[Stupulous]

There were 49 incidents of anti-Asian hate crime in 2019 and 122 in 2020. I get that those numbers should be zero. But am I way out of line in saying that something that affects ~.00006% of Asian-Americans, and makes up ~1.6% of total hate crimes, should have no bearing on how we approach this subject?

My genuine apologies if I am crossing a line. I know this is a potentially touchy subject. Hate crime is serious and has many negative externalities that other crimes and accidents don't carry. They have also been on the rise, and could continue to grow more significant. It just feels very strange to me that 70 additional crimes in a year that saw thousands of additional murders has been such a common talking point for months now.

[hsitz]

The 9/11 attacks killed less than 3,000 people. Or if you want percentages, resulted in the deaths of about 0.0009% of the U.S. populace. Yet it sent our country to war and has had an impact on millions of people. It is in the very nature of terrorist acts that they "terrorize" the wide populace, while only a tiny fraction are ever victims of terrorism. It is similar with hate crimes.

Human psychology deals with numbers strangely. There are many who seem to think 500,000+ deaths (many preventable) from Covid are not something to be overly concerned about. Some of these same people are deeply worried about "Extremist Muslim terrorism" that has had very few victims.

So, yeah, from what I understand about growing anti-Asian crime, I do think it makes sense to be concerned. In particular, because this increase seems to be a (predictable) response to actions by many over the past year to demonize China, which any sane person knew would create a generalized animosity toward Asian-Americans. It's not like things like this have never happened before. They have, and they're quite predictable.

[Stupulous]

I'd like to first take an aside and apologize for a previous error. I divided incidents by population and came to 0.0006. This is off by an order of magnitude. But that is not the worst of it. This number belongs in the context of crime rates. Gallup [1] tells me that 1-3% of people are victims of violent crimes. So I must further multiply by 100 and conclude that hate crimes represent 0.6% of the total violent crimes experienced by Asian-Americans. And once again, I have to add that I did find numbers that suggested Asian-Americans may be victimized much less than the general population, although these numbers were from 2006. 0.6-6% is the final answer. This is a massive misrepresentation, and I want to be clear that this was not intentionally manipulative. It was quick thinking and poor judgment.

I agree that the US response to the threat of terrorism was also very much an overreaction, so at least you can say I'm consistent.

From what I understand, the total number of hate crimes decreased in 2020. I haven't been able to find the data and if, for example, this is because the number of hate crimes against whites dropped, the following is false. But in my mind this fits a model where X people are going to attack minorities in a given year, and this year, for obvious and insane reasons, they typically targeted Asians.

I understand the frustration and pain and cause for pushback. I say this because the next part will come across as cold. From a utilitarian perspective, there is not any material difference between worlds where different minorities are victimized. Changing the targets doesn't solve anything.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/285644/percentage-americans-rec...