“Community”, 200 Bloor Street East
by Kirk Newman

It’s commonly reported that “despite” the fact that black people make up only about 8.8% of Toronto’s population they represent almost a third of people arrested, charged, and incarcerated.

No, it’s not despite but because … it’s exactly because black people make up 8.8% of the population that the other values follow, not despite. If the black population of Toronto was bigger, that number would be different — it’s a direct causation, the cause followed by the effect.

I’ve gone over this topic again and again, showing how the overtly racist, malevolent, destructive, not to mention violent lies propping up Black Lives Matter twist information to appear exactly opposite to what it actually is.

But who gives a shit about accuracy or context when you’re reporting on people’s lives, right?

Apparently not the media and certainly not the academics producing these reports. It’s almost like they have an agenda that they’re trying to promote…

It’s the same reason why the word “disproportionately” is bandied about with zero explanation. Many people assume that this word means that all the numbers are equally weighted, that numbers of individual human beings are being equally compared to other individual human beings, except this is completely false.

I’ve already described at length how numbers are manipulated to turn them on their head in order to support a false narrative, one that’s subsequently propped up with misleading or technical (and conveniently unexplained) jargon that actual means something entirely different — in this case the diametric opposite — in common usage.

It reminds me of when I started looking into cryptography for the CypherPoker project. I saw a few discussions started by people who had claimed to have come up with “theoretically unbreakable” systems to encrypt, and subsequently decrypt, information.

Without knowing the details of how such systems work, most people would probably accept this claim as possibly being true. Except that in a cryptographic context it makes no sense.

In the academic fields that collectively make up the study of cryptography, the word “theoretically” means “in theory“, or as described in the underlying mathematics. Any encryption that can be shown to be impossible to undo (decrypt) would be “theoretically unbreakable”, which means that once the information is encrypted it can never be retrieved.

Although such a property could be useful (in a hash function, for example), to make the claim that a system is “theoretically unbreakable” and then proceed to describe how encrypted information can be decrypted is completely self-contradictory, even though in common parlance (outside of academia), this is often how the word “theoretically” is used.

The people proposing this “theoretically unbreakable” encryption were nearly universally panned online for their fundamental lack of understanding and seeming lack of even the most basic research.

The proponents should’ve been saying “practically unbreakable”, meaning “in practice” or when attempted in the real world. “Theoretically”, most cryptosystems are breakable (they often have to be), but the good ones are “practically” unbreakable.

In fact, for most such systems the theory includes a description of how long they might take to break if one had access to X number of computers capable of Y number of calculations per second, which demonstrates that no one would be able to break the encryption in any practical amount of time.

A correct understanding of the underlying language can often result in a completely different understanding of the supporting information.

So it should come as no surprise that studies like “Racial Disparity in arrests and charges“, the second of three documents cited as a source for the Ontario Human Right Commission’s “A Disparate Impact” study, makes the claim that black people are “disproportionately” affected by police encounters (with no attempt to explain what that actually means), while the actual numbers — not the misleading proportional percentages — stuffed into reams of tables at the end reveal that the lived reality of individual human beings is completely different.

I was going to post these tables here but there are so many of them that they’d literally go on for pages. I urge you to please have a look and judge for yourself.

You’ll find that with only one or two minor exceptions throughout the data, it’s white people who are overwhelmingly stopped, arrested, and incarcerated by police. When taken in the context of all people (when everyone is considered equally), then it’s white people who are disproportionately affected in nearly every category.

No doubt this is why the Ontario Human Rights Council is so keen on stopping any and all debate about the facts that they themselves present.

The time for debate about whether anti-Black bias exists is over.

Ena Chadha, OHRC interim chief commissioner

Because the last thing that researchers and scientists should be doing is asking questions.

Because debate might cause people to look at the numbers and question why nearly every single one of them runs 180 degrees contrary to the OHRC’s narrative.

Because people might also question why nearly all mainstream media, all levels of government, and the heads of police organizations are goose stepping in synchrony with these lies, misrepresentations, and conveniently missing facts.

It might also bring into question some of the other “systemic racism” charges brought forward by exactly the same people who conveniently jump from one institution and government agency to another to demonstrate just how “widespread” the problem is.

Another constant in this discusionless “discussion” is the regular presentation of statistics based on “self-reported” information. You’ll find this sort of “evidence” in many of the works of Dr. Scot Wortley, the lead researcher behind the OHRC’s reports.

