Each mass shooting is followed by speculation about its cause and the motivations of the shooter(s). As would be expected, people tend to speculate within the framework of their world view and ideology. The recent shootings in Dayton and El Paso are no exception.
Many have endeavored to place some of the blame for the El Paso shooting on Trump and his allies. Trump and his allies have endeavored to place at least some of the blame for the Dayton shootings on Elizabeth Warren. While there are the specific issues of sorting out whether these claims of blame are true, there is also the broader matter of sorting out how to place blame in such cases. This is important for assigning moral responsibility but also for assisting those who wish such help to avoid contributing to mass shootings and violence in general. I will begin by addressing the case for Trump’s influence on the El Paso shooter.
While there are many who insist that Trump is not a racist, no one can deny that he speaks very negatively about Hispanics and migrants from the south. He began his campaign talking about Mexicans being criminals and rapists. He has fixated on the made in America MS 13 gang and uses it as a tool of fear. He has consistently presented the migration across the Mexican border as an invasion and has even laughed at the suggestion that migrants should be shot. His defenders will contend that he was not seriously agreeing with shooting migrants, but he clearly did nothing to show that he condemned the suggestion. He has told American congresswoman to “go back home”
In addition to his rhetoric, his administration has taken harsh action against migrants, separating parents from their children and keeping migrants in terrible conditions. Whatever one thinks of Trump, it is evident that he has presented an unrelenting attack against migrants and Hispanics.
The shooter in El Paso apparently posted a manifesto that echoed Trump’s language, thus showing he was both familiar with and influenced in his writing by Trump. This, of course, does not entail that Trump was a causal factor in the shooting itself—the author could simply have liked Trump’s rhetorical style and content and emulated it. However, it certainly shows that Trump’s words had an impact on the author.
The shooter drove over eight hours to reach El Paso, which had been often mentioned by Trump in his attacks on migrants, and targeted a Walmart well known for having Hispanic and Mexican customers. While Trump has not explicitly called for shooting migrants, the targets of the shooters gun were those targeted by Trump’s rhetoric. But can Trump be held causally and morally accountable for having a role in the shooting?
To state the obvious, Trump did not tell anyone to kill the migrants and he did not make the shooter kill anyone. However, the concern is with Trump’s influence—did he influence the shooter in a morally culpable manner?
Interestingly, the Republican claim that video games and the internet cause mass shootings is oddly relevant here. The stock argument is that people are influenced by violent media and thus become violent. If this line of reasoning is accepted, then we would know why the shooter engaged in violence. But this would not explain the chosen target—there are no major video games that task the player with murdering migrants at Walmart. Sticking with the hypothesis that media causes mass shootings and considering how the shooter mirrored Trump’s rhetoric and views, then the logical conclusion would be that Trump was as much a cause of the shooting as video games.
I, of course, do not blame the video games for the mass shooting. Being consistent, I also must hold that Trump did not cause the shooting—however, it is reasonable to accept that the shooter was influenced by Trump. That is, while Trump did not make him shoot anyone, Trump did help shape his views and they determined his targets.
It could be objected that while the shooter echoed Trump, there are so many other influential sources of anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideology—so why blame Trump? This is a fair point—the shooter might have still engaged in the shooting if Clinton had been elected or if Trump did not use such rhetoric. However, there is correlation between Trump’s rhetoric and the increase in hate crimes. While one should always keep in mind that correlation is not causation, there is evidence for a causal connection between Trump’s rhetoric and hate crimes. Researchers have conducted a study on this effect, the study can be reviewed here. While defenders of Trump will probably dismiss this as liberal fake news, such a study cannot be dismissed by a mere ad hominem and can only be countered by due consideration of the evidence and refutation of the arguments. Considering the above, it does seem that Trump most likely influenced the shooter and is thus morally accountable to the degree of his influence. Now, what about Elizabeth Warren; is she accountable for the Dayton shooting?
The Dayton shooter identified himself as a pro-Satan leftist who supported Elizabeth Warren. While some might argue about whether he was a true leftist and supporter of Warren’s views, let it be assumed that this is the case. Giving this assumption, to what extent is Warren accountable for the shooting?
