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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

You are wrong to focus on the color of someone's skin.

Classism is the issue. Opportunity is the issue. Greed of the wealthy reaping rents in a quest to squeeze out every last bit of blood money possible is the issue.

Even the choice to forego a proper security system for the cars is an example of greed, of cutting every corner possible and still charging a premium. Who pays? On both ends of this equation it is the poor.

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It's not strictly speaking the color of anyone's skin, but the taboos around discussing criminals of a certain shade that bugs me.

>Classism is the issue.

Crime does correlate somewhat with income, but racial differences in rates of violent crime are poorly explained by income level. Page 93, Table 6:

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/9...

And here, see "Analysis of the Combined Data" and the conclusion section:

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe...

The author claims a large amount of the difference is explained by family structure. I'm inclined to agree, and I wish our leaders touched on this more often. You can't welfare or police your way out of a failed subculture where kids aren't raised to respect life and property, or themselves for that matter.

Um, have you been to America before, or read any of it's history? Of course we don't openly discuss the racialized class of cheap reserve peon labor that is maintained for everyone else's benefit, that would be super uncomfortable.

It’s worth pointing out that insofar as the failed subculture is failed, its failure was deliberate. Same thing happened with Native Americans. The playbooks for destroying cultures are centuries old and they’re intended to reap exactly the sort of dysfunction you still see generations down the road.

Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be addressing the issue head on and talking about it openly, but it’s definitely more complex than the genetic argument that tends to emerge.

Know of any good books documenting these deliberate actions you talk about or are you speaking more generally?

I’m sure there are plenty, but a few of the strategies that I’m pointing to:

1. Forbid people from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures/religions (slavery)

2. Relocate children to schools of the subjugating culture or prevent them from being educated (happened during slavery)

3. Make drugs and intoxicants widely available (CIA bringing drugs into black neighborhoods)

4. Enslave people

5. Post-slavery, give them fewer rights and a caste-stratified society (Dread Scott)

6. When/where these cultures build wealth, destroy it (Tulsa massacre)

This history is important and relevant in the abstract, but what does it tell us about solutions for today's problems? I don't see what Dred Scott tells us about stopping rampant car thefts in Milwaukee. We are where we're at, now how do we improve?

Not sure! But one important component of a solution is probably to avoid the thinking that generated or at least perpetuated many of the problems in the first place (i.e. intrinsic racial inferiority). Probably also not by acting like everything is all good or that there’s no agency within these communities.

Class and income are not direct parallel. An upper class person falling on hard times still has a generation or three of family and connections and other support structures to reduce the impact. This notion of treating class as about primarily income rather than relationship to control over your own life obscures more than it enlightens. Income affects that control, but so does e.g. societal structures. Family structure is itself a class issue.

>Family structure is itself a class issue.

Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, both very poor parts of the world on average, have a higher ratio of married couples with children to single parents than do the United States and Canada:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/286433/women-worldwide-single-m...

David Drummond, former head of legal at Google and recipient of $47M in total comp in 2019, had a child with a woman who he abandoned and abruptly cut off:

https://www.businessinsider.com/david-drummond-earned-47-mil...

I can provide more anecdotes and data if you like, but my strong sense is that family formation isn't as nearly as tied to class as you think. If anything, low-income people save relatively more money by co-habitating.

I didn't say "family formation" is tied to class. I said that family structure is a class issue.

I also specifically argued against the notion of seeing class as determined by income.

"Classism is the issue. Opportunity is the issue."

The U.S. should owe its citizens access to opportunity. With access, everyone can pursue economic opportunity.

"Greed of the wealthy reaping rents"

This is rarely the case. IIRC, most landlords own 1-2 units. Only a minority can be described with your words.

If 1 person owns 1,000 units and 5 people own 1-2 units then most people own 1-2 units.

Much like farm size the meaningful number is the reverse. What percentage of units are owned by someone with 1-2 units vs 100’s.

"Rent" is an economic term, meaning roughly "income derived from mere ownership of an asset" such as land, but also including things like other monopolies.

I disagree with this framing.

Farming is merely "income derived from ownership of an asset". Web servers, auto rentals, text books, and skii/beach resorts are too.

No it isn't. It is labour. In fact it actually an example of something where the distinction between labour and rent is crystal-clear.

If you're a landlord and you outsource the working of the land to a peasant tenant farmer (as was the norm in many places for thousands of years), your cut is 100% rent, as it is only derived from your (violence-enforced) exclusive ownership rights to the land.

"No it isn't. It is labour."

Is it? Farming is (historically) an optimized form of gathering that's transformed alongside crop consolidation and other efficiency gains.

Without land, farming cannot occur. Without laborers or equipment, farming can occur, but in a less efficient form.

Also, all monetizable "things" represent assets because they hold/produce value.

Without land, farming cannot occur.

Duh. But that's not what you're saying, you're saying "without privatised land, farming cannot occur", which is a trivially false assertion.

>Also, all monetizable "things" represent assets because they hold/produce value.

Yes, that is indeed the definition of asset: an ownable and tradable "thing". I fail to see the point.

"But that's not what you're saying, you're saying "without privatised land, farming cannot occur", which is a trivially false assertion."

The world's land is privatized. What ought to be has no relevance.

Farming is asset-driven for that reason.

I'm not debating what could be; only what is.

Appalachia is poor as dirt, yet has half the crime rate. And that's just one comparison - there are lots of others in the world.

Crime is a meme (in the Dawkins sense). You see your peers memeing and you start to repeat the same meme yourself. The more you're surrounded by the meme, the more it becomes part of you and how you operate. It's how our brains operate as pattern recognizers and pattern repeaters.

The spread of school shootings is a meme - it didn't happen in the pre-internet era, yet the uptick in news about it has led to a proliferation. It's become a part of the public consciousness, including amongst those that feel disaffected and likely to fall into destructive patterns of thought. It's easy to find online communities that reinforce these feelings and dispositions.

"Incel behavior". Meme.

Anti-trans politics. From out of nowhere, it's suddenly everywhere. Also a meme.

Through this lens, gang behavior amongst disaffected youth is no different than shitposting on Twitter in how it latches on to people and spreads.

If you transplanted the seeds of Atlanta crime into Pickens County, Georgia, I've no doubt the same behavior would take root there. It's independent of skin color or genes. It's a brain modality.

Behavior spreads as a meme. If there are pockets that support or reinforce a particular behavior, then the fire can't and won't die out.

There's definitely more at play than just bad thoughts. Actions result from emotions and expectations that are conditioned by complex patterns of social behavior reinforced by material pressures and legal institutions providing complex feedback to behaviors and all of that is also part of the explanation why memes spread farther and faster in some places, like American schools, than in other places.

> The spread of school shootings is a meme - it didn't happen in the pre-internet era

That might not be the case:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...

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