Don't mess with an old pro
It may surprise some to hear it, but my primary influence as a columnist was probably George Will. Mostly due to his ability to deliver methodical bitchslappings of the sort he provides to a few senatorial critics. The old guy still has it:
I have received your letter of June 12, and I am puzzled. You say my statistics “fly in the face of everything we know about this issue.” You do not mention which statistics, but those I used come from the Obama administration, and from simple arithmetic involving publicly available reports on campus sexual assaults.If there was one thing I learned from Will, it was this: always check their numbers. Con artists always get the math wrong.
The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.
I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”
As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.
Labels: media
56 Comments:
"...my primary influence as a columnist was probably George Will."
...but instead of Will's fixation with baseball...you've upped the ante with ... soccer.
God help us all!
This comment has been removed by the author.
I also strongly suggest everyone check a liberal's references, too. I have found their reference very often says exactly the opposite of what they claim or it is not on point at all.
Regrettably, the target of his response will refuse to acknowledge errors and statistical evidence to the contrary and will hold fast to their false assumptions.
Not really george will fan ...
Jack Anderson, Molly Ivins ....but my #1 by far was william f buckley.. he was a preasure to read and a joy to listen too... always a gentleman.
i thing i would have liked hunter thompson too but actually i think its the bill murray version of thompson that i really like. :)
I too believe liberals are the ones soft on sexual assault. They push girls to go places where they know those girls are more likely to get assaulted. Lierals see this as a fair trade: female empowerment at the cost of getting raped. They accept that a few rapes are just part of the struggle for equality. This is also why I as a gun owner accept the gamble that someone I love, or myself, can be killed by the guns I own. I accept that trade. Liberals should confess their gamble like I do. The true hero of women's bodies are those who would entirely segregate them from unsupervised males and rogues.
Regrettably, the target of his response will refuse to acknowledge errors and statistical evidence to the contrary and will hold fast to their false assumptions.
It is never about the fool himself, it is about persuading the fool's honest following. He who has ears, let him hear.
Playing with the numbers apparently also happens in the amicus briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in many major cases.
Princeton professor Jeffrey Satinover MD Phd (Psychiatrist and Physicist) contends that there is "an unbelievable record of blatant distortion of scientific information that has been presented in the major Supreme Court cases relating to sexuality that have affected family structure in the United States."
Dr. Satinover has actually checked the footnotes in numerous cases and assigns his Princeton students the same task in his classes and their results are telling.
Here is the link to Dr. Satinover's address that I believe is a superb example of VD's assertion that con artists always get the math wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TF6AhmfLKA
It's not so much that they "get the numbers wrong," it's that many of them are all but innumerate, and really don't know what numbers and stats actually mean or imply. They were not smart enough at math to use rigorous logic or stick to single definition for terms, hence the sloppy thinking.
Thomas Piketty
Daniel
It is never about the fool himself, it is about persuading the fool's honest following. He who has ears, let him hear.
this is good.
@Al Cibiades
Thank you. I have that filed away for future reference
Shameful Vox. A disgrace. Will is a total neocon. You should delete this post ASAP.
George got too comfortable hobnobing with the Washington elite. He ruffled just enough feathers over the years to give him some credibility as a consevative voice.
OT (sorta): PZ Myers quoted the Mark Shea "Dark Enlightenment" piece as fact. Yesterday. After it's been debunked as a hoax for months:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/06/14/the-dark-enlightenment-loons-and-hbd/
I don't expect George to preemptively kowtow to the demands by Ultraviolet's activists petition calling for his immediate dismissal by the Washington Post. This could get interesting.
Rolf June 14, 2014 1:26 PM
It's not so much that they "get the numbers wrong," it's that many of them are all but innumerate,
both True and False.
are the math and logic necessary to follow the argument beyond the mass of the sheep bleating these points? Yes.
but the problem is this: the original papers which all these masses of people cite? they ARE created by people who know EXACTLY what they are doing and are willful and intentional lies.
just as with Michael Moore and his movies and most of the Pink sociological research over the last 100 years, there is TOO MUCH deft misrepresentation and obfuscation of fact for this to be accidental.
see this Princeton professor, he's a bit long winded but this is the salient:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TF6AhmfLKA&t=9m5s
Gotta love the cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand rape is so horrible that we need to toss accused men into prison without trial, yet somehow its not bad enough for us to tell young women to take even the smallest precautions to prevent it.
