Why do dark skinned males commit so much crime?

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Yeah, when I was a teenager I shaved my head (I'm a girl). And I met some skinheads. Some of them were actually Jewish. The main ideal they held was that of the working class. I've also seen ethnically diverse skinheads which undermines the whole Neo-nazi idea. I'm sure some are Nazi, but that doesn't embody all of them.

Uh.... I think I'll stick with shaving my head. Too many know me around here as having hair loss that I'd become even more of an object of ridicule than I already am.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

It amazes me that this is still blamed on poverty. It's not poverty - it's their approach to it. Everyone here seems to have offered poverty as an explanation for crime. Which could be part of the direct explanation. However, that means the indirect explanation is either cultural or genetic. You see, there is an almost-unbroken pattern of black dependence on other ethnic groups, while no such notion exists with Asian groups. And, if Asia's economic prosperity is attributed to Confucian attitudes to labour, why is it so incredibly hard to attribute black people's reduced productivity and increased (violent) crime rates even in black-majority countries on black culture?

As I said plenty of times before, Asians arrived in western countries under worse circumstances than black people, but they managed to work their way up. Asian countries with cultures influenced by Confucianism - China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Singapore - have shown a pattern where they worked and went from being some of the world's poorest countries to being some of the world's wealthiest countries. China, which was subject to famine a few decades ago, is now one of the world's leading economies. South Korea went from being at an economically-comparable level to a lot of African countries, and without a lot of natural resources, to one of the world's wealthiest countries. And that was after a destructive war, which in turn came after a three-decade occupation from Japan - another country that rebuilt from scratch after being annihilated.

It's also still blamed on colonialism. Don't forget - for two centuries until the 1960s, Singapore was a British colony. The British had ethnic Malaysians, Chinese and Indians to work the land. After independence, Singapore was a tiny state with very little natural resources, and was occupied by Malaysia for two years. However, after complete independence, Singapore developed itself from a small, relatively poor country to one of the world's wealthiest countries and economic power houses. Meanwhile, African countries run by the premise of black nationalism - Zimbabwe under Mugabe, for example - have gone from economic power houses to doing very little with a lot of natural resources. The worst economic decision in Zimbabwe's history was to confiscate land from white farmers, as it annihilated their agricultural sector by taking people's means of production in the most twisted form of 'positive discrimination' imaginable.

Apparently, Zimbabwe's entire economy depended on the efforts of less than 1% of the total population - the white part. Because of the racist land reforms, Zimbabwe is now once again extremely poor and corrupt. Between 2000 and 2008, they had not a single year of economic growth. Which makes a lot of sense, as the main premise of their economy was confiscated from the only people in the country who could handle it. It fits in with much of Africa's situation - unproductive and known for violence between ethnic, religious and political groups while still being kept alive and somewhat fed by the rest of the world.

It's a shame that these things can't simply be said because they're not politically correct - even where black people are the government, they seem to rely heavily on white and Asian people's efforts. They're economic losers in almost any place in the world, including the places where they're put in charge of governing a large land mass full of natural resources. And if Asia is succesful because of Asian culture, why can't we say Africa and African expatriate groups are unsuccesful because of African culture? The few black people I met who were succesful, interestingly, were those almost completely cut off from any large group of black people.

Stopped reading at that

Africa is a continent rich in natural resources, where the governments and their policies are controlled by a very small rich percentage of the population in order to benefit themselves at any cost.

Their presidents are nothing more than puppets in most cases, and these companies and few individuals export huge portions of their natural resources, usually in exchange for already manufactured goods (which is a losing proposition, as anyone who knows economics well can tell you), as the IMF and other such agencies tell them they should, if they want to get ahead. As well as having no manufacturing industry or strong internal economy of their own, which contributes heavily to their lack of internal development, and this is without taking into account corruption, which is extensive.

As long as their presidents and governments get their kick-back or whatever they want out of it, they really don't care. We are essentially talking about plutocracies here.

Europe and Asia took hundreds of years to become what it has on the world stage today, and yet you expect these countries who have ruled themselves for little more than a century (or less, in many cases) to get there, basically overnight by historical standards?

Ad you blame them because they cannot attain such a feat? Even Europe did not attain that feat in the amount of time you are talking about.

