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Random Wednesday: Captain America’s Love of Free Speech, Inauguration Ratings, and Police Homicide

Random Wednesday: Captain America’s Love of Free Speech, Inauguration Ratings, and Police Homicide

Last updated on: January 26, 2017 at 1:43 am by Tom Swiss

Random Wednesday: Captain America’s Love of Free Speech, Inauguration Ratings, and Police Homicide 2017-01-26T01:43:37-04:00 Tom Swiss

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Welcome to the post-inauguration edition of Random Wednesday. Just 1,456 days to go until January 20, 2021.

Captain America’s Love of Free Speech

Following up on our recent piece about why punching people you decide are Nazis doesn’t make you a good person: Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool looks at Captain America’s take on free speech.

In response to the assault on white nationalist dingbat Richard Spencer, current Cap writer Nick Spencer (no relation) tweeted “Today is difficult, but cheering violence against speech, even of the most detestable, disgusting variety, is not a look that will age well.” The internet responded with scorn, asking if Nick Spencer’s opinion that punching people might not always be the best solution disqualified him from writing Captain America.

(I know some of my friends who are deep comic fans aren’t happy with Nick Spencer’s current Cap storyline, with the implanted memories and all. Put that aside for the moment.)

But Johnston has dug up a 1982 story (Captain America #275 by Joe DeMatteis and Mike Zeck) where Captain America explicitly takes a stand for free speech over Nazi punching, saying “Don’t you realize that in your attack, you’ve attacked your own freedom as well? The freedom that guarantees all ideas — both noble and ignoble — the expression this is imperative if our society is to survive! Can’t you see that — in stooping to your enemy’s level — you’re being made over in his image — that you’re becoming the very thing you loathe?”

From Captain America #275. Via Bleeding Cool. Fair Use.

Inauguration Ratings

It’s fascinating how the same fact can be spun different ways. The fact: according to Nielsen (the standard in American TV viewership stats), 30.6 million viewers watched the Trump inauguration.

Entertainment Weekly gave that fact the true headline “Trump inauguration ratings second biggest in 36 years”. (The 36 years is counting fron Reagna, and the Obama inauguration taking first place since then.) EW also pointed out that the Nielson figures don’t account for live streaming, so Trump could have been seen by more viewers than either Obama or Reagan.

On the other hand, from the same numbers, gossip columnist Perez Hilton sticks with a direct comparion to the Obama inaugeration and gives the accurate (if clickbaity and sarcastically phrases) headline “TV Ratings For Donald Trump’s Inauguration Were Tiny! Low Energy President! No Viewers — Sad!”

trump_inaur_screenshot I’ve noted before that through any finite set of data points, we can draw an infinite number of curves to fit the data.

Police Violence

Patrick Ball is a statistician who has used mathematical methods to investigate mass state killings around the world, incluing Colombia, Congo, East Timor, El Salvador, Kosovo, and South Africa. Applying those methods to killings by American police leads to a startling conclusion: eight to ten per cent of all American homicide victims are killed by the police. And of the one-quarter of American homicide victims killed by people they don’t know, approximately one-third of them are victims of the police:

America is a land ruled by fear. We fear that our children will be abducted by strangers, that crazed gunmen will perpetrate mass killings in our schools and theaters, that terrorists will gun us down or blow up our buildings, and that serial killers will stalk us on dark streets. All of these risks are real, but they are minuscule in probability: taken together, these threats constitute less than three per cent of total annual homicides in the US. The numerically greater threat to our safety, and the largest single category of strangers who threaten us, are the people we have empowered to use deadly force to protect us from these less probable threats. The question for Americans is whether we will continue to tolerate police violence at this scale in return for protection against the quantitatively less likely threats.

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