"Coming up on Good Morning America, Dr. Erhartz Feldergarb, an expert on corn. He'll be discussing the corn crisis and a few ways you could change your habits to help..."
"Kellogg's came under fire today for it's continued advertising for Corn Flakes breakfast cereal after experts showed that corn may be causing an outbreak of psoriasis and other scalp issues in left-handed Latinos ..."
I feel like we'd be hear these stories nonstop if the Democrats decided that corn was their best line of attack. I never watch TV news, but on travel, you can't get away from it. It's in the bars, the hotel lobbies and the airports. Enduring it last week, I marveled at all the stories about racism.
I've got some training in mathematics. I'm also an extrovert whose job it is to speak in front of lots of people. I travel all over the country. I believe my acquaintances are a decent sampling of the population. Talking to people one-on-one or in small groups where the conversation is casual and personal, I cannot remember a single one in the last ten years that was racial with two exceptions.
The first exception is the Mexican Mafia in Cursillo. Cursillo is a Catholic movement where crazed papists get together to pray, talk and drink. Well, the drinking part isn't an official component of Cursillo, but it happens from time to time. The Mexican Mafia within my community talk about being Hispanic, but they do it with humor and love. Good example: When a Mass or wedding starts on time, they joke that it can't be a Mexican one because they're always late. They're proud of El Centro, Mexicali or wherever they're from, but it's never aggressive or antagonistic.
The other exception are the deep-blue progressives I know. The more politically active and hardcore they are, the more they talk race. The ones I know are all white and aggressively criticize white people. It comes up at the weirdest times and often in almost reflexive ways. "Oh, that's so white" or "I'm doing xxx like a white person."
The progs aside, assume I know 80 people* well enough to get a sense of their true natures. I think that's an underestimate, but let's go with it. If 10% of the population is racist, the odds I would know zero racists would be 0.9 ** 80 = 0.02184745% or roughly 5000-1. It's simply not believable.
That's what my analytical side is screaming every time I watch the news. It's also why I rant about it here. I'm using this blog to work out explanations for what I see and this is one of the most distressing, hence the repeated and probably highly unpopular posts on the subject.
My take is that Americans are deeply decent people. Of those 80 people, 60 are the type I could invite over for dinner for a pleasant evening. The statistical inferences from that are obvious. Americans are cool.
So how to explain the emphasis in the media? The only thing I can think is that it's what their political team wants beaten into our brains.
If it was corn, they'd talk about corn.
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| Corn. Corn. Are you trying to tell me you can't see the problem? |
While I think the conclusion is true, there's also selection bias-- you won't hang out with folks you find objectionable.
ReplyDeleteYou're a decent person who finds racism objectionable; you will likewise find indecent racists objectionable and not become good friends with them.
That said, you'd think you'd run into at least ONE, y'know? Just on the Jerk theory, you should know ONE loud-and-proud... pretty much anything that's over one or two percent of the population.