Why? Because you're offended by it? Rather than explaining why you disagree with that notion, you feel obliged to show your ideological opposition to an idea that can't be properly researched due to a political taboo, but where some limited-scale types of research have shown certain hormones linked to aggression to be much more prevalent among African males, along with apparently-measurable differences in intelligence. I'm not a proponent of the genetic-based theories until research is finally allowed on the subject, though. Even though research into the subject has been banned in a rather unscientific way before the hypothesis had even been formulated, I'll wait for results to become available after research in order to dismiss genetic theories through falsification is allowed to be carried out somewhere in the course of the century.



The people aren't doing too much about it. They're often too busy having sectarian conflicts. One of Kenya's most recent famines was blamed on farmers leaving their farms after violence erupted. Don't forget, additionally, that African governments haven't traditionally been adept at keeping problems at bay. They're very wealthy, but very unstable and subject to any ethnic or religious group that decides to overthrow it, as we've seen in Mali, Ivory Coast and Libya in recent years. Sixty years into their independence, they still form most of the failed states list - with a mandatory mention for Haiti, which is another case of black people keeping black people down - and failing.



Don't forget, though, that the comparison to Asia is once again reasonably valid. Asian countries started the twentieth century, and even the second half of the twentieth century, being mostly agricultural. They decided, however, to focus on the international stage. They created conditions that were attractive enough for western companies to move their production there and bring in their technology while Africa's rulers were doing such enlightened things as copying Napoleon's coronation ceremony and expropriating properties owned by ethnic Asians and Europeans. You won't build a factory if you know it'll be owned by the likes of Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin in five years.

Another question: why are they plutocracies or aristocracies? Why are their governments exceedingly nepotist while they're in a very weak position and are overthrown every other year?



Most countries in Europe and Asia adapted to the world's changing situation and changing rules in the past sixty years. In 1945, my country was recovering from a famine that killed 18,000 people because Germany had raided or destroyed everything we had and halted all food transports to the west of the country. However, we did not sit down for the next seventy years blaming Germany's people for what happened. We worked together, created conditions suitable for foreign investments, grew our economy very rapidly, and even created a large island where previously, there was sea and swamp (not that I like it, because Flevoland is a dead, artificial island). Meanwhile, medal-clad heads of state in Africa were doing absolutely nothing, and due to their unrealistic borders, were often overthrown in ethnic conflicts that, to this day, are part of the cause of many famines.



Africa has been inhabited by modern humans for tens of thousands of years. That's part of the amount of time I'm talking about. It was subject to famine, plague and unrest before Europeans arrived, and it relied on obsolete forms of technology, which meant it was incredibly easy to defeat. After their independence, many African countries to this day rely on infrastructure and buildings constructed by Europeans, maintaining them with European aid and Asian investments.

The countries you are talking about - China, Japan, etc - they have not followed IMF policy, in fact they have done the opposite. The more debt a country is in, the more the IMF forces SAP's on the said country, which ruin any ability to recover.

They have done the opposite because most of their government has been intent on keeping "control" (read: economic sovereignty) in their own hands via ensuring that their essential natural resources are under chinese ownership, while in the meantime, heavily investing in R&D and in manufacturing.

African countries haven't been able to do that due to a number of reasons - every time they attempt to nationalize essential natural resources, it doesn't end up getting done (due to pressure from their elite, multinational companies or outside powers) or it doesn't get done the right way. I have not seen a half decent attempt since Nasser or Lumumba, in fact.

As per Haiti - the only true chance they had at actual change has been thwarted multiple times. In democratic elections Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected, the the first time he was overthrown in a military coup (funded by - oh, let's guess ). When he was briefly back in office afterwards, he was forced to accept ridiculous concessions which only harmed the country. He was then re-elected a few years later, and then another coup was staged, resulting in him being kidnapped and flown out of the country under the guise of a "rescue". In short - Haiti has never had a proper democratic goverenment run by the people, for the people and every time they have attempted it, there has been outside interference.

African countries have come under severe scrutiny from the IMF, but it hasn't stopped them from confiscating the only well-functioning farms in the country for ethnic and racial reasons and driving their own currencies and economies into the ground with disastrous unilateral decisions.

Cynically speaking, Colonel Gaddafi was probably the best politician and head of state in all of Africa until his death. He kept natural resources under government control, used them to construct irrigation projects, and supported several African countries by allowing their citizens to work in Libya and having irrigation systems and hospitals built there. It's not a coincidence that West Africa has once again become a complete mess, with one of the oldest monuments in Africa under threat from rebels almost directly after he lost power and the new government stopped paying for those projects. Libya itself is now pretty much a tribal non-state, nearing post-Barre Somalia.



