Locate one piece of information in a sports article
Locate the expiration date on a driver’s license
Total a bank deposit entry
People with Level 2 Literacy can:
Interpret appliance warranty instructions
Locate an intersection on a street map
Calculate postage and fees when using certified mail
People with Level 3 Literacy can:
Write a brief letter to explain a credit card billing error
Use a bus schedule to choose the correct bus to take to get to work on time
Determine the discount on a car insurance bill if paid in full within 15 days
People with Level 4 Literacy can:
Explain the difference between two types of benefits at work
Calculate the correct change when given prices on a menu
People with Level 5 Literacy can:
Compare and summarize different approaches lawyers use during a trial
Use information in a table to compare two credit cards and explain the differences
Compute the cost to carpet a room in a house
A lot of them seem to be mathematical questions
Damn, I’m fairly dumb but I think I could put this on my resume, I’m a lot higher in literacy than I expected.
i can't interpret warranty instructions, but I've done the credit card thing. I also found the phones from the manufacturer that were compatable with my non-international telecommunications service. (I got the first Sony waterproof release in the age of ricepacks)
So I'm... esoteric.
I saw that warranty one and was like, welp, I'm already in trouble.
Then I got down to the lawyer one, and was like hey only lawyers can understand lawyers in court. A lawyer I am not.
Oh good catch. Will edit.
I wanted to test myself to get a sense of what "level one literacy" actually meant but you have to pay to take the test and the OECD already gets enough of my money as is.
Here's a good study on gunshoot statistics thay include nonletal gunshot wounds:
Which comes out to about 1/7 of a person in that room being shot per year.
But its not as shocking if I say that there are a million people in the room and one gets shot per day! (But I mean, that still seems significant to me.)
In their example, almost everybody is getting shot every year. Happy birthday, BLAM!
Yea, if 1/400 people were shot a day, nearly everyone would have been shot by the time they were 2.
Quick Google results showed me between 15 and 20% lethality for single GSWs
That needs an addendum, otherwise it sounds like any GSW is about as lethal as covid19:
Not accounting for suicides and precision shooting, a single GSW is likely an accident, which drives the lethality down considerably. Filter out unintentional single GSWs and I bet the lethality is rather different.
This article indicates there's no difference, in fact, and is lower than the conservative percentage I was getting earlier.
Maybe I'm reading the abstract wrong, but it appears that the article specifically compares single headshots with multiple GSW including a single head GSW. In which case there's no significant difference.
But maybe I'm reading it wrong. I may be biased, because I really want to believe that JimBob shooting himself in the foot cleaning his gun, occurs with a higher frequency and with less mortality, than people shooting to kill.
I admit I didn't look deep into that particular article. There are a lot of sources easy to find that show that multiple GSWs are surprisingly not that much more lethal, but they're harder to repair. This one for example which lists 13% for single, and 18% for multiple.
How convenient, you left out the shooting statistic. It's fucking insanely wrong.
That's good to see a lot of the statistics are close, and I appreciate the sources.
That said, for a full picture, I think you should mention that the average 20 year old doesn't have 18 gunshot wounds (365 wounds per 400 per year, is about 9.1 wounds per person per decade, or 18.2 wounds per 20 years per person)
So I'd appreciate if you include a bullet point about that.
You didn't fact-check how many trans people there are in the U.S.^1^
It looks to be between 0.5% and 1.6% of the total U.S. population (2 - 6 in 400).
Semi-related, the number of intersex people (in the literature they talk about people with "disorders of sexual development") have also been estimated to be around 1% of the population (4 in 400), source:
^1^ yes, the U.S. isn't mentioned in the OP, but your sources are looking at U.S. demographics and so I will continue with the U.S.-centrism already present.
Some Thoughts (oh boy):
There is a weird logic to pointing out how few trans people there are actually are in the OP. Even if there were many more trans people, (like if there really were 1 in 5 trans people as is commonly mis-perceived), would that make the GOP's campaign of fear-mongering and animus any more justified? I don't think this is what Shon (@gayblackvet) was going for, but it almost seems like a consequence of how the message was written.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but does it seem like way it is written implies that the problem is not that the trans panic is unjustified in its fear of trans people, but that it is merely blown out of proportion? Maybe the angle was that even if we assume trans people are a problem, it's still so few people it's not worth all this panic and legislation (there are >500 anti-trans bills in the U.S. right now, over 40 of them have already passed).
Rhetorically this perspective-taking might be effective in appealing to mildly transphobic centrists or moderate conservatives who are not entirely comfortable with trans people but who might not want to be perceived as transphobic and don't want to be associated with the rabid and vocal transphobia of the GOP.
That wedge between a more moderate closeted transphobe and a more openly transphobic right-wing one is politically useful, so I am not necessarily complaining, but there is a concern here about whether tackling transphobia is really the goal here, and if so how we should best go about that.
my favourite is how tennessee effectively made insurance more expensive for everyone because one trans child wanted to play sports with her friends in school
what's the story?
they basically put up a bill that banned tenncare from contracting with organizations that offer gender affirming care in any state, which is... a lot of organizations which limits the options which makes everything more expensive. at the time it was all based on a lawsuit from one 8 year old trans girl who wanted to play sports with her friends.
Nothing more Republican than having the government artificially restrict free market capitalism... wait that not what every Republican I've ever known has said they support. Weird.
Those trans people better not play sports! /s
I feel like it would be ok as long as they have health insurance.
Americans care a lot about debating what's "fair" except when it comes to poverty
Because all the other shit is those two people's fault somehow, obvs.
They need to make up reasons why their god is being such a piece of shit.
You just accurately (and accidentally?) summarized all religions.
Holy shit the literacy rate is kinda shocking..
Do people not like to read? A quarter of the population is fucking NUTS
Some people didn't have an opportunity to learn in the first place. Lack of education doesn't make someone "fucking NUTS".
I think they meant a quarter of the population being illiterate, that is, that fact that such a statistic exists, is “fucking nuts,” not the illiterate population themselves.
Well he proceeded it by saying that they don't "like" to read, implying that this is a choice on their part.
Not at all the way I read it, but I can see your thought train
Hence it being a question. I wasn't aware that access to learning to read wasn't easily available.
Stats on illiterate by choice vs socioeconomic standing would be very interesting
This basically comes down to how you define literacy.
Nationally, 21% of Americans have level 1 or below literacy on the PIAAC literacy scale. That's probably where the 85 people came from.
12% are at level 1, meaning they can only read at a basic level. 4% are functionally illiterate, and 4% had some kind of cognitive or physical handicap or language barrier that kept them from being surveyed.
About 34% of illiterate Americans were born outside the US, so they're possibly literature in another language.
One thing I haven't noticed anyone else mention is that the literacy data being referenced here seems to originate from the PIAAC, an organisation that I wasn't previously familiar with. I was curious about their methodology, since I also thought the quoted rate was shocking. The thing is, according to this FAQ, they only assess in English. So the number of people who are actually illiterate is inextricable from the number of people who are literate in another language, but haven't learned English yet.
This video is a great discussion of literacy. To put that rate into context, 'illiterate' often includes people that can read and write a little bit, but still struggle with some vital or everyday tasks. According to Wikipedia, 20% of US adults have a literacy level at or below level 1 which would be 80 people in this example. This report has a ton of stats and also defines each level of literacy.
I have no idea how no one has picked up on this and have all decided "Americans are dumb".
What everyone has missed is the literacy statistic is for ENGLISH literacy. The other 20% or so are pretty much all immigrants that cannot speak English and there aren't tens of millions of adults with the mental capacity of a rock.
I’m from Connecticut. Willimantic area, not Greenwich area, but we were still less damaged by Jim Crow and similar policies (except for redlining, that fucked everyone). I spoke to a man in 2017, who had been born in the US, seemed aware and thoughtful, and had to get his granddaughter to write down the claim number I wanted to give him, because he didn’t know his numbers or letters.
I didn’t ask, even though it was killing me with curiosity. His granddaughter probably heard the curiosity in my voice, and explained that in 1967, when he was able to leave school, the teachers didn’t care whether a black kid learned to read. They let him leave school at twelve, even though it was well after brown v the board of education. By the time he wanted to learn to read, he was older, had full time work, and it just didn’t click.
That man was underserved by his government well past the point of mistreatment, not stupid. He’s obviously only one data point, but he’s not the only black man who was treated differently in schools
Not entirely.
Only about a quarter of them were born in another country. Then you've got e.g. people with severe cognitive delays or some kind of physical impairment such as blindness. And there's also people whose education system failed them.
If at least 1 person in the room of 400 is shot per day they'd be dead in just over a year...
Last I checked the population of the US wasn't plummeting, so what else is wrong here?
Oh no I see the point, but I'm hardly going to believe a point that's surrounded by obvious mistakes or embellishments
In this case, being more accurate would have distracted from the overall point.
Granted, attracting the dismissive comments of insufferable pedants and the wilfully obtuse isn't ideal either, but here we are 🤷
How would being more accurate distract from the point? I agree with what the post is saying, but making up statistics doesn't really help IMO and takes away from the credibility
Hyperbole and hypotheticals aren't "making up statistics"
It doesn't seem like this post was meant to be hyperbolic though? Hyperbole doesn't work well in the context of numbers. If someone said 1 in 100 people drive a Toyota, how would I differentiate that from being an actual figure or hyperbole? It's not obvious unless you look into it. Likewise, if someone told me that 1 in 400 people in the US get shot every day I'd struggle to tell if that's true or not, given how much I hear about gun crime over there.
This post is quite clearly framed in a way that sounds like fact.
Im pretty sure those users a legitimately, unironically autistic.
Not being abelist, just trying to prevent others from taking this argument for more than it is: someone incapable of thinking outside explicit literals.
Lol fair enough, I can understand why you'd think that.
I'm quite capable of thinking figuratively. But in the way that this post is framed, I'm pretty sure any layperson would take the figures as being based on some actual statistics. It's deceptive, and I don't think that's a good look if anyone were to look into this in any detail. If you're going to make an analogy, make it actually analogous. And if you want to use hyperbole, use it in a way that's clear (i.e. by not mixing in numbers)
That's not how autism works, and saying you're not being ableist doesn't actually mean you're not being ableist, as you've demonstrated here.
(and before you even try, because I'm not coming back to debate this, I am autistic, and those assholes are just being deliberately obtuse and pedantic, throwing autistic people under the bus to defend them is gross. And if you are autistic too and think that means you can't be ableist, let me introduce you to lateral and internalised ableism which are what your reply would be if not "run of the mill" ableism)..
now how autism works
I have aspergers, I was in special ed for two years in elementary school because I was disruptive to class. I have met hundreds if others on the spectrum in my life.
I can tell you that this is exactly how many people with autism approach situations.
What makes you say myself and the other poster are being 'deliberately obtuse and pedantic'? It's pretty hurtful and that is not my intention in the slightest. I'm not trying to undermine the argument made by the post, I just think it's a valid concern when the figures don't add up and it's worth discussing.
Expressing the number of people shot as a tiny fraction of 400 million people would raise at least as many questions about accuracy and make it EASIER for people like you to distract from the point by obsessing over an unimportant (to the point being made) detail.
Analogies and third decimal-accurate statistics just don't fit together.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'people like me'. To be 100% clear, I agree with the point of the post but I just don't think they've gone about explaining it in the best way. To somewhat agree with what you're saying, I'd say yes, analogies and accurate statistics don't fit well together, but neither do analogies and statistics in general. Either stick to written analogies/hyperbole OR use actual statistics.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'people like me'
Pedants, the easily sidetracked, those who will jump at the opportunity to distract from the message itself by hyperfocusing on an insignificant technical detail.
