Courage not cowardice; balls not bluster

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Xelor, Apr 23, 2018.

  1. Truck Captain Stumpy The Right Honourable Reverend Truck Captain Valued Senior Member

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    where is the Rand critique of the linked above studies?
    Especially the latter one that I quoted
    More to the point - just because Rand critiques it doesn't mean Rand is beyond reproach

    based upon?

    you are making a claim that it's "likely to be invalid" because Rand?
    That is no different than saying "there is no climate change becuase Watts said so in his blog study about [x] study"

    again, we're at a point where we contradict each other but you accept only the Rand data

    so where is the validation that makes you so sure Rand data is superior to the link by Vociferous?
     
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  3. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Ice is just posting. Nothing more.
     
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  5. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    you mean other than the fact he freely admitted to not caring if his information was most likely fabricated?

    i cant find the exact post due to not remembering the exact wording but he quoted lott when informed of lott's rather notorious lack of integrity stated he didn't care.

    being ok with a source who list of academic transgressions that should bar him from being anywhere near statistics in a professional capacity simply because he agrees with the source's conclusions doesn't exactly lend a whole lot of credibility to anything he uses to support himself.


    and before you accuse me of liberal bias michelle malkin has also suggested he you never actually conducted the survey he claims he did.
     
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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    For starters, that link used linear regression on data aggregated by State - an almost guaranteed invalidity, with gun and crime data. You get false correlations and inversions of cause and effect, you get muddle where trends are clear, etc.
    And it drew conclusions that several more careful and less overtly leaned researchers have declared to be impossible to draw given the poor data and research situation in the US.
    It's in the analysis - not only Rand, but the article and statistical study I linked earlier for you from Donald Richards and his better suited "distance correlation" (http://jointmathematicsmeetings.org/amsmtgs/2180_abstracts/1125-62-777.pdf, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/a-groundbreaking-new-mathematical-tool/557903/)
    and in general as I wander the net.
    Note that Donald Richards didn't set out to analyze gun data - he was just looking for examples of obviously lousy statistical reasoning he could use to persuade people of the superiority of his new methods he is proud of. And the gun violence debate is a dumpster full of bad stats.
    Yeah, it is. Rand features sounder reasoning and fewer known examples of hogwash endorsed over many years.

    But note the response posts, to what is fairly straightforward stuff from me. Guys claiming they never saw links I've retrieved for them twice now, guys basically trolling - no content, no accountability, nothing but attempted insult for ten, fifteen posts in succession, guys denying simple facts right in front of their faces over and over, guys insisting on misrepresenting the simplest of reasoning, refusing to follow arguments - what's going on?

    It looks exactly like cowardice. Exactly like the culturally established defense of a denial's vulnerability. Evidence for my argument - reams of it.
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Everything starting with "if" from you is bullshit.
    It's not an irrelevancy, you haven't addressed it, and it did say - exactly - that there was positive correlation between carrying a handgun and having it stolen.

    The stat is on your side, btw - it helps explain away the occasional finding of positive correlations between gun carry and reported serious crime, which is kind of odd - since the gun carriers themselves do not seem to be committing the extra crimes.
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2018
  9. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    I imagine there's one person who believes all that.
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Here's a third source I left on another thread and forgot about, for the stats: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/science-mass-shooter-psychology-guns-research. Lot of hyperlinks, four or maybe five statisticians to go look at, same basic finding: the research and statistics on gun violence in the US is of poor quality, and does not allow much in the way of deduction or conclusion. But some:
     
  11. Truck Captain Stumpy The Right Honourable Reverend Truck Captain Valued Senior Member

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    Ok, I remember the richards stuff - but I have to disagree with your statement that "Rand features sounder reasoning and fewer known examples of hogwash endorsed over many years"

    that is exactly what a biased perspective would state, so I will examine studies that directly refute any other linked study and go from there

    it doesn't take a genius or new statistical math to figure out that the bulk of gun deaths (that aren't suicide) are from criminal and gang activity - it's freakin' written all over the records!

    sorry, but I'm going to ignore your rant due to it's irrelevance and projection
     
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  12. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    not at all ... the emperor remained in office entirely at the mercy of the allies ( unconditionally) because it served the allies and it's post war program. It had naught to do with the morality of bombing Tokyo and utterly destroying the Japanese people.
    It presumed that the civilians had been deluded by the State Shinto ideology and that the deluded innocent deserved a better end result than turning into molten green goo.
    The allies recognized the cult of Shinto for what it was and took steps to deal with it.

    .....again, the Emperor and his command were entirely at the mercy of the Allies thus the surrender was utterly unconditional. ( regardless of the post war terms attached )
     
  13. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    The point was to end the war. The quicker this was done the sooner people would stop dying from military action. Truman promised the Japanese a "rain of ruin" and they got it.

