Gun and Knife Fights

The sad case of Kiet Thanh Ly’s stabbing spree provides a lot of material to work with.  My thoughts thus far:

• Ly is described in the mainstream press as a “South Vietnamese national”.  Since “South Vietnam” isn’t an actual country anymore, this implies refugee status, although at least one report claims he is here illegally.  But Ly is also described as a career criminal with a rap sheet going back to 1997.  Law enforcement thus had ample cause and opportunity to return him to his country of origin, even under Napolitano’s “enforcement priorities”.  Yet, somehow, this didn’t happen.  Will it happen now that he has attracted national attention?  The World Wonders.
• Ly reportedly yelled at his victims, “You racist [expletive] ... you killed my people ... you should all die!”  If Ly is really a South Vietnamese refugee, this would be somewhat ironic, considering that U.S. policy in Vietnam, however misbegotten it may have been, was to prevent North Vietnam from killing Ly’s “people”.
• Yet I think it unlikely that Ly learned to talk this way on his own.  I’m guessing that he’s at least a partial product of America’s public education system, and it never seems to occur to the Leftists that run it that its program, designed (I assume) to inculcate guilt and self-loathing among Whites, has a far different effect on our increasingly non-White student populace.
• The events themselves could have been written by the NRA’s PR department.  A knife-wielding career criminal goes on a rampage (See?  Gun control would have made no difference) but was brought down by an armed CCW holder.  Perfect.

A Familiar Story

I saw the movie Les Misérables on DVD, which in due course led to reading about the June Rebellion:

The republicans made their move at the public funeral of the popular General Lamarque on June 5. Groups of demonstrators took charge of the cortege and directed it to the Place de la Bastille. They were reinforced by Polish, Italian, and German refugees, who had fled to Paris in the aftermath of crackdowns on republican and nationalist activities in their homelands, as well as by workers and local youth. [Emphasis added.]

Which reminded me of Steve’s bon mot:

It's funny how the refugee system works. It's almost as if foreigners who are really good at getting their neighbors to hate them seem to wind up as refugees in America more than foreigners who are good at getting along with their neighbors.

Moving Along . . .

There are two separate narratives taking shape in the MSM. The first is typified by this J. Krishnamurti-attributed saying making the rounds on Facebook:

So you see, any particularist attachment (especially, it goes without saying, among you American Christians) is itself a manifestation of violence, preceding any, um, actual violence that may proceed from it. Likewise, UC-San Bernadino professor Brian Levin, head of the Orwellian-sounding director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism, had this to say:

This line of reasoning – all religious nationalism is equally bad – is so empirically and morally false that even as ardent a Liberal as Bill Maher is calling bullsh!t.  But more problematically, its policy implications are tricky:  even if, like Prof Levin, you pretend to believe that Christians are just as bad as Muslims, it doesn’t follow that you should want more Muslims immigrating to the U.S.

A fully mainstream, although somewhat more subtle, expression can be found in the NYT:

On Monday, a spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston, a Cambridge mosque, said Mr. Tsarnaev disrupted a talk there in January, insulting the speaker and accusing him of deviating from Islam by comparing the Prophet Muhammad to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was the second time he had disrupted an event at the mosque because he felt that its religious message was too liberal, said the spokesman, Yusufi Vali, according to a report in The Boston Globe.

See! Just like all those nasty TEA-partiers, hating on MLK!

The second line of attack is the dominant one:  nothing to see here, move along.  This is the reasoning that suffuses the MSM, so much so that it is hard to pick the best example.  But this Atlantic article will suffice (H.T.:  Steve, who has done a Yoeman’s service accumulating these articles):

That the brothers Tsarnaev are more than the labels we would hastily apply to them is obvious, I know. Then again, labels are especially tempting amidst the twin confusions of breaking news and municipal lockdown. Stories like the one that has now been shorthanded as the "Boston Bombing," or the "Marathon Bombing" -- among them "Aurora," "Newtown," "Columbine" -- have their cycles. And we have entered the time in the cycle when, alleged culprits identified, our need for answers tends to merge with our need for justice. We seek patterns, so that we may find in them explanations. We confuse categories -- "male," "Muslim" -- with cause. We focus on contradictions: He had a girlfriend, and killed people. She was a mother, and a murderer. And we finally take refuge in comforting binaries -- "dark-skinned" or "light-skinned," "popular" or "loner," "international" or "homegrown," "good" or "evil" -- because their neat lines and tidy boxes would seem to offer us a way to do the thing we most crave right now: to put things in their place.

