Madness

I just finished Louise Penny’s book The Madness of Crowds.

…Chief Inspector finds his holiday with family interrupted by a simple request.

He’s asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.

While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.
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Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone. (source)

Unsurprisingly, murder ensues. Penny is, after all, a murder mystery author.

The villain of the story is the statistics instructor who's come up with an insane spurious correlation.

What is a Spurious Correlation?
A spurious correlation occurs when two variables are correlated but don’t have a causal relationship. In other words, it appears like values of one variable cause changes in the other variable, but that’s not actually happening. (source)

For example, the chart at right appears to show a relationship between per capita cheese consumption and the number of people who die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets. The graph below seems to claim a connection between the divorce rate in Maine and the state’s margarine consumption.  (click on images to embiggen them)

As Mark Twain said “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.”

By the by, I found these amusing area graphs at author Tyler Vigen’s site, Spurious Correlations. Check it out for more weird, fun.

Back to Professor Robinson’s repulsive agenda that she's “proved” with manipulated stats and spurious correlation. What’s the prof’s premise? That the lives of some people are more important than the lives of others. Essentially, some must die so that others can thrive. She advocates mandatory euthanasia for the old, frail and/or ill (also compulsory abortions for any viable fetus showing any sort of defect).

Cake does NOT approve!

Supposedly she was inspired by the pandemic where the weakest of us didn’t survive thus freeing society of costly expenses and burdens. Her studies and analysis, she says, proves that as a society we need to kill off those who aren’t well—just as COVID has done—but on an ongoing, government sanctioned and administered basis.

Those on the death list? Yeah, me and my Nf2ed self would def be near the top of the assisted-death list.

Robinson’s vision has a real Logan’s Run meets the Nazi/Republi/Fascist party vibe, doesn’t it? Hasn't mandatory euthanasia long been an unstated GQP wet dream? Naturally, they’d assume that death-on-government-demand would never apply to themselves. The not-rich will figure that only those people will get the de rigueur death cocktail. The rich will just buy their way out.

I only mention it but who the fuck would be in charge of the who-gets-to-be-born-and-who-dies-early database? Some totalitarian, eugenics brained, control freaking AG in Texas? A human shaped weasel shit assistant prosecutor in Nowhere, Ohio? Will the Republicans bring Eichmann back from the dead to continue with and expand on his Final Solution?

There was no definitive, tidy and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after ending to The Madness of Crowds. Penny doesn’t write simplistic cozy mysteries. This is good BUT I really wanted to see this Nazi bitch locked up, disgraced, with her heartless platform destroyed.

Life’s just not that easy though, eh?