The same applied to a lot of countries, but they've managed to get ahead. Americans invaded Vietnam, and were driven out by force. They supposedly had plans to kill Charles de Gaulle, but the old Frenchman wouldn't ever give up. The Americans tried to have Fidel Castro murdered numerous times, but he was competent and capable enough to avoid being killed, and he's still around, living comfortably in Cuba while sending out doctors to Haiti.

JBA never managed to drive out those who would go on to overthrow him. Nor did he have the inclination, the time - or the resources or support to do so even if he had wanted to. He was not the type of man who was willing to play those games, nor did he expect he would have to as he found out the hard way to his own detriment.

No - Castro is an incredibly cold, calculating and intelligent man.
He knew when he took over the Island that if he were to ever actually make it, that he would need to "clear out the barracks" so to speak - and that is exactly what he did, ruthlessly in fact. He came under severe scrutiny for that period of executions and exiling people.

He is, and always had been, in love with power and power is really the only thing that matters to him, as you can clearly see if you study his early life. His views could have gone either way and the only reason Cuba is now a communist state is because that was the most prominent group at the time of which he could build his base off. His brother Raul, was much more of a communist than Fidel ever was.

There have been well over 500 attempts on his life (and that stat was from 1997 so I'm sure it's more now).

But look at the position it has put Cuba in - economically speaking they are screwed, the blockade effects everything, yet all is does is hurt the Cuban people, not Castro himself. I happen to remember the special period - it was not fun. If that is the price they must pay for political sovereignty, then so be it, but it is a very high price to pay.

If your argument had any merit, then you would find statistical differences between crime occurring in poor communities that have large minority populations in contrast to poor communities that have large white populations.

But that is not what you see. What you see is that poverty--regardless of the racial profile of the community--is the single strongest indicator of crime rates among independent variables studied. It is followed, no suprisingly, by unemployment levels and then by personal income per capital. Race does not present itself as a statistically significant independent variable until much further down the list.

Short answer: poor white people are just as likely to commit violent crime as poor black people.

And unlike you, I have independent, peer-reviewed studies to back up my claim (supra). You have bias, inference and conjecture.



Rebuilt on the basis of what? Why American consumerism, of course. The Asian "tigers" were the first beneficiaries of globalism. A globalism that Americans and Europeans are now bemoaning because they are are unwilling to change jobs from primary production and manufacturing to jobs in services sectors.



Singapore doesn't have an rural underclass to support. Economies like Singapore and Hong Kong don't have to support significant primary production industries. The largest areas of their economies are services based--primarily and transportation and communications, followed by finance. On the other hand, Zimbabwe's economy is almost exclusively primary production: agriculture and mining. And there are plenty of failures in Asia: Myanmar gained nothing from its emergence from colonialism. Indonesia continues to struggle with internal problems. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are all former colonial possessions that cannot claim the same success as Hongkong, Singapore or Korea. You are being selective in your choices where they fit your argument, rather than taking an unbiased critical approach to your thinking.

But back to Zimbabwe for a moment. Almost all of its industry depends on land tenure--tenure that was exclusively white for much of the country's history. But transfer of tenure is not enough. You cannot take a farm away from a farmer who has been managing the land for decades, turn it over to an undereducated, untrained person and except the same degree of success. Mugabe is an idiot--but not because he wants to domesticate the agricultural sector. Rather it is because he expected to be able to do it in an instant, without training or educating the people that he expected to take over.

The problem seems to me to be that you cannot look past skin colour--or you refuse to. A poor white person is held to a different standard than a poor black person. An educated Asian person is considered typical. An educated black person is considered exceptional.

You have only one lens through which you look at other people--the colour of their skin. You never look at the whether an individual has done the best that he or she can with the tools and opportunities avaialble. You uncritically dismiss the influence of any factor that does not suit your preconceived notions of racial influence.

It's your statements that make you a racist, it's your point of view.

Except poor communities are very likely to be largely black or majority-black. And that's not because of racism or discrimination or colonial heritage handed down for seventeen generations. Their culture generally doesn't dictate education or hard work. It dictates opportunism, and often violence and a social code much different from that in Europe or in the white population of the United States. Comparing that to Africa makes sense - Africa, although on a worse scale, has the exact same problems. Zimbabwe's economy depended on the least dark-skinned 1% of the population. Recently, Kenya experienced a food shortage after farmers fled or fought in ethnic violence.

Black people are the poorest - and often the most violent - part of the population in almost any country in the world, including those where they're the government and a large majority of the population.



