That would be relevant if anyone was denying that there is room for debate and analysis of the theory. Rather, I was requesting that Annie not come to conclusions that as far as I can tell even Kirschner has not come to. Nothing in any link Annie has ever provided, nor in this text you have pasted here, indicates any kind of a causative link between adoption and serial murder. Absenting any conclusive evidence pointing to causation, it’s simply a lie to say it exists. Considering your own deep regard for the truth, Stoid, I would expect for you to be able to see that.
There are so few times when I wished that I weren’t an atheist, so I could pray with sincerity. “Oh, please, please God, please don’t let that happen.”
She will stun you with mighty WALLS OF TEXT kapow
I disagree. Read this again:
Do you disagree that meaning of the words above could also be conveyed as: “examines negative consequences of adoption; sums up those negatives as a psychological syndrome (resulting from adoption); uses cases of homicidal adoptees as (extreme) evidence for the existence of the psychological syndrome”?
Or that it could be stripped even further to: “Shows how adoption can lead to severe psychological consequences that in the worst cases make the adoptee more prone to murder”?
It seems impossible to take from it anything other than that the book is devoted to making the argument that adoption can in fact be a causative factor in the development of homicidal tendencies.
Whether the case is persuasive or not, I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t read it, but neither has anyone else participating in this thread, I don’t even know if Annie is aware of the actual details of the argument. So simply rejecting the argument as untenable out the gate, without any familiarity at all with the details of the argument, is not particularly impressive as an argument itself.
The theory exists, the argument for it has been made in depth by someone with extensive experience and knowledge in the area of psychology and the psychology of adoptees,it has been read and received by parties with extensive experience in the area of adoption, and those same people have publicly declared that they find his theories and ideas to be worthwhile.
At the very least, I think this means that it is not accurate to portray Annie as:
[ul]
[li] lying (Steophan)[/li][li] making blatant false claims (you)[/li][li] an idiot (you)[/li][li] stupid (redtail23)[/li][li] pitiful (Cartooniverse)[/li][/ul]
and so forth.
Since it is a legitimate theory that has been lauded by people in a position to know, I don’t think it’s valid to be on Annie’s case about it as though she’s (insert dismissive judgment of your choice here) and can be considered a fool for giving the idea any credence.
The fact that many people have argued against the idea is also not any proof of anything either, since the arguments against it are not informed: no one arguing against it seems to know any details about the theory or argument in support of it.
But if your complaint is really that you’re tired of hearing about it, ok, never mind.
Or your complaint is that Annie herself has failed to make the case and therefore you find it illegitimate for her to bring it up at all, ok, never mind.
You are WRONG and THIS IS WHY YOU ARE WRONG and HERE’S THREE MORE PAGES OF WHY YOU ARE WRONG and WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS
That right there is the thrust of the OP as I read it.
Well, now that Stoid is here to school us all on the validity of arguments in a book she’s never read, we can all go home.
Can you tell my boss I can go home? They won’t accept my word for it.
Careful reading prevents mistakes.
I’m as familiar as Annie wants me to be. I would think that if the evidence for causation exists, she would have been happy to provide it to me one of the several times I’ve asked her for it. Absenting her doing so, I have to believe it doesn’t exist, and so I’ve asked her to stop making a claim that she cannot or will not support. Which I think is SOP for this board, is it not?
Well, I certainly can’t, but Stoid certainly can. After all, she can probably find a link to your company’s employees’ manual, but she won’t have to read it.
Oh, the irony. THE IRONY.
ETA: I <3 this thread so much. It’s the trifecta of WTF.
Not only has Stoid not read the book, she hasn’t even read the thread. Like the part where Annie concedes, or the part where the almighty book is shown to be discredited by the scientific community. Thread over. Off to read the ZPGZ pit thread.
You CLEARLY are unaware of the power of Stoid. She will never, NEVER back down at this point. Settle back to enjoy the pages of WALL O TEXT, with underlining, italics, font size changes, and font color changes.
Take some acid, you’ll enjoy the experience more.
The problem is that you are “math challenged” and have absolutely zero idea of what is statistically meaningful.
Let’s look at some quick statics from the web, and make a couple of wild ass assumptions. Since these are just ball park figures, we could be off by several factors of 10, but we’ll quickly see that it’s absolutely, completely fucking irrelevant. Number of kids adopted.
How many serial killers are there? According to this site:
Now we have to make a guess at how many are born in any particular year. I’m going simply dividing 320 (80% of 400) by 60 years would be 5, so let’s triple it and say 15 are born each year.
According to Stoid’s numbers, (so it must be true), 16% of the serial killers are adopted. That makes 2.4 kids (which you can’t have, but stay with me for just a minute) vs. around 0.4 kids if adoptees had the same 2-3% as the general population.
So, we can expect 2 more serial killers out of the 120,000 children born per year, which is 0.002% Statistically meaningless.
But of course, trolls don’t care about statistics.
Stoid, since you obviously haven’t read the whole thread, here are some of the more relevant parts.
Remember the whole Taubes “Correlation is not the same as Causation”? Now apply it here.
As I said, if Annie’s failure to cite her own assertion is your primary complaint, that’s not what I’m responding to. (Although a failure to offer cites in support of one’s assertion doesn’t make it false…)
It’s like she’s having her own argument.
“I DON’T CARE IF THAT’S WHAT YOU SAID OR NOT, I’M GOING TO HAVE THIS ARGUMENT ANYWAY”
That’s comedy gold, Jerry! GOLD!!
The patented argument technique of nutbags everywhere.
That’s not sociopathy, that’s fighting fire with fire. If women’s lives don’t matter to them, infant lives shouldn’t matter to us. Seriously, how baby deluded can you be to claim a woman should just roll over and take whatever tyranny is inflected on us?
Well, in absence of any supporting evidence whatsoever, I’m going to go ahead and make that assumption if you don’t mind…
Look, I don’t want to dog Annie anymore at this point, but you brought up the fact that I said she was making blatantly false statements and that I said she was making herself sound like an idiot. As far as I can see, if you make an assertion that you are not backing up with evidence you either 1) know that you can’t back it up, in which case unequivocally stating that it’s true IS a falsehood, or 2) you think you ARE backing it up, which means that you don’t understand why you aren’t. I don’t happen to think Annie is an idiot (which is why I said she was making herself sound like one, vs. saying she actually is one), nor do I think she’s a liar. BUT I do think that she’s being hyperbolic in order to push an agenda. And I’m asking her not to do that (which, incidentally, she agreed to). . So, I don’t really see a point to your white-knighting on this thread.