To put this into perspective, consider talking to random teenagers on the street and asking them if they’ve engaged in any illegal activity within the past year. If you found that 90% of respondents said they hadn’t, would you conclude that claims of widespread teen criminality are therefore provably false?

I would be a little loathe to draw such conclusions if there wasn’t some sort of actual scientific evidence showing that teenagers generally don’t lie, but this is apparently where Dr. Wortley draws the line. A handful of aggrieved black people complain about their interactions with police, therefore the police are racist, therefore systemic racism, therefore white equals racist. Q.E.D., no debate allowed.

It’s precisely because this sort of flimsy, unreliable, and sometimes outright fraudulent “research” that has given rise to something called the replication crisis, a problem most prevalent in precisely the types of study that Dr. Wortley is engaged in.

In a nutshell, for a theory to be considered valid it must be independently reproducible; other scientists should be able to produce the same results if they follow the same methods. If not, there’s a major problem!

In the social “sciences”, the lack of replication or reproducibility is getting increasingly worse with each passing year. In fact, it would be accurate to say that a lot of the so-called research requires a good dose of ignorance, gullibility, and blind faith to be believed because other people carrying out the same experiments will often produce startlingly different results. But that requires skepticism and questions.

Imagine buying a light bulb that was claimed to “work everywhere” but in reality only lit up when screwed into one specific socket in the manufacturer’s testing facility — that’s the level of “science” at work here.

Personally I’d call that a fraud but if you prefer the word “lie” I won’t argue with you — the conclusion drawn is the same either way.

Part of my regular morning routine includes scanning some of the dailies to see what’s been happening while I’ve been asleep. I tend to focus on news produced internationally because not only is local (i.e. Canadian) news irretrievably biased, it’s also woefully myopic. If I relied on them exclusively to tell me what’s happening around the world I’d be a very dull boy indeed.

But occasionally there’s an article, like the one in today’s Toronto Star, that inadvertently provides enough entertainment value to be worth a read.

Here we’re introduced to the work of the Founders Fund (not to be confused with the Founders Fund), a business incubator “by women, for women”.

At the outset it’s important to note that I take absolutely no issue with ladies supporting each other to build business. In fact, I think it’s great!

It sucks that a similar men-for-men organization would be screamed out of existence, this despite the fact that the growing inequality gap means that nearly as many men might also be helped out of increasingly abject poverty, not to mention increasing obscurity, but I don’t want to dwell on that.

What struck me as funny is the liberal use of words like “diversity” and “inclusivity” in the literature of the organization.

Really? Overtly excluding roughly half of the earth’s population is “diverse” and “inclusive”? I must be using the old, non-woke dictionary here.

I had to chuckle when I read that the fund (which keeps 50% of its members’ fees), supports “women-identifying entrepreneurs”. So it’s not just biological women who can apply for funding, it can also be any dude who’s willing to throw on a dress and call themselves a lady.

Honestly, though, that sounds pretty damn sexist.

Why would women need to wear dresses and even “act like a lady” to be considered women? I would expect that any guy walking into the Founders Fund offices claiming to be a woman, no matter how “cisnormative” and stereotypically masculine they may seem, would be considered for funding. Surely no one else, including any medical professional, has the right to override one’s self-identification.

It’s a funny corner this exclusively “inclusive” mindset has painted itself into.

The Star article goes over some of the types of businesses that are being supported by the Fund, such as Alder Apparel, which has chosen to focus on the apparently dismal dearth of “functional and fashionable women’s outdoor clothing”. A quick Google search seems to suggest otherwise but I’ll be the first to admit that the subjective world of fashion mostly escapes me so I could definitely be wrong there.

Although a number of prominent images on Alder’s site, not to mention many of those that appear in their extended image galleries, appear to feature traditional “thin, white and athletic” models (an image that Alder claims to be challenging), there’s a handful of differing body types and races on display so, I guess, racist patriarchy smashed?

The Founders Fund has invested in other ventures such as a pricey panic-attack app (which prior to the funding had for some reason somehow excluded “Black, Indigenous and people of colour communities”), athletic hijabs, something called a “a family mealtime experience”, a company that produces “gender-inclusive underwear for people ‘who defy gender norms.'”, and my contextual favourite, a “peer-based program to enhance students’ critical-thinking skills.”

Not mentioned is the fact that both the Fund and Alder, perhaps others, seem to be connected to Shopify, the same Ottawa-headquartered company that provided the building blocks for the government’s contact-tracing app.

