DNA Databases in the U.S. and China Are Tools of Racial Oppression
Two major world powers, the United States and China, have both collected an enormous number of DNA samples from their citizens, the premise being that these samples will help solve crimes that might have otherwise gone unsolved. While DNA evidence can often be crucial when it comes to determining who committed a crime, researchers argue these DNA databases also pose a major threat to human rights.
In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has a DNA database called the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) that currently contains over 14 million DNA profiles. This database has a disproportionately high number of profiles of black men, because black Americans are arrested five times as much as white Americans. You don't even have to be convicted of a crime for law enforcement to take and store your DNA; you simply have to have been arrested as a suspect.
[...] As for China, a report that was published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in mid-June claims that China is operating the "world's largest police-run DNA database" as part of its powerful surveillance state. Chinese authorities have collected DNA samples from possibly as many as 70 million men since 2017, and the total database is believed to contain as many as 140 million profiles. The country hopes to collect DNA from all of its male citizens, as it argues men are most likely to commit crimes.
DNA is reportedly often collected during what are represented as free physicals, and it's also being collected from children at schools. There are reports of Chinese citizens being threatened with punishment by government officials if they refuse to give a DNA sample. Much of the DNA that's been collected has been from Uighur Muslims that have been oppressed by the Chinese government and infamously forced into concentration camps in the Xinjiang province.
Related:
EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection
EFF Sues Justice Dept. Over FBI's Rapid DNA Plans
Kuwait Creating Mandatory DNA Database of All Citizens, Residents--and Visitors
San Diego Police Department Accused of Unlawful DNA Collection From Minors
Massive DNA Collection Campaign in Xinjiang, China
Study Predicts Appearance From Genome Sequence Data
GEDmatch: "What If It Was Called Police Genealogy?"
Bavarian Law Broadens Police Surveillance and DNA Profiling Powers
DNA Collected from Golden State Killer Suspect's Car, Leading to Arrest
Another Alleged Murderer Shaken Out of the Family Tree
Indiana Murder Suspect Found by Using Genealogical Website
Public Ancestry Data Can be Used to Narrow Down the Identity Behind an Anonymous DNA Sample
Rapid DNA Analysis Machines Coming to Police Departments
FamilyTreeDNA Deputizes Itself, Starts Pitching DNA Matching Services To Law Enforcement
Genealogy Sites Have Helped Identify Suspects. Now They've Helped Convict One
U.S. to Collect DNA of All Undocumented Migrants
US Court Let Police Search GEDmatch's Entire DNA Database Despite Protections
China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West
Cousin Took a DNA Test? Courts Could Use it to Argue You are More Likely to Commit Crimes
Ancestry Says Police Requested Access To Its DNA Database
Related Stories
An EFF brief to Supreme Court argues that the 4th amendment also protect people against warrantless DNA analysis.
EFF is asking the Supreme Court to hear arguments in Raynor v. State of Maryland, a case that examines whether police should be allowed to collect and analyze "inadvertently shed" DNA without a warrant or consent, such as swabbing cells from a drinking glass or a chair. EFF argues that genetic material contains a vast amount of personal information that should receive the full protection of the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures.
"As human beings, we shed hundreds of thousands of skin and hair cells daily, with each cell containing information about who we are, where we come from, and who we will be," EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch said. "The court must recognize that allowing police the limitless ability to collect and search genetic material will usher in a future where DNA may be collected from any person at any time, entered into and checked against DNA databases, and used to conduct pervasive surveillance."
From the EFF Press Release:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI to gain access to documents revealing the government's plans to use Rapid DNA. The FBI said it found no records responsive to EFF's FOIA requests, even though it's been working to roll out Rapid DNA and lobbying Congress to approve nationwide use for more than five years.
Rapid DNA analyzers—laser printer-sized, portable machines that allow anyone to process a DNA sample in as little as 50 minutes—are the newest frontier in DNA collection and profiling in law enforcement. With Rapid DNA, the police can collect a a DNA sample from a suspect, extract a profile, and match that profile against a database in less time than it takes to book someone—and it's all done by non-scientists in the field, well outside an accredited lab.
"EFF has long been concerned about the privacy risks associated with collecting, testing, storing and sharing of genetic data. The use of Rapid DNA stands to vastly increase the collection of DNA, because it makes it much easier for the police to get it from anyone they want, whenever they want. The public has a right to know how this will be carried out and how the FBI will protect peoples' privacy," said Jennifer Lynch, EFF senior staff attorney. ''Rapid DNA can't accurately extract a profile from evidence containing commingled body fluids, increasing the risk that people could be mistakenly linked to crimes they didn't commit.''
Glyn Moody reports via TechDirt
Kuwait has the dubious honor of being the first nation to require everyone's DNA--including that of visitors to the country. The Kuwait Times has a frighteningly matter-of-fact article about the plan, which is currently being put into operation. Here's how the DNA will be gathered:
Collecting samples from citizens will be done by various mobile centers that will be moved according to a special plan amongst government establishments and bodies to collect samples from citizens in the offices they work in. In addition, fixed centers will be established at the interior ministry and citizen services centers to allow citizens [to] give samples while doing various transactions.
Those who are not citizens of Kuwait will be sampled when they apply for residence permits:
Collection will done on issuing or renewing residency visas through medical examinations done by the health ministry for new residency visas and through the criminal evidence department on renewing them.
As for common-or-garden[-variety] visitors to the country:
Collection will be done at a special center at Kuwait International Airport, where in collaboration with the Civil Aviation Department, airlines, and embassies, visitors will be advised on their rights and duties towards the DNA law.
[...] The DNA will not be used for medical purposes, such as checking for genetic markers of disease, which will avoid issues of whether people should be told about their predisposition to possibly serious illnesses. Nor will the DNA database be used for "lineage or genealogical reasons". That's an important point: a complete nation's DNA would throw up many unexpected paternity and maternity results, which could have massive negative effects on the families concerned. It's precisely those kinds of practical and ethical issues that advocates of wider DNA sampling and testing need to address, but rarely do.
The ACLU has sued the San Diego Police Department, seeking the destruction of DNA samples collected from minors during a stop that was found to be unlawful:
Specifically targeting black children for unlawful DNA collection is a gross abuse of technology by law enforcement. But it's exactly what the San Diego Police Department is doing, according to a lawsuit just filed by the ACLU Foundation of San Diego & Imperial Counties on behalf of one of the families affected. SDPD's actions, as alleged in the complaint, illustrate the severe and very real threats to privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights presented by granting law enforcement access to our DNA. SDPD must stop its discriminatory abuse of DNA collection technology.
According to the ACLU's complaint, on March 30, 2016, police officers stopped five African American minors as they were walking through a park in southeast San Diego. There was no legal basis for the stop. As an officer admitted at a hearing in June 2016, they stopped the boys simply because they were black and wearing blue on what the officers believed to be a gang "holiday."
Despite having no valid basis for the stop, and having determined that none of the boys had any gang affiliation or criminal record, the officers handcuffed at least some of the boys and searched all of their pockets. They found nothing but still proceeded to search the bag of one of the boys—P.D., a plaintiff in the ACLU's case. (It's standard to use minors' initials, rather than their full names, in court documents.) The officers found an unloaded revolver, which was lawfully registered to the father of one of the boys, and arrested P.D.
The officers told the other four boys that they could go free after submitting to a mouth swab. The officers had them sign a consent form, by which they "voluntarily" agreed to provide their DNA to the police for inclusion in SDPD's local DNA database. The officers then swabbed their cheeks and let them go.
P.D. was then told to sign the form as well. After he signed, the officers swabbed his cheek and transported him to the police department. The San Diego District Attorney filed numerous charges against P.D., but they were all dropped as a result of the illegal stop. The court did not, however, order the police to destroy either P.D.'s DNA sample or the DNA profile generated via his sample. The ACLU seeks destruction of the sample and profile, along with a permanent injunction "forbidding SDPD officers from obtaining DNA from minors without a judicial order, warrant, or parental consent."
Chinese police are amassing a huge amount of genetic information in Xinjiang:
Police in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China, have been collecting DNA samples from citizens and are now ramping up their capacity to analyse that genetic cache, according to evidence compiled by activists and details gathered by Nature. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch reported last month that Xinjiang authorities intend to accelerate efforts to gather blood samples from the region's large population of Muslim Uighur people. China's government has cracked down on Xinjiang's separatist movement in recent years, so the prospect of a DNA database there has stoked fears that authorities could use it as a political weapon.
[...] In its report, the organization said that Xinjiang's police had ordered 12 DNA sequencers. Nature has confirmed the order and learned, from documents and interviews with those involved in the transaction, that the police have purchased enough machines to process up to 2,000 DNA samples per day. The police department hung up when Nature rang to ask about the reason for the purchase.
[...] Many countries use DNA fingerprinting to solve crimes, reunite kidnapped children with their parents and identify bodies, and some researchers say that the boost in Xinjiang's DNA-analysis capacity does not, by itself, stand out. "Expansion of police surveillance is expected by any civilized nation," says Sara Katsanis, who researches the applications of genetic testing at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Still, Katsanis and others worry about how DNA is being collected in China and especially in Xinjiang. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that citizens in Xinjiang were required to give a blood sample to get a passport. And in March, Chinese state media detailed the conclusion of a 4-month programme during which 17.5 million people — who were predominantly Uighurs — were given health checks, including blood tests. Last week, reports emerged that many of the people who underwent these examinations had been forced to do so.
Previously:
China Bans Islam-Related Names in Xinjiang
Anonymity continues to die a little every day:
The physical traits predicted from genome sequence data may be sufficient to identify anonymous individuals in the absence of other information, according to a study set to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.
After looking for links between physical phenotypes and whole-genome sequence data for more than 1,000 individuals from a range of ancestral groups, researchers from the US and Singapore took a crack at predicting biometric traits based on genetic data with the help of a newly developed algorithm. In a group of de-identified individuals, they reported, the algorithm made it possible to identify a significant proportion of individuals based on predictions of three-dimensional facial structure, ethnicity, height, weight, and other traits.
"By associating de-identified genomic data with phenotypic measurements of the contributor, this work challenges current conceptions of genomic privacy," senior author Craig Venter, of Human Longevity and the J. Craig Venter Institute, and his co-authors wrote. "It has significant ethical and legal implications on personal privacy, the adequacy of informed consent, the viability and value of de-identification of data, the potential for police profiling, and more."
[...] [Genome] sequences [...] are not currently protected as identifying data under the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's Safe Harbor method for ensuring anonymous and de-identified patient information.
Also at Bio-IT World, PRNewswire, and San Diego Union Tribune.
