More on the background of Daunte Wright and that outstanding warrant
Now we get some new information on Daunte Wright and his previous encounters with the police:
Daunte Wright had an open warrant related to an armed-robbery case against him when he was shot dead Sunday by a cop who claimed she thought she was firing her Taser, court records show.
Wright, 20, and another man had been charged with first-degree attempted aggravated robbery in December 2019 for allegedly trying to steal $820 from a woman at gunpoint, according to Hennepin County District Court documents.
The pair had crashed at the victim’s home in the city of Osseo after attending a party there –then demanded money the next morning while flashing a gun, authorities said in court papers.
“Give me the f–king money — I’m not playing around,” Wright told the woman, according to prosecutors.
They ended up leaving without the money and without harming anyone, however. Later, there was a violation of bail conditions by Wright, including a weapons possession incident of some sort. The officers who stopped him for a license plate problem became aware of these violations when they did a check as a routine part of that traffic stop.
None of this exonerates Officer Potter in the fatal shooting of Wright, which was apparently unintentional as far as we know up to this point. The knowledge of Wright’s record and possible dangerousness might have heightened Potter’s fear and resultant stress, and affected her ability to judge taser from gun, but I believe that may be legally irrelevant except perhaps in the sentencing stage if she is convicted of anything.
More information here about Wright’s prior behavior:
Wright and another man, identified as Emajay Maurice Driver, a high school acquaintance, had both been charged with first-degree aggravated robbery in a December 2019 incident in Osseso, Minn., Hennepin County District Court documents show.
First-degree aggravated robbery is no misdemeanor, although an earlier article in the WaPo had indicated that Wright’s previous brush with the law was for a misdemeanor (I discussed that WaPo article in this previous post).
More from the Fox News article:
Wright then allegedly choked the woman while trying to pull the cash out from under her bra, where she had tucked it away.
The court documents say she was able to pry herself loose and “started to kneel down and scream.” She told authorities that she allegedly heard Driver tell her to give the money to Wright, who was yelling at her to stop screaming.
She reportedly screamed at them to get out of her apartment, telling them that the cops were close. Wright allegedly told her he would shoot her and said, “Give me the money and we will leave, give me the money and we will go.”
More at the link.
Note that the first story is from the NY Post and the second from Fox. So far I don’t see anything in our illustrious Times or WaPo or even ABC or CNN, although they usually come up very high in the Google algorithm. As so often happens, the Brits of the Daily Mail are covering it, though.
This is from the Daily Mail article:
Wright was due to face trial on a charge of attempted aggravated robbery – with a possible maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Another fact I hadn’t previously heard is that Daunte’s girlfriend was also in the car, and sustained non-life-threatening injuries when Daunte’s car crashed as a result of him losing the ability to control it.
Any discussion by conservatives about the past criminality of the martyrs of BLM is invariably misrepresented by leftists as implying that conservatives are somehow arguing that the deceased person “deserved to die” for his past misbehavior. This is laughably stupid, as the issue is of the knowledge possessed by the LEOs of the history of the arrested person, as well as with the hagiography which has come to surround all those enrolled in BLM’s martyrology (truly a rogues’ gallery of miscreants, often of the woman-abusing variety). Candace Owens has very bravely criticized the elevation of these hardly-admirable characters to posthumous sainthood.
I guess this ends the “pulled over for air fresheners is a capital crime” thing. Oh, who am I kidding?
I want to know if Wright had a gun in the car and if there were drugs in it.
I’m betting yes.
There is much being made of the Taser “accident”. Sounds more like the Officer called, “Taser”, just before the suspect in a rapidly evolving struggle broke free. The Officer then responded by switching to a conventional firearm. That quick, and appropriate, change in tactics seemed to have suprised even the Officer. Good training and an alert Officer. There was no “mistake” or “accident”. The Officer got off one, well aimed, shot at a fleeing and dangerous suspect.
Sounds like a “Good Shoot”.
Mike-SMO
Why is all the attention given to police who stop the Floyds, Wrights etc? Shouldn’t we be talking about the families and communities that produce the thugs? Everyone wants to reform police practices and no one talks about child-raising screw-ups.