While Warren does speak out against those she sees as guilty of economic injustice, her rhetoric lacks Trump’s vitriol and efforts at scare tactics. She has not called for violence nor laughed at suggestions to murder anyone.
Warren does, like Trump, target specific groups of people. However, her criticisms are not based on race or county of origin—she tends to be most critical of the ultra-wealthy. But her call is to tax and regulate; she never even suggests hurting people.
As this is being written, there is no known manifesto written by the shooter—so the only link to Warren is the shooter’s claim that he supported her and his liberal postings. These, however, do not seem to involve violence. If a manifesto does appear, then this matter will need to be reconsidered.
While the El Paso shooter clearly targeted Hispanics, the Dayton shooter seemed to simply engage targets of opportunity, even killing his sister. His targets do not seem to belong to any of the groups that Warren has criticized nor do they seem to be people who are targets of liberal hate. If the shooter had gone after the ultra-rich, shot only right-wingers, or targeted something to do with finance then perhaps one could contend that there was a political angle to the shootings. However, there seems to be no evidence of such an angle. At this time, the best evidence points to the other explanation of mass shootings used by Republicans—mental illness. The shooter apparently struggled with mental illness and had a history of problems (he apparently had a kill list and a rape list). While people with mental illness are far more often victims of violence than perpetrators, the Dayton shooter does seem to fall into the category of someone who is both violent and mentally ill—but further evidence is needed before making a definitive claim. What is clear, however, is that the shooting lacks any clear political motive.
But one might insist that because the shooter posted liberal views on social media and supported Warren, it follows that he did the shooting because he was liberal and supported Warren. The obvious problems with this claim are that Warren does not advocate violence, that the shooter did not make any claims that they were acting from political motives, and the targets were not linked to the alleged political agenda. Even if the shooter were obsessed with Warren, to blame her would be analogous to blaming Jodie Foster for John Hinckley, Jr.’s attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. As such, while a case can be made that Trump influenced the El Paso shooter, it would be a false equivalence to blame Warren for the Dayton shootings.
This discussion provides something of a guide for determining blame. As noted above, key factors include a similarity in rhetoric between the alleged influencer and the influenced, attacks on and fear mongering about a group by the alleged influencer, and a clear link between the rhetoric of the alleged influencer and the targets of the violence. By these standards, Trump deserves some blame while Warren deserves none. If Warren had been savagely attacking people with hateful rhetoric and laughing about violence, then it would be a different matter—but as it stands the effort to blame her is an attempt at a red herring through a false equivalence.
I don’t have time for a full reply now. Just wanted to bookmark this for later. This, by the way, is the first paper I’ve ever seen publicly presented with a request not to cite without explicit permissions from the authors. Sure, pre-publication drafts, but then why upload?
The cited paper is posted from the Latina/o and Mexican-American Studies Department of the University of North Texas. The point I got to was “… we do argue political speech which utilizes racial, ethnic and religious tropes, promotes conspiracy, and excuses the use of violence represents a dangerous oratorical cocktail …” but now I’m stuck on that point. I agree with them, but I keep wanting to scream that they are blind to the obvious fact that this is coming from both sides – Trump being a primary focus on one side, and the same, diffused across a plethora of organisations, news media and academics on the other.
Well, I have worked my way through a first reading of that paper.
You say such a study cannot be dismissed by a mere ad hominem and can only be countered by due consideration of the evidence and refutation of the arguments
I would agree, if it presented any evidence. I’ll get to that. First, it’s worth considering whether such a study can be commended ethically without due consideration of such evidence as it presents, and a clear grasp of its arguments. That is a serious question. Is it responsible, morally acceptable, to present such a paper as part of an argument without having examined its data, methods, and logic? If the public held news media – and politicians, especially your current President – accountable for their statements, and their repetition of the statements of others, we’d have a much healthier public discourse.
