72 Comments
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Sage Alfields's avatar

Loss of social prestige.

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Steve Sailer's avatar

African Americans got more prestigious from 2015 to 2020.

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Sage Alfields's avatar

Did they though? They got attention, sure; but attention for what? Being victims, being incapable of avoiding criminality. Compare pre-BLM Obama, which was untainted with such associations.

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barnabus's avatar

Your view is not that of people with affinity to DEI - so you can't speak for them

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prosa123's avatar

According to his girlfriend Kneeland had a history of mental health issues.

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Josehdgallagher's avatar

I suspect this may primarily be CTE related rather than other sociological factors. Note the recent shooting at Blackstone's NY HQ by a very young football player claiming to have CTE.

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Damon Pace's avatar

A far too easy and lazy response. Every time a football player does something criminal, then CTE is the automatic answer. If CTE was the answer for football players, then we would’ve seen Terry Bradshaw, Chris Collinsworth and Troy Aikman on the crime blotter by now, but we haven’t. After all, based upon your logic, CTE leads players to do criminal acts, right?

Sometimes, these players are as bad people. Just look Antonio Brown, presently with attempted murder charges over his head. This dude has a history of bad behavior, but teams pretty much swept it under the rug until his talent started to fade. Nothing about his behavior has to do with CTE at all. He’s just as asshole.

It has been reported that this young man suffered from mental illness. That seems the most likely answer. Killing oneself after a minor traffic incident involving the police definitely seems like what a crazy person would do.

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air dog's avatar

Easy, lazy, and also wrong. CTE sufficiently advanced to produce such extreme behavior is rare in players as young as 24.

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Barnard's avatar

Exactly right. They have been coddled and showered with attention since 10-12 years old for most of them. It wouldn't apply to this case, but I thought in some others, most notably Junior Seau, the drastic falloff in attention and praise from the public was the biggest factor. Blaming everything on CTE just absolves them of responsibility for their behavior and gives trial lawyers a big target to pursue.

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Kenneth A. Regas's avatar

When Junior Seau killed himself, it was a gunshot to the heart almost certainly to save his brain for post-mortem study, which his family pursued. There was indeed extensive damage. Here's a link:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/junior-seau-suffered-chronic-brain-damage-nih-study-finds/

Seau was an inspiring figure in life, a tragic one in death.

Ken

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Barnard's avatar

I am aware Seau did that, I am sure he desperately wanted to blame his problems on CTE and not on any personal contribution he made to them regardless of how true it was. My comment still stands, these guys get worshipped by the public for years, are rarely held accountable for any of their personal failings and then one day they wake up, can't play anymore and find themselves quickly forgotten about. That's a bigger problem for them to navigate, CTE is most likely a small contributor to it.

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zinjanthropus's avatar

Sounds like someone has a guilty conscience, but it isn't Seau.

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zinjanthropus's avatar

Seau was still getting a lot of attention when he killed himself, and had severe CTE. Not somebody I'd pick if I was trying to minimize the impact of CTE.

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barnabus's avatar

Most people with CTE - chronic traumatic encephalopathy - don't do crime. Anyway, killing oneself after a minor traffic incident could be due to being unbalanced. But it doesn't need to be crazy as psychotic. It can simply be to have no-one talking to one on a regular basis. Many incels are like that.

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JMcG's avatar

No one has ever said no to these guys. That’s not good for anyone.

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zinjanthropus's avatar

CTE is the result of repeated head trauma. There is no reason to suppose that Bradshaw, Collinsworth, or Aikman would suffer from CTE at the same rate as somebody like Mike Webster.

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Kathleen Lowrey's avatar

From what I have read that young man was a heavy marijuana user, which for sure can induce mental illness and paranoid ideation. Self-diagnosis as having CTE from someone who thinks "so I should go shoot some people" vs "so I should get a medical checkup" is not really rock solid even if the pot reports are wrong.

I wonder what the toxicology report from Kneeland will indicate.

