Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 12K
  • Views: 643K
  • Politics 
ChapelHillSooner said:
There is some kind of fallacy inherent in the arguments that immigrants are committing crimes but I don’t know if it is a recognized one or has a name.

It is a valid argument to say that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the population at large. The response is always that so and so would be alive today if we didn’t have immigrants and while true that seems fallacious considering the crime rate disparity. (I am not using Laken Riley as an example as her perpetrator had previous legal problems which makes that story a bit different.)

IMO that argument boils down to an argument that if we have more people we will have more crime - not necessarily at a higher rate but more in absolute numbers. And of course that is true.

Their argument makes no more sense than saying that we should get rid of people from Burlington because someone in Burlington went to Chapel Hill and committed a crime, a crime that would not have happened had we removed all the people from Burlington 100 miles a way.

Someone needs to develop that thought, maybe wrap it in a mathematical framework, and give it a name.
Click to expand...
What do you mean by mathematical? Like arithmetic? I've done the arithmetic many times on the board. Suppose you live in an rea with a 5% homicide rate. That means every resident has a 5% chance of being murdered in a given year. Now suppose the population doubles, with the new entrants having a 1% homicide rate. Now the area has a 3% murder rate. Every resident has a 3% of being murdered. Literally everyone in town is safer, even though some of the new entrants have committed murders. The general formula is extremely simple. I'm not going to try to write it because formatting is a pain but it's Algebra I level if that.

I don't know if the fallacy has a name. I suspect it does. I don't always learn the names of fallacies as I think it's just easier to point out illogic. But I can think of two ways of characterizing it:

1. "But for" fallacy. When a migrant kills an American, the migration is a "but for" cause -- i.e. if the migrant wasn't here, he couldn't have committed the crime. But so many other things have the same causal status. If the victim had been at home instead of out partying (or vice versa, depending on where the killing occurs), s/he would be alive. If the perp wasn't able to buy a cheap used car, s/he wouldn't have wheels and it's hard to be a killer riding the bus. Maybe the perp was angry at being dumped by a former romantic interest. Maybe the perp had been playing football and suffers from CTE, etc.

If any of those factors in the causal chain had been different, the victim would still be alive. But nobody calls for surcharges on used cars, or preventing people from dumping their partners, or banning football, right? It's illegal immigration that caused it, even though the immigration is very far back in the causal chain. Lots of things had to happen between then and now for the killing to happen.

Maybe we can call this the "fallacy of excess causation." Any analysis that relies on "but for" causation will quickly find that everything is a cause of social ills. Thus does everything become a cause and the whole concept of cause loses meaning. The law mostly uses a concept of "proximate causation" which is sort of a cop-out but at least tries to find a way to distinguish who should be held responsible for an action from those who don't deserve it. And one principle is "intervening criminal act," which is to say that we hold the criminal responsible, and anyone who helps the criminal after the fact, but we don't go after the people who acted (even wrongly) prior to the criminal act -- unless the action was specifically designed to aid the crime (i.e. obtaining an illegal gun) or was an obvious result of the action (here, think of the movie Seven and the way John Doe carried out his crime of lust).

2. Another way to think of it is a fallacy of visibility, if that's a thing. Go back to the arithmetic above. Everyone is safer in the town because of the new entrants -- but nobody sees it because you can't see a thing that doesn't happen. Some % of the crimes that would have been committed against an old resident are now being directed at the new entrants, meaning that the original residents should be thankful that someone else was the target of the killer . . . but of course they can't see that. They don't know that they would have been targeted if the new entrant wasn't here. It's arithmetically required, but we don't know who was "saved" by not being targeted.

It's the way people don't see harm prevented, because you have to look closely to see it. This is what RBG famously described, in her Shelby County dissent, as "throwing away the umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet."

Maybe we should coin a phrase and call it the umbrella fallacy. It's a bad idea to close your umbrella in a rainstorm even if you're not getting wet.
 
CFordUNC said:
Hey, would you look at that! So Republicans don’t *actually* hate DEI hiring practices, huh? Kash Patel has exactly zero managerial experience and zero law enforcement experience, so naturally he should be put in charge of leading the largest domestic law enforcement agency in the country!
Click to expand...
Jurassic Park Ian Malcom GIF
 
WaynetheDrain said:
They don’t care. Their only goal is to own the libs.
Click to expand...
Oh, I know it. No doubt about it. I’m just enjoying pointing out the stupidity and hypocrisy in claiming to be a conservative and voting for a party and a presidential candidate that is anything but. It just sucks that Donald Trump was the person for whom we abandoned our principles of small government, free markets, defend individual liberties and personal freedoms, respect for rule of law, and pro-America patriotism.
 
