It isn’t evidence of any such thing.
If there were no bias in the selection of victims (which clearly isn’t the case for a whole lot of reasons that don’t have to include racial animus, but bear with me…), then we would expect that the racial breakdown of those killed by murderers of any given racial category would be pretty close to the racial breakdown of the population as a whole. So if whites are 87% of the population and blacks 3% (with assorted ‘others’ making up the remaining 10%), we would expect 87% of the victims of white murderers to be white and 3% to be black, just as we would expect 87% of the victims of black murderers to be white and 3% to be black. Now, that very obviously isn’t what we find. So let’s look at the figures given in the quoted piece (for what they’re worth, as it strikes me as more than a bit odd that the number of those convicted corresponds exactly to the number of victims, implying that each and every convicted murderer was convicted for exactly one killing…).
Well, we have 511 white murderers. In our hypothetical non-biased scenario we would expect 3% of their victims to be black. That’s 15 people. (I know murders sometimes involve chopped up bodies but let’s stick with whole numbers.) What we actually find is 11, so that’s lower. It’s about 70% of what we’d expect to find.
And then we have 126 black murderers. In our hypothetical non-biased scenario we would expect 87% of their victims to be white. That’s 110 people. What we actually find is 45. Now that’s a lot lower. In fact, it’s not much more than 40% of what we’d expect to find.
So, on the basis of these figures, blacks are under-killing whites to a greater extent than whites are under-killing blacks (even if blacks are doing far more than their fair share of killing tout court). I’m not suggesting that this proves anything regarding racial animus. Our hypothetical non-biased scenario is an unrealistic one. Of course there is bias in victim selection. People are biased towards killing those they have something against, which generally means people they know, and in a society of different ‘communities’ people are more likely to know those in their own racial category. We also know that in the sort of milieux where killings are most rife, whites don’t outnumber blacks by 29:1.
But what we can say with confidence is that these figures do not demonstrate that blacks hold greater racial animus towards whites than whites do towards blacks.
Sorry, that should read:
“The fact that a black person is far more likely to kill a white person than vice versa is frequently cited […]”
That’s what comes of using Preview to make sure the italics are closed rather than to check the actual words.
I agree. I suppose the positive(ly pedantic 🙂 ) way of phrasing it would be something like,”These particular figures demonstrate that any alleged greater animus of their black murderers towards whites than their white murderers towards blacks is either absent or more than outweighed by other factors – for example the tendency of blacks disproportionately to live near and interact with fellow blacks, and vice versa.”
The above is not a particularly insightful comment, but you said, “it’s possible that nobody will even see this”, so I thought I’d reassure you. Much is read, though little is responded to.
Reports of e.g. the knockout game, if unable to be qualified by evidence of its reverse, will continue to maintain the ‘outweighed’ branch as one of the options.
There is also the two-edged remark of a reflective public defender:
The whole article is well worth reading – and not just because the still-liberal public defender has unlearned much that BLM demands he believe again.
@Niall Kilmartin
Thanks for the reassurance that I wasn’t talking to myself. 🙂
@AFT: There was typo in my original comment. It should read 100 times more likely, not 1000.
You make some interesting points. My comment was a little tongue-in-cheek – the statistics struck me as humorous in that they contrast somewhat with the claim BLM UK try to make about the injustices done to black people re the ‘disproportionate’ number of blacks dying in police custody here in the UK; a claim based on a very small sample size. That game could easily be played from the opposite direction.
As you imply, it’s unlikely blacks are underkilling whites to the extent that you outline, as that would require blacks to have a homogeneous distribution around the country, which clearly isn’t the case.
What I do find interesting is why blacks so often murder each other, both here and the USA. I don’t buy the poverty excuse, because it just doesn’t work that way with other ethnic groups. It’s got to be culture, genetics, or a combination of both. I’d like to think it is due to something along the lines of the thesis outlined in Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
The statistic The Critic magazine cites about the United Kingdom are true – but the first paragraph smells like an effort to throw the United States under the bus.
The implied being message being “do not hit us, we are not systematically racist – not like those evil Americans”.
The trouble with this (apart from the cowardice) is that that the claims the Marxists make about the United States are LIES.
American society and American police forces are NOT “systematically racist” either.
Police are no angels (far from it) – but they do NOT systematically treat black people worse than white people, and black people are not being slaughtered by white people in the streets (if anything the opposite is partly true – although only of a small MINORITY of black people who engage in murder – and murder far more BLACK people than they do white people).
Throwing America under the bus to try and save Britain will not work.
We stand or fall TOGETHER.