Any time you measure people, someone will be the best and someone will be the worst. In a list of the greatest geniuses of all time, someone will be last on that list. It is all relative.

Imagine that in the year 2000, every country in the world had an annual murder rate of 100 for every 100,000 people. And, this being bad, every country tried their best to improve things. Come 2020 and the rates varied from 50 to 5, with every country making great improvements. The country on 50 however is demonised as being the worst. Doesn’t matter if they got it down to 1, if they were still the worst, they were the worst.

The guy who runs a 4-minute mile today is regular…

When we lack absolute scores for what is good or bad, acceptable or not, then we easily fall into the trap of demonising the worst.

Weirdly, the US has an obsession with race. Cops calling in something will say gender, age, weight and race. The US has a lot of race based statistics…

If we look at homicide rates by race and gender, blacks are clearly the worst offenders.

So it is easy for a white person to say there is something wrong with Hispanics, Indians and Blacks, because they murder so much more.

Yet American Asians are only half as murderous as whites!

One group is always the best and one group is always the worst.

Unless we define what is acceptable, then demonisation will occur. If there was only 10 murders per century, and 3 were committed by Blacks, is that a problem? If not, where is the line?