Updated @ About Noon Eastern: Welp. I cut and pasted this post, into the comment box at “Ringside” — for our buddy William Otis. He has deleted it. Charming. Seems he believes that free expression, comment and criticism… only should apply when his commenters conform to his world views.
Y A W N.
How utterly… boring. I won’t try to repost mine — this below will stand, in eternity — long after he’s faded to dust, in some obscure graveyard, somewhere…. perfect. End, update.
And I mention his — only because Paul Mirengoff is on vacation in Europe — and we debunked this exact same line of racist, and false “crime stats” crap just about three weeks ago — when uttered at Powerline. [As we said repeatedly before, it all flows from the shrew Heather Mac Donald’s intentionally mal-informed, illogical and bad stats methods “science”… writings.]
So, Bill Otis, apparently a former prosecutor, and thus presumably-a-trained-in-logic lawyer… and now, card carrying member of the frothy, illogical hard right… argues the same old canard, about proportions of US violent crime, whyte v. Black.
What he — and the people he quotes — intentionally fail to mention is that there are about SEVEN times as many non-Black people, as there are… Black people in the US.
Thus the actual ‘incidence rate’ — of violent crime occurs slightly more often at the hands of whyte perps. Simply because they are a larger portion of the overall population. Thus his stats… are meaningless — and misleading, at best.
Said another way, any person in the US — but especially any whyte person — is about 15% more likely to experience violent crime at the hands of a whyte perp, than at the hands of any person of color.
It is a fact, that has been true since the 1960s — and yet, these dyed in the wool racists… do their (like Otis, and Hayward and Hinderaker) absolute level best to only talk about raw overall numbers — ignoring relative risks.
But (for example) when doctors treat humans, they always rely on relative benefit v. relative risk — in a drug regimen, or surgical intervention. What are the odds it improves one’s condition, compared to the odds it leads to a bad side effect / outcome?
Of course, Mr. Otis intentionally ignores here the very same advice he’d gladly credit his physician for offering him.
Malevolent… and moronic — a lethal combination, that.
Out.
Powerline Lies... 
Thank you for this post. Otis is worth additional scrutiny (and mockery). His hobbyhorse on this blog seems to be America’s so-called “underincarceration problem.” See a recent post in which he argues that we’re not locking enough people up and keeping them locked up.
In that post, he links despairingly to a 2021 report asserting that America’s incarceration rate had fallen to lowest level since 1995. But the very report he links to states: “Despite these downward trends, the U.S. still has the highest incarceration rate in the world,” which, you know, undermines his entire thesis.
Despite this zeal for incarceration, in 2007, the same William Otis argued in the Washington Post that President Bush should commute the sentence of Scooter Libby, who had just been convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to the FBI. Otis wrote: “To leave the sentence undisturbed would be an injustice to a person who, though guilty in this instance, is not what most people would, or should, think of as a criminal.”
Hmmm. I wonder who Otis has in mind when he considers criminals who “should” be thought of as criminals.
Surely not…
No. It couldn’t possibly be that black and white, could it?
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But of course!
When rich, old whyte GOPers “crime”, it’s only the finest people — and they are (whitewashed) as “patriots, preserving order”… impliedly (before 45) against the “mud people”.
But now after Tangerine these latter day KKK -ers / MAGAts don’t just imply — it all comes right out front — shouting race nonsense from the rooftops… counting on the fact that the base is too ignorant to think logically.
Cheers!
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