Man Up, Ronnie! Can You Handle the Truth?
You, sir, are intellectually dishonest.
People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right — especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.
— Thomas Sowell
I have a friend. A long time friend, but we’ve grown apart recently due to distance, set in our old-age ways, maybe the predictible end of life bitterness creeping in. I can blame myself for that; I’m not one to stay in touch with people who are not immediately in my life. So now our only communications are as path-crossers on Facebook. Likes. Emojis. That stuff.
Except that I’ve begun to express my opinions lately on Facebook. My conservative opinions. He’s a far left liberal progressive democrat, or something like that. I’m not sure how he labels himself, but it certainly isn’t conservative. And it absolutely isn’t America First!
So I’ve posted my opinions. To which he has occassionally replied, demeaningly. We now snear at eachother via Facebook. I guess the comradery is behind us.
Ronnie harbors, and has long harbored, a general “attitude” of being better, smarter, than most people, but I’ve only recently begun to notice it. He’s an elitist. We have a few mutual friends from back in the college days who he worships and considers his heroes. I’m not on that list. But I’ll go more into all that some other time, maybe in an upcoming post, but first…
Below, I am reproducing an exchange we recently had on Facebook. Tell me what you think.
It started when my younger bother, another liberal, who I enjoy messing with, posted this, along with his own sarcastic comment “Great idea, Ted".”
To which I responded,
“What's your point, brother? I bet you would not have posted this if instead the headline had been: ‘Cruz says schools should have armed security guards. Why not? After all, banks do it.’... but no, you chose to post this because this headline, from state-sponsored fake media, makes Cruz look bad.”
I pointed out that the sourced media he posted, along with the so-called “journalist”, was either deliberately misleading and lying or just plain dumb, and I provided data showing the truth.
(Side note: I’m a Glenn Greenwald mega-fan. Like him, I generally passionately despise mainstream media “journalists”, consider most of them liars captured by corporate masters, and I scrutinize their claims to the best of my abilites. More on that later.)
My reply to my brother continued.
“Oh, and the article blatantly LIES (at least once) when it says "Texas has the highest firearm mortality rate of any state". Here is the real data. You can scroll down to the map.”
What Pew Research Says About Gun Deaths in the US
I continued:
“This lazy dribble that you posted that wants to call itself ‘journalism’ assumes its reader will simply accept what it vomits, and assumes its reader to be too dumb to question them and do their own research.”
What I was showing with the data from Pew (linked above) was that, in fact, contrary to the reporter’s claims, Texas does NOT have the “highest firearm mortality rate of any state”. The chart clearly shows, of 5 categories, it is in the third highest category. Not even close to highest. It is only slightly higher than liberal, gun-banning California.
Well, this is where it gets interesting.
My long lost liberal friend, Ronnie, decided to chime in on my corrections to my brother. He posted:
“FranHalen, reporter is correct re: TX has highest firearm mortality rate. You're looking at per capita kills rather than total kills.”
And then came his elitist final kick.
“Kudos for your source this time being Pew rather than Q.”
I assumed the reference to Q was an acussational jab that I’m a “conspiracy theorist”, the usual trope used by liberal elitists.
Ronnie then posted his source, redundantly, because it is the same source used in the misleading article on Ted Cruze, posted by my brother.
I looked at it again, confirming I was still correct.
“Ronnie,” I replied, “I'm no math wiz but you and he (the reporter) are both using the word ‘rate’ incorrectly. Rate is defined as ‘this per that’, as in kills per capita. ‘Total kills’ is not a ‘rate’. So the reporter remains incorrect.”
“FranHalen, now you're a lexicologist,” he retorted smuggly, “Good to know. Write a letter to Mr. Webster and tell him he got it wrong, too.”
He goes on, “A given quantity (4164 killed in Texas) with relation to a specific unit value or to a standard (firearm mortality) is on the nose as definitions go. I underlined Webster's mistake for your convenience since this is probably interrupting your project of writing a new dictionary. Keep digging that hole.”
Oh now he’s hulking into his true self, the asshole.
So I looked at the photo he sent of his underlined dictionary…
After studying it carefully, I still felt correct. I responded.
“Ronnie, again you remain incorrect, as you often have been (after all, you still believe that ‘fact-checkers’ tell you the truth and that masks work!)… In any case, "Firearm mortaility" is not a specific UNIT value nor a standard. I can not kill people at a rate of 60 people per firearm mortality.”
Then I launched my counter-offensive:
“Come on, Ronnie! Give it up! Or keep digging YOUR own damn hole! Webster is right, YOU are just understanding it wrong, which honestly surprises me.”
And then I included another source as a definition of “rate”.
Wikipedia's Definition of the word "Rate"
I gave it a few days. Nothing. So I poked him one more time.
“Ronnie,” I wrote, “we are standing by while you ring up any mathmetician friend who can find a way to pull you out of that hole so you don’t have to crawl back here with your tail between your legs.”
I thought it was funny and I felt like a winner.
And this is where I never heard from Ronnie again. He went radio silent. Probably fuming. He wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction, or boost his own credibility rating, by responding or admitting defeat. Typical Lib. Craves being right. Fumes silently when proven wrong by someone he considers dumber than he.
All this over a dispute about the definition or the word “rate”. The so-called journalist, and Ronnie, didn’t seem to understand they were citing the “rate” of firearm mortality, but using numbers that were not a “rate” but a total. The rate was low, the total was high. If the reporter and his follower, Ronnie, had simply said Texas has the highest TOTAL kills of any state, I would have then said, yes, because they have a high population. Just like another high-population state, California, with a similarly high total kills of 3,449, compared to Texas’ 4,164 total kills.
(I haven’t compared those states populations yet)
Bottom line, a state with limited restrictions on guns versus a state with oppressive restrictions on guns, have nearly the same total kills. Per capita, Cali’s firearm mortality rate is indeed lower that Texas’, but I hate to break it to you Ronnie and all you fake news so-called journalists, Texas does not have the highest firearm mortality rate.
They are NOT the same thing, but easily used to misinform the public.
Apologies await, Ronnie.
Crickets.
And so to him I emphatically say:
But let’s move on. In an upcoming post, let’s have a little fun talking about the “mindset” of a liberal elitist like Ronnie… a so-called “educated” man who doesn’t like his ideology being challenged by a lowly “deplorable” like me.
(update: mid June, 2023. My “so-called” friend didn’t like this post. He un-friended me. Boo hoo. Cancelled by a far-left liberal. My badge of honor.)
(update: mid April, 2024. I came across this Spike Cohen vs David Hogg debate on gun violence. But in this post-analysis of the debate (at 8:25 minutes), Cohen explains the 5 types of gun violence. Pay attention to the ONLY type of gun violence that’s on the increase.)
https://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol#crime
I know people like that. They'ds have to be an adult to admit their mistake, instead they are blinded by their elitism, virue signalling, and ideology.
Awe, don't be too hard on him!