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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

They don't prove that. This reasoning is like saying the law oppresses men because they are disproportionately convicted of violent crimes.

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Don't read anything into this, but can you see the next step here if you replace "men" with "black men"? Is this actually the point you want to make?

I don't see how that changes anything except to make the analogy politically fraught and easier to derail. The logic remains the same. Certainly, conservatives have no problem with the logic if you modify the analogy as you have suggested.

My only point that as with anything (and especially with crime statistics), "it's just not that simple" and nuance matters, in the sense that (in the modified analogy), to say at least some systemic racism doesn't exist in the way the prison stats play out seems naive at best, it seems similarly naive to assume there's no bias in this case as well.

Obviously nothing is "just that simple", if that's your only point so be it, but that isn't telling us much since this is true of literally everything.

> My only point that as with anything (and especially with crime statistics), "it's just not that simple" and nuance matters,

If this is actually your point then you are supporting root's argument, not rebutting it. Root was pointing out poor causal relationships determined from lack of recognition of confounding variables. You just listed another (substantially more famous) example of such a relationship.

That was such a bad faith argument/read that I don't even know where to begin.

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