Discussion: Trump Jr.'s Bogus ‘Skittles’ Refugee Analogy A Favorite Of White Nationalists

A variant of black men are after your white daughters.

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Only some right wing presidential candidates are dangerous.

A handful of candidates…
Only one of them will protect article 12 of the constitution.
Go ahead and eat them all.

I’m sad to say that I recently encountered the “Skittles” argument from my very own brother, who resides in Germany. He trotted it out while we were (gently) arguing about Merkel.

The most obvious difference between a group of refugees and a bowl of skittles, even before we get to actual numbers (you know, that “reality” thing again) is that refugees are human, and skittles are not. (Thank you, Captain Obvious.) If you have a contaminated batch of skittles, you just throw the whole damn mess out, end of story. It would be a grave moral evil to do the same thing with humans seeking aid and shelter.

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the nazi is strong in this family

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People are notoriously incapable of accurately assessing risk. Let me walk you through this.

Take a bowl of skittles, sans the poison. About 3,000-4,000 Americans choke to death on food each year, putting the risk of choking to death at about one incidence per 81,000 Americans. Assuming five eating instances per day, each American will have 1,825 shots at choking on a meal each year. Combining the two, you have a 1 in 148M chance at choking to death on that bowl of completely untainted skittles. This doesn’t count the potential risk of diabetes or heart disease from eating Skittles habitually, so somewhat understates the risk of that simple bowl of candies (add in the other potential life-threatening effects and the denominator “148M” becomes smaller).

Now, throw poison on three of those skittles (why three?), and you obviously have increased the risk of Skittles. Now you have about 900 skittles in a very good-sized bowl of about 4.5 cups volume (overestimating the size of the bowl in favor of the analogy, but I won’t go to a bowl that can hold 2,000 african elephants to make Trump’s analogy actually work). That is about a 1 in 300 shot of death by poison for each Skittle you take. Assume your “handful” is small and you only scooped up 15 Skittles in that handful, you have a 1 in 20 chance at that handful of Skittles being the last thing you ever eat.

You have a 1 in 3.64 Billion chance at being killed in a terrorist attack by a refugee (Syrian or otherwise) in the US with the current number of refugees, according to the (definitely not pinko liberal organization) Cato Institute. That is 25 times less risky than eating a bowl of skittles. We could accept 25 times more refugees (assuming incidence rates remain constant, which is a bad assumption but go with me here) before the risk of being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack competes with the risk of choking to death at your next meal.

Going back to Trump’s actual analogy, refugees are one hundred eighty-two MILLION times less likely to kill you than that handful of Skittles from a tainted bowl. So, no, Mr Trump, that is absolutely not analogous to our Syrian refugee “problem”.

People are really bad at statistics. But Trump needs to go back to middle school and start cramming before his ignorance can even aspire to the “really bad at statistics” level.

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Here’s a bowl of white nationalists…


http://img3.rnkr-static.com/user_node_img/50043/1000857890/870/1488-photo-u1.jpg




https://lintvkoin.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/james-todd-sapp-07012014.jpg?w=1248

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Somebody needs to e-mail this link to Bill O’Reilly, he seems to think only black have facial tattoos.

Well, it originated with feminists back in 2014.

“You say not all men are monsters? Imagine a bowl of M&Ms 10% of them are poisoned. Go ahead, eat a handful. Not all M&Ms are poison. #YesAllWomen.”

It was equally as odious back then.

Thank you, Ms. Kirkland, for this article. If only media venues larger than TPM would report thus; but they are craven prisoners of their bottom lines, as CBS’s CEO, Les Moonves, reveals.