    Some folks have blathered about the gun-type bomb being kept secret until the implosion bomb was ready. The bombs were delivered to Tinian with orders to use them. There were no orders as to when to use them other than "as soon as possible." Fat Man was dropped three days after Little Boy, a monumental and duplicitous three days. (If one were to be a conspiracy nut, or simply uneducated about the events, that is.)
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Of course - what do you mean by "not at all"? Why are you talking about Tokyo etc?
    The main, central condition the Japanese had proposed for surrender, back when the US was willing to engage in diplomacy (when the Bomb was uncertain), was that the Emperor remain, without facing war crime prosecution etc. That had been a supposed central sticking point in those previous diplomatic efforts - cited by the US as a barrier to agreement, etc. America then granted that condition of surrender (after signaling that it would do so via the careful wording of the Potsdam declaration, as noticed by some Japanese officials), wrote the promise into the surrender documents (read for yourself), and thereby removed the last barrier for the loyal but non-fanatic.
    Which makes the secrecy an anomaly. The war ends when the Japanese realize the facts of their situation - concealing these facts from them delays the end of the war.
    A "blathering" which is simply a timeline, the recorded historical dates and events as one can read in the several links posted above. The design for the Hiroshima Bomb was complete down to the bolts and finish specifications - translated into actual manufacturing blueprints and engineering documents, the kinds of things machinists use to set up their tooling - in February of 1945. It was assembled except for the core by March. The Japanese did not find out about it until August. That's seven months of war prosecuted in ignorance.
    Exactly. Both were to be dropped, by surprise as much as possible, as soon as possible (no waiting around after Hiroshima), on populated cities - Hiroshima first, because it had been set up to yield the most information about the effects (the sure thing design drops there).
    Seven months after the completion of the gunBomb design, the Japanese were about to be informed of their situation - they faced the choice between capitulation to America and certain annihilation as a Japanese civilization. This had been kept secret from them, preventing them from making that informed choice, for all those months.
    And the US was about to burn schoolchildren alive by the hundreds, firebomb hospitals and civilian neighborhoods, destroy two cities by calculation and without warning.

    All that is ancient history now. The question now is about the effects of that sequence of decisions on the people of the country that made them - in particular, what is behind the ubiquitous denials, excuses, cover stories, myths, and downright fabrications that have grown up between the historical record and the public consciousness. And the reason that is a question here, in this thread, is that this one poster thinks it bears directly on the matter of American courage as it manifests itself and its nature in the American gun culture.

    As evidence, note the similarities in the excuses, denials, myths, cover stories, and priority-status "security" considerations involved in the bothsides jamb.
     
  15. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    The concept of atomic bombs were known. Telling them we made one would have provoked a "so what" reaction from the people who refused to consider giving up when their empire was shrunken down to the Home Islands and some land in China. Ice, you cling to this stupid idea but you have no justification for it. Because there is none.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That is a prime example of the crippling effects of that kind of denial.

    1) It is a pure hindsight argument, inapplicable to an assessment of the decision as made - especially on ethical or "courage" grounds. And it seems to be made without awareness of that.

    2) It makes no sense, even as hindsight:
    2a) The discovery that the US possessed the Bomb was supposed to provoke reconsideration by key people, that was what was expected or at least hoped for, and it did in fact do so almost immediately. To see somebody argue that earlier possession of such information could not possibly have had an effect even over weeks or months, in the face of its actually having had such a dramatic effect at the earliest possible moment, is bizarre.
    2b) "The people" who would have shrugged at the incoming annihilation of Japanese civilization did so after the Bomb dropped as well, as expected, but they were not the whole of the Japanese command or the Japanese people, as was known at the time. The Bomb was not expected to sway the incorrigibly fanatic, but rather the others - the less fanatic, the less suicidal. It did.
    2c) The concept of the Bomb being known argues even more strongly for the earliest possible communication of the fact of possession, especially given the possibility of an earlier end to the war at so little risk. As agreed: The Japanese command and scientific establishments were perfectly able to comprehend the nature of the threat, had it been communicated to them.
    2x) And so forth.

    3) It is a cover story, something invented later to paper over a cognitive dissonance - its incoherence a consequence of the denial involved, its existence a mark of the vulnerability created, the threat posed.

    Thereby the relevance: cowardice is a strong and perhaps too personal a word, with lots of baggage, but if we can step back and look at it as a cultural feature maybe a little of the reflexive walling can settle back? The existence of stubborn incoherence in a cover story marks something that - however habitual and reflexive and customary - is accurately describable as a fear, a sensed threat. And if the reaction to this threat involves a re-ordering of priorities that cannot be acknowledged, an elevation of threat-response above what the responder themselves is willing to defend, then even though a term like cowardice is - as they say - not unjustified, we could ease off on its implications.

    Contrasting neutral examples:

    Witchburning was cowardice, in the Middle Ages, but we do give a partial pass to those whose fear was created by others, was a consequence of trust or belief in authority. Their priorities were re-ordered for them, against their own better nature, in a sense.

