Yes, Blalron, and you can bet those states have a disproportionate number of the exact kind of voter I was describing. Not hardcore, conspracy theory Trumpites, but wishy-washy white folks who voted for Obama but don’t know a whole lot about much of anything. We may not like them, but we have to try to lure them over as “customers”.
ETA: Wow, Andy. Stubbornly innumerate it is. Is there anyone not already on my “side” who has the matheematical chops and the integrity to admit I proved my case?
What case? That you can come up with some sci-fi scenario that makes black people look bad?
EE showed factual numbers. You haven’t even tried to refute them. You haven’t pointed out a single statement I said that was false.
Try it again – point to a sentence I said that conveyed incorrect information. Explain why something specific I said was incorrect. Not with hypotheticals, but with facts. Please, please, try again. I want to see it, in detail. I’m always open to the possibility of being wrong, and when shown wrong, it’s a chance to learn. But your weird “black people in space” scenario didn’t do that. Look at my words and try again.
Did you just make up the 50% of blacks and 1% of whites for your scenario? What if you did the same scenario with 10% of blacks and 85% of whites?
So a Black gentleman who kills three Whites wouldn’t be included on this list? And three White gentlemen who kill one Black person in an armed robbery would also not be included? Just seeking clarification.
I don’t know for sure, that was just one possible explanation. Maybe more digging into the FBI website would help, but I’m not going to do that right now.
Customers is the right analogy here. If Coca-Cola found out through marketing research that sales were down amongst the white population, it would be a waste of energy to get angry at white people. Instead they’d figure out how to tailor their advertisements so that white people will buy the product.
But I fear many on the identity left are treating politics like a fundamentalist religion. To a fundamentalist, it’s not good enough that people show up to church (vote), they have to have the correct thoughts in their mind as they doing so. They have to believe 100% of the dogma, or they are damned to hell. That is an idealistic point of view. But from a pragmatic point of view (which is how I see things), a vote is a vote is a vote. It doesn’t matter WHY they cast the vote for your candidate, so long as they cast the vote. Even if it’s for a superficial bullshit reason (like they feel that the candidate is the type of person they can could have a beer with).
Maybe some feel this way, but I want to win elections, and I feel that my preferred strategy is the best way for the Democrats to win elections. It really is reasonable, especially when looking at how successful the party was in '08, to consider motivating young and minority voters as an effective strategy to win.
I will try this one more way, in case there are people who genuinely are thrown by the “toy” aspect of my space station scenario. From my 2013 FBI numbers, 1 in every 771,00 white people killed a black person, and one in every 103,000 blacks killed a white person. Now, when we look at the prevalence of other harmful behaviors, like smoking or having sex without a condom, we use the idea of matched populations. A representative sample of 100 whites has X number who smoke; a representative sample of 100 blacks has Y number who smoke. We wouldn’t just compare the raw numbers of smokers who are black and white without considering what proportion of the population they represent.
So since these numbers are so large, let’s make our matched populations 2.2 million. 2.2 million whites, perfectly representative of the larger group; 2.2 million blacks, also perfectly representative of African Americans overall. In that white group, there are three people who killed a black person in 2013. In the equal-sized black group, there are 21 who killed a white person in 2013.
Which group is it that seems to need more of an education effort to convince them not to kill people of the other race? You could argue “neither”, since the numbers are so low overrall; but to say “the whites need this message aimed at them much more urgently” is simply not supported by the data. Anyone who can crunch numbers yet denies this? I just don’t know what to say to such a person.
Whatever this is trying to address, it hasn’t addressed any specific thing that I’ve said. If you’re trying to refute anything I’ve said, please be specific – tell me what specific words I’ve said that are wrong, and why they’re wrong. Whatever you’re doing here is something else.
It isn’t religion, it’s a desire to make our country and our society better. Politics does not compare to a choice about which rituals to serve which concept of a deity makes you happier, since the world isn’t changed by that stuff.
Your view that Coke and Pepsi are the same, and all you have to do, if you work for Coke, is to get more people to buy it, does not reflect any recognition that there really is a difference that really matters in your choice of party. Your focus on the purist fringe also makes you miss the point.