I wonder if that “critical-thinking” program will touch on some of these subjects. Oughta be a hoot.

There’s a lot of news happening around the world and it’s simply not possible to cover it all. That’s understandable.

And even though some of that news is tragic, only a handful of it can possibly make the front page. I get it.

Every news outlet is (supposed to be) different and editorial decisions that include which stories to run will necessarily produce a bias. That’s fair.

Or at least it would be fair if there was even a hint of balance between the outlets. It would be fair if there was an occasionally alternative voice, if they weren’t all in lock-step, pushing forward a very obvious agenda.

Case in point: everyone remembers Treyvon Martin, the young black man whose name we’re all supposed to perennially keep on our lips, killed by a “racist white man” in Florida in on his grandmother’s front lawn after going out to buy some Skittles.

For a brief moment the media reluctantly wavered in their “racist white man” tirade when pictures of the killer began circulating. Turned out that, if anything, he was Hispanic or Latino. The story wouldn’t have been any better if Treyvon had been killed by a green Martian but the point I’m trying to make is how it was immediately spun into a “yet another racist white man kills an unarmed, innocent black child” narrative.

The brief moment was followed by renewed attempts attempts to paint George Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic“, as idiotic as that sounds. But if race is based on physical characteristics and ethnicity is based on culture and upbringing, as the increasingly absurd news kept promoting, then surely “Latino Catholic” would be far more accurate. Or since Catholicism is widely understood to have been founded in what is now Italy, maybe his ethnicity should be Italian? And since his mother is Peruvian and undoubtedly injected some of her culture into his upbringing, wouldn’t it have made sense to call him Hispanic? How about “Latino Hispanic-Italian”?

Come to think of it, it’s absurd to call someone a Latino Hispanic if they have Latino racial characteristics and Hispanic cultural roots, but this precisely the lengths that the media insist on to ensure that their narrative of a murderous “racist white Hispanic” (emphasis on “white”), is maintained.

And what kind of fucked up demarcation are we supposed to engage in to determine when someone has sufficiently “Latino” (or “Black”, or whatever), physical characteristics? Who gets to decide, and on what basis, who qualifies as predominantly black or Latino or white or Asian or Indigenous, and how is this not unbelievably racist and segregationist?

Yet this is precisely what the incoherent media demand, all so they can continue the narrative that yet another “racist white man” killed an unarmed, innocent black child.

And it was this completely false and ridiculously twisted narrative that spawned the Black Lives Movement which aims, ostensibly, to end “systemic” racism against black people, especially in the context of the police.

Except Zimmerman is neither white nor a cop. And the “stand your ground” laws that Zimmerman successfully used to get away with it aren’t mentioned at all by BLM.

But why should that matter when yet another “racist white man” kills an unarmed, innocent black boy?

Let’s contrast this against a very recent murder in North Carolina in which a 25-year-old black man walked up to a 5-year-old white boy playing in front of his house, put a gun up to his head, and literally executed him in front of his two young sisters.

The handful of US news outlets that bothered to report on this were careful to include “allegedly” in the headlines (was Zimmerman described as the “alleged” killer?), and made sure to remind their audience that the motive for the murder was unclear (flip the skin colours and it’s instantly “racism”, case closed).

Here in Toronto you won’t find a single mention of this story anywhere.

I searched CityNews, CBC News, Global News, the Toronto Star, National Post, Globe and Mail, and Toronto Sun, and although there’s an occasional article about racist (i.e. white) North Carolina cops being fired, apparently the news out of the same state of a little white boy being brutally murdered on his front lawn in front of his sisters by a black man simply isn’t worthy of even a mere mention. Is that because the victim is white or because the perpetrator is black? Maybe a little of both.

But none of this is new.

Everyone’s heard of Treyvon Martin and the immediate rage that followed his death but who’s even heard of Cannon Hinnant?

Everyone knows about George Floyd, maybe not so much about his less-than-angelic past, and who has any idea of who Timothy Coffman was? Where’s the outrage and protests for Corey West? What about Tony Timpa?

Everyone remembers Rodney King but who remembers Reginald Denny?

Due to sheer numbers, there are bound to be far more examples of these kinds of things happening to white people than to black people. The way these incidents are constantly ignored by the media, onlookers, and society in general, goes a long way in explaining why we simply don’t hear about them and why examples of such injustice, when black people are victims, flood every media channel out there.