Before I start, two things:
1. I do not mean to be in any way critical of the authors here. This is not a finished paper. It badly needs a spelling and grammar check, and important elements have not been inserted yet. One of the authors’ pub pages says it is under review, which I take to mean that it has been submitted and sent for peer review, because another author mentions that they are working on weaknesses that have been identified and communicated back to them. It would be entirely unfair to criticise this as if it were a finished work, just as it is unfair to cite it as evidence for anything. So why do we have news organisations covering it, and why are you repeating these claims?
2. I am entirely willing to believe that racial and cultural friction, and incidents arising from that, increased after large Trump rallies. I do not consider that at issue here. My question is about whether this work-in-progress presents convincing evidence for that proposition.
It is not worth writing a full review here. I’m glad of that. If I were sent that paper as a reviewer, I’d want the journal to pay my coffee expenses for the next month. I will just touch on a few points that caught my attention.
1. No raw data is presented. None. While I understand this is the norm in many branches of academic publishing, some branches that have fallen to notorious scandals have taken to requiring data to be presented or archived so that the study can be reproduced. Researchers in climate studies, for example, have seen an admirable improvement in their transparency over the last decade. Elsewhere, we see fake data being eventually exposed in everything from stereotyping to canine genital inspection to the effects of inhaling diesel exhaust.
Without raw data, nobody can reasonably replicate the survey to confirm or dispute it.
The authors rely entirely on external sources and classifications, and do refer to the organisations from which they used data – but that is not the same as presenting the actual data they used. Personally, I regard some of these sources, such as the ADL, as highly reliable, and others, such as the SPLC, as highly unreliable. But even the ADL is a source that, after a quick skim of their data, I regard as reliable largely because they frankly point out the deficiencies of their data in their commentary. Without the actual data, nobody can confirm its reliability. The FBI dropped the SPLC as a “hate” resource in 2014.
2. The tables and figures that would present the summarised results are not in the PDF yet. Even if a reader assumed that all the sources were accurate, and the data had no deficiencies or biases, not even the summaries are present. This is why I say the paper, as preented, has no evidence.
3. I have numerous questions about the assumptions made in the collection of the data, and from reading, it appears the authors are conscious of some of these.
For example, they vacillate between the terms “hate crimes” and “hate incidents”. This may be because, as far as I can tell from the Data and Methods section, their measurements are of reports, not of charged crimes, much less convictions. The ADL is admirably clear about the progress from reports, which may be tagged and reported as “hate” at the discretion of the original officer receiving the report, through the system to investigation and conviction. If Trump had a rally anywhere near Jussie Smollett, that would be included as evidence of this “Trump hate” effect.
One of the authors has written elsewhere that they are currently working on comparisons with statistics surrounding other political events.
4. Many arguments are subject to alternative hypotheses, that are not presented. I will stay away from the “political speech which utilizes racial, ethnic and religious tropes, promotes conspiracy, and excuses the use of violence” issue because I will be tempted to over-egg that pudding, but a similar case presents itself.
The hypothesis they claim to be testing is that “The rhetoric used in the Trump rallies likely promoted White identity and served to increase a sense of group threat, which led to heightened incidents of hate incidents.”
However, they do not consider the symmetrical hypothesis that “The rhetoric used in the Trump rallies likely promoted minority concern about White threat, leading to a rise in attribution of hate as a factor in incidents reported”, nor do they attempt to distinguish between these hypotheses.
.
Finally: I give up. Why do I bother? There may well be something to this, but I suspect that even if the data and code were made available, anyone attempting to verify it would be led down so many arbitrary classifications that the resilts could not be convincing.
“This, by the way, is the first paper I’ve ever seen publicly presented with a request not to cite without explicit permissions from the authors. Sure, pre-publication drafts, but then why upload?”
Sometimes I am so slow I am standing still. If you want to idea-launder a claim quickly through the “Studies” journals into the media, even if you (currently) have inadequate evidence and/or arguments for the claim, what do you do?
If you have the help of a well-connected PR operator, and the sympathy of an activist editor or publication, you can write a paper, using any evidence or no evidence, that provides a policy-relevant or partisan hook that will ensure the narrative gets spread in the.news media.