Come on, people: I know a lot of you are strong in math and statistics. Don’t be cowards, don’t be unwilling to admit something is true just because someone you like or who is on “your team” will feel or look bad. Show some integrity and some numeracy and at least say “I may not like the implications, and we could explore complicated sociological explanations, but Slacker–I must grudgingly admit–is right about the probabilistic/distributional nature of these FBI statistics, assuming they are accurate.” Or go to the Pit and curse me out for even speaking these unpleasant facts. But be forthright and forthcoming here, c’mon. There are a few smart conservatives reading this, and if you expect to have any credibility in future debates with them, you have to face the music here. :dubious:
My degree is in physics (albeit almost 20 years ago) and I’m a qualified Nuclear Engineer by the US Navy (albeit over 10 years ago); I’m very comfortable with math and statistics. You haven’t actually addressed the math and statistics I’ve used (or borrowed from EE), and you haven’t actually attempted to refute specific things that I’ve said.
If you want me to consider that I might be wrong, you’ll have to actually address the things I’ve said, and the real numbers I used, not make up sci-fi hypotheticals, crow about checkmate, and appeal to the crowd for support.
I’m trying to understand what you are saying, but why is the population for both 2.2 million? Shouldn’t the populations be in the same proportion as the total population?
Since the chance of a white guy getting killed by a black guy seems pretty close to getting struck by lightning, doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful line of discussion.
The *chance *of it may be low, but the *fear *of it is not. The battleground is therefore inside the head.
It started because Slacker implied that there was no legitimate statistical reasons in support of BLM. Such legitimate statistics were offered (thanks Evil Economist!), and I went a bit further explaining why these were actually a good demonstration of the need for BLM, and I’m still waiting for SlackerInc to explain why he thinks my assertions and/or the statistics they’re based on are incorrect.
Honestly, out of a country of 325 million people, I don’t find either of these numbers to be particularly noteworthy.
I mean, once we start getting into triple zero numbers, these are basically lightning strike statistics, and imo don’t point to anything I would classify as an “epidemic” or particularly worrisome. The “opioid epidemic” claims tens of thousands of lives, most of them white. If you’re worried about white people dying from non-natural causes, that’s the place to look.
As a white guy I am more afraid of being shot by a crazy white guy on a rampage. Why? Because the media covers the FUCK out of these stories. Make it feel like I could be shot any second randomly by a crazy white guy. Irrational fear perhaps, but one the media definitely plays up. Plus, if a white person is THAT worried about being killed by a black person, they generally can do what white people are known to do: Move.
And as a black person I’d be far more justifiably worried about being killed by another black person than some white person. In 2015 there were 2380 black on black murders, nearly 10 times as much. I don’t know, when a white guy shoots up a place, does that make a black person worried they’re going to be randomly killed by a crazy white guy, more than they are worried about being killed by another black person?
Normally the incidence of harmful behavior is on a percentage basis. Here’s another example for why that makes more sense than what Andy is trying to do. We could talk about what percentage of great white sharks attack humans when they get the opportunity, or we could talk about what percentage of Americans get attacked by great white sharks. But all the people living in the interior of the country or who never swim in the ocean are at no risk–yet that’s not to be credited to the sharks’ pacifism.
Go back and look at my space station analogy, which really is useful to cut through Andy’s highly misleading framing. If you increase the number of whites on the station to 10,000 and still only one of them is a murderer, and make 100% of the ten black people murderers, Andy’s framing would still apply to that colony! Which shows you how distorted it is. With my framing, you can switch the numbers any way you like, but it always reports out the odds a randomly chosen member of either race is a murderer. See what I mean now?
And Andy, if you have these nuclear engineering chops, you have to see what I am saying is right. I’m seriously side-eyeing you now, bro.
And how long until the right wing talking heads talk about how progressives want to close the “gap” by harming straight white males?
They are palatable now, but anything that is used to talk about the disparate impacts of racial prejudice in our society will be demonized by those who don’t want to talk about the subject.
I know why it started. You don’t have to go down every rabbit hole offered to you. BLM is mostly about racial bias in use of force by police. So why drag out piddling numbers that have nothing to do with anything?