@religion-is-a-mental-illness / religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com
"Emotions neither prove nor disprove facts. There was a time when any rational adult understood this. But years of dumbed-down education and emphasis on how people 'feel' have left too many people unable to see through this media gimmick." -- Thomas Sowell
"Then you should understand people choosing the bear"
I'm a sexual assault survivor. When I was 15, a 55-year-old woman assaulted me and three of my friends at a party where she served a bunch of 15-year-olds alcohol. Way to go Granny.
And I don't hate women. I've stepped in to defend women against attacks from men in city streets or bars. I can't say if they're all sexually related or sexually motivated - they probably were.
But when we get to the question of this, I mean, like I do empathize for victims. I get that.
But the question isn't real. And we all know the question isn't real. It's hypothetical.
I was just at a store. There are hundreds or thousands of people at this Walmart, men and women walking around, doing their thing minding their own business. Not a single woman in there was shifty eyed, dysphoric or afraid of any of the men in that store.
I was just at a restaurant. I was at a bank. I was at a coffee shop. I was walking through a park. No one was afraid of men.
Replace any of those men with one bear and see what happens.
So, because we know it's hypothetical, let's have an adult conversation. Ready?
The existence of the question at all creates bias against men. I can trick you just the same way. I'd say, what do you think more Islamic men use to murder their wives with, guns or knives or rope?
The fact that I asked the question, you go, well why is he asking that question? Do they murder their wives a lot?
The queston is: safety, bear, man, alone. Right, those are the four real words in that question. It is embedding a bias against men. Every woman that has answered that question "bear" has stepped out in public since, has interracted with hundreds of men. The average woman will interact with 300 men per day.
Maybe they'd opted for the bear just cause they wanna mix it up. They're like, I'm getting so bored with the thousands of men that I see every week that maybe I just wanna see a bear.
I don't think you understand the gravity of this question. As a abuse survivor, I'm standing up against a false claim against the nature of men, where one in a thousand men - or maybe just a hair over one in one thousand men - will commit a crime of this nature. It's a very thin number of men.
And as a man whose family was responsible for starting World War I - you know, the assassination by the Black Hand, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, my family paid for that assassination. We started World War I, which is why World War II happened. Because I'm so closely tied to that genocide, I've studied it.
And, Hitler and the Germans use the same type of questionings and comparative logic to wage war against Jews. I am literally trying to stop thousands of women who don't know any better but than to participate in a trend from creating this wave of propaganda against men.
Someone is trying to use this question against men, and women think it's a cool, dramatic way to say, "I'm afraid of men." But they're really actually not afraid of men. Cause they wouldn't go outside. They wouldn't go shopping. They wouldn't walk through the park. They wouldn't do anything. They'd be so actually mortified of men.
The question appeals to a logical fallacy called the Fallacy of Relative Privation. They're trying to say that because a single man could do more harm than a single bear, that all men are more dangerous than all bears on average. Regardless of the context of the interaction. That strips away all sense of goodwill or truth to the fact that women interact with 300 men per day on average. That strips away the truth that a woman, per male exposure, if you walk down the sidewalk and you see a guy, you have a 1 in 35 million chance of being forcibly [g]raped in that walk by on the sidewalk.
That Fallacy of Relative Privation strips all logic to the fact that men are, by and large, safe. But yeah, 81% of women will report being sexually harassed or assaulted. 43% of men just the same.
The number of people who will experience unwanted sexual contact, men and women, are roughly the same[**]. Men will underreport at three times the rate of women. Men are victimized just as much, but we're stigmatized against talking about it.
Both sides are victims, but men are not doing this campaign to smear women to try to damage the entire, like, gender of women.
Except for me, now. I'm doing what's called logical parallels. My whole argument for the last two weeks has been such: since women assault children, their children, their biological kids at 2.5 times the rate that all men assault women sexually, then women should lose custody of their kids until they stop it. Because, the phrase going around online right now is all men until no men. So, until no women, all women. Women do not deserve custody of their biological kids if any of them are capable of harming a child. Because children are innocent and honestly, all parallels aside, it's the abuse of children that is propagating people who are becoming monsters later on in life.
So, if anyone could make a decision right now to make the world a better place in the next 15 years, it's women not abusing their kids. It's already too late for us as adults. We're already screwed. We all have our trauma that we have to work through, and that's gonna be a dog fight. But if we wanna guarantee the world's gonna be a better place, let's stop abusing kids.
So, the reason why women are choosing the bears is cause it's not a real question and they won't have consequences if they answer in a dramatic way for effect.
Just like the 30-something percent of boys are like, well, dude, if like, there's no consequences, I'd totally take advantage of a chick. See, yeah, maybe people are bad people by nature, but people still obey the law. And that's why if 32% of college men would commit SA if there's no consequences, but then only one out of every thousand men will commit that crime, that shows how much people have discipline over their nature.
