Citing Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well.  Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks.  Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.

[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes.  I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race."  I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman.  In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]

What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":

I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.

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Children Expelled from Elite Private School Because Parents Believe in the Existence of Boys and Girls

Leighton Woodhouse Reports at Common Sense. Here's an excerpt:

“Today was the last day of school for your children, Charlotte and Carter,” Dinh informed the couple. The Sinclairs—she’s 37; he’s 51—had been driving home from a vacation to celebrate their anniversary. Dinh appeared to be reading a script. Two MCDS board members joined her on the call but stayed quiet. “Please do not contact any other school employees, particularly Charlotte and Carter’s teachers, as your reaching out to them will cause them further stress,” Dinh continued. “The two of you are not to be on campus again.”

It was the closing act of a year-long drama between the Sinclairs and MCDS, which charges $40,000 per student per year and had been teaching first and second graders about “deconstructing the gender binary”—the idea that there’s no such thing as girls or boys, just a spectrum of relative girlness and boyness.

One more excerpt:

(Several parents I reached out to indicated that they wanted to talk but were scared. One father said he’d call me from a pay phone, if only there were pay phones.)

Parents started to hear about weird classroom exercises designed to force the seven- and eight-year-olds to decide how they identified: They were asked which gender they “felt like.” Or to pick the pronoun that seemed right to them. Or to say which toys seemed more like boy toys or girl toys.

Continue ReadingChildren Expelled from Elite Private School Because Parents Believe in the Existence of Boys and Girls

Glenn Loury and Jonathan Haidt Discuss the Structural Stupidities of the Left and Right

In this video, Glenn Loury and Jonathan Haidt Discuss the Structural Stupidities of the Left and Right. It is a fantastic conversation by two good-hearted nuanced thinkers who are concerned about the damage being done to many American institutions.

Continue ReadingGlenn Loury and Jonathan Haidt Discuss the Structural Stupidities of the Left and Right

Nellie Bowles: Fire the DEI Department to Fund College Education for 1,000 Students

Nellie Bowles, writing at Common Sense:

Why do universities need so many diversity officers? University of Michigan emeritus economics professor, Mark J. Perry, broke down the latest numbers on how many professional diversity officers are on the U of M payroll, and how much these officers make: “126 diversicrats at an average salary of $93,600 with 38 making >$100K and a shocking record-high of $430,795.” The total payroll cost for “diversity equity and inclusion” programming is over $15 million a year, or in-state tuition for almost 1,000 students. One wild DEI idea: Fire every single one of them, and use that money to free 1,000 poor students from debt each year.

Continue ReadingNellie Bowles: Fire the DEI Department to Fund College Education for 1,000 Students