Recently as part of a 680 Billion Dollar National Defense Authorization Bill, President Obama recently signed into law an extension to already existing Federal Hate Crimes Laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity in the definition of Hate Crimes.

Given this occasion I thought it was a good time to take a look at hate crimes in the United States. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about Hate Crimes. People insinuate that the laws exist only to protect certain privileged groups and anecdotal evidence is used to suggest enormous secretly hidden problems that the media “ignores”.

We should always be wary about using anecdotes to draw broad conclusions especially when it comes to hate crimes. For example, we ought not think that because some psychopath beats someone up for wearing a red hat that there is some overwhelming epidemic of violence against people who like red hats in this country.

With regards to hate crimes, fortunately we don’t have to resort to anecdotes to understand the state of criminal activities motivated by bias and prejudice. We actually have the statistics. The federal government has been compiling numbers on it for years. We even have detailed statistics about hate crimes involving sexual orientation even though there were no protections in the law for those groups until recently. So we have a lot of data. We can look at it and draw real meaningful conclusions.

A word about how the data is compiled. The numbers come from police departments reporting hate crimes to the federal government. The standard they use is not loose. Police departments don’t contrary to some rumors immediate conclude that whenever a white person commits a crime against a black person or vice versa that it is a hate crime.  Rather, the police investigate the crimes and try to determine the motivation of the person committing the crime. They report it as a hate crime only when they have good evidence that the crime was motivated by a bias against a particular group. Often this is not hard to determine, since the perpetrator admits it quite willingly. Other times it depends on witness reports and the victims testimony about the things the person said while committing the crimes. Likewise other possible motivations are examined and the associations of both perpetrator and victim.  In short it’s done through normal good police investigative work. To suggest that these reports are incorrect is to suggest a systemic problem with the integrity, honesty, or effectiveness of police departments across the country.  That may be true, but you better have some good evidence of that.

On the other hand there’s no question that these statistics don’t represent the entirety of the phenomena. Like with all crimes, sometimes they are simply not reported. In particular if you do not feel that there is any chance you can get justice for crimes committed against you, you are naturally less likely to bother to report it. We will have to see, for example, if adding protections for sexual orientation will cause more people who are victimized for their orientation to report the incidents.  Nevertheless it’s hard to imagine that the numbers are not in most cases at least close to proportional to the scale of the problems.

The last important precursor to this analysis is to say that of course hate crimes are not in any way the full total of discrimination and bias in this country.  They do tell us something about relative attitudes but taken by themselves they form an incomplete picture of the prejudices that drive our every day lives. Many much more subtle biases influence interactions between groups that never reach the level of crimes or cannot be proven to be crimes.

Now, without further ado let me begin my analysis of the hate crimes statistics. For you to check my numbers you can go here and look at the hate crimes statistics:  http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

For simplicity I mostly only looked at the last 4 years of compiled statistics, from 2004-2007. I summed the data from these four years to get a more representative sample. I used the offenses counts, as is most commonly used, which is close but slightly different from the incidents counts.

In the four years from 2004-2007, there were 35,469 Hate Crimes Offenses reported, roughly 9,000 a year.

Racial Hate Crimes
1. Judging from the statistics those who say race discrimination is still prevalent are absolutely correct. Indeed by the statistics racial hate crimes are by far the most common. 19,015 hate crimes were racially motivated, 53.61%  of the total.  That’s substantially more than hate crimes motivated by religious bias, sexual orientation bias, ethnicity bias, or disability bias.  To be fair, we usually THINK of ethnicity bias as the same thing as racial bias. Usually we talk about “hispanic” as a race but in this study it’s considered a part of ethnicity and national origin.  When you add those two you get 67.24% of all hate crimes offenses over the four years are motivated by race, ethnicity, or national origin.

2. Claims that there are a lot of hate crimes committed against people who are white because of their race are absolutely right. 20.05% (3,812) of all racially motivated hate crimes offenses are based on anti-white bias. And 10.75% of ALL hate crimes are motivated by anti-white bias.

3. However, claims that there are a lot of hate crimes committed against people who are black because their race are ALSO absolutely right. In fact, anti-black bias is by FAR the largest. It dwarfs anti-white bias by a factor of more than 3.  And it’s over 4.5 times as high as anti-hispanic motivated hate crimes. 12,892 anti-black motivated hate crimes were commited over the 4 years, 67.8% of racially motivated hate crimes and 35.35% of all reported hate crimes offenses.

4. The claim that people of mixed races are subjected to more hate crimes because they are mixed than members of one or the other of the races are false.  Only 1,040 reported cases over the four years were hate crimes motivated by an anti-mixed bias. That’s about 2.93% of all the hate crimes offenses. That doesn’t mean being mixed will mean you are at low risk of being subjected to racially motivated hate. It’s just that the amount of it will probably depend more on which of your parents races you are most identified with.

5. Racial hate crimes motivated by anti-asian and anti-native american bias are much smaller phenomena. Less than 3% of all the crimes were anti-asian motivated and less than 1% were anti-Native American motivated. This probably is mostly indicative of the smaller percentage of the population these groups represent.  By 2006 estimates, 4.4% of the populate is Asian and 0.68% of the population is Native American as compared to 74% White only and 13.4% Black only. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_demographics#cite_note-32

Religious Hate Crimes
1. People who say there is a lot of hateful persecution of peoples because of their religion in the United State are very correct. Relgious hate crimes represent the second largest group after racial hate crimes. 5,868 hate crimes were reportedly due to anti-religious bias. 16.54% of the total. Still far less than racially motivated hate crimes but definitely not insubstantial.

2. However, those who suggest that christians are the most persecuted groups are absolutely incorrect.  Only 486 reported hate crimes were motivated by Anti-Catholic or Anti-Protestant religious sentiment. 1.37% of the total. Relative to the number of people in the country in those religions that’s a really tiny number.

3. BUT, those who say atheists and agnostics are highly persecuted are ALSO incorrect. Only 26 hate crimes were reported as anti-atheist or anti-agnostic across the four years. Roughly 0.07% of all reported hate crimes.

4. Although anti-Islamic bias motivated hate crimes is only slightly higher than anti-christian bias motivated hate crimes, the number of such crimes HAS grown dramatically since 9/11. In 2007 there were 133 incidents, in 2006, 191. Over the past four years there were 663 incidents 1.87% of the total and 11.3% of all religious motivated incidents.  However, compare that to past years. In 1995 there were only 39 offenses out 9,895.  In 2000 there were 33 offenses out of 9,413. And in 2001 there were 546 offenses out of 11,430 total. So the graph of that is a pretty steady line (0.35%-0.41%) followed by a huge spike up to 4.78%, then a drop back down and stabilizing at a point still 4 times higher than it was originally (approx. 1.87%). (An interesting aside is how hate crimes overall increased dramatically in 2001 as an obvious consequence of anger over 9/11)

5. Beliefs that anti-semitism is alive and well are absolutely correct. By far the largest of all groups who reported hate crimes due to anti-religious bias over the last four years were those who reported an Anti-Jewish bias. 3,940 offenses. It’s the second highest group after blacks with 11.11% of all hate crimes and 67.4% of all religious based hate crimes.

Sexual Orientation Hate Crimes
1. The fact that there is a lot of hate perpetrated  against people because of their sexual orientation is undeniable. At 5,452 offenses, 15.37% of the total sexual orientation bias motivates almost as many hate crimes as religious bias and is the third highest broad category over the last four years.