Not that the “children” may learn that violent behavior is without serious consequences in the public schools? Disproportionate levels of discipline (disparate impact statistics) applied to BIPOC students you know have somehow changed what is allowed and accepted in schools. Now some of these youths do kill each other (Chicago effect) but that is not an issue. It is an issue of systemic racism when their learned behavior is stopped in an unexpected, highly unpredictable incident involving a LEO. (sarc)
@expat:
Taken in the Large, it’s Nature, not Nurture.
This terrifies most people and they will do literally anything to avoid going near it and do literally anything to misdirect. The people you describe are obviously doing this, and your post itself is less obviously illustrating my point too.
It’s arguable that Whites require society to be organised upon more traditional and stricter moral lines than at present in order for Whites to function at their best. There should be no argument at all that Blacks are utterly constitutionally (hehe, CivNats… I’ve gone done befouled the word for you) unsuited to the current social and legal arrangements and would benefit greatly from a firmer (non Pimp Daddy) hand.
Is there a good understanding of the actions of the Black “trainee” cop? I’ve seen multiple references that he didn’t cuff the suspect successfully and was thus a key factor in what happened.
JimNorCal. I saw the footage, can’t find it now. Yeah, something odd happened when the cop and Wright were in the frame. How Wright got loose is a question and from what I saw, it didn’t have to happen.
Thanks, Richard. Yes, I’ve seen remarks here and there, but it still feels like that angle is not understood.
Mike-SMP, the officer reportedly said “Oh sh**, I shot him”. Sounds like she really did intend to tase him.
Wright’s prior actions demonstrate him to be a ‘barbarian’, i.e. someone constitutionally incapable of acting in a non-violent civilized manner.
There currently being no Australia to ship them off to… the only ‘good’ barbarian is a dead barbarian.
Those on the left are turning over society to the barbarians.
The goal is societal dissolution and in the predictable public reaction of demanding order be restored, the left’s tyranny shall be implemented.
@GB:
Actually Australia these days is very open to the importation of Barbarians with a sob story. The Karen Sheilas having emasculated their native menfolk are desperate for their hybristophiliac thrills and will vote in droves against any politician daring to raise his head above the race parapet. Minneapolis isn’t the only city with a Somali problem — they’re happily raping and mugging their way through Melbourne too.
Having said that, the best remedies for the problem at hand are the exemplary ones applied with celerity.
Zaphod,
“… it’s Nature… There should be no argument at all that Blacks are utterly constitutionally … unsuited…”
(bolding by Rufus)
Let’s ignore the myriad examples of blacks like Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell* in order to pick apart the fallacies of your logic.
I’ve read a lot of your writing here. You are obviously well educated yet you throw around absolutes rather carelessly; “no argument at all?” “utterly unsuited?” Even though many folks from India, South and Central Amerika, Pakistan… have darker skin than many people from Africa, I assume by “blacks” you mean people from Africa? If so, do you sincerely believe “natural” behaviors vary that little on the continent with the most genetic diversity on planet Earth? On the one hand you are claiming we humans have little control over how we will act based on our genetic makeup, on the other you are claiming that humans from the region with the greatest genetic variety have even less control than those who are not from that region. I don’t think either of those two clauses are correct, but it is impossible that they both are.
*Both men are clear examples of success when circumstances changed their environments and “nurturing.”
@Rufus:
Gary, Indiana. You could try moving there and seeing how much the existence of Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell out at the far right of the Bell Curve does to alleviate the pain of living there. Or Baltimore. I could go on and list the familiar litany of locales which ‘Civil Rights’ have made unlivable for normal decent humans (including plenty of Blacks themselves).
Now, in the spirit of the Confucian Rectification of Names, convince me that a good working definition of Civil Rights is not ‘Allowing Blacks to fully express their Phenotype with little to zero limit or legal sanction’. How has that worked out for the USA these past 60 years?
Hell, it’s arguable that allowing Whites to fully express their phenotype with fewer but clearly more limits and legal sanctions than Blacks hasn’t exactly been a resounding success of late given the rampant strip mining of social capital, amphetamine and fentanyl epidemics, etc.
But still… having been told that you would be parachuted into a random black or white neighbourhood, we both know which option you would choose.
I do not say that a totalitarian government of Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, and your choice of Black luminaries could not turn Baltimore into a non-@#$#hole. It’s clear however that any form of democracy doesn’t work for them. Please show me one example of a well-run Black city. There isn’t one. They can’t do it. It’s not their fault that they lack sufficient smart fraction to bring it off, but there it is. Wishing won’t change it.