And you cannot say the same thing about a bear.
==
** The following numbers are taken from the CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS) from 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2016/2017.
--
P.S. I'll just leave this here.
"uh no, you just made that up"
There are 85 million moms in the USA and 165 million men. 300,000 women are assaulted by men, 234,000 children are assaulted by their mothers.
Means just under 3 moms per thousand abuse their kids, and just under 2 men per thousand commit assault.
That makes moms the higher perpetrator than men.
And bonus round. Kids who are abused are more likely to become assailants when they're adults. So, if we want to stop men from assaulting women, let's stop single mothers from assaulting their children. The dominoes fall in a certain direction and we can pull the earlier domino.
==
Couldn't figure out where he got the 234,000 child abuse statistic from, but the following are the statistics from 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, taken from the ACF (Administration for Children and Families) website.
Given 234,000 is somewhere in the middle of the figures above, we can accept it without concern.
These are the abuse and homicide stats from 2021 in graph form.
According to Wikipedia, there's been only 10 children (i.e. under 18 years old) killed by any variety of bear in North America as a whole since 1980.
According to the logic of the "bear vs man" people, children are safer with a bear than with their mother.
If women should be more afraid of men than bears, children should be more afraid of their mothers than bears.
If all men should feel guilty for what a fraction of men do, then all mothers should feel guilty for what a fraction of mothers do.
You can't have it both ways, or you'd be a hypocrite.
Or just stop pretending that you don't understand "per capita," and this whole meme has just been about hating on men for sport.
Everyone knows you're not really serious about it, because otherwise you'd never go outside. But you do. You're surrounded by men you don't know every single day. You'd call a bear rather than a plumber, an electrician or the police or fire brigade.
Now, imagine those 4 billion men were 4 billion bears, and then tell us how often you'd go outside. Yeah.
This is - hopefully obviously - parody, but it's worth a moment.
When people insist that describing reality accurately is some kind of bigotry and that you're an istaphobe of some variety, what they're really saying is that they and their beliefs are disconnected from the real world, and they object to the imposition of reality into their fantasy world.
It's the same thing as when Xians call you "mean" or accuse you of "hating god" for pointing out the bible's complete and obvious lack of coherence with reality.
It doesn't matter if they don't like it, if it's true.
"You know, monotheists and conspiracy theorists have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views."
"Truth is really whatever can be shown to correspond to reality. Truth is what the facts are essentially. Facts are after all points of data that you can verify to be accurate.
A lot of people hate these definitions because it completely undermines their theology. They can’t make the assertions that they want to by saying anything is the absolute truth, because under the definition of either word no you don’t!"
-- Aron Ra
"Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence."
-- Leslie Stephen
You may be able to - or even, can - lie to people about what is objectively true. You can even convince people to repeat those lies by making it a moral virtue to do so.
But reality cannot be fooled. Not by threats of hellfire, not by emotional manipulation, not by wails of “bE kInD!!," not by language games, not by redefining words, not by crybullying, not by kafkatraps, not by various “-phobia” ad hominems, not by fallacies, not by academic jargon, not by religious apologetics.
Reality always collects its due. With interest.
By: Helen Pluckrose
Published: Nov 16, 2022
Today I saw a Twitter user say:
People who hyperfocus on "objective truth" and "facts" are the ones most easily duped by the framing of the issue.
The logic for them is: "If the person is correct in their statements, then they have accurately described reality."
The word ‘hyperfocus’ is doing a lot of work here. It is undeniably true that if people only focus on objective truth and facts, they will often miss the point. This is because we are human beings and, as such, we often care more about how people are experiencing a thing than the facts of the matter.
For example, if a friend had suffered a stillbirth, few of us would visit her and inform her that about 1 in 200 births are stillbirths and that this is most often to do with problems with the placenta. This simply would not be the reality that we care about or she cares about. What we would most want to establish is how she and her partner are coping and what we can do to help her/them deal with the sense of grief and loss. In such a situation where somebody we care about has experienced something awful, the reality that matters is their feelings, and those feelings are very much real.
If this is the kind of thing the individual who made the above statement is referring to, then he is undoubtedly correct. However, it is unlikely that even the people most dedicated to discovering objective truth and facts - e.g., scientists - would respond to a friend or family member in need of emotional support following a traumatic experience by coldly providing them in this situation. This is because they are human too and have empathy and compassion as well as a dedication to objective truth, and, ideally, they know which of these needs to be prioritised in which setting.
When people complain about others not valuing objective truth and facts enough, it is almost never because they have offered sympathy rather than information in such a situation. It is almost always because they are focusing on experience, subjective perception and feelings in a situation where objective truth and facts are needed. To continue the example, the organisation, Sands, which exists to support research into:
would not be very effective in its aims if it focused only on how people feel following a stillbirth.