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Bill Price's avatar

Same reason their birth rate is down: increased secularism/lower religiosity.

Blacks lagged whites in this trend but they're catching up.

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Grey Squirrel's avatar

Well yeah. It's just like hicklibs following in the footsteps of NYC libs or metal music being big in Japan in the 90s. The SWPL's set the tone and minorities etc follow afterward.

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Arthur Sido's avatar

black social media is a cesspool of wallowing in self-pity, everyone is out to get them, etc. Couple that with their nihilistic "music" and it is no wonder they are depressed.

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barnabus's avatar

Self-pity is very bad in terms of facilitating suicidal ideation.

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zinjanthropus's avatar

Black suicide is still way lower than white suicide.

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Arthur Sido's avatar

Yes thank you for that completely irrelevant comment.

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zinjanthropus's avatar

It’s relevant that blacks, despite allegedly cesspoolish social media, are less depressed and commit suicide less often than whites.

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John Wheelock's avatar

Pretty depressing, as all I could find was “traffic violation” for why he was pulled over. Also, his father is currently incarcerated and his girlfriend is pregnant.

Ugh. Seems like more of a mental health issue than a gangsta mentality. I think Steve has written in the past about higher rates of paranoia and schizophrenia among Black Americans. Insinuating that the police are always out to get them definitely doesn’t help these matters.

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Ralph L's avatar

Increased pot usage and gambling? Can steroids lead to depression, as some anti-depressants can for some people?

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michael mitchell's avatar

Read the NYT article. There's a story there, somewhere. But the Times totally missed it.

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I thought so's avatar

Internalized black fatigue. They're sick of their own bullshit.

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Erik's avatar

Is it still below the white rate? Perhaps blacks are doing better economically and reaching some level of middle class that is banal and depressing. We assume that doing well economically would make you happier but I have heard that people with more struggles might be less depressed. Perhaps middle class lifestyle gives you too much time to brood and without real problems to distract you, you end up following a chain of logic that leads to the pointlessness of existence.

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Dorkwad's avatar

Wealth also pulls you out of the black community in which you grew up. The rapper Tupac said that once he became wealthy and moved to a fancy neighborhood, he suddenly realized that he was the only black guy.

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Erik's avatar

Social isolation. It would be helpful to know more demographic information about the incremental suicides.

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Tina Trent's avatar

Untrue. He stayed in the elite black Atlanta community. His aunt is famous terrorist Assata Shakur, rescued from rendition by Obama for killing scores of police by escaping to Cuba, with assist from the Weather Underground. He lived in wealth and was embraced by one of the most tight-knit, blackest, and successful communities in the country, from politicians to criminals, DeKalb County, which is the east half of Atlanta. With Assata as his relative, he moved in Atlanta's majority-minority music industry his whole life. They built a community center in his name where he grew up. Of course graft from Cynthia McKinney's crew has it decaying and shuttered now. He has only himself and his stupid criminality for his death. He was tight here.

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Dorkwad's avatar

Interesting, thanks!

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walter condley's avatar

Are you sure you have this history right? AI says Assata Shakur only lived in GA in 1971, which was the year Tupac was born.

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Max West's avatar

Here's a theory: Endless stories of their ubiquitous victimhood make the purported victims unhappy. The race narrative began to get louder with Obama, especially near the end of his term Hence the upward curve.

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Kathleen Lowrey's avatar

The very widespread use of marijuana is a giant societal disaster for young people in the U.S. and Canada. I wonder if it plays a role in this unfortunate rise in suicide.

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Chance Johnson's avatar

The social costs of alcohol are enormously higher. It's not even close.

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Kathleen Lowrey's avatar

Sure because many more people drink

But younger people are drinking less (great) and getting high much much much more (not great)

And this suicide pattern is a new pattern so new phenomena are likely to be more explanatory / relevant

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Chance Johnson's avatar

No. Look at the statistics. Alcohol causes more social damage PER CAPITA.

Do you imagine black potheads don't drink alcohol with their weed? They do.