Then make a partial draft of that paper public, but without any formal statement or press release from your institution, containing the conclusion you want to launder, without enough backup to allow for verification or refutation, and submit it to a friendly journal that will keep it under review. Given the speed of academic publishing, you can draw out the review process indefinitely. Like Trump’s tax returns, the audit/review can be interminable.
Now get your PR person on the job to inject the story into the news media.
If you can eventually get your paper published in some form, even if the conclusions have to be weakened or changed, that’s a bonus, but it’s not essential. Once the narrative is in mainstream news, the mission is accomplished.
I do not know, or even suggest, that this is happening here. In fact, since I think the original media injection was done through a feature “The Monkey Cage”, that explicitly forbids submissions directly from PR organisations, it can’t have been exactly this. But when seeking a motive for uploading, but not directly releasing, a paper about which the authors speak in the media, it can’t be ruled out.
I can even sympathise. I do find it plausible that partisan events, Right or Left, can cause local frictions, which can result in an uptick in local police reports lasting for weeks or months. And Trump is about as unabashedly partisan as it gets. If I believed that Trump was “literally Hitler”, I might be confident that my thesis would eventually be vindicated and the ends would justify the means.
Ben Goldacre, in his Bad Science days, wrote about a very amusing but harmless example of this general method, where Veet hired a mathematician to analyse some “survey data” to rank the 10 sexiest celebrity walks, which you can find by searching for “A wiggle in her walk?” and “Veet”. Veet then submitted the story to national news. My favourite quote: “We haven’t conducted the survey yet, but we know what results we want to achieve.”
Much more sophisticated stories underlie some information that was featured in reports by the IPCC, but they are far too intricate for me to recount. Searching for “Caspar And The Jesus Paper” will find you one such story that saved the original hockey stick, but stock up on coffee, aspirin, and graph paper before reading; this is the big leagues. “Academic check-kiting” is another useful search term.
I think it is reasonable to label the El Paso attack “domestic terrorism” as the shooter deliberately targeted Mexicans and had a political objective. However, the shooter himself says his views predate Trump and that he was mainly inspired by the Christchurch killer.
I do think, however, that toning down the harsh rhetoric Is a good idea, but the toning down needs to go both ways. Right now, the rules say that it is perfectly okay to say hateful things about white people, but if you criticize a POC in the slightest way you are immediately labeled a racist. This model is clearly unsustainable. There needs to be some recognition on the left that the hatred and vitriol they direct against white people will not lead us to a good place.
I finally got around to reading the paper that Coffee Time so eloquently reviewed; I have very little to add to his comments except that where the authors do actually attempt to give examples of the so-called “white supremacist” or “anti-semitic” rhetoric that they claim is at the heart of so much violence, they do not give examples of what Trump has actually said. They give examples of what left-wing news sources said he said, which are clipped, cherry-picked, and taken out of context.
For example, the paper says,
“Perhaps most infamously was Trump’s proposed Muslim Ban, announced December 2015, in which he said,
“[I am] calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (Blumenfeld 2016). “
Trump rationalized this decree as necessary for national security, invoking the notion that Islam as a
religion and Muslims as a people pose a unique threat to the nation. This idea is foundational in
many contemporary white nationalist groups and figures.”
So first of all, Trump never said this. This was a press release issued by his campaign, (hence the brackets around “[I am]”.
Second, the quote is incomplete. The full press release continues –
“”Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,”
That second clause is pretty important, because it offers context – context that Feinberg, et al purposely leave out. (following the lead of the mainstream Left, the “Never Trumpers”, and the media).
They would have us believe (and state as much) that Trump was espousing a foundational idea rooted in White Supremacy, bigotry, and white nationalism – but the fact is that this proposed move was in direct response to a deadly mass shooting in San Bernardino, California by ISIS sympathizers – which occurred the day after Barack Obama called for the country to “not turn on one another out of fear”.
