math is hard, especially if you're a wingnut transphobe dipshit

the Wingnut Grievance Bubble wants to keep you ignorant, afraid and angry

the Wingnut Grievance Bubble wants to keep you ignorant, afraid and angry. an uninformed populace is an easily-manipulated populace. keeping you angry about petty bullshit distracts you from the hand in your pocket that’s stealing your wallet.

which brings us to the Wingnut Grievance Bubble’s all-too-predictable reaction to this week’s Nashville school shooting.

a while back, I wrote a whole thing about how uninformed the average American is about the world around them.

here’s a fragment of a chart from that piece:

I want to draw your attention to the transgender statistic. the average American believes that one in every five people is transgender, when in reality the percentage is a rounding error away from zero. (it’s a belief that makes no fucking sense if you stop for even five seconds to think critically about the world around you, but let’s leave that aside.)

if you’re afraid of spiders, you’ll convince yourself that there’s a spider lurking around every corner. if you’re afraid of trans people, same.

and the Wingnut Grievance Bubble is working overtime to convince you that a trans person is lurking around every corner.

as I wrote yesterday, there are still-unconfirmed reports that the Nashville school shooter is trans, and so of course, the dipshits are working overtime to convince you that trans shooters are a massive problem.

here’s a tweet that’s going around, one of many that repeat this theme:

Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson

The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Nashville shooter identified as trans. One thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.

and of course the stupidest fucking pantsload on the planet just had to reply:

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@bennyjohnson !

HOLY SHIT! IT’S AN EPIDEMIC OF TRANS SHOOTERS. or is it?

let’s do some math. don’t worry, there won’t be a test.

for the sake of argument, let’s treat this “four trans/nonbinary shooters” claim as if it were a fact.

over the last five years, there have been more than 2,840 mass shootings in the United States. 4 of the shooters were supposedly trans/nonbinary. 2,836 were not. which makes the percentage of trans/nonbinary mass shooters …

0.140845%

that’s right: out of every thousand mass shooters, fewer than one and a half of them were trans. that’s why we mean when we say ‘a rounding error away from zero.’

so please tell me one more time how there’s a epidemic of trans violence.

here’s some more math for you:

David Hogg ☮️ @davidhogg111

Fuck the NRA and Fuck The Gun Lobby.

and some more

Peter Frampton @peterframpton

I have posted this before but .. 26 years ago, a gunman entered Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, killing 16 kids and a teacher. The UK govt responded by enacting tight gun control legislation. In the 9400+ days since, there have been a total of O school shootings in the UK.

---

by the way, you know who else stigmatized a minority and blamed them for all of their country’s problems, don’t you? of course you do.

Oliver Willis @owillis

a few months ago i wrote about how der sturmer, a pro-nazi paper in 1930s and 40s germany, laid the groundwork for the holocaust by linking every crime to jewish people. anyhow, here is the front page of rupert murdoch's ny post today.