The sexual assault propaganda has infiltrated the military, I'd say even worse than the college campus's. They claim an increase in percentage of victims, but what they don't tell you is that anyone that reports a sexual assault is AUTOMATICALLY A VICTIM regardless if it turns out to be true or not. They claim an 30% increase in sexual assaults, but that is because the VICTIM AUTOMATICALLY GETS TO GO TO A NEW BASE, so if you hate the base you're at, all you need to do is claim a sexual assault and you get to a NEW BASE, COMPLETELY FREE. The icing on the cake, is the sexual assault investigators aren't allowed to call victims out on their bullshit unless they or another witness hears the victim say she lied or made it all up. This sexual assault bullshit is sickening.
On a left of center news site that has (unmoderated no less) comments roughly once a week does a ''avoid rape in college'' story.
I mentioned three factors:
1>Does it have a top 25 basketball team?
2>Does it have a top 25 football team?
3>Is it near ''the bad part of town''?
The more ''yes'' answers the higher the rape risk.
I'm not kidding about the 'money sports' such schools use coeds (with or without cooperation) as a potential ''fringe benefit'' for athlete recruiting. More than a few star athletes see it as ''the chicks are like the athlete dining hall'' all you can eat!
And of course, if ''da 'hood'' is less than a mile away... Well, you figure it out.
That said 12% is probably close to reality if you count the ''he tried to pick me up... I was raped!'' and ''Oooooh... What did I do last night? OMG, I was raped!'' charges vs. the genuine ones the school is trying to hush up (the team's having a great season this year, wouldn't want anything to screw that up)
There are always college activists looking for a cause. This seems to be about
"grrrrl power." The office I once worked in had conduct rules about unwanted sexual attention. The key word is unwanted. It all depended on how hot the guy was. A simple "unwanted" glance got the unattractive guys in trouble while the "hunks" could say or do just about anything.
@ LES
There are no creepy acts, there are only creepy actors.
Vaginalist Credo: Every consensual sex act with a woman is assault if it needs to be.
It doesn't surprise me that Will was your primary influence, except for one thing. You don't throw in unnecessary Latin. :-)
Short time preference guy says: "Empowering grrrrrls can't do anything other than work out just swell for everyone concerned."
YIH:
1>Does it have a top 25 basketball team?
2>Does it have a top 25 football team?
Top25 doesn't cover it. They're everywhere. Lots of "them" prefer going to worse schools because they'll stand out better against lesser opponents (and teammates).
But why haven't the activists reached the natural conclusion? "Don't want to get raped? Don't go to college."
But why haven't the activists reached the natural conclusion? "Don't want to get raped? Don't go to college."
That's is the same realm as:
Saying we don't need guns because we have cops is like saying we don't need fire extinguishers because we have firefighters.
The other skeptic: I'm stealing that.
The other skeptic: I'm stealing that.
That's OK. I did too :-)
"George got too comfortable hobnobing with the Washington elite. He ruffled just enough feathers over the years to give him some credibility as a consevative voice."
Bingo. He loves being a Beltway Insider just as much as the lefty professors and yammerers. Mirror images. Will is the secular Pat Buchanan. Where has his outrage been the past fifty years of fem-marxist totalitarianism? The annihilation of fatherhood and masculinity? Prisons stuffed with men and boys who have no business being there? Ptooey. Will hasn't been part of the resistance. He's been part of the problem. A very well-kept part, too, like the rest of the Professional Pundits. How did your heroic Professional Pudits do at protecting your nation from ideopolitical totalitarianism over the past four decades? Not too good eh?
And this milquetoast is your Hero? lol yikes
George Will is a filthy neocon. Your hero is a fucking joke.
It is possible to learn a great deal from someone without being in total agreement with him.
George Will is a filthy neocon. Your hero is a fucking joke.
There's a real epidemic of binary thinking these days.
Funniest comment I saw under that article was:
"Will doesn't get it. If he were running for office, he would surely have now ensured his deafeat."
Rabbitization in a nutshell.
Apparently some minds have great difficulty with the idea of admiring someones writing and word-craft while disagreeing, maybe even strongly, with their opinions.
Where did this "hero" nonsense come from?
"Primary influence" in a very narrowly defined, specified and particularized aspect, does not come anywhere close to equating with "hero". Rampant comprehension deficits today are troubling.
I used to be a George Will fan.
When I lived in North Carolina, I had taped to my refrigerator one of his columns from the '70s; it gave a never repeated summation of the Demoncrats planned coup d'etat against Nixon: the plan was to raise Senator Carl Albert to the presidency; unfortunately for them, they went after Agnew first; and before they could remove Nixon, he laced Ford in the vice-presidency; thus, he inadvertently foiled their plans.
And this milquetoast is your Hero? lol yikes
You're a moron.
