Lying whore.

The BBQ Pit
381

One working definition of “stupid” would be an individual who thinks her intense personal aversion to recognizing a demographic fact that doesn’t fit with her political preferences is sufficient to negate the entire actuarial science and profession. , which does just that, with great accuracy and efficiency on a historic basis, every day.

By the way, your return to your tired Godwin jibe (I’m guessing that’s what it is) tips the balance – I now know you were lying about “not having looked at” the statistical link. Not that you’re not intellecutally lazy enough to have argued against data you hadn’t seen, I think you’ve demonstrated that, just that you couldn’t have resisted the impulse to see the source so as to see if you could hurl Godwin and the Genetic Fallacy at my source (“Hmm, ]Huerta cites to the American Spectator, not exactly the most neutral of scientific sources, and they supported Bush in the last election, and Bush hates black people, so what’s Huerta’s real agenda, hmm?”). Actually, at some point herein I think you bruited the possibility that DOJ itself was racist for keeping statistics unless it were for the purpose of disproving that any black person have ever raped anyone. Whatever. You saw the number, were very troubled by it, even more troubled by the fact that you couldn’t name-call the source, and moved on.

My partocular agenda, thanks for asking, is to argue against people being indicted based on bad allegations. The statitstical rarity of white-on-black rape, (which Jesse Jackson harped on as being one of the particularly heinous elements here, long history of sexualized violence against black women, etc.) was one of three or more predictive, past-can-be-prologue, patterns (you haven’t argued with or even addressed the others, I suppose they are not as Godwin-friendly) I cited in my personal smell-test as a Thing That Made Me Go Hmmm, as the Young MC would put it.

WaenaraIf I undertand your question, my understanding is that the rounding was done on the aggregate numbers – not that each city rounded down from nine to zero, but that DOJ aggregated the gross numbers and rounded down if the total was less than nine. Any road, thank God, there aren’t many black women being raped by whites out there AFAWK.

382

uses stats to predict occurrences in individual cases.

I’m moving on. The Luddite (pay no attention to past numbers, I can’t HANDLE past patterns) has said her piece, I mine. Since I know what’s really going on (she REALLY wants this particular allegation to be true, or to be given full credence no matter how improbable it may seem, for a variety of reasons that seem pretty unattractive to me). I really hope she doesn’t get her way and establish that a horrific rape **did]/b] take place, even though some circumstances suggest that the tale might not have i nherent plausibility. 'Cause it’s kind of sick to want that kind of thing to have happened here.

383

apparently prefering investigatory tactics based on flawed use of statistics. got it.

384

From this particular point. I still think the conduct of the prosecutor vis a vis the N.C. ethics rules, and what we do about the apparent problem of dealing with unfounded or dubious rape reports, are interesting issues.

The Grand Jury sits Monday. We may have additional data points then, at which point the ones invoked so far might recede in usefulness.

385

You know, to keep your eye on the ball, my initial use of the statistics was as one factor in the absence of other better probative or predictive evidence (a phrase whose variants I have typed ninethy times and which has been ignored ninety thousand). I have never said the police should use such a factor exclusively or in the face of other “invetigatory tactics.” I suppose they sought eyewitness testimony. They found none. I suppose they talked to the cops. Good. The cops said she was “passed-out drunk” and did not initially complain of a rape. I suppose they sought forensic evidence. Good (though arguably pursued in a heavy-handed way). Good. All things I might have done. But, when all those other tactics still did not appear to move the ball forward for the prosecution to a point where what’s publicly avaialble convinces me that probable cause is not absolutely going to be the right determination – then yeah, I fall back on my initial smell-test thoughts to fill the gap – one of which was the statistic that is driving you people crazy. “But you don’t have all the data.” True enough. I’ll likely place less reliance on my preliminary data points when we have more data. This is how life and human knowledge evolve.

Look, I’ll formally apologize. I am SORRY that more white men did not rape black women in 2003. I am SORRY that it deeply shakes your PC conviction that slavering white slavemasters still stalked the land (though I think you’re sickos for wanting this to be true). I am SORRY that I cited to government statistics and not some Nazi publication that would have made it easy for you to attack me. Hell, I’m sorry actuarial science even exists and that it functions.

But get the fuck over it.