2. Those who make the claim that gay men suffer a disproportionately large amount of that hate are clearly completely correct. 3,313 offenses over the last four years were reportedly fueled by Anti-MALE Homosexual bias alone. That’s 9.34% of all incidents and 60.77% of sexual orientation based hate crimes.  That does not include a separate 1,180 offenses which were reported as general anti-homosexual bias many of which of course were also perpetrated against male homosexuals. In contrast specific anti-female homosexual bias fueled only 757 (2.13%) of incidents. Though of course some of those general anti-homosexual bias also were targeted against women.

3. Claims of a large phenomena of Anti-heterosexual backlash by the gay community are HIGHLY exaggerated. Over the last four years anti-heterosexual hate crimes made up only 113 incidents, less than a tenth of even just the generalized anti-homosexual incidents. It’s only 0.32% of all hate crimes reported. That’s more than anti-atheist hate crimes but substantially less than any other category except for anti-bisexual bias which makes up only 0.25% of all offenses. Anti-heterosexual hate crimes make up 2.07% of all hate crimes based on sexual orientation. So that means although those crimes exist, it’s vastly dwarfed by the numbers of hate crimes perpetrated because of hatred of members of the LGBT community.
  
Ethnicity Hate Crimes
1. Anti-hispanic hate crimes are substantial and steadily growing but are not as large as one might expect given what is often perceived as anti-hispanic rhetoric involved in anti-illegal immigrant movements. Overall 2,816 offenses were reported as due to anti-hispanic bias. While that’s MORE than the total incidents reported for negative sentiment against all other ethnicity or national origins COMBINED (2018) it’s considerbly LESS than anti-white, anti-jewish, and anti-male homosexual offenses. It’s 7.94% of all offenses over the last 4 years of data gathered.

Mysteriously Missing Categories
Hate Crimes statistics are not perfect but it’s interesting to note that there are certain categories that simply do not show up at all in statistics.  Most notably is that there are no Gender based statistics at all. I find it hard to believe that there aren’t people who are violently attacked because of an inherent bias in the perpetrator against their specific gender, especially women. While, I can understand that it might be hard to determine in some cases whether someone has an inherent bias against women or for that matter men, but surely some of these other categories are equally difficult to ascertain. It would be nice if we had those numbers to look at.

And of course akin to gender there are no categorizations for Anti-transgendered bias. There are plenty of examples in the media of people being abused for being transgendered. I find it hard to believe that these incidents are simply never reported. More likely there is no rule requiring gathering of gender or gender identity hate crimes statistics so these categories are left out.

Conclusions
So if we were to be tongue and cheek and look at these numbers as if it were a horse race. You might get an account something like this:

Obviously I’m joking

Straight comparisons like I’ve been making in this document are never the best thing in the world. Especially when I’m not really factoring in relative population sizes nor even looking at all the data but a small four year segment.

But more importantly, sometimes comparative reasoning can cause us to forget the absolute significance of every single incident. To be fair ALL hate crimes are terrible things and we should not tolerate any perpetrated against any group. Deciding you want to hurt or steal from someone or destroy someone’s property because you don’t like the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, their religion, or their country of origin is inherently a sick and deplorable thing to do. Even though they are comparatively small numbers, every time anyone is victimized because they are an atheist or an agnostic or because they are straight or bi is still just as much of a tragedy as when someone is victimized because they were white or black or Jewish. 

That being said, studying these statistics CAN give us a sense of relative perspective. That’s a very important thing to have and in a lot of debates I see perspective is quickly lost in our fervor to assign blame and express our outrage. Knowing the scale of the problem at least as measured by bias-motivated crime can give us a much better sense of where to exert our efforts and can help us to not be misled by misleading anecdotes or false cries of extreme disproportionate persecution.

If someone proclaims that white people in America suffer a substantial amount of violence and crimes perpetrated on them because they are white, agree with them. It’s true. It’s irrefutable. But if someone proclaims that we live in an era where white people are as a group by and large overwhelmingly oppressed by this society or THE most oppressed group, be skeptical. Despite being in the vast majority of the population, they are not the greatest victims of hate crimes, nor are they even in second place. And in particular there are more than three times as many anti-black crimes of hate perpetrated each year as anti-white.

Likewise if someone proclaims that people are sometimes victimized because they are Christians or because they are Atheists, don’t doubt it. Both phenomena really do happen in the United States. However, if someone proclaims that either being Christian OR being atheist makes them an obvious target for overwhelming amounts of religously or anti-religiously motivated violence, be doubtful. Anti-Christian bias represents a relatively small amount of overall hate crimes each year and anti-Atheist bias represents a seemingly minuscule amount. If any group should be complaining about religious persecution in America it should be followers of the Jewish faith.

And of course along the same vein if someone complains that they saw violence perpetrated against heterosexuals by gay activists in retribution for their expressing their belief that gay people should not be married, accept it. Anti-heterosexual bias does motivate hate crimes. But if someone tries to make that a call to action or to use it to smear homosexuals altogether as a violent or dangerously biased and hateful group, be both skeptical and doubtful. Indeed, tell them they are being silly. Hate crimes perpetrated because of hatred for LGBT individuals is almost 50 times more frequent than hate crimes committed due to anti-heterosexual bias.

A little perspective can go a long way.

It’s far too easy when you see a travesty or when a tragic injustice is perpetrated against you or someone you know, to think that that injustice is representative of the overwhelming pattern of the world. You think well I was attacked because of my race or gender or religion or orientation, I never even imagined that could happen to me, therefore, it must be happening all over the place. It must not only be prevalent. IT must be THE most common phenomenon. What’s more you have a tendency to start to look for other cases that validate your perception. Every other injustice perpetrated against your group stands out in stark relief to you. It seems like the whole world is against you and your kind and you look around and it seems like nobody is willing to recognize it. It seems like nobody is willing to DO anything about it.  And so we get outraged. We get feel afraid and alone and that makes us angry and disgusted at society as a whole.

We need to calm down and take a step back though. Our own experiences are not the only experiences. Sure lots of groups are victims of hate, but so are lots of others.  Rather than dwelling on how screwed up that my group happens to be persecuted by this or that other group, maybe we ought to be more united in our anger at the very idea of crimes based on hate. We ought to fight not to protect us, meaning the groups we happen to through accident of birth be associated with, but to protect US, meaning everyone from the scourges of unthinking irrational hate.
 
Hate Crimes legislation exist to try and discourage and prosecute ALL incidents of hate crimes. It’s not, contrary to what some believe a measure to try and oppress White people or Christians or Heterosexuals or whatever. It’s not a vindictive plan to gain revenge against any one group. It’s an attempt to prevent the prevalence of the very idea of crimes based on hatred. It’s to say that we as a society find those acts UNACCEPTABLE. No matter who they are done to.

I totally understand objections to such laws because of possible constitutional double jeopardy concerns, but I hope that even so we can all agree that reducing the number of all of these kinds crimes is an admirable goal that we should strive for as a society. And certainly it was very unfair for hate crimes laws to exist that recognize hate crimes on the grounds of race and religion but decidedly don’t recognize hate crimes on the grounds of sexual orientation. Not when over 15% of all incidents are in fact orientation based. That’s an absurdly unfair situation. Whether or not hates crimes legislation ought itself exist or be necessary, surely now, at least they are a bit more fair.

In any case if you reject hate crimes laws on principle, that’s fine. But don’t disavow or miss-characterize the problem. We need to as a society do something about people who let their prejudice drive them to victimize others. It’s not an easy problem to solve but I think it’s an overwhelmingly important one to try to solve. And part of reaching that solution depends on our getting good accurate data about the nature of the problem so we can try to solve it. Hence it’s really important to take a minute every once in a while to take a good hard look at hate crimes statistics and try to learn as much as we can from them.

