Minecraft Creator Markus 'Notch' Persson Eradicated From Splash Text (arstechnica.com) 342
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has removed a trio of references to Markus "Notch" Persson, the creator of Minecraft, from the game's opening menu screen. Random messages known as "splash text" are printed in yellow on this screen, and they used to include "Made by Notch!", "The Work of Notch", and "110813!" (a reference to the day Persson got married), but now all three mentions are gone. Notch is still included in the game's credits, but the change means that Minecraft players will no longer be randomly referenced.
Persson first released the blocky building game in 2009. Five years later, after the game had become a global smash hit, he sold his company Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, giving Redmond ownership of Minecraft. The references to Notch have remained a feature until their removal in this latest patch. They're reported to have been removed both from the original Java edition played on PCs and the legacy console edition used on PlayStation 4. No official rationale has been offered for the change, but Persson has become something of a polarizing figure on Twitter...
Persson first released the blocky building game in 2009. Five years later, after the game had become a global smash hit, he sold his company Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, giving Redmond ownership of Minecraft. The references to Notch have remained a feature until their removal in this latest patch. They're reported to have been removed both from the original Java edition played on PCs and the legacy console edition used on PlayStation 4. No official rationale has been offered for the change, but Persson has become something of a polarizing figure on Twitter...
RedPill (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't want to continue to weather the based red-pilled notch in a predominantly blue-pilled society any longer.
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It is not because the media tells us that "blue pill" is the right way, that the average person actually swallows it.
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Yeah, MGTOW are totally into.. wait, it's in their name. They're into not raping women, even by modern feminist doctrine that all sex is rape.
What misogynists, denying basic participation in rape culture to women.
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Actually there are different kinds of MGTOW, some of whom do have relations with women.
Modern feminism is sex-positive, you are thinking of one radical feminist who didn't actually think men and women should stop having sex, decades ago.
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Nah just the double standards I'd expect from you.
Any non trivial group will have an extremist. You don't like feminists so you essentially paint the extremists as representatives of the whole. But you identify as right wing yet you don't paint the extremists as representative of you.
Just another blowhard with double standards.
What you'll most likely do now is excuse me of something random (because SJW or some such nonsense) and then utterly fall to present any evidence for it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, WTF Slashdot - the politics has gotten nuts. This needs to stop.
The statement "some feminists are sex-negative", true or false, is not trolling.
There is no fucking mod choice on Slashdot for "fact that, if true, makes my political position look bad". OK, I lie, there is: the "Interesting" mod.
If we don't stop this modding-by-politics shit, we will become Digg. And, dammit, we're better than that.
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Well, the email I just received tells me that the two posts I made in this discussion this morning have since received 22 moderations between them, split broadly equal. They're both currently sat at +2 Interesting.
It's an insane level of moderation, especially for two relatively innocuous posts. Oh well.
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Or any other Web2.0 platform (see, I can also use anachronistic name drops)
Re:RedPill (Score:5, Insightful)
I would hardly call Martina Navratilova a "radical." Until about 5 minutes ago, she was considered a popular mainstream lesbian, a moderate feminist, and a darling of the LGBTQ community. Now suddenly, she's being called a Nazi-transphobe "radical" for daring to suggest that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
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Always bringing Nazis into it...
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LOL, it's your side who goes there, not us.
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I dunno, it sure does seem like you are the one bringing it up most of the time, along with the "straight white male" trope that's in your signature right now. You seem kinda obsessed.
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Drink! Amimojo pulls from alt-right playbook! This one's where he switches topics and trying to control the conversation.
Dude. C'mon. Even on Slashdot there have to be limits. You can't go around encouraging people to play the Amimojo drinking game - people will die of alcohol poisoning!
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Only if you think opposing racism and sexism is bad... And by the way you say "I presume" it kinda sounds like you do.
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Do you know what TERF stands or? The "R" is for "radical", as in not part of the mainstream movement.
You know the term itself is new, and derogatory, right? It's what they got called when they were thrown out. As I said, they are no longer part of the mainstream movement because they were thrown out. Their views were perfectly mainstream 10 years ago.