Your hero is a fucking joke.
And so are you. Seriously, just stop reading here. You're too short for the ride. One of the problems with a growing readership is that more and more idiots with basic reading comprehension problems start expressing their cluelessness here.
UPDATE: Myers now "suspects" the Shea piece of being "quirky", which apparently means that it's "made up", but still true anyway:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BqHV2NzCUAAXuBm.jpg
Are <a href="http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2014/06/new_program_aims_to_feed_trenton_students_dinner_at_after-school_programs.html#incart_river</a>these free after school meals</a> any different than the free corn (grain) provided in Constantinople?
Will will claim to be a Reaganite. If he truly is, then he will sound more like PCR (Roberts), Buchanan, and Stockman. The most outspoken here being PCR. The problem with Will is that (probably unwittingly to be generous) he is too much under the curse of GHWB et al and never knew the real Reagan and his select task force, of which one remains alive to date. (He just turned 74 this past week).
Is he a neocon? If he does not claim to be, then he certainly has acted too much in that vein. Hell, I was a neocon up until 2004, and it took a rude awaking for me. I wasn't sure what was a Straussian-Trotskyite although I was certainly following their lead. That is what happens when one is too comfortable with job, home, and luxury. When you lose that all, then one begins to question and engage in dissent. To me Will is not much different from an Alex Jones or Glenn Beck. ALL these need to be thrusted out of the comfort zones. Yes, even Alex Jones and especially Alex Jones. Rush Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly, et al in that very same camp.
So, how does one prove his point? I say present ALL the aforementioned with the following intel. See how they individually react. PCR will take this the best out of the crop. I think Limbaugh would be the one having the worst Britney Spears moment (Beck following close behind, Hannity and O'Reilly tie for third):
So why do the American people allow it to go on?
Supplement with this.
Now we are separating the men from the boys ..
On a left of center news site that has (unmoderated no less) comments roughly once a week does a ''avoid rape in college'' story.
I mentioned three factors:
1>Does it have a top 25 basketball team?
2>Does it have a top 25 football team?
3>Is it near ''the bad part of town''?
The more ''yes'' answers the higher the rape risk."
Hogwash. Not a shred of data suggesting rapes occur more often at big sports schools or those in poor neighborhoods. Are you suggesting that neighborhood folk go on campus and rape girls? Otherwise why would that make any difference as the students come from all over and rape on college campuses is a student problem. Brown is in hot water for widespread dissemination of date rape drugs, and that has nothing to do with sports – obviously since the school sucks at athletics – or with the neighborhood.
There is a stronger correlative aspects as to to prevent yourself from being victimized by mass shootings in a public place: stay away from angry, bitter, lonely white males with access to guns, no?
I re-read the column again ... the fact that only 12% of women report sexual assault and 1 in 5 women (20%) experience sexual assault is not absurdly wrong mathematically.
If I understand what he did, he took data for a Ohio college and figured that 12% doesn't equal 20% --- is it really surprising that a statistic based on all colleges across the country would not match the results of any one college or even a group of colleges...?
If the data sourced from different sources you don't even know is the definition of sexual assault was the same for each survey ---
Finally - lets say we have a +/-5 % error (which is not unheard of and for something as personal as self reporting on sexual assaults not bad ...) --- 12+5 = 17% 20-5 = 15% -- so the two answers do overlap... and thus if you include the margin of errors then a result that says 12% and a result that says 20% can actually mean the same thing...
As soon as someone refers to statistics as arithmetic you know that they don't know what they are talking about .. that includes George Will... now I don't think he is that stupid so the question is then why does he choice to mis-characterize the data. To his credit at the very least he was smart enough to know that 12% is way too high...
Far from a bitch slapping...
"...but instead of Will's fixation with baseball...you've upped the ante with ... soccer.
God help us all!"
This is why Vox is superior to Will in every way.
clk June 14, 2014 12:54 PM
"Not really george will fan ...
Jack Anderson, Molly Ivins ....but my #1 by far was william f buckley.. he was a preasure to read and a joy to listen too... always a gentleman."
Disagree vehemently on Buckley. I had the opportunity to ask him a question when he spoke at a university. He rudely and lazily dodged the question, being borderline intellectually dishonest IMO. He also argued for conscripting the young to spend months or years forced to empty bedpans and change soiled linens/diapers for old bats with Alzheimer's that were strangers to them, under threatpoint of never being allowed to attend any college in the U.S., anywhere. Lastly, I saw him be discourteous to students waiting after to try to talk to him personally. This is first-hand, not "something I heard".
