Look before You Leap

[supergee]

Good advice from one of the sanest people I know.

Comments

[arlie]

Personally, my tribal instincts are fully engaged. I haven't felt so Canadian since the first shock of living with outré American customs when I moved to the US in the early 90s.

I'm currently wearing black to work, and arguing with my Trump-supporting manager. I've tried to frame those arguments in terms of stressing that people are unlikely to do what he wishes, and settle down to unity under the victor, and lead with examples of miscommunication, where I can see that this is the issue.

But bottom line for me - do I want to manipulate "those people" into behaving better next time, or do I want to honestly communicate my feelings of anger and disgust.

Manager thinks Roe vs Wade won't be repealed, since it wasn't repealed under the second Bush, and cites pro-Life females as evidence that pro-fetus politics is not misogynistic. He's also one of the few pro-Lifers I know who has personally done anything to help pregnant women who didn't want to abort to have their babies and put them up for adoption - volunteering at a charity that's basically a classic home for unwed mothers. But this was in response to my statement that _if_ Roe vs Wade is overridden, there's no chance at all for his political opponents to change their minds about considering the president-elect and all his supporters as essentially misogynistic. [Though it's the president-elect's personal treatment of women that's the real source of this attitude to him, AFAICT.]

He also justifies the wall with Mexico on the following theory. Foreigners intending terrorist acts are attempting to get into the country via Mexico, with the aid of the same people smugglers who normally assist illegal economic migrants. It's not racist to specifically target Mexico because of this. [I wasn't accusing him of racism, as it happened.] I asked for numbers. In particular, a breakdown of all incidents of mass killings in the US, by where the perpetrator came from, and how he or she got into the country. I told him that I believed the numbers would demonstrate that more than 50% of these perpetrators got into the country via a maternity ward. And I explicitly made clear that I counted shooting up schools and night clubs as terrorism, and didn't care whether the weapon was a rifle, a plane, or a bomb. I did not add my belief that of the foreign-born perpetrators, most probably got into the country by air... frankly I have no more evidence for this than he does for them coming via land from Mexico.]

In his opinion, the source of the domestic violence isn't guns, it's over-prescription of SSRIs. [He was arguing against a straw man. I wasn't focussed on gun violence in particular.] It turns out there's reasonably good evidence that young people (below 25) taking or withdrawing from SSRIs are approximately twice [ratio of 1:0.6] as likely to commit violent crimes as the same individuals were when not taking those drugs. Approximately 10% of the population is on SSRIs. If we assume SSRIs are the cause, not the conditions for which the SSRIs were prescribed, that the 10% rule applies in the target age group, and that almost all criminal violence is committed by people in that age group, then we have to assume that the 90% not on SSRIs are committing violent crimb at the usual rate. (0.6% in the country where the study was done) compared to the 10% on SSRIs commiting violent crime at the inflated rate (1%). So for every 1000 individuals we have 6 violent crimes without SSRIs. With 900 non-SSRI individuals we get 5.4 crimes and an additional 1 crime from the 100 on SSRIs, producing an increase of (6.4-6/6) * 100%. That's about 6%. And I give these numbers because the manager in question is not innumerate; until his promotion, and for some time afterwards, he was a more than competent software engineer.