I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and frankly, I’m not at all convinced about some of the claims that we’re seeing. Recently, I heard that hate crimes were up year over year and they tried to blame Trump and the conservative right.
Yeah, maybe there’s another explanation that they don’t want to consider? Maybe, it’s all a load of complete bullshit.
This isn’t the first time this thought has come about. This has nothing at all to do with political ideology, but I think it might be the same thing. There are reports out there that the rate of autism is going way, way up. There have been various explanations proposed for this, from better testing to more people seeking treatment and those could be perfectly adequate explanations. Of course, others have been saying that “more people are just autistic these days” for every reason under the sun, without any evidence provided, except “there are more reported cases!”
There’s one they don’t want to think about though, that’s the fact that tons of people are self-describing themselves as autistic and the range of what autism means has been vastly expanded over the years. Again, some of that could be perfectly legitimate but some of it might very well be a desire to explain things as a disease that aren’t actually a disease.
All of a sudden, people with little or no social skills are being described as autistic instead of… you know… assholes. It would be one thing if there was some demonstrable diagnostic going on, where there are tests that a potential patient could be put through that would demonstrate that autism was present before these people were making the claim, but there isn’t. It’s purely subjective on their part. It’s not like cancer. You either have cancer or you don’t. Autism diagnoses are often “but I feel like it!” and that shouldn’t be enough.
I brought this up a little while ago but it fits in here too. One of the very first videos I ever did on YouTube was about an Indian woman who claimed she was continually getting raped. Ever day, she was getting raped. Of course, she wasn’t, she just *FELT* like it. She didn’t like how people looked at her and she equated it to rape. that doesn’t mean she’s been raped. That’s just dumb.
Here’s the thing, “hate crimes” aren’t real. If you go and beat someone with a baseball bat, that’s a crime. It’s physical abuse. Why you did it shouldn’t matter. It’s irrelevant if it was done because they were trying to steal your car, if they didn’t like your face, or if you were black. The results are all the same. It doesn’t matter if someone paints a swastika on the side of a Jewish temple or if they paint a bunch of happy faces. The result is the same. There’s actual, demonstrable damage that needs to be fixed. How anyone feels about it doesn’t matter.
Yet I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people on the left screaming that someone insulted them and that’s a “hate crime”. No, it is not. Nobody has to like you. Nobody has to make you feel good. If I think you’re a fucking imbecile, I have every right to tell you that, no crime involved.
So I pointed out that I needed not only the crime statistics, to see what these “crimes” were, but also some justification for why it’s hate. How have you determined the internal emotional state of the criminal? Just because you don’t like what they did, that doesn’t mean you can assign a motivation to them without evidence. How have you justified any of this?
The second that I bring it up to anyone on the left, they just scream. They want you to just accept the narrative uncritically. I’m not saying that the stories are wrong, I’m saying that you haven’t proven to my satisfaction that they’re right. Just because you say a thing with conviction, that doesn’t mean it’s true.
Unfortunately, a lot of people can’t see past the ideology to the need to actually research these things on their own. So long as they get a story that they like, they stop asking questions and that’s only going to lead to more stupid people.
You know, like the political, religious and ideological extremes.