[notadev]

At no point did they say anyone was being paid to be gay. Only you stated that, twice. They are saying people can be influenced. Take LGBT representation in contemporary media. A casual interpretation would be that nearly 1 out of 4 people are gay, lesbian, etc., since nearly every popular TV show has one or more of these characters. However, when you look at the actual numbers, they tell a much different story.

This is similar to what happened with the 2020 protests around George Floyd. Many people thought, and many still do, that unarmed black men were being hunted by police. Surely hundreds or even thousands a year were being murdered by the police, yet according to the WaPo database of police shootings only 13 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. Why do people believe in the myth of endemic police killings? Because the media continues to push that narrative.

Read this USAToday “fact-check” trying to debunk the 13 unarmed black men statistic by saying things like the WaPo database is incomplete and may not show the whole picture, or conflating the number of unarmed black men shot with the percentage of total black men shot, etc. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/23/fac...

[yardie]

Floyd wasn’t shot so he wouldn’t even be one of the 13 in that list ;-)

[jon-wood]

Did you just use the sentence “only 13 unarmed black men were shot by police”? That’s still outrageous. For context in the same year the UK police had 13 occasions total where officers fired their weapons, resulting in 3 fatalities. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shoo...)

[notadev]

I said “only” in relation to the myth that hundreds of unarmed black men were being shot by the police. I’m not saying 13 is good, but it’s objectively better than more than 13. There was a poll some months ago, which I can’t find, that asked people with different political beliefs to estimate how many unarmed black men were killed by police in the previous year and the liberal and progressive left had outrageous numbers. These are the same people watching the mainstream media constantly pushing the narrative that it’s open season on black men.

[tasuki]

Yes the UK police might be better than the US police. Without knowing how many unarmed men of other ethnicities suffered the same fate (and the frequency of the respective ethnicities), it's a meaningless number. It could be "only 13 unarmed black men" because it isn't unusual for the US police to shoot unarmed men.

On second thoughts, I guess you're right: it doesn't make sense to use the quantifier "only 13" without knowing all the other numbers. This might be trivializing the matter.