But white people, and Asian people, Native Americans and South Americans are all doing better than African-Americans. Through education and work, that is, instead of keeping themselves in a culturally-tolerated or even endorsed cycle where welfare and crime are more acceptable than working hard in school and employment because 'we are still being oppressed by whites'. If they moved to Africa, they'd be oppressed by blacks and even poorer.

I'm sure you love 'independent, peer-reviewed studies'. However, I've experienced those studies. Research into genetic reasons for economic disparities between black and white people was banned, refused funding and safely locked up in an archive. Meanwhile, millions were spent on much-lauded research that showed traditional African or Arab names meant a potential employee was slightly less likely to get a job with the exact same letter. Those are the standards of research - they're only widely published if they support a popular 'enlightened' point of view, which is in this case that white employers are racist. Meanwhile, there have been several theories I've read about - although I'm not sure how to find them on the internet - that did acknowledge that Afro-Caribbean, African-American and Maghreb people's bad social role in society can be blamed on their group-bound social code and aversion against the system trying to help them.



And Africa wasn't. Your opinion about the consumerism that means you have the time and means to type these responses is completely irrelevant to the fact that Africa was not and is not a good location for industry to settle, because of the constant civil wars and political chaos. It meant Europe and the United States looked beyond Africa for a location that was suitable for production. A location where politicians were willing to guarantee the integrity of businesses and expatriates, and a location where they didn't run the permanently-high risk of being looted due to poor local safety.



Absolutely not. For staters, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia have been subject to Confucianism - apparently a preferred reason for the success of several Asian countries - much less than Vietnam, China, Japan, Korea and Singapore. Secondly, Vietnam is quite developed, and would rank among the wealthiest and most developed African countries only 40 years after a war that left it completely barren and starving. Indonesia has a lot of faults, but is fixing them rapidly and would also be ranked among the most developed African countries despite being a poorly-held together collection of islands with most of the country being peripherous.

Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia would be approximately average or slightly above-average in development for African standards.



Why is it a good idea to 'domesticate' - these white people have lived there for all their lives, by the way, and were mostly born there - farms in the first place? Mugabe used black nationalist sentiment to warrant this. He bred hate against white people who were responsible for the growth of Zimbabwe's economy and most of Zimbabwe's food supply. The farms were their property, and were only really taken away because of black nationalist sentiment. Along with several other disastrous policies, this caused Zimbabwe's economy to implode and a lot of people to go hungry and fall into extreme poverty like much of Africa.

Once again, this was an ominous sign for businesses that considered for a while to invest in Zimbabwe. The idea of having your property taken away and being kicked out onto the street because your skin isn't dark enough is not a nice prospect if you want to invest in a poverty-stricken country. I think it's time Mugabe himself becomes a victim of Africa's political chaos.

The problem seems to me to be that you cannot look past skin colour--or you refuse to. A poor white person is held to a different standard than a poor black person. An educated Asian person is considered typical. An educated black person is considered exceptional.



I'm glad you have a degree in psychology or psychiatry, and you've carefully analysed my behaviour based on several hours of research and several hours of talks as is that sector's norm. For some reason, I think this is another ad hominem character analysis. Semi-quoting a relatively funny video:

"It's very depressing when you can't make honest cultural commentary without having to disavow the assumption that your feelings are motivated by an irrational response to different levels of melanin."

And that's the issue - I'm not saying they're much more criminal and stuck in a cycle of poverty because they're dark-skinned. What I am saying is that large groups of dark-skinned people tend to share a sub/counter-culture that implies aversion against 'the system', tolerance or even endorsement of poor results in school and employment, and in some subgroups even glorification of rape, robbery and murder. A black rapper was arrested here because he had forced a fourteen-year-old girl into prostitution. He's certainly not new to the local rap scene, and his views aren't uncommon. He did blame his arrest on racism, I think, as "it was totally consensual." That's why I'd rather be part of prosecution than a judge - if I have this type in front of me, covered in tattoos, with gold teeth and an arrest for forced prostitution of minors, I'd not be able to hide my anger.

Where is your evidence for the causes of poverty in black and majority-black communities? You suggest that there is a cultural cause to poverty. But could it not equally be that poverty is a cause for the cultural norms that you observe? You claim causation, but you don't provide a shred of evidence to support your claim.



Again, which is the causative agent? You continue to refuse to contemplate that there might be more than one answer to the question of why this should be. You focus on race, and blithely ignore any other possible factor.



