April 11
Creating statistics. You've all heard of a remarkable drop in crime in this country. And there may be some truth to it. Nevertheless, several cities have been found to have deliberately skewered the statistics by not arresting as many offenders as they would have previously, or after an arrest, reducing the charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. After all, there are a lot of benefits accruing to a city that has a reduced crime rate. Tourists. Conventions. Why didn't we think of this earlier.
A reader writes to the New Haven Register to say a previous reader claims that "historical experience and statistics in states that have made this move toward 0.08% alcohol for legal drunkenness clearly indicate that this lowered threshhold has no effect on alcohol-related crashes." In fact it's not true, he tells us. A major study comparing the first five states to do so found the 0.08 states experiences a 16% decrease in the proportion of proportion of fatal crashes etc.and that there was a significant difference. Now how can two people have such opposed opinions. Is one lying?
Well, no, I wouldn't way one was necessarily lying. After, one may have picked up another person's lie. Number 66: we tend to believe what we want to believe. You see this both in reference to something having been proved and to glomming onto statistics. If you like it, you snatch it up. If you don't like it, you're skeptical. I have a little clipping here on my test that says: Many Smokers Ignore High Risks, Survey Finds. In the body of the article is this amazing statement: "most smokers say they do not believe they run a higher than average risk of heart disease and cancer, a national survey found."
I recall the time many years ago where I saw this in action. I must admit I don't remenber all the specifics, but it was in this order. One feminist: "Women are found to be 28% poorer after a divorce." A woman at her side: "No, it's higher than that. It's about 74%." "Well, okay. Women are 74% poorer." And I'm thinking: Wait a minute lady. You were just enlightening us, on national television, from your store of knowledge and you give up your figure that easily? How are we supposed to trust anything you say?"
In any event, I think we'd do well to be very skeptical of people who use statistics to "prove" a point. We first have the right to ask if the statistics are valid, not because we like or don't like 'em but because we'd like to know what's up, no?
Reality. That's what it's all about. The reality you see. A man in I can't remember what state was sentenced to death while sane but has now fallen into a mental illness that happens to be inhibited if he takes the right medicine. Now, the United States won't execute any insane people. So do you see the dilemma? Can we force him to take the medicine that will make him sane enough to execute?
The man himself had a rather curious defense of his right to live. He was working in a "religious" state of mind when he killed someone and had a wrong sense of reality. Well, if having a wrong sense of reality exonerates someone, should we not exonerate Hitler for his evil deeds. He certainly has a grotesquely distorted sense of reality. Indeed, I might go one step further and say don't all criminals who get caught have a mistaken picture of reality? When I'm reading of one malefactor or another getting caught, I often think, well, don't they read the newspaper and see how many people who commit embezzlement or some such crime get caught? Well, of course they do. But each criminal -- speaking of deliberate acts, not crimes of passion -- thinks he or she will be able to dupe the police or the jury.
Reality is what we move our lives by. We must react to the reality we see. Nothing else makes sense. We must do something and the possibility that we may be wrong cannot be allowed to paralyze us. However, I do say that when our picture becomes important, very important, such as affecting the life another, such as a surgeon or a jury, then it behooves them to be very, very careful about their picture. I have another clipping of a woman in Norwich who gave a man ten times the dose she was supposed to give.
Prosecutors who have convicted an innocent man will invariably say, no, they think that person is really guilty -- that's when another person has confessed to the crime, or when the accuser withdraws his accusation. I have seen this any number of times where this is so.
A recent program took up the case of a man who was accused by a 13-year-old boy who didn't like the man making out with the boy's mother. He was more convincing than the man in court and off to jail with him. But one day, visiting his father and step-mother, he burst into tears and said it didn't happen. The man was sprung. But the prosecutor said, no, I think the boy was right the first time.
Analogies: There is never any shortage of stupid analogies. Some people seem incapable to presenting an argument without an analogy! On the same page as where the man disputes the statistics about reducing the alcohol level to .08 for legal drunkenness, another reader quibbles with a letterwriter who said guns are there for one purpose: to kill. If an article concluded that water was there for one thing and that was to drown, people would recognize a faulty conclusion, etc.