I’m curious as to what you use for independent alternatives to mainstream news, radio, television, and entertainment? List whatever resources you consume in the comments and what you like about them so others can try them out.

I’ll start the ball rolling by listing some of my favorite resources. Obviously they will reflect my tastes which these days leans toward news and politics and since I’m a leftist the resources I plug will be those that reflect an opinion that I believe to be trustworthy or reliable at least most of the time. That being said, please don’t believe I am trying to bound the conversation toward my own interests. Feel free to add your own be it, alternative music stations, alternative radio, alternative gaming, alternative movies, alternative comedy, alternative books, educational resources, etc.

Continue reading →

A very creative form of protest.

Full Transcript

Since I sort of  bashed Keith Olbermann in my last post I think it’s only fair that I also say what I like about him.

I love some of his special comments. Indeed his latest on Health Care is his best since the hay day of Bush’s great transgressions against human rights. In these he manages to simplify and humanize complex political issues and make them real to people. He gets down to the core of what these things are about.  In this case he humanizes the issue particularly well by describing his own family ordeal. He talks of his own father’s fight with illness and you can see how deeply it effects him.

You should really watch it. So I’ve included it here.

Yeah I don’t agree with his using this platform to directly ask people for donations for his favorite charity. And yeah I do have issues in general with Keith Olbermann and with the show Countdown in particular. But for the most part I agree with this. So much of  what he says is true and what people really need to hear that I forgive him his minor transgressions.

Most importantly I deeply agree with the statement I quoted above. When people raise the argument that we cant afford Health Care reform this is always the thing that comes to mind. We spent money on banks and on war and on other nonsense when what I want, and what I think many many other people want, is for that money to go toward Health Care FIRST. Not as a n after thought. Not just what we can squeeze in without going over budget.  Why is it that we can pass war bill after war bill and bailout after bailout with a single worry over the deficit but when it comes to Health Care, we wrangle for months over nickles and dimes determined not to go a single penny over the remarkably small allotment of money we’ve given for it. 

Our priorities are all screwed up. Fighting Death ought to priority one. Keeping us healthy. Giving us the means to obtain happiness. That should come first.  It’s ridiculous that it’s taken so long. Absurd that we can’t do this. The people are outraged over the state of Health Care and terrified that our government will fail to anything of any value and make matters worse AGAIN. 

I have more faith in the government than your average conservative. I think the principle that government can’t do anything is fundamentally flawed. But I can’t begrudge people their fear of governmental failure. How many years has it been since we recognized the Health Care crises? Decades. And yet nothing was done. Anyone who looks at foreign policy with a clear mind can see that so much of our actions abroad do in fact create blowback that makes matters more dangerous for us and our troops. We know our government couldn’t protect us from 9/11, couldn’t protect us from Swine Flu pandemic, couldn’t protect us from Economic Collapse after Economic Collapse, the foreclosure crises, or predatory lending. We face an economic crises on average every three years. And all we see that is done is a bunch of big banks are given trillions of our dollars and nothing gets better.

Oh no, it’s no surprise at all that people don’t trust the governement. None at all that people are terrified. Our government has seemed to have been on a mission to undermine itself at every turn for decades. Torturing people. Illegal wiretapping. Extraordinary Rendition. Holding people indefinitely without trial. Cutting deals under the table with pharmaceutical companies. Meanwhile stories come back that we don’t even give our veterans proper Health Care. Stories come back like every week of another sex scandal or infidelity with one of our major political figures. Stories come back every few days of bailed out companies receiving huge enormous bonuses and salaries and then having major figures in them being appointed to supposed “fix” the economic problems they caused. 

And in the mean time you have a town whose water got so polluted that people were literally becoming mutated. Skin falling off. Hair falling out.  In the meantime you have a response to a Hurricane that left a city buried underwater so inept that it is condemned all the world over.

And people ask, why are Americans so afraid to trust the Government with Health Care reform? 

I think the reasons are obvious. Americans have every reason to distrust our government. Generations of reasons. Maybe some of this is just the way governments fundamentally are, but that doesn’t matter. We expect and demand more.

So I forgive people for being afraid, for having doubts, for being uncertain. I understand their terror. It makes sense.

What I don’t forgive is for people to simply use that as an excuse to simply opt out.  Those who then go from there to then argue that the government should do nothing. Secure in their own finances, happy with their own insurance, those who say they don’t need the Government mucking with their affairs. For that line of reasoning is the equivalent of saying that the government should then simply LET PEOPLE DIE. That non-interference, non-intervention policy is exactly what we’ve had since 1980. And guess what? It’s pretty much precisely what’s caused most of the problems. Government failures yes. But they are as much a result of no action as they are bad actions.

It’s a pipe dream to believe in somehow dealing with the massive GLOBAL problems we face can be fixed at a State Level. It’s even more ridiculous to assume that businesses and rich people will somehow find themselves out of the goodness of their hearts devoted to our happiness and health. Some will do some good when it is aligned with their interests, but they are neither equipped nor capable of nor incentived to solve huge problems. They simply lack the means and the inclination. The only way to even get them involved, is to have government intervention or popular pressure force their cooperation.

Nor can simply relying on the goodness of charity to fix the ills of the world work. Charities are so poor and so broke they are barely scrounging by.  And many turn into scams or are run for the interests of the businesses that sponsor them. Charities have their place to be sure. But they are not big enough to solve huge problems like our health care crises.

No. The only agent big enough to even tackle the problem of Death on a grand scale IS OUR Government.  And note the most important word of that phrase. OUR.  It’s not just a random secondary entity we can sneer at. It’s OURS. We create it. We build it. We monitor it. We compel its behavior.  And while of course so many times so many of our leaders do indeed seem more interesting in serving their own petty interests or the interests of the businesses that pay them off, we still CAN influence them. Our voice can be heard. We can make the government do what we want. At least a little. At least a little more than they are now. We can compel them to spend our money the way WE want.  That’s MORE than we can say about our neighbor or the major businesses and corporations that run so much of our daily lives.

So I don’t accept the idea that “Government screws up often” as the end of the argument leading to the conclusion of inaction. That’s the beginning. We recognize the flaws of our government, and then we work to make it better.  So that it CAN act and in ways that we need. We get them to try to fix things. And when they screw up, we demand we fix their mistakes. We demand they make things better.

But it’s terribly wrong to just say “Government sucks, we’re better off not doing anything and being on our own”. For that line of reasoning leaves millions to die. Die while we sit comfy in our own homes content with our own good Health. And not just die. Die miserably. Die in pain. Die afraid. Many will die alone.

Yeah I want my government to spend my money fighting that. Yes, I want them to do it right, but above all I want them to just start DOING IT!

We’ve waited far too long already.

Over the last two weeks the two biggest news stories on Mainstream News Networks were:
1. Balloon Boy   and
2. The Obama Administration’s critique of Fox News

I found these two stories fascinating in that they have served to reveal in stark clarity how absolutely terrible mainstream media in our country happens to be.

The Obama Administration’s critique of Fox News did achieve what the White House wanted to achieve. It highlighted huge problems the Fox News Channel and Fox News programs in particular have with being balanced in particular with regards to the Obama Administration. But what they didn’t expect was how the spotlight on Fox News just brought into stark focus how really incredibly bad all the OTHER news networks are ALSO.