“suicide pattern is a new pattern so new phenomena are likely to be more explanatory / relevant” of course, but this does nothing to help your case. There are SO MANY new phenomena.

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Dorkwad's avatar

Also marijuana exacerbates schizophrenia and black people have higher susceptibility to schizophrenia to begin with. Pity the Rastafarian mother.

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..'s avatar

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364645/

Weed feels like a potential cause, but Jamaican blacks have low rates of suicide. Maybe the combo of new marijuana strains and THC everything is a worse combo than stereotypical rasta potheads?

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AnotherDad's avatar

"Discredited theory of eugenics"

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AnotherDad's avatar

> Marshawn Kneeland spent nearly all of his 24 years working to get to the N.F.L. He died two days after scoring his first touchdown. <

Yawn. Anyone else get tired of this whole line of melodramatic scribbling?

It's not like the guy spent his youth working to quantize gravity, or to become a medical doctor or even just be an ordinary productive citizen. His "job" is grabbing other guys and slamming them to the ground for entertainment. And then he ends up digging himself a hole--completely unnecessarily--and--completely unnecessarily--shooting himself.

There's no tragedy here. There's not much of anything. Just lowlife stupidity.

If there is a lesson it would be "a civilized nation requires quality people".

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Tina Trent's avatar

Athletes are very disciplined and work very hard.

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Guest007's avatar

Being a starting football player in college is a full time job outside of being a student even at a place like Western Michigan.

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ScarletNumber's avatar

Being a starting football player in college is a full-time job outside of being a student even at a place like William Paterson College. Even at that level the coaches don't fuck around as they are eyeing their next gigs as well

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ScarletNumber's avatar

O/T

I really should stop using twitter because it's such a timesuck but it's so entertaining that I can't help myself. In the latest controversy Steve's hero Laurence Summers may have finally committed the ultimate unpardonable sin: Being friends with Jeffrey Epstein. However, coming to his defense is none other than Richard Hanania. Now, I am no fan of Hanania, but I will give him credit for this: He will gladly stake out an unpopular position and defend it to the death no matter how unpopular it is.

Hanania is currently saying that there is nothing wrong with adult men finding 17-year-old girls physically attractive. Now there is a certain segment of the online population that loves finding age-gap relationships to be problematic and love throwing the word p3do around, so they are really piling on Hanania. Since I'm pseudonymous here I will say this: While I currently teach middle school, I have taught high school before; believe me when I tell you that some of those girls are full-fledged women physically, even if they are nominally underage. One of my former students is majoring in marketing at the University of Miami and during the school year she works as a yacht girl. Now during the summers she comes back to New Jersey works internships at major companies you have heard of and she will graduate into a marketing role soon enough, but as for now she makes her money wearing a bikini and looking pretty. I will say that even when she was 16 she was stunning pretty, but in her high school yearbook her middle school picture was included and I didn't recognize her nose 🤣

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Tina Trent's avatar

How brave of anonymouse you. It makes me seriously question you honesty, especially with your keeping in touch (stalking) these girls you taught as children, and the creepy details you offer about their desirability. I researched nonprofits for decades as a writing job. You know who were board members for the most sleazy and prestigeous nonprofit in NYC? Epstein and Weinstein. They chose to focus on junior and high school programs (just like you) -- with that fellow scuzzy board member Katie Couric, who is now desperately backpeddling to deny her involvement with them. But it's on record. Just like you should be, pal. I wouldn't want my daughters around you. Sicko.

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ScarletNumber's avatar

LinkedIn is commonly used by college students. Also, Weinstein was railroaded

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ScarletNumber's avatar

> the cops stopped pulling over black bad drivers a few days after May 25, 2020

During COVID they stopped pulling over the white drivers as well and I'm not sure if those rates ever rebounded. Here in New Jersey Route 21, which connects Newark and Paterson, is a free-for-fall, especially at night but even in the middle of the afternoon there is unnecessary weaving at high speed in cars low to the ground.

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