Blue State Red State, Blue State Dead State
Back when he was a conservative (and didn’t just play one on TV) David Brooks specialized in the ecological inference fallacy. He tried to argue that the Democratic party was the elite party, because Democratic “blue” states are wealthier than red states. He wrote as if all people in blue states were upper middle class as he and all the people he knows are.
This is passé. Current conservatives just replace data with prejudice. For example, someone tweeted “Still doesn’t answer why these red states don’t have higher mass shootings and murders.” (picking on a random tweet is called the “nut picking fallacy”). This is hard to answer, since those red states do have higher murder rates.. Some people are sure this must not be true as soft on crime liberalism leads to lots of crime. However, there are tens of thousands of dead people who won’t argue back (being dead).
So I decided to look at maps of murder and church attendence. By Brooksian logic we can conclude that christ
kills.
There are two big exceptions — devout but not homicidal Utah and my native, blue, secular, and homicidal Maryland.
Still a pretty impressive state by state correlation of church going and killing no ?
“Brooksian logic”
Anyone have a good way to remove coffee from my monitor?
maybe they’re praying they don’t get killed.
Brooks, of course, is a paid liar. And as such he is likely to sound more logical than the average person. But the illusion needs to last only long enough for the average person to forget the details while incorporating the impression into his belief system.
As Trump, and before him Cheney-Bush, are teaching themselves if not us, they needn’t go to the bother. Bald face lies will do. “i love it when you talk like that.”
Church going also correlates with divorce. There’s a reason it’s called the Murder-Divorce-Bible Belt. I’m guessing you can find other correlates, like infant mortality. There are lots of red state pathologies.
In the old days, there used to be a joke showing a worker arriving at the plant by bicycle while the boss pulls up in a limousine. In the US, the worker is thinking “some day, I’ll have my own limo.” In Europe, the worker is thinking “some day, that swine will have to ride a bicycle”. With the rise of the modern Republican party and European socialism, it’s the other way around now.
The Democrats want to make every state a blue state, but the Republicans want to make every state a red state, and they have the means. I think of it as the Shithole America strategy, and it has been fairly effective.
P.S. How about a scatter plot?