Category: Lies and Untruths

Fools, Idiots And Feminists (Some Overlap)

Lies and Untruths, Seen On Campus

I think I’ve told the story before of how I was taking a Sociology class at college when the Commie / feminist professor [redundancy alert] asked the question of the class:

“Is gender a social construct?”

…whereupon I answered quickly:

“Yes it is… provided that one ignores completely all genetic study and research conducted on the topic since the 1970s.”

Icy silence from the professor followed.  (Incidentally, I got an A for the course because she never could dispute any of my papers’ theses.)

I was reminded of this happy little exchange when I read Heather Mac Donald’s latest article in City Journal.  Hie thee hither and read all of it, for verily (as always with Heather) it’s nothing but net, and will give you all the ammo you’ll ever need when debating some loony feminist [redundancy alert, again] on the topic.

Heather Mac Donald’s collected writings should be required reading in any Humanities course at university, which means that it will never happen because Commies hate any writing which places fact over dogma and disturbs The Narrative.

…And So Much For All That

Gummint, Lies and Untruths, Technology

I remember people welcoming the advent of driverless cars with exclamations of: “I can take a nap!” or “I can catch up on my work!” or “I can play online games!” or “I can go out and get plastered and not worry about breathalyzers!”, all while being driven to the office / home / airport etc.

Sadly, as with so many things, it’s all bullshit because of Nanny Government:

Drivers of self-steering cars such as Teslas will be ordered not to take their hands off the wheel for more than a minute.
The new regulations from the UK government will target drivers who let go of the steering wheel thanks to lane steering, cruise control or emergency braking features.
Motorists who break the new rules will face points on their licence, a potential £1,000 fine and even prison.
It comes after legislation requiring cars manufacturers to install a feature to alert drivers when they have not touched the wheel for 15 seconds.

So the attraction of driverless cars is… what, exactly? Forgive me while I snort with derision.

Ahhhh, let’s forget about all that driverless crap and gaze upon a car which absolutely mandates self-driving, a 1957 Maserati 3500 GT:

None of that no-drive nonsense here: the 3500 line features a six-cylinder 3.5-liter engine driven with a four- or five-speed manual transmission, and it was in production for eight years (a long time for Maserati, in those days), attesting to its popularity. And if that pic wasn’t enough to persuade you, here’s the convertible version:

Those of you wanting one can form a line behind me.

Big Picture

Lies and Untruths

I’m always amazed that people can sometimes get hoodwinked by statistics, but then I spent probably half my life working with the damn things, so I’m more or less immune to the problem. Here’s one which could affect me personally:

More than 120 Uber and Lyft drivers have reportedly sexually assaulted their passengers, according to a report by CNN.
After analyzing police reports, federal court records and county court databases across the US, the cable news channel found that over the last four years, at least 103 Uber drivers and 18 Lyft drivers have allegedly raped, forcibly touched or kidnapped passengers, among other crimes.

Whoever wrote this scare story needs to get a kick in the ass. Here’s the first part: the appearance up front of the total number — which is alarming, I’ll admit.

I’ll ignore the Lyft number for the moment, because I’m an Uber driver.

Granted, the hundred-odd incidences (rounding down to a manageable number) involving Uber drivers is too high — hell, one is too many — but we’re dealing with human beings here, and any human activity is prone to abuse.

At least the number of years was disclosed — four — which averages about 25 per annum. Still too many, but not as scary as the magic 100. But the killer statistic is really the one which CNN buries much later in the “report”, which is, 100 out of how many total Uber trips or events over four years did these attacks take place.

That number is, according to Uber, is 2.4 billion. In other words, the chances of anyone getting molested by an Uber driver are 1 in 24 million.

Even allowing (let’s say) that only unaccompanied women are going to get molested, and they account for about half of all Uber trips — which is roughly my experience — that’s still only 1 in 12 million.

Now factor in geography — i.e. places where the Uber driver population is skewed towards men most likely to commit these crimes — and the stats, just looking at the last names of people who are accused of such crimes, tend to support the hypothesis that these criminals fall into the Middle-Eastern and African  demographic, and many, especially in large urban metropolises, are fairly-recent immigrants — and the picture becomes especially clear.

What’s disturbing about all this is that Uber does screen potential drivers before enlisting them, which begs the question as to whether their screening process — or at least the proficiency of the company that Uber uses to do the screening — should not be more comprehensive or thorough. And you can be sure that Uber will do just that — because they too say that even one such incidence is too many.

Still, ladies: it looks like you’re safer taking an Uber trip* than walking (or even driving) to your destination, especially in a strange locale.

That’s the conclusion to be taken from the CNN report, even if that’s not necessarily the one that CNN wanted you to.

*You’re even safer, of course, if you have me as your Uber driver — unless of course I forgot to take my “special” pill that morning… [exit, drooling]

Depressing Statistic

Lies and Untruths, Men & Women

As Longtime Readers all know, I look on most “studies” nowadays with the utmost skepticism, being as they generally employ shoddy data collection techniques, poor sampling and / or stupid analytic conclusions.

All that said, I found this one, from this study, to be at least credible:

Most relationships start with terrible or awkward sex.