It’s nice that Blacks smarter and more moral and more fitted to the republican ideal than myself exist. But relative fractions matter. In matters of population, we have to look at actual populations rather than individuals when reasoning about what might or might not work.
Idealism is all very good in the abstract. In the concrete it often destroys the lives on people who have done nothing to deserve it. Ask the Boston Irish whose lives were blighted by school busing imposed upon them by their ‘Betters’ who could make sure that *their* children didn’t have to go to public schools with Blacks.
Let’s talk a little bit about Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and its genetic diversity. There’s certainly plenty of that. Is Diversity a Good Thing? I guess the Ibo of Nigeria would say yes given that they are the smartest ethnic group in SSA with a mean IQ ca. 90 — which is why you get Nigerian email scammers… and why if you look at Black investment bankers in London, Singapore, Tokyo, HK, etc… they’re as likely to be ‘Nigerian’ as African American. Put simply with a mean IQ of 90, you are going to get some small but noticable number of guys and girls out past 120 in the tail. Much of the rest of SSA however has mean IQ around the 70 mark and that’s why Wakanda doesn’t exist.
OK that’s just the IQ bit. Now imagine that you and your ancestors had been living in a harsh and *unpredictable* ecology for the last million or so years. Unpredictable, you ask? Ever saw the extremely poor taste movie A Million Ways to Die in the West? There’s 10 million ways to die in Africa. Just dip your toe in a freshwater lake and you might earn a lingering death from Bilharzia. Cop that for a million years and how would you expect your mental faculties for future orientation and planning to have evolved? Now compare and contrast with putting stuff aside for Winter in Northern Europe — harsh ecology but *predictable*.
Project line forward million years from the past and what do you get? Some jungly masks and a few Benin Bronzes vs. Space Rockets. Not their fault. Just is. In less than an eye-blink we’re supposed to believe that entire populations can or should be transplanted from vastly different ecologies they have evolved to fit and mixed with other populations?
With regard to your *point re Nurture. Do you seriously propose that randomly selecting at birth 1000 Blacks and 1000 Whites and 1000 South Koreans and giving them precisely metered equal nurture would produce same proportions of career criminals, drug addicts, Classical Greek Scholars, network engineers, neurosurgeons, NASCAR Drivers and Dog Meat Chefs? 🙂 We both know it won’t happen and can’t happen. Received Religion, morals, public virtue, good manners, basic human kindness may all cry out against this fact. But the fact remains. I harp on about it here because in this forum we are trying to get to the bottom of things. Strangely I can’t help thinking that a good civic religion if such a thing could even exist would have to be somewhat like that of the Druze or the Masons — some knowledge and public policy decisions should not be bandied about in public. Singapore has some unwritten and censored out of public discourse but easily-inferred rules on which races get access to which levers of power and decision-making, for example.
You mentioned India. Castes/Jati are very interesting. You get commercial castes where for two thousand years only males who are good in business have reproduced. Guess what? They do better than even higher-status Brahmin castes when it comes to money-grubbing buying and selling of tangible stuff. Brahmins having bred themselves for more esoteric pursuits tend to make better sociology professors than used car salesmen. The Parsees who really are Iranians and kept strictly to themselves are at the absolute top of Indian commercial life. India is a fascinating land full of racial experiments which they’ve so considerately been running on themselves under the guise of religion of two plus millennia now. More attention deserved :).
Zaphod; Rufus T. Firefly:
Apparently Zaphod is one of those “the science is settled” people. And who settled it? Why, Zaphod.
That doesn’t make it so. Obviously.
We’ve discussed this nature/nurture thing on this blog many times – perhaps long before Zaphod became a commenter here. I’m not going to go round that mulberry bush once again, except to say I disagree with Zaphod and I’ve presented much evidence on that score here before. I refer him to the work of Thomas Sowell on the subject of race, ethnicity, IQ, and nature/nurture, which I find quite brilliant (as is his work on most subjects). He’s written quite a few works on it, but I would recommend for example this short piece, or this book or this one. I haven’t looked at this more recent book but it’s probably very good too.
What is tragic is that there will be many more incidents like this. Low end criminals and frightened minorities will now think it is okay to resist arrest and flee. With the prosecution of this officer (and she will be convicted) the police will just let the lawlessness go and major depravations will be visited on the poor communities just like in the 70’s. The inhabitants in Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” will see their lives getting worse as the criminal elements run roughshod over them until “some savior” offers an authoritarian way out.