The problem is that there is no real place for the Boston bombings and their aftermath, just as there was no real place for Aurora or Columbine or Newtown. Their events were, in a very literal sense, outliers: They are (in the U.S., at least) out of the ordinary.

Steve observes:

Now this is the kind of intelligent-sounding boilerplate that gets churned out whenever anybody from a vibrant demographic does anything stereotypical. To extrude this kind of text, you don't have to actually know anything. In fact, the implicit message is fundamentally anti-knowledge: do not notice patterns, do not see what is in front of one's nose because one should be stabbing oneself in the eyeballs with Occam's Butterknife.

Exactly.  But I’m not sure this is going to work much better than all-religions-are-equal.  A lot of people are learning a lot about Chechnya, and Chechens, and Beslan, and the organized crime.  And I hopeful that they aren’t going to buy the story that there’s nothing to see here.

The Perils of Globalization

So.  Chechen Muslim immigrants, then.

Here’s a reminder (H.T.:  Steve) that the U.S. helped the Russians take out Dzhokhar’s namesake.  But I’ve also read reports that Islam weighs more heavily on the lad’s mind.

Although I’m too lazy to Google the link, Jonah Goldberg once referred to Islam (or “radical Islam”, whatever) as “Globalization for Losers”.  Pithy, but its too bad Goldberg, and the people he represents, can’t think more critically about the implications of that phrase beyond name-calling.

In the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, we see the familiar pattern emerging.  Young Muslim men come to the West from a backwater.  Strangers in a strange land, they find themselves unable to assimilate into a country that doesn’t even know what that means anymore.  But if not Americans, who should they be?  Chechen nationalists?  Personally, I cheered the Chechens back in the early ‘90s during the initial success of their independence movement.  But, that ship sailed, and would probably earn them dumb looks in America today anyway.  But, Islam!  Now that’s the ticket to respect from all quarters.  It has an international network striking blows against the West, and the West itself fawns over Islam to show its Respect for Diversity.  How better to demonstrate their allegiance than to blow something up?

Once America offered real incentives to immigrants to identify with its founding stock.  This path was denied to the descendants of Black slaves, obviously, but it was more or less open to everyone else.  But then came the Civil Rights laws and Diversity™.  Now the incentives are completely reversed.

The Civil Rights laws are set in stone, and Diversity™ is, if anything, even more entrenched, having permeated our entire public ecosystem.  So, really, reducing immigration is the strongest ground on which we can fight.  By strongest, I mean we have a maybe 10% chance of success as opposed to, what, 0.1%?

Let’s face it: the Marathon bombers, in the grand scheme of things, are mainly a dramatic nuisance. Again, I’m too lazy to look it up, but I would guess that run-of-the-mill street crime caused more death and injuries across Massachusetts, let alone America, than these two.  Reading between the lines, this attack may have struck a blow against, if anything, “comprehensive immigration reform,” a.k.a., amnesty.  Which is ironic.  If immigrants could just avoid . . . being themselves for just long enough, the national media could continue to ignore their primary weapons:  culture, and demography.  But now, alas for our elites, everyone is starting to ask why, exactly, these two were even allowed into America in the first place.

Fact-checking Sirota

From Salon (H.T.: Steve):

Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American

There is a double standard: White terrorists are dealt with as lone wolves, Islamists are existential threats

BY DAVID SIROTA

Every word of this is a lie.

As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.

This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.

In fact, although whites are no more likely to be mass shooters than their bare percentage of the population would predict, they are routinely and collectively blamed for all of them.

Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters.

In fact, the bodies of terror victims are barely cold before liberal politicians, usually in the teeth of the evidence, being blaming conservatives.

Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

In fact, Al Qaeda is, or was, a “larger conspiracy”, awash in Saudi money and ensconced in Islamic safe harbors, when they perpetrated the attacks on 9/11.  And all these “law enforcement actions, military operations, civil liberties legislations and foreign policy shifts” have served as a mainly temporary distraction from what our policy should have actually been:  the repatriation of all Muslims.

“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation,” writes author Tim Wise.

In fact, this sentence would literally be true if the the word “white” was replaced by “non-white”.

Econ 11/23/12

I don’t understand the economics of “Black Friday”, so named (apparently) because it’s the day of the year that retailers start turning a profit.  Doesn’t the discounting undermine this objective?

Some possibilities:

• The discounts are only offered to the most price sensitive buyers, screened by their willingness to stand in line outdoors in the cold for a couple of hours waiting for a chance to buy that television for which they would never pay full-sticker.  This is known in economics as “price discrimination”, the same process behind, for instance, coupons.  But it still requires the retailer to sell the television at a profit, even if it is a much reduced profit.  Does the retailer still have a margin after the discounting?
• I would be inclined to think that competition in the age of online shopping would have brought retail profit margins in general down to the “indifference curve” (another econ concept).  Yet the discounts offered on Black Friday are below even the internet pricing, sometimes a lot below.  This means that the retailers are taking a loss or the economy-wide retail markup is huge for the rest of the year.  Neither seems likely.
• Retailers might be counting on shoppers to buy non-discounted items on their visit.  Best Buy, for instance, could sell you a TV at a loss and then charge you $80 for the Rocketfish HDMI cable you need to connect it.  Wal-Mart might count on shoppers with money burning holes in their pockets to buy full-priced items when they learn that the discounted items were sold to the first four people through the door.  If true, it shakes my faith in the financial probity of Black Friday shoppers.

But I don’t actually know the answer.  Any ideas?

Φ is a bad upper-class parent . . .

Returning again to the Education Next article from last post, there were a number of things that jumped out at me.  For instance, this description of parenting styles:

The cultural differences between the newcomers and the old-timers in gentrifying neighborhoods can be easily, though inadequately, summarized: white, upper-middle-class families prefer a progressive and discursive style of interaction with their children, both at home and in school, and lower-income, nonwhite families prefer a traditional or authoritarian style of interaction with their children in these same venues. Annette Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods, delves deeply into these contrasting styles and how they play out over a lifetime. In my research on school choice, one cultural disparity came up repeatedly as a reason for why white parents leave the schools they are trying to integrate. They were put off by near-constant yelling—from principals, teachers, school aides, and nonwhite parents who come to drop off and pick up their kids. The white parents were surprised to discover that not only is the authoritarian end of the schooling spectrum alive, which would be tolerable if not ideal, but also that their gentrifying neighborhood schools exhibit what these parents perceive to be an extreme and outdated education environment, characterized by strict discipline with yelling adults.

Avery (pseudonyms are used for all of my interviewees), a white mom who was clearly resigned to the pervasiveness of this norm at her newly integrating school, explained that she was leaving “primarily because of the discipline issues. I figured the older, the higher up you got, the more effect there would be on him. I didn’t know enough about the upper-grade teachers to automatically be comfortable, because I know there were some yellers in the bunch. And I didn’t want him to get a yeller. It’s a crapshoot every year who you’re going to get.”

Amber was “appalled” by what she “saw in the hallways and in the cafeteria with the way some of the teachers would speak to students.” She remembers many teachers “screaming at the students,” and quickly concluded that “the pre-K was fine, but there was no way she was going to see the kindergarten year of that school.”

Erich used the word “insanity” to express his disdain for the yelling and strictness norm, which he attributed primarily to the administration: “There was just a lot of yelling in the halls, a lot of screaming at the kids. If the kids were acting up they would be punished by not allowing them to go to recess. You need to give them more recess time if they are acting up! Punishing the whole class if one kid is acting up is insanity to me.”