386

Let us imagine you are on a trip without access to phone. Hiking in Alaska, say. If someone tells you that there was a hurricane in your hometown and that 80% of the houses were destroyed, would you be concerned? I rather think you would. Conversely, if someone were to tell you that there was a hurricane in your state and one house was destroyed, would you hurry off the mountain to check if it was yours? Unlikely, since you’re smart enough to do the math and realize that the odds that yours was the one house wrecked are very small.

In either case, you have used statistics to predict the likelihood of an individual incident.

Everyone does the same thing every single day. People shop in one store instead of another because the prices are usually lower, they look for homes where there are lower crime rates, and so on and so on. In every case, the statistics could be wrong, and nobody denies that; but everyone also understand that while Nieman-Marcus has probably once upon a time beat Wal-Mart on a price on something, it ain’t the first place you look if you’re shopping around.

This is not something strange or unusual; it is basic logic.

Noone here is saying, suggesting or implying that an investigation or prosecution should be based on statistical inference. But police would be fools not to be aware of criminal patterns when they start an investigation. It’s why when a married person is murdered, they always investigate the spouse first; because the statstics tell them that that is the most likely suspect. They investigate and go from there.

If a man calls in and says he was abducted by a gang of Russians and injected with LSD against his will, the cops are not wrong to raise an eyebrow at the very unusual claim: there are, after all other possible explantions for how he got LSD in his system.
***If *** we accept the accuracy of Huerta88’s statistics (and I’ve not seen anyone present any contradicting evidence), the fact is that white-on-black rape is a very unusual claim. It is of course possible, and obviously requires investigation. But since we are not police, we in our discussion are left with what information we do have. Namely, that what this woman is claiming happened is in fact far more rare an occurence than one might suspect (I for one was very surprised).

Huerta may or not be a Racist; I don’t know. But he sure isn’t one for pointing out the facts.

387

There are two kinds of people: those who, when the data does not conform to the theory, reason that the theory needs a little work; and those who, when the data does not conform to the theory, strain all credibility to argue that the data must be flawed. 'Sall I’m saying.

388

Apples and oranges, furt.

In one situation, you’re using statistics to determine the probability that your house wasn’t damaged by a hurricane. Assuming that the hurricane affected the whole state the same way and there was nothing special about your house that made it less likely to be damaged than the others, there is an 80% chance that your house was destroyed. This conclusion is not much different than concluding a 50/50 chance of getting heads on a coin toss. It’s a safe bet because we are talking about essentially random events.

In the situation we’ve been talking about, Huerta is using reported crime stats to determine the likelihood that this rape occurred based on the race of the participants in this case. He’s essentially using that data to say that there is a slim probability that this incident occurred as alleged by the accuser. But that assumes a whole bunch of unreasonable crap, such as:

  1. Reported crime stats reflect what actually occurs. Anyone who is familiar with data collection knows this is a big limitation when it comes to drawing conclusions from population-derived stats.

  2. Rape is a function of race. Unless you can show that race is an intrinsic property behind rape (meaning that race, in and of itself, affects one ability to rape), then that assumption should not be made.

  3. That other factors (such as the fact that she was in sexually charged environment, possibly intoxicated, in a room full of possibly intoxicated men, at a frat house, etc.) are not important to consider when determining likelihood. Only race. That’s a big WTF? if there ever was one.

  4. That individual human behavior can be predicted using population-derived statistics.

  5. That crime stats don’t represent a snap-shot in time and place but rather reflect a fixed property of human nature.

All of those assumptions are wrong, as I hope is obvious to you just by reading them.

No they don’t. Your life does not run like a computer program. And it doesn’t run like everyone else’s either. What Huerta has done is look at statistics taken from the whole and applied it to an individual case, never mind the fact that every person and situation is different.

This is the antithesis of logic. Maybe this isn’t apparent to you if you’ve had no formal training in statistical analysis, but I have.

Which makes sense if no one can them tell them who did it. But if a credible eye-witness says that the murderer was a Chinese man with one arm, the police is not going to go looking for statistics on crimes commited by Chinese men with one arm before they decide to investigate. Get how stupid that sounds?

