• Welcome to the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

New research: Police shootings show no racial pattern

The problem is you are bending over backwards to find a scenario in which data that shows no racism is somehow hiding racism.
No, the problem is that you are making a claim for which the evidence presented is inadequate. You haven't got "data that shows no racism"; You have data that shows (at best) that there is no MORE racism in shootings than there is in accusations of criminal behaviour.
Where's this 'bit'? Right now, it exists only in your mind.

It's been discussed on here before.
If you think that's an adequate citation, then there's no point in discussing anything with you.
 
It's been discussed on here before.
If you think that's an adequate citation, then there's no point in discussing anything with you.

Repeated requests for citations has been used to avoid answering questions so often that I no longer bother when it's stuff that's come up on here before. Maybe you're not the one crying wolf but I've heard too many "wolf!" calls.
 
It's been discussed on here before.
If you think that's an adequate citation, then there's no point in discussing anything with you.

Repeated requests for citations has been used to avoid answering questions so often that I no longer bother when it's stuff that's come up on here before. Maybe you're not the one crying wolf but I've heard too many "wolf!" calls.

That's the price for wanting to be believed. If you won't pay it, then you simply don't care enough about being believed - and people simply won't believe you.

Refuting PRATTs, with citations, is what we MUST do if we wish to persuade new audiences of the value of our arguments.

When a citation is just a link to another of your own posts on the same forum, that requirement should be far from onerous.
 
"There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates."

A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141854

FYI, they used the wrong crime rates measure. Their outcome to be predicted was the relative log odds of being shot if you were black versus white.
The requires predictor would be the relative odds of committing a crime if you were black versus white.

Instead, they two separate crime rate measures for whites and blacks rather than a single measure that contrasts the relative crime rates between the races.

Note that the study Loren cited does use the correct measure of relative odds of crime by each race and finds a large effect in predicting county-by-county racial bias in shooting.
 
If fatal shootings of minority civilians are due to bias by white officers, we would expect that when white officers are involved in a fatal shooting, the person fatally shot would be more likely to be black or Hispanic.

You lost me at stupid.
 
I think we can all agree that if we increased the general well being of our police force by significantly increasing pay, hiring standards, training standards/rules of engagement & health care while holding them accountable to the very law they enforce (special console) we can make a dent in the issues we're having with law enforcement. We'll never get ride of it entirely though. Now, I don't like saying this but I do every time which is; "as a black man" I don't believe the problem is as rampant as Fox, CNN, YouTube and so on make it out to be. For everyone tragic interaction with police there are hundreds if not thousands that lawfully occur. Sure I used to get stopped every single god damn night walking from home to work when I lived in NYC under Rud Jewlz watch. Spent a few weekends in jail for nothing, lost jobs over the bullshit but I can't ignore the fact I've met black folks from better neighborhoods than mine who thought I made it all up.

But I digress, pardon. We just need to improve our police department as well as rules of engagement and stuff. These guys put there lives on the line and deserve high pay and high care which in turn should demand high standards & accountability ascribable to the immense amount of public trust needed to keep the peace.

yeah,
 
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which is administered twice a year to large national random samples of US residents, collects data from representative samples of people of all racial categories about any and all crimes they have been victimized by, regardless of whether they reported it, or if there were any arrests.
They collect as much detail as possible about the nature of the crime and the victim's report of the suspects (number of suspects, race, gender, etc.)

The results show the same racial disparities in offenders as the official arrest data does, and it holds for victims of all races. IOW, it isn't just white victims claiming the offender was black. Overall, close to 60% of crime is within-race, so a victim is more likely to say their offender was the same race as them than any other single race. However, the differences in these ratios shows that blacks are disproportionately more likely to victimize not only their own race but all other races. Black violent crime victims are 6 times more likely to say their offender was Black than White, and 10 time more likely to be Black than Hispanic. But White victims are only 4 times as likely to say their offender was White than Black, and 5 times more likely White than Hispanic. While Hispanic victims are only twice as likely to say their offender was Hispanic than Black and that Blacks and Whites were equally likely to be the offender. This pattern is the exact opposite of what would be predicted by the total proportion of each group in the population, showing that crime victims within each racial group report a % of black offenders that is far higher than their % of the population. Overall, the data show that blacks are 3 times as likely as whites and twice as likely as Hispanics to be identified as the offender in a violent crime by crime victims. And this pattern holds for both male and female victims and victims of all age groups.