Pulled over for an air freshener on rear view mirror? Eric Garner strangled to death selling single cigarettes on the street? Talk about your “Three Felonies a Day” scenario. And the police have to enforce these laws.
Another point, Donte Wright was arrested in December 2019 for aggravated robbery and still loose in 2021? One thing that needs reformed is the court system. The courts and the police have to be quicker in charging and conducting trials. Justice delayed is justice denied.
But this is not what I am cranked up about. Today in The Gateway Pundit two stories of pregnant women and on Tucker Carlson a story about Sammy Montoya being arrested with heavily armed police breaking in like they were terrorists or drug lords. Note the words, single mother, poor, mobile home, heavily armed, at gunpoint, public defender and social media cancelled.
They are targeting the deplorables to intimidate us. The defenseless against the power of the state. Meanwhile the Capital Hill shooter identity was never disclosed, and the case is closed.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/exclusive-pregnant-single-mother-raided-fbi-detained-week-going-open-door-capitol-facing-30-years-prison/
A month after the protest, she was yanked from her bed at gunpoint by the FBI. Her entire street was blocked off and crowded with unmarked vehicles. Her small mobile home was raided and a two page long list of her belongings was seized.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/exclusive-mother-four-stopped-capitol-protesters-breaking-windows-raided-faces-55-years-prison/
Talk about a war against women.
Is this your America?
Meanwhile men are still being held without bail for what will be at worse Felony Trespass with 60 days maximum sentence. Essentially, they have served their sentence. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Is this your America?
This is Totalitarianism and the police are complicit. I have referenced several times the essay “The Police and Us”. We are descending into this spiral of repression and it has to stop. Note that the first article had FBI listed. I guarantee that it was Federal officers in the other arrests too. Local officers where people know who they are, where they live and where their children go to school would not act that way.
This seems to be a modus operandi for the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Roger Stone raid caught live on CNN. Also, triple amputee Brian Kolfage being raided by armed US Postal Service from NY in his home in FL.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/outrageous-15-new-york-agents-dragged-triple-amputee-war-hero-brian-kolfage-wheelchair-backseat-arrest-vehicle/
Is this your America?
The past 12 years has shifted my perspective about policing and the justice system. I firmly believe that the militarization of police forces needs to be cut back particularly at the Federal Level. Why the hell Postal Inspectors needs SWAT teams? ATF, DEA I can see due to the nature of the material they regulate but mail fraud? I also think the FBI and CIA needs disbanded. Their culture is too corrupt. Disband them and move their functions to other departments. CIA, the analysis section to the State Department. Direct Operations to SOCOM after amending several laws to allow it. Right now SOCOM “lends” people to the CIA. Overseas HUMIT to Secret Service or SOCOM. FBI, the investigation segment to Federal Marshalls. Counter intelligence to the Secret Service. Labs and Forensics to the HHS. All FBI and CIA personnel have to apply for their jobs back.
This past year I am seriously thinking about the concept of sovereign immunity and law enforcement. By and large I am for it but after some of the Gestapo actions we have just seen above there has to be a strict code of conduct or you lose it.
We also have to call out the race baiters and escalators and not be afraid about it. Tell it to their faces especially Legacy Media. They are frauds and deserve no respect. Finally, we have to work and have both sides de-escalate in an arrest situation. You cannot be allowed to fight and then try to run. This is where our elites have failed us in order to achieve their political ends.
Change starts with us not accepting this sordid state of affairs. I am working to change it. Hopefully you are too.
@Neo:
I don’t think the Science is Settled ™. I just use my lying eyes to observe observable facts in the world as it *is* rather than as it ‘ought’ to be. Call me a debased and depraved British Empiricist, if you must :).
There is far more to life than Race to be sure. But to pretend that it should be ignored when evaluating and making public policy seems to me to be folly and inviting in the long run far more human misery on all sides than facing up to it in the here and now. Reciting litanies of Exemplary Blacks and their Exemplary Works from the vantage point of a charming piece of New England Rarefied Whiteopia changes not a wit on the ground in Base Reality.
I think it’s also disingenuous to talk about Race and Culture as orthogonal concepts. Again, observation of the real world suggests that they are intertwined and feed back into each other.
There *are* I am sure moral and ethical approaches to dealing with racial differences which can help to avoid nightmare outcomes, but wishing the topic away is not an answer. We are what we are — sadly.