What if the man lives in an area where there are Russian gangs? That would be kind of important when deciding what sounds outlandish or not. Every allegation is unique to some extent, but unless the claim is incredible for reasons that have more to do with common sense and less to do with limited statistical inferences (e.g. “I was sodomized by aliens from outer space!”), there is no reason to automatically raise an eyebrow when something sounds unusual or different.

You conclusion is erroneous, as I’ve pointed out more times than I can count. Occurrence can not be concluded from statistics than are based only on reported accounts. This seems to be lost on you and your compatriots in this thread. but it’s signficant.

Suppose that most white men who rape black women kill them. I’m thinking of serial killers who target black prostitutes. Those rapes would likely never be reported because while you can prove that a murder has occured without a victim saying so, rape is not so easy. I’m not saying that most white-on-black rape occurs by a serial killer, but I’m saying you can’t rule that out either. * Unless you can account for every and all reasons why data may go unreported, you can’t safely deduce from the crime stats that white men have some aversion to raping black women.*

389

I’ve never said the data is flawed, only people’s intepretation of it. I have no reason to conclude that the data is wrong. It’s just irrelevant.

'Sall I’m saying.

390

The problem is that the facts indicate that different races behave differently on average. A lot of people find this fact so offensive that they will not accept it, at least when they are discussing issues in the abstract.

When it comes to decisions that affect one personally -± such as which neighborhood to live in, where to send one’s children to school, and so forth -± most peoples’ conduct seems to indicate that they accept that group differences exist.

391

I just realized that I misunderstood the basics of furt’s little scenario, but my response is no different. .

392

The statistics in question are irrelevant to the court case, as well as the investigation. Nobody has refuted that.

Why aren’t they admissible (sp?) in a messageboard thread where people who have nothing to do with the case are shooting the shit about what they think of the case? What is the huge problem with us, specifically, considering the statistics in formulating our meaningless opinions?

That is the question that troubles me. You seem to be going to great lengths to convince us that we should or should not consider this or that data when reaching a conclusion. If we were the jury, I would be fighting the good fight in complete agreement with you.

But we’re not on the jury. Think of all the evidence the jury wasn’t allowed to hear in the OJ case. Would you be screaming that we on the messageboards shouldn’t be able to consider it as well, simply because the jury didn’t hear it?

This is a speculation thread. We are allowed to speculate about whatever the fuck we want. And we are also allowed to use whatever source we want to base our speculation on.

As for your generalized argument, I’m still not buying it. If a black was accused of burning a cross on another black’s lawn, I would strongly doubt the claim because of how statistically unusual such an occurence is. I would not be moved by an argument framed as “unless you can show why blacks are physically incapable of constructing and lighting crosses, race is irrelevant.”

393

I hate fisking, so I’ll number my refutations.

  1. This incident is reported. Therefore, I consider unreported crimes to be only marginally relevant, if at all. In particular the poster who repeatedly raised the issue of “but reported cases include false charges.” No shit. That’s part of the point. At this point in time, based on what I have to go by, I think this is a false charge. Therefore that particular objection is meaningless.

  2. It has nothing to do with ability. It’s about tendencies. We can cite the DOJ as evidence that the tendency of white males to rape black females is surprisingly small.

  3. Cite for anyone in this thread saying or doing this. Cite a post number, or apologize for your consistant obnoxious harping on this particular point. The fact that you have projected this assumption onto us is what the big WTF? truly is.

  4. Statistical behavior prediction is not 100% accurate, obviously. It’s pretty much as accurate as the statistics predict them to be. Just like quantum theory. No individual particle’s behavior can be predicted, but we know precisely how accurate individual predictions will be. Granted, with humans that precision isn’t quite so high, but predictions of individual human behavior based on statistics will be more accurate than predictions pulled out of a hat.

  5. When did this crime get removed from time and space?

394

And statistically, there isn’t. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, anymore that it’s impossible for Russian gangs to randomly inject guys on the streets with LSD. But something that is a rare occurence does warrant more investigation. If I say I found a pretty rock while gardening, I’d hope you’re inclined to believe me; and yet I won’t blame you if you’re skeptical when I claim I found buried treasure.

No, but they’re a good starting point for the conversation.

I don’t for a minute imagine that it’s a racial trait. Facts may correlate without any obviously necessary causation.