And those relative rates of engaging in violent crime map on very closely to the relative likelihood of being shot by the cops, which is also about 3 times as likely for blacks than whites, and twice as likely for blacks than Hispanics.

Also, because about 60% of violent crime is within racial group, greater rates of crimes committed by blacks predicts greater victimization rates among blacks. That is just what the data shows. Relative to their proportion of the total population, blacks are about 50% more likely than whites to be crime victims overall, and 50% more likely to be violently victimized by a member of their own race.

Finally, according to victims of all races, their offenders were more likely to have a weapon in general and a especially a firearm when the offender was black.

These data (with highly similar patterns in every other year) provide strong independent confirmation of the racial disparities shown in police arrest reports, with actual greater propensity to commit violent crimes (and more likely to use a gun when doing so) among blacks in the US, than among either whites or Hispanics.

These facts contradict the unsupported speculation that official crime rates based on arrests are merely due to racial bias by police, and rather provide independent evidence that those rates largely reflect the greater rates of actual crimes committed by blacks. It is important to note that the objective reality of greater actual crime rates does NOT support any notions that the source of these disparities in committing crimes lies in any biological/genetic/innate racial differences. 100% could plausibly be due to differences in SES combined with differences in cultural/political history of these groups.

But none of that changes the facts relevant to who/why the cops shoot, which are that 1) Cops shoot suspects more likely to be engaged in violent crime and who are encountered in high violent crime areas, 2) different regions (e.g., urban, suburban, rural) differ in racial disparities of crime rates and this strongly predicts variations in who is more likely to be shot, and 3) On the national average, blacks are more likely to engage in violent crime and be in high violent crime areas. All of which combined logically imply that blacks in the US are more likely to be shot by the police, even if the cops respond with zero racial bias in how they respond to the objective facts of a situation. Which of course does not mean that no cops ever respond with deadly force due to racial bias, but that such bias is not evidenced by statistical racial disparities in police shootings b/c those disparities are almost entirely accounted for by disparities in violent crime rates, even when crime rates are determined by victim accounts whether reported to the police or not, and regardless of the victim's own race.

Why would we assume that members of the general public, anonymously responding to surveys about crime victimisation, in a context where no actual suspect could be harmed by a false accusation or attribution of blame, will be less likely to exhibit racial bias than the police?

All of the data are contaminated by the 'House MD effect' - everybody lies.

Sorry, but your "Everybody lies" excuse is incapable of explaining the data. Your dismissal of the data require that you assume "Everybody always tells the same lies for the same reasons, regardless of who they are talking to." Why would people lie on an anonymous survey about what race attacked them and somehow all tell the same type of lie that makes blacks look more violent than whites, and Hispanics more violent than whites but less than blacks? Your excuse requires assuming that the majority in each race share the same ideology that whites are less criminal than blacks. In fact, your interpretation requires that blacks are actually more motivated than either whites or Hispanics to spread the racist ideology that blacks are more criminal, since their reported relative odds ratio of being victimized more by blacks than whites is much higher than the ratio reported by whites or Hispanics. Also, the each racial group would have to share the same racist ideology that puts Hispanics crime rates higher than whites but lower than blacks. In addition, half of the reported victimization were not reported to the police, and yet the results are highly similar to crime rates from police reports. So your there requires that everyone in all races are lying in the same way to make blacks look bad, and lying the same whether they are talking to police or to filling out an anonymous survey that has no impact on themselves or the accused.

The plausibility of all this rather absurd speculation is near zero is absolute terms, and much less plausible than the people are simply reporting accurately to the best of their ability and that objective reality is why all their reports line up with each other regardless of who they are reporting it to.

