CONTRA ALT-RIGHT IDEOLOGY
“Despite making up 13% of the population, blacks commit 50% of the violent crime.” This claim is addressed thoroughly here without diving too much into socio-economic factors. A lot of the points made here can also be applied to other UCR stats, as we also address the general reliability of the UCR program. Here is a google doc version of this section**
Is 13/50 even an accurate or reliable ratio to start with? The origin of 13/50 is from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics [1]. Technically, these stats give you 13/50 for homicides and not all violent crime (the crime number is way lower, at 27.4%, and they don’t actually compile the exact violent crime % for us), and even these statistics show that black people were arrested for 38.7% of homicides [2] when you include thousands of homicides where the race of the perpetrator was unknown, so the people using 13/50 should actually be using 13/38 (or at least acknowledge we don’t have an exact number and that our best guess would be within a broader range). It’s not even surprising that we don’t know the race of many murderers - around 40% of reported homicides go unsolved [3], a huge gap in the data, and in general we see a lot of crime go unreported to police [4]. On top of this, when you use the 38.7% figure, this UCR data still has limitations for the following reasons:
a. Even if police aren’t racist towards black people and just happen to spend too many resources in majority-black areas compared to majority white areas, there’d still be an artificial increase in arrests from black areas by virtue of them over-policing the black area. This basic thought experiment is clarified in this video (from 2:11 to 3:30).[7]
It relies on voluntary reports from local law enforcement agencies [5], so it can easily suffer from racially-driven selection bias (as further evidenced in this source [8]). Law enforcement agencies are essentially allowed to choose whether to disclose their data or not. This might not be a minor problem, either - back in 2017 the FBI found that a significant number of agencies weren’t reporting those numbers to the FBI. [9]
The UCR program admits that it doesn’t have a real means of ensuring that the data they receive is reliable. “The accuracy of the statistics depends primarily on the adherence of each contributor to the established standards of reporting. It is the responsibility of each state UCR Program or individual contributing law enforcement agency to submit accurate monthly statistics or correct existing data that are in error.” [5]
Keep in mind that this doesn’t necessarily mean blacks don’t commit a disproportionate amount of crime. All this really does is show that 13/50 is based on data which is unreliable and that people who use 13/50 blindly probably don’t know what they’re talking about.
What if we disregarded any inaccuracies which lower the 13/50 ratio or make it unreliable? Even then, if the result of your data is that you are now saying “blacks are only 13% of the population but do 50% of the crime” then the correct response isn’t to use this as some kind of ammo for online arguments on “black people bad.” It’d be better to say, “so what are the factors that are leading black people to commit a higher number of crimes than other races, and what can be done to reduce this number?” Throwing around 13/50 without providing any deeper analysis doesn’t actually tell us what to do to lower that purported ratio.
The 13/50 data also doesn’t account for other variables - it’s raw UCR data, and thus lacks context with which we could make any meaningful interpretation of the data. This means that it doesn’t control for factors like poverty, family instability, urbanity, and so on, which all have a significant role in crime levels. Without controlling for all of these factors plus more, it’s hard to use 13/50 to make any claims regarding innate racial differences, racial discrimination, etc. If someone tries to take 13/50 and, without any further analysis, conclude that blacks are just inferior to whites, they are simply an idiot.
What if we do try to account for some of those variables? Let’s see what happens - from the Bureau of Justice Statistics [10], after accounting for poverty and urbanity (which are strong predictors in crime levels), ‘Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000)’. Keep in mind though that there are a number of predictors of crime and that it’s not a very clear cut issue at all [11], which means that just blaming crime on just these two particular factors could be just as misguided as blaming crime on just race.
What if we did accept 13/50 to be a completely accurate portrayal of reality which pertains to all violent crime and not just homicides? Well, even this still isn’t necessarily damning to black people as a group. Crime rates within population groups tend to be skewed to a small minority of that population [12], and regardless high crime rates don’t justify abandoning or discriminating against black people.
For one, we must consider that most violent crime is done by a very small group of people - 1% of the population in Sweden does 63% of the violent crime, for example [12]. In the US, most of the violent crime in the 13/50 ratio is probably also clustered within a 1% which does most crime, so this is even less damning to 13% as a whole compared to just that 1%. This gives us perspective on how much 13% is actually responsible for 50%, which is not very much.