Is there some inherent trait about higher education that makes students drink more and play loud music? Of course not. But if the residents of a quiet neighborhood hear that five college students are moving into a house on their street, they’re going to be a little concerned until they find out some more specifics.

Or to return to my other metaphor, there’s no special reason a Russian mob wouldn’t inject a random person with drugs … it just doesn’t sound like something they in fact actually do; thus, *unless and until more evidence emerges * (which a competent police would seek), it’s not unreasonable for them to approach the case with a raised eyebrow.

True; but no-one here has said this.

True; but no-one here has said this.

True; but no-one here has said this.

Sure; because now you’ve introduced other evidence. Nobody has said that police should ignore evidence that a particular case is atypical. The only thing they’ve said is that *absent or pending other evidence *statistical probabilities can’t be ignored.

See above.

And this is really the crux of the argument really is, IMO. And here’s the thing: if the rates were merely somewhat different, or even significantly different, I’d be inclined to agree with you. But Huerta88’s cite (which I find very much surprising, and am a little skeptical of, though my search for refutation failed – but which you at any rate have made no effort to refute with a countercite) is that reported cases of white-on-black rape are almost non-existant. Less than 10 cases in a year in a country of hundreds of millions is very, very, very rare.

Now I’m willing to buy the notion that black women are somewhat less likely to report white rapists; I’m willing to buy that some police departments are somewhat less likely to investigate and prosecute those cases. Heck, I’m even willing to buy your white serial-killer hypothesis. But here’s the thing – that number of 0.0 % is so stunningly low that even with all those concessions, all you’re doing is dropping one or two “verys.”

The only way you keep it from still being “very rare” is to hypothesize that black women are fifty or a hundred times more likely to report a rape with a white assailiant, or that nearly every PD in America is straight out of Bull Connor’s Birmingham, or that there are dozens if not hundreds of crazed, uncaptured white dudes out there serially raping and killing black women. And those claims are so amazing that I’d have to see some damned impressive cites on your part to believe them.

395

Should be less likely … I trust everyone got the point anyway.

396

It’s not a problem, if the stats are applied in the appropriate manner. But we have folks on this board not doing that. They are using these stats to support a certain position and all I’m doing is saying that the manner in which they are doing that is wrong. Wrong in the same way that 1 + 1 = 3 is wrong. Not wrong in the immoral sense, but wrong in the logical sense.

This board is supposed to be about stamping out ignorance, right?

The reason why I’m so adamant is simple. It is so easy to make the errors that Huerta and others are making when you are blinded by race. I guarantee if we were talking about something else, everything that I’m saying, post after post, would seem more obvious to the people I’m arguing with. But because all that they can see in this case is that the accuser is black and that the accused are white, they are not hearing me.

If you want to speculate in a manner that flows from illogical thinking and not expect to be challenged on it, you might want to go elsewhere. This message board is not about turning a blind eye to bullshit.

And that would make you stupid then. Supposed Colin Powell was the one making that claim. Why in the hell would you disbelieve him just because of what some statistics told you?

How come?

397

The only person blinded by race is you. Tell the truth: You believed this report when you first heard it. You have a desperate need to believe it still, to believe that the bad white patriarchs they told you about in women’s studies really were raping, and do rape, black sisters at horrific rates. Everyone, but everyone, on here knows that if there were statistics indicating a true plague of white-on-black rape, you and your ilk would yield to no one in your haste to declare this latest rape just another manifestation of the statistically prevalent sexualized violence against black gals. It’s impossible to imagine that you wouldn’t.

The reason I know you’re blinded by race is because person after person has given examples of statistical predictors (running across a highway probably won’t work out too well in any particular case; it’s unlikely you’ll be gang-raped by a Norwegian midget in Tokyo) which are perfectly logical, and you’ve either disingenuously pretended, “Well, just because tigers eat people somewhat frequently and cheetahs almost never do, I would certainly never speculate that a particular cheetah (as opposed to a tiger) probably didn’t devour the gameskeeper on my cheetah-tiger reserve.” Or, you’ve lame-assedly said, “That’s different, because in crossing a busy highway in traffic EVERYONE KNOWS that past accidents are predictors of the likelihood you’ll get hit this time.” Which is, of course, question begging of the rankest sort – “Everyone knows” vs. “race has no relation to rape, ever, I really want this to be true.”

