My Funny Picture

Why do people believe everything someone says on here? Like the black dropout rate being 50%?

A questioner a little while ago said the dropout rates amongst African-Americans in the US was over 50%.....he cited an article from a website for a group called American Renaissance. Thats all well and good until you take a look at the source, American Renaissance is a white separatist organization. I know this because they decided to have a conference in a town near me and the local government tried to halt it, basically they are neo-nazis in suits. The wikipedia article for their organization is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Renaissance_(magazine) What is shocking to me is a lot of answerers on here took the numbers on this site as face value, without even questioning the source. Meanwhile the REAL numbers are reported by the US department of education, which paints a MUCH different picture than the white separatists. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16 That is the official government website on school dropout rates. Why do people insist upon taking crap like this at face value, this happened again yesterday when someone said Obama sponsored a bill that would send 400 BILLION dollars a year to Africa, meanwhile not mentioning the bill didn't any such thing and was co-sponsored by several prominent conservatives... I mean my god people can't you actually think for yourselves? Jeff what does that have to do with the question? Bwana, the government side actually shows the methodology of the calculations. But the point is 99% of people will trust an official government statistic over the statistics on a hate groups website.

Public Comments

1. The followers of one political party will believe anything they read on the Internet.
2. I take all statistics, especially on here, with a huge grain of salt.
3. Well why is it okay to have a Black Music Awards, or African American College fund. If the white people created a Arian college fund we would be labeled a racist. If we had White Music Awards, oh we would be discriminating.
4. I agree, it's as if there is one brain and it's shared by all. They lack objectivity and the ability to think for themselves. Or, it could be that people are just generally lazy and it's much easier to blame a lib or a conservative and find an inflammatory website to back up the claims. That seems like a waste of time and well, life. If that's how someone wants to practice free speech... I have to believe that the American people are more intelligent than what we see here, the real issues are going to come to light and that this election is a wake up call for us all.
5. Actually researching things involves work. And it is human nature to accept as true that which you were already preconditioned to believe in. You have to want to know the truth, regardless of how it falls out, to be willing to dig into unsupported claims found on here. As for graduation rates, especially of blacks, especially of blacks in failing inner city schools, there have long been debates on how those numbers are figured, and what they include. The school district will necessarily try to shade those numbers to the smaller side using measurement systems to minimize it; detractors of the public school system will shade it to the higher side, using measurement systems that maximize it. Even the numbers of the federal government need to be clarified as to how they were derived. As Mark Twain quoted Disraeli, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
6. Because on this forum, truth is irrelevant and truthiness prevails. The question is not what is the truth, but what must I state as the truth in order to justify my pre-conceived notions. You will see someone on here rail against welfare every day for bankrupting the country and redistributing wealth from people who earned it to people who don't deserve it. But in Truth we spend $18billion/yr on welfare (the TANF Program) - Less than 1% of the Budget. Even if you counted all of the aid to the poor including medicaid (by far the biggest item in the social spending bucket) it still amount to only about 10% of federal expenditures or about $260 billion) By contrast the service on the national debt is almost $500billion. Fed Budget Chart: http://www.federalbudget.com/ HHS Budget Chart http://www.hhs.gov/budget/09budget/2009BudgetInBrief.pdf
7. A lot of people on here don't know what bias is.
8. No I do not. I will do my own research and form my own opinion on the subject. I do not believe something just because someone else says it's true.