One variant of 13/50 is 6/50, which focuses specifically on black men. Not only is this in line with existing UCR stats [2] (disregarding UCR’s reliability), it’s also a passive admission that black women commit almost no violent crime, so already half of 13% isn’t responsible for 50%. This suggests that homicide or violent crime isn’t necessarily a general black thing, but rather a black male thing, which really needs to be taken into consideration when making statements about the nature of black people.
Even relying on UCR data without assuming any flaws, we see that only ~6,000 cases of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter were done by black people [13] (or ~5000 if you want to go by the original UCR data [1]). Even if we assume that every single homicide was committed by a different person (which is highly unlikely), that’s still barely representative of the broader black population of ~50 million in the US. Over 99% of black people will never be murderers.
The exact same sort of logic applied to 13/50 can be applied to men and violent crime, where the ratio trends around 50/90 (despite making up 50% of the population, men commit 90% of violent crime). Despite 13/50 and 50/90 having a similar 40 point disparity, most promoters of 13/50 oppose anti-male discrimination, and for good reason: men face oppression in certain parts of society but at the end of the day should still be treated like humans, not subhumans. Society at large does teach men to work in more dangerous jobs, to have a more violent mentality, and so on – and even if men are biologically predisposed to violent behavior (which is probably true to some extent), this doesn’t change that men are still human and should be treated as such. The exact same should apply to black people, even if they commit a wildly disproportionate amount of crime and even if they’re biologically inclined to do so.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-43
[3] https://nypost.com/2018/09/25/a-shocking-number-of-us-murders-went-unsolved-last-year/
[4] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
[5] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/ucr/a-word-about-ucr-data.pdf/view
[7] https://youtu.be/E8hj4IseFP4?t=131 2:11 to 3:30
[8] https://psmag.com/news/federal-agencies-failing-to-report-to-fbi-national-database
[9] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d56b/73bb7e1b72a8436e571761078a1be8ebc227.pdf
[10] https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5137
[12] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/
[13] https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2&selYrs=2018&rdoGroups=1&rdoData=c
More stuff here
Debunk of “Africans didn’t invent the wheel” argument, general history of continent, etc….https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2bgqyf/carts_cereals_and_ceramics/
General resources on African history and civilizational contributions:
https://au.int/sites/default/files/documents/40334-doc-africa_factbook-version-digital.pdf (thorough)
Here are a few rebuttals to Holocaust denial talking points, though not all unsubstantiated denier claims warrant an academic paper in response. The Liberal Sanity Project, who helped with Vaush’s original document, has a good video on this.
A quick word on Holocaust Deniers/Revisionists - oftentimes, they’re not open to new information or evidence. Unless they’re listening to others with their beliefs, they’ll have all the incentive in the world to troll and act in bad faith as they don’t expect a good faith response from non-believers (social stigma against Nazism plays a good role in this). With this in mind, these debunks will usually do nothing of value for you because they just don’t care what you bring to the table.
A few general resources for addressing a wide variety of claims:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190507151714/http://nizkor.org/qar-complete.cgi
https://phdn.org/ (oh no it’s french)
This extensive and well-sourced post explains how modern historians arrived at their estimation of Jewish Holocaust deaths (5.4 - 6.2 million).
There is lively academic debate within that range (Nazis kept poor records so we will never have a completely accurate answer) but no serious historian believes in any figure which deviates significantly from that range.
A passage from Denying History:
Historians are the ones who should be described as revisionists. To receive a Ph.D. and become a professional historian, one must write an original work with research based on primary documents and new sources, reexamining or reinterpreting some historical event—in other words, revising knowledge about that event only. This is not to say, however, that revision is done for revision’s sake; it is done when new evidence or new interpretations call for a revision.
Historians have revised and continue to revise what we know about the Holocaust. But their revision entails refinement of detailed knowledge about events, rarely complete denial of the events themselves, and certainly not denial of the cumulation of events known as the Holocaust.
Holocaust deniers claim that there is a force field of dogma around the Holocaust—set up and run by the Jews themselves—shielding it from any change. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether or not the public is aware of the academic debates that take place in any field of study, Holocaust scholars discuss and argue over any number of points as research continues. Deniers do know this.