Previously: Creating Wanted Posters from DNA Samples
Related: EFF to Supreme Court: The Fourth Amendment Covers DNA Collection
Kuwait Creating Mandatory DNA Database of All Citizens, Residents--and Visitors
Massive DNA Collection Campaign in Xinjiang, China
Routine Whole Genome Sequencing: Not Scary?
Police submitted a DNA sample under a fake name to GEDmatch, an online DNA-matching/genealogy service, in order to capture a man they suspect to be the "Golden State Killer". Science Magazine interviewed Yaniv Erlich, who warned back in 2014 that GEDmatch could be used for law enforcement purposes:
In Germany, controversial law gives Bavarian police new power to use DNA
Police in the German state of Bavaria will have new powers to use forensic DNA profiling after a controversial law passed [May 15] in the Landtag, the state parliament in Munich. The law is the first in Germany that allows authorities to use DNA to help determine the physical characteristics, such as eye color, of an unknown culprit.
The new DNA rules are part of a broader law which has drawn criticism of the wide surveillance powers it gives the state's police to investigate people they deem an "imminent danger," people who haven't necessarily committed any crimes but might be planning to do so.
[...] move was prompted, in part, by the rape and murder of a medical student in Freiburg, Germany, in late 2016. An asylum seeker, originally from Afghanistan, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison. But some authorities complained that they could have narrowed their search more quickly if they had been able to use trace DNA to predict what the suspect would look like. Existing federal and state laws allow investigators to use DNA only to look for an exact match between crime scene evidence and a potential culprit, either in a database of known criminals or from a suspect.
In 2017, federal authorities proposed allowing investigators to conduct broader DNA profiling, but the proposal stalled after critics called for an expanded ethical debate on the advantages and disadvantages of the techniques.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/06/02/us/golden-state-killer-unsealed-warrants/index.html
When the suspected Golden State Killer drove into a Hobby Lobby parking lot in April, investigators were waiting nearby. As he walked into the craft store, it gave them a perfect chance to collect a secret DNA sample.
Police swabbed the driver's side handle of [the suspect's] car, according to arrest and search warrants released Friday.
Authorities sent it for testing and matched it to semen recovered at some of the Golden State Killer's crime scenes, the arrest warrant said.
[...] The stop at the Hobby Lobby was just one of several ways investigators used to zero in on a suspect. Earlier this year, police tracked him down by comparing genetic profiles from genealogy websites to crime scene DNA, according to investigators.
On April 23, a day before his arrest, police say they collected multiple samples from a trash can outside DeAngelo's home in Citrus Heights, a town 16 miles northeast of Sacramento. They had watched the home for three days, the warrant said.
Previously: DNA From Genealogy Site Led to Capture of Golden State Killer Suspect
GEDmatch: "What If It Was Called Police Genealogy?"
The Associated Press and the Everett Washington HeraldNet carry a story about a 30 year old double murder solved using Public Genealogy Sites similar to the Golden State Killer story carried here on SoylentNews.
Deaths of two Canadian visitors shopping in the Seattle area were unsolved since 1987.
The deaths remained a mystery for more than 30 years, until DNA led to a major breakthrough. A genealogist, CeCe Moore, worked with experts at Parabon NanoLabs to build a family tree for the suspect, based on the genetic evidence recovered from the crime scenes. They used data that had been uploaded by distant cousins to public genealogy websites. They pinpointed a suspect, Talbott, a trucker living north of Sea-Tac International Airport.
Police kept him under surveillance until a paper cup fell from his truck in Seattle in early May. A swab of DNA from the cup came back as a match to the evidence that had waited 30 years. Before then, Talbott had never been considered a suspect. Days later he was in handcuffs.
This time the police used Parabon NanoLabs (more well-known for generating facial models from mere samples of DNA) to build a family tree of the killer by submitting the 30 year old crime scene DNA samples to multiple genealogy sites.
Results from those sites were combined by a Parabon genealogist to map the family of distant cousins found in those data bases. Police were then able to narrow down the list using other methods unmentioned.
Neither article mentions if any family members were stalked by police while being eliminated as suspects, or whether any samples were submitted by other family members.
Murder suspect due in U.S. court after DNA cracks open 1988 case
A 59-year-old Indiana man will be formally charged on Thursday with the 1988 murder of an eight-year-old girl after the decades-old cold case was cracked open by DNA evidence linked to a genealogical website, authorities said on Tuesday.
John Miller of Grabill, Indiana, was arrested in nearby Fort Wayne on Sunday after DNA evidence and records on publicly accessible genealogical websites helped investigators track him down. Investigators followed a pattern similar to that used to track down the "Golden State Killer" in California earlier this year.
Miller on Monday was preliminarily charged with murder, child molestation and confinement of someone under 14 years old, 30 years after eight-year-old April Tinsley was found dead in a ditch. He has been ordered held without bond.
If you don't hand over your DNA, you want child murderers to frolic in freedom.
Related: DNA From Genealogy Site Led to Capture of Golden State Killer Suspect
GEDmatch: "What If It Was Called Police Genealogy?"
DNA Collected from Golden State Killer Suspect's Car, Leading to Arrest
Another Alleged Murderer Shaken Out of the Family Tree
'Martyr of the A10': DNA Leads to France Arrests Over 1987 Murder
DNA Methylation Can Reveal Information About Criminal Suspects
If you're white, live in the United States, and a distant relative has uploaded their DNA to a public ancestry database, there's a good chance an internet sleuth can identify you from a DNA sample you left somewhere. That's the conclusion of a new study, which finds that by combining an anonymous DNA sample with some basic information such as someone's rough age, researchers could narrow that person's identity to fewer than 20 people by starting with a DNA database of 1.3 million individuals.
Such a search could potentially allow the identification of about 60% of white Americans from a DNA sample—even if they have never provided their own DNA to an ancestry database. "In a few years, it's really going to be everyone," says study leader Yaniv Erlich, a computational geneticist at Columbia University.
The study was sparked by the April arrest of the alleged "Golden State Killer," a California man accused of a series of decades-old rapes and murders. To find him—and more than a dozen other criminal suspects since then—law enforcement agencies first test a crime scene DNA sample, which could be old blood, hair, or semen, for hundreds of thousands of DNA markers—signposts along the genome that vary among people, but whose identity in many cases are shared with blood relatives. They then upload the DNA data to GEDmatch, a free online database where anyone can share their data from consumer DNA testing companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com to search for relatives who have submitted their DNA. Searching GEDMatch's nearly 1 million profiles revealed several relatives who were the equivalent to third cousins to the crime scene DNA linked to the Golden State Killer. Other information such as genealogical records, approximate age, and crime locations then allowed the sleuths to home in on a single person.
Even if you can convince your entire immediate family to not use these services, you could still be vulnerable. And the success rate is likely to climb over time for all racial groups. Maybe the tests could be subsidized to get more of the population to give up the goods.
Also at LA Times
Related: DNA From Genealogy Site Led to Capture of Golden State Killer Suspect
GEDmatch: "What If It Was Called Police Genealogy?"
DNA Collected from Golden State Killer Suspect's Car, Leading to Arrest
Another Alleged Murderer Shaken Out of the Family Tree
'Martyr of the A10': DNA Leads to France Arrests Over 1987 Murder
Indiana Murder Suspect Found by Using Genealogical Website
Coming Soon to a Police Station Near You: The DNA 'Magic Box'
They call it the "magic box." Its trick is speedy, nearly automated processing of DNA. "It's groundbreaking to have it in the police department," said Detective Glenn Vandegrift of the Bensalem Police Department. "If we can do it, any department in the country can do it." Bensalem, a suburb in Bucks County, near Philadelphia, is on the leading edge of a revolution in how crimes are solved. For years, when police wanted to learn whether a suspect's DNA matched previously collected crime-scene DNA, they sent a sample to an outside lab, then waited a month or more for results.
But in early 2017, the police booking station in Bensalem became the first in the country to install a Rapid DNA machine, which provides results in 90 minutes, and which police can operate themselves. Since then, a growing number of law enforcement agencies across the country — in Houston, Utah, Delaware — have begun operating similar machines and analyzing DNA on their own.
The science-fiction future, in which police can swiftly identify robbers and murderers from discarded soda cans and cigarette butts, has arrived. In 2017, President Trump signed into law the Rapid DNA Act, which, starting this year, will enable approved police booking stations in several states to connect their Rapid DNA machines to Codis, the national DNA database. Genetic fingerprinting is set to become as routine as the old-fashioned kind.
[...] But already many legal experts and scientists are troubled by the way the technology is being used. As police agencies build out their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly, from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking their genetic identities to criminal databases.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
FamilyTreeDNA Deputizes Itself, Starts Pitching DNA Matching Services To Law Enforcement
One DNA-matching company has decided it's going to corner an under-served market: US law enforcement. FamilyTreeDNA -- last seen here opening up its database to the FBI without informing its users first -- is actively pitching its services to law enforcement.
The television spot, to air in San Diego first, asks anyone who has had a direct-to-consumer DNA test from another company, like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, to upload a copy so that law enforcement can spot any connections to DNA found at crime scenes.
The advertisement features Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, a Salt Lake City teen who was abducted in 2002 but later found alive. “If you are one of the millions of people who have taken a DNA test, your help can provide the missing link,” he says in the spot.
Welcome to FamilyTreeDNA's cooperating witness program -- one it profits from by selling information customers give it to law enforcement. The tug at the heartstrings is a nice touch. FamilyTreeDNA is finally being upfront with users about its intentions for their DNA samples. This is due to its founder deciding -- without consulting his customers -- that they're all as willing as he is to convert your DNA samples into public goods.
Bennett Greenspan, the firm’s founder, said he had decided he had a moral obligation to help solve old murders and rapes. Now he thinks that customers will agree and make their DNA available specifically to help out.
Genetic genealogy — in which DNA samples are used to find relatives of suspects, and eventually the suspects themselves — has redefined the cutting edge of forensic science, solving the type of cases that haunt detectives most: the killing of a schoolteacher 27 years ago, an assault on a 71-year-old church organ player, the rape and murder of dozens of California residents by a man who became known as the Golden State Killer.
But until a trial this month in the 1987 murder of a young Canadian couple, it had never been tested in court. Whether genetic genealogy would hold up was one of the few remaining questions for police departments and prosecutors still weighing its use, even as others have rushed to apply it. On Friday, the jury returned a guilty verdict.
“There is no stopping genetic genealogy now,” said CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist whose work led to the arrest in the murder case. “I think it will become a regular, accepted part of law enforcement investigations.”
Detective James H. Scharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office in Washington State took all of six minutes on the stand to describe how a semen sample collected from one of the victim’s clothing led to two second cousins of the suspect, and then to the name of the man on trial, William Talbott II.
