November 25, 2013

Slate: the Knockout Game trend is a myth

From Slate:
Sorry, Right-Wing Media: The "Knockout Game" Trend Is a Myth.

By Emma Roller 
I remember the summer of 2011, a story about a crowd of teenagers at the Wisconsin State Fair randomly attacking fairgoers went viral as a sign of a burgeoning race war. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel fanned the flames, calling the teenagers "rampaging youths" who caused "mob-like disturbances": 
"Then around the closing time of 11 p.m., witnesses told the Journal Sentinel, dozens to hundreds of black youths attacked white people as they left the fair, punching and kicking people and shaking and pounding on their vehicles." 
"Dozens to hundreds"? When witnesses can't differentiate between 24 and 100, should we really rely on them to speculate whether a crime was racially motivated?

In other words when the number of attackers is too many to count, we shouldn't listen to the victims and other witnesses. What do they know? Are you going to trust people with concussions? They're just wimps who got beat up. They're losers with memory loss. They probably had it coming.
One of the reasons the story gained so much traction could have stemmed from the fact that Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the country, and it validated white residents' fear that their black neighbors are dangerous.

Like I said, those racists had it coming.
Now, the false trend story of black mob violence has cropped up again, as it seems to do annually, in conservative media outlets. (McKay Coppins wrote about this phenomenon in BuzzFeed last year.) The new scare is the "knockout game," in which black youths supposedly attack innocent people just for fun. 

It's a respectable story now, finally, because it recently happened to some New York City Jews, and Jewish leaders are allowed to complain about hate crimes against their people.
Conservative pundits decry the MSM for suffering from political correctness and whitewashing crimes perpetrated by black people, but a more reasonable explanation for why most media outlets aren't devoting round-the-clock coverage to the knockout game is that—sorry, Sean Hannity—there is no hard data showing that it's a trend. 
An important clarification: the game definitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years.

It's not news if it's not a trend. If an earthquake levels San Francisco tomorrow, we shouldn't cover that because that's not a story because it's not a trend. Earthquakes are just something random that happens. They aren't increasing so you shouldn't notice them.
I'm not claiming the game doesn't exist. But the idea that it's reached epidemic levels, or that it's only being played by young black people, is a fallacy. As Alan Noble convincingly writes, "Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling 'knockout game.'" And when it comes to the knockout game's supposed popularity, the data is almost entirely anecdotal:
Here’s the fascinating thing about this “spreading” trend: nobody seems to have any evidence that it’s spreading, or that it’s new, or that it’s racially motivated, or that black youths are the ones typically responsible, or that whites are typically targeted. This hasn’t stopped Mark Steyn, Thomas Sowell, and Matt Walsh from describing this specifically as a crime committed by blacks against whites, CNN from claiming that it is “spreading,” or Alec Torres at NRO from say it is “evidently increasing [in] popularity.” 
This is precisely the type of story meant to animate the deepest recesses of our lizard brains—"Danger lurks around every corner! Identify your enemy!" At the epicenter of this narrative is Colin Flaherty, a writer for WorldNetDaily who probably has a Google alert set up for "black suspect." He's made it his life's work to report any single crime perpetrated by a black person in the U.S. against a white person. In a recent blog post, he lists as evidence six separate crimes in Philadelphia over the course of two years, which share nothing in similarity except for the fact that they involved black people. 
Imagine if another national "journalist" started doing the same for, say, any crime committed in Alabama, or any arson charge in the country. People would start to think Alabama was going through a crime epidemic, or that arson was becoming all the rage with criminals.

Like the white-racists-are-burning-down-black-churches-in-Alabama quasi-hoax that was a huge respectable story in the 1990s? (What happened then was this: there are a lot of churches in America, many of them closed most of the week, more than a few of them more or less abandoned. And every year hundreds of churches across the country catch fire, more than a few due to arson. Whether this arson is for more for functional reasons [e.g., nobody around most of the time], or because churches attract firebugs for psychological reasons [flames of hell?], or because some financially failing ministers unleash a little Protestant Lightning to collect fire insurance, is unknown. What happened was that the national media started paying selective attention to black churches being subject to arson, and soon we had an national crisis on our hands.)