    A while back there was a nightclub fire in Rhode Island, and many died because the escaping crowd jammed the exits. The usual explanation is that they panicked - the crowd panic is thought of as a sum of individual panics. But recent and more sophisticated "agent-based" computer modeling of such crowds suggests instead that individuals in panic poorly explain that event as it happened - that the people in that nightclub behaved as if they were taking care of their friends, as if the welfare of their immediate companions were their highest priority. We give such people a pass - even though that willingness to let others burn if their friends were saved caused many more to die than would have if their courage had risen another level.
     
  17. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    Here was my reply:
    So you're just lying about anyone saying they "didn't care", and you never even got around to citing anything about his "academic transgressions" or anything "likely fabricated." Maybe you'd like to get around to that now?

    And Malkin's article is here, with a linked point by point rebuttal from Lott himself: https://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2003/02/05/the-other-lott-controversy-n1238414
    Well then, maybe you'd like to explain how that doesn't reflect on your lack of conscience.
    Yes, here's what you're citing: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2088.html
    And that data is cited from this study: https://injepijournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-017-0109-8
    It only asks if the person carried a gun in the last month, and doesn't even say if the gun was stolen while carrying. Much less how much overlap there may have been between other high rate of gun theft groups, like female, urban, or non-white, and carried or even car gun thefts. Higher risk groups are likely higher risk in every category.

    Guns carried and serious crime likely only correlate in urban areas, and maybe even where they don't determine if the guns are carried legally.
     
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  18. Gawdzilla Sama Valued Senior Member

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    Ice, you still don't know what you're talking about.
     
  19. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Or just highlight your typical approach to stuff you don't want to handle - it's not a product of thought, obviously, so where does it come from?
    So?
    And that leads to higher rates of gun theft, apparently. Yep.
    For example: part of it may simply be carelessness and opportunity from habituation and ubiquitousness - so thefts from cars and houses and lockers are also correlated with carrying the things. Nobody would be surprised, eh?
    The correlation at the beginning, there, was with legal carry and gun theft.
    Guns and crime (other than suicide and gun theft) do not reliably correlate in general, so far as one can tell by current research. You have to be more sophisticated and detailed, both in data acquisition and analysis, than people have been so far - I posted a reference to Donald Richards above, the article also mentions a few other researchers.
     
  20. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    So you don't even care what this says about you :
    What is it you think I "don't want to handle?"
    It doesn't say what you seem to think it does.
    Well, nobody is surprised you don't understand how these categories overlap.
    No, that survey didn't ask if the gun was "legally" carried.
    Your Richards links only mentions a correlation I haven't seen cited by anyone here. Just a red herring.
     
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  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    The Atlantic article, and Richards himself, mentions a considerable variety of stuff - everything involving linear regression on State aggregated data, for starters. In general, the pro-gun crowd is better off attending to the more careful data analyses - they tend to do more net damage to the anti-gun rhetoric. So don't dismiss the guy because he chose the particular example he did - - - .
    I didn't seem to think it said anything - I wasn't talking about what it said.
    Nope. The reasons you fall back on that kind of shit are occasionally interesting, and thread relevant speculation - the content, never.
    That's a point. I forgot that. I was illegitimately assuming that reported gun thefts would be from people legally carrying - that the influence of gun theft on aggregated official crime rates, as suggested, implied a count of legal guns being stolen, and was therefore an underestimate if anything - as would be the influence of gun carry on unrelated crimes. But I am forced to retract - we have no good and relevant data on legal vs illegal gun carry.

    Meanwhile: you could salvage some relevance by bringing my attributed character flaws around to the topic of courage and gun culture in the US - not an impossible task, given the fictional me you have invented to operate with, and might even make a relevant point. Change of pace? Go for it.
     
  22. Vociferous Valued Senior Member

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    And? Until you can show where he refuted actual studies cited here, it's a red herring.
    And I'll pas2 on more of your sage concern troll advise.
    So your concern about gun deaths in disingenuous. Got it.
    Bravo, way to swallow that pride for once. Or just let reason prevail. Either way, commendable.
     
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  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No, wrong direction, that's more irrelevance - there's a thread here, you're trying to bring it around - - -
    He invalidated the conclusions of essentially all studies that apply linear regression to State aggregated gun topic data. That's not a red herring from my pov - that's retroactive support for a third of my postings here on gun topic statistics.

    Meanwhile, those studies had already been shaded by their obvious flaws, here, anyway. No need for Richards's fancy techniques.
    Oh, it's way worse than I let on - I had four or five of my past links muddled in a sleep-deprived brain, and one of the researchers in the Science article (Docque) misfiled under "Rand". But if I just keep posting simple and factually accurate stuff from basic principles (the gun research on both sides is crap, and no conclusions can be drawn from it without visible and explicit argument, say) it will all work out.

    Meanwhile: cowardice and US gun control, the topic. Bothsides have cowardice to point at - are they equivalently self aware? Do their respective cowardices have the same roots?
     

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