I’m not suggesting that it’s acceptable when black people (or anyone!) are brutalized, what I’m asking is why similar incidents are nearly completely ignored when the much more numerous victims are white?

And who bothers to mention that in the US, white hate crime victims outnumber victims of anti-semitism, anti-Islamism, or anti-LGBTQ-ism, often by a large margin. The media go to great lengths to make it seem that the exact opposite is true. In fact, behind black people, white people are the second most likely group to be hated on of any racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation group — as long as every individual is considered equally.

And even though they occupy the number one position for hate crime victims, black people are only slightly less likely to be hit by lightning (0.0002% = 1 ÷ 500,000), than they are to be the victim of a hate crime (0.0007% = 2,325 ÷ 328,200,000 total US population).

The overall numbers are minuscule no matter how you look at them, yet hate crimes against everyone except white people are regularly played up in the media. Why is that?

And to what lengths will the media go to defend, justify, and “explain” violence against a white person when they would balk at even the hint of a suggestion that a black person be criticized and analyzed in the same way?

When they claim that they want to “dismantle white supremacy”, are they advocating that everyone simply be left to their own devices or that it be replaced with the dominance of another group? Has anyone bothered to ask this question?

Don’t even get me started on the constantly evolving definition of what constitutes “white privilege” which now is supposed to mean how a white person’s life isn’t made more difficult because of the colour of their skin. I can write at length on this topic with plenty of personal, first-hand experiences of exactly how my life was made more difficult specifically, directly, and very openly because I’m white (and a man). I bet plenty of other white people have similar experiences to share, at least until it’s decided to shift the definition again.

Despite the daily avalanche of examples we see demonstrating something entirely different (I’m working my way through a detailed write-up about the OHRC’s latest road apple), we’re supposed to believe that black people are being “systematically targeted for demise” (according to BLM), and being oppressed by “white supremacy” and “white privilege” everywhere.

In the words of Jeanie Bueller, “dry that one out and you can fertilize the lawn.”

I took a trip to a local grocery store this morning to get some coffee and bread. I was surprised to see a line formed outside of the front doors, similar to ones we’ve seen not so long ago.

“That’s weird,” I thought as I peeked into the seemingly empty store expecting it to be visibly busy, so I asked the security guard why people were being held back.

He told me that there were only two cashiers working and that the lines to pay were causing unacceptable congestion. I couldn’t tell if this was true from outside so I just shrugged my shoulders and plodded back into line.

My little detour managed to lose me a few spots so I ended up waiting for an additional 10 minutes, not because the line was long but because the tiny trickle of people leaving/entering was excruciatingly slow.

In all, roughly 5 people had left by the time I got inside the spacious store. Not exactly the deluge that I was given as a reason for being kept outside in the first place. But maybe the crowd was inside, away from view?

Nope.

As I circled the store there I counted no more than 30 people inside, and no one at the checkouts. There was only one entrance / exit so unless these “long lines” spontaneously de-materialized into thin air, where did all of the shoppers disappear to?

I got a sort-of answer to my question when I strolled up to pay for my purchases at the still-completely-empty checkout. (This is not an exaggeration, there were literally no people in line).

I told the cashier that people were being made to wait outside based on a claim that the store, or at least the cashiers, were crowded. Except … where were all the people?

She turned to me and with a heavy, sputtering Filipino accent said, “only have two cashiers working so need to limit lines. Too many people!”

“Yeah, I already heard that. But what lines?”

“Would you like bags, sir?” she replied, seemingly ignoring my question.

I leaned in and made an obvious show of looking around to try to spot these imaginary “lines” of people, then asked again, “what lines?”

She stared at me blankly for a moment, as if the question had overloaded her brain, and only managed to blurt out “bags?” a second time before turning away. Didn’t even wait for my response.

I decided to ask one more time. “I’m sorry, what lines are you talking about? Was it very busy earlier?”

She turned around and, once again seemingly ignoring the obvious revelation that she and store security had been shoveling bullshit, cocked her head to the side with noticeable annoyance (I guess at having to hold up the throngs of invisible people waiting behind me), and asked once again if I wanted bags.

I decided to drop the questions. I knew it wasn’t a language barrier; she’d already used the same words I had. This was possibly an example of cognitive dissonance on full display. Or maybe it was a form of genuine mental illness in which she was hallucinating long lines of people where there were none. Maybe this was what life is like in the government’s “new reality”.

This could almost be a humorous anecdote if it wasn’t so indicative of the general public’s unwillingness / inability to see the reality that’s quite literally right in front of them.

