6 thoughts on “It’s Really Barely Even Jokeworthy Anymore”

1. A good way to approach the gun control debate would be to begin by demanding gun parity. That means that if you restrict the right to posess a gun from, say, a few million people between the age of 18 & 21, you need to identify a similar size group that is currently forbidden to own a gun that will now be allowed to own guns.
   So if you say you want to ban people with TRO’s from gun ownership, you have to identify another group that will now be allowed to posess a gun — say, 16 year olds who pass a background check & training regime.
   Yes, I am dead serious.
   Otherwise, the gun control people advance their goal. Their goal is not a safer society, it is a society with fewer guns.

2. If you want a good example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the “fact checkers” that the tech companies want to use to guide our public discourse, check out this politifact article: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/24/blog-posting/social-media-post-says-uk-has-far-higher-violent-c/
   Note the bad faith ‘reasoning.’
   Politifact begins by examining an unsourced internet meme that Britain, with strong gun control, has four times as many violent crimes as the US.
   So they begin attacking an unserious argument. Strawman, should be easy, right? Right up the alley of our self-selected “fact checkers.”
   They look at the data, and find out the claim is — gasp — true!!
   So Politifact takes a closer look at the data & redefines terms to reduce the UK violent crime rate.
   Problem: After redefining the UK violent crime rate downward, it is still twice the US violent crime rate.
   Politifact has a problem. UK violent crime rates are still significantly higher than US violent crimes, even though the US has far more individual gun ownership. The strawman still stands.
   What does politifact do? They reach out to people who tell them that statistics can’t be used to compare the US & UK violent crime rates. It’s just too crazy! We can send a man to the moon, but it is impossible to accurately compare US & UK violent crime rates!
   Stats are reliable enough to only demonstrate that progressive ideas are better than conservative ideas, I guess.
   So politifact declares the internet meme that the UK has four times as much violent crime as the US as “False,” even though the stats say it is true.
   It has got to be humiliating when you erect a strawman & can’t even knock it down.

3. “It has got to be humiliating when you erect a strawman & can’t even knock it down.”

   Always ask an experienced hand, got an opinion on that DG?, Peev? Emery-Collective™?

4. Read the book “How to lie with statistics.”
   Then recognize my Daddy’s homily, “Figures never lie, but sometimes liars figure.” I long ago gave up on the “fact checking” organizations, since most of them are reliable left wing propagandists. The only truth I found was in labeling Obama’s “if you like your doctor” the Lie of the Year.

5. Politifact exists to turn progressive argument into fact, and conservative argument into opinion. They aren’t very good at it.
   The idea of journalists being arbiters of the truth is ridiculous. They are story tellers, not scientists and not theologians. The history of the word “fact” is illuminating. It is sometimes said that there were no facts until the 16th century (before that time you had truth and reason, bot of which were acknowledged products of the human intellect, not “things that are”).

6. they admit that “there is no good way to compare” violent crime rates between countries. Funny, I seem to remember the gun control crowd doing that quite a bit over the past few decades…..

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