Take your pick.
You seem to have a very binary view of things though. Is it not possible for someone to agree with a message, but think we can improve on how we tell it? If we want to convince people of something, is it not best to provide as convincing an argument as possible? I'm not trying to distract from the message, I'm wondering how we can tell it better.
You seem to have a very binary view
Of distracting from the actual topic by needlessly fixating on an only tangentially relevant detail? Yeah, I'm kooky like that.
Is it not possible for someone to agree with a message, but think we can improve on how we tell it?
Sure, but that's not what you're doing. You're, deliberately or not, pulling all attention away from the message by demanding a fix to something that, in the specific case, is unimportant.
If we want to convince people of something, is it not best to provide as convincing an argument as possible?
As I said before, being more exact would invite MORE distracting arguments about it, not fewer.
I'm not trying to distract from the message
You're also not trying to NOT distract from the message either, though. Or you are and you're doing a piss-poor job of it.
I'm wondering how we can tell it better
It was told just fine. You're actively obscuring the salient point with your pedantry.
Ok my friend. If I have distracted from the message, that is genuinely not my intention. I'll leave things here.
Ok so you're saying that you need to outright lie to get people to side with you?
That makes you sound like a politician, not a human rights advocate, but sure
Burning Man called. They want their gigantic strawman back.
How about you address the fact that you're saying that telling the truth would distract from the point instead of pulling up distractions? Sounds like whataboutism to me
Let me put it another way.
There's 4,947,342.562 kinds of people in the world: those who obsess over needless numeral exactitude when faced with a rhetorical argument, and those who don't.
If anything the people pointing out how others are missing the point, are actually missing the point…
There’s a middle ground between ‘autistically measuring in decimals’ and blowing something completely out of proportion to make a forced point.
People are just getting defensive because it’s an underlying point they agree with (rightly so) and going on attack for anyone calling it out for being disingenuous.
Why are you using 'autistic' as an insulting word?
I’m literally calling people out for using it incorrectly.
why does that make it fine to use as an insult?
Nope. That's just objectively wrong.
The choice of 1 almost certainly wasn't a deliberate exaggeration of the actual amount. It's just the nearest number that isn't too specific to distract from the overall argument and/or small enough that pro-gun advocates can use it as an argument for gun violence not being a problem at all.
You can’t say they’re just rounding up when they randomly decided to choose 400 as the starting point…
So what you're saying is that 400 is completely random and because of that, it follows that 1 is meant to be accurate? 🤔
I'd say that it's much more likely that they're operating under the (incorrect but commonly believed) assumption that the US population is closer to 400m than 300m and both numbers are rounded up for simplicity.
The post says “at least 1” which implies that if anything they’re rounding that number down, because on some days that number is 2. So they’re suggesting that on any given day between 800,000 and 1.6 million Americans get shot, or that every single person in the country gets shot every 13 months or so.
If they’re going to use a number that wildly inaccurate then I immediately assume that every other number in the statement is equally inaccurate, even if that’s not actually the case.
Shot does not mean killed. Of the 327 average daily people shot, 210 survive. I will however admit that 1 in 400 people being shot a day does not represent the same ratio as the 327 out of the 330,000,000 a day at all.
Also birthrate
Pedantry is a great distraction when you don't want to address problems.
Very true, which is why it's important not to give easy fuel for pedantry like this gun stat does. It undermines the entire point if the numbers aren't at least close to the real statistics.
Good point
Not to detract from the overall message, buuuut....
48,313 gun deaths in US in 2021.
333,000,000 people in US
On those rates 0.05 people in a room of 400 would be shot per year, so 1 person per 20 years.
It'd 1 person every 2 years in a room of 4,000.
Also those mental health numbers are off given the lifetime prevalence of most disorders being around 5%.
2/400 (0.5%) of the population identifying as trans would be 1,665,000 people - which may be plausible but idk, I generally work on the figure of ~4% of any population being LBGTQI.
Poverty numbers are probably bang on.
"shot" does not mean "killed".
What I can find is roughly 315 people getting shot every day in the US. Out of 333m, that's roughly 1 in 1m daily. In a room of 400 that's 1 per 6.8 years.
Good point. Still, though your numbers get to a similarly outlandish time period.
absolutely, it's 3 times more, but still 3 orders of magnitude short.
Where did you get the 4% being LGBTQI number from?
That's from 2014 and only accounts for Australia, not any population also the survwy points out that among indigenous and Islander populations in Australia there aee more same sex couples.
Pls be more careful which such generalised statements and wether your source is reliable/saying what you want it to say. Also Wikipedia is not a good source to refer to.
Wikipedia is only a source of concern if the primary sources it cites are unreliable, in the linked article they refer to ABS data which is the most accurate population data for that country. No LGBT question was asked in the more recent Australian census. The ~4% of population being homosexual was a talking point during our same sex marriage plebiscite, hence why I use it.
However, in recent US census data 3.3% of the population respond as being Lesbian or Gay, with 4.4% bisexual https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/11/census-bureau-survey-explores-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity.html. It'd be interesting to see how that percentage progresses as majority of positive respondents were in younger generations, while I doubt any will go from identifying as gay to then straight, we may see a decline in those who identify as bisexual as they age...but who knows.
Regardless, returning to the OC, the figures for trans were all around the 0.6 mark in most sources I saw, so the 2/400 in the OC is accurate.
I did the fact checks with references on everything else in another comment. NIH numbers actually made mental illness worse, but must keep in mind the lack of "serious" in OPs definition. Other stats were spot on. Where did you get these numbers? I couldn't find anything I trusted on non-fatal gunshots.
(Note: just realized you found the same number I did for deaths vs gunshots)
You misinterpreted the NIH numbers. It isn't 57% of 400 are untreated, but rather 57% of ~90 (NIH state 1 in 6/ 22.8% love with AMI). In any case though that ~90 figure relates to AMI which is a broad definition and includes very mild cases, whereas my numbers were related to SMI - which tends to be 5% (as supported by your NIH source). Having worked in the field, untreated schizophrenia is a lot more serious than untreated GAD or ADHD.
Funnilly enough, if 2 people were shot a day in OP's scenario, one of those would statistically be a suicide.
Only 15-20% of single GSWs are lethal. The post doesn't say "shot and killed", just shot
That's still a crazy stat. That's something like 830k people in the US being shot every day. Almost the whole population getting shot in a year. They must've misplaced a few decimals doing the math
Good point.
Fact time. You don't always die when shot, and the US is a baby factory. I can't find good stats on non-lethal gunshot, so I'll do the rest.
Verdict: Pretty accurate.
8.4% without health insurance (33 in 400)
11.5% poverty rate (46 in 400)
20% adults below literacy level 1 (80 in 400)
57% mental illness untreated (228 in 400) (requires math from NIH source)
There's a new person thrown into the room each time someone is shot.
That should fix the analogy?
No the rate is still too high, unless one of the people in the room is a serial killer but frankly that'd skew the untreated mental illness score pretty badly by giving everyone PTSD
Youre probably just trolling to troll, but
Being shot doesn't mean being killed
Why do you assume the population doesn't change? Ya know people can make babies right? We're actually pretty good at it. Probably too good at it.
Also, not the fucking point.
Yes, but the average person doesn't get shot once every 400 days
It's reasonable to assume any new arrivals also get shot on 0.25% of days
It's not the point, but frankly your point is more of a rounded curve than a point because anyone who doesn't support trans rights is going to call BS on your numbers immediately so you're just posturing, and why make up numbers to do that when you're not actually having to convince anyone?
I really don't get why people with all sorts of beliefs lie to people with the same beliefs to convince them they have the right beliefs... It's a waste of time, why not actually go out and make a difference if you support human rights and have enough time to make posts to your echo chamber about it?
No, the average person doesn't get shot once every 400 days. That's not the statistic. It's 1 person in 400 getting shot. Number of days is not being factored.
Again, you're looking at the wrong variable. It's not about how many days. This is a snapshot (of what I assume is population of the US) brought down from millions to hundreds of people. Roughly 400 million people brought down to 400. The whole point is to help people conceptualize just how absurd it is to target such a small minority. Smaller numbers are easier for people to conceptualize percentages.
Sure, the numbers need to be rounded off in order to bring them down to easier to understand figures. I'm not saying they're perfectly accurate, but they're close enough to accurate to get the point across. Pointing out how the hypothetical situation doesn't use exact figures of people distracts from the ultimate message. Which is your point I'm assuming. Just because these numbers are rounded, doesn't mean they're inaccurate.
I agree with your last point. Lying doesn't get anyone anywhere, especially when trying to appeal to "the other side" because that will be pointed out and then the argument (whether valid or not) is put into question.
But this post is about a hypothetical situation with rounded statistics to emphasize the general absurdity of targeting trans folk as "the problem with this country." When there are actual and bigger issues we as a whole face. Like gun violence, terrible healthcare infrastructure, and mental illness.
Arguing about pedantics just obscures any actual criticism and distracts from the message. And who says this doesn't make a difference? This is how issues in society gets resolved. By talking through them and bringing attention to them. So yeah - this helps the cause of human rights because it's about bringing awareness and different perspectives into the conversation.
1:
everyday, at least 1 person is shot
Remove everyday and maybe, but that everyday means you're wrong on point 1
2: not contesting this - I agree
Rounding 0.00... to 1 acheives nothing
At the end of the day I'm just saying it's a useless post as it's not really achieving anything, but I'm not saying you couldn't make something good using the same premise
Fair point. I did not realize the "everyday" aspect in the original post. You're right that it's a gross over estimation (see point 3) but it still doesn't mean the average person gets shot every 400 days. It's a statistical percentage which doesn't account for birth rates or repeat shootings (although I'm sure those are more rare) and other external factors
Cool beans
After looking at the statistics the CDC puts out on daily shootings (roughly 327 are shot each day out of 400 million) this data point is grossly exaggerated at best. I agree that it doesn't make sense to round up to 1 person is shot a day when it equates to roughly 0.0000008%.
I still feel like the original post is not "useless" as it sparks conversation (as our replies have shown) and although it has an inaccurate data point, it doesn't negate the rest of the message.
As a member of the trans community, I don't think the original message should be discounted or ignored for having an exaggerated statistic (honestly it's just a lie in this case) because the original message still rings true.
Now the post says shot and not killed. I think that distinction is important. But I imagine those statistics are insane.
I fact checked in other comments 😉 OP is fairly accurate overall, but I didn't include gunshots since I couldn't find reliable enough stats on non-fatal.
It’s insane because it’s still bullshit, 1 in 400 would mean that over 800,000 Americans get shot every day, and every single person in America gets shot every 13 months or so.
That’s the beauty of the 400 system. Once you become part of one facet, you can achieve so much more. Poor? Now you have the opportunity to be illiterate and definitely not have health insurance. Which is convenient as you will either participate in or be privy to a crime that increases your odds of getting shot. Let’s say you hit the jackpot on all these and you recover from your injuries, you still have the opportunity to participate in mental illness!
Are they also trans?
Jesus saves and I'm a soldier for Jesus, but only in the ways that don't cost me money or require me to make any lifestyle changes or acknowledge that I may not be perfect. Now, who's doing something that I can tangentially relate to the Bible that I'm not doing and don't plan to ever do?
that guys eating fish! get him!!
2 are trans so you decide that ruining their lives is a priority
I get to marry them both?
