The Mysterious Case of the Absence of EvidenceWhen a court declares by fiat that half of the electorate is imagining things, it undermines the very idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people.
By Jay Whig
January 30, 2022
We live in what might be called a political opinion “bubble.” One of the features of this bubble is the authority of science. This is the idea that the magic words “the science is settled” foreclose further discussion of an opinion. It is often expressed as I f—ing love science, or IFLS.
The reason IFLS exists is to enforce political dogmas with the authority of empirical material science. The flip side of IFLS is the conflation of the absence of evidence with proof or conclusive evidence. Let’s call this I f—ing love evidence, or IFLE. The purpose of IFLE is to discredit facts that might be used to resist a policy or political act.
A few days ago, USA Today ran an IFLE story under the headline “Fact check: No evidence defunding police to blame for homicide increases, experts say.”
The “experts say” part of the headline is a sly admission that IFLE really means I am feeling stupid, or IAFS. When someone points out that politicians degraded the anti-homicide infrastructure and an increase in homicide followed, that is evidence of causation. It may not be conclusive evidence. It may be only circumstantial evidence. Maybe it is just a correlation.
There is a strong correlation between the broken windows policing that George Kelling and James Q. Wilson promoted in the 1980s and a reduction in homicide. During the Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg Administrations from 1994 to 2013, when broken windows policing was forcefully implemented, New York City homicides declined dramatically from above 2,000 in 1994 to 335 in 2013. Homicide rates thereafter remained roughly flat throughout the de Blasio Administration until 2020, the year of the defund the police movement. By 2021, homicides had jumped to almost 500, a 49 percent rise from 2013 levels.
That’s evidence. Just because it doesn’t support a favored policy preference or factional interest doesn’t change that. “Experts say” is a preemptive defense that not USA Today but its expert sources are the ones suffering from IAFS.
This brings me to the obscure matter of John Eastman, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump who advised on 2020 election matters.
The United States District Court for the Central District of California Southern Division recently denied Eastman’s request for a preliminary injunction to protect his papers at Chapman University, where he was formerly dean of the law school, from the subpoena of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack.
In the order denying the motion, the “Facts” section states, “Despite the lack of any evidence of voter fraud or election tampering ‘a significant portion of the population came to believe the election was tainted by fraud, disregard of state election law, misconduct by election officials and other factors.’” The words “despite the lack of any evidence” through “tampering” were added to a quotation from the plaintiff’s complaint.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/30/the-mysterious-case-of-the-absence-of-evidence/