I think you will find that aboriginals in North America are certainly not doing "better" than blacks. And for many of the same reasons of systemic poverty that actively prevent people from gaining an education and qualifying for employment that will keep them out of poverty.



Ah, the old PC chestnut.

I will grant you that politics have exerted an improper restraint on academic freedom. (Although right-wing think tanks are certainly doing their part to balance those scales).

And here, at least, we see you acknowledge something beyond skin colour. Group-bound social codes may well present an internal barrier to access for young members of the bound group from accessing the public services required to emerge from poverty. And if you could just leave that last vestige of racial profiling off of it, then we could start to have a clearer conversation.

These same ethnic insularities show up in other communities. For many decades, francophones in Canada outside of Québec were isolated, not by race, but by language. They were discriminated against, their educational outcomes were lower and their economic performance lagged.

But this has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with cultural isolationism. It doesn't matter whether you're White, Asian, Black; Francophone, Anglophone; Christian, Jewish or Sikh. If you set yourself apart from other communities, then there will be consequences for that isolationism.



Africa was not a good location for industry to settle because there was no infrastructure to get manufactured goods out, and in Asia there was. To this day, Africa continues to have vast amounts of uncultivated, arable land, more than adequate to meet the food requirements of the global population. But any attempt to farm will be faced with how to get product from farm to market without the transportation infrastructure to facilitate that.

And because the fruits of globalization continued to settle on Asia, African nations were left to fight for humanitarian crumbs, feeding a cycle of corruption. This is no less true of North Korea (one of your hallowed Asian countries) than it is of African nations.



Ah, so it is only some types of Asians that are worthy of your respect? Pity that the Japanese were never "subject" to Confucianism. Or the Koreans. So keep grasping at straws to defend your increasingly ludicrous positions.



Read again. I never said it was a good idea. I said that it was not the reason that Mugabe was an idiot. It was his methodology, not his goal, that was his economy's undoing.



But it has nothing to do with being black, and everything to do with being a murderous, short-sighted megalomaniac. Do you see money pouring into Belarus? Or Moldova? No. These "white" countries are held back by the stupidity of their political classes, too.



It is not an assessment of your behaviour, it is an assessment of your statements. I can only glean your motivation from your premises, your logic and your conclusions. Your work is clearly uncritical, and fails to take into account data that tends to contradict your conclusions. If I saw some evidence that you were looking through any analytical lens other than race, I would not be so critical. But not one of your posts has suggested any deeper thought.



Reread your posts. That is almost precisely what you are saying. Every disparity is brought back to the fact of race as its causitive element. You have never suggested that there is any reason for crime and poverty other than race.



Does this counter-culture exist by reason of their skin colour, or does it exist for some other reason. Does this counter-culture exist among other ethnicities? Take a look around you--there are vast number of white folk reacting to their systemic poverty in similarly contrarian fashion.

If poverty was a cause, there would be a lot more trouble. However, the Chinese quickly and vigorously worked their way out of poverty in two generations while African-Americans sat around for well over a century, not improving all that much in terms of employment, education and becoming more and more over-represented in crime. What I'm saying here is - if you have two groups, both non-white, and one makes it out of poverty almost immediately while the other sits around for a century without improvement, it's clearly not the base condition - poverty - but a variable causing it. What's the difference between those two groups? One difference that immediately comes to mind is culture.

Something I've noticed is that Chinese people are pressured by their peers to study, to work hard and to succeed. Black people aren't pressured that much, and they seem to be taught from what they've told me to assume they'll be discriminated and do absolutely nothing in school or employment as a result. If you're told by your parents during your entire youth that you'll never succeed, and don't get supported, you're being set up for failure. They're subject to very little social pressure, and they're not expected to adhere to our values. One of the most saddening things I ever saw was the black man next door sitting on the sidewalk in front of his house smoking. He has a giant television, a new car every three months, and he can send his children to university without paying. But he won't. He's using them as errand boys to make him money. If they do well, they can play with an illegal motorised vehicle.



If you can offer me any other factor that is true for all people regardless of race and culture, and in which they're equally represented, go ahead. I'm explaining the fact that they act differently from all other inhabitants of the world because of culture, because research into all other options except 'poverty' are refused funding and censored. The cause I think is logically closest to the truth is culture, as other cultural and ethnic groups are not nearly as widely and deeply affected by poverty as African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans and Maghreb-Europeans. It might be part of the cause, but there's no chance that it's most of the cause.