IAmSpar, when you get that inevitable GOP donation request be sure to return it with suggestions.
Say her name: Ashli Babbitt
Stolen Election
Repeal ObamaCare
Make it clear that there will be no money till they fight for Traditional Americans
Zaphod: If you view everything through the lens of race what are you? Simple?
You forgot malaria, dengue fever, and a whole slew of other maladies that beset Africa, or Asia, or the northern hemisphere. Biology is like that, deadly.
@om:
I prefer to think of myself as Convoluted. In the Frequency Domain, of course.
Yes. It’s no accident that Sub-Saharan Africa was not colonised by Whites much beyond the Cape until after mid C19 when understanding of basic sanitation, and hygiene kicked off. Simply wasn’t very survivable before then.
India and the West Indies had shocking death rates from disease but there was more of a wealth / natural resources extraction pay off so more took on the risks earlier.
Zaphod:
What you’ve observed tells you nothing, or next to nothing, about the causes of what you’re observing.
I’m very serious about those book recommendations.
I don’t recommend Sowell’s works because of his race. What would make you think I do? Nothing I’ve said indicates that. I recommend them because of the caliber of his mind and thought and research, period.
And I’m certainly not “pretending that race should be ignored when evaluating and making public policy” or “wishing it away.”
JimNorCal – my wallet is slammed shut to the Republicans. I support Citizen groups in Michigan like Rescue Michigan, Stand Up Michigan and Unlock Michigan.
I am a conservative economic nationalist not a Republican. I work within the Republican Party to have it live up to it’s founding principles of maximum liberty and minimal government. It is hard work but I am not deterred.
I Am Spartacus:
Wright wasn’t pulled over for an air freshener. He was pulled over for an expired license plate. The air freshener also got him a citation, but it wasn’t why he was pulled over and I doubt he would have been pulled over for that. Of course, when they ran his driver’s license, they saw his record, which was serious.
@Neo:
I dunno.. If I observe members of Group A regularly performing Action X at a much higher frequency than Group B then after a long enough period of such observations, perhaps one might start out with an initial working model along the lines of A’s having an innate propensity to X more than B’s do.
All a bit simplistically Galilean sure… but in real Science and Engineering it’s always a good idea to start with the simplest possible models and see what predictive utility they have before proceeding further. A good sign that one’s model might be just plain bad is the need to add Ptolemaic Epicycles and flourishes and curlicues and tomes of exegeses with footnotes in order to arrive at an ‘Explanation’. IMHO the Left *and* ‘Conservatives’ are both equally guilty here – just that they stumble around drunk under different lamp posts.
I’ll go read more Sowell per your recommendations. Hopefully he has some good suggestions for fixing Baltimore. Given that Baltimore is ruled by Blacks and has been ruled by Blacks for quite some time now, it’s a pity they haven’t applied these fixes.
Zaphod:
You’re a smart guy, and I think you realize that you cannot possibly differentiate between the culture of a group and the genetics of a group. Meaningful theories about the genesis of human behavior have very little in common with engineering.
Sowell on the topic of racial differences, just to take one short clip:
I don’t know that I have anything particular to add to this conversation, but as I am still up for a few moments I wish to mention a piece of history which has interested me for many years and one which provokes some rather surprisingly intense negative emotions among progressives toward the settlers I am going to mention.
Most probably have intuited that I am referring to Liberia, and the Americo-Liberian culture built by the settlement of pioneering black Americans.
It’s strange how negatively they are viewed by many, and how their struggle, along with the US Navy to suppress the local slave trade there, gets only a kind of shrugging acknowledgement. Slaving is bad. Except you know, when indigenous tribes are doing the marketing. Then it’s not good maybe, but blah blah blah someone else’s fault, part of local culture, not qualitatively the same etc,, etc, etc,
I’m not saying that the family business, as the little republic more or less came to be, was perfect, but it was a fascinating project and surely deserves a more positive and sympathetic treatment than it has received.
The progressives of this world are no friends of anyone who does not share their view: Black, Christian, American pioneers in Africa, included.
I think it is tragic to think of what might have been but was never realized. Rather like the abortive – or at least destroyed by goddamned barbarians of the same stock- mercantile republic of the Kievan Rus, “Prince” Novgorod.
If the mentally ill lunatics running the Democrat Party have their way, we will be joining them both.