What’s the point of criticizing Fox News for putting Glenn Beck on the air when CNN airs Lou Dobbs? What’s the meaning of complaining about Fox News crossing the line from reporting the news to CREATING the news by promoting tea parties adn the 9/12 movement, when a few weeks later MSNBC crosses the same line when Keith Olbermann promotes free Health Care Clinics for the explicit political purpose of pushing certain Democratic senators into supporting a public option?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t defend Fox News. I think they are beyond the pail.  They have no shame. They’re twice as bad as the next worst network. They deserve every once of criticism the Obama administration official leveled against them.

But they should have followed it up with an equally blistering critique of the media, especially the television media, in general. Of course they can’t do that, because a White House with no media access is a White House that has no power to influence public opinion at all. No sane administration would risk alienating the mainstream media, however bad they happen to be. Even the critique of just Fox has been answered by numerous figures across the spectrum of the media coming out defend them from “unfair” Presidential influence. It’s the classic “Leave our Industry Alone!”

Balloon Boy is even more illustrative. The fact that this was a major national story at all reveals the pettiness of our news coverage. The fact that news networks repeatedly came back to this story revealing every tiny little detail as if it were the most important thing in the world basically shows how little perspective Media has. They’re just selling emotional porn. Ratings matter more to them then substance.

And indeed the very fact that the Father in this scandal thought that he could by perpetrating this scam score a reality TV show sort of shows how ridiculous television has become. The honest truth is, we have reality television shows no less ridiculous than the show he proposed. Indeed our serious television often borders on that level of ridiculousness. The fact that the Balloon Boy was made for a moment the darling son of all of America just shows how in fact likely it was that had this not in fact been a scam, Balloon Boy’s family could have become a new reality TV phenomenon.  And to be perfectly truthful I’m not yet convinced that family won’t be able to leverage this controversy into the lifetime fame they desire. They might be able to. People will watch. Networks will make money. That’s all it takes.

So that’s the media as it stands today.

In the mean time….

• Quietly 13,000 more troops were sent to Afghanistan
• Obama continues to wrestle with the decision of whether or not to send up to 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan
• International Climate Action Day begins and the world prepares for the Copenhagen Talks which may very well determine the future of Life on Earth
• A National Equality March was held having upward to 200,000 people. President Obama gave a significant speech the night before promising commitment to gay rights.
• Congress debates revoking the Health Insurance Industry’s antitrust exemption
• The Obama Administration implements rules cutting executive pay by about 50% in all directly bailed out firms that haven’t given the money back
• The Foreclosure Rate in America hit an all time high at the same time banks reported record profits. DOW Jones tops 10,000
• Tensions between Iran and the US grow as six revolutionary guard members were killed and Iran blamed US and British intelligence for their death
• A new former Goldman Sachs executive was named to a top post in the SEC
• The UN Human Rights Council endorsed the Goldstone Report on Gaza, a report highly critical of Israeli actions
• The President of Afghanistan finally agreed to hold run off elections because of the voting irregularities and corruption marring the previous election.
• Support for the Public Option for Health Care increased to 57% in the US
• The Obama administration announced it will not go after, investigate, or prosecute medical marijuana users in states where that is legal provided they are in compliance with the laws of those states
• the New York Times announced that it is eliminating 100 News Room positions
• US officials started warning that withdraw from Iraq might not occur according to previously announced schedules
• Iran accepted an agreement transferring its uranium enrichment abroad making it impossible for them to et a nuclear weapon if inspectors are able to do their job.
• Japan considers scaling back its military ties to the United States
• President Obama made his first visit to New Orleans and gave a speech.
• House and Senate have been voting on whether to allow Gitmo prisoners to be tried or held in the US
• It was announced that Social Security recipients will not receive cost of living increases in the year 2010 due to the economy
• House and Senate have been working on new reforms for Wallstreet.
• And of course work continues endlessly on Health Care Reform. All bills are out of committee and being consolidated for vote on the floor.
• Fears rise that the US Treasury Bonds might be downgraded from their previous triple A rating

That’s just SOME of what’s been happening over the last two weeks. Not all. And it’s just stuff I’ve been able to find out about with my limited point of view as an American. People in other countries probably could tell you tons of other things happening all over the world that are far more important than Balloon Boy and some random off the cuff comments by a White House flunky.

But even just any of these stories would have been better expenditures of time and energy than what we got. We were instead inundated with pointlessness.

And that’s just the teleivision news. I don’t have to tell you how mediocre most teleivision shows are. How ridiculous most movies are. How pathetic most newspapers and magazines have become. How increasingly shallow so many novels are becoming.

It seems to me that virtually anything peddled by the major media companies toward what they think the masses want to see, read, or hear is virtually worthless.

Today the best media around is coming out of alternative sources. If you completely stopped consuming any media owned and paid for by a major media company I don’t think you would be missing a damn thing.

I have to admit I’ve never been big into fan fictions. Occasionally I read one I like but most are either poorly written or are well written but totally corrupt characters I love in ways that make me want to crawl somewhere and cry.

But this is somewhat different.

Check this out:

I posted the first two Dead Fantasy videos earlier because I thought they were pretty much the coolest pure action videos I’d ever seen.  But back then they were just pure action. Completely incoherent random fighting. There was no story.

But as you watch these three videos you can see that it’s turning into a crazy cross over fan fiction. Only it’s done purely visually. It has music but not even any real dialogue. Just visual video scenes. The closest thing I’ve seen to this in the past is certain AMVs that sort of have a tiny plot to them. But this is different. I haven’t really watched anything like this before.

For some reason I find that a lot more interesting than standard fan fiction. Maybe it’s because it avoids the problem so many fan fictions have of not really getting a character’s “voice” right by simply leaving out the dialogue altogether. So the viewer can imagine their own dialogue. Or maybe it’s just because it’s got cool fighting scenes and I’m addicted to those.

Anyways, anybody have any other good examples of visual fanfiction I can look into? Feel free to link them to me. Is this an emerging genre? How popular is it becoming?

And I wonder how people making these are dealing with the potential legal challenges that constantly plague normal fan fiction.

I have a new guest article on Gay Persecution in Iraq up on Queerish. Feel free to read and comment.

And yes, I DID have the audacity to REC my OWN entry. Deal!

http://queerish.xanga.com/714588990/guest-post-gay-persecution-in-iraq/

People now are finally starting to speak up and declare what ought to have been obvious for months. That there are people, people with power, people with influence, who will simply always oppose everything that President Obama does or says. Some call them “the Republican party” others “the conservatives”. In truth it’s a small but influential subset of both. But the fact that it’s not everyone, does not make it any less important to bring it to people’s attention. Here’s how Representative Alan Grayson put it:

The ever more eloquent Rachel Maddow put it in very different terms which discussing the Nobel Peace Prize. She quoted a Republican commentator who argued that liberals and Democrats were suffering from “Bush Derangement Syndrome” when they seemed, in that commentator’s mind, reflexively opposed to everything President Bush did. Rachel Maddow turned it around and suggested that maybe the Derangement Syndrome that exists now is apparent in opposition to President Obama. Here’s what she had to say:

The phenonemnon she’s describing is unquestionably real. There are people out there who simply reflexively oppose President Obama. When they hear the President made a decision about something, the first thought in their mind is something along the lines of “how is this a BAD decision?” They assume it must be bad. And if they can’t immediately see why it is a BAD decision they either come up with a way to paint it as bad anyway or they simply ignore it. The idea that Obama might have made a good decision never occurs to them.

Is there any real doubt that such people exist? Further, not only do they exist but they are influential. They have large massive audiences and entire news networks in their thrall. Take the obvious example of Rush Limbaugh. When asked in a recent interview if he could name one thing President Obama has done that he approves of, he could come up with nothing. This might not seem like a big deal were it not for the fact that this is a person whose entire life revolves around analysis of news and politics and who spends three hours every day preaching to his base. You’d think in that time you could come up with something you didn’t dislike. Especially when you consider how very similar to Bush’s policies so many of President Obama’s are.