Assuming they are, you might just have given me a holy grail of proving my point. Self-defeating culture causing an endless cycle of poverty and crime? Self-defeating culture causing an endless cycle of poverty and crime. This makes a lot of sense - if they're suffering from the same affliction as many African-Americans, namely being able to be just as wealthy and educated but talking yourself into defeat generation after generation, that part of their culture might be at the root of the problem. You see, Europeans and Asians don't generally have a self-defeating mentality in employment and education embedded in their culture.



That's a very unfortunate thing, and I can't stress it enough. A lot of universities throughout the world keep denying or downplaying the necessity of research into certain subjects because they're not politically convenient. Not just politically incorrect, but they might cause a political faction to be discredited. Multiculturalism was assumed to be good and interesting until a few years ago, when almost all politicians suddenly took a sharp turn and admitted that it wasn't all that good after Geert Wilders was put on trial for inciting hatred by saying what a lot of people - even wealthier and better-educated Turks - thought. Suddenly, a lot of new figures and reports are pouring in, as the academic and political taboo has been broken. We finally have solid figures now - a majority of dark-skinned young men has been held by police for relatively serious crimes - and we're finally allowed to discuss human trafficking, forced prostitution at the hands of Moroccans and Antilleans, and arranged marriages. Discussing that on national television five years ago might have landed me a trial.

There are no notable right-wing think tanks in this corner of the world. Sociological research is almost exclusively carried out by people who are openly left-wing, and a lot of court judges are members of liberal parties. Political interference in academic research doesn't even have to be forced - it's intrinsically supported, and many local research papers don't take the effort of using academic language or even proper grammar, and just get to bashing right-wing politicians. If you ever fancy a read, here's a paper that was awarded the maximum score available at a Dutch university, which caused a lot of people to become frustrated or angry. Thankfully, it's in English - it's about how Geert Wilders, who's been pushing for more referendums and elected local officials, is a fascist. Interesting thing to note: it relies on a carefully-chosen definition and extrapolates in an extreme way.

http://universonline.nl/wp-content/uplo ... vekerk.pdf



To be honest, it's been about culture all along. What I needed to do was to explain why dark-skinned people are involved in crime so often. There's a very accurate correlation between a dark skin colour and a culture that portrays itself as a culture of archetypical victims, struggling to survive against economic and racist oppression, sometimes offering crime and welfare as a solution, as I've often heard. This might surprise you, but I actually enjoyed Tupac and other acts very actively years ago, and I still enjoy some of the more obscure hip-hop and rap music that breaks some of the traditions.



This is a ground rule that I immediately agree with. It's what I've noticed a lot. And that might be a very basic explanation - a lot of facets of black culture involve isolationism. What I've noticed was the attitude that 'they hate us, so we should fight back'. Completely unbased - I know a lot of people who have tried to help, but were threatened or assaulted. It took riot police to drive fifty of them apart after they attacked an arrest team that tried to arrest a known criminal for involvement in a shoot-out. It's social pressure, but not the productive kind.



Several Asian countries started with poor infrastructure. India, for example, started with a typical colonial type of train lines. Several points of production with railways leading to central points along a track leading to ports and trading points. In fact, the very purpose of these railways was to facilitate imports and exports. A somewhat similar system exists in Africa. Vietnam, meanwhile, started a period of rapid economic growth with complete and utter destruction, with roads, bridges, forests and cities bombed to smithereens. There was little infrastructure, but the Vietnamese kept working on it, and Vietnam is developing rapidly now.

North Korea is a case of willingness to work and obey to a frightening extreme. It's the world's most amazing and complicated state - keeping its population in the dark, both in terms of knowledge and electricity, in serving an insane and isolationist regime. South Korea, which wasn't completely guaranteed by the likes of Mao in a formative phase, is doing much better than most of the world now.



It's not grasping at straws. My positions aren't ludicrous - they're simply politically inconvenient. As for Japan's exposure to Confucianism, I've found a ridiculously convenient Wikipedia article. I don't even have to discuss Korea - apparently, they were exposed to important parts of Confucianism because they found it in Korea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Confucianism_in_Japan



His methodology was bad, but his goal was even worse. His goal was to introduce racism in land ownership, and force whites out of business in favour of blacks. Didn't work properly, and now there are apparently regular food shortages, about twelve years of economic catastrophe by now, an imploded currency and a rather noticeable rise in absolute poverty. Was all of that really worth it for getting a few thousand white people out of business?



