RUTHFULLY YOURS

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On August 4, 1944, the Grüne Polizi, along with the Gestapo, raided the “secret annex” of an abandoned office building complex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had been hiding for over two years. Less than three weeks earlier, on July 15, 1944, Anne wrote in her diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.” Ultimately, peace did come. The Nazis were defeated, and Europe has been free of wars for seventy-five years – the longest period in its history – thanks to the people of the United States. But peace came too late for Anne Frank. Less than a year later, she was dead at age fifteen, probably of Typhus, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Nazi-held Germany.

One marvels at Anne Frank’s outlook, when bleakness enshrouded her environment and hoped dimmed for millions caught in the Nazi’s web and in a world gone dark. As we reflect today, in far better circumstances than were hers, is there not a lesson for us, in our pandemic, fear–filled world?

Optimism is a state of mind. Perhaps a dream over reality, or naïveté over cynicism? In retrospect, Anne Frank’s optimism appears innocent or guileless. Yet, she lives on through her Diary of a Young Girl, because in spite of everything she experienced she had the vision to see that sunlight would return and the world would move on. In her optimism, she was wise, for the two – optimism and wisdom – are linked. Optimists draw from the ancient classics, the birth of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the Industrial Revolution and the recent victory of democracy over socialism. All have helped man’s condition to improve. Individual freedom, democracy and free-market capitalism have lifted multitudes from poverty and early death. Optimism, it should be remembered, does not mean nostalgia for an earlier time, but the expectation of enhanced prospects for a better future.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-31-happy-new-year-reality-den

On the last post a few days ago, several commenters raised the subject of the popular and long-running TV series Law & Order, particularly as to the race of the perpetrators of the crimes. The show purports to be based on actual incidents, and tries to give an impression of basis in reality. On the episodes of that show that I have watched — admittedly not a large sample — the perpetrator of the violent crime has seemed almost always to turn out to be white and, for that matter, rich. But are the show’s producers intentionally skewing the reality of the race of perpetrators of violent crimes? And if so, by a little, or by a lot?

I decided to look around to see if I could find some relevant statistics. It turns out that several researchers (if you want to call them that) have gone through collections of these shows to compare races of crime perpetrators to actual crime data. As suspected, the difference is staggering.

Here is a July 2015 piece with the title “Manufacturing white criminals: Depictions of criminality and violence on Law & Order,” from a journal called Cogent Social Sciences. The authors reviewed several seasons of L&O, and compared the races of the perpetrators of the crimes in the episodes in those seasons with actual New York City police data for the same years. Stripping out a lot of social science mumbo jumbo, here are the results for two of the years:

1992. In New York City, there were 51,490 arrests for violent felonies, of which 5,567 (10.8%) were white, 27,976 (54.3%) black, 16,096 (31.3%) Hispanic, and 1,851 (3.6%) Asian/other. On L&O season 3, covering the same year, the perps were 15 (65%) white, 2 (9%) black, and 6 (26%) Hispanic.

1995. In real NYC data, there were 49,549 violent felony arrests, of which 5,332 (10.8%) were white, 27,405 (55.3%) black, 15,169 (30.6%) Hispanic, and 1,643 (3.4%) Asian/other. On L&O season 6, the percentages were 26 (79%) white, 3 (9%) black, and 4 (12%) Hispanic.

Other years showed virtually identical patterns. To summarize, on L&O whites are over-represented (compared to real-world data) among perpetrators of violent crime by a factor of around 6 to 8, while blacks are under-represented by also a factor of around 6 to 8. This is not some small random mismatch, but rather a very intentional effort to paint a wildly distorted view of reality.