Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, mgriff2k4 is angry that the picture to the right here showed up on his computer screen. Sorry, make that fucking angry. “Did this really just fucking pop up on my news feed?” he asks in the title of his post, adding in a comment: “sorry about the word “fucking” but im really pissed off about this.”
Why is he angry? Presumably, he assumes the statistic is untrue, and that it unfairly paints men as evil murderers.
Luckily, in this Age of the Internet it is trivially easy to find out whether statistics like this are true. It involves something called “Google.” mgriff2k4 did not bother to avail himself of this easy-to-use research tool.
But I did. In less than 5 minutes, I confirmed that this factoid is indeed true, at least according to the most recent figures on gender and homicide found on the Department of Justice’s web site, drawn from FBI data covering the years from 1976-2005. According to the FBI, 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by “intimates.” Roughly 20% are killed by husbands or ex-husbands; 10% by boyfriends or girlfriends. (In the overwhelming majority of cases the murderers are boyfriends, not girlfriends; men are ten times more likely to commit murder than women.)
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.” Men kill women more than twice as often as women kill men. Women suffer far more serious injuries from domestic violence than men do; so it is not altogether unexpected that they are also far more likely to be murdered by intimates.
If you want to see what this means on a human level, I suggest you take a look at the excellent if depressing web site Domestic Violence Crime Watch, which links to stories in which men are the perpetrators, and in which men are the victims. There are far more of those in the former category than in the latter.
I should note that (as of this writing) one commenter in the thread also found his way to the DOJ site, and noted that men were more likely to be killed by strangers or acquaintances. But he didn’t bother to tell mkgriff2k4 that the sign in the picture was in fact accurate.
My personal answer to the free will question: sure, I have as much free will as I always thought I did!
Think- is there any decision which, given exactly the same input (which includes memories and so on), you’d have made differently? I don’t think there is. I make decisions, which are a result of my personality and preferences, which may at the cellular level be a result of squirting hormones and so on but that doesn’t matter at the level I think on.
I’d say that, with the MRA’s logic, the stats are fake because they were, definitely, studies conducted and mandated by women, who rule the world. Right? Right.
(if anyone didn’t see it, that’s irony)
All this talk of brains has turned mine inside-out. O.O I’m really glad I never developed an interest in brain science, I mean it sounds fascinating but half the time it’s like.. wha?
His anger is a response to the (MRA?) paradox that all men are exactly alike in abilities when it’s a question of positive behaviour and unique individuals when it’s a question of negative behaviour. Anger is a typical response to a threat to a narcissist’s believe in his/her perfection. It’s a shame for him so it is.
if the sign highlighted the number of women killed by strangers, on the other hand, he’d be up in arms about how feminists treat men as the enemy
it’s heads i win, tails you lose
Re the point on free will. I see there are two options:
– no free will at all, in which case every decision you have ever made, and ever will, is simply post hoc rationalisation of a path that your body has already decided for you. I call BS: that’s a pretty damn complicated way of getting through life, also means that you would have to very rapidly be able to come up with post hoc explanations of actions regardless of how nuanced/complicated the situation is.
– constrained free will, in which case your decisions are based on the current situation, combined with abilities, past experiences, etc. For example, you may choose not go to medical school because your grades aren’t high enough, you don’t like the sight of blood, you’re not really a people person, etc.
I don’t know that any people still really believe in absolute free will.
I’m very intrigued with consciousness/self as entity existing over time. I think that the understanding of free will will improve as we understand these concepts better. My belief is that the neuroscience results (which really seem to fail Occam’s razor) are misinterpreted because we don’t have a good understanding of consciousness, which we need to interpret the results.
Back to the post, and linking to free will: to be honest, I hate the idea that some people are arguing against free will as I see this as a potential future non-scientific legal defence of abusers and murderers/manslaughterers.
Re: neuroscience — I cannot recommend this book strongly enough — Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V. S. Ramachandran. Ramachandran’s a (fairly famous) neuroscientist but it’s written without too much detailing of brain structures, so it should make sense to anyone who can handle college level reading (which would seem to be all of you).
MorkaisChosen — your math checks out, but your wording has me slightly concerned the MRM will misread it as “per hundred people” or some shit. When what you said is — for every hundred women killed 20 men are killed by intimates, versus 30 women. Point being that even once you account for the higher homicide rate among men, women are still more likely to be killed by intimates (I’m repeating you, and myself, to make this bloody clear).
“. . .the vast majority of violence against women is done by men. That’s just a flat out fact, and it’s not a debatable point. . . .”
