"Noah Simoneaux" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 30 Nov 2003 15:02:08 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Bing" wrote in message
(snip)

I'm not worried about guns much at all. My own collection is of a size
that
the news reports call a "private arsenal" when they talk about some gun
owner who goes berserk.

Since an arsenal can be defined as a "stock of weapons" that wouldn't be a
lie.
Sometimes telling the truth selectively can be better than an outright
lie.

Yes, something like "Andrew Ford" did in this case, right?


Ah, but when Gunner et al. quote a statistic, you're supposed to BELIEVE
it,
because it's a pro-gun statistic. People like Ford, in general (and I
don't
know him so I can't say whether he's one of these or not) count on you
not
checking out what they say. That's one of the methods Joseph Goebbels
used
for the Nazis, if you've ever studied his work. That's how you perpetuate
a
lie to serve your own ideological purposes.

What's wrong with the truth? Is it just too equivocal and boring these
days?

Which truth? There are lots of truths to pick from. There are often
SEVERAL
different truths to pick from in almost any situation.

And how you pick among them determines if you have a critical mind that you
employ in a search for the meaningful truths, or if you have a manipulative
mind that you employ in a search for ways to twist a story to your
advantage.


And an argument like the one you're making here is a legitimate one,
while a
lie like Ford is perpetuating is not.

Where was the lie? If a statement is ambiguous that doesn't make it a lie
if you
disagree with one of the possible interpretations of it.

That's a good question, Noah. Let's see which kind of mind you have here.
What do you think the purpose of "Andrew Ford's" assertion was? Was it to
reveal something about the relationship between open carry and murder rates,
or was it to employ a mixed kind of statistic to delude the reader with an
anomaly, in the sense that Mark Twain talked about statistics when he
described "lies, damned lies, and statistics"? (Actually, I don't think it
really was Clemens, but I won't quibble.)

What do you say? Can you distinguish between statistics employed to tell
lies, the way Goebbels did and the way that many politicians do today, or do
you recognize the truth that's being implied, and are you willing to judge
an assertion on the basis of whether its rhetorical use is honest or
dishonest? Are you one of the people who isn't afraid to make a judgment of
that type, or not?

That's really the question here, because, as several people have pointed out
in this thread, there isn't much question about what "Ford" intended by his
statistic. To assume otherwise is to assume that he was talking about
something else when he called those people "crazy" who didn't have his
penetrating insight -- aided by his bogus statistic, of course. g That's
always a possibility but then we'd want to know how people understand the
meaning of the assertion.

--
Ed Huntress
(remove "3" from email address for email reply)