13 Comments

A quick followup. This video was marked as "hateful content" by TikTok and removed.

Expand full comment

"BLM is actually part of the problem."

Brilliant! Matt's clarity is inspiring. Keep writing, Matt.

Expand full comment

"repeating it over and over again with a narrative that the entire media, like the mockingbirds that they are, repeats endlessly"

Unfortunately, it's not only the media.

I can't tell you how many instances like that I've encountered during my attempts at sincere academic analysis of race-based discrimination in policing. There's an enormous number of academic papers in supposedly serious disciplines repeating just the same narrative, building mountains of research motivated by the same convictions, which directly or indirectly rely on unreliable or misleading data.

Expand full comment

Even Steven Pinker has said that putting a cop on every street corner in these zip codes you speak of for 6-24 months would solve a lot of these problems.

Unfortunately, college campuses are parasitized by woke ideology. Here's some stuff on that from Gad Saad. https://unskool.substack.com/p/the-parasitization-of-college-campuses

Expand full comment

Misinformation cuz of the media’s: Moneyed interests. Rumor incentive. Progressive Gospel ideology broadcast and accepted by enough US citizens who are students and colleagues (via compelled DEI trainings). Media narratives are proprietary terministic screens interpellating us into false impressions of the country’s problems.

Expand full comment

While this feels accurate, we must, however, resist the urge to believe we know something about what population segments believe based solely on media narratives since that’s as much of a terministic screen as the narratives themselves. What should we then believe? Data. Violence is a male problem. While there may be a certain satisfaction in watching a member of one’s own tribe wag a finger at the Other, essentially this entire series and his book are merely a diversion from the problem of male violence. In other words, dude is gloating over the fact that black-on-black crime is worse than white-on-white crime but this misses the greater point that nearly 100% of violent crime is committed by men.

Expand full comment

Point well taken about the risk of categorizing people’s entire beliefs solely on media narratives. Hence my adjective ‘enough’ because my point is accurate AND incomplete...I focus on how media manipulate our beliefs about specific events and how our beliefs about media as objective extensions of our personal beliefs let them interpret data for us. Data alone is insufficient imho. Media persuasively direct our attention toward parts of events/data beyond our immediate experience...and we as humans take their incomplete or skewed narrative at face value when we should not. And your data discussion takes up my point that we know media select certain data sets and occlude others...the data on total male violence exist yet they omit it as an overwhelmingly male problem in favor of a racially charged and minute outlier in the data set on officer involved deaths and shootings. Moneyed interests and rumor incentive further prevent reporting full data sets, and then enough people believe police are killing thousands of unarmed black men when it’s a dozen or less. My point is not that we only believe media (cuz we don’t) but that we do at all to mediate data and the broader world for us.

Expand full comment

So right. I certainly see now why, on one hand it makes sense to seek a profession in which you have ample free time to read & explore to learn about history & the current state of affairs (a preacher or minister, for example), and why, on the other hand, it will only drive you to madness quicker. Cheers!

Expand full comment

Violence may not be a societal problem in the sense of "there are no examples out there of large-scale societies without *any* violence", but it *is* a societal problem in the sense of "violence mitigation (or redirection) is one of the core reasons to have a society at all".

I expect if you gathered a sufficiently large number of wolves together, pack instinct or no, violence would eventually ensue.

Expand full comment

Seems like a shift in black culture would be a much more effective solution than locking more killers up. I mean, if the entire point of this video is to look objectively at the data, no one can deny the fact that mass incarceration is not working. Now, how we create a shift in thinking & behavior in an entire culture is a job for better thinkers than me. I’m only a middle manager creating very top-level ideas 🤣

Expand full comment

You make a good point. The challenge is how do we adjust people’s culture to encourage a more harmonious society...

Expand full comment

Violence isn’t a societal problem. Violence is a male problem.

Expand full comment

Which table is the zipcode data found in?

Expand full comment