Of course not all feminists are sex-positive, which is how it should be. It's not a church,
You do know that most churches are sex-positive, right? Just "within marriage". Which is how it should be, it's not like a church is a progressive movement where no disagreement is tolerated.
That doesn't make your statement any less false though.
What statement? That there are sex-negative feminists? Who cond
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Marriage is the proven recipe for keeping a community going across generations. There may be other ways that work, but most clever ideas haven't worked out.
I agree, in modern society there's not really anything in it for the man. Seems like a problem to be solved, if you ask me.
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Re: RedPill (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine if more than 50% believed it
That would be crazy, you would end up with Trump as prez and Brexit in Europe
That could never happen...
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Anyone able to translate for people who're not interested enough to understand jargon nor follow the life of some game creator?
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Notch has some incredibly stupid personal ideas about society, backed up by reading a subforum on reddit that is filled with shitty people and creating an echo chamber of "I deserve to get laid by women" instead of treating women like normal human beings. This shitty thinking extends to white nationalism as well, because SURPRISE: most o
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Uhm, there are millions of Africans moving to India.
You probably don't think the surrounding countries took the largest wave of the Syrian refugee crisis either.
As for the "Africans" in the US they didn't exactly go there by choice.
White people "invited" them forcefully.
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Oh yeah, the Chinese are famous for their love of Africans [theguardian.com].
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Marcus has such extreme financial security that he no longer needs to worry about whether he upsets people.
This means that he speaks his mind openly and his views transgress the politically correct viewpoints expected of public figures on social media.
Notably he calls out what he perceives to be silliness and lies when people attack the industry he's helped shape on the topics such as sexism, racism, professional ethics or daring to actually suggest that certain business practices are damaging to customers.
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What he says is bog standard right wing PC & right wing SJW language.
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So ... just the usual internet kindergarden bickering. Gotcha.
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Red Pill is a term used by the "Manosphere" ("MRAs", Incels, etc) to describe their version of the world, which is a reference to an old, classic, movie from decades ago called The Matrix whereby the hero takes a "red pill" and suddenly finds out that the world is fake.
The ironic thing is that a big part of it is that the identity forced on you by your surroundings is fake and instead identity comes from within. This is the compete antithesis of what red pillers seem to believe.
Re watching the matrix 15 ye
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Notch has deplorable views, MS wants to minimize its association with said views.
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/m... [dailydot.com]
HTH
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Translation: He had the temerity to actually publicly admit that he voted for Donald Trump instead of Her Divine Holiness, which makes him racist-sexist-homophobic-puppie-kicking-worse-than-Hitler.
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Your guy won the election. Why are you so incredibly sore about it?
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I hope he didn't. He's not a US citizen.
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"Punch a commie. The only good commie is the one your fist is connecting with right this second. As soon as you're no longer in contact, they are bad again. Help them be good. " - Notch.
"How anyone is still on the left now that they're advocating infanticide and claim walls don't work is a mystery to me." - Notch
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I'm pretty sure the punch a commie remark was a parody of the Left's infamous "punch a Nazi" meme [theguardian.com].
But I'm going to throw out a radical idea here and advocate that it's not okay to go around punching either one.
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Commie, nazi... either way, not something that a multinational mega-corp wants to be seen endorsing.
Re: RedPill (Score:1)
He got paid (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's ok if they do whatever they want with the game. They own it. He's still in the credits and they're not trying to say he didn't make it so... This isn't much of a story. For $2.5 billion you can take my name off my birth certificate, I wouldn't care.
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You could say they used a notch filter.
Are you sure? (Score:1)
For $2.5 billion you can take my name off my birth certificate, I wouldn't care.
Are you sure? Mr. "The Artist Previously Known as 'Anonymous Coward'"
Totalitarians don't like notch (Score:2, Troll)
This is my favorite tweet:
https://mobile.twitter.com/not... [twitter.com]
I wonder if Microsoft is in CYA mode or full totalitarian true believer mode?
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Presumably they've just decided that referencing Notch any more than they are legally-obligated to will bring them more problems than benefits.
So, yeah, CYA mode.
There are going to be a lot of people saying that Microsoft are "pandering to snowflakes" (or whatever the current jargon is) but any time a company "takes a step for more inclusivity" or the like it's only ever been about optics.
