Well, that seems like a discussion about relative sentencing - there’s nothing in that philosophy that prevents us from analysing the motives behind crime in an attempt to understand it better. What we do with that understanding once we have it is another matter. Personally I don’t believe that extra punishment should be meted out solely on the basis of motive - however if motive is ever to be taken into account as a mitigating factor, hate seems to me to be the least mitigating motive. Certainly this discussion has focused on violent hate-crime, and thus hate as a motive rather than a crime in itself.
Oh, I know. I know that’s how they do it. I just don’t agree with it. Before I killed you, it was my decision to drink. I do not accept, on principle, the mitigation of a crime by intent assuming the intent is both free and volitional. When you’re dead, whether I was drunk or angry or hated you, you’re still dead.
In principle i agree with much of this, but it seems to me that your framework assumes that we determine sentences only in order to punish the criminal act.
Another factor taken into account at sentencing is the likelihood that the person will commit the same crime again. And it seems to me that taking into account the person’s motivation for commiting the crime in the first place does, and should, constitute an important factor in making this determination.
Maybe you guys don’t know anyone that’s been a victim of such a crime. In my experience, the level of violence and lack of humanity towards the victim, seems a lot more intense. Especially when you view the victim as worthly of hating enough to the point in which you will attack a total stranger simply because he’s there.
If an attacker see two people walking down the street who are virtually indentical, except for the color of their skin, or a perception of sexual orientation, or whatever and puts the boots the other guy, his motivation was hate. His crime may well be assult or worst, but i fail to understand why hate or really terrorism which is what this is a form of, is a lesser mitigating factor than a desire for cash…when ANY person could have been a victim of robbery.
I don’t understand your premise, unless you’re saying that all crimes should be punished equally, regardless of the moviation or circumstances.
So in effect the guy that punches you and causes you hit your head on a chair and die gets the same punishment as the serial killer that tortured you for days, before he killed you…
Are you saying that the circumstances don’t matter, only the results?
Sorry, I’m not quite sure what you’re saying. I don’t think that robbery as a motive is a mitigating factor either - I tend to the view that robbery and hate as motives don’t mitigate the crime at all, whereas things like provocation might. As such I tend to believe that hate and robbery fall towards the nastiest end of the criminal spectrum, which seems to be what you’re saying, too. I don’t get what this has to do with my experience of crime…
So should motive never be taken in account when a crime is committed? That would mean that someone who negligently kills someone in an auto accident should recieve the same punishment as someone who intentionally tortures a person to death.
Nope, I’m sorry misunderstood your point, and hence the reason why I suggested a lack of first person experience in viewing the level of violence when the sole moviation of the attack was hate and not say robbery when often the perp only wants the cash and if he’s a professional, will take the cash and go with a minimum of destruction.
Of course these days finding such professionals is a rarity.
Good grief, man, what did you do with that calculator after you whipped it out? Gaze at it with the same look of amazement that an aborigine would have the first time he grasped a BIC lighter?
Instead of playing tricks with percentages, let’s just work with the raw numbers.
According to the 2000 census:
whites = 211,460,626
blacks = 34,658,190
Of their population, blacks committed 1,140,670 crimes against whites.
Of their population, whites committed 135,369 crimes against blacks.
Now, here’s where it’s goin’ to get a little tricky for some of you. Ya gots to use that 'ol math.
For whitey, divide the total white population by the number of crimes committed against the black population. This number will be the rate of crime that whitey persecutes the black race with. This number is 1,562. Which means that whitey commits one crime against the black population for every 1,562 whites in the population.
Now, for the black population. Divide the population by the number of crimes against whitey. (34,658,190 by 1,140,670) This will give you a quotient (Oooh, that’s a big word, ain’t it?) of 30, which means that for every 30 blacks in the population, one of ‘em is goin’ to pinch whitey.
Now, you take 1,562 and divide it by 30, and you get 52, which translates into the statistic that blacks are 52 times more likely perpetrate a crime against the white race, than the vice versa.
Your ad hominem twittery is noted, dear. And what I did with it was prove you wrong. All of your blithering about the prior probabilities of a given black person committing a crime is so much crap, as anyone with half a braincell can discern. Of course black people are more likely to target white people than vice versa - there are many more white people than black people, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you. Unfortunately you have shown yourself repeatedly to be too intellectually dishonest to acknowledge this indisputable fact.
What I showed was the statistical properties of the situation with which we started this thread. You asked why, given that a white person was attacked by black people, the press did not assume that it was a hate crime. The answer, as shown by me, using your figures, is that the probability of this statement being true is 1 in 1000. Not a good bet, I think you will agree.
You went on to question why, given a white-on-black crime, the media might be more likely to assume it is a hate crime. The answer is because it is more likely to be a hate crime - 23 times more likely, in fact. Still not a good bet though, and that’s why your attempts to come up with such media assumptions are limited to cases in which the police stated that they suspected hate was the motive.
If you would like to dispute these statistics, please do so; at present I find it deeply significant that you do not. Repeating your mantra that blacks are more likely to commit crimes against whites will get you nowhere, as the reason has been explained to you many, many times and has absolutely bupkes to do with hate.