At the heart of it, and stated right within the press release, was that this was intended to be a temporary suspension, bearing with it the political accusation that the current administration was not doing enough to stop this kind of terrorism.
(Remember the Tylenol scare of the 1980’s? Although the company and the government both knew that the poisoning of Extra Strength Tylenol was limited in scope and due to some criminal activity rather than a broad manufacturing defect – ALL EXTRA STRENGTH TYLENOL was removed from drugstore and supermarket shelves … “until we can figure out what is going on”.)
The words “Muslim Ban” were not his. It’s doubtful that many people (and I’d include Feinberg, et al in this group) have any clue about what the intent of the speech was, and what the result of it was. It resulted in a temporary travel ban for the citizens – regardless of religious affiliation – of seven distinct countries that were suspected of supporting Islamist terrorism. The final order was vetted by the Supreme Court, who determined that the language of the EO was neutral with regard to religion.)
In fact, opposition to Trump is so complete that not only are his words and context mischaracterized such that he is painted as an anti-Muslim White Supremacist, not only are their articles, speeches, blogs, accusations based on “Trump’s Muslim Ban” (a term coined by the left, BTW), but after he became president, after passing the final version of the executive order (titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”), he was again criticized and excoriated in the press for “Breaking A Campaign Promise”. Never mind that the “campaign promise” in question was a fiction cooked up by the left.
This is the norm in this country. I’ve made similar comments about statements like “There are some fine people on both sides of this debate”, which has been similarly misquoted, truncated, taken out of context and used to “prove” some kind of point about Trump that they would have us believe. That, increasingly, they need us to believe. I don’t think they have enough with all the free stuff they’re promising.
In his manifesto, Patrick Crusius is very clear about his motiviations. Did you read it? Did Feinberg?
“My motives for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement. ”
“The inconvenient truth is that our leaders, both Democrat AND Republican, have been failing us for decades. They are either complacent or involved in one of the biggest betrayals of the American public in our history. The takeover of the United States government by unchecked corporations. I could write a ten page essay on all the damage these corporations have caused, but here is what is important.”
“The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Wall Street CEOs–the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs–still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.”
Oops – my bad. That last (bold face) quote didn’t come from the manifesto. It came from Elizabeth Warren.
Crusius continues:
“Due to the death of the baby boomers, the increasingly anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right and the ever increasing Hispanic population, America will soon become a one party-state. The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate. They intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters.
With policies like these, the Hispanic support for Democrats will likely become nearly unanimous in the future. The heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold. Losing Texas and a few other states with heavy Hispanic population to the Democrats is all it would take for them to win nearly every presidential election. “
He is not anti-Hispanic. He is not a “White Nationalist”. In addition to blaming both sides for the corporate takeover of American government (something you yourself have written about, Mike), he’s being perfectly clear in stating that the Democrats are using immigration as a new kind of gerrymandering. Texas, traditionally a Republican stronghold, could swing decidedly blue if the population demographic were to shift to Hispanics. Texas is a key state for Republican elections; Democrats have made no secret of the strategic advantage Texas would offer them.
His manifesto continues – he talks about the fact that while a high-school diploma was once sufficient for success in the workforce,
“Now a bachelor’s degree is what’s recommended to be competitive in the job market. The cost of college degrees has exploded as their value has plummeted. This has led to a generation of indebted, overqualified students filling menial, low paying and unfulfilling jobs. Of course these migrants and their children have contributed to the problem, but are not the sole cause of it. The American lifestyle affords our citizens an incredible quality of life.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this, too, a Democrat talking point?
“our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources. This has been a problem for decades. For example, this phenomenon is brilliantly portrayed in the decades old classic “The Lorax”. Water sheds around the country, especially in agricultural areas, are being depleted. Fresh water is being polluted from farming and oil drilling operations. Consumer culture is creating thousands of tons of unnecessary plastic waste and electronic waste, and recycling to help slow this down is almost non-existent. Urban sprawl creates inefficient cities which unnecessarily destroys millions of acres of land. We even use god knows how many trees worth of paper towels just wipe water off our hands.”