The defense could have challenged the use of genetic genealogy on privacy grounds, or as a violation of people’s right to control their personal data. Instead, defense lawyers did not pose a single question about the technique. After more than two days of deliberation, the jury convicted Mr. Talbott on two counts of murder.
Mr. Talbott’s lawyers said they viewed genetic genealogy as just another way of generating investigative leads. “Police have always used a variety of things to develop tips,” said Rachel Forde, a public defender, in an interview. The brother of one of the victims had even consulted a psychic at one point, she said.
But if the case quelled some investigators’ concerns, it was not likely to put to rest a raging debate over the ethics of using the technique to solve crimes and how to balance privacy with the demands of law enforcement.
U.S. to Collect DNA of All Undocumented Migrants:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing a plan to take DNA samples from each of the undocumented immigrants and store it in a national database for criminal DNA profiles, they said.
Speaking to journalists on grounds of anonymity, DHS officials said the new policy would give immigration and border control agents a broader picture of the migrant and detainee situation.
And stored on the FBI's CODIS DNA database, it could also be used by others in law enforcement and beyond.
[...] Officials said they were in fact required to take the DNA samples by rules about the handling of arrested and convicted people that were issued by the Justice Department in 2006 and 2010, but which had not been implemented.
They said the program for collecting DNA was still being developed, and they did not have a date set for implementation.
Collecting and storing the DNA of people simply detained and not tried or convicted of a crime has drawn criticism from civil rights advocates.
"Forced DNA collection raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns and lacks justification, especially when DHS is already using less intrusive identification methods like fingerprinting," Vera Eidelman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
"This kind of mass collection also alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation to population surveillance, which is contrary to our basic notions of freedom and autonomy," Eidelman said.
If it becomes okay to do this to "them", how long will it take before they want to do it to "us"?
Submitted via IRC for soylent_red
US court let police search GEDmatch's entire DNA database despite protections
Michael Fields, a detective from the Orlando Police Department, has revealed at a police convention that he secured a warrant to search the full GEDmatch database with over a million users. Legal experts told The New York Times that this appears to be the first time a judge has approved this kind of warrant. New York University law professor Erin Murphy even told the publication that the warrant is a "huge game-changer," seeing as GEDmatch restricted cops' access to its database last year. "It's a signal that no genetic information can be safe," the professor said.
[...] More importantly, its new policy only allows authorities to search for GEDmatch users who make their information available to the police. Users literally have to opt in -- their profiles are set to opt out by default. Company co-founder Curtis Rogers said only 185,000 users chose to opt in, but Fields' warrant allowed him to access all 1.3 million users' information. The detective said the service complied with the warrant within 24 hours, and while he hasn't made an arrest yet, he has already found some leads.
DNA policy experts are now worried that this development will encourage law enforcement to secure warrants for much larger databases. GEDmatch is smaller than its peers, since it doesn't offer its own testing kits: users have to upload their own DNA information in order to find relatives through its website.
Submitted via IRC for chromas
China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West
With a million or more ethnic Uighurs and others from predominantly Muslim minority groups swept up in detentions across Xinjiang, officials in Tumxuk have gathered blood samples from hundreds of Uighurs — part of a mass DNA collection effort dogged by questions about consent and how the data will be used.
In Tumxuk, at least, there is a partial answer: Chinese scientists are trying to find a way to use a DNA sample to create an image of a person's face.
The technology, which is also being developed in the United States and elsewhere, is in the early stages of development and can produce rough pictures good enough only to narrow a manhunt or perhaps eliminate suspects. But given the crackdown in Xinjiang, experts on ethics in science worry that China is building a tool that could be used to justify and intensify racial profiling and other state discrimination against Uighurs.
In the long term, experts say, it may even be possible for the Communist government to feed images produced from a DNA sample into the mass surveillance and facial recognition systems that it is building, tightening its grip on society by improving its ability to track dissidents and protesters as well as criminals.
Some of this research is taking place in labs run by China's Ministry of Public Security, and at least two Chinese scientists working with the ministry on the technology have received funding from respected institutions in Europe. International scientific journals have published their findings without examining the origin of the DNA used in the studies or vetting the ethical questions raised by collecting such samples in Xinjiang.
How similar do you think you are to your second cousin? Or your estranged great aunt?
Would you like to have people assess your behaviour from what your great aunt has done? How would you feel if courts used data gained from them to decide how you are likely to behave in the future?
Scientists are making connections between a person's DNA and their tendencies for certain kinds of behaviour. At the same time, commercial DNA databases are becoming more common and police are gaining access to them.
When these trends combine, genetic data inferred about offenders from their relatives might one day be used by courts to determine sentences. In the future, the data from your great aunt could be used by a court to determine how severely you are punished for a crime.
[...] A Florida judge recently approved a warrant to search a genetic genealogy database, GED Match. This American company has approximately 1.3 million users who have uploaded their personal genetic data, with the assumption of privacy, in the hope of discovering their family tree.
The court directly overruled these users' request for privacy and now the company is obliged to hand over the data.
[...] This might be used by the prosecution to make the case for a longer sentence. In some jurisdictions and circumstances, the prosecution may have a means of obtaining a sample of DNA directly from the offender. But where this is not legally possible without the offender's consent, the inference from relatives might fill a gap in the prosecution's case about how dangerous the offender is.
Your ability to be granted bail may hinge on your genes.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Ancestry declined to give law enforcement access to its DNA database, the company said Tuesday.
Ancestry received a request from law enforcement to access its genetic database in 2019, but the company said no, according to a transparency report released in late January. The warrant, reported earlier on Monday by Buzzfeed, came from a court in Pennsylvania, but the DNA analysis company said it was improperly served. The warrant could have let law enforcement officers have access to 16 million DNA profiles from the company's customers.
The transparency report comes at a time when law enforcement agencies around the country have cracked dozens of murder, rape and assault cases, some from decades ago, using a technique called genetic genealogy. The practice relies on investigators having access to a large cache of DNA profiles, and raises concerns among privacy watchdogs.
An Ancestry spokesperson said in a statement that the company hasn't received any followup since it fought the warrant. The company said it declined law enforcement access to its database as part of its larger commitment to user privacy.
"Not only will we not share customer information with law enforcement unless compelled to by valid legal process, such as a court order or search warrant, we will also always advocate for our customers' privacy and seek to narrow the scope of any compelled disclosure, or even eliminate it entirely," the spokesperson said.
U.S. Cracks Down on Firms Said to Aid China's Repression of Minorities
The Biden administration said on Thursday that it would put limits on doing business with a group of Chinese companies and institutions it says are involved in misusing biotechnology to surveil and repress Muslim minorities in China and advancing Beijing's military programs.
In announcing one set of the moves, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said China was employing biotechnology and medical innovation "to pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups."
The administration said those efforts included the use of biometric facial recognition and large-scale genetic testing of residents 12 to 65 in the mostly Muslim region of Xinjiang.
China has used such technology to track and control the Uyghurs, a predominately Muslim ethnic group.
[...] In its announcement on Thursday, the Biden administration said Beijing was using advances in biotechnology to drive forward its military modernization. A senior administration official called out China's work to edit human genes for performance enhancement and create ways for human brains to connect more directly to machines.
Also caught in the crosshairs is the drone company DJI, for providing drones used by the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau to surveil Uyghurs, Megvii, which makes artificial intelligence and facial recognition software, and Dawning Information Industry (also known as Sugon), a manufacturer of supercomputers and provider of cloud-computing services.
See also: Disney under fire for 'Mulan' credits that thank Chinese groups linked to detention camps
Previously: Massive DNA Collection Campaign in Xinjiang, China
Massive DNA Collection Campaign Continues in Xinjiang, China
China Installs Surveillance App on Smartphones of Visitors to Xinjiang Region
DNA Databases in the U.S. and China are Tools of Racial Oppression
The Panopticon is Already Here: China's Use of "Artificial Intelligence"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:29PM (22 children)
However, if these types of databases are tools of oppression in only 2 countries in the world, but not elsewhere, then I think we can conlude that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with such types of databases. Stop the oppression at its core, and then the tools no longer become useful for oppression.
Am I saying that I would like the DNA of the fucker who ruined my rucksack mid-multi-hop-holiday and stole my camera to be on record, so he could be more easily found? Of course I am. I'd be an idiot not to want to shorten the path between discovery and resolution of any crime. That's not racist. That's not oppressive. That's practical. That's efficient. That's the rule of law, and part of what I get in return for my taxes.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:41PM (20 children)
>> That's not racist.
Yes, it is. As the article says, Black people are five times as likely to commit crimes. Give up your systemic racist mindset and consider the possibility that the thief might have used your camera to launch into a career as a professional photographer. Instead, you want to see him in jail. #BLM
(Score: 5, Informative) by Opportunist on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:24PM (19 children)
Black people are five times more likely to be arrested, not to commit crimes. Jews were also a lot more likely to end up in a concentration camp than other Germans.
Yes, that's hyperbole. Hey, who started it?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:47PM (12 children)
They have a much higher crime rate than 5x relative to other groups. On a national level their homicide rate is about 1000% that of whites, similar with most other forms of violent crime. The Bureau of Justice statistics carried out a lengthy analysis available here [bjs.gov]. In a nutshell blacks make up around 12-13% of the population and commit about 53% of the homicides. Those figures are dated but the values haven't changed. You can get more recent numbers from the FBI Crime Reports. [fbi.gov] If you're going to compare groups remember that the white race includes hispanic ethnicity so you need to remove those numbers to determine e.g. non-white hispanic figures.
It's kind of curious they *only* have a 5x higher DNA collection rate. I suspect one factor is probably recidivism. Some guy that's been imprisoned tens of times is going to account for tens of arrests (and crimes) but only 1 entry in the DNA database. And the crime rates for nonviolent crime are much more evenly distributed and so that's also going to mitigate factors a bit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:31PM (1 child)
I would extend your remarks with the usual urban/rural disparity issues.
Certainly Chicago has fifty blacks die every weekend after being shot by fifty other blacks so they have a regular assembly line of submitting DNA data from fifty murders per weekend for a long time.
On the other hand rural Montana, some good ole boy has a few too many Saturday night and ends up sleeping it off in the drunk tank at jail, do the locals have the resources and motivation to even bother submitting his DNA?
It does seem like something a "big city" would provide much more often than some random low crime burb or farm county. You expect NCIS high tech TV hollywood stuff in NYC more so than rural Maine.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:12PM
Do you know who else was living in rural Montana? Ted Kazincski! The Unabomber! Not to mention Henry Plummer, and Soapy Smith.