Dead Badger, i’m afraid the mountain of ignorance and obfuscation is going to be insurmountable.
Consequently, i’m done with this debate, and will leave you to fight the good fight, if you feel it’s worth doing.
Best of luck.
Well, evidently, you can’t read.
Dr. Williams stated that ," Some of the study’s findings about interracial crime were surprising, so much so that I did an independent verification of the numbers." In his verification, he used statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, not some racist organization as you so spouted.
Okay, I’ll acknowledge. The white population is apporximately seven times larger than the black population. So, that explains why their interracial crime rate is 52 times that of the white population? I’m afraid it is you that is being intellectually dishonest.
This level of stupidity is getting painful to deal with. Your reasoning is false for two reasons. Firstly, you assume that every crime is committed by a different criminal, which is stupid. Then, and more fundamentally, your calculations factor in the population ratio twice. Think about it - roughly 1/8 of white people’s victims will be black, if chosen at random. Similarly, roughly 7/8 of black people’s victims will be white, if chosen at random. You then weight this by population again. This, again, is stupid, and it’s not any less stupid for being deliberate.
If you were even remotely interested in learning the truth, these aren’t even the calculations you’d be doing - you’d be trying to work out whether black people who attack someone are more likely to choose a white person. But we know you won’t, because those figures prove that in fact black people attack proportionally more black people than the population would indicate. And we know you know this, because it’s been pointed out at least three times. So you’ll persist in fiddling bullshit figures that sound like they make you right, but in fact have bugger all to do with any of your claims. I guess this is an advance on when you were just whinging about your opinion, but to be honest it’s not much of one.
Well, no, that’s not what it means exactly. There’s no such thing (given the premises of the philosophy) as a negligent accident. Negligence is born of freedom and volition, but accidents are not. Since crime is the usurpation of rights, a criminal in his commission forfeits his own. Crime can be found within mere intent alone without any action whatsoever. For example, if a man approaches you and says, “Your money or your life,” you do not have to wait for him to pull out a gun or knife to defend yourself. He has already committed a crime by his threat. As I explained, force that is defensive or retaliatory is ethical, but force that is initial is not. Excessive force is tantamount to initial force inasmuch as more force than necessary is used to restore rights. It is not a matter of crime and punishment, but of crime and restoration with compensation. In other words, the ethical focus is not on the criminal but on the victim. If he steals your car, then he must restore your car and compensate you for every right that you lost while your car was missing. Whatever force is necessary (but no more) is used to see that you are restored. Prison, if necessary, is the means by which he restores you through his labor. But if he kills you, then you cannot be restored no matter how much he labors. Therefore, he forfeits all his rights, and the rest of his life is given over to your estate. Your heirs, in effect, own him.
Okay, I know I said I was done until something substantive came along, but something substantive did.
Substantively freakin’ hilarious.
I say:
"No it wasn’t: he verified the numbers, but his analysis was either nonexistent or identically incompetent. "
Razorsharp rebuts:
He even bolded the quote I was referring to in saying that I couldn’t read. It is to laugh!
Daniel
I think you’re unintentionally committing a fallacy of equivocation, Lib. If you don’t like “accident”, substiutute “car wreck.”
So the question is thus: Do you think newly licensed driver who negligently causes somebody’s death in a car wreck should be subject to exactly the same punishment as somebody who deliberately kills a person by torturing them to death?
No, no equivocation. (For your future reference, I really don’t need links for things like that, but thanks just the same. :)) I think that an accident implies a lack of fault and that negligence implies carelessness. You can freely choose to be careful. I think I’ve explained the premises and theory sufficiently that you can apply them to any arbitrary event, including a car wreck. Do you recall what I said about freedom and volition? If the driver’s free choice resulted in the car wreck, then he owes the victim’s estate what he took: life. Just because the torturer was evil, that is not a matter for the state, but a matter for his God or conscience. Government should secure rights. Let God or conscience deal with good and evil.
This ignores degree, doesn’t it? You can choose to be arbitrarily careful, anywhere along a continuum of choices that affect the probability of harming someone in extremely complex ways. How do you define negligence, and how do you say when it’s become sufficient to stop being an accident and start being a straight-out crime? To the extent that anyone chooses to drive at all, they’re probably increasing quite significantly the chances that their actions will result in a death - is that negligence?
And I think the evil motives or otherwise of a criminal do have significance - as Daniel points out it indicates an increased probability that the criminal will re-offend. At some point it becomes rational to restrict such a person from the general population for the greater good, I would have thought. Would a libertarian system not take such considerations into account?
Shodan, I think anybody who knows anything about science or logic or statistics could tell you that this single isolated case doesn’t prove a damned thing about bias in the media. Just because Razorsharp happened to be right in this instance about the attackers being black doesn’t mean that his assumptions weren’t faulty.
For instance, his assertion that we can “safely assume” that all failure to mention race means that the attackers involved were Black. As a general rule, I don’t think this is a safe assumption to make.