Barbie was right.

Math is hard.

Don’t hurt your brain. There’s plenty of other issues to examine in this case.

398

Why? You need to elaborate on this.

But you’re only looking at race independently when gauging tendency. What’s the “tendency” of white men to rape black women when the woman is drunk, is dancing naked in front of them, and alone? Is that same “tendency” the same when we are just looking at race, without looking at other things? What if the black woman looks like this? What if the white guys in question were raised to be color blind and nondiscriminatory in their sexual preferences? What’s the likelihood look like then? Does it change?

Since the guys in question hired a black stripper and probably knew she was black when they hired her, that should automatically affect your assessment of likelihood. It tells me that many of the biases and barriers generally associated with white men and black women were probably not major, therefore you can’t assume that they’re in play. Which means that this women’s risk of being raped may be no different than had she been white. We don’t know if it is, but we certainly can’t assume that it isn’t. It makes those numbers, in other words, irrelevant.

Tell me why the FBI stats were brought up in the first place and why Huerta poo poohs the idea that strippers are at more risk of being raped. He sarcastically suggests her occupation is more relevant to her credibility than to the plausibility of her allegation.

But only if the stats are meant to be predictive. These are not, for the upteenth time.

The crime stats reflect data what happened in another year. You can not use it predict what will happen this year. Just like I can’t use data from 1955 to predict what will happen in the year 2010.

Just like you can’t use it to predict anything, really.

Let me ask you this since you are arguing with me: Have you ever taken a course in statistics before? Maybe you should.

399

I said I was interested in the ethical issues. We’ve got a new one:

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/5502684

Now, the North Carolina Rules of Professional Responsibility for lawyers (which most emphatically apply to prosecutors as well) provide that:

http://www.ncbar.com/rules/rul_sel.asp?ID=37&type=V

Any arguments for why the DA (of whom the police are agents) did not directly and egregiously violate this rule? Everyone on Earth knows these players are represented. (It gets worse: there’s a report the cops also tried to search their dorm rooms, without notifying defense counsel, and it’s not clear that they even had search warrants: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/04/14/D8GVS9J82.html)

Obviously, the prosecution is desperate. That does not justify having the police speak to accused players without contacting counsel (Oh, in case you are wondering, yes, the actions of the police are imputed to the prosecutor; see Rule 3.8, and esp. note 7, making it clear that the prosecutor can’t absolve himself of unethical conduct by outsourcing it to cops). Unless he has some pretty specific proof that these cops were off the reservation and that he had warned them not to violate accused’s rights once they’d obtained counsel, in my initial view this looks very troubling for Nifong if someone files an ethics complaint.

400

“You and your ilk?” Christ, Huerta88.

I’ve been lurking in this thread for awhile now, mostly because of all the black/white problems in this country I find alleged rape cases to be some of the most unsettling, tapping into a lot of primal fears about black sexuality and dismissed beliefs about rape as aggressive sexuality/power dominance. Since most rape boils down to intraracial interaction and he said/she said charges, this tends to dredge up all sorts of victim objectifying I find really distateful for an underreported crime where the vast majority of victims who do report rape are telling the truth about what happened to them.

There’s a world of difference between believing the probable, documented sexual misconduct of the bad white patriarchs and the possible, proven misconduct of a houseful of distantly related privileged heirs who engaged in all kinds of misbehavior that night, including drinking, some minor ethnic slurs, the questionable email, besides procuring a couple of strippers. I see and hear “evidence” going both ways, including the more troubling lack of DNA evidence.

If I have “a desperate need” to believe its true – it’s pretty consistent of me to stick by my initial beliefs until more facts are in that call those into question. Make no mistake – hearing no DNA evidence was found did shake my assumptions – until I heard she also ID’d one of the suspects and that the DA thinks they still have enough to prosecute. It’s called “suspending judgment.” If the allegations are not true, I’ve reflexively come to support the hateful fantasies of a particularly vicious liar. I don’t think we’re there yet.

Something went wrong in that house.

I don’t think “a grin” or “laughter” is necessarily indicative that nothing was wrong, either. Some people have a self-preserving gallows humor that kicks into overdrive after something traumatic like a forced gangbang rape.