They've never really cared about anyone's cause—save their own.
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If it was google, there would be no question. Everyone knows they are true believers.
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Seems unremarkable to me. What secifically are you referring to?
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Seriously why the heck is this modded troll? I presume because I'm not blindly agreeing with the parent, but I've still literally no idea what I even should be agreeing to.
Maybe it's because its referencing some meme I'm not familiar with or perhaps there's some context I am missing due to Twitter's aggressively poor user interface.
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"Totalitarians" (by which I assume they mean "People who are against concentration camps, stealing the children of desperate people, against people being executed because they're the wrong "race", against women being excluded from employment, etc")
This is exactly guilt-by-association. If you’re against censorship and guilt-by-association (definition: people being declared guilty of whatever random thing regardless of the fact that they didn't do that thing) then squiggleslash (and the hate movement squiggleslash is advancing) says you love concentration camps.
The squiggleslash message is: you will obey
If you ever want to make your own decisions or think your own thoughts in the future, you should reject censorship and guilt-by-association and
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You have an over developed sense of something. All I see is someone correcting someone else about their net worth. If that's your favorite tweet then you have an incredibly dull sense of humor.
This doesn't seem to be sticking it to anyone particularly hard.
Seriously why on earth do you think this is such a marvelous tweet.
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Re:I don't like him because he's dabbling (Score:5, Insightful)
in white supremacist rhetoric and memes
Totalitarians like to proclaim guilt-by-association, just like that. Regardless of truth, they proclaim guilt. And if anyone questions them for proclaiming guilt, that makes the questioner guilty too.
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a broader call for working class unity.
That is an aryan brotherhood meme, whether you realize it or not.
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The "Southern Strategy" is a typical Democrat myth - as even the New York Times admits [nytimes.com].
Just look at the fact that the South continued to be run by Democrats for almost 40 years after your supposed switch by racist voters. It must have been one hell of a strategy if it took more than an entire generation to work...
Re:I don't like him because he's dabbling (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't tend to follow Notch and never really enjoyed Minecraft either, but out of curiousity, which rhetoric and memes do you feel he's dabbling in that are white supremacist?
I'm so sick of watching angry white men get taken advantage of while also being dragged down with them.
I would ask 'dragged down with who?' because it's not clear from your post, but instead I'm going to laugh at you dabbling in what is clearly white supremacist rhetoric, whether you realise it or not.
Oops.
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I can't actually find any white supremacist tweets by him mentioned. Crude, yes. Transphobic, certainly. Politically extreme, I would say, given that he accuses 'the left' of promoting infanticide and appears to advocate for violence against them, though he later claimed that one was a joke. But no white supremacy that I can find. He's deleted a lot of tweets though, so I'm going on news coverage.
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You're implying it's not okay to be white. That makes you a racist.
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There's blood in the water and the frenzy is on and you're trying to argue against it with words.
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Surely he was merely being sardonic. Nobody would be stupid enough to interpret "It's ok to be white" as supremacist rhetoric. Would they?
Splash Text (Score:2)
That's actually a typo (Score:1)
It was a reference to a health issue Notch was dealing with at the time, and was supposed to read "open sores"... but English isn't Persson's first language so there you go.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Seriously, does anyone here actually care? If so, why do you care? Do you feel his compensation insufficient for the game?
News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. (Score:5, Informative)
I love Minecraft but Why is this even news??
Founders leave their companies all the time. Is the company under some "moral obligation" to keep a reference to the founder for all perpetuity??
He's still listed in the credits, so who gives a fuck if his name has been removed from the Splash page?
Is Bill Gates listed in the credits for Windows, Excel, Word, etc?
--
The Lie of Judaism: God commanded his children to kill one another.
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"Is the company under some "moral obligation" to keep a reference to the founder for all perpetuity??"
Yes, ask Sid Meier.
Re:News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. (Score:4, Insightful)
I love Minecraft but Why is this even news??
Because it's part of a wider and very worrying trend of tech companies deciding to expunge people from the record for wrongthink.
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Notch is a bit beyond just having unpopular opinions.
He needs some serious psychiatric help and it is probably too late now. He could have used it years ago.
From what I have heard he was a bit "off" even before he started Minecraft but it has really started to show the last few years.
