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> Abraham Wyner, a Pennsylvania professor of statistics, wrote in Tablet that the GHM casualty figures were "faked".[68] Wyner's article was analyzed by professor Joshua Loftus of the London School of Economics, who concluded Wyner's article was "one of the worst abuses of statistics I’ve ever seen".

source?

> This argument doesn't account for would happen to the valuations of those assets once the government decided that it owned a portion of them or started forcing people to sell them

I don't think the author was trying to argue what would happen if the assets were to be sold, what they were arguing is the downplaying of billionaires wealth, largely people's belief that the extent of the wealth is exaggerated because it's just "on paper".

I posted this link to respond to this assertion:

> Is it possible that the people figuring up "wealth" for these articles have multiple reasons to exaggerate the totals

> the author would've been able to have it published SOMEWHERE and it wouldn't just be a gist

ad hominem and appeal to authority fallacy

> Don't know why I wasted my time clicking that link. I knew it would be what it was.

If you already had your mind made up, why did you bother clicking and reading the link?

> In effectively all societies, the vast majority of serious crimes are committed by a tiny sliver of the population who offend again and again.

I agree hence removing that 2% of murderers caused the homicide rate to drop dramatically and not just by 2%. The fact that we are even talking about homicide though is a complete detraction from the original post that is showing how giving people money helps them improve their lives and not rely on crime to sustain themselves. Are you not understanding that the majority of crime that exists in a society is petty crime that doesn’t cause any serious physical harm to others or society at large? Why do you lump murderers into this category?

> This is not an extreme political opinion, nor something that is unreasonable to ask someone whether they believe.

Why are you asking if this is something they believe if by your own admission it’s a position that is widely held? Again, how is your question not a provocation? And why am I still entertaining it?

why are you assuming I’m “worked up”? I was simply asking some questions and just because I disagree with the original commenter’s characterisation doesn’t mean I’m necessarily upset. In fact, quite the opposite, I’m curious why so many people blindly accept things as “real” when they are only “real” insofar as we make it so.

Nobody should be surprised that removing an entire portion of the population would cause the homicide rate to fall the same way nobody would be surprised that there is less rainfall on a day that has less cloud coverage. This isn’t really addressing my point at all. The point is that crime happens because of a set of conditions. You cannot expect crime to be reduced if you remove the “criminals” without addressing the conditions that made them criminals in the first place. Homicide is not a good example here, a better example would be things like petty crime, vandalism, etc.

Why is paying into a social safety net considered “free money” but usury is not? Why is it that when rich people as for money it’s a “loan” but when poor people ask for money it’s a “handout”. Free money is never free, money isn’t even real. You live in a society and if you want people to be there for you when you are down, you have a duty to return the favour.

Why would you even ask a question like this? It’s clear that our society has issues that stem from people’s inability to navigate our complicated modern world. Your “why not just let them suffer” provocation adds nothing productive to this discussion.

What do you mean? Crime does not happen in a vacuum. The idea that people steal because it’s fun or commit fraud because they enjoy seeing their victims suffer is not supported by any sort of rigorous sociological or criminological understanding of social deviance. If you want to fix crime, you need to fix the social ills that cause people to turn to crime to begin with. Of course crime prevents people from improving their financial situation, nobody denies that, but the crime itself is not the cause.

Why is there no linked, independently verifiable research on EMF “sensitivity”. I think I know why but…

There might be an impact, but it’s not clear what the impact is. I’m no biologist, but I’d wager your volume of immune cells changes quite a bit over your lifetime. I’d be more interested in seeing the long-term health outcomes of vegetarians vs. non-vegetarians.

Is critical theory a rhetorical dead-end if you want to seriously debate something? Sure, but framing a debate and constricting it to a dichotomy is no less radicalising than a critical theory argument. I think people dislike critical theory so much because they know that it shifts focus to the structures everyone knows control society but nobody wants to acknowledge. Sure, it’s lazy to blindly advocate for revolution for the sake of revolution, but it’s also lazy to reject a line of philosophical inquiry just because you don’t like how it was presented. What should high school debate even be for? Should we restrict it to rhetorical sandboxes, or should we allow it to be a forum where ideas can be put forth and debated?

> make the evolution of improved systems possible by dismantling what's in the way.

I think you already answered that question for me. I’ll also add that I don’t think this book was meant to be a contribution to management theory at all, I think the broader point is that we as a society have valued jobs more than we value humanity, so we now have hundreds of thousands of people performing meaningless work just for the sake of having a job. This isn’t an issue of management, it’s an issue of values.

You must not have read the book because Graeber was pretty clear that he wasn’t making suggestions of what ought to be, he was simply diagnosing the issue and providing a framework to think of something better.

Consumed by anger? Graeber was an anthropologist, it was literally his professional job to make anthropological observations about society and form them into a coherent theory, which, as someone who read this book in its entirety, he did an excellent job. To say something like “well that’s just the way things are” is tautological nonsense and adds nothing to the conversation he jumpstarted, you’re basically just saying “suck it up, these things won’t change”. One of the most compelling argument of this book was how we got to where we are by socially engineering such a system. If we can come to the conclusion that we got to where we are by deliberate choice, we can unwind all of what we’ve built and do something better for ourselves.