Some Of You Need To Learn The Definition Of 'Facts'

There is hardly anything more frustrating than presenting a solid, indisputable fact and having some knuckledraggin' mouth breather try to dispute it. Trust me, I read behind the profiles, if someone is going to call a "fact" into question it's rarely coming from an educated viewpoint.

nessmania

Of course there are some people who are intelligent folks who question "facts" but these are people who generally expound on that "fact" broadening it's scope. This type of exploration of facts is necessary to both reinforce the facts and to learn what made them facts.

Let's go to the definition of a "fact". According to Dictionary.com, a "fact" is "something that really exists, reality, truth". Being a blogger I am constantly at odds with people who want to dispute my "facts". The problem for them is, I really drill down on my research and /or quote the sources from which the "facts" come.

In a recent blog I stated the "fact" that according to FBI violent crime statistics you are more than twice as likely to be the victim of a violent crime in Lubbock as you are in the Rio Grand Valley (at the Texas/Mexico border). Sorry, this is a fact. You could dispute it saying it's only "reported" crimes, or that the crimes down there are more violent, but all of that is not included in my statement. So someone typed "yeah, but you rarely hear about decapitations or bodies hung from bridges in Lubbock" as if this somehow changed the facts. First off, you rarely, if ever here of those things on our side of the border at all and even if you did, there's more than enough robbery, beatdowns and whatever in Lubbock to still make it more likely that you will become a statistic here rather than there. Now if we had a premise like "what area are you most likely to be a victim of drug wars?" then we would have a different set of facts to deal with. What this person did was introduce a "straw man" logical fallacy into the argument by changing the "fact" that was being discussed. I'm sure he meant no harm, but it altered the evidence that was presented as "fact"

In Lubbock, I could look at a rock on the ground and say "this is a rock" and someone would say "maybe it's a dinosaur bone" and I would say "I can see the layers in it, it's a rock" and they might say "maybe it's cliché" and I would say, "it's too hard to be cliche" and they would say "maybe it's an old car part" and I finally would have to pick it up, hit them upside their stupid damn empty head and say "NOW DO YOU BELIEVE IT'S A ROCK?". That's what it takes to prove a "fact" around here.