He also fears automation, technology, and the impact this will have on jobs – another left wing talking point that has been brought up on this very forum.
And finally, he declares,
“My ideology has not changed for several years. My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president. I putting this here because some people will blame the President or certain presidential candidates for the attack. This is not the case. I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump’s rhetoric. The media is infamous for fake news.
And yet, remarkably, that is exactly what is happening. Forget the corporations, forget the environment. Forget fears of automation, forget spiraling college costs and unsustainable entitlements. Forget the fact that he blames Republicans and Democrats equally for the problems he sees, forget the Democrat exploitation of Hispanics in order to flip the electorally precious Great State of Texas. And forget the fact that he specifically denies having been influenced by anything Trump has said. There can be only one takeaway here – “Trump is a White Supremacist Who Causes Mass Shootings”.
One thing is true – there is a tremendous amount of anger and hatred in this country. But I have listened to Trump’s speeches, I have read the transcripts, I read them in their entirety. I read them in context. I have concluded that there is nothing this man can say, nothing he can write, nothing he can do, nothing he can tweet that will not be truncated, reworded, reproduced out of context, or even ignored – all in the service of underscoring the White Nationalism rhetoric that has been created by the Left. This is the unbridled hatred that the left has for Donald Trump; hatred that blinds them to truth (don’t get me wrong – by “truth” I am not saying “Trump is Great”; but that they are blinded to any kind of reasonable discussion on what has actually been said or done). Hatred that guides their every action (“Impeach that Motherfucker!”), hatred that they hope you and I will adopt as our own so that they can regain the power they crave so deeply.
And if all I read was the same as what Feinberg, et al “quote”, if all I read was commentary that “Trump Thinks Neo Nazi’s are Fine People” or that “Trump Says All Mexicans Are Rapists”, or that “Trump’s Rhetoric Is The Cause of Mass Shootings”, why, I’d hate him too.
In fomenting all of this hatred and anger, the Democrats are doing tremendous damage to this country. And, at the risk of being called a “White Supremacist” myself, I will say that I agree with Crusius with regard to the Democrat strategy of trying to secure the State of Texas – they are willing to walk back everything they have said about illegal immigration over the past 30 years, abandon their own ideology about illegal immigration just so that they can virulently oppose Trump, accuse him of White Supremacy, and exploit Hispanics for their own power.
One final point.
Sometimes simple common sense trumps all the gyrations of logic anyone can come up with. This point was made in a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal:
“Mr. Trump’s fiercest adversaries couldn’t be more certain that he is a racist. They parse his tweets and his spoken words and quote them to each other in versions deliberately stripped of context. They speak of “dog whistles” and “code language,” as if he were capable of verbal subtlety. They accuse him of saying what he hasn’t said: I wonder how many commentators on CNN and MSNBC have stated, as if reporting fact, that Mr. Trump thinks Mexicans are rapists and neo-Nazis “good people”? If he were an actual racist or white supremacist, Mr. Trump’s verbal incontinence would have made this fully apparent by now. There would be no need to debate the question.”
How elegant. “As if he were capable of verbal subtlety”. Right on. Subtle he’s not – and isn’t that one of the major criticisms the world holds of him?
“If he were an actual racist or white supremacist, Mr. Trump’s verbal incontinence would have made this fully apparent by now.”.
How absolutely true. Trump wouldn’t know which end of a dog whistle to blow on. It’s part of his charm – or so say many of his supporters. Verbal incontinence indeed.
One of the points of the piece was that the “White Supremacist” trope against Trump is, as I have claimed all along, is manufactured by the careful parsing of tweets and stripping of context, and has become little more than a wild conspiracy theory that his held by half the country. And it bears an eerie resemblance to the “birther” movement of a few short years ago.
“Birtherism” is the claim, quietly peddled by Hillary Clinton ’s allies in 2007-08 and loudly promoted by Mr. Trump in the years after, that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and therefore couldn’t legally be president.
Birtherism was the complaint of cranks from the beginning, and it should have died in April 2011, when, in response to Mr. Trump’s taunting, President Obama obtained and released a copy of his original birth certificate from the archives, which proved he was born in Honolulu.
