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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg or e who wrote (17097)	6/19/2001 11:37:43 AM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

It also crossed my mind that it would be awfully hard to gather any meaningful statistics on a practice that by definition, is underground, by virtue of it's illegality. A problem that surfaces often. For example, you tend to see statistics saying things like "only one third of all rapes are reported." Huh? If the other two-thirds aren't reported, how do we know they happened? Because politically, certain groups need them to have happened. A related problem is definition. That one comes up in sexual harrassment. Again, you get statistics saying, for example, that 80% of all college women have been sexually harrassed. Well, if you define a leer as sexual harrassment, probably true. As I used to say in my debating days, let me define the terms and I will win any argument. That, or course, is the key to the abortion issue. Defining terms. Define the fetus as mere tissue, and the pro-abortion argument "wins." Define the fetus as a person, and the pro-life argument "wins." 73% of all arguments actually turn on differences of definition; only 27% have underlying substance. (How do I know those statistics are accurate? Simple. I made them up. Just like 61% of all statistics are made up.)