But on a deeper level is it surprising that Rush Limbaugh does not or is unwilling to admit to agreeing with any of President Obama’s choices? No of course not! Nor is it surprising for Glenn Beck to be forever against Obama or a host of his other critics. Part of this just has to do with the nature of politics for these people. It’s a game to them. And to praise Obama, however rational that praise might be, would effectively be giving free points to the other side. They aren’t about to do that. So Obama advocates the Olympics in Chicago, and it’s a horrible failure of judgment. Bush advocated having the Olympics in Chicago and it’s a patriot doing his duty for America. Obama ramps up military intervention in Afghanistan and does a detailed review of American policy in Afghanistan and it’s a botched, feet dragging, effort that will result in US failure. Bush does a detailed review of American policy in Iraq leading to a ramp up of military intervention and it’s him saving the country and liberating the millions of people there. And so on for illegal detentions, wiretapping, the patriot act, etc. etc.

Yes reflexive Obama critics are a very real phenomena and more and more often, the irrationality of them are being called out by the Press.  People are even adopting Grayson-style exaggerated language to describe it. Take this article by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post.

It’s easy to see why this language is effective. It’s amusing and memorable and when people compare it to the rhetoric coming out of the reflexive critics I described above it rings with a hint of truth to it, even though hypothetical claims like these are impossible to prove and largely just silly.

But if you read that article closely you might have noticed a hint of a deeper and perhaps more serious problem than the masses of overly loud and obnoxious Reflexive Obama Critics. That is, the emergence in the press of the equally dangerous Reflexive Obama Defenders.

Reflexive Obama Defenders do exactly as the critics do. When a criticism is aired against Obama, they immediately defend him, without pause to rationally consider whether or not that criticism is justified. Defending Obama who they see on their “team” or as their patriotic duty is more important to them than a rational analysis of what’s true and what’s false. And then to make matters worse, they attack the critics, not on the merit or lack thereof of the criticism, but on the fact that they dare to criticize Obama at all.

There are numerous anecdotal accounts of encountering Reflexive Obama Defenders all over the place going back even to the primarys. Many writers have written about how they’ve encountered fans of Obama who let the sense of “hope” he inspired in his speeches interfere with their rational analysis of the policies he was advocating. So people who described themselves as anti-war suddenly seemed to have NO problem with Obama’s steadfast and unapologetic determination to escalate the war in Afghanistan. And worse, they’d vehemently defend Obama’s position of Afghanistan as IF it were an anti-war position. Though Obama himself was wholly honest during his entire campaign about his intention to continue and ramp up our aggression in that country.

The Nobel Peace Prize controversy though I think brought out the very worst in the Reflexive Obama Defenders.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is a writer for the Nation and has always been an ardent supporter of Obama and his administration. However, when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, she did not entirely agree. She even dared to crack some jokes about it on her twitter and facebook. Here is her description of what happened in an article in the Nation:

You can see her more direct and immediate reaction on her Twitter. She tweeted the following:

I found it rather disturbing that Melissa Harris-Lacewell felt the need to prove her “Obama-credentials” against ardent Defenders who were ready to cast her out of the fold because she dared to criticize the fact of Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize in a joking manner. In her article, she attributed it and tried to link it to a much discussed phenomena of racial anxiety partially consequent of affirmative-action and then tried to show quite logically how such anxiety was unjustified, trying to calm some of those fears. However, I don’t think simple anxiety explains ALL of this reflexive Obama defense. And certainly not all of it is black-anxiety. Especially since a good chunk of it is coming from white defenders as well. But anxiety does explain some of it. There is real fear of falling back into another Bush-like era.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t really care about some random, unnamed twitterers. I mean with EVERY popular figure you’re going to have people who reflexively defend them and reflexively oppose them. That’s a given. Just ask any famous actor or news personality. Sometimes people randomly get a grudge or fall in love with random symbolic figures. It’s not logical, but fandom is very human. It was that way with Bush, with Clinton, with Reagan, with ALL Presidents.  Still is. There’s a certain amount of it that we’re just going to have to accept.

However, when things get too far I think is when trusted, influential sources of information, hyped by the media engage in obvious reflexive Obama Opposition or Defense. My problem with the Reflexive Obama Critics is NOT that they exist. It’s that they are given so much credence. If Rush Limbaugh had an audience of a couple thousand I wouldn’t give a crap about him. He can say what he wants. But his audience numbers in the millions. And a good number of those audience members trust him and listen to him. And when you are in a position of power and influence you have a responsibility to at least be minimally honest and fair minded. Reflexive reactions are anything but.

So that’s why when I saw this video I was outraged:

This is probably the worst attack video I’ve seen coming out of the left. And definitely the worst I’ve seen out of MediaMatters. The first three quarters of it, there’s nothing wrong with. But then it ends with the disgusting insinuation that those who are against Obama’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize are somehow “siding with” the terrorists.

Also on MediaMatters there was this by blogger Chris Harris:

One could expect this reaction from our nation’s enemies, but it is unseemly and downright unpatriotic coming from American political leaders.”

MediaMatters in case you didn’t know is a pretty popular left wing site. They do a lot of work documenting and recording all of the misleading, outrageous, untrue, or unfair statements in the right wing AND the mainstream media. They also do a lot of work compiling and popularizing statistics about media coverage over time. Likewise they track the spin being put on developing stories. Of course the bulk of what they document demonstrates what they perceive as a right-wing bias in the media.

In addition to all this documenting work, MediaMatters also publsihes numerous opinion pieces and blogs like the Chris Harris piece above.

And it’s not just, MediaMatters. The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) spokesman Brad Woodhouse made the same kind of declaration:

To be fair, this quote needs to be taken in context. He was responding specifically to Michael Steele, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) statement about Obama’s win of the Nobel Peace Prize:

But even if you perceive this statement of Steele’s as crass and out of line (I actually thought it was rather tame for him compared to other things he’s said), does it make sense to say as Woodhouse did that Steele or worse the entire Republican party “has thrown in its lot with the terrorists”??? Of course not! You can well think Steele is a jerk. You may well disagree with the Republican party’s position on every single issue, but it’s a FAR cry from that to say that they are terrorists. It’s simply a twisted and immoral position to declare.

And it’s not an isolated incident. These statements by a DNC spokesman and MediaMatters have real measurable influence. And we can see this disturbing idea that it’s “unpatriotic” and wrong to criticize the President’s award spread Note the previous piece quoted piece by Eugene Robinson. In it he also said:

Likewise there’s this entry on DailyKos.  And even Rachel Maddow skirted dangerously close to this kind of unthinking patriotism when she ended the segment posted above by asserting: “The American President just won the Nobel Peace Prize. By any reasonable measure, all Americans should be proud.”

The irony of all this is of course that this was exactly the kind of stuff that outraged Democrats and the Left when it was done against them during eight years of the Bush administration. And is STILL being done to them. Liz Cheney has suggested several times that Obama wants to “hold hands with the terrorists” and is “siding with the terrorists”.

Fortunately there are a number of liberal voices who did not embrace the hypocrisy and spoke out against this kind of reflexive Obama Defense that justifies these kinds of statements. For example, Glenn Greenwald wrote an in depth piece about it in which he shows both how flawed the logic is and takes us back through a history lesson of all the times Democrats have been accused of being buddy buddy with the terrorists simply for daring to disagree with Bush.  Alex Koppleman scathingly critiqued MediaMatters coverage. And David Sirota wrote a piece for the HuffingtonPost expressing his disgust and disappointment in the DNC statement and words of some Democratic Talk radio hosts. He ended his piece with the following:

He’s right of course.  These people are seriously problematic on both sides. The Reflexive Obama Defenders and the Reflexive Obama Critics are both contributing to the promotion of a world view that sets citizen against citizen and makes politics into merely a popularity contest and not a debate over our future and well being.

