this is literally the funniest plot twist in any form of media ever
No but get this dude’s entire’s backstory. When he went to church it was blown up. He was impaled by a crucifix and onlt survived 2 days because he drank the blood of his dead family for 2 days until he was rescued. They called him vamp but not because all of that. Because he was bisexual
ALT
Also this is what “he’s named Vamp because he’s bisexual” looks like
Did I mention that hole in his forehead is a gunshot wound which he survived because he’s essentially immortal, and he can walk up sheer vertical faces?
this is going to be an incredibly long post and i had to use GOOGLE SLIDES and GOOGLE SHEETS which i hate so so much so in the words of twitter kpop stans please don’t let this flop
let’s look at the numbers, claim by claim
claim #1: “the number of people held in ICE detention has increased by 70 percent since Biden took office”
if you click through 3 link layers from the slate you land at cbs as the source for this which tells you that mainstream media is certainly not immune to playing with stats to make the democrats look bad
fortunately ICE detention stats are easily publicly available thanks to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which does the lord’s work of crawling through federal agency publications and submitting tedious FOIA requests to collate useful data
here is the data – not only was cbs not wrong about the total number of detainees at the time of publication (25k in aug 2021), but the increase from when biden was inaugurated is actually 90%, not 70%. look:
well holy shit!!! that’s terrible. biden is the worst and he hates immigration reform and the democrats are no different from trump, right?
but if you zoom out
actually, Jan/Feb 2021 was at the absolute low for detainees, after a full year of covid restrictions slowing down or minimizing gov’t operations of all kinds AND reducing border volume
and if you actually want to compare the biden admin to the trump admin?
relative to Aug of 2019, after 18 months the biden admin has reached a 56% decrease in the number of detainees. even if you look at only the month before COVID lockdowns really hit, it’s still nearly a 40% decrease
that’s not to say that immigration reform isn’t still needed, but it IS to say that myopically comparing current-state to january 2021, aka one of the WEIRDEST months statistically on record ever, is going to give you crap perspective
claim #2: “the federal prison population has grown for the first time in a decade”
by now we know that federal data is public so let’s go look for it
this trend continued under trump. in fact, the rate of decrease at the end of trump’s presidency was even bigger than obama’s – turns out the republicans were BETTER than the democrats at criminal justice reform?!
(it is worth noting at this moment of sarcasm that a bipartisan groupof senators did actually manage to get the First Step Act bill through the senate gauntlet and onto trump’s desk for signature, which lowered some sentences)
(note i’ve only included data from 2005 onward so it’s easier to actually see what’s going on in the last 10 years. for those who like math, these are CAGRs calculated over each presidential term)
but there it is – decline in populations accelerated under trump. surely both parties same. surely democrats actually worse than republicans
but wait, what’s that?
that can’t be …
SPIDERS GEORG????
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
ARE YOU SAYING THAT … THERE IS AN OUTLIER?
THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN COUNTED?
so it turns out that under trump, the trend had decelerated to less than half the rate of change at the end of obama’s last term
here’s what things might have looked like had there been no covid outlier:
now that assumes trump wasn’t successful at slowing down the momentum from the obama years
this is what it might have looked like had we perhaps ended up with a second trump term:
again this isn’t to say that biden is pure and perfect on criminal justice, even if there were some agreed-upon definition of what pure and perfect legislative or policy priorities would look like
it’s to put the context back into place around the data
are the democrats and republicans actually the same or are we being fed a diet of pruned stats and catchphrases to make us simultaneously angry and disempowered
last claim: “federal covid relief funds are being used to pad local police budgets”
you know what, this one is relatively not decontextualized
it’s hard to know how much went to cops, but knowing how much cops take up of local jurisdiction budgets it’s unfortunately probably a significant share
biden doesn’t help his case by going on record telling states and local jurisdictions to use ARPA funds to shore up before summer, when crime typically goes up (same source as link above)
that said in the grand scheme of even just ARPA funds, this is what $10B looks like, so like … is this the hill to die on
SO all of that to say
we don’t stop pushing for immigration or criminal justice reform
or any other reform that is sorely needed
but using data in incredibly selective ways, out of context, to promote a narrative that somehow democrats are the same or even worse than republicans
ESPECIALLY the republicans of today
is literally propaganda
propaganda by definition uses kernels of truth and then presents it in a biased way to attempt to push a narrative
pretending that the democrats are exactly the same as the republicans is propaganda, and i’m like 80% sure it’s right-wing propaganda designed to discourage left-wing turnout that has somehow been accepted by an online population that doesn’t understand statistics
so like
understand statistics
do a bit of research
draw conclusions that you can back up
and for fuck’s sake, vote
God thank you so much for this detail. I knew OP was bullshit but didn’t have the time or energy for this level of clap back. Bless.
The left is not immune to propaganda. If you see something that enrages you… Maybe read the article? Do your own research? Don’t just believe everything you read on Tumblr?
Also OP literally just copies tweets that make it seem like Democrats Are Bad with no context. Which, in 2016, was a Russian psyop play. It’s helpful to know what agenda someone has when they post things.
having internet friends is the same as having irl friends but backwards. when you first meet someone irl the first thing you see is your face, and the first thing you learn is their name. maybe you ask where they’re from, what their family is like, what they like to do in their free time. you have to figure out if you want to be friends. but if you make friends over the internet, you already have a shared interest. you might learn each other’s routines, timezones, different habits. but learning their real name is a big deal. face reveals are an even bigger deal. the things you usually first learn about someone are some of the last things you learn about someone you meet online. you’re making friends, but backwards.
love seeing everyone in the notes say how much they love their online friends and how grateful they are for them. love seeing love in the world
ALT
