Guest post: Every self-deception was multiplied
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on How DO we put up with it?
Most murdered? Come off it. One look at official homicide statistics should put that to rest, but activists are actively hostile to data. Just as with the religious, statistics and math and facts are not how they came by their beliefs in the first place. Remember, “If your original Hebrew disagrees with my original King James — your original Hebrew is wrong. If your original Hebrew agrees with my original King James, your original Hebrew is right.”
They’ve heard the idea that trans people are being murdered and denied basic rights at a terrifying rate. They’ve heard it a lot. As Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory.” Because they so easily recall claims of the dire straits of trans people, they are absolutely certain that any stats showing a contrary scenario are false. And now everyone they talk to treats the claim as obviously true.
Whether due to the company they keep or social media siloing, they’ve heard it about trans people more than any other group, and everyone they interact with is of like mind. As Albert Speer wrote:
… in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich, there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.
Nullius, this is too true. I have a relative who is totally immersed in trans culture, and has declared himself a woman. He cannot hear anything other than what the trans are saying, and everything becomes multiplied. I think they have some coefficient by which they multiply every murder to bring it to the desired murder rate…and they totally ignore the multiple risk factors of those trans who are murdered…most of them black, women, and prostitutes, all groups with much higher murder rates than trans, suggesting that the murder could be for some other reason. Or those that are ordinary domestic violence of a partner who didn’t mind that they were trans, but managed to get pissed off about something enough to murder their partner (much like women have to deal with every day – validation? Of a particularly dismaying kind.)
Meanwhile, any actual statistics get filed away as “hate speech”, lumped in with Rush Limbaugh, or otherwise diminished in value, making them go away. Every data point that shows violent behavior in trans can be “not really trans”, just as people doing violence in the name of Christianity are “not really Christian”.
Lots of ways to avoid unpleasant realities. I usually just prefer a glass of wine and a hot bath. The realities are still there, I just don’t care anymore.
iknklast, I wish I had something pithy and comforting and hope-inspiring to say to that, but …
I don’t. Aside from the fact that humanity yet abides, there’s little to bring solace or succor in the face of mounting madness. When the horror grows too much to bear, I turn to fiction and myth, for at least that gives me a picture of what people could be and damn well should be. Sadly, even that has been corroded by the universal solvent that is our new secular religion. When I look at the state of our modern mythologies, like Dr. Who and Star Trek and Star Wars, I see corporatized deconstructions produced as offerings to the genderfluid godxs of intersectionality, bereft of the universality that made them mythic. No longer do they provide models that connect us to and place us within a morally and emotionally significant universe. Now they are nothing, devoid of meaning beyond the overt and superficial.
But hey, wine and whisk(e)y are still tasty. So is cheese. Let us put aside thoughts of nihilism’s ultimate victory. Let us instead eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!
In the video linked to above in “actively hostile to data” the guy who’s harrassing the protesters says that more whites are killed by the police than blacks. The data I found (for the US) shows nearly twice as many whites are killed in numbers, but since blacks make up only 13-14% of the population, and whites 73%, blacks are killed by police *per capita* roughly 2.7 times more often than whites. The data is clear if you get the math right. So the guy in the video may show the protesters being hostile to data, but the particular data he is using is fucking wrong, and he’s harrsssing them with it. I’d be hostile too, and probably belligerent. I see this ‘whites-are-more-blah-blah’ bullshit argument pretty often, and it’s always someone with an agenda ignoring per capita rates. The ‘conservative twins’, Trump himself, and others on the right have parroted this disinformation, and it hints at their agenda, doesn’t it. But it’s a bad argument just like any other bad argument.
Look at that Ami dude in the video, it’s like he’s saying “more whites prefer ice cream to brussels sprouts.” Right, stupid, because there are more whites. He also cites the WaPo as his source, but they also had a per capita caveat in that article, so I guess he stopped reading after he saw his ‘more-whites-blah-blah’ confirmation.
I would agree that the trans-cult and other protesters (not to mention the devout) who won’t deviate from their dogma are hostile to data, but there is so much bullshit ‘data’ out there.
The title of that video too — “all stats matter” is akin to those who think “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” is a slam dunk response to BLM, when all it does is deliberately miss the point. The people who I have heard utter the words “all lives matter” were dismissive and unwilling to debate the issue. That sort of inflexibility of thought is pitiable.
The “activists actively hostile to data” video shows the guy stating stats that, when black people are killed by police officers, the majority of police officers doing the killing are black, and therefore the killings are not done on the basis of race. I’m not certain the conclusion follows from the data, assuming the data are accurate. It might mean that black police officers are biased against black citizens they encounter, just as much as any other police officers. The salient claim is that police officers are racially biased, not that white officers are the only officers that kill black citizens. I’m also not sure how to make accurate comparisons, or what data “count” as proper statistics, when part of the data should include encounters with police that don’t end in fatality. I don’t agree that the video shows activists being hostile to statistics on the issue; I think they are dismissing the paucity of reasoning (black police kill black people; therefore the killings can’t be based on race).
