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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the could-just-ask-23-and-me dept.

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:03PM (13 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2020, @05:03PM (#1018269)

    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)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday July 09 2020, @12:55AM (#1018447) Journal

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @03:36AM (#1018520)

      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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2020, @04:35AM (#1018534)

      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)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday July 10 2020, @01:35AM (#1018925) Journal

        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)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @05:03AM (#1018963)

          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)

            by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Friday July 10 2020, @06:10AM (#1018977) Journal

            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)

              by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:25PM (#1019883)

              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)

                by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Monday July 13 2020, @12:10AM (#1020094) Journal

                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

                  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @05:24AM (#1020157)

                  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)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 13 2020, @07:05AM (#1020167)

                  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:

                  In 2017, the median incomes of non-Hispanic black and Hispanic veteran households were more than $20,000 greater than those of black and Hispanic non-veteran households. Among non-Hispanic whites, by comparison, the gap in median income between households headed by veterans and non-veterans was only about $5,100.

                  Income differences between veteran and non-veteran households are also large when examined by education level. The median income is roughly $20,000 higher for households headed by a veteran with a high school diploma, compared with non-veteran households with the same level of education.

                  Veteran households also fare better than non-veteran households when looking at other economic measures, including poverty. In 2017, the poverty rate for non-veteran households was 6.4 percentage points higher than the rate for veteran households (13.0% vs. 6.6%).

                  In 2017, black veteran households had a poverty rate of 9.6%, versus 23.2% for black non-veteran households, a difference of 13.7 percentage points. The rate for Hispanic veteran households was 7.6%, compared with 18.6% for Hispanic non-veteran households. The difference was less stark between households headed by white veterans and white non-veterans: 5.8% vs. 9.4%, respectively.

                  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)

                    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday July 14 2020, @12:36AM (#1020858) Journal

                    "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)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:37PM (#1021287)

                      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

                        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday July 15 2020, @12:57AM (#1021594) Journal

                        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...