The wooden doors presented in these images led to delousing rooms, not gas chambers. These are literally just pictures of wooden doors. It is not known what the original gas chamber doors looked like because Nazis destroyed those facilities before Soviet soldiers arrived.
This door, however, was found in the building yard of Auschwitz and is believed to be the kind used in their gas chambers.
The doors may have been destroyed, but the receipts for those doors were not. This receipt calls for an order “on 6/3/1943 concerning the delivery of a gas tight door 100 x 192 cm for cellar I of Krematorium III, to be produced to the identical pattern and dimensions as the cellar door of Krematorium II which is situated opposite, with peephole of double 8 mm glass, with rubber sealing strip and frame.”
It takes 1-5 hours to cremate a civilian body at a professional service. It takes far less time to cremate a body in an industrial furnace when speed takes priority over cleanliness and decency.
Also, Holocaust victims were not cremated one at a time. Toph and Sons (the makers of the Auschwitz crematoriums) claimed their units could handle 4-6 bodies an hour.
The bodies were “. . . sorted according to their combustibility: for the bodies of the well-nourished were to help burn the emaciated. Under the direction of the Kapos, the bearers began sorting the dead into four stacks. The largest consisted mainly of strong men, the next in size of women, then came children, and lastly a stack of dead Mussulmans, emaciated and nothing but skin and bones. This technique was called ‘express work,’ a designation thought up by the Kommandoführers and originating from experiments carried out in crematorium 5 in the autumn of 1943. The purpose of these experiments was to find a way of saving coke. . . . Thus the bodies of two Mussulmans were cremated together with those of two children or the bodies of two well-nourished men together with that of an emaciated woman, each load consisting of three, or sometimes, four bodies.” Filip Müller, Sonderkommando - Filip Müller
When crematoriums failed, they used burning pits.
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/ab4-civilian-ovens-comparison/ Comparing the civilian cremation process to the process at Auschwitz-Birkenau is misguided. The authorities in Auschwitz-Birkenau abandoned any respect for the dead and did not abide by civilian rules for cremation. They burned multiple bodies at one time, continuously pushing in more to keep the fires hot.
The Red Cross inspectors were not allowed to visit the parts of the camp intended for genocide and they had Nazis prepare their camp for scrutiny, deporting the near-dead and sanitizing the presented facilities.
“I repeatedly witnessed guided tours of civilians and also of commissions of the Red Cross and other parties within the camp, and I was able to ascertain that the camp leadership arranged it masterfully to conduct these guided tours in such a way that the people being guided around did not see anything about inhuman treatment. The main camp was shown only and in this main camp there were so-called show blocks, particularly block 13, that were especially prepared for such guided tours and that were equipped like a normal soldier’s barracks with beds that had sheets on them, and well-functioning washrooms.” - SS-Untersturmführer Hans Münch
Additionally, that letter tallying camp deaths is attributable to the International Tracing Service, not the Red Cross. They tally estimates, not records, and are not historically relevant.
All these amenities were present at Auschwitz I - the main camp, which held POWs, not Holocaust victims. The infamous extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Also, the band and “pool” were for the guards exclusively. The “pool’s” main purpose was actually that of a backup water reservoir.
Even if these amenities were present at Auschwitz-Birkenau, it wouldn’t disprove anything concerning the Holocaust.
The officially accepted death count for Auschwitz-Birkenau is closer to 1 million than 4 million, so the claim is already very misleading. Regardless, the death camp could still hypothetically have killed 4 million within its time of operation.
https://www.hdot.org/debunking-denial/ab3-german-documents-ovens/ The central office of Auschwitz-Birkenau asserts they could cremate, per day, 340 persons in crematorium 1, 1440 persons in crematorium 2, 1440 persons in crematorium 3, 768 persons in crematorium 4, 768 persons in crematorium 5, which totals to 4765 persons per day, 1,737,129 persons per year, and 4,690,248 persons over Auschwitz-Birkenau’s 2.7 years of operation.
Further, the issue is ultimately irrelevant; when the ovens’ daily capacities were exceeded, bodies were burned in open-air pits.