The theory lived on for several more years, but not because there was evidence for it. Empirical evidence was never birtherism’s appeal. What made it attractive, what made it so hard for its exponents to relinquish it, was their hatred of Barack Obama.”
Sigh.
We will never learn, will we? We are a hate-motivated people, I suppose.
I’m happy to find that there are still people in the US who don’t believe everything they read – or reflexively disbelieve, if it works against their side.
In
https://reason.com/2019/09/06/no-trump-rallies-didnt-increase-hate-crimes-by-226-percent/
two Harvard Econ Ph.D. students reproduce the Feinberg et. al. results and find, using the same methods, that “Clinton rallies contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.”
The bubble is popped when they note that
“Both of these results rely on comparing counties with rallies to other counties without them. This produces a glaring problem. Politicians tend to hold political rallies near where large numbers of people live. And in places with more people, the raw number of crimes is generally mechanically higher. Simply put, no one should be surprised that Orange County, California (population 3.19 million) was home to both more reported hate incidents (5) and Trump rallies (2) than Orange County, Indiana (population 19,840, which had zero of each).
“Nor is it sensible to interpret that one of these differences (hate crimes) is caused by the other (political rallies). Indeed, adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero. The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway.”
So there was no need for more subtle confounders of the kind I was considering.
The problem was in basic Numbers 101. Numbers are hard.
THIS is why papers should be published with data.
Now, having said that, the tables the two published are not adequate either, so I do not take this as a final word, but to be fair this was a blog piece rather than an attempt at a formal paper.
So what odds would you give on Feinberg, Branton, and Martinez-Ebers 2019 ever being published?
Mike, you might consider the personal responsibility the journalists at the WP, SF Chronicle, and CNN should have to ask basic questions of such a paper before featuring it. You might also ask yourself what responsibility you should have to due consideration of such evidence as it presents, and a clear grasp of its arguments. before you repeat it.
If people would stop repeating outright lies and shoddy speculations, wouldn’t we all be better for it?
But they’re not lies if they tell a greater truth. Just like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Mike has stood by the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie for years now because it tells a greater truth. Why should “studies” be any different?
I am just getting very tired of all the assertions on the web from people who don’t take responsibility for what they say, who just repeat whatever pattern of words seems to strengthen their rhetoric, with no attempt to confirm, question, understand, or falsify.
I’m tired of it when it’s Trump making some assertion bracketed by “people tell me”, I’m tired of it in news articles, and I’m tired of it in blog posts and opinion pieces.
These grand generalisations with appeals to an absent authority are mostly puffs of smoke.
Even when the work is done according to accepted standards, we too often find that the standards that are accepted aren’t acceptable – see Replication Crisis.
Parables and analogies are a necessary part of teaching and communicating, how can anyone attempt to justify a broad assertion using sloppy and erroneous methods, or downright false data, presented as fact?
I’m sorry for that last sentence. I really should not hold a license to enter text directly into an editbox. It bothered me. Let me try again.
But they’re not lies if they tell a greater truth.
Parables and analogies are in a sense lies, but are a useful part of teaching and explaining. Presenting false information as true as evidence for an argument is something else. How can anyone attempt to justify a broad assertion using sloppy and erroneous methods, or downright false data, presented as fact?
Yeah. Your point about parables and analogies, amongst adults, really should not have to be stated. And yet it did. Because people who do not live in an environment where their words have consequences (I was going to say words and actions, but let’s be real..in academia there are no real actions, it’s all just words), don’t have to adult up.
These grand generalisations with appeals to an absent authority are mostly puffs of smoke.
Puffs of smoke to people who believe a little too much in a logical world. Make no mistake, over the long term, the Gods of the Copybook Headings eventually with terror and slaughter return, but until then, these “puffs of smoke” to which you refer, rule the day. The USSR, Nazi Germany, and today North Korea, Venezuela, China, etc. were/are ruled, quite violently and decisively by these puffs of smoke.