XDA

Here is the piece Mr.Sirota wrote in late 2012 and to which he self referred in his latest triumph, Let's Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a white American, which has been roundly criticized for good reason. The older piece was called Time to Profile White Men? It's even more stupid than the stupid article wishing for the bomber to be white (although both are equally racist). Let me explain.

He wrote, paraphrasing a TV appearance:

I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong.
 

For support for his statement, he referred to the Mother Jones article on mass shootings in America which analyzed 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012. It is not a complete list for reasons difficult to fathom. 60 of the profiled mass shootings were by lone gunmen and two had two guys shooting. So the total number of shooters was 64 of which 44 were white men (only 1 was a woman) and 19 were men of another race. For guys of Sirota's ilk, with the stupendous intellects, that means that white men are doing most of the shootings and it must be some defect of character latent in their race that causes them to be the most. Or it might just mean that the number of pathetic and/or crazy white psychopaths who do mass murders represents roughly the number of whites in America as opposed to other races. Let's see.

44 divided by 63 (I left the one woman out of it) is 69.84%. What is the percentage of white people in America? Well, according to the 2010 census, it's 78.1% in 2011. Just over half of white Americans are women, of course, but I've left out women so the percentage of white men would be very similar, comparing apples to apples, that is, only American males. So actually the number of white male mass murderers is a small distance below the number expected of that demographic, assuming the desire to shoot a lot of people is equally distribited across the races. What about black mass murderers? There were 9 or 14.3% of the 63 murderers. Blacks made up 13.1% of Americans in 2011. So they're a little under-represented in the mass murder category according to Mother Jones. What about the rest, who are Asians? They're above 15% of the mass murderers but Asians only represent 5% of the American population. That ain't so good.

But you see the problem with Sirota's assertion right off the bat. There are so many white mass murderers, not because of something wrong with them, but because there are so many whites in the population. Nothing more.

If Sirota had talked instead about why women are so under-represented in the list, I would have listened--yeah, what's up with that? But he didn't. He made a facile and specious analysis of numbers, came to a wrong conclusion, and then proceeded to be even more foolish as he continued writing. Really.

Any honest observer should be able to admit that if the gunmen in these mass shootings mostly had, say, Muslim names or were mostly, say, African-American men, the country right now wouldn’t be confused about the causes of the violence, and wouldn’t be asking broad questions. There would probably be few queries or calls for reflection, and mostly definitive declarations blaming the bloodshed squarely on Islamic fundamentalism or black nationalism, respectively.
 

As an honest observer I guess I would analyze the incidence of muslim or black shooters just as I have above to see if the numbers involved in mass shootings had any relation to their numbers generally in the population before I would ask any questions or throw out any blame. Sirota skipped that step. It's a basic first step only a moron would skip. And I still don't throw out any blame for the 300% above expectation representation of Asians on the list. I just go hmmmm? Sirota's not finished being stupid though.

...the conservative movement has exposed its desperation — specifically, its desperation to preserve its White Victimization Mythology.

In this mythology, the white man as a single demographic subgroup can never be seen as a perpetrator and must always be portrayed as the unfairly persecuted scapegoat. In this mythology, to even reference an undeniable truth about how white privilege operates on a political level (in this case, to prevent a government profiling system of potential security threats even though such a system exists for other groups) is to be guilty of both “injecting divisive racial politics” and somehow painting one’s “opponents as racist” — even when nobody called any individual a racist.
 

The reason no one, but Sirota, is calling for profiling all white males for potential security threats (specifically for mass shootings) is that white males commit such horrible crimes less often than one would expect for their representation in the population. It would be stupid to profile those who are less likely to commit the crime you're seeking to prevent. It's probably stupid to profile for mass shootings as they are very rare events, althoug more sad and tragic, it seems, than single murders, which are also rare in America compared to many other countries.

What Sirota has stupidly done is assert that white men are defective in some way because they commit so many mass shootings (but at a rate less than their representation in the population). That's racism, saying a race is different and worse than other races. So that's why I call Sirota, and always will in the future, a stupid racist. He is.

UPDATE: Mr. Cook came to the same conclusion (with slightly different numbers) earlier than I at the NRO. Money quote:

In his book Race and Crime, Anthony Walsh joins Jenkins in taking apart the “myth” that whites are over-represented, noting that “white (Anglo) males are actually slightly underrepresented in the serial killer ranks in terms of their proportion to the general male population.”

Labels: David Sirota, stupid racist; Mass Murder numbers

Although I hate to judge things before all the facts are in, it's beginning to look like David Sirota will not get his wish that the Marathon bombers were white American males. All the calumny and projection the left could have made from that granted wish is lost in the smoke of just another bomb attack by members of the Religion of Peace.

Labels: David Sirota, racist idiot; Islamic bombers

If you want to know what's wrong with the left in the United States, this would be a good place to start. Its title: Let's hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.

Money quote:

If recent history is any guide, if the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident — one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate the political debate from any fallout from the attack.
 

This is rich, given Mr. Sirota's earlier description of America under a "consistent barrage of of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists" with a supporting link to an article written by fellow leftist David Neiwert just after the Rep. Giffords shooting in Tucson. Mr. Neiwert listed 19 incidents of "domestic terrorism from the extremist American Right" during a 2 and 1/2 year period.

Included on that list was Jared Loughner, a left leaning completely crazy person not in any way on the 'extremist American Right'.

It also included the guy who attacked a Pentagon Metro stop, John Patrick Bedell, a crazy Democrat 9-11 Truther, not on the 'extremist American Right'.

It also included they guy who shot a guard in front of the Holocaust Museum in DC, James Von Brunn, an anti-Semite 9-11 truther not on the 'extremist American Right'.

It also included the guy who flew a plan into an office building, Joseph Ray Stack, who protested taxes but was not on the 'extremist American Right'.

It also included career criminal Byron Williams who hates Soros and his lefty network but is just as comfortable with Green Party loon David Icke and 911 truther loon Alex Jones.

Indeed, the most common connection between the listed, so-called extremist right wingers was that they were crazy.

Others made the list mainly because their victims were black or Muslim, as if there is no racism or anti-Muslim feelings on the left or among the apolitical. The list also includes two people who shot up churches (one to kill an abortionist), not an activity usually associated with the Republicans.

Does anyone want to bet me I cannot find 190 violent criminals in any 2 and 1/2 year period in the last 50 years who spouted lefty talking points before or after committing their crime? Here's a partial list of actual lefty political violence in America from 1963 to 2008 and here is the very disturbing partial list of world political murder by leftists during the 20th Century.

Beam, mote, etc.

UPDATE: Here is a good take on the article from Red State.

UPDATE 2: James Taranto also has a lot to say worth listening to on the subject.

UPDATE 3: Roger Kimball has an admirable analysis of the Sirota article and the situation generally. Money quote:

If Timmy McVeigh blows up a government building, says Mr. Sirota, only he is blamed. If Mohammed does it, Muslims are likely to be “collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse).”

What do you think of that argument? I think it’s hooey. For one thing, categories like “white male privilege” are a sort of Leftist version of phlogiston: hypothetical explanatory devices that have the unfortunate attribute of not actually existing. For another, there’s plenty of “collective slander” of Christian fundamentalists (you know, those “bitter” small-towners who “cling to guns or religion”) going around.

Labels: David Sirota, racist idiot