This example should also make it clear that there is no contradiction between caring about how people experience things and gathering objective truth and facts about the thing. In fact, they are complementary. Somebody who has experienced a stillbirth is likely to be amongst those most motivated to support scientific research which hyperfocuses on discovering more facts about it in order to aid the effort for fewer people to experience the grief that they did.
The problem, then, is not that some people focus too much on objective truth and facts and some too little but that some people focus too much on the wrong one in any situation. While there must be some examples of people focusing too much on objective truth and facts when listening to experiences and feelings is what is needed, most of us who argue for the need for greater respect for objective truth and facts are concerned that the opposite is becoming too much of a norm. That is, we are concerned that too much of a focus on how (certain) people experience or perceive something can take precedence over establishing the objective truth of the situation. That matters because we cannot possibly hope to remedy any social ill without having an empirically substantiated understanding of the reality of the situation.
The context in which this perceived conflict between objective truth and subjective perception is most often raised in the circles within which the tweeter (who is a sociologist) and I move is in relation to society and culture and the “Culture Wars.” The conflict arises between Critical Social Justice scholars and activists and liberal empiricists with the former wanting us to focus more on the lived experience of marginalised groups and the latter wanting to focus more on empirical data that might explain why imbalances continue to exist, whether this indicates a social problem to exist and, if so, how to remedy it. It is important to note that both groups seek the same end: a just society in which nobody is marginalised and discriminated against because of their identity.
The problem as I, a liberal empiricist, see it, is that the tendency of CSJ scholars and activists to attribute all societal imbalances to things like ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘cis/heteronormativity’ and to attribute these entirely to socialised attitudes and dominant discourses that must be dismantled using things like unconscious bias training is simplistic, implausible, unfalsifiable and thus unlikely to work. If something doesn’t work, there is good cause to be sceptical of the hypothesis underlying it and strong grounds for instead gathering data about the genuine cause of imbalances and what will work to address those that need addressing.
Subjective perception is simply not a good tool for discovering the reality of complex social phenomena, especially when they vary so much by individual and Critical Social Justice activists only regard as authentic the perceptions of those members of groups seen as marginalised who agree with them. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Candace Owens cannot both be right about the experience of black Americans and the prevalence of white supremacy in the US at the same time (although they could both be wrong). It is simply not good enough to go with the perception of the one you already agree with. A truth exists and must be examined rigorously to understand reality and remedy any racial injustice. Just as the fact that polling among Britons revealed that they believed, on average, that 22% of Brits would be Muslim by 2020 did not make their perception correct. We cannot go by their subjective perception (or lived experience) and act as if this were true. The actual figure is estimated anywhere between 5% and 7%. Knowing the objective facts of the religious demographics of the UK is useful for many reasons but this does not mean that the subjective perception does not matter, particularly when it is so spectacularly wrong. We need to understand the cause of that too.
I doubt the hypothesis that “People who hyperfocus on "objective truth" and "facts" are the ones most easily duped by the framing of the issue.” I suspect that a larger cause of error and misframing of reality is too strong a reliance on subjective perception. However, the biggest error is the belief that we need to choose between facts and feelings or prioritise one exclusively when the reality is that, as humans, we naturally care about both. The important thing is to try to get the optimal balance for the context.
==
Imagine getting mad at an indifferent, objective reality.
“The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a Mermaid and a Seal.”
-- Mark Twain
“I'll never understand why ‘deeply held religious beliefs’ are held in higher esteem than thoroughly understood facts.”
"Deeply held religious beliefs” occupy equal footing with “my alien abduction and rectal-probing experience.”
Truth can be substantiated, not merely asserted. When they decline to validate it, we can decline to consider it.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the ‘evidence’ eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.”
-- Hitchens’ razor, Christopher Hitchens, ”God is Not Great”
When they tell you that objective facts are the problem, you know you have a problem.
We talk about the narcissism and arrogance of religious believers, who think that evolution isn’t “true” because they don’t “believe” in it, that their god will alter the universe to suit them because of prayer, or that they experienced their god through some banal anecdote with an obvious explanation. And to contradict them is a disrespectful denial of their deeply held “faith.”
And yet, we’re also surrounded by sufferers of untreated Cluster B disorders who demand we respect "my truth” and “my lived experience”, and that questioning or contradicting this subjective reality is some kind of bigotry, “-ism” or “-phobia.”
Reality, and describing it accurately, isn’t “shaming” you, nor is it “hateful”. It just doesn’t care about your feelings, can’t be gaslit, can’t be changed by trying to redefine it, and has no tolerance for being denied.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
-- Aldous Huxley
Or because they’re labeled “hate.” Reality doesn’t “hate,” it just has no tolerance for being denied.
Why does objective reality feel so personally threatening to you?