And I think right now the Reflexive Obama Defense is even more dangerous, if less common, than the Reflexive Obama Critiques. That’s the case simply because right now Obama is the one in charge. His party holds the reigns of power. So if you respond to unjustified and invalid criticisms of Obama by creating an ethos of never questioning and never criticizing the President at all then the end result will be to allow President Obama and all future Presidents to do whatever they want. If it becomes taboo, a sign of unpatriotic disrespect, a symbol of siding with the “enemy” or the “terrorists” to say anything bad about the President, you’ll create a world of passive meek followers who have no influence and no means of promoting the policies that serve their interests. Everyone will be too afraid of be discredited and cast out of the fold, scorned for daring to critique.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand very well why Reflexive Obama Defenders came out in force in reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize controversy.  Indeed, I feel much of the same disgust and outrage that they must have felt while watching the criticism of Obama aired across the news networks. I felt that EVEN though I’m one of those who doesn’t think the President really deserved the Nobel Prize. The critics were jsut that outrageous.

I mean to hear all these smug well fed clearly elitest news anchors and personalities react with undisguised glee at the fact of Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, not because they were happy for him, but because they thought it made such a great “joke” of a story, was sickening. It was an opportunity for them to laugh at the President and reveal their undisguised scorn for him and feel justified in doing so.  It was as if the media perceived the President as a joke and as if they saw winning the Nobel Peace Prize, unasked for,  as some kind of mistake Obama made. From listening to a lot of the coverage you’d think Obama had somehow done something wrong by winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

But you have to understand that these criticisms are often coming from Reflexive Obama Critics in the media. That and unthinking shills that just uncritical repeat whatever the common wisdom of the day is according to other news outlets.  And indeed, you must also understand that just as annoyed and outraged you are at this kind of commentary out of the media being leveled at your prefered leader, there were people on the other side feeling precisely the same way when they heard the jokes and snarkish criticism of former President Bush.

Still, though, in this case, the heart of the critique of the Reflexive Obama Critics is NOT a laughing matter. It’s very serious and should not simply be dismissed as mere raving or insanity. Whether or not President Obama actually deserved the Nobel Prize is a real serious question. But that’s not because of what it says about him but because of what it says about us.  Ideally, this wholly unexpected award would have opened up a serious and nuanced debate about United States foreign policy. How much ARE we a nation devoted to peace? If Obama has implemented policies that might lead us to say he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, what are those policies, why are they good, why do they help? If he hasn’t implemented policies that are deserving of the NPP, what SHOULD he be doing? What isn’t he doing?   And if he’s done things that ought to disqualify him outright from any kind of prize for Peace, what are those things? Why did he do them?  Why are we allowing him to do them? What can we do to make sure he, and our government are MORE deserving of a Peace Prize in the future?

That SHOULD have been the discussion wrought from the Nobel Peace Prize. Then the prize would indeed have had meaning. Many smart people started to open up that kind of discussion.

But they were quickly drowned out by the loud choruses of Reflexive Obama Critics AND Defenders that turned the entire discussion into a pathetic childish political show.  The entire discussion became:
“Obama didn’t deserve it!”
“Yes he did!”
“No he didn’t!”
“Yes he DID!”
“He didn’t do anything!”
“He did to do things!!”
“Did not!!”
“Do to!”

And so on and so forth… It eventually of course winds down to everybody calling everybody else a terrorist or a Nazi.

Does this sound familiar to you?  Gee, I wonder if it’s because that ‘s pretty much the tone and tenor of virtually ALL political arguments in the main stream media today.  The reason why most Americans don’t know a damn thing about Health Care reform in spite of most seeing it as an essentially important part of their life, is that all they get in the news media is the back and forth whining, finger pointing, childishness that comprises our national debate.

If we’re going to move past this we’re going to have to stop listening to the Reflexive Critcs and Defenders who are just acting out their part in a great political show. We have to start praising people for sound arguments no matter which side of the aisle they come from, even when we disagree with them. Rather than simply latching on to the best soundbites or the cleverest rhetoric.

But to do that we need to stifle our own instincts too to be reflexively for or opposed to certain public figures or political parties we happen to like or dislike. We need to focus on facts and data and cast a skeptical eye toward everyone and everything until we can find the truths that matter.

Of course, my saying this is unlikely to actually change the way most people approach politics. Indeed, probably the deepest reason nothing will change is that my characterization throughout this piece is actually not correct for many of the people I’m describing.  Many of them aren’t really “reflexive”. IT isn’t really a “syndrome”. I fear that for a vast majority of the political pundits it is in fact very deliberate and calculated behavior. It’s not something they can’t control.  It’s something they do on purpose. They do it because it has influence and because they have an ideological goal they are trying to accomplish.

And for Reflexive Obama Critics and Defenders, those goals do not entail your deep and nuanced understanding of the issues involved. No, some Reflexive Obama Critics don’t want you to simply understand so that you disapprove of the specifics of what the President is doing, they want you to HATE the President. Likewise some Reflexive Obama Defenders don’t want you to simply understand and approve of the President’s agenda, they want you to LOVE him.

Neither emotion should have any place anywhere near politics where matters of life and death are decided every day. But for the politicians playing their endless game, these emotions are essential. Love and Hate drive elections. Passion is more important than fact or truth. That’s just the way it works.

And yeah Alan Grayson WAS right about one thing in his diatribe above. Americans DON’T care about the bullshit going on in Washington. And Americsans DO understand. We have a much deeper understanding than  even Grayson himself does.

We understand that politics has become a game played by infantile elites in suits and in this game, the commoners are nothing more than pawns. It doesn’t have anything to do with serving OUR interests. It just serves the egos of those involved.

Not to mention 36,620 Black Females Raped. And that’s just cases in the US where there’s only a single offender.  And it’s only the cases where the person reported their own race as “White Only” or “Black Only”. It doesn’t include mixed races or other races.

Sometimes people have a weird way of looking at statistics and missing the forest for the trees. They see part of the issue but miss other substantially interesting parts of the discussion.

A lot of you are probably wondering what I’m talking about. So let me start from the beginning.

There’s been a recent discussion across Xanga and on some other forums and web sites about these U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Victimization statistics for the year of 2005:  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cvus0502.pdf

The point of interest to the people raising this discussion is “Table 42: Personal crimes of violence, 2005″ on page 30.

For those two lazy to look it up, (just as I’m too lazy to create screen captures) the numbers it shows are roughly as follows:
Rape/Sexual assault/a Single Offender Victims:
White Only:  111,490
Black Only:    36,620

Percentage of those White Only Victims who reported the perceived race of the Offender as:
White: 44.5%  roughly 49,613
Black: 33.6%   roughly 37,460
Other: 19.6%*   roughly 21,852
Unknown: 2.3%*  roughly 2,564

Percentage of those Black Only Victims who reported the perceived race of the Offender as:
White: 0.0%*
Black: 100.0%

The *’s reflect cases where the estimate was made based on Estimate is based on about 10 or fewer sample cases.

The “/a” in the table above specifies that included in the study are “verbal threats of rape and threats of sexual assault.”  Nowhere in the report does it provide a breakdown. I use the term “rape” above and below as short hand for rape or sexual assault or threats of either.