Kind of like that black gay mayoral candidate in Mississippi who was dragged and set on fire by the homophobic white male Southern Republican Christian power structure.
That would be ridiculous, because it's ridiculous to assume that a few unrelated counts of arson make arson an epidemic. But when you inject race into the equation, it conveniently aligns with the assumptions of people who happen to be racist. That's the sort of twisted logic that justifies why more than half of the U.S. prison population is made up by black and Hispanic people, even though they comprise a quarter of the total population. 
Crime happens to every type of person, and is perpetrated by every type of person. What makes the false narrative of the knockout game—or any "black mob violence" story—crop up every year is the fact that some people will always believe the color of someone's skin predisposes him to commit a crime. When a few YouTube videos are able to convince terrified white folks that young black people are dangerous, they may as well assume that all cats can play the keyboard.

Seriously, as I've been pointing out for several years, the spread of video recording technology is having multiple effects on crime and our perceptions of crime.

It encourages some idiots to commit more crimes so they can post them on World Star Hip Hop for their idiot friends to watch.

But the Surveillance Society also works to discourage crimes. Recall the 2011 bus shooting in Philadelphia that was recorded on multiple high definition video cameras newly installed. The half dozen or so perps are readily distinguishable. In the long run, that level of surveillance ought to discourage crime as the lesson sinks in that you can't intimidate video cameras into not testifying against you in court.

But mostly, the spread of video just makes it harder for the media to limit our awareness of what really goes on in our country.

The overarching trend is that the spread of readily accessible information increasingly converts the prestige press into Gatekeepers who see their job as preventing the public from engaging in acts of pattern recognition.

62 comments:

  1. Oh I get it now. The people who have been killed because of Knockout Martin Luther King didn't really die, their own deaths are figments of their racist imaginations.

    Repeating for those needing: Where, and how, Knockout "Game" was born:

    http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/the-knockout-game-case-that-shocked-st-louis-and-how/article_cdf5032a-b65e-51e0-a84e-de0f0ce0c5f8.html

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  2. Well, if they are going to be color-blind regarding the knockout game, then they should remain colorblind regarding the number of "players" who wind up dead who happen to be black:

    http://club937.com/60-year-old-woman-shoots-two-kids-playing-the-knockout-game/

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  3. One man kills one black teenager with no video evidence and is released without much questioning, obvious example of systematic white racism.

    Multiple filmed assaults on only nonblacks by blacks and interviews on how this game is played for fun,nothing systematic or pattern recognizable there. Nope.

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  4. I think they have been told to spread the word that Obama's sons are nice people.

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  5. many commenters called slate out on their disingenuous trope that "well, members of all groups commit crimes" which falsely implies they commit crimes @ equal rates. DWLs cried when data were produced that "tattled on" reality. DWLs screamed "that/those data is/are 10 years old" -- uh, some black administrations don't like to release fresh data on reality! countenance is right to call it knockout (martin luther) king!

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  6. Steve,

    In regards to black on white crime, are we now in the cycle quoted by Ghandi, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” ?

    The MSM basically ignored these stories. Then all of a sudden this week, I am seeing several of these stories telling us that we are imagining things.

    Are Yglesias and company going to pick a fight next?

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  7. The author has her own little self-promotional web site, for those who'd care to google it in order to have a look and a laugh -- ie it's all what you might expect from someone who boasts in her CV of having lots of experience working with the NYT and AP style guides. If I was the type who wrote "LOL", I'd write LOL here. But I'm not.

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  8. Can we just exhaust all epistemic uncertainties right now and be done with it? Thumbing through my History of Western Philosophy, here is a crib sheet for the benefit of the Reality-based Community-


    pre-Socratic: The knockout game is impossible because a fist would have to traverse an infinite number of infinitesimally small spaces just to reach a head.

    Socratic: Those who admit they know nothing about the knockout game are wiser than those who think they do.

    Aristotelian: No man can be called happy until he has died never having suffered the knockout game.

    Scholastic: The knockout game is mentioned in neither the Bible or the Greek philosophers [sic- bad, second-hand translation from Arabic of a bad translation from the Greek]

    Descartes: All I can know for certain is that I am thinking of the knockout game.

    Leibniz: If the knockout game were real, this would not be the best of all possible worlds.

    Hume: That getting punched in the head, blacking out, and hitting the concrete have always tended to follow one other in the past does not mean we ever have grounds to believe that getting punched in the head causes one to black out and hit the concrete (this one's for you, Yglesias!)