Haha what a hoot, that's some unexpected positivity there, I'm guessing you're not trans
This analogy is flawed.
It's the people who put the people in the room who set the priorities, not the ones inside the room.
You also need to assemble this group from a random selection of people from all across the country. The context of the analogy attempts to get the reader to visualize a room of 400 people which is easiest to do by drawing on personal experience such as a school assembly. But the stats listed will not apply to a group of 400 people from the same school zone, the same age. But visualizing a group of people you have an empathetic connection to is effective because it makes you wonder "what if a large amount of my friends of these disadvantaged people?" So it makes the message more effective, but it is utilizing emotional manipulation to do so.
Tweets has limited words so I'd say that it wasn't necessary to go into more detail about the selection of people.
It's quite obvious that they meant 400 random people.
Wait is this stat for real or a hyperbole?
Assuming this represents the demogrpahcis of US. With a population of 333 million, there are 1.6 million trans people and 830 000 prople are shot everyday?
It's not even remotely accurate. Just a bunch of bullshit to make people angry.
According to the CDC, 1.03% of the population identifies as transgender. Not including people like me who are enby but not trans (1.4% who get their own other category).
As for the 1 in 400 getting shot, that's obviously dubious, and the question is how they arrived at that value (say at a different time frame.) I'm working on it.
That said, as this is c/196, I posed it from my old reddit meme pile without checking the facts so I'm not invested in its veracity. The other numbers were verified in these comments, thank the Lemmy community.
Go out and vote. Can't complain about that which you permit. Also Vote with your money and vote with your time. Those are the real impactful ones.
The public has no-one to vote for. We get to vote against the autocratic party by voting for the slightly less right wing party. But even Mr. Hope & Change couldn't get much done.
And the Federalist Society controls SCOTUS which has final say on the laws of the land, and has been stripping the people of civil rights for a while now. They got noticed after Dobbs
It's going to be a long, rough ride and the Christian nationalists may take over in the short term. Look into regional organizing and mutual aid. I think these are how the plutocrats will be beaten in the end.
That or global famine.
2 seems high
Just checked. Trans folk make up 1.02% of Americans. Another 1.04% are other (neither AMAB, AFAB or Trans, so enbies and such)
Where is this happening? That's a very high shooting rate!
It's a breakdown of the United States general population, I think.
So, in a little over a year everyone in the USA will be shot? 875K people are shot daily?
Yea I could believe the other stats but there's no way one person out of 400 is being shot every day.
Also, over 20% of the population is illiterate? I don't buy it
It's about 26k total homicides per year, about half are firearms, a huge majority of those are handguns.
So 875k people in the US are shot to death roughly every 67 years.
There are 400 people. Yet the 2 trans people are all you talk about. Goes both ways
I'm confused, you made OP's point? So how is it both ways? OP is saying they, and the government, should be focused on everyone, however half of our government is focusing only on those 2.
They're trying to "both sides" deflect so they can continue to vote for literal monsters.
Right: aims to make a specific portion of the population miserable.
Left: talks about how the right is attacking that group of people to bring attention to it so we can stop it.
Dolts: ThEy'Re BoTh ThE SaMe!!
On the Democrats side, I remember there being some hullabaloo about kids in school going without lunches, which we might want to change, since it's not their fault they're poor.
Also that college debt has proven itself to be a scam that has driven large demographics into literal debt bondage, and maybe we should fix that.
Those two are off the top of my head.
So lets take a look at the everyday, at least 1 person is shot
This would assert %0.25 of the population receives one or more gunshot injuries each day or 830,000 gunshot victims per year
Which is 0.000098% of the population or 120,167 victims a year.
Brady United clocks US gunshot victims at 117,345 per year or 0.035 of the population (321 victims a day).
I suspect our poster Shon was computing that one of his 400 Americans in a room (I presume folks in the US) was getting shot every year and misspoke / forgot to carry the one. It's too easily detectable speaking to communities that will be eager to apply skepticism and dismiss the post in entirety.
I could also write this but like 2 trans people decided to ruin life of 10 others each round. And factual value would be about the same.
I'm sick of those victimize everything agendas to be honest.
So after 400 days everyone is dead?
Single GSWs aren't THAT deadly. Quick Google shows about 20%. So after 2000 days everyone is dead, assuming we're not replacing them ever.
Birthrate in the US is about 1.1% per year. You'd need a lot of immigrants to replace the workforce.
Maybe there's a group of people who get shot more than once, and they get included multiple times. That would skew the statistic.
Probably before. I'd wager people without heath insurance might succumb to illness, mentally unstable might commit suicide, homeless might freeze to death
Hah, yea, I did a fact check above but left gunshots out. Shot doesn't equal death and rotating the 400 people solves your comment, but I didn't trust the stats enough to include it. Everything else checks out, though.
Not every gun shot wound is fatal.
That doesn't make the number much better... That is a lot of people being shot. And it says at least which means it's the lower bound? I support the message, but can't we deliver the message without making stuff up?
True. But assuming I'm part of that population statistically I'd be shot after at most 400 days. Definitely not a population I'd wanna live in.
I prefer to meet trans people in person to get to know them and judge them based on their actions like any other person rather than what I believe is on their minds.
Sadly, there are multiple trans exclusionist movements in the US and UK who are glad to presume the worst of all trans folk, and seek to criminalize as much of their presence as possible when they aren't advocating literally massacring them.
Even the TERFs of the UK have admitted they're really not all that RF. It's really about the TE.
Why would I be in the same room? Ew, I'm going back in my gated community and calling the cops
I don't want to be that guy but 8 billion divided by 400 is 20 million. So to get a global average you would multiply the number here by 20 million.... 20 million people are not shot every day
Are you conflating the global population and US shots? I don't trust the gun stats I found, so I left them out of my fact check in the other comments. Added sources for those and OP is pretty accurate overall.
That's world stats because I wasn't sure what it was counting. The US is 827k
This is not an argument about whether or not the stats are accurate but: I think they're talking about the US, not the world.
If that is the case than 827,000 people are shot every day in the US... That's not right either.
It's literally math for what they are saying when one person out of 400 is shot and it is scaled up to the US population. Even if it was rounded from .5 in a set of 400 that's still over 400k
The actual number is 316 per day. Still a bad number but that is .1% of the number they have given
Not to mention one everyday would be 365 out of 400 every year. Clearly, ~90% of the population isn't getting shot every year.
Shot doesn't mean dead and one person can receive multiple gunshot wounds in a year.
There's just one poor unlucky guy who drives the average up. Keeps surviving though
Bullet wounds Goreg, who spends his free time insulting people with guns and is shot 10,000 a day, was an outlier and should not have been counted.
That still means everyone in the US is shot in just over a year. That's not right
Yes. Still, 90% of the population isn't getting shot every year and a couple of people aren't going to make up for it with multiple gunshot wounds.
That being said, whatever the real percentage is, it's still too high
Oh, yes, 1 in 400 is still the wrong proportion, but I guess you can't say a quarter of a person is shot every 8 months or whatever it would be, if you're just trying to make a quick and concise point.
Then why choose 400 people, or why include the shooting stat once they went with 400? The number would very much round down to zero, and the post says at least 1 person per day which means that's the lower bound
How would I know? I didn't make the post. What if they based it off of a very specific day where a lot of people got shot?
By my math, at this scale it would be one person shot roughly every 7 years. That's still kinda scary.
That isn't right. 1 in 400 means in 400 days everyone has been shot once
The number provided in the post is inaccurate to a real-world scale of US shootings. One person shot every seven years is instead accurate to real world data if the US population were scaled to 400 people.
What number do you have for the actual number? The number I found said 316 every day which makes it about 1 million years with population
316 shootings per day, every day for 7 years, is 807,380 people shot. 807,380 into 331,000,000 (the US population) is one in 400. Therefore if the US population were 400 people, there would be one person shot every 7 years.
Ok I see, same answer just shown different
How did you get 1 million years?
316 people a day times 1 million is 316 million people technically it takes a bit longer but the time scale is so large it's irrelevant
I think your math is off there. First, you're forgetting that there's 365 days in a year. Then you're forgetting that the scale is 400 people. Yours basically said that shootings irl are only happening once per year instead of once per day, and the US pop is only 1 person.
Say you are in a room with 400 people. One of them is voenkom, 399 of them will die today.
But hey, at least Putin got new engine for his yacht from Italy! And his oligarchs are honorable buisness owners in EU and US.
The reason trans people are such a hotly debated topic is because republicans (and some leftists) view it as an assault on truth. They firmly believe that woman means adult human female and that males cannot be females. It's not a surprise why there is so much controversy around it.
First it was people of color. Then it was marriage across races. Then it was women having the right to vote. The the homosexuals. And now, here we are, it's those dangerous trans. It's always masked as an "assault on truth" tho inn'it?
I personally don't really think racism/homophobia are that comparable. Being trans is something that requires other people to participate in. The former situations do not. In order to believe that transgender women are women, you need to believe that woman does not mean adult human female. That's where a lot of the fundamental disagreements arise from.
Maybe if the US didn't have a long history of ignoring intersex gene configurations, and letting doctors assign gender to infants with ambiguous gonads, including gender assignment surgery.
We already know that gender needs to be adjusted medically, say in cases of precocious puberty. This is applying the same techniques to persons who identify as someone other than they present.
And yes, we'd reduce the problem if human societies didn't treat men and women so disparately, and freak out when little Joey is undressing Barbie.
In most cases it doesn't matter what you believe though. The bare minimum of not being aggressive and transphobic would be great for a lot of people.
Sure, I don't want anyone to feel aggressed. But I think things get tricky when you start talking about topics like trans women in female sports, in female jails, etc
That's true.
I personally try and avoid any discussion about that, so I don't have to take a stance.
I have nothing against Trans people, but I recognize that it could be a problem in sports. Fortunately I don't care about sports, so I don't have to figure out if it's a problem or not.
For jails, maybe start with a prison that's respecting the persons identification and if (and only if) trouble arises, you could move them elsewhere.
And gendered bathrooms just seem stupid imo. Do mixed bathrooms with real walls (like we often do here) instead of shitty stalls and put urinals in a separate walled off section towards the back or something.
The entire, "adult human female," argument is BS. Trans women are clearly both adults and humans, there's no debate around that. It's the female part that people get hung up on. It's the assumption that gender is defined by sex, which isn't how humans think about things on an intuitive level.
When you see a person with all the outward characters of a woman, most people, especially most conservatives, simply label that person in their head as a woman. In most societies we rarely see each others genitals, and often can't fully make out certain markers of woman or manhood due to clothes or masks, worn for practical or cultural reasons. In fact, most apparel isn't inherently gendered outside of cultural context, as dresses, pants, makeup, and countless other fashionable displays have been gendered very differently through history, even in the English speaking world. When you categorize someone as a woman in almost all circumstances, you use "female" to denote gender, not sex.
If you recognize the empirical reality of how humans use the word female, you realize that sex is almost irrelevant for most uses of the term. Trans women get recognized as female all the time by people, and because female is both a term to denote gender and to denote sex, insisting those people are only male once you learn their, "sex," is not only a rude thing to do, but also objectively wrong. Trans women are often undeniably adult human females, so pretending the definition is incompatible with Trans women is a lie.
The thing you might have a problem with is people that don't pass being referred to as female, but this isn't an absolute truth either. Tons of cis women identify as women and are of the female sex, but don't get gendered as female by many people. The same is true for some cis men, and while there are less of them due to social stigma against femininity, male failing cis men do exist. Almost no one insists that butch women are men for their male gender presentation, or that femboys are women for female presentation. Conservatives might demonize these people as, "abnormal freaks," and people that gatekeep trans identities might get very uncomfortable, but I've yet to see them insist that GNC folks are the gender they most present.