(Score: 5, Informative) by meustrus on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:56PM (5 children)
Your statements assume that race is the best lens through which to view crime rates. In fact, higher crime rates are only one of many correlations with race, and it would be ludicrous to ignore all of the other correlations.
The most important correlation to crime is wealth and poverty. It's a simple fact that poor people commit more violent crime. And yet, seemingly nowhere in your sources has anyone bothered to analyze this correlation.
Instead, the FBI and the DOJ are engaged in this self-fulfilling prophecy where they expect blacks to commit more crime, so they look for more black criminals, so they find more black criminals, all the while ignoring the ways in which their own enforcement activities exacerbate poverty in black communities thereby leading to more crime.
The rational thing to do here would be to figure out how to stop crime from happening in the first place. All this obsession with race in our police system detracts from that rational response. And based on the evidence, that the USA has the highest crime rates and incarceration rates of any developed nation on Earth, this obsession is likely making crime worse. Not better.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:56AM
Please do keep pointing this out--but know the kind of person you're replying to it won't benefit, because they have a narrative, and that narrative is "dark-skinned people are innately criminal and inferior."
The reason to keep pointing it out in reply is for anyone who might stumble on the racists' endless torrent of brain diarrhea and be swayed by it in a moment of epistemological or moral weakness. Just seeing the counterattack is enough of a memetic vaccine for anyone who isn't already a CHUD to begin with. You're doing a service!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:40AM (2 children)
It's a simple fact that poor people commit more violent crime.
Yeah, a rich guy will hire somebody. Doesn't want to mess up his suit.
Aren't most murders committed by relatives?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @11:14PM (1 child)
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/figures/expanded-homicide.gif [fbi.gov]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday July 09 2020, @08:22AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:15PM
The reason this isn't mentioned often is because the correlation between crime and poverty is *much* weaker than that between crime and race. In many places in the US blacks are not lowest on the socioeconomic ladder, yet they are almost invariably highest on the violent crime ladder - generally by a very wide margin. For instance NYC is rather interesting that not only hispanics but also asians are worse off than blacks. And, like everywhere, blacks top the charts for violent crime by an extremely wide margin.
The socioeconomic argument simply does not hold up to scrutiny at all.
This is not to say there is no correlation there, but the one that exists is pretty weak. For instance Asians almost invariably have slightly lower crime rates than Whites. But in NYC where Asians are the poorest, they have slightly high crime rates than whites. Poverty can move the rates a few percentage points. Race moves them by orders of magnitude.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Captival on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:45AM (3 children)
And as usual, facts that Liberals don't like get moderated as Troll, then they come in and try to shift the goalposts from "Blacks don't commit more crimes" to "Okay they do but what about raaaaaaaacism". Are all you SJWs completely nuts? Do you not see how ridiculous you are when you rationalize and distort this way? I know that you do, because when you get your same style of argument parroted back at you, you can't stand it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:24AM
Racists are like 7 times more likely to be down-modded on SoylentNews. This is not to suggest that they are unpleasant, in error, intentionally ignorant, or otherwise stupid, but you can't argue with facts.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday July 09 2020, @08:31AM (1 child)
Don't you think there might be some alternative variable to correlate with - one that gives an even stronger correlation?
And once you've found the stronger correlation, you need to control for that when evaluating your previous statement. You might find that it evaporates into nothing, but you might even find the correlation is reversed. You won't know until you control for the appropriate other variables.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @02:10PM
Do you notice when people, as yourself, go this route they never provide any figures whatsoever? The correlation between crime and poverty is real but it's generally quite weak. The most recent study I'm aware of on this is available here [sciencedirect.com]. This [sci-hub.tw] is a sci-hub link to bypass the paywall. You'd be most interested in table 2. If you're not familiar with correlation table values: 1 = there is a perfect correlation between A and B, -1 = there is a perfect inverse correlation between A and B, 0 = there is no correlation whatsoever between A and B.
So let's look at the correlates of murder:
Income: -40%
Life Expectancy: -61%
IQ: -64%
Skin Color (black): 84%
Income is, by a wide margin, one of weaker correlations with murder. By contrast race is invariably one of, if not the single strongest, correlates. So strong is the correlation that it can create spurious correlations of the type you probably think are significant. In any variable where blacks are over-represented (which includes poverty) you'll see disproportionately high violent crime rates. So e.g. if I wanted to be a bad social scientist I could research the correlation between music tastes and murder rates only to 'discover' that 'rap music has an extremely strong association with murder'. Time to ban rap music! Due to Poe's Law, let me emphasize that that suggestion is sarcastic.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:58PM (5 children)
True, they're only around 3 times more likely to commit violent crimes. [whiteprivilegeisntreal.org] IIRC the arrest rate is around 2.5 times higher overall in the US while the linked article seems to only look at a limited number of jurisdictions.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:45PM (1 child)
Two things:
1) You are making a common statistical mistake based on their data. Imagine 50% of people commit 100% of crime. How much more likely is that 50% to commit crime than the rest of society? It's obviously not (percent_of_crime_committed / percent_of_population) because that'd lead you to believe that they're only twice as likely to commit crime when compared to the other 50% of people who are committing 0 crime!
So how do you calculate the proper number? Break it down into ratios. Imagine 10% of people commit 50% of crime. The ratio there is 50% crimes per 10% population = 50/10. The rest of society would be 50% with 90% of remaining crimes = 50/90. So the first group has a relative rate of (50/10) / (50/90) = 9 meaning they are 900% more likely to commit crime. In our earlier example of 50% committing 100% you get: (100 / 50) / (0 / 50) = 2 / 0 = infinity. The point of this is that 10% of people committing 30% of crime are engaging in crime at a much higher relative rate than 3x.
2) That site made a critical mistake. They said violent crimes but they're looking at *all* crimes. Here [fbi.gov] is the table they linked to. You can confirm that it includes arrests for drug violations, DUI, vandalism, etc. The violent crime ratio is about 10x higher for blacks compared to non-hispanic whites.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:55PM
Ha! The racist trolls just love downmodding everyone who argues with them, but dare downmod a racist post and they cry oppression.
Truly they are the most pathetic users around here.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:49PM (2 children)
Did you just unironically link to a site called "whiteprivilegeisntreal.org" and expect people to accept it as a reliable source?
You've been modded Flamebait, but maybe Funny would be more appropriate.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday July 09 2020, @08:33AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 09 2020, @09:20PM
Ok, but whiteprivilegeisntreal.org?
How could I possibly take that seriously?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:41PM
Additional countries are mentioned in the related stories.
Clearly, we need the full genomes of every single citizen to be stored in order to shorten the path between discovery and resolution of any crime. Then someone can hack the database and leak the genomes of the celebrities and supermodels, for perverted purposes, framing people [slashdot.org], or whatever.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:38PM (2 children)
So, if they just did what China is doing, it would be better? Why is this together?
No, it's not collecting male DNA because "most likely to commit crimes". They collect it because once you have it, then you can find the family of the suspect in question. You don't have their DNA, but you have someone close. Maybe their uncle or father or brother. You don't need female DNA if you have their brother or father or son or even just related.
To me it seems China wants total oversight over everyone while in US it's the "shit applies don't fall far from shit trees" mentality.
Anyway ... Big Data. The number of the beast is your DNA and you can't change it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:57PM (1 child)
The thing you miss is recidivism. In the US there are quite a lot of people living lives of crime. They go into prison, get out, engage in crime, go to prison, repeat until they escalate to something that gets them locked away indefinitely. In China recidivism is far less for a variety of reasons. So I think it's more like what you said for China, whereas for the US it's simply getting ready to reel in the exact same fish over and over again.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:03PM
Looks like somebody longs for Communist dictators to take over and enforce the One True Culture over all those awful people over there. The ones in the news.
Yup, definitely nothing dangerous about being an average Chinese person in Communist China. At least as long as you're not one of those awful people over there. Isn't it great when the government tells us who is bad and arrests and re-educates them at scale?
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:39PM (4 children)
s/ Racial//
FTFY
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:13PM (1 child)
Indeed! Omitting the " Racial" leaves a statement which is rather obvious and less inflamitory .
Of course, nearly anything can be employed as as a tool of oppression by those who have a will to oppress.
If only we knew which genomes determine the content of character, then we could discover oppressors using DNA tests and lock them up before they become a menace to society. I mean, turnabout is fair play, no?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:23PM
I see what you did there. It did make me laugh. Unfortunately I'm out of mod points for the day.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by OrugTor on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:36PM (1 child)
One of the most elegant lines of code ever. Having said that, I find it disturbing when I agree with TMB. Damn, I hate getting old.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:06PM
You're just getting over your cynicism deficiency is all.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:41PM (46 children)
"This database has a disproportionately high number of profiles of black men, because black Americans are arrested five times as much as white Americans."
Is the database disproportionate because it contains 5x as many black americans as white americans? Or did they conveniently leave out the fact that it *might* be exactly proportional? I didn't bother checking myself - I just highlight biased propaganda. (It's biased if it presents facts for one view but completely neglects facts from the other view that should support the claim)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:53PM (23 children)
Agreed but you're not going to get anywhere by using logic and reason with the people of the opposing viewpoint. They're already aware of this and have no problem whatsoever with calling night day and day a `76 Buick if that's what it takes to keep them from having to reevaluate their position.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:44PM (22 children)
Finally we see TMB's true form, he is a "just the facts" racist.
Woopsie, years of claiming otherwise down the drain :(
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:11PM
:( LOOK :( AT :( ME! I AM ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY SO THIS MAKES ME SO SAD RIGHT NOW :(
YOU JUST 100% PROVED YOU ARE A RACIST MEANIE :( ALL THOSE YEARS DOWN THE DRAIN YOU ABSOLUTE SCUM SUCKING CHAMELEON :(
BEING SO RIGHT ALL THE TIME IS HARD BUT I DO MY BEST TO BE THE ADULT IN THE ROOM :(
MEH, BACK TO PROTESTING I GUESS. ACAB :)
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:32PM (20 children)
Facts? All I saw was content-less namecalling.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:12PM (19 children)
Yeah that was the point. I'm just happy to trigger thst all-caps dipshit. They have nothing left, their motives have been laid bare, all that is left is the wild thrashings of their ego trying to preserve their outdated world view.
They claim to only support the facts yet they ignore every bit that goes against their narrative. I thought BuzzyBoy was just an idiot, but it appears he is just another alt-right jackass trying to hide his prejudice and twist it into 'objective fact.'