Furthermore, not only do these independent sources of data relying on different methods and sample converge on the same finding, but they converge with the other completely separate analysis that estimate crime rates based upon the known correlation between race and SES and the corresponding correlation between SES and crime rates. Plus, they converge with how the number of reported acts of major violence (the vast majority which are reported to police) correlates highly with the relative % of blacks vs. whites who live in the area. IOW, no matter how you slice it, blacks are consistently associated with higher rates of violent crime than whites in the US.

I continue to believe that it is impossible to eliminate bias from data regarding race and crime, and that any and all conclusions from any study of this topic are highly unlikely to be useful in any way.

You continue to invent absurd excuses to ignore the empirical data b/c you have a faith based commitment to denying the objective reality that blacks commit a higher rate of violent crime than whites in the US, even when some of that data points to SES (and therefore racist injustices that have lead to SES differences) as the underlying cause.

Oh, and you are engaging in victim blaming, and implying that women of all races regularly lie about being raped an beaten up.
 
It's been discussed on here before.
If you think that's an adequate citation, then there's no point in discussing anything with you.

Repeated requests for citations has been used to avoid answering questions so often that I no longer bother when it's stuff that's come up on here before. Maybe you're not the one crying wolf but I've heard too many "wolf!" calls.

I learned a new word today... "Sea-Lioning"... that's a form of trolling where the troll appears civil in discourse, but insists on evidence of every assertion, just to be a pain in the ass. I make no claim, just learned the term, and found a place to use it without making the assertion myself (Thanks!).
 
Occam's Razor says that if we see 10x more implications of crime from a particular demographic group that is greater than the population distribution, then that means that demographic group commits 10x more crime than the rest of that population. It takes layers of "extra unnecessary steps" to claim it reveals 10x more error.
 
Repeated requests for citations has been used to avoid answering questions so often that I no longer bother when it's stuff that's come up on here before. Maybe you're not the one crying wolf but I've heard too many "wolf!" calls.

I learned a new word today... "Sea-Lioning"... that's a form of trolling where the troll appears civil in discourse, but insists on evidence of every assertion, just to be a pain in the ass. I make no claim, just learned the term, and found a place to use it without making the assertion myself (Thanks!).

It's from this Wondermark comic.

IMG_4459.PNG

And isn't about requesting citations; Sealioning is the refusal to accept that someone has the right to leave a discussion at any time, and doesn't owe you any further explanation or justification for their opinions.
 
Sorry, but your "Everybody lies" excuse is incapable of explaining the data. Your dismissal of the data require that you assume "Everybody always tells the same lies for the same reasons, regardless of who they are talking to." Why would people lie on an anonymous survey about what race attacked them and somehow all tell the same type of lie that makes blacks look more violent than whites, and Hispanics more violent than whites but less than blacks? Your excuse requires assuming that the majority in each race share the same ideology that whites are less criminal than blacks. In fact, your interpretation requires that blacks are actually more motivated than either whites or Hispanics to spread the racist ideology that blacks are more criminal, since their reported relative odds ratio of being victimized more by blacks than whites is much higher than the ratio reported by whites or Hispanics. Also, the each racial group would have to share the same racist ideology that puts Hispanics crime rates higher than whites but lower than blacks. In addition, half of the reported victimization were not reported to the police, and yet the results are highly similar to crime rates from police reports. So your there requires that everyone in all races are lying in the same way to make blacks look bad, and lying the same whether they are talking to police or to filling out an anonymous survey that has no impact on themselves or the accused.

The plausibility of all this rather absurd speculation is near zero is absolute terms, and much less plausible than the people are simply reporting accurately to the best of their ability and that objective reality is why all their reports line up with each other regardless of who they are reporting it to.

Furthermore, not only do these independent sources of data relying on different methods and sample converge on the same finding, but they converge with the other completely separate analysis that estimate crime rates based upon the known correlation between race and SES and the corresponding correlation between SES and crime rates. Plus, they converge with how the number of reported acts of major violence (the vast majority which are reported to police) correlates highly with the relative % of blacks vs. whites who live in the area. IOW, no matter how you slice it, blacks are consistently associated with higher rates of violent crime than whites in the US.

I continue to believe that it is impossible to eliminate bias from data regarding race and crime, and that any and all conclusions from any study of this topic are highly unlikely to be useful in any way.