As a trans person who often doesn't pass as my gender identity, it's frustrating when others complain about people like me inconveniencing them. I'm sorry interacting with me challenges your contradictory worldview as I know critical thought takes effort. I want to pass to everyone, but not because I want to put anyone's mind at ease. I want to look like a woman because it makes me happy, while feeling like a man makes me miserable.
I'm sorry that the unavoidable reality of cultural change makes you unhappy, but there has always been change and will always be change. All manner of changes in our lives are more extreme right now. The change might be more drastic than at any point in history, but no one chooses where or when they are born. It is wise to make the most of the hand you're dealt instead of demanding a reroll than cannot happen. You can change neither the past or present, but you can shape the future.
It's impossible to actually rid the world of trans people, so the tension between the outdated gender ideology of the past and material reality will always exist. Instead of attempting an impossible task or burying your head in the sand, find a consistent worldview and learn to live with us. Everyone should learn to peacefully exist with benign difference in others.
Trans women are clearly both adults and humans, there’s no debate around that. It’s the female part that people get hung up on. It’s the assumption that gender is defined by sex, which isn’t how humans think about things on an intuitive level.
The "not being female" part is exactly what holds people up about calling them woman.
When you categorize someone as a woman in almost all circumstances, you use “female” to denote gender, not sex.
I don't believe this is true at all. It would be weird to call women "females" in most circumstances. Your entire long comment pretty much serves to argue that female doesn't mean what it actually means. It reads like a bunch of woo woo to me.
Sex is very important in human relationships. It's how we procreate, which is the basis for the evolution of human sexuality. That much cannot be denied. Until very recently, there was no distinction between gender in sex. And don't bring up some random old tribe having a third gender hundreds of years ago as proof, you can find an cultures who believed nearly anything and exceptions don't prove the rule.
I believe that you can be a feminine man, dress how you want, and play whatever role you want, but that does not mean you are a female/woman. I would not try to challenge anyone to their face but don't be surprised why I don't truly believe that they are a woman.
Why don't you read up on the medical consensus and make an effort to understand gender dysphoria? If you really care, you would participate in the conversation with a genuine interest and understanding. It seems you are more invested in confirming your biases instead. The medical research has evolved way past the surface level analysis you will find on Lemmy or Reddit.
Medical consensus on how to treat a specific mental illness is not relevant in this conversation about definitions.
The medical consensus is just as much about our understanding of the symptoms underlying issues as much as the treatment. The issue is your "belief" system of what falls in the categories you described. I'll ask you how you define the female gender. Give us a working definition and let's see where we disagree.
Ok. You're free to dismiss uncomfortable ideas as woo woo and cling to what feels right rather than what's true till the day you die. So long as you don't become bitter and lash out as the world passes you by, have fun.
It's always masked as an "assault on truth" tho inn'it?
Regarding everything you listed? No.
Your comment is both a gross misrepresentation of US history and a simplification of a complex contested topic across the world.
Why don't you provide a counterargument instead of whining. The truth is fascists need an out group to maintain power. That outgroup is always picked from some type of marginalized group. The issue is republicans are running out of those out-groups more and more, but the strategy is virtually the same. If you go back in time and analyze the rhetoric it's virtually identical.
The fact that you're equalizing US Republicans with fascists speaks magnitude of how shallow and undeveloped your position is.
And that's coming from me as a European, with absolutely no vested interest in US internal affairs.
The fact that you've blustered twice without providing any actual points whatsoever speaks magnitudes of how shallow and undeveloped your position is.
While I do believe the other commenter is making a gross simplification of the reasons the average conservative does what they do, there is genuine merit in recognizing the relationship between US Republicans (or conservative movements and groups in general) and facism. The ideological cudgels they use are based in the same foundations, utilize the same rhetoric, and are often intended by their progenators to reach the same end goals. If you are a European, you should have some interest in this - after all, the US of A is not the only country struggling with facist rhetoric being normalized in its culture.
Thanks. I personally don't like throwing the "f" word around too much. It's been losing it's meaning in the past years. But we have to have a way to analyze the rhetoric through a past lense.
The thing is, here in the US the transnational white power movement / white Christian nationalist movement features all the indicators of fascism (there are multiple lists. Choose one. I like Umberto Eco's). We could argue that it's incidentally fascist, that it's developed these features as symptoms in the process of coming out as an autocratic, identity-focused culture. But that doesn't change that it is dangerous and is stripping away civil rights from the people of the United States, and is engaging in efforts to neuter the already meager democratic features of the US, in order to hedge out the other party.
So whether or not the Republican party is a fascist party, whether or not some states have fascist elements, they are behaving in those ways historic fascist regimes have that cause harm. And as such it is doing harm to their respective publics.
And that means our attention should be focused not on what to call them, but how to stop the harm.
I never directly stated they are completely equivalent. I said the rhetorical devices they use are the same. This is hard to refute. I'm an American and I also happen to live in Europe (I was born and grew up in Italy) so I know plenty about Fascism. Why don't you provide an actual counterargument?
I think you underestimate the prevalence of the transnational white power movement in the Republican Party. We currently have the right-wing extremist factions, MAGAs and the Christian Nationalists, and then we have the old guard. I think Mitt Romney is the least right-wing throughout the federal government, and he still believes in policies that will drive the US toward fascism and autocracy. And when he wasn't in politics, he was engaging in hedge-fund shenanigans that depended on regulatory capture.
So yes, every last one of them bought the ticket to ride this train, and are financed by the plutocrats that laid the rails.
Bullshit. It's a classic divide and conquer move. Political game to focus the political debate on a non-issue
I don't think so. Social change is almost always controversial and heavily talked about.
The reason conservatives focus so much attention on it is a soulless tactic, but they do believe what they say.
Isn't it pretty normal for political party's to signal their values during a period of cultural divide? Isn't that sort of what political parties are for?
The broader point is to showcase how terrible the Republicans are for spending so much energy oppressing a tiny minority instead of focusing on more important issues. Republicans focus so much on cultural issues because their economic policy is deeply unpopular. Democrats take a stand on trans rights, but most politicians don't talk about trans people that much. They talk about the economy, regulations, government programs, and other issues that have a huge effect on everyone's lives. They usually talk about trans people in the context of opposing oppressive Republican policies and bigotry.
Democrats mostly play defense on trans rights because America's hands off attitude to personal decisions actually makes the US one of the easiest places on earth to legally change your gender or get prescribed hormones. Before it became a partisan issue, most right wingers supported informed consent and name changes, as the freedom to live on your own terms was an important part of the American mythos. The cost of treatment sucks here, making transition a bigger economic burden than most other countries, but considering how fucked healthcare is for everyone, trans folks aren't as unique.
Transphobes think about trans people more than trans people, just like how Judaism was more important to antisemites than to most Jews. Scapegoats are the glue that binds fascists together, and bigotry is necessary to distract from unpopular policies.
Too much for people to handle.
Most people don't give a shit about what people think. They could think they are a fairy for all anyone cares. Most people don't even care if you hold the view that gender is a social construct and women aren't better at cooking/cleaning just because they are women and men aren't the only one that's like sports because they are men. No one really cares about anything like that.
But most people look at women and look at men and say "yea those are two different types of things we could separate. One is called women the other is men. One has a pussy, one has a cock"
That's what they believe and someone saying "they believe they should be in the other group." Fine but it doesn't make them the other group, the groups aren't based on believe
That doesn't fully explain it though. What's wrong or dangerous about someone being both male and female, switch between the two, or be neither. I explain the lie of sex=gender and, "adult human female," in another comment, but why do they care about this being the case? Some people claim it threatens religious order, but there aren't universal religious principles. Others claim trans people are directly dangerous, but never have proof. Many people insist that it disrupts the natural order, usually failing to explain why the natural order is good, how the status quo is natural, and how exactly trans people being accepted is worse than forcing them into the closet.
The most honest reason is that it clashes with their beliefs about what should be the case and makes them unhappy. They don't have a good argument, but at least they're honest.
Functionally, trans acceptance is rejected by conservatives because it weakens patriarchal cis-heteronormative power structures that personally provides them with something. For those directly empowered by the hierarchy, the selfish benefits are obvious, but it provides other benefits that get some of the disadvantaged on board. It provides clear order and direction, telling people what to do with their life and how they can be successful at it. Most people prefer clear goals and obvious rules, things that more enlightened worldviews don't provide. Live a happy and flourishing life? The fuck does that mean?
There are other appeals to being old fashion, but those are some of the big ones.
What’s wrong or dangerous about someone being both male and female
This is not relevant. You also can't switch from male to female. It's not physically possible. I'm not religious either. I think that a male can be as feminine as they want, play whatever role they want, etc... but nothing they do will make them female in my eyes. It goes against the definition of the word.
Functionally, trans acceptance is rejected by conservatives because it weakens patriarchal cis-heteronormative power structures that personally provides them with something. For those directly empowered by the hierarchy, the selfish benefits are obvious, but it provides other benefits that get some of the disadvantaged on board. It provides clear order and direction, telling people what to do with their life and how they can be successful at it. Most people prefer clear goals and obvious rules, things that more enlightened worldviews don’t provide. Live a happy and flourishing life? The fuck does that me
This reads like cultish woo woo.
You can be as gender non conforming as you want, I will have no problem with it. But don't expect me to believe that you are the sex that you are not. I won't call anyone out for it if they claim otherwise but they can't change how I think deep down.
Hope this helps give some perspective.
It does, but not in a flattering way. You default to equating sex and gender because thinking about constructs is hard, instead asserting that they are exactly the same thing. I don't expect everyone to need that level of understanding. However, this doesn't mean I need to value your view. A person who hasn't learned to do multiplication doesn't need to be listened to when they claim 8x8 can't be 64.
Most younger trans people consider themselves transGENDER, not transSEXUAL. Most trans women don't focus on changing their sex to female, as that distinction doesn't most of the time. Someone's gender determines if they are female in most scenarios. Some people can pass as male and female through specific presentation, being seen as either gender by themselves and everyone else.
My comment about, "a happy and flourishing life," was pointing out how philosophers have known for thousands of years that most people don't question things, making fun of people that do. The specific reference is to the concept in ancient Greece of Eudaimonia, a term slightly different from happiness that philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle thought of as the thing everyone should strive for. Of course, Socrates was executed because Athenians got tired of him poking holes in their beliefs. People don't want to think critically, and trying to question common assumptions gets dismissed as "cultish woo woo."
If there is nothing wrong or dangerous about the modern view of gender, why should we cling to the old view instead? The new view has fewer contradictions than the old view while letting trans and cis people alike live better lives. Forcing the old view onto trans people can be lethal, and strict gender divisions limit life for both men and women. It forces women to be subservient to men, while men are told to be disposable machines without feelings. The old norms are a prison for everyone, while the modern view encourages everyone to live their own life.
Well said. There has to be a way to bridge this conversation but somehow it seems to make people really uncomfortable, which is understandable. I just wish people would start with questions instead of taking the world for granted.
Wait, how are the illiterate who aren't in poverty doing it?
There are a lot of manual labor, factory, and agriculture jobs that don't require high literacy. It's also not clear if they're limiting it to "English literacy".
Considering the questionable literacy of our last two Republican presidents, I think being very rich and capable of taking orders helps.