It did have something to do with being black. A lot, even. The main reason for the plan, and the main reason for supporting the plan for many people, was because Mugabe's - and much of the local population's, as they gladly supported him in exchange for land that would rapidly dry out within months - interpretation of African nationalism dictated that white people couldn't co-exist in a black society if they controlled most of the means of production.

Interestingly, I do see money pouring into Moldova and Belarus, and both of those countries would, again, be very well-developed if they were situated in Africa. Their governments are slightly depressing (though not so much compared to any government based on African or slave culture), but their people are quite resilient and economically relatively well-off compared to most parts of Africa or black parts of the Caribbean.



Does deeper thought, taking into account data that tends to contradict my conclusions, and looking through any analytical lens other than race - and I'm talking about culture rather than race, so please read it again - mean discussing your views? I'd like to discuss them, but it seems no other explanation than seemingly black-only systematic poverty has been offered here. And I think poverty in itself is not the reason, as other groups were able to become wealthier and under-represented in almost any type of crime statistics.



Again, I'm glad you know what I think. However, what I've observed is that it's black culture. It's not genetic, so related to race as a subject in itself, until research into the subject has shown it to be genetic, and apart from some small-scale hormone and intelligence tests that showed a difference, there has been nothing to base that on as all further research has been forbidden and censored. What I do see, though, is that there's a very large overlap between people with a black skin and people adhering to an African-based or slave-based culture that involves self-defeating and discouragement in terms of education and employment, and sometimes glorifies crime and broken families.



One white counter-culture that, using such logic, should be similar would be racist skinhead culture or Neo-Nazi culture. However, I have better experiences with them than I have with black gangster culture, which is exceedingly popular among dark-skinned people here. Where the worst parts of black gangster culture glorify rape and prostitution, the last time I read about Neo-Nazis was when they were protesting against two rapists moving into a small German town, saying they were not part of the therapy and that the rapists should go away. They're relatively popular in Greece now because they protected people from robbers and were helpful to the elderly in Athens.

I suspect HisDivineMajesty would have a different notion of those skinheads if he was dark skinned.
And as a matter of fact, while I can't speak of Europe, here in the United States, there is a thriving black middle - and even - upper class.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Again, you're making pronouncements with no evidentiary basis. The linkage to poverty is already amply demonstrated, so I fail to see how you can conclude that there is insufficient "trouble" to support the conclusion that poverty is a leading cause.

When you look at the development of the Chinese community, you are looking at an effective response to poverty--and if this thread was about how different minority communities respond to systemic poverty, then we would be having a completely different conversation.

But this thread is predicated on your view that race is a driving factor in crime, not that it is a driving factor in communities' response to poverty.



Where's your evidence for this supposition that social pressures to succeed are distinct among different racial groups? You are taking a stereotype and you are asserting it as true, but with no evidentiary basis on which to support it.

Now, I will certainly agree with you that family plays an important role in student success. One of the enormous challenges for aboriginal families in this country is that the legacy of residential schools has left a generation of parents who have no idea how to be parents, because their parents were never allowed to raise them. And yet we expect these children to succeed when their parents have little basis on which to encourage that success.

There are plenty of Chinese people in this city with marginal education, working in low skilled, low paid jobs (if they are working at all) and turning to Chinese organized crime gangs to supplement their incomes. Yet again, race is determinative of nothing at all.



But you're still caught in this chicken-and-egg argument. If you admit that the studies demonstrate the link between poverty and crime (and I will grant you that you haven't arrived there yet, the compelling mathematics notwithstanding), and if you admit that black communities are more deeply affected by poverty, then how can you claim that their poverty is disconnected from the crime of which you complain?

What are the tools that these communities have to lift themselves out of poverty? How can they make use of those tools? Can they make as effective use of these tools as other communities have? I think that it is a mistake to uncritically assume that the education system is not culturally biased. And if it is culturally biased, then all of the consequences that flow from that need to be taken into consideration.



But you don't turn your attention to whether it is possible to break that cycle. You blame the cycle on race, rather than blaming the cycle on an economic system that continues to send children to school hungry, and ensure that they never emerge from the education system with the skills to succeed. And then you complain that they don't succeed.

Remember, it is the majority that creates the social and education structures. We decide how welfare is managed. We decide how schools are established. We set learning outcomes. We have created the system that traps people in poverty. We cannot blame people who are victimized by a system when they had no part in the creation of that system and are given no voice in is maintenance.



