LogFAQs > #916766585

Zeus posted...

Oh? And you know for a fact that somebody explained that to them so they actually understood it?

I do concede that Trump could just be a complete moron, like you're suggesting here, but that honestly doesn't paint him in a much better light.

Zeus posted...

Racism requires a certain level of understanding understanding or intent, which again ties back into what I've repeatedly said -- Trump is an old man who doesn't understand those connotations in a way that somebody who grew up in the system would.

Which would have been fine if that was your initial response, but it had to be pried out of you. You didn't say "I don't think it was really racist when Trump said it because of these reasons..." - if you had, that would have been an acceptable answer to the question. Instead you continued to dodge for a few posts until you finally came out with a qualified "no".

Zeus posted...

Which, as previously mentioned, ties back to context. Again, for instance, if you grew up in an age when you taught to say colored because that was the politically correct thing to say, odds are you're going to innocently say it from time to time.

Alright, so what's your excuse for saying "calling people animals is racist" to people who very well could have grown up with the term the same way Trump did?

Zeus posted...

Because, again, you don't seem to talk to many people.

You're projecting again.

Zeus posted...

You have a skewed worldview based on an overly apparent lack of offline communication, which is you insist on having statistics nobody has collected to prove something you should already know.

And here we see the Know-Nothingist's favourite defence - "We don't need no stinking stats, it's just common sense!"

To prove how ridiculous this is, let's do a little playing with numbers. The average person knows somewhere between 600 and 800 people, based on various estimates and studies that have been carried out. Note that this includes casual acquaintances, and people you are familiar with but barely know - Dunbar's Number provides the maximum number of people with whom someone can maintain a close social relationship as 150.

But you don't really need to be close to someone to know if they have a habit of making racist statements. So let's say you "know" 800 people. Problem is that those people aren't all going to be seniors - in fact, unless you're a senior yourself, most of them probably won't be seniors. The number of seniors in an average young person's life is likely in the low double digits, unless their job has them interacting with seniors on a regular basis. But, again, let's be generous and assume you know 100 seniors.

There's about 40 million seniors in the US, meaning our hypothetical example counts for just 0.00025% of the senior population, nowhere near enough for statistical relevance. Worse, it's not even randomly sampled, as most of those seniors are going to be clustered in a single geographical area.

This is exactly why your personal anecdotes, however interesting they are and however convinced you are of their validity, are worth precisely nothing in a debate like this. If you want me to take you seriously when say something like this, back it up with something that's more concrete.
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