Although the statistics in this table don’t specify gender, please excuse my use of the term “females” and “women” and “men” above and in the discussion that follows. I do so because, for one, it’s the language used by the others who have been discussing this issue, and secondly because in said study as we can see in table 43a. the sample sizes for male reported victims of “Rape/Sexual assault/a” contained fewer than ten incidents so estimates made with them are questionable at best. We can assume the majority of the cases reported in this survey are women being raped by men. Males raped suffer from an under reporting problem due to social pressures, but if anyone has solid data on it I’d happily include it in my analysis.

—-

Now that you understand the data let’s see how we should interpret it.

A lot of people have been looking at these numbers and stressing that 37,460 White Women have been RAPED!  (all caps required of course)  But isn’t that a decidedly odd way of looking at it? Yes, it’s absolutely true that the survey estimates that 37,460 white women have been raped by black men. But using that language seems to weirdly “disappear” the 49,613 white women who the survey estimates have been raped by white men. Not to mention the 21,852 white women who the survey estimates have been raped by other races or the 2,564 white women who have been raped in cases where their assailant’s race was unknown or could not be determined. Also not to mention the 36,620 black women raped. Numbers that apparently they deemed irrelevant.

So some people seem incapable of looking at these numbers and seeing anything other than 37,460 white women raped by black men. So that number must REALLY stand out. If that’s so, we should expect that there must be something really odd, unusual, and decidedly horrible about THAT number.  IT must be the most unexpected piece of the data or else why would they bring it up? And they ask the question how can it be that 33.6% of the rapes of white women are done by black men?!? That’s terrible! Doesn’t it show that black people are more RACIST than white people?  Doesn’t it show that terrible persistence of white oppression!?!! (you can almost hear the implicit underlying – “it’s all because of affirmative action and other evil leftist redistributive policies!”)

Well for now I make no judgment on the degree of racism for or against white people in this society or the existence or lack there of, of “white oppression”. That’s simply irrelevant to this discussion. It’s a value judgment that does not derive directly from the data analysis. And what we’re talking about is the data analysis here.

What I look at these numbers and see and what I’d assume a trained statistician or sociologist would see is not how unusual it is that so many white women are being raped by black men, but how unusual it is that so few black women are being raped by white men. Or to be more precise in our language, why is it that so few black women report their assailant to be white? Either those rapes aren’t happening often or black women aren’t reporting them even in an anonymous survey. We can’t tell, just by the data, which is the case. But in either case, it’s very ODD.

Isn’t that really the strangeness this data is showing? Indeed  it’s substantially more unusual than that. The study seems to be showing that black women by and large are being raped almost entirely by black men only. Huh!? No cases of others? No cases of unknowns? In a segregated society that might be expected, but in an integrated on, that’s just plain WEIRD. Why so different from White women who report substantive numbers in all four categories? The question of whether that’s accurate and if so why on EARTH that’s true is the question the anthropologists and sociologists would want to get to the bottom of.

Now most people on forums like this wouldn’t bring that up because it would be sooo easy for an enemy to twist into making it seem like I’m arguing for more black women to be raped or some such nonsense interpretation. Obviously it is true that I and I hope most people consider ALL rape to be horrible and indefensible but an honest analysis looks at the actual anomaly and tries to explain it. You don’t just pick the data that makes the point you want to make. It’s not about pitting two sides against each other and saying “oh look blacks rape more whites than whites rape black, score one for the white team!” That’s a ridiculous analysis and I would think any paper in any academic institution in the country that made such a claim or tried to use it to make a broader point about racism in the United States would be thrown out. It’s terrible research.

Here’s another way to look at it to see why it’s so abnormal. Think of it from a historical perspective.  We don’t have much statistics that go back too far on race and rape but those that we DO have or at least the source I see cited all over the internet (albeit by some decidedly unreliable sources): “Gary D. LaFree, “Male Power and Female Victimization: Toward a Theory of Interracial Rape,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 88, No. 2 (September 1982)”  shows that in 1960 3.2% of rapes were black on white and 3.6% were white on black.  I couldn’t verify this source as I don’t have the article mentioned and couldn’t find it online, but if someone else can or find some better historical statistics from primary sources I’d appreciate it. I’ll adjust my analysis accordingly.

But assuming those statistics are correct. What would you expect to happen between 1960 and the present?  Obviously in 1960 we lived in an exceedingly segregated society. Different bathrooms. Different buses. Different schools. Different neighborhoods. Black people didn’t interact with white people and vice versa at least not to any large extent.  So no surprise that most reported rapes were within the same race. And also no surprise that the number of reported cross racial rapes were roughly similar. It seems then that rapists on average back then had a strong bias for their own race but that there was an equal amount of cross racial rape on both sides. More white on black but not inordinately more or unexpectedly more considering the greater size of the white population as the greater amount of power they held.

Today things are different. Today’s society is much more integrated, presumptively. And if race distinctions are disappearing,  but RAPE decidedly ISN’T, we SHOULD expect that the people inclined to rape would be equally likely to rape white women as black women. That’s certainly what we would expect if the often touted ideal of people being “color blind” were on the verge of, or anywhere near coming true.

So… what you should expect to see  in the data is that the percentage of rapes of white women by black men would be roughly equivalent to their greater percentage of the populate. Since 74% of the population describe themselves as “white only” and 13.4% of the population describe themselves as “black only” we should expect a distribution somewhat similar to those numbers adjusted reasonably for continuing segregation since there shouldn’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind that we haven’t wiped that out entirely.  What the data shows instead is a roughly even distribution.  36,620 black women raped and 37,460 white women raped by offenders described as being black.  We can’t do a straight out percentage using those numbers because we don’t know the total population.  But if we assume the number of victims who describe their offender as black who are neither “white only” or “black only” is relatively small we can say that roughly 50.5% of rapes performed by a person reported to be black were done to white women and 49.4% of such rapes were done to black women.

Is that unusual? Well it’s unusually high in absolute terms. Yes. Black men perform more rapes than White men, 74,080 vs. 49,613 according to this study. That’s a number that is particular unusually high considering the greater size of the white population. This is consistent with other reports that show a greater rate of black crime, in particular violent crime, theft, and drug possession, in general than white crimes of said nature. It’s a point many scholars black and white have been making for a long time and there’s a lot of study being done to get to the bottom of why that is. And most studies have shown it’s directly tied to economic and educational standing. That is to say that white and black crime statistics within the same economic and educational class do not vary widely.

But if THAT were the point advocates of this study were trying to make, that black people rape more often than white people, the number 37,460 would be irrelevant. The number 74,080 would be the number they’d stress. The distribution of that number is not particularly interesting or unexpected. Not from a historical perspective. It just means that interracial rape has increased as society has become less segregated. Exactly what we should predict.

But what of the other side? What happened to white rapes of black women? Apparently, rather than increasing, they disappeared. The number dropped from 3.6% to roughly 0.0%. That’s very ODD. It really is. As society became less segregated, nevertheless rapes didn’t become less segregated as least amongst white rapists. And it’s not like white men are such paragons of virtue that they simply stopped raping people. No. They still raped 49,613 white women.

They simply stopped raping black women.

It’s particularly unusual when considering that studies have shown that black rapists generally receive larger jail sentences and more severe punishments than white rapists. So it’s not fear of punishment that explains this discrepancy.

So where do we go from here?  Well the next immediate logical step is to look at MORE than just the 2005 study in order to better understand where the discrepancy lies so we can analyze trends. Here’s the list from 1996 to 2006, the data for this survey that is readily available on the internet.

