March 30, 2012
6. THERE’s A REMOTE CHANCE THAT INDIANS WERE NOT LIVING IN A HIPPIE COMMUNE WHEN WE GOT HERE
The accepted narrative for Native Americans is they were all playing Ring Around the Rosie until we blew germs on them and they all fell down. Though he had a helluva time getting it published, Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization debunks that myth. The book describes common traditions such as mutilating a body AFTER it was killed to ensure the victim was doomed in the afterlife. We learn of mass graves with hundreds of scalped cadavers a good half-century before Columbus got there. Indian traditions have many wonderful traits, but let’s grow up a little and allow for the possibility they were simply incompatible with the modern world. For Christ’s sake, when we got here they hadn”t even invented the wheel. (Full disclosure: I”m allowed to consider this because the mother of my two children is a Native American.)
7. MEN END UP HAVING SEX WITH PEOPLE THEY DON”T WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH
The image of the huge black guy locked in a cell with the cowering white man is the fodder of many a bad joke, but doing the math gets unfunny really fast. The Justice Department recently came out with figures suggesting there were 216,000 victims of prison rape in 2008″that’s the number of victims rather than incidents, which are probably far higher. Even this conservative estimate puts America in the painfully uncomfortable position of being “the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.” You won”t see it on Jezebel anytime soon, but it appears it’s men who should be more offended when rape is trivialized.
8. SLAVERY DOESN”T DO MUCH FOR YOUR MORTGAGE IN 2012
The notion that the evil white man got rich stealing everyone else’s shit fits the great narrative and makes people feel better about themselves (including whites, the only group that derives pleasure from feeling bad about themselves). Here’s a hole in that argument wider than the Mason-Dixon Line: After the Civil War, the South had no wealth. The cotton money was spent. The cotton fields were burned. So even if slavery made us all plantation owners before the war”which is not the case, seeing as how a minority of Southern whites owned slaves even at slavery’s peak”we were all at a level playing field after it was done.
9. GUNS AREN”T ALL BAD
Several books have been written about this counterintuitive truth. Basically: The laxer the gun laws, the less crime. The infantilized left hears about a murder and sees it came from a gun so it says, “GUNS = BAD.” Then they pile on statistics about innocent kids playing with guns and soon we”re doing everything we can to rid the world of “the Devil’s right hand.” All this is obliterated by the countless times a criminal is deterred by the possibility of their victim being armed. We”re not only talking about the thousands of times a potential victim has brandished a weapon and said, “Not gonna happen,” but also the millions of times the perp has been forced to assume their prey may be armed. I”d hate guns too if they led to more crime, but they don”t, so I”m left to enjoy protecting my home and occasionally exploding the living shit out of a unopened can of cola using a .30-06.
10. FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN AREN”T EQUIVALENT TO SAME-SEX FRIENDSHIPS
Nobody’s saying males and females can”t be civil with each other and thoroughly enjoy a relationship devoid of boinking, but friends? You think a married man can be best buds with a woman? OK, try this on for size, guys: “Bye honey, me and Lesley are going camping for a couple of days. We”re going to get wasted and hunt small game and build a fire and probably crash in the same tent because that’s how best pals roll. You cool with that?” Yeah, right. Bringing this up inevitably leaves one open for a barrage of examples of platonic male/female relationships. Maybe one of them even survived a camping trip. Good for you. That’s called an EXCEPTION. The “hatefact” mentality assumes anecdotal evidence erases all the evidence of a general pattern. This crippling allergy to logic isn”t merely ignorant. It discourages people from learning, and that is one of the few things I truly hate.
Please share your favorite hatefacts in the comments section.
UPDATE: I’ve been getting a lot of hatetweets for hatefact, #8 particularly the words, “Level playing field.” Though there are many blacks who say they were actually better off during segregation and most of them voluntarily practice it now, that debate is a whole other ball of hatewax. The myth I was trying to focus on in #8 is strictly: America’s wealth is built on slavery. As far as the American economy goes, we were in debt after the Civil War so any money slavery made was long gone. The whole country had to start from scratch. You almost never hear this simple economic truth; hence, it’s a "hatefact."
