bogleech:siryouarebeingmocked:shaughan: YouGov poll shows what people assume vs reality. Most of wha

bogleech:

siryouarebeingmocked:

shaughan:

YouGov poll shows what people assume vs reality. Most of what folks assume is the result of the relentless propaganda of the Left and media. 

Ironically, this makes these groups look like less of a minority than they actually are, so they seem less “oppressed”.

Okay, if you have a brain that operates on any modicum of real world understanding, the above comments probably look like gibberish because you probably thought everyone knew “the left” as the side always famously emphasizing that minority groups are, you know, minorities, and that this is the very reason we are expected to care about the issues they face.

In fact, it’s pretty common even among “the right” to be angry at “the left” for implying a majority group has inherent privilege, so if ANYONE would want to trick people into over-estimating the population size of these groups, almost anyone would conclude it’s the hardcore conservatives, right? They would want you to think there are more black people, for instance, so they can argue that white people don’t have as much societal advantage anymore.

So what the HELL are you witnessing here? It’s probably important to explain because not everybody realizes the prevalence of this particular cognitive difference:

Many people, such as @shaughan up there, tend to at least subconsciously base their concern for other people more on an evaluation of their “usefulness” rather than sympathy alone, so in their world, the struggles of a given group matter *less* the smaller that group is. and importantly, they assume by default that this is your internal logic, too, even if you don’t admit to it.

As a consequence, guys like him believe that “the left” would be the ones who want to artificially inflate the size of a given “interest group” in order to trick people INTO caring about them. Remember, small = unimportant in his world view and he presumes this is the same logic everyone else runs on.

So he sees evidence that minority groups are smaller than everyone thinks, and his reaction isn’t the normal human one. It isn’t “wow, maybe they really are oppressed.” Instead his reaction is “aha! There’s fewer of them than I thought! They don’t matter after all, just as I suspected, and just as dirty liberals were trying to HIDE from me!!!”

If this sounds bizarro world clownshit deranged, that’s because it is, and it’s the same reason they scoff at the idea of protecting people from a deadly virus if it’s “”“only”“” deadly to one in a hundred.

It’s such an unexplainably backwards and twisted way of viewing things, you can see how even siryouremocked, who considers himself merely libertarian rather than far right, understands that a smaller population would be a more vulnerable one people might have more reason to sympathize with, but just didn’t finish turning those cogs far enough to realize he’s replying to someone who was trying to make exactly the opposite point.

I want to point out here that we’re also dealing with a failure in mathematical thinking. These are small percentages of huge populations. 1% of a big number can still be a big number.

 “1% of the population” is still about 3,300,000 people. That’s not an inconsequential number of people. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Nevada. 3% of the population is the equivalent to Michigan. These ‘fringes’ are not so fringe.