Well, in Trump's case, the capacity to convince his handlers he can take orders.
where is this hell scape that you are referring to?
The United States of America.
Someone else did a good job of demonstrating that these numbers aren't exaggerated:
The AVERAGE American has over 9 gunshot wounds? Man things are getting bad in the US.
Note: The other statistics seem to mostly check out (see another guy's comment about that), which is great. It's just weird the gun one is so astronomically inaccurate.
Yep. I addressed this in a reply. I think he was thinking 1/400 evey year and then forgot where he was in the thought process.
Posting this at top level since its burried in replies:
Fact time. You don't always die when shot, and the US is a baby factory. I can't find good stats on non-lethal gunshot, so I'll do the rest.
Verdict: Pretty accurate.
References:
Btw your 20% figure includes those at Level 1 literacy, only 8% are below level 1 (from your source)
What is level 1 defined as?
Best I could find:
A lot of them seem to be mathematical questions
Damn, I’m fairly dumb but I think I could put this on my resume, I’m a lot higher in literacy than I expected.
i can't interpret warranty instructions, but I've done the credit card thing. I also found the phones from the manufacturer that were compatable with my non-international telecommunications service. (I got the first Sony waterproof release in the age of ricepacks)
So I'm... esoteric.
I saw that warranty one and was like, welp, I'm already in trouble.
Then I got down to the lawyer one, and was like hey only lawyers can understand lawyers in court. A lawyer I am not.
Oh good catch. Will edit.
I wanted to test myself to get a sense of what "level one literacy" actually meant but you have to pay to take the test and the OECD already gets enough of my money as is.
Here's a good study on gunshoot statistics thay include nonletal gunshot wounds:
https://www.theactuarymagazine.org/firearm-risk/
Which comes out to about 1/7 of a person in that room being shot per year.
But its not as shocking if I say that there are a million people in the room and one gets shot per day! (But I mean, that still seems significant to me.)
In their example, almost everybody is getting shot every year. Happy birthday, BLAM!
Yea, if 1/400 people were shot a day, nearly everyone would have been shot by the time they were 2.
Quick Google results showed me between 15 and 20% lethality for single GSWs
That needs an addendum, otherwise it sounds like any GSW is about as lethal as covid19:
Not accounting for suicides and precision shooting, a single GSW is likely an accident, which drives the lethality down considerably. Filter out unintentional single GSWs and I bet the lethality is rather different.
This article indicates there's no difference, in fact, and is lower than the conservative percentage I was getting earlier.
Maybe I'm reading the abstract wrong, but it appears that the article specifically compares single headshots with multiple GSW including a single head GSW. In which case there's no significant difference.
But maybe I'm reading it wrong. I may be biased, because I really want to believe that JimBob shooting himself in the foot cleaning his gun, occurs with a higher frequency and with less mortality, than people shooting to kill.
I admit I didn't look deep into that particular article. There are a lot of sources easy to find that show that multiple GSWs are surprisingly not that much more lethal, but they're harder to repair. This one for example which lists 13% for single, and 18% for multiple.
How convenient, you left out the shooting statistic. It's fucking insanely wrong.
That's good to see a lot of the statistics are close, and I appreciate the sources.
That said, for a full picture, I think you should mention that the average 20 year old doesn't have 18 gunshot wounds (365 wounds per 400 per year, is about 9.1 wounds per person per decade, or 18.2 wounds per 20 years per person)
So I'd appreciate if you include a bullet point about that.
You didn't fact-check how many trans people there are in the U.S.^1^
It looks to be between 0.5% and 1.6% of the total U.S. population (2 - 6 in 400).
References:
Semi-related, the number of intersex people (in the literature they talk about people with "disorders of sexual development") have also been estimated to be around 1% of the population (4 in 400), source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
^1^ yes, the U.S. isn't mentioned in the OP, but your sources are looking at U.S. demographics and so I will continue with the U.S.-centrism already present.
Some Thoughts (oh boy):
There is a weird logic to pointing out how few trans people there are actually are in the OP. Even if there were many more trans people, (like if there really were 1 in 5 trans people as is commonly mis-perceived), would that make the GOP's campaign of fear-mongering and animus any more justified? I don't think this is what Shon (
@gayblackvet) was going for, but it almost seems like a consequence of how the message was written.Maybe I'm wrong here, but does it seem like way it is written implies that the problem is not that the trans panic is unjustified in its fear of trans people, but that it is merely blown out of proportion? Maybe the angle was that even if we assume trans people are a problem, it's still so few people it's not worth all this panic and legislation (there are >500 anti-trans bills in the U.S. right now, over 40 of them have already passed).
Rhetorically this perspective-taking might be effective in appealing to mildly transphobic centrists or moderate conservatives who are not entirely comfortable with trans people but who might not want to be perceived as transphobic and don't want to be associated with the rabid and vocal transphobia of the GOP.
That wedge between a more moderate closeted transphobe and a more openly transphobic right-wing one is politically useful, so I am not necessarily complaining, but there is a concern here about whether tackling transphobia is really the goal here, and if so how we should best go about that.
my favourite is how tennessee effectively made insurance more expensive for everyone because one trans child wanted to play sports with her friends in school
what's the story?
they basically put up a bill that banned tenncare from contracting with organizations that offer gender affirming care in any state, which is... a lot of organizations which limits the options which makes everything more expensive. at the time it was all based on a lawsuit from one 8 year old trans girl who wanted to play sports with her friends.
Nothing more Republican than having the government artificially restrict free market capitalism... wait that not what every Republican I've ever known has said they support. Weird.
Those trans people better not play sports! /s
I feel like it would be ok as long as they have health insurance.
Americans care a lot about debating what's "fair" except when it comes to poverty
Because all the other shit is those two people's fault somehow, obvs.
They need to make up reasons why their god is being such a piece of shit.
You just accurately (and accidentally?) summarized all religions.
Holy shit the literacy rate is kinda shocking..
Do people not like to read? A quarter of the population is fucking NUTS
Some people didn't have an opportunity to learn in the first place. Lack of education doesn't make someone "fucking NUTS".
I think they meant a quarter of the population being illiterate, that is, that fact that such a statistic exists, is “fucking nuts,” not the illiterate population themselves.
Well he proceeded it by saying that they don't "like" to read, implying that this is a choice on their part.
Not at all the way I read it, but I can see your thought train
Hence it being a question. I wasn't aware that access to learning to read wasn't easily available.
Stats on illiterate by choice vs socioeconomic standing would be very interesting
85 is a bit high. It would be around 60, and that is the global illiteracy rate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate Still too high though.
This basically comes down to how you define literacy.
Nationally, 21% of Americans have level 1 or below literacy on the PIAAC literacy scale. That's probably where the 85 people came from.
12% are at level 1, meaning they can only read at a basic level. 4% are functionally illiterate, and 4% had some kind of cognitive or physical handicap or language barrier that kept them from being surveyed.
About 34% of illiterate Americans were born outside the US, so they're possibly literature in another language.
One thing I haven't noticed anyone else mention is that the literacy data being referenced here seems to originate from the PIAAC, an organisation that I wasn't previously familiar with. I was curious about their methodology, since I also thought the quoted rate was shocking. The thing is, according to this FAQ, they only assess in English. So the number of people who are actually illiterate is inextricable from the number of people who are literate in another language, but haven't learned English yet.
This video is a great discussion of literacy. To put that rate into context, 'illiterate' often includes people that can read and write a little bit, but still struggle with some vital or everyday tasks. According to Wikipedia, 20% of US adults have a literacy level at or below level 1 which would be 80 people in this example. This report has a ton of stats and also defines each level of literacy.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I have no idea how no one has picked up on this and have all decided "Americans are dumb".
What everyone has missed is the literacy statistic is for ENGLISH literacy. The other 20% or so are pretty much all immigrants that cannot speak English and there aren't tens of millions of adults with the mental capacity of a rock.
I’m from Connecticut. Willimantic area, not Greenwich area, but we were still less damaged by Jim Crow and similar policies (except for redlining, that fucked everyone). I spoke to a man in 2017, who had been born in the US, seemed aware and thoughtful, and had to get his granddaughter to write down the claim number I wanted to give him, because he didn’t know his numbers or letters.
I didn’t ask, even though it was killing me with curiosity. His granddaughter probably heard the curiosity in my voice, and explained that in 1967, when he was able to leave school, the teachers didn’t care whether a black kid learned to read. They let him leave school at twelve, even though it was well after brown v the board of education. By the time he wanted to learn to read, he was older, had full time work, and it just didn’t click.
That man was underserved by his government well past the point of mistreatment, not stupid. He’s obviously only one data point, but he’s not the only black man who was treated differently in schools
Not entirely.
Only about a quarter of them were born in another country. Then you've got e.g. people with severe cognitive delays or some kind of physical impairment such as blindness. And there's also people whose education system failed them.
It's honestly a mix of things.
If at least 1 person in the room of 400 is shot per day they'd be dead in just over a year...
Last I checked the population of the US wasn't plummeting, so what else is wrong here?
Oh no I see the point, but I'm hardly going to believe a point that's surrounded by obvious mistakes or embellishments
In this case, being more accurate would have distracted from the overall point.
Granted, attracting the dismissive comments of insufferable pedants and the wilfully obtuse isn't ideal either, but here we are 🤷
How would being more accurate distract from the point? I agree with what the post is saying, but making up statistics doesn't really help IMO and takes away from the credibility
Hyperbole and hypotheticals aren't "making up statistics"
It doesn't seem like this post was meant to be hyperbolic though? Hyperbole doesn't work well in the context of numbers. If someone said 1 in 100 people drive a Toyota, how would I differentiate that from being an actual figure or hyperbole? It's not obvious unless you look into it. Likewise, if someone told me that 1 in 400 people in the US get shot every day I'd struggle to tell if that's true or not, given how much I hear about gun crime over there.
This post is quite clearly framed in a way that sounds like fact.
Im pretty sure those users a legitimately, unironically autistic.
Not being abelist, just trying to prevent others from taking this argument for more than it is: someone incapable of thinking outside explicit literals.
Lol fair enough, I can understand why you'd think that.
I'm quite capable of thinking figuratively. But in the way that this post is framed, I'm pretty sure any layperson would take the figures as being based on some actual statistics. It's deceptive, and I don't think that's a good look if anyone were to look into this in any detail. If you're going to make an analogy, make it actually analogous. And if you want to use hyperbole, use it in a way that's clear (i.e. by not mixing in numbers)
That's not how autism works, and saying you're not being ableist doesn't actually mean you're not being ableist, as you've demonstrated here.
(and before you even try, because I'm not coming back to debate this, I am autistic, and those assholes are just being deliberately obtuse and pedantic, throwing autistic people under the bus to defend them is gross. And if you are autistic too and think that means you can't be ableist, let me introduce you to lateral and internalised ableism which are what your reply would be if not "run of the mill" ableism)..
I have aspergers, I was in special ed for two years in elementary school because I was disruptive to class. I have met hundreds if others on the spectrum in my life.
I can tell you that this is exactly how many people with autism approach situations.
What makes you say myself and the other poster are being 'deliberately obtuse and pedantic'? It's pretty hurtful and that is not my intention in the slightest. I'm not trying to undermine the argument made by the post, I just think it's a valid concern when the figures don't add up and it's worth discussing.
Expressing the number of people shot as a tiny fraction of 400 million people would raise at least as many questions about accuracy and make it EASIER for people like you to distract from the point by obsessing over an unimportant (to the point being made) detail.