You continue to invent absurd excuses to ignore the empirical data b/c you have a faith based commitment to denying the objective reality that blacks commit a higher rate of violent crime than whites in the US, even when some of that data points to SES (and therefore racist injustices that have lead to SES differences) as the underlying cause.

Oh, and you are engaging in victim blaming, and implying that women of all races regularly lie about being raped an beaten up.

I don't think that the assumption that everybody tells the same lies is unreasonable, when those lies are rooted in racism, and racism is endemic in society.

The idea that each person is completely independent in their choice of lies, falsehoods and inaccurate claims is, in my view, absurd.

But not as absurd as the idea that I care enough about the USA to have a 'faith based' position on her societal problems.

And the idea that anything I have said could reasonably be considered 'victim blaming' is beyond absurd - but, ironically, is good evidence for my actual claim - that, as House MD says, "Everybody lies".
 
Repeated requests for citations has been used to avoid answering questions so often that I no longer bother when it's stuff that's come up on here before. Maybe you're not the one crying wolf but I've heard too many "wolf!" calls.

I learned a new word today... "Sea-Lioning"... that's a form of trolling where the troll appears civil in discourse, but insists on evidence of every assertion, just to be a pain in the ass. I make no claim, just learned the term, and found a place to use it without making the assertion myself (Thanks!).

It's from this Wondermark comic.

View attachment 22839

And isn't about requesting citations; Sealioning is the refusal to accept that someone has the right to leave a discussion at any time, and doesn't owe you any further explanation or justification for their opinions.

In a broad sense, I disagree with your characterization; to me it generally speaks about a lot of things, and in particular, continuing to do those things particularly in bad faith, and acting like the opposition operates in bad faith when making (actually) reasonable requests.
 
Occam's Razor says that if we see 10x more implications of crime from a particular demographic group that is greater than the population distribution, then that means that demographic group commits 10x more crime than the rest of that population. It takes layers of "extra unnecessary steps" to claim it reveals 10x more error.

Actually, if we only had a single source/measure and that measure was not actually a direct measure of crime rates but only indirectly related to it, such as in arrest reports, then both the "more crime" and "more error" interpretation involve similar "extra steps".
We know that, especially with indirect measures, there is always measurement error that causes the observed scores to vary from "true score" on the theoretical variable. So, for a single measure, it is no more parsimonious to assume that differences in the observed score are due to the differences in the true score, than to assume they are due to measurement error.

Fortunately, we do not only have a single measure, but multiple independent measures that all show the same results. In fact, the crime victimization reports made by each different racial group of victims are each a separate estimate of crime rates committed by the members of the various groups. Plus, we can compute a predicted estimate based upon empirical data of the correlations between SES and crime and between race and SES, and we get a similar result as the more direct correlations between race and crime activity. All of these converging measures can be explained by a single assumption of differences in the true score on crime rates that all the measures are theoretically tied to. Having to invoke different types/sources of error for the various measures is what makes that explanation non-parsimonious and thus less plausible (since every added assumption adds to the probabiltiy that at least one assumption is wrong).

As suggested in my post to bilby above, the only way to avoid that lack of statistical plausibility is to presume that the identical type and source of error is determining all the different measures. The plausibility of that hinges on the particular nature of the different measures and whether its reasonable that their sources of error would be the same and produce the same result. Even just trying to account for the victim reports in surveys requires that black crime victims are falsely making black people look more criminal when they are talking to the police or an filling out an anonymous survey, and even more likely to do so than white victims and Hispanic victims, thought they as well. And there is no similar source of error for the indirect estimates based upon shared variance of SES and crime, which exists even within racial groups, so no racial bias in reporting is possible. Same goes for reported serious violent crimes where, even when the race of the reported victim is ignored, the completely independently collected data about the racial makeup of neighborhoods predicts the rates of such serious crimes that are reported.
 