–Jackson Katz
–see 14:30
“which really seem to fail Occam’s razor” — there often isn’t an easy vs complex set of possible answers when asking what parts of the brain do and how they interact, and when there is, well, you write a book about it (see above).
Fuckit, let’s quote the Matrix.
“You’ve already made the decision. Now you just have to understand it.”
Argenti: I think we’re in agreement. The proportions remain, so we can say for every 20 men killed by intimates 30 women are killed by intimates.
Kiwi girl: very much agreed on the “Not my fault, no free will!” defence. Slightly flippant response is “Fair enough. You can’t blame me for acting to get you locked away in prison so you don’t do it again, I have no free will.”
MorkaisChosen — “I think we’re in agreement.” — yeah I wasn’t questioning your math, just whether the MRM would understand it, sorry if that wasn’t clear.
And I don’t think the “well I can’t not lock you away then, no free will” answer is flippant, I think it a logical conclusion if we utterly lack free will. (You want to see hilarity? Put a neuroscientist and a philosopher in the same room and ask “what is the nature of consciousness?”)
@Argenti, thanks for the link, I’ve added it to my wishlist (which never seems to get below 2 pages 🙁 ).
This article in Scientific American suggests that we still understand very little about consciousness, we seem to be getting better at understanding what it is not, but still quite a ways from understanding what it is: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=consciousness-does-not-reside-here
Until we have a better understanding of the capability, my scientific view is that we should refrain from making any bold statements about the implications of studies into free will – I think this type of statement is making generalisations beyond the data. What worries me the most is that there is a history of the legal system accepting “scientific methods” without proper scrutiny (e.g. fingerprints – the number of match points used differs over time, polygraph, offender profiling) and there already seems to be interest in bringing neuroscience into the courtroom (e.g. brain scans to “show” whether the person is lying) ahead of a body of work that establishes the sensitivity and specificity of the technique.
Mixed up with this has been the poor presentation of how to interpret statistical evidence (expected number of SIDS cases in one family, expected DNA match rates presented independent of base rate information) to juries.
Finally, no free will = exceptional claim. Exceptional evidence is required.
Argenti: Didn’t think you didn’t think we agree, just being extra-emphatic. 😀
Ugh, Ruby, seriously, no. Just no.
Gad, forget the annoying gender policing/stereotyping she does, the biggest problem I have with a lot of Ruby’s statements is that they kind of play a little too nicely into that MRA idea of the awful man-hating feminist for me to think she’s just stupid and harmless. Saying women are more likely than men to be murdered by their intimate partners because, dude hormones is just plain ignorant and lazy and not any kind of help to the issue of gendered violence.
We should be focusing on the 5% of killings done by women that kill, and just leave out 30% of killings done by men, because that is gender equality! -MRA logic
Keep up. It’s not exactly rocket surgery.
I think that one of the reasons that discussing the implications the findings of neuroscience (or anything else for that matter) have for free will can be so difficult is that different people use the term “free will” differently. If someone is going to claim that some particular aspect of neuroscience has shown that humans either have or don’t have free will, I’d asked them how they were defining the term in the first place.
Seconding the Phantoms in the Brain recommendation – no exaggeration, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.
@Anathema Indeed. For example, I don’t know any philosopher or neuroscientist who defines free will the way kiwi girl does. For a non-strawman version of the “no-free will belief” I would suggest people check out Galen Strawson (philosopher) or Joshua Greene (psychologist with philosophy degree)
If you scroll down the thread he explains why he’s angry: “30 percent of all women? That’s bull”
So I think he thinks the sign says nearly a third of all women are murdered by male partners.
Ruby: Years ago I used to watch America’s Most Wanted and was amazed at the number of women killed by their romantic partners. Heck, just watch the regular news.
And when those men are convicted you are laughing at the chance of them being raped. Go you. Such a mencsh you are.
And that testosterone shit… is nonsense. Women have it, men have it. If you could show constant rates of violence across time/culture, you would have grounds for an hypothesis.
You can’t. I’m not sure, at this point, you know how to look for that sort of evidence. So good luck at trying to back it up.
How do you explain your lust for torture? Is it the estrogen? No. It’s that you aren’t really a good person.
@Jarrod, at least one neuroscientist did define “free will” this way, Benjamin Libet: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17835-free-will-is-not-an-illusion-after-all.html
@Kiwi girl
Well, someone was bound to eventually.
Oh, and the claim that no free will = no jail is absurd. Nobody argues for this. Again, check out Galen Strawson or Joshua Greene. I would also suggest David Boonin’s The Problem of Punishment, which is less about free will, but does deal with the implications of the no free will view.