Lately, in response to some especially violent incidents a trope of Asian oppression and victimization has developed in the media.

This is particularly noticable in New York City where a spate of horrible bashings, knifings and a terrifying subway push murder have taken the headlines. It has been argued that this is a national trend although 60% of the incidents are in NYC where there have been 110 episodes since March 2020.

There is a spike for sure, along with an increase in most crimes here and nationally, but this is from a very low number: perhaps the media have a signal to noise problem.

Far from our society turning against Asian Americans there is no proof that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to pick on Asian people. Each (solved) incident to date has been the act of an individual mad-man rather than any organized group or socially contagious trend, contrary to the going narrative. The criminals all seem to be ranting, frothing (often homeless or very marginal) men. They are just part of the landscape in New York, unexceptional.

Further, anecdotally and by the one available statistic it looks like all the perpetrators are black men (certainly in NYC) bashing Asian people, mainly women. Not white people, thus removing the problem from being a “societal” one: what does that fact do to the Intersectional Magic 8 Ball? Smoke is pouring out of it, I guess.

One of the largest mistakes humans make is seeing patterns in randomness. At the busy, clinical end of this phenomenon is schizophrenia – a specific neurotransmitter dysregulation that has the patient seeing conspiracies and non-existant connections everywhere, but at the normal distribution end it manifests in seeing nonexistent trends where there is only randomness. Cancer clusters and some mass toxic tort actions (Roundup, anyone?) can be examples of this. You can seriously joke that if people came close to understanding statistics and randomness there wouldn’t be a casino industry.

This “patternicity” is a wildly underrated dynamic, a mistake, moving individuals and society in the wrong direction because causality is important.

When it comes to patterns verses randomness I come out in favor of the latter to explain nearly everything, and I mean NEARLY DAMNED EVERYTHING, perhaps this is due to being a former Wall Street trader myself where I’ve seen a lot of loss by mistaking the two. Patterns, with their accompanying narratives, even mistaken ones, are comforting – providing meaning – as few things are as terrifying or as hard to understand as utter randomness. In the light of Covid you might think exponentiality or non-linear dynamics are not well understood generally, well try explaining randomness. Understanding it and the part it plays in reality is an utterly lost cause for most of the humans: a depressing notion surely because it results in a lot of our analysis and all we do based on that analysis being wrong. Big time wrong at best, not even wrong at worst.

This is not to degrade or misunderstand the horror of these crimes individually, random crime is utterly terrifying because by definition we can do almost nothing to defend against it. But this “Asian Hate Crime Wave” isn’t backed up by data: it consists of a few dozen very splashy spectacular crimes which, when presented as a narrative make for a recursive feedback loop for the media to bash on. It results in noisy headlines searching for a story from a small data anormality signifying nothing. A slight spike in crime, a glitch in the victimology isn’t a race war or a concerted pogrom (“WHITE SUPREMACY!”) as is being asserted by the media, and racism itself can at times be the ultimate pattern mistake people and the media make.

Like the witchfinders of our ancestors’ eras, there is a multi-billion dollar D.E.I./D.I.E. (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or Division, Incitement and Exclusion if you prefer) industry pushing similar lines: that “slavery defines America”, “everything is racist” and white people (particularly straight men) are evil. Now, how could there be any blowback against these phony, aggressive, virtue signaling claims? Whatever the blowback mess, and to date that consists of Trump’s MAGA madness, it is sure to land on the doorstep of the minorities the whole edifice is allegedly intended to benefit.

This is not just a signal to noise problem put about by our shamefully stupid media, this is a disaster for the morality and harmony of our country.

Chasing racism, promoting it and its incoherent twin “anti-racism”, defining our “original sin” around it as a religion (see the work of John Mc Whorter or Coleman Hughes) is a lose-lose proposition for all except those making bank selling it. They continue despite actual facts (remember them?) like that D.I.E. “training” is not only useless, but actually counter-productive according to the best psychological reckoning, studies and data for over a decade now. Just like the fact that “microaggressions” are not real but are trendy bunk from a legitimate psychological perspective.

Like this phony anti-Asian pogrom, D.I.E. is good at nothing other than lining the pockets of the Racism Industrial Complex and the arms dealers in this phony race war such as Ibrahim X, Kendi, Robin Di Angelo, Kimberlie Crenshaw, et al. There is HUGE money in pushing this damaging ideology which serves only to divide us. The above bad actors charge tens of thousands an hour to divide us with their unprovable, self referential theories. Here we see the tyranny of the woke minority over a population that either doesn’t care or is cowed into silence lest the bone be pointed at them. After possibly “pedophille”, “racist” is the worst label activists can affix to an individual in our society.

There are university majors dedicated to this divisive ideology and the counter-productive “tools” used to “fix” white supremacy. When you employ witch finders they’ll find witches.

This anti-Asian hate “crime wave” is being turned into a movement by the media while neglecting to explain any system these individual crimes could be a part of. For a bigoted movement to really have legs and motivate people it needs a governing ideology, coherant messaging, and it needs to be believed by a group for the essential in group/out group dynamic to adhere. Even within the vanishingly small white supremacy subculture there is some attempt at ordering their idiotic ideas into a cogent movement: they have websites, propaganda and even airy compounds in Idaho. There is no such anti-Asian “movement”, no more than just random, violently mentally ill nutcases who would be in jail or hospital in a better America.

The anti-Asian pogrom is yet another phony moral panic fed by rent seeking grifters, profiteers and activists who can’t get a real job and their useful idiots. Its “proof” is statistically insignificant, irrespective of the suffering such random madness inflicts on its victims. Were I an Asian woman I wouldn’t be so concerned, no more concerned than a person of any race in America today.