That guy is a nutcase.
Re:News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's part of a wider and very worrying trend of tech companies deciding to expunge people from the record
Oh buddy do I have news for you. None of this is new. Like not even this century new. Companies just vanishing you from all code is pretty par at least since I've been programming (~ late 70s).
wrongthink
Have you read some of his tweets? I mean it's not really important, but have you read some of his tweets? I could maybe understand if he's apologetic about some of them, but nah, he seems totally fine with some choice racial slurs. That being said, he's totally free to say what he wants but Microsoft is free to do whatever they want with the code they bought from him for ~$1B. Do remember he sold his company lock, stock, and barrel to Microsoft so, I think that kind of entitles them to vanish his ass if they so wish it. I think they were leaving it in just to be nice, but ya know, push come to shove. Either way, dude got his money and ran. Now he's on Twitter whining about "injustice". Maybe he's making a pitch to be noticed again? Maybe not. I won't pretend to know what his motives are or if he's truly lost his ever loving mind from all the money (because he does bring up the fact that he's a billionaire quite often on Twitter). It's Microsoft's code, Notch can kick rocks and go say whatever he wants to say. Microsoft still gets to do whatever they want with their code. That's what it means when you completely sell out.
Re:News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
You use the word "wrongthink" like you've read Orwell but, if you have, you've clearly got no fucking idea what he was on about.
1984 is scary because the party is controlling everything you do and changing society so that you can't think any other way.
This is a company ditching an association with someone they don't think fits their brand.
No-one is controlling what Notch is doing. He *literally* sold his right to control what happens to Minecraft.
It's kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting. Everyone involved in this story is exercising their freedom. Notch is still free to say whatever it is he says on Twitter (I don't follow him so I've no idea what it is). MS is still free to say (or not to say) whatever it wants on its software.
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Right and since the book was written by a New Age prophet (see what I did here, he did not live in the time of New Age), everything must be and only be in the way he wrote.
Corporations are not very different from totalitarian states and at some point become indistinguishable.
That's why they need to be regulated, that's why if you love free speech you must love the government that does not allow this sort of thing. Remember another Marx saying that go
Re:News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
i dont think its about expunging.
Minecraft was sold in 2014, so that is 5 years ago. The continued references to Notch as "The Creator" is more and more offensive to the TEAM behind Minecraft today. Notch was responsible for the early days of Minecraft, but we are approaching the break-even point between Notch's cumulative time and the Mojang team's cumulative time.
It's an appropriate point to begin to define Notch's contributions appropriately in context of the total time of Minecrafts existence.
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Wrongthink is exactly the right term.
We should ask ourselves:
Is there any evidence Notch mistreated anyone based on their membership in a 'protected status' group? Any evidence at all? Who was mistreated? What was the date and time? What action did Notch take against this person? What indicates his motive in this incident?
Do any of the people complaining about Notch answer any of these questions?
Should someone who didn’t do anything to hurt anyone be considered guilty?
Notch brought joy to like hal
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Why is that relevant. Do we give passes on behavior just because of other behavior that's good? What's next, "person X saved 20 children from drowning, so here's a gift certificate for 2 free murders?"
Re:News for nobody. Shit that doesn't matter. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is that relevant. Do we give passes on behavior ...
What behavior, specifically, are you talking about? What was the date and time of this behavior? How many people were injured?
Details please. Because if this is just general totalitarian bitching about someone taking offense instead of being cool, then you're damn right Notch should "get a pass" for someone's (opportunistically) hurt feelings for all the millions of people's lives he made a little bit better.
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I honestly don't know what the fuck Notch did. I know that people are upset with him. I also know that you aren't really weighing whether Notch should "get a pass", it's that you don't feel what he's been accused of is important. Which, depending on what he did, may be a defensible position, but has nothing to do with his experience as a game designer.
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Because it's part of a wider and very worrying trend of tech companies deciding to expunge people from the record for wrongthink.
Or maybe they paid $2.5bn for not having to give credit to some dude they no longer care about. .... nah must be some wrongthink conspiracy.
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For 2.5 billion, Microsoft can expunge me all they want.
(That is some fetish thing, right?)