Small world. Less than six degrees of separation.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/04/14/strange-connection-between-george-floyd-and-daunte-wright-n361402?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=onsite&utm_campaign=-1
“According to the Daily Mail, Wright’s relatives and supporters assembled near the Minneapolis courthouse where Chauvin is standing trial and talked about Wright. They were met there by Courtney Ross. Courtney Ross was Floyd’s girlfriend for three years until his death. She used to work as a dean at Edison High School where she knew Daunte Wright.”
I suspect that “African American” includes two very different sub-populations.
A (I think) smaller portion are descendants of unlucky “normals” who were jacked in tribal raids. Smart through dim, but “normal”. Both the Igbo and Oyo Empire (of the Yoruba) both seem to have dumped their “defectives”who were a-social or anti-social into the Atlantic Slave Trade. Smart through dim, but resentful and hostile. In our midwest metro, there are Black communities that have been peaceful, and cooperative since before Illinois Abe took that job in Washington. The urban core has been converted into a ghetto in which 2020 was spent trying to get the murder toll above the COVID death toll.
Historians can’t seem to determine the total of West Africans sold into slavery, so it is unlikely that the numbers of “kidnappoed” vs. the numbers “dumped” will ever be resolved. But if you have been around, you can see the two separate peoples.
I have know some fine human beings and have been cornered on a light rail platform by some that were no so fine, but were another kind. Immigrant West Africans seem to do OK in the U.S. and in the U.K. Most “African Americans” are “different”. It isn’t because of the “experience” of slavery or racism. They experienced “slavery” because of what the “founding population” was, or wasn’t. The violence and hostility were endemic components of this sub-class. I believe that the behavioral composition of this sub-population created New World “racism”. The “racism” didn’t create the defective sub-population.
No. I can’t prove this theory, but look around. You don’t need a heroic IQ to hold a job, run a business, or do well in some professional careers. You do have to be able to get along, work consistently, and to cooperate. The ghetto is full of individuals who can’t get along or hold a job with the slightest responsibility. I am pretty sure that the founding population of these “defectives” were those dumped at the Bonni Port in exchange for steel implements, brightly colored cloth and/or Rum.
Watch the jargon and word play in the African histories, when they are explaining how African “slavery” was different and “so nice”. Yeah, unless you were a persistent screw-up and were destined for an “all expense” trip to the “New World”. “African Americans” are (in my opinion) mostly made up of the descendants of the cast-offs of the West African tribes/empires/nations.
@Mike-SMO:
Interesting observations. Reminds me of the spaceship full of Telephone Sanitizers and other useless people in Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Their home planet had told them that everyone was setting out to colonise a new planet on multiple ships and they were being sent first because they were most deserving of the honour.
I would make the point that immigrant West Africans in the present day are the smart fraction boiling off and heading to wherever they can best maximise their personal utility functions. On the whole they’re not the worst of potential immigrants, but they could do more good for all concerned staying where they belong and improving the lot of their less capable fellow countrymen.
Ceterum autem censeo Somalis are just plain Bad News.
Going around with a young pastor of liberal bent, I quoted Sowell, “Cultures vary and differences have consequences.” Anathema.
Some time back, U-Mich ran a study. Hard to figure how they got a grant for this;
Recruit undergrad guys for a study of something or other.
Guy shows up as appointed. Receptionist gives him a hard time about being later, or early and not prepared. Sends him out. He runs into a large guy who shoulders him into a wall and calls him an asshole or something.
Bingo. That’s the start. Blood and urine draw.
Those who came from the South, or whose parents did, spiked adrenalin and testosterone higher than those whose roots were in the North, and the spike lasted longer.
Which brings up the question of whether a culture, if sufficiently proof against outside influences, can function as “nature” in natural selection.
Anthropologist named Napoleon Chagnon got in trouble for–he apparently didn’t–making the case that, among the Yanomami of the South American jungle, murder was a reproductive advantage and the propensity for violence was selected for. Several other issues were laid at his door but the possibility that he might have made the case was so…scary on account of it might actually be true that he was slagged pretty hard in the business.
One of the aspects of Sowell’s “Conquests and Cultures” is trying to imagine his research staff. Good lord. He considers geography; distance between coal and iron ore….beyond a certain distance you don’t get iron/steel technology. Rainy season and dry rivers keep people from boating into Africa with the resulting development or non-development.