    Kant: It is never permissible to lie, even if it is to misdirect knockout game players from their intended victim.

    Hegel: The knockout game is the necessary antithesis to the Trayvon Martin shooting's thesis. Their synthesis will advance the World Spirit.

    Nietzsche: All higher culture is based on the knockout game.

    William James: The point is not whether the knockout game is good or bad, but is it useful?

    Heidegger: To be a victim of the knockout game is to experience true dasein by being thrown into the world and having one's crushed, bleeding temple be finally ready-at-hand instead of just present-at-hand.

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  9. next we'll have colleges offering scholarships for the knockout king team. i wonder if affirmative action would allow a few whites on the team.

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  10. I can soooooort of see her point, but I agree that it's a hypocritical point. We have proof that the game happens, but not that it's all that common, and it may not be as racial as it first seems--if someone produced video showing some white kid playing or some black kid playing with a black victim I wouldn't be terribly shocked. However, the same must be said of "hate crimes" by white perpetrators--they happen, they're probably not common, and they may not all be racially motivated after all.

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  11. So this woman says a trend doesn't exist, then immediately concedes that it does.

    And Tina Brown cries.

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  12. freudwasrightaboutafewthings11/25/13, 7:01 PM

    No it's not a respectable story,it's a story. Liberals are still denying it, despite the fact that there has been a spate of black-on-Jewish hate crimes in NYC. The NY Times ran an article denying the reality of the knockout game.

    This notion that "It happened to the Jews so now it will be taken seriously" is a Sailersphere fantasy.

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  13. It's still not a respectable story. Although it happened to Jews, it didn't happen to the right kind of Jews. Ultra orthodox chasids are hardly the ones controlling the media.

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  14. I suppose the Christian-Newsom torture-murders (covered extensively by Steve's Vdare colleague Nicholas Stix) in Knoxville, Tennessee are another Urban Myth.

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  15. "you can't intimidate video cameras into not testifying against you in court."

    Nice one, Steve.

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  16. freudwasrightaboutafewthings11/25/13, 8:50 PM

    By the way, the 78-year-old lady who got knocked out was wheeling her great-grand around when she was attacked.

    You just have to know she was Orthodox. A non-Orthodox 78 year old Jewish lady in Brooklyn would have grands, but not great-grands.

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  17. "freudwasrightaboutafewthings said...

    This notion that "It happened to the Jews so now it will be taken seriously" is a Sailersphere fantasy."

    You are absolutely wrong. Knockout King / Polar Bear Hunting has been going on for years. It is only now a national story because of the attacks (on Jews) in New York City. Nobody has said that the MSM will take it seriously, as indeed many outlets are not. But that we are now talking about it - the fact that the MSM is talking about it - that happened just as Steve said.

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  18. "Anonymous said...

    ""you can't intimidate video cameras into not testifying against you in court.""

    Nice one, Steve."

    Perhaps vibrant urban "communities" need a new popular campaign: Stop Filmin'

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  19. Liberals like this writer remind me of the mayor in the movie Jaws.

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  20. X Doesn't Get It11/25/13, 9:06 PM

    Gotta love the patronizing Slate heds that begin, "Sorry, [GOP/Christians/Bigots/Whitepeople]"--yes, this snotty Swarthmore grad or assistant poli-sci professor or former visiting fellow at Brookings is here to Slatesplain everything about the revised reality to you.

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  21. Liberal translator: "For now we find this an acceptable level of violence"

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  22. Harry Baldwin11/25/13, 9:10 PM

    . . . if someone produced video showing some white kid playing or some black kid playing with a black victim I wouldn't be terribly shocked.

    One of the most vicious examples I have seen of the knockout game involved black perps and an elderly black victim. Prison time is not enough for such as these.

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  23. I just wandered over to World Star, primarily expecting to be traumatized by the comment section but while the grammar and vocabulary there tested my comprehension skills, virtually all of the comments read like the old Chris Rock bit: "I love black people, but..."

    It was actually heartening to read

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  24. No it's not a respectable story,it's a story. Liberals are still denying it, despite the fact that there has been a spate of black-on-Jewish hate crimes in NYC. The NY Times ran an article denying the reality of the knockout game.

