Nope, just don’t like being called a liar, and like I’ve said a couple dozen times now if I’m going to have to put up with year’s worth of horseshit related to my particular location like I have with my age, it’s going to cost someone.
It’s an offer I’ve made before when people seem hell bent on calling me a liar with no proof whatsoever. It’s a test to determine the strength of their conviction. If he’s certain enough that I’m lying, or certain enough in the efficacy of his research methods to call me a liar on the strength of them, then he should be confident enough to risk some moolah on it. The fact that he won’t is a pretty testament to me - as it should be to the board - that he’s pretty sure I’m telling the truth. Otherwise, what’s he got to lose? The money will be in escrow with an attorney. If I can’t deliver, he keeps his money. So the fact that he won’t risk it says to me he’s pretty sure I’m not bluffing. And that means he’s pretty sure I’m telling the truth. And that’s good enough for me.
And now having said that I’m getting tired of arguing about it. This will be my last post on the subject unless and until one of the posters I’ve made offers to decides to take me up on my challenge. This is getting silly in the extreme. I make one offhand comment about the increasing murder rate in my town in order to illustrate a larger point and in return I have to spend days arguing with a moderator no less, and a former moderator, both of whom are strenuously trying to harangue me into revealing personal information that I’ve said time and again I don’t want to reveal and which the board’s software allows me the option to keep private.
Right, because some delusional imbecile on the internet who makes ridiculous claims and then walks away when asked to prove them, and who wants to remain so anonymous he won’t even say what city or state he lives in, is really likely to honor a $5,000 bet when he can’t prove his story.
Nobody has to ‘bet’ that you are an idiot - we can only dream that Vegas would ever offer such a game.
Czarcasm has posted that he lives in Oregon, RickJay has Ontario entered in his profile. April R is in Memphis, Bricker is in Virginia, Kolga is in Denver, PunditLisa in Ohio. marshmallow is in Indianapolis, RTFirefly in Maryland, and I am in Quintana Roo, Mexico. That is just scrolling back 1 page of posts. Whatever you’re afraid of with regard to revealing such personal information about yourself is also a delusional product of your own little mind.
But it doesn’t matter. The FBI publishes annual crime statistics. There is no US city that has shown anything even remotely close to the increase in murder rates or violent crime in general that you claim.
And unemployment expenditure has a multiplier in its stimulative effect on the economy. Nobody is particularly happy when feeling like they’re giving away their money to someone that hasn’t earned it, but that effect is ameliorated when it is going to cover basic necessities (mutual aid) and amplified when funding systems of oppression (rent and working for a wage). There will always be members of the population that’ll be incapable of providing productive labour. Milton Friedman alighted on the notion of “necessary unemployment”, Marx on the “industrial reserve army”. Adam Smith described in the very beginning of the Wealth of Nations the barbaric countries in which the very young and the very old of this surplus population are left to die. He goes on to explain that “The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality… This at least would be the case in a society where things were left to follow their natural course, where there was perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to chuse what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper.” Proposing that the difference between welfare and charity is that charity is intermittent and unexpected isn’t a serious analysis. Describing the conditions of life when the people were reliant on parochial aid is.
No, you’re running a scam in an effort to cover up a lie. That’s why you made up the numbers in the first place. You got caught and you’re using bravado to avoid admitting it.
But it didn’t take me long to find you’ve said you live in the Midwest, and you’ve described your hometown as “large,” which it certainly would have to be, so I’m compiling a list of all cities that fit that description.
You do that, chum. And then when you finally figure it out, my consolation for the annoyance that results will be that you’ve had to waste so many hours out of your life in a fevered attempt to prove me a liar which will only serve to bring more attention both to the fact that I am an honest and truthful poster after all, and that things have indeed gotten so bad in this country that even in my whitebread city murder has increased 60% over the last year alone.
And so once again a poster (you, just so everyone knows who we’re talking about) will join the pantheon of posters here who’ve accused me before of being a liar over these last ten years and wound up eating their words when they couldn’t prove a word of it.
So, all in all, I think that’s a WIN for me (:D) despite the bit of annoyance that will inevitably result from my more immature and weak-argumented opponents who will try to use it stereotypically for purposes of derision.
But hey, it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye! And best of all, I still WIN!
I’m sensing frustration, John. A frustration born of the fact that I can’t be taunted and bullied into submission. And I’m sensing emptiness, John. I’m sensing an almost utter lack of substantive thought or logic in your mind, and thus an utter lack of rebuttal to a post you find so frustrating but against whose apparent righteousness and truth you are at a loss to defend.
But like you all surmised, the 60% mentioned by SA was probably an exaggeration and taken from an outdated source. This is the only reference I could find for a 60% increase in murders with the approximate numbers mentioned by SA. It is the only thing that fits, so he was obviously confuscating data to make a point, and it wasn’t exactly genuine.
Meh, I figured it out, anyway; SA lives in Oklahoma City. It’s the only city that fits; it had over 50 murders last year, has seen a huge percentage upswing in murders this year, and it also fits descriptions of his hometown he’s given in past posts and references he uses - SA uses OKC as a reference point and speaks of news coming out of Oklahoma. The only problem, of course, is that Oklahoma isn’t “Midwestern.” It’s really a southern, Bible-belt state, but it seems to fit the available evidence better than any Midwestern city.
And yes, OKC has seen a huge upswing in murders in 2012, by almost 60%. So that part of the claim appears to be true. Took a couple of tries, but he got it right the second time, sort of, aside from claiming Oklahoma is Midwestern.
Of course, are things in OKC generally worse than they used to be? Nope. In fact, even at 2012 levels, the murder rate in OKC is lower than it was before the downturn in crime rates that began in the early 90s. The key thing is that OKC has grown really, really fast; it is 40% bigger than it was twenty years ago. It’s one of the fastest-growing large cities in America. So in fact the murder rate has gradually sloped DOWNWARDS; even having a bad year in 2012, it will be significantly lower than it was twenty years ago. However, it’s higher than it was in the years prior to the fiscal collapse.