On and on. One item which is likely telling in the current discussion is his assertion that Polish immigrants from areas controlled by Germany did better than Polish immigrants from areas controlled by Russia.
And how long the cultural traits lasted. See the Volga Germans.
Studying SubSaharan Africa back fifty-plus years ago, I had a prof who said he could read terrain relief by looking at disease ocurrence, or disease occurrence by looking at terrain maps. A bit of doggerel from the Royal Navy’s West Africa station: “Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin. There’s one comes out for forty goes in.” What numbers I’ve been able to find don’t support that ratio, but it was pretty bad.
Kwame Nkrumah, first leader of independent Ghana, said that they needed a giant statue of the anopheles mosquito in downtown Accra. Sort of a much grimmer version of the statue of the boll weevil in Enterprise, AL.
But the point is, what is to be done now? Black Lives Mansions aren’t going to give up their gig. Nor are Sharpton or Crump.
Liberals of all colors aren’t going to give up believing, at some level, the equivalent of “hands up, don’t shoot”, and insisting that others believe it as well, including young blacks who have no other source of information–that they’d credit because the hustlers tell them not to.
Liberals aren’t going to give up their feeling of superiority they get by “helping” others continue to be self-destructive.
Where we used to live and where our kids went to school was a very pleasant midwest town. Almost entirely white except for some absurdly middle class black families and some Asian/white families. Everybody got along. The football team was on the point of throwing out a kid who used a term for a black teammate he honestly didn’t know was wrong.
Then came the “project”. Need a cop on the school bus which picks up from that area. A colleague since retired said that there had been fifteen fights by Christmas in the high school, all kids from The Project.
If you don’t want to be around that, the nature/nurture question is irrelevant.
If somebody says, about a vid of a brawl a McD’s “If I guessed right, am I a racist?” what is the answer?
As I keep saying, almost all the celebrated cases of cops shooting blacks involve blacks resisting the cops for no good reason. There are exceptions, of course, but look at the cases that get the ink.
Zaphod @ 10:18pm
“Please show me one example of a well-run Black city. There isn’t one. They can’t do it.”
Cascade – Atlanta, GA, Lake Arbor, Maryland, Hillcrest, NY, Friendly, MD, Ladera Heights, CA, View Park Windsor-Hills, CA, Woodmore, MD…
I can also list white majority cities that are poorly run (including where I was raised), but I’d risk developing carpal tunnel syndrome from all that typing.
Zaphod,
Your reasoning is completely in-line with BLM. If we lump everyone into categories and predetermined behaviors based on skin color what happens?
“Blacks” can point to the millions murdered by white regimes in just the past century. Let’s list the most murderous nations of the 20th century. How far down the list do we have to go until we get to a black majority nation or culture? BLM doesn’t have to do much digging to find abominations and atrocities to pin on the “white” race. Statistically, if one wants to look at history and predict if someone is likely to become a genocidal, mass murdering maniac based on attributes you would have to completely agree with BLM’s stance that white males ought to be eliminated from an abundance of caution.
@Rufus:
By that logic you’d expect them all to have perfect Sunday School attendance and never use four letter words. We being so dangerous and all.
I tend to agree with Victor Davis Hanson that there is nothing so violently murderous as Westerners when they get sufficiently riled up and ramped up. No arguing with you on this point.
But Blacks in the USA appear to have some inability to draw correct inference from our Deplorable History. I certainly wouldn’t be pushing the envelope right now were I to find myself transported into their shoes in a stroke of what you would doubtless consider poetic justice 🙂
Zaphod: “Please show me one example of a well-run Black city. There isn’t one. They can’t do it.”
Rufus: Cascade – Atlanta, GA, Lake Arbor, Maryland, Hillcrest, NY, Friendly, MD, Ladera Heights, CA, View Park Windsor-Hills, CA, Woodmore, MD…
Me: Cascade is a neighborhood of Atlanta. The other examples are unincorporated areas or “census designated places” and thus have no discrete local governments.
Rufus T Firefly:
Cambodia under Pol Pot, CCP under Mao, Japan during the 1930s-1945 in China, Korea, …. Turks and Armenia. And then there are the Hutus in Rawanda, and Idi Amin in Uganda. But I would say that having infrastructure and ideology does help with the body count if genocide and slaughter is a feature not a bug (Europe), or just superior weapons and willing helpers (King Leopold and the Congo).
But BLM and the other racists have a story and they will stick to it.