Quote: (04-07-2017 11:59 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:
Quote: (04-07-2017 11:48 AM)Lime Wrote:
European people call these news reports 'fearmongering' and even bordering fake news.
People become blasé 'statistically there are fewer war casualties then ever', 'alcohol and traffic kill more people then terror'.
What should I counter to these arguments?
While statistically true, this is of course a bullshit argument.
Islamic terror is preventable by stopping Islamic immigration, telling the truth about Islam and making everything in your power to either punish or secularize those groups (if they already live in the West). Otherwise you have mantras of all religions being equal, Islam being peaceful and Mohammed being like Jesus - all of those statements are objectively wrong. The result will be that the Muslim population grows, such attacks become more frequent until one nice day in the future the Muslim majority violently subjugates and kills the minority. But then it will be too late to scream about statistics. Voila - you are living in an an Islamic shithole.
Usually arguing with progressives is useless. You can only speak truth with those who are already on the edge or have doubts about it.
Yeah... the distinction between terrorism and traffic deaths is so obvious to me, I would probably be caught flat footed if someone actually made that comparison seriously in a conversation. It would be like have a math discussion with someone and getting pretty deep into it, then having them trot out "well since 2+2 = green...".
How do you talk to someone when you suddenly realize even though you're using the same language, their understanding of the world is radically flawed?
I suspect most people who actually make sincere comparisons like those listed have never actually examined those comparisons. Some people, I'm sure, are willfully toeing the party line. But the rest? The human mind is a funny thing, and sometimes people can go a long time believing something is true without having ever examined it, and then realize instantly that it must be bullshit the moment they actually analyze the thing in question.
This is a bit of a silly example but it illustrates what I mean above. I've been playing Quake 2 recently, and in Quake 2 you can fall in lava. In movies, people fall in lava sometimes. In both cases, when people fall in lava they sink right in and burn up. I'd never really questioned that before. But when I was playing Quake 2 the other day, I actually thought about what would happen if a person jumped in lava, and two things occurred to me instantly: first, you can't sink into lava because lava is way, way denser than the human body. Second, most lava is so hot you'd probably be dead from the heat before your body even touched the lava, and it would flash boil the water in your body so you'd probably literally explode into steam and chunks of flesh that would quickly burn to ash. It might be quite interesting to see a fleshy body tossed on fresh lava to see exactly how that would go down, but it would be absolutely nothing like in a movie or game.
Now, I'm a geologist by training. I internalized the specific gravity of average rock a long time ago. I know how viscous lavas are as well. So you'd think my mind would've immediately called bullshit on people falling in lava years ago, especially since I used to go out of my way to watch movies with bad geology to laugh at them. But it never did until about a week ago, when for whatever reason that analytical bit of my brain turned its attention toward the trivial matter of why my avatar was sinking in lava in Quake 2 and said "wait a second..."
And that's why I think so many people parrot bullshit like "terrorism is less dangerous than traffic". It's not that they're necessarily stupid or lying for the sake of their ideology. It's that they've heard that as truth for a long time and just never stopped to logically analyze it. And sometimes all it takes is planting the seed of uncertainty, to ask the question "why is this so?" so they'll have to find an answer outside the rote repetition of the "commonly known truth". And if the answer isn't available, well... that's how people wake up.