    This notion that "It happened to the Jews so now it will be taken seriously" is a Sailersphere fantasy.


    It wasn't even covered by mainstream national media before the attacks on Jews in Brooklyn. Before, despite reports of it going on for several years, it was only covered by local news affiliates and right-wing blogs.

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  25. Nicely done Steve. I'd love a rebuttal from the Slate writer. But that'll never happen. Still, I am vastly amused imagining her reading this now. (How dare they!)

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  26. The overarching trend is that the spread of readily accessible information increasingly converts the prestige press into Gatekeepers who see their job as preventing the public from engaging in acts of pattern recognition.

    Losing readers who read the press to be informed, but gaining readers who read the press to know what they must think to be PC, such as "the knockout game exists but it's not a trend".

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  27. reply to eah said...

    Folks check this young Cultural Marxist's blog emmaroller.com

    One more thing, she is a former NPR intern and a 2011 University of Wisconsin Madison grad.

    Nothing quite like being told how the world works by a 25-26 year old New Lefty antifa.

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  28. FYI, there is some precedence for white youths doing this sort of thing, but in the UK, not the US. A friend of mine who grew up in Britain said that on more than one occasion he was randomly assaulted by a group of white teenagers. And in his pre-Sex Pistols youth, Sid Vicious supposedly assaulted random strangers with a bicycle chain.

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  29. Gubbler:

    And why are white liberals so eager to 'gentrify' urban centers and relocate blacks if blacks are so wonderful to have around?

    From my own experience, I have noticed that real grassroots gentrification around Philadelphia almost always means taking a poor/working class white neighborhood or mixed white/hispanic neighborhood and transforming it into hipster heaven, or pushing out at the margins on black or mixed race neighborhoods from an already gentrified white area for a couple of blocks.

    In general, I don't see many 99% black ghetto hoods suddenly going white and upper middle class, because, well, who in their right mind would be the first 25% of well off whites to move into such a neighborhood?

    Examples: Manayunk, Fairmount, Queens Village (1970's/1980's first wave gentrification), Old City, Northern Liberties, Bella Vista (1990's/2000's second wave), Fishtown, Kensington (today's front line). There has been a minor frontal push into what is being called Graduate Hospital which was a black area, but the push is block-by-block where people gradually move south out of an already white area.

    As another example, some fool of a developer tried to jump a few blocks into the ghetto north of Fairmount called Brewerytown. Instead of having the expected results of whitewashing the area, the development mostly attracted well-off blacks who could live near a safe white neighborhood but still stay among their own kind. The return earned was not what was expected given the clientele who actually bought, and the experiment has not been repeated.

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  30. Protestant Lightning: I laughed.

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  31. X Doesn't Get It: ...yes, this snotty Swarthmore grad or assistant poli-sci professor or former visiting fellow at Brookings is here to Slatesplain everything about the revised reality to you.

    "Slatesplain". Good one.

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  32. The knock-out game was a white-on-black crime known by another name in the South. And the 60-year-old woman shoots two attackers is an urban myth according to Snopes.

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  33. Slate is right. It is not a trend. The knockout attack has been happening regularly for at least forty years. Most white people who went to a a school which was at least 10% black have been, or know, victims of the Knockout attack. The Noticing is the trend.

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  34. Blogger not securely anchored said...

    "The knock-out game was a white-on-black crime known by another name in the South. And the 60-year-old woman shoots two attackers is an urban myth according to Snopes."

    So we should Keep Calm, Carry On and call it the Payback Game instead?

    And Snopes? Really?

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  35. While relaxing and sitting in a local small park last year I saw a middle-aged man and his teen son come in and start taking photos of the flower arrangements. Tourists who like flowers, apparently. There were three Trayvons shuffling about nearby. One of them suddenly lashed out and punched the small, scrawny son of the tourist. The two tourists were obviously taken by surprise and didn't know what was going on. Another one of the rangy Trayvons jumped in and slugged the adult, knocking him down. The three then ran off laughing, pleased as punch with themselves as if they had just gotten done partying or had accomplished a successful rape. The tourists were left to dust themselves off and wonder what had just happened. Must be a great memory, getting knocked down in front of your own son. Welcome to Chicago and thanks for the memories. I guess I didn't see anything, it's all just an illusion.

