Stats and lies and selective stupidity

Michael Flynn is a font of information when it comes to actually looking at the facts, versus the stats and factoids most often used in modern discourse.

There are a few reasons I seldom go into great detail on my blog with appeals to this or that stat, or endless citing of references.  As I learned during my days in that hippy haze of postmodern, millennial level liberalism at Patheos, stats can easily be refuted or ignored.  Just like any appeal to anything on that site. 

More than one of my references was met, not with a counter reference, but with an assurance that it was just dumb or pointless.  No reason, other than it obviously was.  Sometimes, an intrepid troll would find some counter stat, or poll, or survey that said something else.  Which is fair as far as it goes.  But any attempts to break down the down the data would typically be ignored or dismissed in kind.

And why not?  As Mr. Flynn shows, these stats that we love to toss around are often a thin layer of icing on a cake full of nuances that never seem to make their way to the foreground of the discussion. 

Please note, sometimes I will refer to the wacky lunacy that was Patheos.  Understand, a few of my regular readers were quite informative, debated in good will, and brought thoughtful insights, even if we disagreed (I think of Illithid and Bemused as I write this).  Many, however, were nothing but half baked trolls at best, or spewed hyper partisan lunacy at worse.  They are who I think of when I think of Patheos as a living example of the train wreck that is modern leftist discourse.