You'll see this in regard to the situation in Kosovo also -- in spades. It doesn't seem as if many can discuss the situation without resorting to an analogy either to the Nazis (if you favor the involvement) or Vietnam (if you disfavor it). Lemme see. In today's NY Times letters, there is a column devoted to the Kosovo situation. Lemme see how many brought up an analogy to a past historical event:
1. "To me it's no different than if we'd asked surviving Cambodians to accept permanent automony under Pol Pot."
2 "The most important lesson . . . is that aggressive despotism, whether in the Persian Gulf or a corner of Euope . ." Well, not an analogy exactly, the writer does draw on our distaste for Saddam Hussein's policies.
3. "President Clinton has done with Serbia what the French should have done with Hitler in 1938."
Well, not such a terribly high percentage, I guess, given that the middle example isn't really an analogy, but this was something of an off-day. It just seems few people can discuss the matter without "proving" their point by reference to another situation. Oh, I'm not saying we should ignore history, for heaven's sake. I'm only saying that each new situation is different, and ultimately we're going to have to decide on the merits of the case before us.
I read in the paper that South Africa's Independent Broadcasting Authority "said material showing hard-core sex or depicting 'excessive violence' especially against women, would be banned from television." Whoa! That would be scanned awhile.
If something is banned, how do you ban it more for one group than for another? Aren't they saying in essece, "All violence will be banned, except on occasion violence directed against men" I mean, if there isn't a complete ban, then it would seem that there's not a complete ban, no?
"Listen up, everybody. There'll be absolutely no ice cream in this house for a year, and this applies especially to children." Oh, yeah.
Sharon tells us "the killing has got to stop!" Oh, a wonderful idea. Marvellous. Why didn't something think of that before World War II or better still, World War I. How many lives would have been saved. Okay, let's stop the killing, all of us. Yeah, right.
I've got news for Sharon. There is no conceivable way to stop the killing in the near future. As for the slightly more distant future, well, there are always two basic ways to stop it. One is to let your adversay have everything he wants and the other is to beat him into submission with overwhelming force.
Half measures, containing an adversary, such as North Korea and Saddam Hussein might lessen the killing but aren't likely to stop it. So now, Mr. Sharon. Which is it to be?
In the past few weeks, I've taken issue with the NYTimes for slick and non-enforceable slogans. It started with one letterwriter's call for having "Never again!" on our lips forever more. I began my letter of rebuttal by saying, "Whaddya mean! It already happened again, and you didn't even notice. Then it happened still again and you still didn't notice." My point was, of course, that when these slaughters and genocides occur, when the only way to stop them is to do a little killing ourselves, which will inevitably mean some of our soldiers get killed, we'll find a rationale for not intervening.
The slaughter in Cambodia came soon after our withdrawal from Vietnam, and I dare say any President who advocated sending troops to stop it would have had to suffer a barrage of brickbats. The genocide in Rwanda came, well, the year after the disaster in Somalia. Oh, Rwanda was so far away and on the far side of Africa, no less. How on earth can we land troops there and stop this! Huh?
And so it goes. Now Clinton may have gotten us into this mess largely because of overreaction to the horrors of Nazism and our failure to do something in Rwanda. But one thing you never see discussed, and that's the unpleasant fact that to stop a genocide, we've got to risk the lives of some young soldiers and they're our soldiers and those people being killed aren't our people. We just don't discuss it. Clinton (as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff?) seem to have assumed that Milosevic would cave in at the appearance of bombing from NATO. There'll be no ground troops, no siree, bob, no ground troops. If I've heard that once, I've heard it 50 times from the administration.
Well, okay, no ground troops. But you're either going to bomb Belgrade into a wasteland or tuck your tail between your legs and look for a way to save face. There's no way Milosevic will cave in with anything less than overwhelming force wiping out his army. No other way.
And so with Sharon and all these letterwriters, I say, well, can we first face the unpleasant fact that you can't stop these genocides by haranguing the killers. You stop them by capturing their means of killing. Now, would you like to be part of an Army sent to do just that?