@5 I don’t know the demographics of police who have killed people either, but it’s probably in line with the demographics of police generally, i.e. that there are more white police officers than black, more men than women, etc. I don’t think any forceful conclusions can be drawn by that, other than ones that point to a white male majority.
But the statistics of roughly 2.7 times more black people are killed by police than whites has potent implications.
@6 Add *per capita* to that. ;)
Also, it’s hard to tell in the video if the protesters are being generally dismissive, or if they actually understand that the rate of black deaths at the hands of police is not proportionate to the population, which it’s not. You could also get into the statistics of how many of the people killed were criminals or were resisting arrest and the demographics of that, but I’m not sure how much minutiae is required to justify the main point, which is where the dogma and piling on comes in. It’s the same with the trans cult, there is much piling on without knowing the facts, more notably in the JKR attacks, which are all completely unjustified.
Ay, there’s the rub. For most people, math is something they are forced to do in school, and they will use it to balance their checkbook. Statistics are taken mostly by choice, and people who don’t understand statistics are not likely to make that choice.
twiliter: I find it interesting that you would view the questioning as harassment. From my perspective, it did not come across as such. Perspectival differences in perception are, of course, the point. Attachment to a belief is (directly) proportional to defensiveness about that belief, whether that be racial injustice, gender ideology, or theism.
twiliter & maddog1129: How the numbers shake out depends on how the data are grouped, conditioned, and normalized. For instance, Harvard economist Roland Fryer conducted an analysis of policing data back in 2016, finding racial disparity in the application of excessive—but not lethal—force. Others dispute his results, on such grounds as the masking effects of poor administrative records and relative robustness of population-level measures to encounter-conditioned measures.
When extraordinarily intelligent and learned people disagree on proper analysis of something outside my realms of expertise, it’s my inclination to withhold judgement.
It only looks like harrassment to me because this dude was not just questioning, he was positing his own BS in argument form. If I’m out enjoying the blue sky and some asshole comes up and asks me why I’m enjoying the sky, and then proceeds to tell me that the sky is yellow and I shouldn’t be enjoying it, I’m going to think it’s harrassment. ;)
Withholding judgement is an ideal I try to live up to as well, but it gets tougher as I get older, and the fact that the level of BS has skyrocketed in the age of social media.
Just going by the the displayed screen statistics it’s bullshit because he completely ignores the “Other” category, which means definitely “not white” otherwise they would be counted as “white”.
I agree with the harassment assessment as well, he is being a harassing jerk.
Ikn @8 One of the subjects I really hated in school too, not that I was bad at it, it was just presented in a way that forced memorization of rules and tons of tedious practice problems. I didn’t appreciate it until my 30’s and then studied it on my own, and found out how fascinating it really is. The relationship between logic and reasoning in particular as they relate to math are enlightening, or at least they are for me. I really had no use for basic arithmetic and therefore still count on my fingers periodically. Looking back, I really should have memorized more of it than I did. ;)
twiliter:
Ah, but what if you’re out enjoying the light from the bleu cheese moon, along with two hundred others who are carrying signs and demonstrating the importance of political change based on the dairy goodness of said moon, and someone comes up to you and asks what you’re on about, then proceeds to tell you that there is research saying the moon is not, in fact, made of bleu cheese, but rather is a blend of Manchego, Irish cheddar, and Swiss?
Then I will commence with the drooling and acquiescence. ;)
Nullius, sorry, but that video was a prime example of JAQing off. Note that he doesn’t actually have the statistics himself, ready to provide details in a coherent form–instead, he’s carefully shouting out a single data-point at people marching in protest against over-policing of black communities, in order to make himself feel good about not giving a shit about black people dying at the hands of cops.
And yes, it is a form of harassment. (Also, that video had cuts. I have no doubt that many folks actually challenged this asshat intelligently, but he deliberately cut those replies out.)
I’ve noted this before in folks who cite WaPo articles, actually. WaPo frequently posts all the stats, but puts the most conservative interpretation in the lede. Then other news sources, pundits and random asshats with phone cameras proceed to drop all the explanatory details, filter the info to fit a Neo-Con world-view, and then cite the original WaPo article, preferably without an actual link.
(Another example–a friend who has fallen deep into Q-Anon referred to a statistic showing that ‘DNA tests show one-third of children coming across the southern border were with people not actually their parents’ to argue that there was a massive child-trafficking operation. This was ostensibly reported in WaPo, but I was linked to a Breitbart site that used the above formulation. What ACTUALLY was in the story was that one-third of those tested in a pilot DNA analysis program used on a sampling of immigrants discovered non-parental custodians. However, the secondary source dropped the fact that the analysis was only done on individuals who had already been deemed suspicious by the border patrol–meaning that there were red flags tipping them off, and even then, 2/3 of the time, they were wrong. Furthermore, even in the original story, no evidence was given for an official stating, ‘And these aren’t cases of uncles or family friends being sent with the children’–so we have an unjustified allegation that they were all trafficking cases.