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“Assumptions” and the Canadian Shooter
Do you know what happens when you assume? Well, you’re generally correct. Despite nursery rhymes to the contrary, assumptions are a wonderful and necessary tool in life. Without them, one can do hardly anything but stand in place.
When you drive through an intersection with a green light, you make an assumption that the cross street has a red light. You make this assumption despite the fact that traffic lights can and do fail, causing hundreds of traffic accidents every year.
In order to run no risk of your assumption proving faulty, you would need to cope with all intersections by turning right, and then making the first available U-turn so that you may turn right again, back onto your original street.
If this sounds like the behavior of a mad-man, then I invite you to read this piece from Amanda Taub at Vox, about the Canadian Parliament shooter.
Yesterday, the media reported that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the man allegedly responsible for a horrifying shooting spree in and around the Canadian parliament, was a convert to Islam. News reports on the shooting then spent much of the day fixated on that unconfirmed fact — even though there is as yet no evidence that his religion was a motivation for his actions. More sensational coverage discussed dubious social-media connections to ISIS.
These reports imply that because Zehaf-Bibeau was Muslim, jihad is the likely motivation for his attack. But at this stage, without any actual evidence, it makes no more sense to come to that conclusion than it would to assume that he was motivated by Quebecois separatism, just because he was from Quebec.
We’ll circle back to this delicious morsel in just a moment. First, let’s delve deeper into the nature of assumptions.
Seeing as our time on this Earth is limited, all of us make thousands of small assumptions every day, as well as numerous larger ones. We make them not because we are careless, but because predicting the future based on well-established patterns saves us a great deal of time and energy.
If a customer service representative encounters the same issue everyday when a certain customer calls, it might make sense to skip the initial steps of research and assume that it is the same problem they have encountered every day for the previous week.
Occasionally this will come back to bite you, as working under a faulty assumption can waste time and resources. Often though, an incorrect assumption comes at little or no cost and can potentially save time by putting you on the correct path faster.
When children go missing, the police generally cast their suspicion upon the family, as a majority of violence committed towards children is done by someone the child knows. If a woman and the man she is having an affair with are murdered, suspicion moves first to the husband, who has an obvious motive.
Of course, without evidence, you cannot prove this is the case. The husband may turn out to have been oblivious to his wife’s affair and be proven completely innocent — but only a fool would not look first at the husband in such a case.
And fools Vox would have us be:
Consider, for instance, a previous Canadian shooting that bears a chilling resemblance to yesterday’s events. Thirty years ago, Denis Lortie stormed Quebec’s National Assembly with two C-1 submachine guns and a pistol. He murdered three people and injured 13 others before he, like Zehaf-Bibeau, was stopped by the parliamentary sergeant-at-arms. It was later discovered that Lortie was politically motivated: he had left a message with a local radio station that said “the government now in power is going to be destroyed” — apparently a reference to the separatist Parti Quebecois, which Lortie opposed.
What Taub neglects to mention, is that there has not been an act of violence from Quebecois separatists in the ensuing 33 years, whereas numerous Islamic attacks have recently taken place in the West:
If all we’re looking for is a shared characteristic, then Zehaf-Bibeau has as much connection to Lortie’s attack as he does to Islamist terrorism. He, like Lortie, was from Quebec. If we applied the same logic to people from Quebec that we apply to Muslims, then today we would see media reports suggesting that their shared Quebecois heritage likely explains this attack.
As per usual, Vox is the place where common sense goes to die. In Taub’s mind, defunct terrorist groups are equally as likely to produce acts of terror as active groups.
Zehaf-Bibeau may not have been motivated to attack the Canadian parliament because of his conversion to Islam, but investigators are fools if they do not analyze that particular motive; as foolish as when the Obama Administration declared that the Fort Hood shooting committed by Nidal Malik was not an act of Islamic terrorism — when it was known that the man shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire.
Someone with the same mindset as Taub clearly conducted the Fort Hood investigation. Let us hope for our Canadian brethren that their investigators will not be so willfully ignorant of reality as evidence comes to light.
Published in General
What I can never figure out is WHY. WHY are so many in the press and on the left side of the aisle in such a hurry to apologize for these terrorists. What is the motivation? Even if you set aside the PC motive, what could possibly be the motive for being consistently wrong?
I wonder how Ms. Taub would react if a doctor was shot at an abortion clinic.
Exactly.
FWIW, the NYT‘s coverage yesterday made a lot of Zehaf-Bibeau’s conversion to Islam.
1) We are the worst culture on the planet, so nobody but us can do any evil.
2) “Please Mr. Crocodile, eat me last…”
Because they aren’t utter fools. Actually, that might be too strong. In this area, they aren’t utter fools.
It could end up not being relevant. Or it could be the most salient fact. You find out by following the assumption in pursuit of evidence.
