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https://twitter.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1838634148518342991

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Sep 21

There are like five or six different charts that keep popping up in my feed over the last few days some of which purport to show that mass shooters are disproportionately white and some that show they are disproportionately black. Since I have no idea which of these charts are based on real data and which aren’t, I just want to make a higher level point about this data, more generally, and how it’s used to tell various stories.

Basically, there are two kinds of mass shootings and similarly two kinds of school shootings. The first kind is the more sensational kind that shows up on the news and in our nightmares, where a gunman walks into a public place and starts executing people indiscriminately. These kinds of shootings are relatively rare, if sensational, and the majority of the perpetrators are white.

The other kind of mass shooting is where a shooter is targeting an individual or a group, maybe at school, maybe somewhere else. Maybe it’s a group of people standing on the street corner or at a party. He may only intend to shoot one or two people, but he’s not exactly an expert marksman and he doesn’t care that much if he hits bystanders, so often many people are shot, and it qualifies in the data as a mass shooting. These kinds of shootings are much more common, they make up a much larger share of all homicides in any given year, and the shooters are disproportionately black.

So, basically, what you can do is shift around your definition of, “mass shooting“ depending on what kind of story you want to tell. Progressives do this in order to have it both ways. When they want to tell a story about how common mass shootings are, they use the more inclusive definition to increase the numbers. But when they want to make a racialized point about the whiteness of mass shooters, they use the more narrow definition.

What I’m just describing here is the broad direction of the data. The more kind of sensational, rarer mass shooting, the kind we all picture in our head when we hear the phrase, “mass shooting” — those shooters are indeed disproportionately white.

If you want to include all of the more normal, routine, everyday mass shootings — five people shot at a party, four shot while waiting for the bus, some kids caught in the crossfire on a porch — then those shooters are disproportionately black.

You can obviously chop the data up however you want, but if you lump them all together when you’re trying to make a point about the prevalence of mass shootings, but then separate them when you’re trying to make a racialized point about the unique evils of white people, Then that’s quite plainly dishonest.

And, again, to continue with my theme from the last few days, this kind of deliberate, intentional manipulation of the data in order to obfuscate in support of a racist point about white people will never ever show up on a list of misinformation. You’re of course allowed to do that all you want. It will never be counted as misinformation.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Sep 20

This chart is a black pill that demonstrates that most people cannot read and interpret the presentation of data. For example, 99% of people who read this chart come away thinking that the departure happened in 2010. But that’s ridiculous. 2008 and 2009 were particularly low years for pedestrian fatalities (probably because of the great recession), but the chart clearly shows that 2011, 2012, 2013, and even 2014 were well within the recent historical range. 2010 to 2014 is on this graph very obviously a continuation of the trend evident from 2000 through 2008. If you drop out the two low numbers from 2008 and 2009, it’s basically a flat line from 2000 through 2014.

The departure, again quite obviously, occurs around 2015.

This is extremely important. If you want to understand what’s going on here, then you need to understand that the departure occurred in 2015, not in 2010.

Why does this matter? What happened in 2015? We dramatically changed policing after Ferguson and the publication of the Ferguson report.

This explanation fits with the timeline and it proposes a direct causal mechanism that is unique to the United States. All other causal mechanisms — the cars got bigger, people are looking at their cell phones, etc — are just as true in Europe and everywhere else, yet the numbers only went up dramatically here.

What was different here is that starting around 2015 we stopped giving out tickets for reckless driving and everything else.

Again, this is the only explanation that is both concordant with the timeline and that explains a unique rise in fatalities in the United States.

It’s a sign of just how mushy most people’s brains are that they will look you right in the face and say, “the problem is that cars got bigger!”

Only in the United States? And starting suddenly in 2015? The cars have been getting bigger all over the world and, even just focusing on the United States, complaints about the sizes of SUVs have been around since the 1990s. The cars have been getting bigger for 35 years. The number is fatalities Rose dramatically starting in 2015.

