After the death of George Floyd on 25th May 2020, America was rocked by weeks of protests and rioting – 25 people lost their lives and property damage totalled $1–2 billion.
The protestors’ main grievance was “systemic police racism”. As the media reported endlessly at the time, black people make up around 30% of the victims of police shootings despite comprising only 13% of the population. Black people, it was said, could not even walk down the street without fear of being gunned down by a racist police officer.
Yet the narrative was flawed. After all, victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male, but this doesn’t mean the police are sexist against men. It is simply that men are more likely to get into situations where a police officer ends up shooting them.
What’s more, activists were vastly inflating the numbers. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting database, only 12 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 –in a country of 330 million.
We now know that part of the problem was innumeracy. In 2020, Skeptic Research Centre asked a representative sample of Americans, “How many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?” Options were: “about 10” (the correct answer), “about 100”, “about 1,000”, “about 10,000”, and “more than 10,000”. Results are shown below:
As you can see, “very liberal” respondents – the ones most supportive of the protests – massively overestimated the number of unarmed black men killed by police. Over 50% said “about 1,000” or greater, and only 16% gave the correct answer of “about 10”. It’s possible that America would have been spared the unrest in the summer of 2020 had people been better informed of the facts.
It’s now three years later, and Skeptic Research Centre just asked another sample of Americans the same question. What did they find? There were slight improvements, but “very liberal” still massively overestimated the number of unarmed black men killed by police. Results are shown below:
Fewer “very liberal” respondents gave answers of “about 1,000” or greater, and more gave answers of “about 100”. Yet only 17% gave the correct answer of “about 10” – just one percentage point more than in 2020. “Conservative” and “very conservative” respondents did about as well as last time.
On the one hand, it’s surprising we don’t see more improvement among “very liberal” respondents. There are numerous articles and videos debunking the narrative about “systemic police racism”, and the Washington Post’s database is freely available online; anyone can download it and check the numbers for themself.
On the other hand, it’s not surprising. Why not? Because the mainstream media hasn’t levelled with its audience. Liberal Americans don’t get their news from the kind of outlets that question the narrative about “system police racism”. They get their news from CNN and the New York Times. And those outlets still cover race and crime in a highly misleading way.
You can’t expect people to update their beliefs when they don’t have correct information.
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During Covid there seemed to be state control of the newspapers only it was the pernicious British government via the advertising spend.
Indeed – which is worse? Hard to say. The British government doesn’t appear to be acting on behalf of the British people and appears to be “follow” directives from “foreign” or “global” entities.
Also what about the BBC? That seems pretty foreign to me, in that it doesn’t share values with me and a lot of others. It’s also controlled by a government.
Well that’s cleared things up.
Foreign states will not be allowed to take over British news organisations but Foreign organisations are allowed to take over the British government.
Nice and tidy.
Chinese sponsorship of UK newspaper will probably also still be allowed. Makes one wonder if the UAE guy perhaps failed to grease the right wheels.
Brown envelopes? British government? Heaven forbid!
Not forgetting all the foreign nationals (aka illegal immigrants) taking over British hotels and holiday camps.
But foreign individuals will still be able to shower them with cash a la Dr Gates presumably.
Can anyone in Scotland attest to this? You have ‘Hate Crime Reporting Centres’ moonlighting as sex shops? WTF is this??
”The Scottish Government has created walk-in snitching centres in every major Scottish city where people can report ‘hate crimes’ under the new Hate Crime and Public Order Act and the one in Glasgow is in a sex shop!
Welcome to Humza Yousaf’s Scotland, where you can go shopping for a dildo and report a ‘hate crime’ at the same time.”
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1767852719761445249
Condoming innocent people…
I would read between the lines. They obviously see a certain pathway ahead that they aren’t speaking about and they are trying to be a step ahead. It would be nice to think that their strategems represent a well-informed attempt to save our future but it is far from this. Just look at the events of the last five years. You can see the level of capture, which has necessitated a level of ineptitude. The strange spectacle of Joe Biden. At first I was a little perplexed why they even let him out in public. And then it was obvious. He is meant to look that way for a number of reasons foremost among them being the tacit cry for help of the Western mythos. Then you had the mad dog theory of war, look it up. And then the arrrogance of victory of the corporate state showing you what they can get away with. Just soberly look at it all. People with huge fibrous growths in their veins and they don’t seem too troubled about it at all. Surely this suggests a lack of vitality and a fatalism resigned to death of our culture.
State ownership or funding of British news organisations (whether they’re foreign states or our own) should be banned. That includes the state funding of the BBC.
There are cliches like ‘the breakdown of the rule of law’. This doesn’t even come close to what is coming. It will come via fifth dimensional warfare on one hand and deepening lassitude among the general public on the other. It might be demoralisation or it might be ill-health and the two will merge into one. You could easily look at the status quo and think that it isn’t even worth bothering with. But that is to give in to the force we oppose. The violinist Jascha Haifetz broke one of his strings during a performance and carried on playing until the end with three strings. Afterwards somebody asked him why he carried on and he said that it is our duty to carry on and try to make something beautiful even with just three strings. Anything less means that you have capitulated.
The whole discussion is ludicrous given the takeover of local radio in the mid 1990s. Local radio was very important largely because ir was decentralised. We weren’t all born under a Chrstmas tree and as Milan Kunera said, the power of man over tyranny is the power of memory over forgetting,
But Foreign Ownership of UK transport, energy, water supplies, steel industry, care homes, government computer systems, supermarkets, and vast tracts of British land, for example, are fine. Well that’s a relief.