[About Donald Trump:] Trump ended up governing very differently than he talked and maybe that was obvious to some people that got Trump, but it was n… - Coleman Hughes

[About black people being over-represented in criminal statistics:] As any intro stat student will tell you, you've got to control for the confounding variables. Men make up more than 90 % of victims in all these cases whether you're talking about brutality, prison, shot by the cops, or otherwise. Men are of course only 50 % of the population. Just viewing that fact doesn't tell you anyting about anti-male bias per se. It's impossible to not to talk about the underlying facts of racially disparate crime: 13 % of the population commits, and suffers, 52 % of the murders. [...] Virtually all of the disparities [...], show [young black men] in particular, showing up at heavily disproportionate rates and that's a first order problem. The police are coming into contact with young black men far more often as a result. [...] I'm not saying there's no racial bias in police; I think there is. [...] But I don't want to be such a self-flattering backseat driver to the cops whose job it is to actually keep everyone safe, including black and hispanic people, the vast majority of whom do not commit crime even in the most criminal neighborhoods. Virtually every study I've looked at that controls for all of these variables finds no anti-black bias in deadly shootings. Sometimes they find anti-black biases in cops' likelyhood to put his hands on and rough up a suspect and that's very real problem, but there's really no disparity to be found when it comes to a cop's decision to pull the trigger.

People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates.' I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal.

Mainstream media outlets selects for people who make points that feel good, that preach to the choir, that don't involve any statistics because people don't what to hear numbers. Ever. They want to hear short soundbites and maybe, at most, a story. And anyone who wants to get more complex than that is going to find [themselves] relegated to non-mainstream.