2005-07-13-2015Z


Oftentimes people sabotage the legitimacy of a program they're trying to promote by misrepresenting statistics and other "facts". For example, the Ciudad Juarez femicide. The linked page would have you believe the rate of murders of females is alarmingly high, when in fact, compared to similarly-sized U.S. cities, it's probably only "about average", if the FBI's estimate of 22% of murder victims being female is applicable to both U.S. and Mexico. For example, Dallas, Texas and Ciudad Juarez both had 1.2 million or so citizens at the turn of the century, and with about 200 murders each year, roughly 40 of those ought to have been females. But the SaveJuarez site claims far less than that. So where's the story? Maybe here. When you get past the raw statistics and see some of the gruesome details that make these killings unique, you begin to see why so many activists are stoked about making changes in Juarez City. I think what happens is that, when there's a groundswell of support for anything, opportunists come along who try to make a profit from it. And in so doing, they can taint the program and make its supporters look like fools.

I rarely lend my name to programs, regardless of their apparent urgency or obvious need, not only because I agree with Daniel Quinn's "if the world is saved, it will be saved not by old minds with new programs, but by new minds with no programs at all", but because things like the Juarez problem, no matter how worked up people get and no matter how many dollars are poured into it, just aren't going to go away as long as this world of nation-states, governments, and laws continues as it has been. It's time to try something that works, and tribalism seems to be a working model. It served us well for millions of years. I'm forming my tribe now, a tribe of intellectual, earth-friendly, free-loving libertarians. Tribes are small and non-hierarchical, and the members take care of one another. No courts, police, laws, corruption. Murder? Maybe, but with no more than a few hundred people in the tribe, the murderer isn't going to remain anonymous long.

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last updated 2013-01-10 20:37:51. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com