Sorry, but your "Everybody lies" excuse is incapable of explaining the data. Your dismissal of the data require that you assume "Everybody always tells the same lies for the same reasons, regardless of who they are talking to." Why would people lie on an anonymous survey about what race attacked them and somehow all tell the same type of lie that makes blacks look more violent than whites, and Hispanics more violent than whites but less than blacks? Your excuse requires assuming that the majority in each race share the same ideology that whites are less criminal than blacks. In fact, your interpretation requires that blacks are actually more motivated than either whites or Hispanics to spread the racist ideology that blacks are more criminal, since their reported relative odds ratio of being victimized more by blacks than whites is much higher than the ratio reported by whites or Hispanics. Also, the each racial group would have to share the same racist ideology that puts Hispanics crime rates higher than whites but lower than blacks. In addition, half of the reported victimization were not reported to the police, and yet the results are highly similar to crime rates from police reports. So your there requires that everyone in all races are lying in the same way to make blacks look bad, and lying the same whether they are talking to police or to filling out an anonymous survey that has no impact on themselves or the accused.

The plausibility of all this rather absurd speculation is near zero is absolute terms, and much less plausible than the people are simply reporting accurately to the best of their ability and that objective reality is why all their reports line up with each other regardless of who they are reporting it to.

Furthermore, not only do these independent sources of data relying on different methods and sample converge on the same finding, but they converge with the other completely separate analysis that estimate crime rates based upon the known correlation between race and SES and the corresponding correlation between SES and crime rates. Plus, they converge with how the number of reported acts of major violence (the vast majority which are reported to police) correlates highly with the relative % of blacks vs. whites who live in the area. IOW, no matter how you slice it, blacks are consistently associated with higher rates of violent crime than whites in the US.

I continue to believe that it is impossible to eliminate bias from data regarding race and crime, and that any and all conclusions from any study of this topic are highly unlikely to be useful in any way.

You continue to invent absurd excuses to ignore the empirical data b/c you have a faith based commitment to denying the objective reality that blacks commit a higher rate of violent crime than whites in the US, even when some of that data points to SES (and therefore racist injustices that have lead to SES differences) as the underlying cause.

Oh, and you are engaging in victim blaming, and implying that women of all races regularly lie about being raped an beaten up.

I don't think that the assumption that everybody tells the same lies is unreasonable, when those lies are rooted in racism, and racism is endemic in society.

The idea that each person is completely independent in their choice of lies, falsehoods and inaccurate claims is, in my view, absurd.

For my explanation, the lies don't have to be completely independent, just not the same for everyone in every racial group as your interpretation presumes. And you cannot presume generalities. You must presume the specific motives to lie that account for this specific data. Which means you must presume that blacks are at least if not more motivated to lie to make themselves and their loved ones appear more criminal than either whites or Hispanics in the eyes of society than whites are to lie about blacks that most of them have no close relationships with. And you must presume that Hispanics share this same motive to make blacks look the most criminal but themselves and family still more criminal than whites. That is what is absurd.

In addition, you ignored all the other implausible assumptions about the data that your excuse neccessitates. See my reply to Gun Nut for more detail on how your excuses are not merely implausible for the particular self-destructive lies they presume by black (itself a condescending insult to black intellect), but also implausible from a mere statistical standpoint due to the extreme lack of parsimony required for you to account for all the various independent measures and data that can easily be accounted for by the single assumption that black do have a higher crime rate.

And the idea that anything I have said could reasonably be considered 'victim blaming' is beyond absurd -
You dismissed the reports by thousands of rape and assault victims as "lies". If they are not lies, then the data is valid and blacks commit higher crime rates. To pretend that your claims do not logically entail this is itself a lie.

If you applied the same logic you are applying to dogmatically dismiss this data, you would have to dismiss all data of sexual assault prevalence based upon victim reports. In fact, the oft reported stats about sexual assault being more prevalent than reports to police suggest are usually based on this very survey data I am using and you are dismissing as "lies".
 
I don't think that the assumption that everybody tells the same lies is unreasonable, when those lies are rooted in racism, and racism is endemic in society.

The idea that each person is completely independent in their choice of lies, falsehoods and inaccurate claims is, in my view, absurd.