The site continues to roll downhill, eventually it'll shift enough for the moderste users to become disgusted as well and realize the problem is more than just a few racist trolls.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:59AM (18 children)
> Yeah that was the point. I'm just happy to trigger thst all-caps dipshit. They have nothing left, their motives have been laid bare, all that is left is the wild thrashings of their ego trying to preserve their outdated world view.
> They claim to only support the facts yet they ignore every bit that goes against their narrative. I thought BuzzyBoy was just an idiot, but it appears he is just another alt-right jackass trying to hide his prejudice and twist it into 'objective fact.'
> The site continues to roll downhill, eventually it'll shift enough for the moderste users to become disgusted as well and realize the problem is more than just a few racist trolls.
I'd been warning people about them for years, Uzzard especially, and it's taken until now for people to start waking up. There are times I seriously wonder if this site would be better off gone...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:11AM (1 child)
I never saw TMB actually go racist so I figured he was just a selfish libertarian conservative type.
I am disappointed to see him join the "blacks are criminals just teh FAX" bruhgade :( Of course this comment section devolved into racist bullshit instead of anger at the authoritarian surveillance state. Shows the priorities of these freedom loving individuals.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:50PM
It's all over his post history if you know where to look. Coded dogwhistles everywhere. He spends his time *not* saying "nigger" as loud as he can, if you catch my meaning. It's hidden behind code phrases like his particular childish idea of what "freedom" actually is.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @09:02AM (15 children)
Yeah, you could bail. Some of us aren't trolls though, including you, and we non-trolls do try to have meaningful exchanges still.
Agreed that there's a handful of nicks and a substantial portion of ACs who seem to be pushing - with excruciatingly low quality argumentation! - some specific low-quality ideas of the alt-right. IDK what to do about them any more than I would know what to do, as an individual, against a flock of seagulls mobbing me.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:48PM (14 children)
Sometimes I wonder if dropping their dox is the right thing to do. Most of them have utterly shit opsec (Runaway is likely the worst offender, as he is about as old as his nick suggests...) and the problem with places like this is there's no real accountability.
He and a few others have been flirting with if not outright advocating domestic terrorism. It may be wise to alert the FBI or a related agency if they keep it up. At this point I don't even care; they'll have it coming to them and if this site refuses to wipe its own ass maybe it deserves to disappear.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:03PM (13 children)
You are a paradoxical example of echo chambers. I say paradoxical since this site obviously is not an echo chamber, though some would prefer to turn it into one. But in general in November of 2016 about 66 million people voted for Clinton, about 63 million for Trump. The voting age population in the US in 2016 was about 250 million [wikipedia.org]. This can help give us a general overview of politics in the US:
~25% republican
~25% democrat
~50% none of the above
And I think in general public settings where there's otherwise no significant political bias, you'll find this distribution matches up pretty well to reality. But perhaps more interestingly is that you'll find you'll find the 75% in general are pretty far away from where you are. Your perception of increasingly radicalism is because you yourself have become increasingly radicalized. Whoever you were a decade ago, I doubt you would have been the type to declare people "racist" for stating statistics that involve race. The whole idea to declare facts as racist is something very much out of 1984 and I think that's pushing more and more of that 50% towards the right.
Let me give the most softball example of this. Last month George Floyd was murdered. Protests and riots followed shortly thereafter nationwide. It's unclear how many people protested, but there were more than 14,000 rioters were arrested and they presumably they were a relatively small percentage of all protesters. So it's fairly safe to say, in total, it was easily in the hundreds of thousands and maybe even into the millions. And many of the protesters engaged in no real pandemic protection. There was no social distancing possible, even if people did desire it, and masks were frequently not worn or of insufficient quality to have much effect.
Today, we have seen an otherwise inexplicable massive increase in COVID infections with 50,000+ new cases a day, and rising. Why? Well when I turn to the New York Times front page, they're trying to claim it's because of churches. [nytimes.com] CNN? They want to blame the reopening of the economy. [cnn.com] I assume you can see there's a rather giant pink elephant in the room they're all trying to pretend doesn't exist. But the thing is, the vast majority of people see exactly what's up. And this divides society. Because when somebody claims things like CNN or New York Times are fake news you immediately jump to 'omg omg that's what trump said so he must be a trump supporter'. It's dumb. I'm liberal, but anti-democrat - as I find *many* are.
And the reason is this. You honestly think some guy like Runaway or Buzzard are threats to society? I don't think you're dumb by any means of the word, but I do believe you have a very poor ability to judge the character and motivation of people - probably driven in large part by political radicalization.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 09 2020, @12:55AM (12 children)
That is a lot of words to say "No U."
Now listen and listen good: statistics say what they say, and that is all that they say. Most significantly, they do NOT mention the process of their own collection (i.e., sampling biases), nor do they hold explanations for themselves. *And this is the key sleight of hand the "just the facts hurr hurr" racists count on you not seeing them pulling.*
Do you get it? The statistics they quote are always just bait; they are towing along an unspoken narrative hook, usually "$GROUP are inherently criminal," and most insidiously, they are implying it rather than saying it outright so when someone points it out, they can pretend to be all offended that their "objectivity" is being impugned, wring their hands, clutch their pearls, and go "well, them's the numbers."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @03:36AM
As you said before, read between the lines of that post you replied to. Yet another self-described liberal pushing rightwing points. Either confused or just another of the assholes trying to radicalize and disenfranchise others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @04:35AM (10 children)
Then perhaps you should respond and provide clear fact based evidence of any such bias in sampling instead of simply trying to call facts racist? The general conversation goes something like this:
1) Blacks commit violent crime at about 10x the rate whites do.
2) 'That's biased. Blacks are poor, and poor people commit more crime in general.
3) If the bias was economic then in the increasingly large number of areas where blacks are not the poorest group, they would also not be the most violent. This is not what we observe.
4) I'm not listening! Racist Racist Racist!
It's like if unless you refuse to accept reality, then you must be a racist in our 1984 driven world.
But what I'd also emphasize is that this whole 'racism' thing is just one component of the entire issue. So many agendas being pushed by the DNC just require refusing to accept reality. The recent protests have driven the infection of what will be somewhere between tens of thousands and millions of people (you need to count indirect infections). And these infections will, in turn, see the deaths of thousands to hundreds of thousands. So 'protesting police violence' is something that's going to effectively result in causing the deaths of far more people than police have ever killed in their entire existence. Again, this makes no sense at all - unless you just turn off your brain.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 10 2020, @01:35AM (9 children)
I doubt you were intending to illustrate my point for me, but thanks for doing it, anyway :)
Regarding your first point...the statistics say black people commit, per capita, ~10x the violent crime white people do. So...how good are the data? How do you know you've accounted for every single violent crime committed by every single black person vs every single white person? Until you have very near perfect sampling, you need to qualify that statement in big, bold letters.
See, there's always a question of sampling bias, as I pointed out above. I am definitely willing to believe black people have a higher rate of violent crime than whites based on my own experiences and observations, and this leads us into the next question: *Why is this?*
Now the answer you and your kind *want* people to automatically jump to is "because they're inherently violent hurr hurr hurr." Again: the stats say what they say, and that's all that they say. You're making an assumption that every single person is on an even footing here. What are the correlates and causes of violent crime? What is the specific breakdown of each type of violent crime, stratified by age, wealth, location, health status, etc etc?
"Black people" (and "white people" for that matter) is a huge group, consisting of people from birth to over 100 years old, people of both sexes and every gender, from homeless to blasphemously wealthy, living in all sorts of different environments, hammered on the anvils of tens of millions of different experiences (although there is some *heavy* systemic skewing going on there...).
And did you notice something? We've gone far afield of statistics and are now into such diverse-yet-overlapping subjects as epidemiology, urban planning, sociology, law, and even the very definition of what a crime is and its distinction with moral good and evil. Next to all this, the data are almost uninteresting.
But you? No, no, no, you and your buddies don't want anyone thinking about all that stuff! Hell no! You want people to see the numbers you present, turn off their brains, and go "black folks are inherently criminal." Fuck you sideways for insulting everyone's intelligence *and* human decency.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @05:03AM (8 children)
My response here got a whole lot longer than I intended so I'm going to flip it around. At the top I'm going to hit on the issue of why black folks may have more issues on average, and on the bottom I'll hit on your questions.
In this thread somebody was trying to create an argument that slavery was holding people back (and thus the root cause of this all) by invoking the fact that Dave Chapelle's great grandmother was a slave. It was his great grandfather [wikipedia.org], but their point remains... right? William Chapelle, after the emancipation proclomation, would go on to become the president and chairman of a university. He also took the time to become a bishop in his church. One of his sons would become equally renowned - becoming a physician and surgeon who opened up an all-inclusive practice at a time when segregation still made it difficult for some blacks to access healthcare. Dave Chapelle's own father was a statistician who later went on to become a professor. And Dave Chapelle is Dave Chapelle - he played a fool for a career but is one of the most intelligent and eloquent individuals there is when you actually read (or listen) to him as a person - probably why he pulled a Bobby Fischer on comedy and a $50million contract. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
The "problem" in Africa is that, relative to our basic needs, it's a paradise. Have you seen what places like Liberia look like? Go search from some pictures now if you haven't. It's just amazingly beautiful rich lands as far as the eye can see. And that is Africa in general excepting the Sahara. If not for the violent crime issue I'd love to live in Africa. Why is this 'utopia' a problem? As you get further away from the equator, IQs and incomes increase, violence decreases, and a million other ultra positive correlations. The reason is that you start entering into areas that are the real 'shit holes' as far as human needs are concerned. Scandinavia? If you're not smart enough to prepare for the winter and work together towards it - you're gonna die. By contrast in most parts of Africa, you can live off the land from the day you're capable til the day you die with no need of anything other than basic knowledge. Africa never had a filter for things like intelligence or civility like other places in the world did. This doesn't mean all Africans are dumb, there are plenty of brilliant Africans, but their distribution is much worse than among other groups whose lineage had more 'pruning'.
As a hot take I expect the same thing that happened to Africa is now gradually starting to happen to the entire world. Life has become comfortable and easy for most of everybody (speaking, as always, relatively). And so there's no longer any filter for competence. And thus we're beginning to see global IQ's decline. [wikipedia.org] When you have no filter, it just ends up being a reproduction contest. And who's reproducing the fastest? Well, their genes are the genes of the future. Fun times ahead!
---
As for your arguments, don't you see you're just throwing out a large number of arguments but without putting any effort into actually seeing if anything is valid? Many of these questions can be pretty easily answered if you actually wanted to answer them. For instance, murder is one of the easiest to look at because there's near perfect sampling of all cases. How? Missing/dead people tend to get reported, one way or the other. Now of course not all murders are solved, but even this gives us some very workable information. The reason is that the *vast* majority of murders that are not solved are in murder capitals like St. Louis and Baltimore. And in these places nearly all murder is black on black. You could try to argue that the unsolved cases are some white guys running into Baltimore and killing a bunch of black guys, but I think that'd be a very bad faith argument. The missing data suggest very strongly that the 'real' murder rate difference is actually much higher than 10:1 from the data (solved crimes) that we have available.