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  36. Anonymous above wrote:

    From my own experience, I have noticed that real grassroots gentrification around Philadelphia almost always means taking a poor/working class white neighborhood or mixed white/hispanic neighborhood and transforming it into hipster heaven, or pushing out at the margins on black or mixed race neighborhoods from an already gentrified white area for a couple of blocks.

    I respond:

    I've noticed the same thing in my own city:

    http://countenance.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/thank-a-hoosier/

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  37. I love the reference to Sean Hannity as some kind of extreme, race-realist right-winger! When Sean Hannity is the quintessence of the right on your political spectrum, it's a good indicator that you're an unimaginative liberal.

    It reminds me of when I heard Edward James Olmos give a talk on my old college campus in honor of Cesar Chavez Day. (If you're wondering what I was doing there, I was into Battlestar Galactica at the time.) Anyway, I remember EJO referring to Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly as "far right-wing."

    We should be so lucky!

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  38. I know one person who was a victim of Knockout Game, but her hospitalization didn't result in a criminological data point. I suspect that's true in many cases that are not recorded and posted online; victims are treated and released or they come to and never mention what happened.

    The author of the Slate article claims that all is anecdote, that no hard data support the claim that this is a racially motivated trend. My question is: Is there any research at all? Surveys of urban populations (victims and perps) would be a start.

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  39. This is precisely the type of story meant to animate the deepest recesses of our lizard brains—"Danger lurks around every corner! Identify your enemy!"

    Liberals seem to love this "lizard brain" trope. I suppose it's part of the Frankfurt School tradition of dismissing conservative views as the product of psychological flaws.

    However, the thing about our more primal fear instincts is that they cannot be sustained over a long period of time. The mental and physical responses associated with reptilian fight-or-flight instincts are designed to get us out of discrete life-or-death situations. The "lizard brain" cannot sustain a worldview.

    Personally, I rarely if ever worry about crime, terrorism, etc. at a primal level. My concerns about these things are intellectually legitimate; I wish to minimize the risk that I, or people I care about, or my fellow citizens will be so victimized.

    But why argue with your opponents' orbital cortex when you can trot out this sneering "lizard brain" canard?

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  40. Does she know Tom Sowell is black?

    It wouldn't surprise me if she didn't.

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  41. The knock-out game was a white-on-black crime known by another name in the South.

    Evidence supporting that contention? Liberals don't need no stinkin' evidence, they have their feelings of moral superiority.

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  42. Somehow, this all puts me in mind of the "Come Back to Jamaica" television ad campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

    As a lad, I was watching TV with my Dad and wondered aloud what these commercials were about. They seemed kind of random. Why the soothing music, black people playing polo, and smiling black women and old men? And what's with "Come BACK to Jamaica."

    Since Mom wasn't around, Dad was able to explain that the Jamaican government was trying to convince white tourists that black Jamaicans were pretty much over the whole mob violence/robbing/killing/raping white tourists thing. A thing which came into vogue there when the loony socialist Michael Manley came to power in the 70s. It's safe now! We won't kill you!

    The commercials couldn't say that, though, since the abuse of white tourists was an official un-fact, both in Jamaica and in the US. I went googling around just now, and it is not that easy to find clear descriptions of exactly what went on in Jamaica during the mid 1970s. Just vague statements about "recurring violence" and the suffering of the poor Jamaican people.

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  43. The author of the Slate article claims that all is anecdote


    Yeah, unlike the "evidence" of white-on-black racism which the media tries to conjure into existence. Zimmerman shooting Trayvon? "Hey, that's not an anecdote, it's proof of the violent oppression suffered by blacks in Amerikkka!"

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  44. "Does she know Tom Sowell is black?

    It wouldn't surprise me if she didn't."

    Seriously you have to ask, Emma here, what fitting first name, is a 25-26 year old UofW Madison School of Journalism under grad and former NPR intern.

    She barely had enough time to learn all that her profs expected her from
    Adorno, Horkheimer , Marcuse, Hofstadter, Zinn, Chomsky.....

    Now she at Slate desperate to show the world what $100,000 of the parents money and student loans can buy in terms of lefty brainwashing.

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  45. "Does she know Tom Sowell is black?

    It wouldn't surprise me if she didn't."