For my explanation, the lies don't have to be completely independent, just not the same for everyone in every racial group as your interpretation presumes. And you cannot presume generalities. You must presume the specific motives to lie that account for this specific data. Which means you must presume that blacks are at least if not more motivated to lie to make themselves and their loved ones appear more criminal than either whites or Hispanics in the eyes of society than whites are to lie about blacks that most of them have no close relationships with. And you must presume that Hispanics share this same motive to make blacks look the most criminal but themselves and family still more criminal than whites. That is what is absurd.

In addition, you ignored all the other implausible assumptions about the data that your excuse neccessitates. See my reply to Gun Nut for more detail on how your excuses are not merely implausible for the particular self-destructive lies they presume by black (itself a condescending insult to black intellect), but also implausible from a mere statistical standpoint due to the extreme lack of parsimony required for you to account for all the various independent measures and data that can easily be accounted for by the single assumption that black do have a higher crime rate.

And the idea that anything I have said could reasonably be considered 'victim blaming' is beyond absurd -
You dismissed the reports by thousands of rape and assault victims as "lies". If they are not lies, then the data is valid and blacks commit higher crime rates. To pretend that your claims do not logically entail this is itself a lie.
I made no mention of any such reports.
If you applied the same logic you are applying to dogmatically dismiss this data, you would have to dismiss all data of sexual assault prevalence based upon victim reports. In fact, the oft reported stats about sexual assault being more prevalent than reports to police suggest are usually based on this very survey data I am using and you are dismissing as "lies".
You clearly cannot follow my reasoning, and are dependent upon inventing imaginary claims on my part to support your assumptions about me, so your ability to predict the consequences of 'following the same logic' is nonexistent.

I am disinterested in being drawn into a debate with someone who is misrepresenting my position so grotesquely, so I shall say no more. I no longer care that you are wrong.
 
If fatal shootings of minority civilians are due to bias by white officers, we would expect that when white officers are involved in a fatal shooting, the person fatally shot would be more likely to be black or Hispanic.

You lost me at stupid.

Nothing stupid about it. If bias on the part of the shooter was a substantial factor we would see it show up as a racial disparity in those who were shot--but in practice we don't see this.
 
Sorry, but your "Everybody lies" excuse is incapable of explaining the data. Your dismissal of the data require that you assume "Everybody always tells the same lies for the same reasons, regardless of who they are talking to." Why would people lie on an anonymous survey about what race attacked them and somehow all tell the same type of lie that makes blacks look more violent than whites, and Hispanics more violent than whites but less than blacks? Your excuse requires assuming that the majority in each race share the same ideology that whites are less criminal than blacks. In fact, your interpretation requires that blacks are actually more motivated than either whites or Hispanics to spread the racist ideology that blacks are more criminal, since their reported relative odds ratio of being victimized more by blacks than whites is much higher than the ratio reported by whites or Hispanics. Also, the each racial group would have to share the same racist ideology that puts Hispanics crime rates higher than whites but lower than blacks. In addition, half of the reported victimization were not reported to the police, and yet the results are highly similar to crime rates from police reports. So your there requires that everyone in all races are lying in the same way to make blacks look bad, and lying the same whether they are talking to police or to filling out an anonymous survey that has no impact on themselves or the accused.

The plausibility of all this rather absurd speculation is near zero is absolute terms, and much less plausible than the people are simply reporting accurately to the best of their ability and that objective reality is why all their reports line up with each other regardless of who they are reporting it to.

Furthermore, not only do these independent sources of data relying on different methods and sample converge on the same finding, but they converge with the other completely separate analysis that estimate crime rates based upon the known correlation between race and SES and the corresponding correlation between SES and crime rates. Plus, they converge with how the number of reported acts of major violence (the vast majority which are reported to police) correlates highly with the relative % of blacks vs. whites who live in the area. IOW, no matter how you slice it, blacks are consistently associated with higher rates of violent crime than whites in the US.

I continue to believe that it is impossible to eliminate bias from data regarding race and crime, and that any and all conclusions from any study of this topic are highly unlikely to be useful in any way.

You continue to invent absurd excuses to ignore the empirical data b/c you have a faith based commitment to denying the objective reality that blacks commit a higher rate of violent crime than whites in the US, even when some of that data points to SES (and therefore racist injustices that have lead to SES differences) as the underlying cause.

