Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Yeah the racial significance is entirely hypothetical, it seems, which isn't to say entirely irrelevant. I.e. if a black kid did what Rittenhouse did, play by play, would the verdict be the same?
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah the racial significance is entirely hypothetical, it seems, which isn't to say entirely irrelevant. I.e. if a black kid did what Rittenhouse did, play by play, would the verdict be the same?
This is a useful counterfactual in general. E.g. what would the likely outcome have been if those involved in the events of January 6 had been black?
 
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william kent

Well-known member
Yeah the racial significance is entirely hypothetical, it seems, which isn't to say entirely irrelevant. I.e. if a black kid did what Rittenhouse did, play by play, would the verdict be the same?
I think if a black kid had done it then there's a good chance it wouldn't even have made it to trial as the police might well have shot him.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah the racial significance is entirely hypothetical, it seems, which isn't to say entirely irrelevant. I.e. if a black kid did what Rittenhouse did, play by play, would the verdict be the same?
Also it was at a Black Lives Matter event wasn't it? Which is probably why people tended to assume the victims were black.
 
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sus

Moderator
I think if a black kid had done it then there's a good chance it wouldn't even have made it to trial as the police might well have shot him.
This is an impression you've gotten thousands of miles away via news and social media coverage, which is grounded in no personal experience and I imagine, no real statistical investigation.

My understanding is that, controlling for police encounters, the statistics do not show a strong bias where police shoot blacks at higher rates. That higher rates of black victims can be explained primarily the statistics, by rate of encounters with police.

Which isn't to say there isn't structural discrimination in the justice system. But is to say that these kind of hypothetical speculations are ungrounded scientifically.
 
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william kent

Well-known member
This is an impression you've gotten thousands of miles away via news and social media coverage, which is grounded in no personal experience and I imagine, no real statistical investigation.
True, but, in this particular instance, I think if the police at a BLM protest in response to a police shooting got word that a black guy was running around with an AR-15 style rifle and had already shot three people then they would be more inclined to shoot him than they were Rittenhouse.
 

sus

Moderator
True, but, in this particular instance, I think if the police at a BLM protest in response to a police shooting got word that a black guy was running around with an assault rifle and had already shot three people then they would be more inclined to shoot him than they were Rittenhouse.
That sounds intuitively right to me but I don't trust an intuition formed purely on news coverage, which is an engine of selection bias.

Intuition is reasonable when you have lots of experience in a given domain, e.g. career firefighters have incredible intuitions for when a building is gonna collapse.

Neither you nor I nor 99.9% of the people who share this intuition have ever been present at a single police shooting. Let alone enough to train an intuition.
 

luka

Well-known member
what interests me is never the statistics or the rights and wrongs of any argument but who gets hot under the collar and what it is that upsets them. im always more interested in eg what's motivating Gus in these kinds of conversations. (of course we all assume hes a white supremacist)
 

sus

Moderator
If you paid attention to news in the 1920s you'd have had an "intuition" of black men as inherently violent, aggressive, sexually lascivious types. (Despite having met one black person once on a railroad.)
 

sus

Moderator
what interests me is never the statistics or the rights and wrongs of any argument but who gets hot under the collar and what it is that upsets them. im always more interested in eg what's motivating Gus in these kinds of conversations. (of course we all assume hes a white supremacist)
I literally get tagged and baited repeatedly in these threads by foreigners spouting half-coherent taglines picked up from NYT and Guardian headlines. There's all the motivation you need buddy
 
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