Comment by hlloyd1925

> would you be open to changing your mind on either the absurd sounding statistics of the rate of Somalians using welfare

I'm never completely closed to changing my mind on anything. I don't have any confidence that anything that I know is set in stone. I only have a reasonable confidence in anything I say. You can see that in my original comment too. Those weren't my judgments, those were my assessments based on available evidence that I quoted.

However, this debate started with the quoting of a source with extreme conflicts of interest and bias that wasn't declared. That's academic dishonesty, if you know how reaserch is evaluated. The proper way to debate this was to either quote a reputable source or at least give a heads up about the data and the source. Once that trust is breached, the readers have every justification to be very skeptical and prejudiced about any further claims. That's how debates work. Resorting to these tiring meta debates about the source instead is just shifting the goal posts and inverting the responsibility again.

And as for the counter evidence, I hope you see what others have been saying. Statistics can be used to lie about reality. I don't know who said this, but 'there are lies, damned lies and statistics'. It takes extra context to interpret it properly - a fact that's persistently used by some to spread lies. Because of this, these claims are now going to need a lengthy scrutiny.

> or the reputation of CIS in general?

CIS was started by a eugenicist and they still are a hate group connected to a hate movement. Their motive isn't even in question here. The simplest trick in the book they can use is to cherry pick data that supports their claims from a valid research and neglect everything else. So even if their data turns out to be true in however narrow sense, I don't see how that should give them any more legitimacy.