The other explanation people offer is smart phones, which is why their brain wants them to see a departure in 2010 to roughly coincide with their rise in popularity. Their case would be a lot stronger had the departure occurred in 2010. You’d still have the problem that cell phones are ubiquitous worldwide and the increase in fatalities is local, but at least the timeline would match up. But, again, look at the damn chart! The data for 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 are basically a flat line with 2000 through 2008.

What it looks like happened is that pedestrian fatalities fell during the worst years of the great depression and then continued on trend until around 2015.

This isn’t a strange explanation. Similar drops are evident in all kinds of domains. It was a bad recession! People stayed home, they commuted less, they spent less money, they tried to save on gas, and so on and so on. You see dips like this in lots of data for 2008 and 2009.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Sep 14

Like so many things in our current discourse, I feel similarly about liberals. Like, what I think is that I know what they think they mean by, “having been born somebody else,” but they don’t understand what I think I mean by, “having been born somebody else,” which means I actually have more information than them and I understand this problem space better than they do. In fact, I understand their own position better than they do, because they literally cannot even conceive of the opposite position.

The biggest clue here that I’m right is that of course literally everybody can, “imagine what it would be like to be somebody else.”

Short of brain damage or mental retardation or something, this is a universal human capability. Literally everybody can do it.

What we’re being asked to do, though, is something much more extreme, which is to accept the claim that you actually could have been born somebody else, that your soul was floating around in the ether and then randomly assigned to a uterus at conception.

This insane metaphysics is far beyond imagining yourself as somebody else.

“Try to imagine yourself as somebody else, think through the motivations you’d have and the constraints you’d face” is a perfectly fine thought experiment whereas, “you literally could have been born somebody else” is an insane pseudoscientific metaphysics with absolutely no relationship to reality as we actually find it.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Aug 23

Just in the first 10 minutes of this he puts the video interviews of suspects in the park that night up against footage from the Netflix show. In the show, the kids are playful and laughing. They are a little aggressive with some cyclists, patting them on the back as they bike past. They come upon some older guys robbing someone and stand back, mouths agape, surprised and perhaps even horrified by what they're seeing.

Meanwhile, in the real life interviews they all admit that they entered the park to do violence -- to beat on people and rob them -- and, further, that this was a favorite pastime, something they'd done many times before.

It's shameful.

In the show, they stumble upon other people doing a robbery and are horrified. In their testimony they admit that they entered the park to rob and beat people.

It's just so completely shameful. How do you make such straightforward propaganda and live with yourself?

He cuts to an interview with the director who says that she wanted to humanize the boys, to ask the viewer to "interrogate" all that they think they know about supposed criminals like them.

I mean, sure; you can just lie about what happened. It's true that they're more sympathetic characters if you lie about what they did.

Read 7 tweets

wanye

@wanyeburkett

Aug 23

https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1826798196632551711

This kind of stuff has pretty negatively polarizing effect on somebody like me. I think if you just broke it down to its most base level, you'd find that not many issues have a bigger gap between what normie liberals think and I what I do.

https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1826798196632551711

Even where we have disagreements, my views on, say, abortion or immigration or welfare remain consistent (if not perfectly so) with mainstream normie liberalism. But I just cannot understand knowing anything about this case and nevertheless choosing to feature these men specifically in the party's biggest night.

You could conclude in your mind that they probably didn't do the rape in question and I wouldn't think less of you, but I still wouldn't celebrate them, feature them in the party's biggest moments.

Read 7 tweets

wanye

@wanyeburkett

Aug 22

Observe that countries around the world have wildly diffferent customs and cultures. Observe that I rather quite like our culture and customs just the way they are. Observe that culture is in some sense zero sum. Are you still baffled? Is this chain of reasoning really so hard to follow?

Just do a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Replace every American with somebody from a Muslim country. Do things get better here for women and gay people? Do any laws regarding religious freedom change? People around the world believe different things! They have wildly different views on American-style freedom. They can change the law!

Liberals sort of imagine that everybody around the world wants exactly the same things in life, desires the same freedoms Americans enjoy, and that their countries only ever have governments in opposition to those freedoms because of a few autocrats who subvert the will of their people.

But, you know, that’s just a thing they assert without evidence. In fact, it appears that people around the world *genuinely* disagree about a lot of stuff.

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