Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Well we all "know" that police murder young black men with impunity (that means whenever they feel like it for those of you in Rio Linda). NFL players are kneeling during the national anthem because it's such an epidemic of official oppression that someone needs to stand up to it (apparently by kneeling down which doesn't make a lot of sense unless they are praying which they are not). White cops are hunting down and killing tens of thousands of young black men.

At least that's what you are meant to believe.

But the numbers game is as Benjamin Disraeli described it - "...lies, damned lies and statistics." Let's look a violence against the Police, where the narrative can be somewhat at variance to the facts. In 2016, for example, 135 police officers were killed. There are around 900,000 law enforcement officers of one sort or another in the country. According to one set of relatively reliable statistics, cops are 32 times more likely to be killed by citizens than the other way around. In those shootings, the perpetrator has a 50 percent chance of being black.

Let's use the "progressive" approach and parse that statistic against percentage of population. Since blacks make up just over 13% of the population against 87% of us are some other race, that means that a mere 13% of the population kill half the cops that are murdered each year.

Let's look at the claim that white cops are the killers. It turns out that black police officers are 330% more likely to fire their guns at a crime scene than any other ethnic group of cops. When a black cop is shooting at black Americans, the numbers are even higher.

But how can that be? Fat overfed football divas are kneeling during the national anthem? They wouldn't do that if cops weren't really hunting down and killing young innocent black men. Well, as it turns out, what you feel must be true may not necessarily be true. One can take the same batch of statistics and select out bits and reframe them and voila' - white cops can be made to seem to be murdering poor innocent black people with impunity.

Don't get me wrong. The problem isn't race. No race of people are entirely to blame. Black people are not bad people as a race. They've gotten mistreated for sure. They've been lied to, manipulated and kept down, not by white men, cops or otherwise, but by a political system playing head games with the black community. Malcolm X recognized the problem. "Both (liberals and conservatives) want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives."

The problem is that what to many seemed a well-meaning attempt to "end poverty" (a good thing) was created and managed by a cynical, power-loving group of individuals that have deliberately created vast islands of institutionalized poverty, dependency, anger, monolithic voting, and resentment against the enemies of the people who put them in this unhappy position. In selling our political views, manipulating statistics and rigging the welfare system to keep people in poverty so they'll vote the right way, we've triggered a backlash. I say "we" because good people have forgotten how God has led us in the past and sat by and let them do it. We even enjoyed feeling good about what was being done without actually looking at the damage that was being done by it to black families, culture and community.

The thing is, I don't blame black folk for being angry. They have been practiced upon by the political upper classes. I don't condone it, but I also understand why racism hasn't vanished as it should have after the Civil War. It has been in the interest of politicians to keep the warfare between races going. Racial tension gets elite folks re-elected.

If politicians keep dividing people into victim groups by race, war is what they're going to eventually get. Who knows, the more sinister politicians may actually be hoping for such a war so that some form of marshal law can be put into effect which will allow a massive seizure of power such as happened in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao's China. Mild-mannered university professors, some of whom have been consultants to the White House in the previous administration, have suggested that collapsing the economy would be a good thing, in that it would allow for the establishment of a socialist state in the ensuing confusion. They do this seemingly with no recognition of misery this would cause the very people they claim to be helping.

All of this game of statistics is nothing more than manipulation for political purposes. Both sides of the argument do it sadly. Far right "conservatives" do it. Far left "liberals" do it. People in the middle fall for it because most of us never take a statistics class in school. I've taken three graduate level statistics classes. It's hard to read the news without getting my blood pressure raised because of it. I know their nasty little tricks and how they manipulate statistics.

This is a power game, folks. You are being fed cold-blooded propaganda as surely as if Joseph Goebbels was running the media. Sometimes I think his ghost is running it. After all, Goebbels was a socialist!

© 2017 by Tom King