Analogies and third decimal-accurate statistics just don't fit together.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'people like me'. To be 100% clear, I agree with the point of the post but I just don't think they've gone about explaining it in the best way. To somewhat agree with what you're saying, I'd say yes, analogies and accurate statistics don't fit well together, but neither do analogies and statistics in general. Either stick to written analogies/hyperbole OR use actual statistics.
Pedants, the easily sidetracked, those who will jump at the opportunity to distract from the message itself by hyperfocusing on an insignificant technical detail.
Take your pick.
You seem to have a very binary view of things though. Is it not possible for someone to agree with a message, but think we can improve on how we tell it? If we want to convince people of something, is it not best to provide as convincing an argument as possible? I'm not trying to distract from the message, I'm wondering how we can tell it better.
Of distracting from the actual topic by needlessly fixating on an only tangentially relevant detail? Yeah, I'm kooky like that.
Sure, but that's not what you're doing. You're, deliberately or not, pulling all attention away from the message by demanding a fix to something that, in the specific case, is unimportant.
As I said before, being more exact would invite MORE distracting arguments about it, not fewer.
You're also not trying to NOT distract from the message either, though. Or you are and you're doing a piss-poor job of it.
It was told just fine. You're actively obscuring the salient point with your pedantry.
Ok my friend. If I have distracted from the message, that is genuinely not my intention. I'll leave things here.
Fair. Have a nice day 🙂
Ok so you're saying that you need to outright lie to get people to side with you?
That makes you sound like a politician, not a human rights advocate, but sure
Burning Man called. They want their gigantic strawman back.
How about you address the fact that you're saying that telling the truth would distract from the point instead of pulling up distractions? Sounds like whataboutism to me
Let me put it another way.
There's 4,947,342.562 kinds of people in the world: those who obsess over needless numeral exactitude when faced with a rhetorical argument, and those who don't.
Hyperbole and hypotheticals aren't "outright lies"
Exact and false numbers given as proportions aren't hyperbole, they're misrepresentations, ie lies.
"Say you're in a room"
It's literally at the start of the post. Anyone who has eyes and can read now understands this is hypothetical
If anything the people pointing out how others are missing the point, are actually missing the point…
There’s a middle ground between ‘autistically measuring in decimals’ and blowing something completely out of proportion to make a forced point.
People are just getting defensive because it’s an underlying point they agree with (rightly so) and going on attack for anyone calling it out for being disingenuous.
Why are you using 'autistic' as an insulting word?
Because that’s literally what people are doing for anyone calling this out
And that makes it okay for you to do it?
I used it as an example and put it in quotes…
I’m literally calling people out for using it incorrectly.
why does that make it fine to use as an insult?
Nope. That's just objectively wrong.
The choice of 1 almost certainly wasn't a deliberate exaggeration of the actual amount. It's just the nearest number that isn't too specific to distract from the overall argument and/or small enough that pro-gun advocates can use it as an argument for gun violence not being a problem at all.
You can’t say they’re just rounding up when they randomly decided to choose 400 as the starting point…
So what you're saying is that 400 is completely random and because of that, it follows that 1 is meant to be accurate? 🤔
I'd say that it's much more likely that they're operating under the (incorrect but commonly believed) assumption that the US population is closer to 400m than 300m and both numbers are rounded up for simplicity.
The post says “at least 1” which implies that if anything they’re rounding that number down, because on some days that number is 2. So they’re suggesting that on any given day between 800,000 and 1.6 million Americans get shot, or that every single person in the country gets shot every 13 months or so.
If they’re going to use a number that wildly inaccurate then I immediately assume that every other number in the statement is equally inaccurate, even if that’s not actually the case.
I claim this point for unicorns!
Shot does not mean killed. Of the 327 average daily people shot, 210 survive. I will however admit that 1 in 400 people being shot a day does not represent the same ratio as the 327 out of the 330,000,000 a day at all.
Also birthrate
Pedantry is a great distraction when you don't want to address problems.
Very true, which is why it's important not to give easy fuel for pedantry like this gun stat does. It undermines the entire point if the numbers aren't at least close to the real statistics.
Good point
Not to detract from the overall message, buuuut....
48,313 gun deaths in US in 2021.
333,000,000 people in US
On those rates 0.05 people in a room of 400 would be shot per year, so 1 person per 20 years.
It'd 1 person every 2 years in a room of 4,000.
Also those mental health numbers are off given the lifetime prevalence of most disorders being around 5%.
2/400 (0.5%) of the population identifying as trans would be 1,665,000 people - which may be plausible but idk, I generally work on the figure of ~4% of any population being LBGTQI.
Poverty numbers are probably bang on.
"shot" does not mean "killed".
What I can find is roughly 315 people getting shot every day in the US. Out of 333m, that's roughly 1 in 1m daily. In a room of 400 that's 1 per 6.8 years.
Good point. Still, though your numbers get to a similarly outlandish time period.
absolutely, it's 3 times more, but still 3 orders of magnitude short.
Where did you get the 4% being LGBTQI number from?
For Australia it's around 3-4% LGBT.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_in_Australia
That's from 2014 and only accounts for Australia, not any population also the survwy points out that among indigenous and Islander populations in Australia there aee more same sex couples.
Pls be more careful which such generalised statements and wether your source is reliable/saying what you want it to say. Also Wikipedia is not a good source to refer to.
Wikipedia is only a source of concern if the primary sources it cites are unreliable, in the linked article they refer to ABS data which is the most accurate population data for that country. No LGBT question was asked in the more recent Australian census. The ~4% of population being homosexual was a talking point during our same sex marriage plebiscite, hence why I use it.
However, in recent US census data 3.3% of the population respond as being Lesbian or Gay, with 4.4% bisexual https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/11/census-bureau-survey-explores-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity.html. It'd be interesting to see how that percentage progresses as majority of positive respondents were in younger generations, while I doubt any will go from identifying as gay to then straight, we may see a decline in those who identify as bisexual as they age...but who knows.
Regardless, returning to the OC, the figures for trans were all around the 0.6 mark in most sources I saw, so the 2/400 in the OC is accurate.
I did the fact checks with references on everything else in another comment. NIH numbers actually made mental illness worse, but must keep in mind the lack of "serious" in OPs definition. Other stats were spot on. Where did you get these numbers? I couldn't find anything I trusted on non-fatal gunshots.
(Note: just realized you found the same number I did for deaths vs gunshots)
You misinterpreted the NIH numbers. It isn't 57% of 400 are untreated, but rather 57% of ~90 (NIH state 1 in 6/ 22.8% love with AMI). In any case though that ~90 figure relates to AMI which is a broad definition and includes very mild cases, whereas my numbers were related to SMI - which tends to be 5% (as supported by your NIH source). Having worked in the field, untreated schizophrenia is a lot more serious than untreated GAD or ADHD.
Edit: my gunshot source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Funnilly enough, if 2 people were shot a day in OP's scenario, one of those would statistically be a suicide.
Only 15-20% of single GSWs are lethal. The post doesn't say "shot and killed", just shot
That's still a crazy stat. That's something like 830k people in the US being shot every day. Almost the whole population getting shot in a year. They must've misplaced a few decimals doing the math
Good point.
Fact time. You don't always die when shot, and the US is a baby factory. I can't find good stats on non-lethal gunshot, so I'll do the rest.
Verdict: Pretty accurate.
References:
I guess hyperbole isn't your thing
There's a new person thrown into the room each time someone is shot.
That should fix the analogy?
No the rate is still too high, unless one of the people in the room is a serial killer but frankly that'd skew the untreated mental illness score pretty badly by giving everyone PTSD
Youre probably just trolling to troll, but
I really don't get why people with all sorts of beliefs lie to people with the same beliefs to convince them they have the right beliefs... It's a waste of time, why not actually go out and make a difference if you support human rights and have enough time to make posts to your echo chamber about it?
No, the average person doesn't get shot once every 400 days. That's not the statistic. It's 1 person in 400 getting shot. Number of days is not being factored.
Again, you're looking at the wrong variable. It's not about how many days. This is a snapshot (of what I assume is population of the US) brought down from millions to hundreds of people. Roughly 400 million people brought down to 400. The whole point is to help people conceptualize just how absurd it is to target such a small minority. Smaller numbers are easier for people to conceptualize percentages.
Sure, the numbers need to be rounded off in order to bring them down to easier to understand figures. I'm not saying they're perfectly accurate, but they're close enough to accurate to get the point across. Pointing out how the hypothetical situation doesn't use exact figures of people distracts from the ultimate message. Which is your point I'm assuming. Just because these numbers are rounded, doesn't mean they're inaccurate.
I agree with your last point. Lying doesn't get anyone anywhere, especially when trying to appeal to "the other side" because that will be pointed out and then the argument (whether valid or not) is put into question.
But this post is about a hypothetical situation with rounded statistics to emphasize the general absurdity of targeting trans folk as "the problem with this country." When there are actual and bigger issues we as a whole face. Like gun violence, terrible healthcare infrastructure, and mental illness.
Arguing about pedantics just obscures any actual criticism and distracts from the message. And who says this doesn't make a difference? This is how issues in society gets resolved. By talking through them and bringing attention to them. So yeah - this helps the cause of human rights because it's about bringing awareness and different perspectives into the conversation.
1:
Remove everyday and maybe, but that everyday means you're wrong on point 1
2: not contesting this - I agree
At the end of the day I'm just saying it's a useless post as it's not really achieving anything, but I'm not saying you couldn't make something good using the same premise
Fair point. I did not realize the "everyday" aspect in the original post. You're right that it's a gross over estimation (see point 3) but it still doesn't mean the average person gets shot every 400 days. It's a statistical percentage which doesn't account for birth rates or repeat shootings (although I'm sure those are more rare) and other external factors
Cool beans
After looking at the statistics the CDC puts out on daily shootings (roughly 327 are shot each day out of 400 million) this data point is grossly exaggerated at best. I agree that it doesn't make sense to round up to 1 person is shot a day when it equates to roughly 0.0000008%.
I still feel like the original post is not "useless" as it sparks conversation (as our replies have shown) and although it has an inaccurate data point, it doesn't negate the rest of the message.
As a member of the trans community, I don't think the original message should be discounted or ignored for having an exaggerated statistic (honestly it's just a lie in this case) because the original message still rings true.
Now the post says shot and not killed. I think that distinction is important. But I imagine those statistics are insane.
I fact checked in other comments 😉 OP is fairly accurate overall, but I didn't include gunshots since I couldn't find reliable enough stats on non-fatal.
It’s insane because it’s still bullshit, 1 in 400 would mean that over 800,000 Americans get shot every day, and every single person in America gets shot every 13 months or so.
That’s the beauty of the 400 system. Once you become part of one facet, you can achieve so much more. Poor? Now you have the opportunity to be illiterate and definitely not have health insurance. Which is convenient as you will either participate in or be privy to a crime that increases your odds of getting shot. Let’s say you hit the jackpot on all these and you recover from your injuries, you still have the opportunity to participate in mental illness!
Are they also trans?
Jesus saves and I'm a soldier for Jesus, but only in the ways that don't cost me money or require me to make any lifestyle changes or acknowledge that I may not be perfect. Now, who's doing something that I can tangentially relate to the Bible that I'm not doing and don't plan to ever do?
that guys eating fish! get him!!
I get to marry them both?
Haha what a hoot, that's some unexpected positivity there, I'm guessing you're not trans
This analogy is flawed.
It's the people who put the people in the room who set the priorities, not the ones inside the room.