    Or if she does, I wonder if she felt even a twinge of PC-induced shame that a 20-something white girl was contradicting the racial views of a man who grew up in the Jim Crow South then Harlem and went to Howard and then Harvard (before affirmative action) graduating Magna cum Laude.

    I'm surprised that Slate would print such an article, dripping of white privilege, attacking the lived experience of a wise old black man.

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  46. The best argument that the Knock-out Game is NOT a trend is actually one that the MSM could never possibly use, to wit: since young blacks have always committed a great many assaults, it is not clear if this is really anything new or if the newness is more from the ubiquity of video rather than any newly emergent behavior.

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  47. Anecdotes are data that a ruling class considers not useful.

    YouTube videos of Russian skinheads beating up Jews = data.

    YouTube videos of the Knockout Game = anecdotes.

    All those lynchings and assaults in the Deep South were merely anecdotes - part of the scene - until someone powerful decided to consider them A Trend. It was at that point that concern about them became trendy.

    A million observations through telescopes would not have vindicated Galileo in the eyes of the Church of his day. Likewise, a thousand, a million, even one hundred million videos and police reports would not be enough to indicate "a trend" to all the Emmas and Matthews at Slate.

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  48. Remember the home invader who beat a mother senseless in front of her small child? Threw the woman down a flight of stairs as well?

    Surprising that the trial wasn't all news all the time, considering the viciousness of the perp & the victim a "soccer mom". Black on White crime so ignore or refutation of Whiskey's Dictum? Not trying to rile anyone, it just seems to be an odd one to drop down the Memory Hole. By the way, the video showed the idiocy of having a firearm locked in a safe. Unloaded.
    As recommended by "Authorities".

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  49. This article relies heavily on an article from Alfred Noble, which relies heavily on an article by John H. Tucker from 2 1/2 years ago. Things could have changed greatly in the past 2 1/2 years. And the section Noble quotes to support the idea of it not being a racial thing says this:

    "All but two of the ten victims . . . interviewed were white (one was black and was Latino), and all of the players were black. But Knockout King does not appear to be bounded by race. Jason, from St. Louis County, says two white friends were part of his punch-out crew. One Dutchtown woman, agreeing to speak on the condition that her name not be published, says police caught her son, who is white, playing Knockout King. . . .

    “It’s not a black thing, it’s a kid thing,” the woman says. “It’s teenage kids trying to be cool. My son’s as white as can be. He doesn’t have a black bone in his body.”"

    Noble says this:

    "How could Torres read this article and yet still come to the conclusion that the assaults are on the rise and that “most” of them involve black assailants and white or asian victims? In his defense, other pundits have drawn the same conclusion, despite the lack of evidence."

    Well, let's see- his first sentence flat out says "all but two of the ten victims were right", which could also be read as "eight out of ten victims were right." I guess Noble didn't consider that angle. And then it quotes a single instance of a knockout game perpetrator who was white. How does this refute the overall trend of it being a black on non-black phenomenon?

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  50. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  51. The Jamaican tourist ads made a big deal about how Noel Coward lived in Jamaica.

    The Clash didn't find Jamaica safe. Google their song "Safe European Home."

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  52. I just realized that the entire passage Noble quotes is classic "well, not ALL of X do X" liberal reasoning on display. Him listing 10 documented knockout game attacks where two of the victims weren't white somehow refutes the overall trend of it being primarily black on white (actually, many publications mention other non-white victims). And to refute the fact it's all black perpetrators, he mentions a single instance of the knockout game being perpetrated by two whites with one of their mothers arguing it has nothing to do with race.

    There's no trick wording, it's just playing on the timeless liberal ignorance and denial of statistics and probability. And the Slate article just keeps rising in popularity. They really don't even try.

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  53. "I went googling around just now, and it is not that easy to find clear descriptions of exactly what went on in Jamaica during the mid 1970s."

    Essentially the National Party and the Labour Party stopped wanting to bother with elections and took their disputes to the streets. Both parties armed gangs and had them battle for control of urban constituencies. Manley attempted a very blusterous gun control scheme during this time that was seen rightly as a transparent attempt to disarm his opponents. Naturally everyone ignored it.

    Nor surprisingly, Manley was also very cozy with Fidel Castro and the various socialist leaders in Africa.

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  54. "Anonymous said...

