Correlation, Causation, and Racism in “Science”

You’ve got to love the modern pseudo-science of polling.  I remember during the last municipal election cycle, getting a call from a polling agency asking me how important Police Services were to me.

“In what context?” I asked.

“How much will the importance of Police Services be influencing your vote in the upcoming election.”

A meaningless question without context.

I hold a dim view of the Calgary Police Service; my anecdotal experiences with them have shown a deficit of actual policing skill.  They can’t differentiate between “Alpha citizen” and “Alpha criminal,” often stiffening in fear whenever they witness testosteronic power (in Hamilton this wasn’t the case; and I personally can tell  the difference immediately).  They’re far too fond of self-serving and blunt instruments (such as red light cameras) seemingly unable to put deeper thought into the consequences of their policies and behaviours.  Not to mention that their new-hires seem to have criminality in their blood – aggressive, obedient bullies are who they want.

[Caveat lector: I’ve also met some extremely decent cops, and have no statistics to back me up.  These are just my generalized impressions.]

So voting for a Mayor who’d be willing to lean on the CPS was a major consideration for me; but without a context, my answer could have been twisted to mean the exact opposite.

None of this is new, of course; Penn & Teller did an episode of Bullshit! on it years ago:

The modern Democratic mess isn’t merely restricted to polling, however; sometimes they bring out the big-guns of Science! to redefine reality, dividing up the populace with a schizophrenic taxonomy.  For example, this study reported by The Blaze “proving” that gun owners are racist.

A new study is making the connection between owning a gun and harboring racist attitudes in the U.S.

The study, “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in U.S. Whites May Influence Policy Decisions,” published in the research journal PLOS ONE says “symbolic racism,” or “racial resentment,” correlates directly with American citizens who keep guns in their homes.

The study found that for every point on its “symbolic racism” measure, there was a 50 percent greater chance of respondents having a gun in the home.

Wait a minute – what exactly is “symbolic racism”?  I decided to check out the original study (by Kerry O’Brien, Walter Forrest, Dermot Lynott, and Michael Daly) just to find out.

In wave 20 of the ANES, participants were asked to respond to a four-item scale drawn from the Symbolic Racism Scale [37]. Specifically, participants indicated the extent to which they agree (1 = agree strongly to 5 = disagree strongly) with statements such as “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” [emphasis added]

And now we’re right back to polling.

The question asked is one of economics and history, neither of which lend themselves to simple answers; the more advanced your heuristic, the harder this question is to answer.

If this question were asked on a binary scale – “Is this question true or false?” – then an obvious answer of “True” comes up.  Certainly, the slavery which existed one-hundred and fifty years ago (combined with Lincoln’s violent dismantling of it) have, to a certain extent, put blacks behind the eight ball.  “To a certain extent” being the key words in the last sentence: the statement raises the question “As compared to what?”

An educated Black Panther could score “Rasssist” on the above test, simply for believing that slavery has less of an effect than:

• Learned-dependence from the welfare state.
• The subsidized destruction of the black family through support of single mothers.
• The introduction of crack-cocaine, and the gang culture that surrounds it.
• The vastly disparate prison sentencing between “white drugs” like cocaine, and “black drugs” like crack-cocaine.
• The fact that black ownership of businesses has declined since the civil-rights era, partly due to the removal of Jim Crow laws which acted as protectionist measures.

And that’s hardly a laundry-list of the possible causes of black dysfunction; those are just the ones that a Black Panther would find most palatable.

This study is attack-rhetoric, not science.  It’s so utterly useless that no conclusions can be drawn from it.  Are Republican gun owners more:

• Educated and insightful about history and economics?
• Ignorant about history and economics?
• Morally oriented, intuiting black dysfunction as a consequence of immoral behaviour?
• Faithful in the free market?
• Or do they just find black culture generally distasteful?

It’s impossible to say from the evidence gathered.  Thanks to a bad heuristic, this study actually makes you more stupid just by reading it.

Kerry O’Brien, Walter Forrest, Dermot Lynott, and Michael Daly; you are moral slime.  Your commitment as researchers should be to discovering the Truth, not distorting it; you are in utter dereliction of duty.  You are delinquents, who should be banned from every being published in another academic journal.

Of course, that’s unlikely to happen; but their is a silver lining to your vile crimes against science.  Through your actions, you’ve provided even more evidence of how morally bankrupt the scientific establishment has become, showing the world that – yet again – our new priestly caste is not to be trusted.

Oh, and one more thing guys – Google Searches are forever.

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A final word, for any Liberally “Educated” University children out there, the ones who are meant to absorb the conclusion unquestioningly, and repeat it ad-nauseum in their whiny voices: you guys have just opened up Pandora’s box.

By saying that “Gun owners are more likely to be racist,” you’ve admitted that judging groups by correlated behaviour is a fine and dandy thing to do.  While I’m still not sure what exactly a “symbolic racist” is, I do know what a violent criminal is – and whatever correlation you’ve managed to find, it pales in comparison to that between melanin and murder (and yes, those are FBI statistics).

As a right-wing man of science and red blood, I understand the difference between a demographic and an individual, and am able to reach out my hand in friendship to any of my black brothers and sisters of good moral character; you degenerate children of the left, however, have shown an utter inability to understand math beyond basic arithmetic.

People are beginning to figure out who the real racists are.

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