Oh, and you are engaging in victim blaming, and implying that women of all races regularly lie about being raped an beaten up.

I don't think that the assumption that everybody tells the same lies is unreasonable, when those lies are rooted in racism, and racism is endemic in society.

The idea that each person is completely independent in their choice of lies, falsehoods and inaccurate claims is, in my view, absurd.

But not as absurd as the idea that I care enough about the USA to have a 'faith based' position on her societal problems.

And the idea that anything I have said could reasonably be considered 'victim blaming' is beyond absurd - but, ironically, is good evidence for my actual claim - that, as House MD says, "Everybody lies".

Occam's Razor.

You're inventing a lot of complexity to explain away the data that doesn't agree with your faith.
 
I don't think that the assumption that everybody tells the same lies is unreasonable, when those lies are rooted in racism, and racism is endemic in society.

The idea that each person is completely independent in their choice of lies, falsehoods and inaccurate claims is, in my view, absurd.

But not as absurd as the idea that I care enough about the USA to have a 'faith based' position on her societal problems.

And the idea that anything I have said could reasonably be considered 'victim blaming' is beyond absurd - but, ironically, is good evidence for my actual claim - that, as House MD says, "Everybody lies".

Occam's Razor.

You're inventing a lot of complexity to explain away the data that doesn't agree with your faith.

"Everybody lies" is not only simple, it's obvious.
 
I don't think that the assumption that everybody tells the same lies is unreasonable, when those lies are rooted in racism, and racism is endemic in society.

The idea that each person is completely independent in their choice of lies, falsehoods and inaccurate claims is, in my view, absurd.

But not as absurd as the idea that I care enough about the USA to have a 'faith based' position on her societal problems.

And the idea that anything I have said could reasonably be considered 'victim blaming' is beyond absurd - but, ironically, is good evidence for my actual claim - that, as House MD says, "Everybody lies".

Occam's Razor.

You're inventing a lot of complexity to explain away the data that doesn't agree with your faith.

"Everybody lies" is not only simple, it's obvious.

"everybody lies" speaks to scope, but not frequency... unless, of course, the claim is "everybody lies all the time"... then we are arguing for agnosticism... that it is impossible to know "anything"...and while that may or may not be true, it ends all possible investigation into subjective matters.
So, assuming less than exactly 100% frequency (i.e. "sometimes people aren't lying"), this is a variable equally applying to all investigations.. so it should not "move the needle", as it were.

I still call Occam's Razor on the thought that the large population of incarcerated black people leads to a conclusion other than higher frequency of deviance among the group. That is the plain reading of data. Even of there is racism at play (to which I have no delusions - it certainly exists in my observation), it would still be totally miraculous if that could possibly account for the entirety of the result.

This statement sounds racist... I know that. It sounds like I am making the claim that black people are more likely to be criminals. I am not making that statement. all human beings are equally capable of corruption, more or less. I truly believe it all comes down to local (family / neighborhood) culture and economic standing (influence and access to resources). Why black people to this day suffer this economic inequality may very well be due to racism, or at the very least, historical racism. The result is more black people committing crimes... but it is perhaps more meaningful and accurate to say that statistics show more poor people commit crimes. That they tend to be black is incidental... probably.
 
Repeated requests for citations has been used to avoid answering questions so often that I no longer bother when it's stuff that's come up on here before. Maybe you're not the one crying wolf but I've heard too many "wolf!" calls.

I learned a new word today... "Sea-Lioning"... that's a form of trolling where the troll appears civil in discourse, but insists on evidence of every assertion, just to be a pain in the ass. I make no claim, just learned the term, and found a place to use it without making the assertion myself (Thanks!).

It's from this Wondermark comic.

View attachment 22839

And isn't about requesting citations; Sealioning is the refusal to accept that someone has the right to leave a discussion at any time, and doesn't owe you any further explanation or justification for their opinions.

ah interesting... the person that used that expression in a discussion with me didn't use it that way... They will prolly find your post eventually and hunt you down to argue about it after calling you some unfriendly names... so... look forward to that.
 
Back
Top Bottom