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For $2.5 billion, I'll gladly let Microsoft remove my name from the splash screen.
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If Microsoft gave me even 1 billion, they could use me as the fall guy for all their shitty security and should be illegal business practices. Hell I'll even volunteer to go to prison for a year or so!
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Founders leave their companies all the time. Is the company under some "moral obligation" to keep a reference to the founder for all perpetuity??
It's just a reminder that Notch is a liar. He promised that he would open source Minecraft when he was done with it. Instead, he sold it to Microsoft. I, for one, bought Minecraft while that promise was still on its webpages.
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You are a hateful commie piece of shit. Get lost, asshole.
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Strawmanning /and/ gaslighting? I've outdone myself.
I find it hard to see how Notch is a victim though. He sold the game to Microsoft, willingly giving up control of it. And with 3.7 million followers and a billion in the bank he doesn't seemed to have suffered much.
"Mild irritation" isn't much of a qualification for victimhood.
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> That's a pretty priceless strawman, given that while Bill Gates may have a lot of micromanagement tendencies, he wasn't chiefly responsible for a lot of what made Windows, Excel, Word, etc.
*Facepalm*
1. Joel says otherwise [joelonsoftware.com]
everybody chill out (Score:1)
Microsoft paid 2 billion dollars for this game, they can do that.
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No official rationale offered for the change ... (Score:1)
The REAL question (Score:2)
https://babylonbee.com/news/en... [babylonbee.com]
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The police gun down whoever's in the way. Its not a racial thing
And yet somehow you're far more likely to be gunned down as a black man than as a white man for a 100% identical interaction with police.
Re: Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
. 4,847,887 total violent crimes with a perp group of pers with a single known race.
1,324,270 violent crimes committed by blacks.
2,557,910 violent crimes committed by whites.
307 + 266 = 573 Blacks shot by cops, rate is
584 + 574 = 1158 whites, rate is
Those rates are close enough that I'd say the police are fairly even handed in their brutality, and mostly aren't gun happy. Not even 1 in a thousand violent criminals get shot. Unfortunately, numbers over 3 years shouldn't be directly combined with numbers for 2 years of which only one overlaps, but that's what I've got. 2015 alone has roughtly the same, while 2016 is wildly different. I used to use an older measure of violent crime, because prior to 2017 the last time violent crimes by race were included in the NCVS was 2006 IIRC.
I could go to the UCR, but then I have to limit it to homicides to get race of offender, and relative homicide rates did NOT track relative violent crime rates the last time I checked. The latter is measured by victim surveys, the former is for crimes where the victim obviously can't answer. That doesn't even get into simpson's paradox issues, where certain areas have different crime rates and shooting rates, and it's possible for the overall trend to be magnified OR reversed in every jurisdiction. And of course the fact that counting crimes does not count criminals, since one person can victimize multiple people. And not all violent crimes are the same.
Re: Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Blacks account for 31% of police murder, despite being 13% of the population.
But they're a much greater percentage of "police encounters". People tend to have confrontations with the police in crime-ridden areas. That is not racist per se and more than explains your statistic. You can argue that there's some racist reason that black neighborhoods have more crime, of course.
Re: Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we most certainly can't all agree with that. The vast majority of cops are decent people just trying to do their jobs. Every day they have to deal with some of the shittiest human beings on the planet, so that the rest of us don't have to. And most of them--despite getting regularly beaten, spit on, attacked, screamed at, and threatened by said shitty human beings--will never murder anyone in their entire careers.
You try being a cop for a while and see if YOU can maintain that level of professionalism, loudmouth. It's always easy to play armchair quarterback on every police shooting when you're not the one having to go out there and put YOUR life on the line every single day, isn't it?
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Even if they aren't murdering people, they're still treating us all like cattle to be milked for traffic fines.
And there's no accountability most of the time when police mistreat non-police.
The us vs. them mentality towards non-police needs to end if police want to be supported by the public in the future. Go back to "protect and serve" the public. Protecting and serving police interests only isn't going to work out in the future.
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Happens all the time. Someone has proof the police did something wrong, nothing happens. Zero accountability most of the time.
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Shut up, niggah. You should be taken your broadband welfare.
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They never actually went through with breaking them up the last time, and it is definitely too late now.
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