Occam’s Rubber Room
16th September 2015
Steve Sailer is on a roll.
About a decade ago, I coined the term Occam’s Butterknife to characterize the contemporary liberal insistence upon implausibly convoluted explanations.
But now that race man Ta-Nehisi Coates is back with a giant article in The Atlantic about “The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality,” I need a more all-encompassing term to describe this increasingly fashionable rejection of reality. Let’s try: Occam’s Rubber Room.
In “The First Rule of White Club,” I reviewed Coates’ best-selling mini-book Between the World and Me about how as a nerdy child he had been terrified of Baltimore’s black thugs, which, due to redlining by the Roosevelt administration, were all the fault of white people. Or, excuse me, of “people who think they are white.”
Fortunately, The Atlantic’s staffers have edited out of the new article some of Coates’ more eye-rolling verbal tics (such as “black bodies”) and left us with 18,000 words of generic professional magazine prose. In the wake of a swarm of derisive comments citing the abundant statistical evidence that black criminality is no myth that greeted a preview of the article, the title is now “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”