Black victim/White offender Percentages:  13.5*, 0.0*, 7.2*, 0.0*, 7.0*, 13.4*, 14.2*, 0.0*, 0.0*, 0.0*, 0.0*
White victim/Black offender Percentages:  8.8*, 8.0*, 9.9*, 7.3*, 7.0*, 17.1, 13.1*, 15.5*, 8.3*, 33.6, 16.7*

Here is the link:  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cvusst.htm  The reports with the appropriate table are under Victims and Offenders.

Now two things immediately stand out when looking at these numbers. One is that’s an AWFUL lot of *’s!! Recall * means that the sample size contained fewer than 10 respondents so the percentages provided are probably more questionable.  Only two numbers in the entire comparison are not starred. Meaning only twice in the entire history of doing this survey (at least through 96) did they get  a sample size of more than 10 in either direction for interracial rape. In both cases it was for white victim/black offender cases.

It should also be noted that in 2003 and 2006 the number of black women altogether who reported rape/sexual assault was starred. That should suggest, though it does not prove, a possible under-reporting problem with black women with regards to rape and sexual assault.

Now these facts would immediately to me put virtually any analysis of interracial rape trends on the basis of this data alone in suspect. Not because the data is wrong or falsified of course but because, there’s just not enough reliable information here. The samples just aren’t large enough to draw any real conclusions about interracial rape and especially not the trends over time. This makes sense because we know people are often reluctant to report rape and the survey was focused on all kinds of violent crimes not just specifically looking for and trying to compile statistics with regard to rape victims.

But if we are to suspend our disbelief and take these estimates seriously despite the generally small sample sizes what do we see?

Well it seems interesting that the 2005 numbers were heavily publicized and yet no other years data was chosen, not even 2006. Go back just one year to 2004 and the number of black on white rapes estimated decreases dramatically to approximately 11,192.  In previous and later years the numbers vary wildly. But it should be noted that the methodology changed over the course of the years the survey has been given so the numbers are difficult to directly compare. Also to be fair, 2005 was a year in which there actually were enough respondents to say something about black on white rapes that can’t just be dismissed as statistically insignificant so that might be why it was chosen. The only other year where that happened was 2001. Still… two data points do not a real trend make. And indeed, rather than a trend, the data shows the opposite. Looking at the data, if anything 2005 is the outlier year for the black on white rapes. The percentage for 2005 is more than twice as high as almost any other year where a percentage was reported.

The white on black rapes are however more interesting. The numbers always are ALWAYS predictions based on fewer than 10 respondents. In 6 out of 11 years the estimate was ZERO percent, and in the last FOUR years the data has been compiled, it’s been ZERO percent every single year! Do you see why, if accurate, this would be the piece of data that should peek a researcher’s interest? It means cases of white men raping black women are either not happening AT ALL or not being reported AT ALL. And that’s precisely NOT what you’d expect the data to show.

We can speculate for a long time on why this might happen to be the case but without more research and more comprehensive studies we can’t say for sure. There are a lot of possible explanations and I’m curious to see what readers opinions are. I’ll just throw a few probably provocative explanations out there for discussion’s sake.

It could have to do with social segregation. White men might be avoiding black women or black women might be avoiding white men or might be being more wary of them. If the segregation between black women and white men (or non-black men in general) was substantially greater than the standard amounts of segregation it might explain the phenomena of different rape statistics, albeit though just immediately resulting in the necessity to ask the deeper question of why THAT would be the case.

OR it could be that there is a deeper stigma against rape in particular amongst black women preventing them from reporting it. Certainly the two starred years for overall black rape reports might suggest that. And that stigma might be GREATER in the case where the perpetrator is white. Again that just leads to the question of why would that be? Well it could be that it is perceived as a sign of weakness amongst black women to be raped by a white man. Or it could be that black women who are raped by white men generally tend to be raped by people who are their bosses or are in a position of power over them and are thus more fearful and reluctant to mention it for fear it might “get out” somehow and ruin their life or career. Or it might be that black women are less trusting of the researchers asking the surveys and unwilling to provide honest personal information. Or it could be some other reason.

Another possibly explanation is that white men in general are more conscious of or wary of possibly being perceived as racist. Therefore, a white man who is inclined to rape, might consider it a greater risk to them to rape a black woman than a white woman. They might perceive a greater social cost amongst society as a whole and amongst their immediate social group for being caught raping a black woman than raping a white woman.

Another possible explanation for the lack of white on black rapes could have to do with perceived ideals of what is considered “beauty” since rapes often involve delusions in the minds of the rapists.  Or put another way, it could be an indicator that the kinds of white people who are most likely to perform rapes, perceive black women as undesirable or don’t see any advantage in gaining power over them. That would suggest a subtle racism on the part of white rapists. In contrast the black rapists seem to rape indiscriminately at least based on this survey.

ASIDE: It would definitely be interesting for someone to examine how these trends compare to interracial relationship trends. For example, anecdotal accounts certainly suggest white male/black female relationships are a LOT less common than black male/white female relationships. How does that relate to these findings?

Even assuming there’s any relevance at all to asking the question of which group of rapists is the most racist, we definitely CAN’T say is that the black rapists are more racist on the basis of this data. The numbers of black men raping white women simply aren’t high enough relative to the distribution of the population to draw that conclusion.  If we saw all or most black rapists raping white women it would be a different matter entirely. But here in one year we see about 50% and in other years the numbers vary wildly. Even if it were the case it certainly wouldn’t be a very good indicator that black men in general are more racist than white men, or black people than white people. Just as the suggestion I made above with regards to the possible white racism behind the lack of white male rapes of black women doesn’t in any logical way reflect anything on white men in general or white people in general.

MY point is this. The way this report is being publicized is to suggest that black men are raping an inordinately large number of white women and that proves that there is more racism amongst blacks towards whites than there is the other way around.  Implicit in that assumption is the idea that INTRA-racial rape is somehow more acceptable and more normal than INTER-racial rape. That is, in a “normal” world blacks would only or primarily rape blacks and whites would only or primarily rape whites. That’s the assumption that allows people to say OMG blacks are raping so many white women! They’re soooo racist! Implicitly, there is the idea that in a normal world black men would stick to raping their OWN KIND like civilized white men.

But that implicit understanding is itself racist. Or at the very least it strikes me as very very twisted. We can’t see from this survey any indication that black men are by and large going out of there way to try and rape white women because they are white or out of vengeance or hatred or to oppress white people or out of a desire to prove their race supreme. Nor can we see any indication that it’s considered more “acceptable” to rape a white woman. Whether or not such phenomena exists (and I highly doubt it does), the data provided, incomplete though it be, gives us no reason to suspect that at all.

And generally I guess the reason I felt the need to comment on this is not to excuse the horrible fact of the 37,460 rapes and/or sexual assaults and/or threats of either performed by black men on white women, but that I just don’t see the logic in celebrating the fact that white rapists have become so “enlightened” that they no longer rape black females but still feel no qualms about turning their attention toward raping tens of thousands of white females instead.

That doesn’t strike me as progress at all.

A man was arrested for tweeting the location of police officers during the G20 protests to protesters trying to avoid them.  Somehow they call that “hindering prosecution”.

I find this rather scary. How on EARTH is that against the law?!? 

So if I tweet the location of a cop waiting on the side of the road to give people speeding tickets, am I “hindering prosecution”???

So apparently the police are upset that they didn’t get a chance to blast enough kids ears out with sound canons or pose with pictures of enough unjustly arrested protesters. So now they’re looking to punish to people that prevented that from happening. This is really kinda sick.

Or am I missing something? Someone explain to me how this makes sense?

Here’s the link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/04/elliot-madison-accused-of_n_309042.html