Over the years, I’ve developed an informal list of things that tell me the writer or speaker is not someone worth my time. These are not hard and fast rules, just warning signs that I may be dealing with a huckster, moron or proselytizer. One of those warning signs is the use of graphs. If you rely on a visual representation of your data, I’m going to assume you’re up to no good.
Now, here’s a chart with a break down by race:
It’s not hard to see what’s happening. In response to outlandish crime rates amongst blacks, America has ramped up jail terms and the number of crimes for which you end up in jail. This has raised incarceration rate for all groups, but it has hit black males hardest, as they are the highest offending population.
If you scroll to the bottom, the writer of that piece has this bio:
Helen Walters is the ideas editor at TED. Previously the innovation and design editor at BusinessWeek, she writes about interesting people and what keeps them up at night.
What in the hell is an “innovation and design” editor? What’s an “ideas editor”?? This sort of insipid gibberish is popular with the Ted Talk types. It reminds me of something I observed with millennials. Words have no meaning, beyond the feeling they elicit. It’s why Obama speeches read like they were written by a mental patient. I guess the emotive language stuff works well as emotive labeling.
These figures are meaningless. Most of the word has no real records. Further, justice and law enforcement as practised in the USA is unknown outside our borders. In the UK a murder is not a murder unless it can be solved. Sound incredible? Yes it is, but if you wish to distort your crime figures.
In most of the world a thief who is caught and killed is not a matter of concern. That’s just the way it is. So these figures are meaningless to me. To know the truth one has to have lived in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia and seen how criminals are treated.