You also need to assemble this group from a random selection of people from all across the country. The context of the analogy attempts to get the reader to visualize a room of 400 people which is easiest to do by drawing on personal experience such as a school assembly. But the stats listed will not apply to a group of 400 people from the same school zone, the same age. But visualizing a group of people you have an empathetic connection to is effective because it makes you wonder "what if a large amount of my friends of these disadvantaged people?" So it makes the message more effective, but it is utilizing emotional manipulation to do so.
Tweets has limited words so I'd say that it wasn't necessary to go into more detail about the selection of people.
It's quite obvious that they meant 400 random people.
Land of the free baby.
In no land are babies free
idk, some places just let anyone adopt, and you can just make a baby for free, if you know how to do it right.
Idk, 9 months of housing, food, etc is pretty damned expensive.
but the baby itself can be free
Wait is this stat for real or a hyperbole? Assuming this represents the demogrpahcis of US. With a population of 333 million, there are 1.6 million trans people and 830 000 prople are shot everyday?
It's not even remotely accurate. Just a bunch of bullshit to make people angry.
According to the CDC, 1.03% of the population identifies as transgender. Not including people like me who are enby but not trans (1.4% who get their own other category).
As for the 1 in 400 getting shot, that's obviously dubious, and the question is how they arrived at that value (say at a different time frame.) I'm working on it.
That said, as this is c/196, I posed it from my old reddit meme pile without checking the facts so I'm not invested in its veracity. The other numbers were verified in these comments, thank the Lemmy community.
Go out and vote. Can't complain about that which you permit. Also Vote with your money and vote with your time. Those are the real impactful ones.
The public has no-one to vote for. We get to vote against the autocratic party by voting for the slightly less right wing party. But even Mr. Hope & Change couldn't get much done.
And the Federalist Society controls SCOTUS which has final say on the laws of the land, and has been stripping the people of civil rights for a while now. They got noticed after Dobbs
It's going to be a long, rough ride and the Christian nationalists may take over in the short term. Look into regional organizing and mutual aid. I think these are how the plutocrats will be beaten in the end.
That or global famine.
2 seems high
Just checked. Trans folk make up 1.02% of Americans. Another 1.04% are other (neither AMAB, AFAB or Trans, so enbies and such)
Where is this happening? That's a very high shooting rate!
It's a breakdown of the United States general population, I think.
So, in a little over a year everyone in the USA will be shot? 875K people are shot daily?
Yea I could believe the other stats but there's no way one person out of 400 is being shot every day.
Also, over 20% of the population is illiterate? I don't buy it
It's about 26k total homicides per year, about half are firearms, a huge majority of those are handguns.
So 875k people in the US are shot to death roughly every 67 years.
There are 400 people. Yet the 2 trans people are all you talk about. Goes both ways
I'm confused, you made OP's point? So how is it both ways? OP is saying they, and the government, should be focused on everyone, however half of our government is focusing only on those 2.
They're trying to "both sides" deflect so they can continue to vote for literal monsters.
Right: aims to make a specific portion of the population miserable.
Left: talks about how the right is attacking that group of people to bring attention to it so we can stop it.
Dolts: ThEy'Re BoTh ThE SaMe!!
On the Democrats side, I remember there being some hullabaloo about kids in school going without lunches, which we might want to change, since it's not their fault they're poor.
Also that college debt has proven itself to be a scam that has driven large demographics into literal debt bondage, and maybe we should fix that.
Those two are off the top of my head.
So lets take a look at the everyday, at least 1 person is shot
This would assert %0.25 of the population receives one or more gunshot injuries each day or 830,000 gunshot victims per year
A Penn Medicine study claims the number is 329/day
Which is 0.000098% of the population or 120,167 victims a year.
Brady United clocks US gunshot victims at 117,345 per year or 0.035 of the population (321 victims a day).
I suspect our poster Shon was computing that one of his 400 Americans in a room (I presume folks in the US) was getting shot every year and misspoke / forgot to carry the one. It's too easily detectable speaking to communities that will be eager to apply skepticism and dismiss the post in entirety.
I could also write this but like 2 trans people decided to ruin life of 10 others each round. And factual value would be about the same.
I'm sick of those victimize everything agendas to be honest.
So after 400 days everyone is dead?
Single GSWs aren't THAT deadly. Quick Google shows about 20%. So after 2000 days everyone is dead, assuming we're not replacing them ever.
Birthrate in the US is about 1.1% per year. You'd need a lot of immigrants to replace the workforce.
Maybe there's a group of people who get shot more than once, and they get included multiple times. That would skew the statistic.
Probably before. I'd wager people without heath insurance might succumb to illness, mentally unstable might commit suicide, homeless might freeze to death
Hah, yea, I did a fact check above but left gunshots out. Shot doesn't equal death and rotating the 400 people solves your comment, but I didn't trust the stats enough to include it. Everything else checks out, though.
Not every gun shot wound is fatal.
That doesn't make the number much better... That is a lot of people being shot. And it says at least which means it's the lower bound? I support the message, but can't we deliver the message without making stuff up?
True. But assuming I'm part of that population statistically I'd be shot after at most 400 days. Definitely not a population I'd wanna live in.
I prefer to meet trans people in person to get to know them and judge them based on their actions like any other person rather than what I believe is on their minds.
Sadly, there are multiple trans exclusionist movements in the US and UK who are glad to presume the worst of all trans folk, and seek to criminalize as much of their presence as possible when they aren't advocating literally massacring them.
Even the TERFs of the UK have admitted they're really not all that RF. It's really about the TE.
Why would I be in the same room? Ew, I'm going back in my gated community and calling the cops
I don't want to be that guy but 8 billion divided by 400 is 20 million. So to get a global average you would multiply the number here by 20 million.... 20 million people are not shot every day
Are you conflating the global population and US shots? I don't trust the gun stats I found, so I left them out of my fact check in the other comments. Added sources for those and OP is pretty accurate overall.
That's world stats because I wasn't sure what it was counting. The US is 827k
This is not an argument about whether or not the stats are accurate but: I think they're talking about the US, not the world.
If that is the case than 827,000 people are shot every day in the US... That's not right either.
It's literally math for what they are saying when one person out of 400 is shot and it is scaled up to the US population. Even if it was rounded from .5 in a set of 400 that's still over 400k The actual number is 316 per day. Still a bad number but that is .1% of the number they have given
Not to mention one everyday would be 365 out of 400 every year. Clearly, ~90% of the population isn't getting shot every year.
Shot doesn't mean dead and one person can receive multiple gunshot wounds in a year.
There's just one poor unlucky guy who drives the average up. Keeps surviving though
Bullet wounds Goreg, who spends his free time insulting people with guns and is shot 10,000 a day, was an outlier and should not have been counted.
That still means everyone in the US is shot in just over a year. That's not right
Yes. Still, 90% of the population isn't getting shot every year and a couple of people aren't going to make up for it with multiple gunshot wounds.
That being said, whatever the real percentage is, it's still too high
Oh, yes, 1 in 400 is still the wrong proportion, but I guess you can't say a quarter of a person is shot every 8 months or whatever it would be, if you're just trying to make a quick and concise point.
Then why choose 400 people, or why include the shooting stat once they went with 400? The number would very much round down to zero, and the post says at least 1 person per day which means that's the lower bound
How would I know? I didn't make the post. What if they based it off of a very specific day where a lot of people got shot?
By my math, at this scale it would be one person shot roughly every 7 years. That's still kinda scary.
That isn't right. 1 in 400 means in 400 days everyone has been shot once
The number provided in the post is inaccurate to a real-world scale of US shootings. One person shot every seven years is instead accurate to real world data if the US population were scaled to 400 people.
What number do you have for the actual number? The number I found said 316 every day which makes it about 1 million years with population
316 shootings per day, every day for 7 years, is 807,380 people shot. 807,380 into 331,000,000 (the US population) is one in 400. Therefore if the US population were 400 people, there would be one person shot every 7 years.
Ok I see, same answer just shown different
How did you get 1 million years?
316 people a day times 1 million is 316 million people technically it takes a bit longer but the time scale is so large it's irrelevant
I think your math is off there. First, you're forgetting that there's 365 days in a year. Then you're forgetting that the scale is 400 people. Yours basically said that shootings irl are only happening once per year instead of once per day, and the US pop is only 1 person.
Only 332 million people in the US 😉
Yep that's why that number is probably wrong
Say you are in a room with 400 people. One of them is voenkom, 399 of them will die today.
But hey, at least Putin got new engine for his yacht from Italy! And his oligarchs are honorable buisness owners in EU and US.
The reason trans people are such a hotly debated topic is because republicans (and some leftists) view it as an assault on truth. They firmly believe that woman means adult human female and that males cannot be females. It's not a surprise why there is so much controversy around it.
First it was people of color. Then it was marriage across races. Then it was women having the right to vote. The the homosexuals. And now, here we are, it's those dangerous trans. It's always masked as an "assault on truth" tho inn'it?
I personally don't really think racism/homophobia are that comparable. Being trans is something that requires other people to participate in. The former situations do not. In order to believe that transgender women are women, you need to believe that woman does not mean adult human female. That's where a lot of the fundamental disagreements arise from.
Maybe if the US didn't have a long history of ignoring intersex gene configurations, and letting doctors assign gender to infants with ambiguous gonads, including gender assignment surgery.
We already know that gender needs to be adjusted medically, say in cases of precocious puberty. This is applying the same techniques to persons who identify as someone other than they present.
And yes, we'd reduce the problem if human societies didn't treat men and women so disparately, and freak out when little Joey is undressing Barbie.
In most cases it doesn't matter what you believe though. The bare minimum of not being aggressive and transphobic would be great for a lot of people.
Sure, I don't want anyone to feel aggressed. But I think things get tricky when you start talking about topics like trans women in female sports, in female jails, etc
That's true.
I personally try and avoid any discussion about that, so I don't have to take a stance.
I have nothing against Trans people, but I recognize that it could be a problem in sports. Fortunately I don't care about sports, so I don't have to figure out if it's a problem or not.
For jails, maybe start with a prison that's respecting the persons identification and if (and only if) trouble arises, you could move them elsewhere.
And gendered bathrooms just seem stupid imo. Do mixed bathrooms with real walls (like we often do here) instead of shitty stalls and put urinals in a separate walled off section towards the back or something.
The entire, "adult human female," argument is BS. Trans women are clearly both adults and humans, there's no debate around that. It's the female part that people get hung up on. It's the assumption that gender is defined by sex, which isn't how humans think about things on an intuitive level.
When you see a person with all the outward characters of a woman, most people, especially most conservatives, simply label that person in their head as a woman. In most societies we rarely see each others genitals, and often can't fully make out certain markers of woman or manhood due to clothes or masks, worn for practical or cultural reasons. In fact, most apparel isn't inherently gendered outside of cultural context, as dresses, pants, makeup, and countless other fashionable displays have been gendered very differently through history, even in the English speaking world. When you categorize someone as a woman in almost all circumstances, you use "female" to denote gender, not sex.
If you recognize the empirical reality of how humans use the word female, you realize that sex is almost irrelevant for most uses of the term. Trans women get recognized as female all the time by people, and because female is both a term to denote gender and to denote sex, insisting those people are only male once you learn their, "sex," is not only a rude thing to do, but also objectively wrong. Trans women are often undeniably adult human females, so pretending the definition is incompatible with Trans women is a lie.