    ""The knock-out game was a white-on-black crime known by another name in the South. And the 60-year-old woman shoots two attackers is an urban myth according to Snopes.""

    And Snopes? Really?"

    The notion that Snopes is an unbiased arbiter of fact is itself an urban myth.

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  55. Anybody else remember the lament of The Clash?

    In their song "White Riot" (for years wrongly identified as a "skinhead" and "neo-Nazi" "anthem") they noted with frustration:

    Black people got a lotta problems
    They don't mind throwin' a brick
    White people go to school
    Where they teach you how to be thick

    Everybody's doin
    What they're told to
    Nobody wants
    To go to jail

    IOW, whites are too busy learning, and avoiding behaviors with ill future consequences, to have riots.

    I was a chinos-n-plaid-wearing Philly punk when this came out. My nearby industrial town had already been visited by Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and Temple "experts" and grad students who knew exactly what was wrong: the most degenerate, disheveled, lazy, violent, low-intelligence among us didn't get enough goodies, and we, watching our wages dry up and our jobs blow away, were at fault. For being white.

    It would all be solved by lots of welfare payouts for the blacks, and turning the reins of power over to them, and making all the children ride a Magic Bus. Or more accurately the Yellow-Submarine-equivalent in the Peter-Max-(etc.)-addled minds of these unbelievably elitist, hostile, and self-hating/guilted-up/black-pathology-worshipping whites.

    Thing is, knockout attacks were common then as well. We called them suckerpunches. It never stopped happening in my 70+percent black home town. It's just that till now, we didn't have the ubiquitous recording technology to document them. Till recently, degenerate blacks did everyone the favor of recording themselves doing this stuff, as the feral girls did in Chester, PA, while attacking a severely mentally disabled white woman.

    Denial is getting harder, and twentysomething content providers at Salon--raised in the left-conservative hyper-orthodoxy of hating whites and worshipping at the feet of black narcissism and grievance--have no other narrative to reach back to. So much for diversity.

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  56. I went googling around just now, and it is not that easy to find clear descriptions of exactly what went on in Jamaica during the mid 1970s. Just vague statements about "recurring violence" and the suffering of the poor Jamaican people.

    Enough went on in the 70s that Toronto is full of Jamaicans that say "nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there."

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  57. 'I remember the summer of 2011, a story about a crowd of teenagers at the Wisconsin State Fair randomly attacking fairgoers went viral as a sign of a burgeoning race war. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel fanned the flames, calling the teenagers "rampaging youths" who caused "mob-like disturbances": '


    Actually the Journal Sentinel only reported on this incident because it was a particularly bad example of a common problem. There are a lot of outdoor festivals in Milwaukee and black violence and intimidation of white people is pretty common at some of them. This is well known to everyone locally. Since the newspapers would have people covering bigger festivals and people from the paper would certainly go to them for fun the papers own staff members would experience these things. I'd guess the paper would also have some younger staffers or interns living in the slightly sketchy bohemian neighborhood where are few of the more serious incidents have happened as well.

    Of course none of these incidents would result in 'hard data' since the cops would treat each victim's case as a discrete incident. What a world we live in where people don't believe something unless the government collects numbers and arranges them a certain way so as to allow for the belief.

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  58. "there is no hard data showing that it's a trend.

    An important clarification: the game definitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years."

    Idiots.

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  59. "When witnesses can't differentiate between 24 and 100, should we really rely on them to speculate whether a crime was racially motivated"...

    The author is being deliberately stupid . Last time I went to a pro football game there were buses lined up to take the specators home. I noticed it as row after row. There were several busses in each row. I didnt' count them. I was amazed at how many there were, and how many people could fit in them.

    No one who went to the game, who wasn't particularly estimating the busses, would have eyeballed it thusly.

    The author has an axe to grind.

    God help a crime victim coming up against someone so concerned with making a point and not adressing the facts.

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  60. Even though a new instance of TKOG is reported nearly every day, it is not a trend.

    http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/elderly-woman-city-10th-knockout-game-victim-article-1.1532989

    Got that? NOT a trend.

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  61. The people attacked at the Wisconsin State Fair had it coming? Not everyone who attends the STATE fair is from Milwaukee. It's not even held in Milwaukee, idiot. Also, if you'd done the least bit of research into the attacks, you'd know that several of the attackers admitted that it was racially motivated.

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