And as for the correlates of violent crime there have been plenty of studies, though not so much recently. The reason is they all end up showing the exact same thing. The most recent and comprehensive I'm aware of is available here [sciencedirect.com]. Here's [sci-hub.tw] a sci-hub link to sidestep the paywall. Table 2 is what you're after. The studied a large number of variables across all 50 states to see what correlated with what. If you're not familiar with a correlation table, 100% = perfect correlation between A and B, -100% = perfect inverse correlation between A and B, 0 = no correlation whatsoever between A and B.
Here are correlates of murder:
Income: -40%
Life Expectancy: -61%
IQ: -64%
Skin Color (black): 84%
Skin color is invariably the strongest correlate to violent crime when you actually look at the data. This correlation alone is likely what drives other correlations. Blacks for instance are over-represented in low income and low IQ groups, and so they alone will substantially drag up the violent crime rates of those groups. It should be clear that things like poverty itself does not inherently drive violent crime. Look at places like China or even India. Both are/were deeply impoverished nations with extreme income inequality, yet they also both have very negligible violent crime rates - a handful of high visibility cases from the latter notwithstanding.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 10 2020, @06:10AM (7 children)
Where are you going with this? That's what I want to know. What is your solution to this problem? The "just the facts" types are oddly reticent on that.
See, what I'm taking from this here is a lot of eugenics. You're dancing around it, but what you're saying in way too many words is that old discredited trope that people from the tropics are infantile and are never going to "grow up" as a group because there were never any dangers, nope, no, none, in the tropical regions compared to where the Ubermenschen Nordic people live.
Hasn't it occurred to you that you're undercutting your genetics-based argument here by explicitly focusing on what is a matter of culture? Need I remind you that the entire human race *came from Africa?* For a species as intelligent as H. sapiens, culture trumps instinct and breeding, and does it about a zillion times quicker, geologically and biologically speaking. There was not enough time for people to evolve from "suited for the tropics" to "suited for the northlands;" that is entirely culture, tool use, and creativity.
I'm not even angry. The self-own here is so comprehensive, so unwitting, so completely naive, it's actually hilarious. Kipling called and he wants the white man's burden back.
As a final rejoinder: given that these *are* cultural and educational problems, a very liberal, wide-reaching social safety net with a heavy focus on education and healthcare is the fastest possible way to solve the issues you're bringing up :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:25PM (6 children)
Ahh! But you are provably wrong in this case. First off, consider that cats also share about 90% of their genes with the human race, chimps upwards of 96%. Genetic similarity is a rather misguiding metric because the smallest of things can yield huge differences. One of the most interesting genes is MAO-A - 'the warrior gene'. It's responsible for an enzyme that has a rather curious effect. When production of the said enzyme is dysfunctional, the resultant animal will become vastly and measurably more violent.
Literally you can take a healthy mouse, impair the MAO-A gene, and its offspring will be measurably more violent than normal for the species. And the exact same is true in humans. We do not engage on these type of genetic experiments yet when you take a sampling of violent criminals and compare it against society at large, again you see widespread MAO-A malfunction. And guess what race in particular has a rate of MAO-A malfunction generally magnitudes higher than other races? And of course this is just one tiny aspect of genetics. Most groups have filtered out impaired MAO-A genes. Africa has not. Why? Well now you can get into cultural answers. The various personal characteristics that make for success in one region vs another are radically different and thus the people that ended up thriving became radically different.
As for where am I going with this? Very simple:
1) Equality of opportunity, not equality of result. The latter is not possible unless you gave Brave New World where you lobotomize the top the reach the ineptitude of the bottom.
2) Assisting people based on their real needs and not the needs you project on them. If we run this world 1000 times, Mike Tyson is probably dead or in prison right now in about 990 of them. But because his talent for fighting was uncovered quickly - he's instead a legend, even if an infamous one, in our timeline. Trying to turn everybody into e.g. a computer scientist is stupid. If somebody wants to fight, teach them to fight as well as to weld or operate heavy machinery. If somebody wants to be a social media guy - teach them to influence and charm, as well as teaching them to work in public relations. So forth and so on. Same reason when teaching somebody to be a computer scientist, you should also teach them to be a teach support guy.
3) Research and find out what makes certain people of various conditions succeed while others fail. Not everybody with an impaired MAO-A gene is a violent criminal. And similarly not all violent criminals have MAO-A genes. Why? And how can we use this information to create a better society for everybody? Right now this sort of research is as taboo as it possibly could be because it doesn't go for this blank slate nonsense you're talking about.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday July 13 2020, @12:10AM (5 children)
Ah, someone else who knows about the monoamine oxidase type-A gene! I was beginning to think I was alone on here...
You know that every post you're making is actually in agreement with me, right? I know very well what it is to start with genetic disadvantages: I'm horribly deaf, have even worse vision, and am probably predisposed to depressive disorders. What helped? A supportive early home environment (after "early" not so much but eh...), access to glasses and hearing aids (...sometimes...), and recognition of my strengths as well as weaknesses.
All of those are pretty high up Maszlow's pyramid, did you notice? Can't really focus on improving yourself when you can't eat right or sleep soundly, or when the water's full of lead (speaking of things that interact badly with MAO-A mutations).
You're so close, so, so, so, so close, to having the proverbial "come to Jesus" moment. If you really, truly care about these people, if you truly care for "equality of opportunity," *you have to support a widespread social program that has enough capacity for everyone AND can be tailored to individual needs.*
Somehow, though, I can only hear this odd, high-pitched whistling noise. It's making the dogs go nuts, which is bizarre since it sounds like "blacks are inherently violent" and dogs don't speak a human language. Hmmm...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @05:24AM
I don't understand why you think such things would be controversial to me. If you simply asked me whether or not I believe blacks are, as a group (not as individuals), genetically more inclined towards violence than most other groups then of course I would say yes. The over representation of malfunctioning MAO-A genes is, by itself, sufficient to justify that claim. And I don't view it as an inherently bad thing. Most kids get into a fight at some point or another. One kid runs to a teacher crying, one kid instead punches back. I have always been the latter and would be absolutely ashamed if my kid was the former. However, I'd also be ashamed if he threw the first punch. Never throw the first punch, always throw the last one. The capacity for violence is important lest society give way to the first evil with such a penchant, but it requires self discipline and restraint lest you turn into that evil yourself.
What I do view as a bad thing is creating solutions based upon the assumption of a blank slate hypothesis. When that hypothesis is invalid, so too are our solutions. Most don't realize that the US already spends more per capita than most of anywhere on the world in things such as education and even social spending. [oecd.org] Remember to swap from % GDP to $/capita. We spend more per capita than, for instance, both the UK and Canada.
So why do our programs suck? Because they're completely misguided. Inner schools having problems? Throw money at the problem which is generally used to upgrade the computers, buy new textbooks, and just generally wasted. Lo and behold, it achieves nothing. By contrast, start boxing/wrestling classes alongside shop (lumberworking/metalworking/etc) classes and you'd see huge dividends. But it doesn't fit the cultural narrative we're trying to impose that 'everybody needs to be a feminist (if not effeminate) computer scientist and the only reason that's not happening is [insert identity politics].'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @07:05AM (3 children)
I just realized something I never thought about for some reason. Most of what I've said is actually a testable hypothesis. We do have one program that focuses on physical discipline and training over 'become a computer scientist' in schools. What is it? ROTC and junior ROTC programs and the military itself. To be clear, I'm not especially fond of the US military but I am fond of the sort of physical and mental training that the military entails. Anyhow, I decided to look up economic outcomes for veterans on average. Turns out Pew recently did an extensive survey [pewresearch.org] of the data.
The results were incredibly surprising given the usual narrative about starving veterans:
Those numbers are just huge and I do think offer at least a workable existential argument in favor of the logical position on the emphasis of physical training and discipline in lieu of simply 'everybody must be a computer scientist.'
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday July 14 2020, @12:36AM (2 children)
"Starship Troopers" was still built on a shit premise, Mr. Heinlein.
Again...every time you post, you further support the central thesis I've been pushing, that human behavior is *far* more influenced by culture than genetics. No, I don't believe that tabula rasa stuff (and no one seriously has since the 70s so shove it), but I am capable of observation. If you want to blunt the effects of "bad" genes, *culture is key and education is how.*
Your veterans are getting an education in their own parameters, limits, and thought processes, do you get it? I would rather push for encouraging introspection, critical thought, emotional intelligence, and a thorough grounding in basic predicate logic starting in elementary school than the soldier-sucking compulsory military service you seem to be hinting at. And your disdain for "computer scientists" is a bit odd on a site like this. Even someone like me can program just a tiny bit and has run Gentoo since the mid-noughties :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:37PM (1 child)
I don't know how you got any of from what I said.
The point of the military example was to show that all of our current ideas about education, solving poverty, and everything amount to *much* less than 2 years in the military *on average*. Why? Because all of our ideas we are *currently* implementing are actively based around pushing people down paths that they're unsuited for. I have no disdain for computer science, I make a living from software and absolutely love it. However it's a horrible path for the vast majority for people. And vice versa for the military. It's going to be a bad fit for some, yet it's somehow clearly *much* more effective at producing better outcomes than what we're *currently* doing.
The idea is simple: you don't push people in any direction. You find out what they're good at and you work from there. Take your emotional intelligence idea. I could not care less about the feelings of others besides my loved ones, and I strive to even nullify my own emotions. And I view these things as values worth pursuing. So any education in "emotional intelligence" is going to be a disaster with me in your class - and I would end up, even if unintentionally, actively antagonizing the rest of the class. The exact same thing is *currently* happening today as we put people in math classes where they simply have 0 interest (or perhaps ability in some cases) of learning. Yes, becoming highly capable at mathematics would give these people a far better chance at a better life, but you ultimately cannot force people to do anything they don't want to. That effort to force people simply results in them disrupting the class for those who would want to learn it and wasting the time of the non-learner. So, again, instead find out what people are good at and pursue that.
Essentially, I believe that general education has been a failure. What can we do to improve it? I'd look in the other direction - specialized education, no longer just for the short bus.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:57AM
Somehow you managed to gag yourself on Heinlein's rotting dick *and* run straight into his "Specialization is for insects" snark at the same time. Amazing. Where the hell are you *going* with all this?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:02PM (21 children)
In either case it is biased propaganda. The context that is always missing whenever racial disproportionality is brought up is the rate of violent crime.
