ABC News: US stats show violent crime dramatically falling, so why is there a rising clash with perception?
From ABC News:
In his State of the Union address this month, President Joe Biden boasted that the nation reported a historically low murder rate in 2023 and violent crime had plummeted to one of the lowest levels in 50 years.
For some Americans, however, the perception of crime is clashing with the statistics.
“I don’t believe it, plain and simple. I don’t believe it because we’re experiencing different results,” Auriol Sonia Morris — a South Carolina education, finance and legal consultant who describes herself as a Black conservative Republican and a supporter of former President Donald Trump — told ABC News.
This sure rings true to me. I know quite a few Trump supporters, and one thing they have in common is the belief that nothing good happens under a Democratic administration.
In most cases, and this issue with crime statistics is a great example, this overall mode of viewing the world is extremely clunky, because it involves the belief that huge classes of people, in this case, the FBI, are lying.
Perhaps even tougher to support is the notion that the stats surrounding COVID-19 are falsified. To believe this, you have to accept that the doctors who went through a decade of medical training and seem to do a pretty good job with our illnesses and other diseases have become completely dishonest, almost overnight, and are now deliberately lying about their patients’ causes of death.
An old friend of mine believes in the “plandemic,” the notion that the COVID epidemic is planned and orchestrated by the U.S. government. Of course, he faces an even more difficult challenge, i.e., the fact that there are more than 200 countries on Earth, and each one of which have their own responses to the disease. Is he suggesting that the governments of Uruguay, Romania, and Nepal are all colluding with our CDC? Or that they are implementing their own independent conspiracies to murder their citizens?
If this seems hard for you to accept, perhaps it’s because somehow, through all the disinformation floating around you every minute of every day, you have miraculously retained the ability to think. Well done.
In the human population, at least in the Western World, we find a strong correlation between intelligence and atheism. What Stephen Hawking said here hits home to me.
Here’s a very short video that reveals 
The concept that rule of law sits at the core of all civilized societies has been around a long time–at least 2100 years.
I’m not familiar with Noel Casler, but he’s both funny and insightful.
I have a conversation with one friend or another on this subject about once per month. The question: how terrible do things have to become before “bread and circuses” no longer maintain the order of capitalism over some other system of social order?
I would edit the text in the meme at left and replace “….to die for your Second Amendment right” with “to die for what is clearly a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment .” What Warren Burger said on this subject is more than worth keeping in mind, IMO.
This excellent rebuttal was made by a Canadian, but it could just as easily been a Japanese, or a citizen of almost any other country on Earth than the U.S.
What these congressional Republicans are attempting to do, of course, is to communicate to the National Rifle Association and the most extreme right-wing voters that they are not wishy-washy on the Second Amendment, and that they couldn’t care less how many little kids’ bodies are riddled with bullets.
I saw the announcement at left on a social media group called “Grammar Police,” where people come to ask questions about the proper use of English, and to lampoon folks who may have gotten something wrong.