And you should be talking about these things. But you should not be drawing improper conclusions from them. Crime is a symptom of a dysfunctional society but it does not tell you what that dysfunction is. Beyond merely observing crime, you should be turning a critical eye to the causes of crime. Blaming causation of nothing more than race (or even race and culture) does absolutely nothing to prevent further crime. But looking for a functional cause of crime then provides public policy makers with a basis on which to address crime prevention, rather than merely responding to crime.



You won't find me disagreeing on academic freedom issues. But that does not support the essential theme of your posts.



If this has been about culture, then why are you talking about skin colour?

It seems to me that you are looking for a basis on which to justify racist preconceptions while hiding behind an attempt at critical thinking. And I'll have none of it. If your argument was about cultural behaviour, then you could have dispensed with any mention of race from the beginning. You have yet to acknowledge that the exact same complaints that you have about black and brown skinned people are applicable to white skinned people, too.

Where are the Russian mobsters in your litany of criminal woe? Where are the Triads? Where are the mafiosi? They are guilty of exactly the same counter-cultural isolationism--but they don't merit any of your notice. And I am left to infer that you are doing so deliberately.

If you were remotely interested in talking about the cultural roots of crime, you needn't have chosen black and brown skinned communities as your subjects. But you did, which can only lead me to believe that you are not in the least interested in discussing crime, you are interested in demonizing people whose skin colour you don't like.



Again with the "black culture." You're only taking one example of a larger phenomenon.



I maintain that they're ludicrous because you go looking for the bits and pieces of evidence that support your prejudices, and you ignore the evidence that contradicts them. You are engage in an overwhelming exercise of bias confirmation.

Where did the infrastructure get built in Asia. It got built in the places where the War was being staged and fought. Railways moved British and Australian troops from India into Burma. Railways moved primary resources through China into Manchuria and on to Japan. Railways moved troops and equipment from Pusan and Cheju up to the 38th parallel.

Which were the Asian tigers? Singapore, Hongkong, Taiwan and South Korea. Two of them were so small that their infrastructure needs were met through their ports, one of them had infrastructure built to support a ground war and one of them had infrastructure built to support a Cold War outpost.

Japan survived the war with almost all of its infrastructure intact. Much of its wooden construction was destroyed, to be sure, but the railways and roads were largely spared, because a ground war was never fought on the home islands. And that meant that Japan was very well positioned to become a source of cheap manufacturing.



So his racism is bad, but your racism is not? You're tying yourself in rhetorical knots, now.

My criticism of Mugabe is based on the utter stupidity of his attempt to use the coercive power of the state to effect dramatic economic change. It failed, just as the Great Leap Forward (tm) failed, and any number of Soviet 5 year plans failed. It was stupid not because it was racist (which it most certainly was) but because it was doomed to failure.



You're confusing the motivation for the stupid plan with the inherent stupidity of the plan.



You're making a relative value judgement. Who cares how big the Moldovan economy would be if it were in Africa? The point is that it is the most economically stunted country in Europe. Belarus survives only because the Russians are content to throw money at the problem, not wanting to have another basket case on their doorstep.

These countries are economic failures--that's the point. They are blessed with the geographical advantage of being located next to the largest market on the planet, and they are still failures. White failures.



But if these issues were "black-only" then we would not observe them in any other community. But we do. So it's not black only. More importantly, we observe it in communities of all races. And that should lead any critical thinker to the question of whether race can be a factor in a phenomenon that is observed independently of race.



I don't know what you think. I can only infer what you think from what you say. And if what you say does not relfect what you think, then that is your failure, not mine.



How about Russian organized crime? How many prostitution rackets are the Russians running in Amsterdam right now? How about Italian organized crime? And for that matter, your beloved Chinese and their organized crime?

Look at the rate of violence with poor Scots. They having a culture of drinking, punch ups and knife fighting. They have a huge violence problem. IIRC the United Nations put Scotland on a most violent nations list. And it's not Scots in general. It's the poor white underclass and their culture.

There certainly are cultural differences and some are superior to others when it comes to generating success. But to pretend that 500 solid years of the exploitation of Africa and Africans played no role in that outcome is silly. We can't strip away the history and guess what might have been. Today poor black Americans are raised by parents who never knew better, sent to failing schools, etc. IT's called a cycle for a reason.;

Once upon a time the Germans were living in mud and sh*t while great civilizations went on without noticing them. Was that their choice at the individual level? or a combination of historical realities that curtailed their ability to suddenly change their fortunes?