When the police or military brutalize them, kick in their house doors, or violently pull them out of their cars for staying out too late or not obeying the newest set of arbitrary government dictates, as is being done in Australia (be sure to read the last few paragraphs!), a virtuous example being promoted here in Canada, these same people will ostensibly deny that what they’re experiencing actually exists. And we can be certain that this won’t be the result of a philosophical inquisition into the nature of reality.

It’s hard to know when a line has been crossed when that line doesn’t even exist.

Everyone knows that Black Lives Matter. Duh.

But due to racism and slavery and etc. there’s a question that no one is willing to ask: just how much do Black Lives Matter?

Well, thanks to the investigative work of some local newspapers we can finally answer that question!

Gird your loins … the results will startle you.

Before I get into it I want to clarify that in a previous OFTA post I made it seem like individual lives shouldn’t matter, that only group-based averages that flip the numbers on their (correct) head were worth considering. Clearly, that was my confused white supremacy talking. It doesn’t fit in with the Black Lives Matter messaging and could be construed as cold, callous, and dismissive (not to mention racist!), so I’m changing the narrative — individual (Black) lives do matter!

The two sources I used for this include a very recent study by the CBC and a similar, albeit more limited, study by CTV.

Both make sure to highlight the fact that Black and Indigenous people are far more likely to be killed by police (when various mathematical transformations are applied), so we can be fairly certain that the numbers aren’t skewed to support some racist (i.e. white) narrative. The CTV study even quotes Norm Taylor, an expert on Indigenous policing, who describes the numbers as “staggering” and “shocking”, so you know it’s totally balanced and unbiased.

Are your loins sufficiently girded? Here are the numbers…

These numbers are pretty much the same whether the people killed were armed or unarmed but before you go off making ignorant assumptions, it’s important to be reminded that in both tables all lives are given equal weight within the total Canadian population which is, of course, unbelievably racist.

And in case you thought that challenging popular suppressed information was somehow noble or enlightening, here’s an asshole white supremacist with the caucasity to preach about his own non-status-quo “research” (i.e. hate), even going so far as to compare Black People’s experiences to his own (!):

What an ignorant fucking racist piece of shit, huh?

The important take-away from all this is that, obviously, Black Lives Matter anywhere from an estimated 4 to 6 times more than white lives, depending on the numbers used. This explains why when a Black Person is killed by cops it results in mass demonstrations and round-the-clock media coverage, and conversely when a white person is killed, well, who gives a fuck.

In the words of BLM Toronto co-founder Yusra Khogali:

“Plz Allah give me the strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today. Plz plz plz.”

After posting this irate retort to hateful whites who question the scientifically established primacy of Black People, understandable since clearly her Black opinion matters about 4 to 6 times more than theirs, this brave young woman also hijacked a Pride parade to remind everyone of the (now mathematically derived!) superiority of Black Lives. In a clever twist she was subsequently awarded a Leadership award by the mayor, thus demonstrating just how deep systemic racism runs.

Despite her understandable rage, she’s since somehow managed to tone down her approach to just calling white people “subhuman genetic defects” (do I smell another award?!), but it seems she’s finally getting her positive, inclusive, peaceful message across: Black Lives Matter … considerably more.

/sarcasm mode off

Why does this seem to be so regularly and easily glossed over?

White people are overwhelmingly killed by police throughout North America when compared to all other ethnic groups. The numbers, the individual people killed, are there in all the stark statistics. Then they’re deeply massaged by proportional calculations which I’m sure have their uses and provide useful information, but do these calculations outweigh the importance of individual human lives? Not to me.

And wouldn’t it be nice if this was at least part of the discussion?

My intention with this is not to diminish but to raise. Why is it so awful to suggest that all lives matter? By that I mean, literally, every one. Is it because it “misses the bigger picture“? (note the linked report which further confirms my points regarding “proportional” calculations)

I’ve looked at the bigger picture, as suggested, and my conclusion is that the story being told is not an honest one. It’s a distortion of the bigger picture, one that hides individual human lives behind equations. Or is that preferable?

It makes my blood boil to see anyone being brutalized by the state. I believe that the history of posts on this blog will back up this position in multiple ways. Should I care more, or less, about the victims because of the colour of their skin? Fuck that shit — the evidence doesn’t fit. I don’t think it ever has.

MannLab, 330 Dundas Street West
(previously the pink worm place)