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Comment by sli | Hacker News Reader

Utah is the #1 state for porn consumption in the US. Utah loves porn, they only hate it on paper.

This is not the dunk you think it is. Consider: African Americans hate guns, and also murder more people with them, per capita, than almost anyone else. Does this strike you as contradictory in any way? If confronted with a black voter who said they wanted stricter gun laws, would your response be to sneer and say, "You only hate guns on paper"?

Your claim makes no logical sense.

The largest purveyor of violence is the white controlled US government. Per capita, the people committing the most murders are white. That murder is just committed with impunity, specially re-classified, and/or tax payers are forced to subsidize it.

I'm guessing you're making some argument about war? If so, I'm not interested in sophistry. I'm not playing the "which race is better?" game. In the US, it's a fact that violent crime is not disproportionately committed by white people. If you take off your offense glasses and reread my original comment, you'll notice I am pointing out that despite there being lots of crime committed by African Americans, that community is not at all a monolith, and the vast majority of black people want desperately to turn the tides of violence that plague their communities, and support policies to that effect.

>I'm guessing you're making some argument about war?

The old "It's not murder and/or criminal if the innocent people I kill earn me a medal or paycheck" argument.

Murder is murder, nothing sophistic about dealing with reality.

Just because the US white community regularly commits organized extrajudicial mass murder under a self serving special classification, it doesn't change the reality that US whites commit the most violent crime.

I'm not dealing with war because it's irrelevant to the comment I wrote. You're bringing up war because you want to prove "white people are more violent in a general sense than black people." "Which race is, in general, responsible for the most violence?" is an inane, inflammatory question that I have no interest in interrogating. In my original comment, I used well-known crime statistics to make a very basic point about why it's silly to say that a large group of people is hypocritical because they, in aggregate, hold views that are in tension with their behavior, in aggregate. You got triggered by the racial aspect, assumed I was just being a racist, and tried to prove me wrong by demonstrating that white people are the cause of the world's suffering. It's bizarre behavior.

You made a false statement about a minority racial group as if it was a forgone conclusion and I called it out as being false.

The fact is US white society has committed the most crime (murder, robbery, fraud, etc) of any group (by many orders of magnitude) since the country's founding.

Nothing bizzare about clarifying that your claim was false.

What you wrote is "Per capita, the people committing the most murders are white." My original statement was very obviously made with reference to a US legal context, and in that context, your statement is completely false. If you want to use a definition of murder which is not accepted in the US legal context, be my guest, but it has nothing to do with what I wrote.

The problem with this statement is people are individuals, and murder, thankfully, is still a rare event. You might as well claim, white people hate serial killers, but still per capita, have more serial killers than almost anyone else.

That's exactly the point I'm making. African Americans support gun control because guns are such a problem in their community. The people who want the guns banned are not the same people using them, so there's no contradiction between the statement, "African Americans use guns more than anyone," and the statement, "African Americans support gun control more than anyone." A person who says "Utahans say they hate porn but really they love porn" is falling prey to the same logical fallacy as a person who says "Black people say they hate guns, but if you look at the stats, they really love guns." In both cases, the person taking a differentiated mass of people and collapsing them into a unified whole, then complaining that the monolith they've created in their heads has incoherent views.

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