Well, duh. That’s true of pretty much most human interaction,because you’re on unfamiliar territory and you need to get things straightened out before you can make it work properly.

Within the report, however, was a factoid which I found downright depressing:

69% of Americans admit that they get feelings of excitement right before sex with a new partner.

Now the last time I had sex with a new partner was during the Clinton presidency, so my memory may be failing me. But FFS: what other feelings can one have before first-time sex, if not excitement? Dread? Nausea? Fear? Disgust? And to make it worse: if 69% of folks get excited before a first-time bonk, that means that 31% don’t get excited, which seems incredible. I can understand pre-bonk anxiety, of course — which over half of people admit to — but one can be anxious about something yet still be excited about it. But 31 percent?

As I suggested above, this may just be shitty data, in which case we can carry on with our lives. But if the data can be trusted, then we as a society are in deep shit when something so basic, so natural, and (speaking from memory again) so much fun is not exciting.

Fucking Leftist Bullshit

Lies and Untruths, Two-Minute Hate

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much stuff like this, this, this and this recently, but I have to tell you, I’m getting totally sick and fucking tired of all this snowflake-ism, fascism masquerading as anti-fascism, threats against conservatives, Twatter storms when someone dares voice a viewpoint counter to the Orthodoxy, children screaming about how their parents have fucked up democracy (and being treated seriously by their ideological allies in the Press instead of being laughed out of the room), and all the rest of the politically-correct, safe-space-seeking, thumb-sucking kindergarten antics which passes for serious behavior on the Left.

Fucking hell: I enjoy a good show as much as anyone, but when Leftists are pilloried by other Leftists for being not Left enough — when the first Leftists stand to the left of Joseph Stalin to begin with — I start to get a sinking feeling about all this. Some people are treating this as a spectator sport: “Go ahead! Let’s all get the popcorn while the Left devours itself!” Well, it may be oh-so amusing, but what happens if this bunch of loony Commies gets their hands on the levers of power?

Does anyone remember when Hillary Bitch Clinton bragged that when she became President, she was going to allow not one or two, but twenty thousand Muslim Syrian refugees into the United States? Does anyone else see that this bit of American Merkelism could only have one purpose, that purpose being the undermining of American society? And that was Hillary Clinton, FFS: the most conservative member of the freak show that calls itself the Democrat Party nowadays. What if ultra-Socialist Bernie Sanders or one of those other Marxists became POTUS? Does anyone think that this would end well?

We’re all going tsk-tsk as we watch Venezuela descend into chaos, or South Africa descend into the usual African slaughterfest, and we comfort ourselves that oh no, none of that could happen here. Here’s my take on this:

Oh yes it fucking could.

I used to think that whoever was elected POTUS didn’t really matter because the Establishment would provide some kind of corrective stability. Sure, we elected a silly Lefty like Jimmy Carter or a fake conservative Democrat like Bill Clinton, but that didn’t really matter because the Republic survived their silliness. But then a serious Marxist (Barack Obama) got elected because golly gosh, it was time we had a Black President (even though he was really half White), an intellectual (even though he was an appalling student with crap college grades) who could then inflict Leftist bullshit like ObamaCare and subversive initiatives like the “Dear Colleague” missive sent to college administrators. Couple that with a vacillating, cowardly foreign policy, a feral politicization of the federal bureaucracy (Lois Lerner’s IRS, Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and the EPA to name just three), a serious attempt to undermine the electoral process using fake information and the FBI — and we have, for the first time, a really quick and effective transformation of the United States into a socialist police state.

And here’s the really good news: Obama was just the beginning. The next Democrat president is going to make him look like an amateur socialist: a member of the 1930s Fabian Society, as opposed to Joseph Stalin.

This, by the way, is the reason I’m really irritated by the NeverTrumpers: their childish little tantrums about Trump’s uncouth manner, his “undignified” behavior (e.g. his use of Twitter) and the “chaos” of his Administration don’t do anything but help make the Leftists’ screams that “Trump Is Hitler!” ring true.

But if the NeverTrumpers irritate me, the pillars of the American Left (academia, the Press, the Democrats and so on) have a different effect. Where before I looked on them with scorn and some amusement — FFS, do they actually believe that bullshit they’re spouting? — I now look on them as I would a rabid dog or a black mamba: they really do believe that crap, and they are that fucking dangerous.

One of Obama’s more telling pronouncements (as opposed to his bald-faced lies) was “Punch back twice as hard.” Well, that’s what I’m going to do in future. I’m not going to let some asshole Leftist get away with behavior that as few as twenty years ago would have been unthinkable to the Left itself. If they attempt to suppress my speech because it’s “hateful” or “hurtful” or “threatening” or any one of their little masquerades which all mean “Shut Up!”, I’m just going to ratchet up the venom quotient.

If they think that I’m “hateful” now, just wait: I haven’t yet begun to hate.

I didn’t think I was ever going to have to resort to violence to protect myself, my right to free speech and all my other Constitutional freedoms, but then came the calls for gun confiscation, Black Lives Matter and Antifa (to name just three), so I’d better get in some preparation.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range. While I still can.