This is in the same line of thought as San Francisco no longer releasing mug shots in an attempt to "stop fueling racial bias" [nbcnews.com] Ironic. Can't look the people being arrested because the people getting arrested might reinforce a stereotype that those people get arrested.
This is a very childish way to handle social issues. It's infantilization of an entire group of people through an Orwellian memory hole for emotional reasons.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:09PM (14 children)
It also ensures that progress is never possible. The politically correct nonsense is to try to assume that everybody is identical and thus any differences are solely a result of other some form if discrimination/bias/etc or some environmental factor. The problem with this is simple. Most of all evidence we have indicates that there are differences between groups. By embracing these differences society can help create better outcomes for everybody. But by assuming a falsehood, any action you take is almost certainly doomed to failure before it even begins. Of course the motivation for the politically correct is people going full eugenics again, but that's hyperbolic. There's a rather large gulf of possibilities between 'stick your head in the sand and insist 2+2=5' and 'all but the master race must be genocided'.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by VLM on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:37PM (8 children)
Non-Christian creationism.
If a Christian says Jesus said love thy neighbor that's evil Christians being hateful as usual by not admitting their white privilege and giving "love" instead of retribution payments and all that nonsense.
If a Jewish woman in the legacy media says race doesn't exist and if it did its only skin deep and genetics doesn't exist and if it did then science is racist anyway, then that's being holier than thou and we have to agree with her style of devout creationist beliefs or be cancelled.
Because all religions are treated freely and equally, right?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:01AM (7 children)
Buddhism predates Christianity by over 500 years and has superior ethics. "Love thy neighbor" is not Christian or even Abrahamic in origin. And have you noticed that the louder a self-proclaimed Christian is the more he or she sucks pickled monkey balls at doing what Jesus said to do?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:58AM (1 child)
superior ethics? [jchronlettsci.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:44PM
Yes, superior ethics, because nowhere in any mainstream Buddhism that I know of does the idea of someone suffering infinite punishment for finite crimes committed by a finite mind in finite time with finite powers exist. That alone seals the deal. Nice try. I'm not a Buddhist myself, I just know evil when I see it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:29PM
On the other hand, despite the claim of being older and better, Buddhists in practice usually don't have the holier than thou problem the Abrahamic religions seem to suffer from.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:31PM (3 children)
Are you familiar with the myth of the noble savage? That really does, in many ways, sum of modern liberalism. I live in a Buddest country, so you get to see what religions turn into in practice. And it's not pretty. In Buddhism the fundamental tenant is that if you do good things in this life then you'll be rewarded with better things in the next life. How could that go wrong? Humans and self righteousness is how.
One of the weirdest experiences I had came with a family I was living with at the time. They were incredibly nice and friendly people who did genuinely seem to genuinely try to follow the teachings of Buddhism - even had a little Buddha temple thing setup at our place where they'd leave offerings daily. Well one day they were driving my wife and I around. And there was this crippled beggar walking overly bow-legged. The wife of the family couldn't stop laughing - like it was the most hilarious thing she ever saw. It essentially came down to 'lol poor [person of other nationality]'. After talking a bit and trying not to be some sort of SJW type, we found out what was up.
What's the corollary of 'if you do good things in this life, you'll find yourself in a better place in the next life'? Yip. If you're in a shit place in this life, it's because you were a super shit person in your past life. And so all of the sudden some poor guy from an even poorer country whose crippled beyond belief is just supposed to be hilarious because you're looking at an awful person being punished for unimaginably bad deeds. Yay - self righteousness. An amusing thing as well. In the country Christianity is revered. Good people see what Buddhist monks do, how Buddhist people act, and realize it's all just a shit show. But they very rarely see Christians and so they have this idealized version of Christianity in their minds, exactly like you have this idealized version of Buddhism in your mind.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:01AM (2 children)
Please don't insult my intelligence. I'm not some dillettante who watched a video of a Tibetan retreat and thinks that's the entirety of Buddhism. I am well aware of where its faults and flaws lie, and the problem you're describing here is one it inherited from Hinduism--remember, Buddha himself, like Jesus, was not intending to start a new religion so much as purify an existing one, and Buddha less so than Jesus in my estimation.
People suck no matter what. The value I see in Buddhism is that it appears to be the world's first serious attempt at an understanding of the mind. Some of the texts sound almost clinical, such as the ones describing the chain of events between perception and suffering. If you are introspective enough to make use of it, you can figure out how to start debugging your own mind.
The key insight is that there is nothing special about your ego, the "self," vis-a-vis the rest of reality. It's just another emergent phenomenon. Once you understand this, there is a great letting-go, and an amazing sense of continuity and one-ness with everything else. This in turn lets you stop taking your own existence so seriously, which lets you act a bit more dispassionately when analyzing your own circumstances, thoughts, habits, and goals.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @05:44AM (1 child)
I don't disagree. The thing I took note of was you taking an existential interpretation of one religion, and a personal one of another. Your quote above, "have you noticed that the louder a self-proclaimed Christian is the more he or she sucks pickled monkey balls at doing what Jesus said to do?" is equally accurate should one substitute in Buddhist and Buddha. Many who live in the Western world don't really realize this because they aren't generally exposed to what the mass adoption of Buddhism looks like, which is similar to the mass adoption of Christianity. People and self righteousness are a recipe for dystopia.
However, while I do think Buddhism adopts a much more Stoic value system (which to me is more precisely of what you find so appealing in Buddhism - perhaps look into Marcus Aurelius' Meditations? [dailystoic.com]) you can find a similar worldview in Christianity in that it emphasizes the distinction between the worldly world and the one after, with the former lacking ultimate relevance. This is a recurring theme in all major religions since for a religion to achieve mass adoption it quite tautologically needed to appeal to the masses. And the masses generally lived less than pleasant lives. A way to reconcile their existence of today for something better tomorrow is where the appeal of religion came from. This is also why today as we live mostly *relatively* pleasant lives, the mass adoption of religion is dying except for in areas where life remains unpleasant.
I suspect this is also why Stoicism never received the same adoption. The Stoics rejected any notion of a knowable afterlife. And so the virtue espoused within Stoicism is not for some greater reward or outward signaling, but simply to gain mastery of oneself. This is one of the many reasons that Aurelius' writings are so interesting. Those are the writings of the most powerful and wealthy man in the world - who could have had anything he ever wanted, not writing for an audience or some grand cause - but simply writing for himself. Clearly it's not always the case that absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday July 10 2020, @01:21AM
I know little of Stoicism but have been very impressed by what I've seen so far.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:11PM (3 children)
Don't worry, they've already started working on the next step. 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 have all been implemented, and they've started working on the Harrison Bergeron stage. If everyone can't be equally any other way, they'll force the matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:39PM (1 child)
Where is my soma ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:08AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_U.S._jurisdiction [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:02AM
You think you're one of the ones who'll get muzzled or weighted down, no doubt. You may be in for a rude shock... :D
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @11:32PM
There are statistical differences between groups. Individuals should be judged on their own merits, without being subject to prejudice, whether it's detrimental or in their favor. Sadly, prejudice and xenophobia are instinctual reactions, so they are unlikely to ever disappear as traits of human societies.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:10PM (4 children)
Because someone of the same color as them, who died many generations ago, that they don't know, was traded by their african tribal chiefs for slavery in exchange for pretty trinkets.
That my friends is "truth"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:49PM (1 child)
FTFY, and your historical perspective seems, er, a bit racist?
Angles and Saxons are almost useless as slaves, though. They malinger, lie, steal, and rape the livestock. Francs or Iberians are much better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:41PM
What he's referring to is the fact that the slave trade in Africa was already thriving long before foreigners arrived. It's the main reason that Africans ended up being the final slaves. Europe, Asia, and the Mideast saw the rise of massive, powerful, and relatively technologically sophisticated empires. And within these empires slavery was generally restricted if not banned against other 'in group' types. So in Europe the in group was religion - the church forbade Christians from enslaving other Christians.
By contrast Africa was still a completely divided continent with vast numbers of tribes using primitive equipment and a thriving domestic slave market. Their lack of development and unification left them very vulnerable. This is part of the reason I suspect the future belongs to China now a days, with India coming up the rear. Multiculturalism seems to have been a failed experiment simply because you can basically halt any and all progress in the nation by invoking claims of racism. And the only way that would not be true is if everybody was completely equal which will never true. So the only way to ever proceed cooperatively is if nobody ever decides to start race baiting but that's just never going to be the case - even in a world with 0 racism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @08:04AM (1 child)
Many in the "one, two, many" sense? Ie. five generations? Dave Chappelle's great grandma was a slave.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @06:23PM
You mean his great grandfather, William Chappelle [wikipedia.org]. William Chappelle was born into slavery and became the president and chairman of a university, as well as also taking the time to become a bishop in his church. One of his sons would go on to become a physician and surgeon opening a significant practice. Chapelle's dad was a statistician who became a professor.
If you want to know why some people end up thugs and others end up as 'Chapelles' (of any generation!) it's not because of where they came from, but because of who they are. And in some ways the two are related. Genetics is real. And if you stick two idiots together, guess what's usually going to come out. Of course stupid people have the right to breed as much as anybody else, so there's no good solution. But blaming people's failure to achieve on "racism" is getting dumb and not really doing much besides dividing America.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:25PM
Financial reason not emotional. Ultimately anyway. A lot of people make a lot of money off selling victimhood.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:55PM (40 children)
The logic of the Left leads to not going after criminals because they don't want to "oppress" them. Criminals get rights over the victims of their crimes. We have been seeing the consequences over the past month or so. More innocent people including small children die. More BLACK people die. We ALL suffer while the mob is given free reign. THAT is the true injustice.
Note that this has all happened before (60s - 70s especially, and also 80s - early 90s).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:07PM (3 children)
And if you dare try to defend yourself with a gun from a mob while wearing a pink polo. You are the problem and will be investigated. Not the mob that trespasses and destroys property.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:03PM (2 children)
One thing these ongoing riots and killings have demonstrated, is that apparently, a certain group NEEDS more policing.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:14PM
Not even dog whistling anymore? Fucking neo nazi shits, go back to Russia where you can stomp your boots on plenty of necks. Assuming you can catch them you fat slob.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:03AM
Yeah, the white supremacists are fucking insidious...but they're not gonna GET "more policing" because they've infiltrated the policing apparatus. If anything, you could argue they were there from the start. Hell of a problem.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:11PM (4 children)
Police are looking for two White people who painted over a Black Lives Matter mural
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/06/us/black-lives-matter-mural-painted-over-trnd/index.html [cnn.com]
No comment.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:34PM
And? I thought vandalism matters?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @04:33AM (2 children)
They got them [thesun.co.uk]. Charged with painting a street without a permit. (The BLM, being law-abiding Americans, had a permit.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @08:55AM (1 child)
Score: 0 for you though. Shame reality has such a leftist bias, like you seem to.