The thing you might have a problem with is people that don't pass being referred to as female, but this isn't an absolute truth either. Tons of cis women identify as women and are of the female sex, but don't get gendered as female by many people. The same is true for some cis men, and while there are less of them due to social stigma against femininity, male failing cis men do exist. Almost no one insists that butch women are men for their male gender presentation, or that femboys are women for female presentation. Conservatives might demonize these people as, "abnormal freaks," and people that gatekeep trans identities might get very uncomfortable, but I've yet to see them insist that GNC folks are the gender they most present.
As a trans person who often doesn't pass as my gender identity, it's frustrating when others complain about people like me inconveniencing them. I'm sorry interacting with me challenges your contradictory worldview as I know critical thought takes effort. I want to pass to everyone, but not because I want to put anyone's mind at ease. I want to look like a woman because it makes me happy, while feeling like a man makes me miserable.
I'm sorry that the unavoidable reality of cultural change makes you unhappy, but there has always been change and will always be change. All manner of changes in our lives are more extreme right now. The change might be more drastic than at any point in history, but no one chooses where or when they are born. It is wise to make the most of the hand you're dealt instead of demanding a reroll than cannot happen. You can change neither the past or present, but you can shape the future.
It's impossible to actually rid the world of trans people, so the tension between the outdated gender ideology of the past and material reality will always exist. Instead of attempting an impossible task or burying your head in the sand, find a consistent worldview and learn to live with us. Everyone should learn to peacefully exist with benign difference in others.
The "not being female" part is exactly what holds people up about calling them woman.
I don't believe this is true at all. It would be weird to call women "females" in most circumstances. Your entire long comment pretty much serves to argue that female doesn't mean what it actually means. It reads like a bunch of woo woo to me.
Sex is very important in human relationships. It's how we procreate, which is the basis for the evolution of human sexuality. That much cannot be denied. Until very recently, there was no distinction between gender in sex. And don't bring up some random old tribe having a third gender hundreds of years ago as proof, you can find an cultures who believed nearly anything and exceptions don't prove the rule.
I believe that you can be a feminine man, dress how you want, and play whatever role you want, but that does not mean you are a female/woman. I would not try to challenge anyone to their face but don't be surprised why I don't truly believe that they are a woman.
Why don't you read up on the medical consensus and make an effort to understand gender dysphoria? If you really care, you would participate in the conversation with a genuine interest and understanding. It seems you are more invested in confirming your biases instead. The medical research has evolved way past the surface level analysis you will find on Lemmy or Reddit.
Medical consensus on how to treat a specific mental illness is not relevant in this conversation about definitions.
The medical consensus is just as much about our understanding of the symptoms underlying issues as much as the treatment. The issue is your "belief" system of what falls in the categories you described. I'll ask you how you define the female gender. Give us a working definition and let's see where we disagree.
Ok. You're free to dismiss uncomfortable ideas as woo woo and cling to what feels right rather than what's true till the day you die. So long as you don't become bitter and lash out as the world passes you by, have fun.
Regarding everything you listed? No.
Your comment is both a gross misrepresentation of US history and a simplification of a complex contested topic across the world.
Why don't you provide a counterargument instead of whining. The truth is fascists need an out group to maintain power. That outgroup is always picked from some type of marginalized group. The issue is republicans are running out of those out-groups more and more, but the strategy is virtually the same. If you go back in time and analyze the rhetoric it's virtually identical.
The fact that you're equalizing US Republicans with fascists speaks magnitude of how shallow and undeveloped your position is.
And that's coming from me as a European, with absolutely no vested interest in US internal affairs.
The fact that you've blustered twice without providing any actual points whatsoever speaks magnitudes of how shallow and undeveloped your position is.
While I do believe the other commenter is making a gross simplification of the reasons the average conservative does what they do, there is genuine merit in recognizing the relationship between US Republicans (or conservative movements and groups in general) and facism. The ideological cudgels they use are based in the same foundations, utilize the same rhetoric, and are often intended by their progenators to reach the same end goals. If you are a European, you should have some interest in this - after all, the US of A is not the only country struggling with facist rhetoric being normalized in its culture.
Thanks. I personally don't like throwing the "f" word around too much. It's been losing it's meaning in the past years. But we have to have a way to analyze the rhetoric through a past lense.
The thing is, here in the US the transnational white power movement / white Christian nationalist movement features all the indicators of fascism (there are multiple lists. Choose one. I like Umberto Eco's). We could argue that it's incidentally fascist, that it's developed these features as symptoms in the process of coming out as an autocratic, identity-focused culture. But that doesn't change that it is dangerous and is stripping away civil rights from the people of the United States, and is engaging in efforts to neuter the already meager democratic features of the US, in order to hedge out the other party.
So whether or not the Republican party is a fascist party, whether or not some states have fascist elements, they are behaving in those ways historic fascist regimes have that cause harm. And as such it is doing harm to their respective publics.
And that means our attention should be focused not on what to call them, but how to stop the harm.
I never directly stated they are completely equivalent. I said the rhetorical devices they use are the same. This is hard to refute. I'm an American and I also happen to live in Europe (I was born and grew up in Italy) so I know plenty about Fascism. Why don't you provide an actual counterargument?
I think you underestimate the prevalence of the transnational white power movement in the Republican Party. We currently have the right-wing extremist factions, MAGAs and the Christian Nationalists, and then we have the old guard. I think Mitt Romney is the least right-wing throughout the federal government, and he still believes in policies that will drive the US toward fascism and autocracy. And when he wasn't in politics, he was engaging in hedge-fund shenanigans that depended on regulatory capture.
So yes, every last one of them bought the ticket to ride this train, and are financed by the plutocrats that laid the rails.
Bullshit. It's a classic divide and conquer move. Political game to focus the political debate on a non-issue
I don't think so. Social change is almost always controversial and heavily talked about.
The reason conservatives focus so much attention on it is a soulless tactic, but they do believe what they say.
Isn't it pretty normal for political party's to signal their values during a period of cultural divide? Isn't that sort of what political parties are for?
The broader point is to showcase how terrible the Republicans are for spending so much energy oppressing a tiny minority instead of focusing on more important issues. Republicans focus so much on cultural issues because their economic policy is deeply unpopular. Democrats take a stand on trans rights, but most politicians don't talk about trans people that much. They talk about the economy, regulations, government programs, and other issues that have a huge effect on everyone's lives. They usually talk about trans people in the context of opposing oppressive Republican policies and bigotry.
Democrats mostly play defense on trans rights because America's hands off attitude to personal decisions actually makes the US one of the easiest places on earth to legally change your gender or get prescribed hormones. Before it became a partisan issue, most right wingers supported informed consent and name changes, as the freedom to live on your own terms was an important part of the American mythos. The cost of treatment sucks here, making transition a bigger economic burden than most other countries, but considering how fucked healthcare is for everyone, trans folks aren't as unique.
Transphobes think about trans people more than trans people, just like how Judaism was more important to antisemites than to most Jews. Scapegoats are the glue that binds fascists together, and bigotry is necessary to distract from unpopular policies.
Too much for people to handle.
Most people don't give a shit about what people think. They could think they are a fairy for all anyone cares. Most people don't even care if you hold the view that gender is a social construct and women aren't better at cooking/cleaning just because they are women and men aren't the only one that's like sports because they are men. No one really cares about anything like that.
But most people look at women and look at men and say "yea those are two different types of things we could separate. One is called women the other is men. One has a pussy, one has a cock"
That's what they believe and someone saying "they believe they should be in the other group." Fine but it doesn't make them the other group, the groups aren't based on believe
That doesn't fully explain it though. What's wrong or dangerous about someone being both male and female, switch between the two, or be neither. I explain the lie of sex=gender and, "adult human female," in another comment, but why do they care about this being the case? Some people claim it threatens religious order, but there aren't universal religious principles. Others claim trans people are directly dangerous, but never have proof. Many people insist that it disrupts the natural order, usually failing to explain why the natural order is good, how the status quo is natural, and how exactly trans people being accepted is worse than forcing them into the closet.
The most honest reason is that it clashes with their beliefs about what should be the case and makes them unhappy. They don't have a good argument, but at least they're honest.
Functionally, trans acceptance is rejected by conservatives because it weakens patriarchal cis-heteronormative power structures that personally provides them with something. For those directly empowered by the hierarchy, the selfish benefits are obvious, but it provides other benefits that get some of the disadvantaged on board. It provides clear order and direction, telling people what to do with their life and how they can be successful at it. Most people prefer clear goals and obvious rules, things that more enlightened worldviews don't provide. Live a happy and flourishing life? The fuck does that mean?
There are other appeals to being old fashion, but those are some of the big ones.
This is not relevant. You also can't switch from male to female. It's not physically possible. I'm not religious either. I think that a male can be as feminine as they want, play whatever role they want, etc... but nothing they do will make them female in my eyes. It goes against the definition of the word.
This reads like cultish woo woo.
You can be as gender non conforming as you want, I will have no problem with it. But don't expect me to believe that you are the sex that you are not. I won't call anyone out for it if they claim otherwise but they can't change how I think deep down.
Hope this helps give some perspective.
It does, but not in a flattering way. You default to equating sex and gender because thinking about constructs is hard, instead asserting that they are exactly the same thing. I don't expect everyone to need that level of understanding. However, this doesn't mean I need to value your view. A person who hasn't learned to do multiplication doesn't need to be listened to when they claim 8x8 can't be 64.
Most younger trans people consider themselves transGENDER, not transSEXUAL. Most trans women don't focus on changing their sex to female, as that distinction doesn't most of the time. Someone's gender determines if they are female in most scenarios. Some people can pass as male and female through specific presentation, being seen as either gender by themselves and everyone else.
My comment about, "a happy and flourishing life," was pointing out how philosophers have known for thousands of years that most people don't question things, making fun of people that do. The specific reference is to the concept in ancient Greece of Eudaimonia, a term slightly different from happiness that philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle thought of as the thing everyone should strive for. Of course, Socrates was executed because Athenians got tired of him poking holes in their beliefs. People don't want to think critically, and trying to question common assumptions gets dismissed as "cultish woo woo."
If there is nothing wrong or dangerous about the modern view of gender, why should we cling to the old view instead? The new view has fewer contradictions than the old view while letting trans and cis people alike live better lives. Forcing the old view onto trans people can be lethal, and strict gender divisions limit life for both men and women. It forces women to be subservient to men, while men are told to be disposable machines without feelings. The old norms are a prison for everyone, while the modern view encourages everyone to live their own life.
Well said. There has to be a way to bridge this conversation but somehow it seems to make people really uncomfortable, which is understandable. I just wish people would start with questions instead of taking the world for granted.
Wait, how are the illiterate who aren't in poverty doing it?
There are a lot of manual labor, factory, and agriculture jobs that don't require high literacy. It's also not clear if they're limiting it to "English literacy".
Considering the questionable literacy of our last two Republican presidents, I think being very rich and capable of taking orders helps.
Well, in Trump's case, the capacity to convince his handlers he can take orders.
where is this hell scape that you are referring to?
The United States of America.
Someone else did a good job of demonstrating that these numbers aren't exaggerated:
https://lemmings.world/comment/3323575
Except that the 1/400 shot per day is and remains an exaggeration.
It’s already so concerning, we don’t need to make it sound worse to have an impact
That sounds about right
The AVERAGE American has over 9 gunshot wounds? Man things are getting bad in the US.
Note: The other statistics seem to mostly check out (see another guy's comment about that), which is great. It's just weird the gun one is so astronomically inaccurate.
Yep. I addressed this in a reply. I think he was thinking 1/400 evey year and then forgot where he was in the thought process.