Thanks for this Frank. I appreciate the points about assumptions. I regularly talk about how redefining marriage changes the underlying assumptions about marriage and am repeatedly told that I am crazy about something that I think is perfectly obvious!
I also love your line about how Vox is where common sense goes to die. I’ve noticed that too.
Exactly! If you are wrong all the time, does not your usefulness and credibility decline?
And who does she think she is fooling? If she’s a mother, I bet she knows and uses all the politically incorrect assumptions to protect her children.
Where does this lead? I think to the situation where almost everyone knows the intellectual class is mostly fools, and the government won’t protect you. People will not walk among headchoppers thinking, no problem, just because intellectuals tell us to. Is this not inviting insurrection?
You shouldn’t say “Islamic terrorist” when you really mean “terrorist who just so happens to be Islamic”.
Also they use the word “allegedly”. Should we not assume that the guy shooting the gun was the guy shooting the gun?
Without proof, no. It could be a massive black flag op by the CIA and Mossad. How do you know without proof?
Oh right, because you’re not a complete fool. That’s how you know.
Are you sure you want to stand by that assumption?
FYI: Marc Lepine, the man that shot up
the Quebec Legislature 30 years ago(my apologies, Lepine was the Ecole Polytechnique shooter, not the Quebec Legislature shooter), was born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi, and was the son of a Canadian nurse and an Algerian businessman. His father was abusive and contemptuous towards women.That angle of the story is almost never told. The incident has been mythologized in Canada ever since as proof of society’s misogyny and the need for gun control, but there is an argument to be made that his misogyny had a cultural/religous origin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine
The Quebec Legislature shooter, Denis Lortie, was a serving Canadian Forces soldier (stationed at the Diefenbunker), which is how he acquired his firearms, and how he was able to gain access to the legislature building, since he arrived in uniform. The incident was incredibly anomalous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Lortie
According to Fox News at http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/10/23/ottawa-gunman-displayed-possible-mental-illness-knew-homegrown-jihadist/
So, his father is Muslim (I presume) but he converted? Does anyone have any info on when / where he converted?
Define “complete”.
;-)
Assumptions – Ms. Taub:
I wonder how I’m doing so far.
That might be too strong, Frank. In this one instance they aren’t utter fools.
Excellent, strong piece, Mr. Soto.
As I was taught many years ago by my professors in Medical school:
If you hear hoofbeats, don’t think of Zebras…
It all goes back to probability. Is there a higher probability that the shooter is motivated by Jihad or a higher probability that he is not? Based on the history of shootings in the US (I don’t know about Canada), you would have to say there is a higher probability that he is not. There have been plenty of random shootings that had nothing to do with Islam. On the other hand, if you narrow it to attacks on public officials and members of the armed forces, you may (or may not) come to a different conclusion.
Your analogy to the traffic light is not the best because the probability that the light is malfunctioning is very small. So moving on at the green light is a safe assumption.
This isn’t an either/or sort of question.
There is no reason that the man couldn’t have been a schizophrenic drug abuser and for him to be inspired by/connected to/directed by Islamist Jihad.
Analogy: Was Charles Manson motivated by mental illness, or by drug use, or by hippie revolutionism? The answer is yes. Today, Manson might have latched on to Islamist Jihad as a focus for his madness.
If you were recruiting suicidal religious revolutionaries, can you think of a better pool of candidates than drug-addicted schizophrenics?
Not quite right. Name a single motivation for attacking a government building in the west that is more likely than Jihad. You have to start somewhere. And that place should be the most probable, even if that probability is less than 50%.
All starting points begin with an assumption. The author writing that defunct seperatists groups are as likely a culprit as active terrorist groups is ludicrous.
One of the biggest attacks on a government building, Timothy McVeigh in OC, was unrelated to Jihad.
Why would you assume the most probable even if the probability is less than 50%? That may be ok in an emergency that calls for a rapid decision. Otherwise, there is no reason for it.
No, you don’t have to say anything of the kind. If you wish to restrict yourself to the sort of analysis that looks great in center-justified bold text on a monolithic HTML 1.0 web page and proves the viability of your perpetual-motion device, fine. You have to say that.
On the other hand, if you wish to rely upon the sort of analysis that tells you that an oncoming bus isn’t turning away no matter what the blinker says, well then it’s the differences that make the case, not the pedigree of a single cherished data point.
You edited my comment to say the opposite of what I wrote. Why?
Not at all true. All I did was bold three words. My quote of your comment is the same as Frank’s.
Okay, looks like Ricochet quote simply omits underlined text. I understand your consternation. As I cannot edit my own comment anymore, please read my comment in light of your comment, not my ungrammatical quote of it. Same for Frank’s, I should think.
Ricochet is penalized five yards. (And if I were going to edit your comment, I would have done a better job than that :-0 )
You’re right. Sorry.
No sweat. I didn’t read closely enough to catch. It’s certainly not your fault.