Cindy’s son “hated” school, and she attributed it to a classroom that “was kind of disorganized. There was a lot of yelling and there was no standard of discipline in place.” Clearly trained in diplomatic speak, Cindy expanded on how the yelling drove her out of the school: “I do think it is a little strange when you’re walking down the halls of the school and you hear teachers shouting and screaming ‘shut up’ at the kids. That is not a good thing. Our kids get yelled at enough at home, but to have to go to school and get yelled at too, it is not a good thing. So, I just wanted out of the school at that point.”

Meredith was not just concerned about “the policing of kids” and the impact this was having on her own children, she was especially aggrieved by the way the yelling seemed to target the young black boys in the school. She described a scene in which the black boys were “being treated like prisoners, lined up against the wall, like they’re being incarcerated already!” She was clearly pained recalling this story: “It was so tragic, so, so tragic. You know I was so aware of my own privilege in the situation, knowing I could pull my kids out at any time. And there are some parents for whom this is their chance!”

Lisbeth was equally horrified by the way the school aides’ yelling always seemed to hone in on the black boys, and she told her principal, “They would never dare speak that way to my children. They speak that way to the black boys. So not only is it horrible for everybody, but they’re reinforcing a stereotype that black boys can be spoken to in a way that white boys and white girls are not spoken to.”

A couple of things here.  First, it does not seem to occur to any of these parents (although it occurs to the writer; more on this in a bit) that perhaps the authoritarian style might be necessary given the characteristics of the population the school serves.

But second . . . really, none of these people ever yell at their kids?  I mean, I attended a variety of public schools in my youth, urban, suburban, and rural.  And yelling was a regular feature, particularly, though not exclusively, from the male teachers.  I suspect I would be disconcerted to witness yelling at my children’s lily-white little school, but if I did, I would make a point of warning my children, “it better not be you upsetting your teacher like that!”

I’m a yeller.  I would characterize it as “speaking forcefully,” but my children call it yelling.  I don’t start off yelling.  But when the “discursive style of interaction” fails, as it often does, I escalate as necessary.  My prejudice is that parents who claim to “never yell” have naturally better behaved children than we do . . . at least so far.  But I will also allow that “naturally better behaved” is disproportionately likely to occur among upper middle class Whites than poor Blacks.

In Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit explores the dissimilar styles of communication exhibited by people from different racial and class backgrounds, and how these differences might have a negative impact on learning. For example, Delpit sees a problem when a typical white, middle-class teacher uses a passive communication style with her low-income black students, such as asking them to take their seats instead of telling them to take their seats. She argues that this passive communication style is confusing because of low-income black children’s expectations of how authority figures should act, and this mismatch hinders their academic progress. She asserts that white, liberal educators who value student-centered pedagogy and soft, conversant, negotiated power end up alienating and confusing children who are used to explicit instructions and assertive, strong authority figures, a parenting style more common in the black community. My research suggests that this cultural mismatch also appears to work the other way. The teachers in predominantly poor, minority schools, who are reportedly mostly black and have adopted the more teacher-centered, authoritarian style of instruction that they view as appropriate for their students, are turning off white, upper-middle-class parents who want school climates similar to their own progressive homes, where problems are discussed. The “yelling” described by my interviewees could simply be a misperception of Delpit’s described assertiveness. What they think of as “yelling” might just be a firmness and directness that these parents are not used to, that is not part of their culture. Regardless, it hampers integration, because the white, upper-middle-class parents who send their children to schools in their gentrifying neighborhood do not want them spoken to in that way, whatever its label, and they often reconsider their schooling decision.

Okay, but the fact is that I remember being annoyed, as my own children now claim to be annoyed, when my parents ask them to do things in a manner that falsely indicates to them that they have a choice as to whether they must do the thing or not.  I remember distinctly telling my mother, when I was home from boarding school on break, “Look, if I must go to the Wednesday night prayer meeting, then tell me to go to the Wednesday night prayer meeting!  Because if you’re asking me to go, then my answer is that the Tuesday night Bible study is enough mid-week religiosity to get me through to Sunday.  So don’t lecture me about it anymore!”

And now, my older daughter calls me out on my own lecturing, to often humorous effect.