This is without even getting into his involvement in purging REAL conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who eclipsed him in philosophical importance to U.S. conservatism well before his death.
========================================
Earl June 14, 2014 1:13 PM
"I too believe liberals are the ones soft on sexual assault. They push girls to go places where they know those girls are more likely to get assaulted."
Exactly. Rapes of women in the military could be cut to virtually nothing by ending their participation in units other than medical (e.g., nursing) or stateside clerical. It's not conservatives that want chicks in the 101st Airborne, Fleet Marine Force, or on subs.
==========================================
Mike Jones June 14, 2014 2:54 PM
"The sexual assault propaganda has infiltrated the military, I'd say even worse than the college campus's. They claim an increase in percentage of victims, but what they don't tell you is that anyone that reports a sexual assault is AUTOMATICALLY A VICTIM regardless if it turns out to be true or not. They claim an 30% increase in sexual assaults, but that is because the VICTIM AUTOMATICALLY GETS TO GO TO A NEW BASE, so if you hate the base you're at, all you need to do is claim a sexual assault and you get to a NEW BASE, COMPLETELY FREE."
The "new base" should be Portsmouth or Leavenworth in the event of false accusations. False rape accusations won't go down until they carry the same legal consequences as being convicted of the rape charges. Given estimates run from 30% -70%+ being false, that means that as many as TWICE as many women SHOULD be in prison, right now, for false accusations as there are men in prison for rape convictions. So, if in 2009 the FBI estimates 88,000 rapes, then there should be as many as 60,000 women being convicted and imprisoned for years for felony FRA. I'd support that.
**Con artists always get the math wrong.**
Do con artists usually get their claims about non-Christian religions and the definition and spelling of words wrong?
**more and more idiots with basic reading comprehension problems start expressing their cluelessness here.**
Does repeated failure to read past the first entry in a dictionary when looking up the spelling or definition of a word constitute a reading comprehension problem?
There is a stronger correlative aspects as to to prevent yourself from being victimized by mass shootings in a public place: stay away from angry, bitter, lonely white males with access to guns, no?
Actually, no! Stay away from lonely bitter Asians or half Asians and self-described savages.
It seems that even a lot of Africans are not pure in the sense that they have Eurasian genes from past back migrations.
"If I understand what he did, he took data for a Ohio college and figured that 12% doesn't equal 20% --- is it really surprising that a statistic based on all colleges across the country would not match the results of any one college or even a group of colleges...? "
CLK, that didn't sound right, so I went back and looked at the article. In fact, he got a rate of 2.9% -- (98 reported sexual assaults in four years / 28,000 female students) * (100 sexual assaults / 12 reported sexual assaults) = .029 sexual assaults per female student, which is about one in 34, so almost seven times less than the claimed 1 in 5.
So no. It's that 2.9% doesn't equal 20%, which is a bit different. As you note, this assumes that the numbers from Ohio State constitute a representative sample of all American universities, which may not be the case. These statistics for actual reported sexual assaults seem similar to others I've seen, though.
"I re-read the column again ... the fact that only 12% of women report sexual assault and 1 in 5 women (20%) experience sexual assault is not absurdly wrong mathematically."
I skimmed over this at first, but here's the problem -- it's not that "12% of women report sexual assault", it's that (according to a White House task force), 12% of sexual assaults in college are reported (that is, 88% aren't.) The same task force claims that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college. (I've heard various feminists claim 1 in 4 or even 1 in 3.)
The above calculation, which is the same one George Will made, shows that, at least for Ohio State, these two claims are inconsistent with each other.
Will will claim to be a Reaganite
George Will started writing for the WaPo around the time Nixon resigned. He was nearly 40 when Reagan was elected. I suspect his political views were fairly well-formed by then. I think the term "Reaganite" is more appropriate for someone my age (Will was in his 20's when I was born).
The impact of Islam
Al Cibiades: "Here is the link to Dr. Satinover's address that I believe is a superb example of VD's assertion that con artists always get the math wrong."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TF6AhmfLKA
I found that link very informative.
Does the complete lack of sensibility towards my towering IQ, subtle logic, and fiery-yet-vulnerable school girl status get in the way of recognizing that I always, ALWAYS, have something pertinent and interesting to say, dictionary or no? Y u no pay attentions 2 me?
VD,
Somehow this does not surprise me. Because through a convoluted train of websites I was led here from my admiration of Will. I don't read him regularly anymore, but if anyone is interested, the sequence was: Will (who was published in the now defunct Rocky Mountain News) -> RealClearPolitics -> James Taranto -> Ann Althouse -> Instapundit -> Heartiste -> AlphaGame -> Vox Popoli.
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