Shame nobody cares enough about facts to vote for you. Maybe they blew all their mod points voting up the trolls. :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:08PM
A less than zero AC! Racist! Now, get back to towing that line.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:15PM (24 children)
The logic of the Right. Black person is victim of crime. Calls police. Police arrive and before any questions, handcuff black caller before questing white criminal to begin their "investigation" of why they were called here.
Santa/Satan maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:39PM (14 children)
Link?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:53PM
That Australian lady who called the pigs in Minneapolis a few years back to report a crime and got gunned down. She was Black, right?
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:55PM
I provided as many links as the post to which I replied. But you can find some on YouTube.
Santa/Satan maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: -1, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:04PM (3 children)
The problem with leftist politics in practice is it tries to implement macro-scale cultural-level policy based on microscale rare essentially irrelevant anecdotes or outright imaginary stuff or occasionally outright fabrications.
It doesn't really matter if it happened at all or if in a HUGE nation of 330 million people it happened once or even 10K times, we're all gonna be subjected to the result of the imaginary belief that it happens all the time to everyone.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:38PM (2 children)
No finer example than the white, BLM Seattle "they" that promoted themselves from gender fluid to fender fluid by partially blocking the interstate with vehicles and then standing behind the vehicles dressed in black at 1AM. There are leftists insisting this was a "white supremacist" attack even after the arrest of the black driver. Anti-psychotics are useless against this level of delusional.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:23PM
>> Anti-psychotics are useless against this level of delusional.
It's a shame they emptied out the state mental hospitals in the 50s and 60s. Society used to have a place to take care of these poor damaged souls. Now they're hire as grade school teachers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:19AM
That's some systemic racism on your part right there by making assumptions based on the color of his skin. Who says that the Black driver wasn't a white supremacist?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:07PM (7 children)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/nyregion/amy-cooper-false-report-charge.html [nytimes.com]
and you're welcome.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:14PM (6 children)
Ah, the one where the guy likes to hang out in the park and bait people into calling the cops on him, then film them, conveniently leaving out the provocation? Which he did this time by threatening to poison her dog?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:57PM (3 children)
. . . in the basement of a Washington DC pizza shop . . . right?
Santa/Satan maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Captival on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:48AM (2 children)
Bill Clinton
Anthony Weiner
Burns Strider
Jeff Epstein
Harvey Weinstein
Tony Podesta
Is there any male acquaintance of Hillary's who is NOT a sex creep/rapist/pedo? And you guys still want to pretend the whole thing is made up. That makes you culpable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:25AM
Yeah. That basement at Comet Ping Pong is completely real.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @09:06AM
Most women in N.America have been sexually assaulted or harassed.
Many men have assaulted.
Doesn't mean every assaulter realized it, btw.
No, #metoo is kinda about not pretending it was made up. Epstein was going to stand trial. Now more of his cronies - from whatever walk of life or political stripe - will, with M.G. flipping.
If you see it being ignored, you're only listening to fools or strawmen; sorry.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:29AM
There. FTFY.
Damn. You just have to go with bald-faced lies don't you? Well, for a troll like yourself, I suppose that's not surprising.
Toodles!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:41AM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/terinaallen/2020/05/29/3-things-amy-cooper-did-in-central-park-that-destroyed-her-life/ [forbes.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:54PM (8 children)
Logic of the Right: End all government worker unions. That way if you get police that are doing a bad job they can be fired. If you get teachers that doesn't give a shit, get rid of them. Address multiple problems that affect inner city communities with one policy change.
VS.
Logic of the Left: Defund the police. Some of the first civil rights issues after the Civil War was a lack of policing in black communities. Those black communities took up arms to defend themselves. Gun control started to become popular after that. We are full circle with democrat logic. For the decades democrats have controlled the inner city communities they have made zero progress in actually solving any of the problems.
Tough sell.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:25PM (6 children)
Use race as a distraction so that poor whites have an enemy to focus on so they can justify in their own minds voting for a party that acts against their interest. See: Southern Strategy [wikipedia.org] ,War on drugs. [wikipedia.org]
The US has no left, so the right needs to pretend the other right wing party is a bunch of "Radical Marxists" or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:08PM (5 children)
Sane people keep the far-left and far-right as far from mainstream politics as possible.
Uncanny parallels between Weather Underground / Black Panthers & Antifa / Black Lives Matter. The emerging threat in the late '60s was targeted for a reason [fbi.gov] and it's a stain on history that Huey P. Newton is remembered as anything other than a sociopathic murderer, rapist and junkie.
(Score: 1, Troll) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 07 2020, @11:20PM (4 children)
Antifa does not really exist except as another imaginary enemy for the right to use to scare the hard-of-thinking with.
It seems to be working too.
The Black Panthers were heroes, and ought to be celebrated as such by the second amendment people, because that is one of the rights they fought for for.
It worked until Ronald Reagan decided guns were only for white people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:00AM (3 children)
LOL [discoverthenetworks.org] The development of modern Antifa is described in chapter 2 of "Antifa" - Mark Bray's anti-fascist handbook. [archive.org]
What the fuck does the second amendment have to do with murder? [salon.com] Why are so many leftist "heroes" murderers?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:43AM
Dylann Roof is an American hero!
#MAGA
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:51AM (1 child)
I love your links.
You try to prove your point by linking to some weirdo far right propaganda and think it helps your case? Hilarious.
David Horowitz? Jesus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:23PM
I'm not sure Mark Bray would appreciate that characterization of his work.
Horowitz is a former editor of radical Marxist rag Ramparts - the magazine of the 60s new left. He began distancing himself from the left after his friend was murdered. [wikipedia.org] I'm not sure Jesus had much to say on the evils of Marxism although there may be parallels to the millions of innocent people murdered after struggle sessions with the sociopathic scumbags rallying behind the "Marxist cause".
If you want to give a link some love, how about this by Ken Kelley? [archive.org] Former White Panther, editor of Ann Arbor Argus, [wikipedia.org] The Berkeley Barb [wikipedia.org] and Sundance magazine? Not so well known as Jesus but a verifiable contemporary and confidant of the murderous, crack-addled sociopath Huey P. Newton.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:09PM
Only to the alt-right infestation is that a tough sell, everyone else with a brain capable of empathy has no problem.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:59PM (5 children)
> Note that this has all happened before (60s - 70s especially, and also 80s - early 90s).
Most things, in terms of government and the mob, have in fact happened before. Those who want to cancel history and tear down the reminders of it are in fact doomed to repeat it, they know that, that is why they want to remove knowledge of history so that everyone else cannot know it in future.
Seattle CHOP / CHAZ apparently had racially segregated zones, presumably they think that if they topple enough statues people will not know about Jim Crow Laws or Apartheid and will believe this is a good thing.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:08PM (3 children)
It is so weird that democratic ideology does seem to be gradually headed towards 'separate but equal' all over again. I mean do people not understand that this is exactly what something like a 'racially segregated safe space' is? Does really feel like the politically correct nonsense is just an effort to do the same dumb ideas as we tried in the past and pretend it might yield a different result.
I kind of feel like we're gradually seeing another role reversal. The republican party of Lincoln was obviously a far cry from the republican party of the early to mid/late 20th century. Yet today the democratic party aiming for racial categorization if not segregation, muzzling of free speech, equality of result, and actively working to inflame racial and social tensions at any opportunity is obviously already a far cry from the democratic party of the sixties which aimed for free speech and equality of opportunity. Democrats in California are currently trying to get rid of proposition 209. [wikipedia.org] Proposition 209 is the "Prohibition Against Discrimination or Preferential. Treatment by State and Other Public Entities. Initiative Constitutional Amendment." Here is its ballot summary:
They are literally trying to roll back discrimination protections. The democratic party is becoming such a messed up institution.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:52AM (2 children)
You should actually look at what that ideology is. It's not what you think.
https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/ [democrats.org]
DNC Platform [wikipedia.org]:
There's more. But I know you won't try to educate yourself. Do you get decent wifi under your bridge?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:39PM (1 child)
Here [wikipedia.org] is the 'Fascist Manifesto'. It was the stated principles upon which Mussolini's fascist party claimed to stand for.
You might find something interesting. You probably agree with just about everything in it. And that's okay. They're generally good ideals. The point is that what a party claims to stand for and how that party acts are two very different things. I couldn't care less what a politician says, let alone a political group - I care how they act. And in modern times the DNC is becoming one hell of a scary organization. I tend to agree with their ideals on paper, but in practice I absolutely abhor what the DNC has turned into.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 09 2020, @01:06AM
> but in practice I absolutely abhor what the DNC has turned into.
Reagan Republicans, yeah. I'm with you on that.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @05:21AM
This is nuanced, more so than either side acknowledges. The Confederacy existed for the purpose of supporting and perpetuating slavery, the right of a white person to own black people as property. This is not defensible.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Jefferson publicly criticized slavery as being terribly wrong, yet he lacked the conviction to even refuse to personally partake in the evil. This is also not defensible.
For a particular monument, we need to consider its purpose. This is where it gets complicated. We don't memorialize Washington or Jefferson because of their support for slavery. We memorialize them in spite of their support for slavery. Jefferson's ownership of slaves is a "hideous blot" on his character. The same can be said of Washington. We should acknowledge that Washington and Jefferson willingly participated in morally evil acts, that they are deeply flawed. But we should recognize their contributions, too, in rebelling against British rule and establishing the governing framework of the United States.
Many monuments of people like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis do not exist to acknowledge positive contributions from these people in spite of their role in the Confederacy. Neither do they stand to be grim reminders of a past we should never repeat, which is why some concentration camps like Dachau are preserved in Germany. Instead, many of these monuments were erected to portray the Confederacy positively, to encourage people to sympathize their their cause, which was the enslavement of black people by white people. Monuments supporting the Confederacy do not belong on public property. This is wrong.
Nancy Pelosi ordered the removal of four portraits of former Speakers of the House from the Capital because they served in the Confederacy. This is also wrong. Those portraits are not displayed to support the Confederacy. Removing those portraits really is whitewashing history. We should conspicuously acknowledge that these four men served in the Confederacy, which was wrong. But we should not remove their portraits from being displayed along with those of all the Speakers of the House. Doing so is to deny history, which is a mistake.
History is messy. People are messy. We need to be thoughtful in our decisions to remove or not remove monuments.