They also hate weaponization of government so much that they are appointing a guy to head the FBI who has previously invoked the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury.

Also, the guy's 2020 portrait is Manson-esque. I don't know enough about human physiology to assess it. Are there people whose eyes naturally look sociopathic? I don't want to slam on the guy if this is just how he looks, but to me it looks like he's a crazy man.

en.wikipedia.org

Kash Patel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
superrific said:
They also hate weaponization of government so much that they are appointing a guy to head the FBI who has previously invoked the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury.

Also, the guy's 2020 portrait is Manson-esque. I don't know enough about human physiology to assess it. Are there people whose eyes naturally look sociopathic? I don't want to slam on the guy if this is just how he looks, but to me it looks like he's a crazy man.

en.wikipedia.org

Kash Patel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
He may be crazy, but I don't think that's crazy. That's cocaine.
 
You know, for someone whose claim to fame is that he only hires the very best people, many people are saying it, believe me, it’s pretty wild that not only did he have to replace the Republican vice presidential candidate on his ticket because he tried to get the last one hung, but he is also wanting to replace the Republican FBI Director whom Trump himself nominated last time. I’m starting to think that there is a common denominator, but I’m gonna need a little bit more time before I can be certain.
 
superrific said:
They also hate weaponization of government so much that they are appointing a guy to head the FBI who has previously invoked the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury.

Also, the guy's 2020 portrait is Manson-esque. I don't know enough about human physiology to assess it. Are there people whose eyes naturally look sociopathic? I don't want to slam on the guy if this is just how he looks, but to me it looks like he's a crazy man.

en.wikipedia.org

Kash Patel - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
I’d cross the street in heavy traffic to avoid him.
 
HeelingAg said:
Wide eyes can indicate anxiety and/or predation (also general excitement); we're wired for, and conditioned to, ply caution with people in states of anxiety and fear (obviously) predation. Additionally, the flat affect more present in anti-social personality disorder robs us of the subconsciously and consciously processed information we rely on for sussing out danger.
Click to expand...
Well, Michelle Bachman had similar eyes and was also crazy.

Maybe you're right, that I'm reacting to the flat affect more than (or as much as) the eyes. Either way, that is not a photo of man I would like to see head the FBI. I mean, if there was nothing but the photo, it wouldn't be important -- but there's so much more with Kash. The photo seems to encapsulate his essence, in much the same way as Steven Cheung.
 
CFordUNC said:


Does this count as indoctrination, or is it only when woke lib teachers try to teach that slavery once existed in the United States and that Black people were considered to be 3/5 of a person?
Click to expand...

this guy wants to be Sec. of Education sooooo bad. Sounds like he's trying to beat out this wacko lady -
www.yahoo.com

Potential Trump education secretary calls for DOE to be 'shut down': 'Put parents back in the driver's seat'

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice suggested that abolishing the Department of Education would be a positive step in fixing America's broken education system.
www.yahoo.com www.yahoo.com
 
superrific said:
What do you mean by mathematical? Like arithmetic?
Click to expand...
I was thinking more about using an argument with set theory or something although after typing out what I did below it isn't really a set theory argument. Hadn't really thought it through.

Let's say you have groups A and B where the crime rate committed by members of A > B. Let's assume the targets of the crimes committed by members of one group are equally likely to be in any group. (In reality crimes are committed against members of the same group at a higher rate than otherwise which you could add to the argument.) Now let's say you introduce C (immigrants) whose crime rate is less than A or B.

There will be some crimes committed by C against members of A or B. These are the ones you can argue "but if C didn't exist, so-and-so in A or B would not have been harmed." While true and unfortunate for the victims, the actual rate of crimes committed against members of A or B would be lower because A (having the higher crime rate) will now be committing some of their crime against group C. This would be a higher number than C committing crimes against A. So, in effect, you have lowered the rate of crime committed against A and B.

Something like that but I suppose to make it a fallacy one would have to make it about something more generic. I would imagine if we thought hard enough we could come up with other more benign scenarios that essentially boil down to the same problem.

One complication is that it is probably true that the more people you have the higher the overall crime rate tends to be because people having more interactions with others - road rage, etc - although we are talking about a relatively small percentage of people added.
 
Last edited:
CFordUNC said:


There's a lot that is funny about this tweet, but #historiclandslide might be the funniest.
Click to expand...

Trump didn't even win a majority of votes and will finish probably around 1.5% ahead of Kamala, but yeah lAnDsLiDe. Unfortunately, that narrative is already canon in the MAGA community and no one will ever be able to convince them otherwise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top