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by d23 1127 days ago
It's pseudoscientific bunk (in this case, statistics manipulated to deceive) designed push a narrative of a specific race being more violent. It is no more moral, intelligent, or useful than phrenology.
1 comments

I think saying that it amounts to phrenology is a manipulation designed to push a narrative. I expected something completely different than what you’ve presented. I think you aren’t better than Elon Musk in that regard.
I don't know how warped you have to be to look at that and think this isn't the most bottom of the barrel racism there is.
If the worst racism possible is complaining about disproportionate media focus on white on black crime then I think we can safely declare the problem of racism solved. :)

To be a bit more constructive: looking at those links it seems obvious to me that the main point is about media focus, not the actual crime statistics.

Complaining about "disproportionate media coverage" is a thin veil for the delivery of the more insidious message the dishonest graphic is conveying: why aren't they covering the real problem of all these black people committing violence.

And I didn't say it's the "worst" racism. It's cheap, low effort, dishonest, unintelligent, and designed to manipulate morons, which brings me back to my original comparison to phrenology.

Well, from my somewhat uninformed un-american perspective, the question of "how can we fix the problem of violence in black American communities?" does indeed seem much more important than the one of "how can we fix the problem of white Americans doing violence against black ones?" due to its relative size. So I'm unclear on why the message you claim is being delivered is bad.
I just don't know how many times I have to post the same basic takedown of why this presentation is a problem: https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1655948197129494532

It's completely removing intra-racial statistics that would make the problem much more apparent, which is that there are far more white people in America than black people, and thus, there are far more white victims of crime than black victims. Expressing absolute numbers rather than percentages is a bald faced misrepresentation, and the creator of the graphic went out of their way to represent it that way (the cited source has the data correctly expressed as a percentage and includes intra-racial statistics too).

The fundamental problem: this is designed to mislead people like you and it works. And I'm struggling not to be rude here, but it is really hard for me not to see how someone with even the most rudimentary critical thinking skills couldn't look at a graphic like that and immediately see the red flags.

You said he promotes "what amounts to phrenology" and then linked to a tweet where someone calls Musk a white supremacist for commenting "wow" on a post about illegal immigration. That whole chain of justification looks to me like a total non sequitur.