Side note: I can hardly believe how long it's been since I've added to this blog...but it looks like several months have flown by since my last entry. I guess I took an impromptu blog break while I was heads-down on some personal Go programming projects. Amazing how something can expand to fill your spare time activities...now I have programming plus personal issues to nudge me into remedying my blog hiatus status...
This entry is not a Go-related topic. This, instead, is an entry about a Presidential candidate's campaign assertion that, when I heard about it, felt eerily familiar.
Donald Trump, Jr. used the recent bombings in Chelsea and New Jersey to compare refugees to a bowl of perhaps-poisoned candy. Basically, the argument goes, if you have a bowl of Skittles and 3 of them were poisoned, would you take a handful?
The makers of Skittles were not amused, as you can imagine. Their reply simply asserted that Skittles are candy while refugees are people, so they did not believe the analogy was proper (side note: did you know Skittles is owned by Wrigley Americas? I thought they were known for gum...)
Leaving aside the argument that the suspect in the bombing is a naturalized American citizen or that the actual math behind your odds of dying at the hands of terrorism in the US are minuscule compared to heart disease, being struck by lightning, car accident or, in the US, being shot, hearing this tweet make the rounds in the usual social media reminded me of another "would you want to risk <eating a large amount of innocuous, common food> if you knew there was a <tiny but acknowledged number> that were deliberately fatal?" meme, only for the opposite, pro-social justice argument. It wasn't hard to uncover it.
Apparently the Trump campaign was resurrecting the old "Not All Men" argument that used M&M's, instead of Skittles, in response to the idea that not all men are terrible, so please don't overgeneralize about all men being <murderers || rapists || chauvinist pigs || etc>. It seemed to make sense...they acknowledge that not all men are terrible, but all you're doing is derailing the actual point by trying to deflect on focusing on the population of people that were good instead of the very real danger of the significant population of men doing bad things. I had forgotten that meme...and only realized now that it seems to have largely disappeared from the social media rounds. Or perhaps I had simply stopped paying attention to the waves of regurgitating hive-thoughts posing as original thought...
Thanks to the anti-Trump sentiment, though, this iteration of the poisoned candy argument didn't last long before a rebuttal made the rounds. Now the small-population-of-poison-in-the-patch argument is linked to anti-semitic material from Nazi Germany. In the heartwarming story Der Giftpilz, Jews are compared to mushrooms in the forest, where there are good people and good mushrooms, and there are bad people and bad mushrooms, and bad mushrooms can kill whole families...so you have to be vigilant against poisonous Jews killing your family. The author, Julius Streicher, was executed as a war criminal.
Oversimplifying to the point of overgeneralization (ironically, in the case of what I'm about to say) is rarely, if ever, effective when analyzed. It is a propaganda tool; a way to get eyeballs with a headline without actually having a headline. In the cases here, these were used as tools to manipulate people using what seemed, at first thought (and rarely a second thought applied) logical, sound reasoning. It takes more thought to understand the nuances of the actual issues involved...and these shortcut-think-phrases are simply a way to appeal to lazy supporters of side X, and to possibly deflect from the actual goal or reasoning behind a movement or idea.
In the case of the poisoned candy, if you're told there are definitely, say, 3 poisoned items in there, of course reasonable people are not going to eat them (or in some variants, feed them to their kids.)
Of course it ignores that candy are not individual people with complex, nuanced personalities.
It ignores that a reasonable person has little reason to believe that any candy are poisoned in your average bag of bulk candy.
Or that the actual odds...the math that we, as human beings with minds poorly wired to think in terms of mathematics and statistics,...are nowhere near the same for dying from terrorism as they are for "3 of <a bowl> of candy" are for killing you, unless the bowl were perhaps a swimming pool or you apply the analogy to something purposely vague so every jackass making a sexist or unwanted comment to a passing stranger counts as a poisoned candy.
It also ignores the ethical motivations of the rest of that candy bowl...that they're people, searching for safety, fleeing a war they had nothing to do with, and the vast majority want nothing more than to live their lives in reasonable safety.
And it ignores the possibility that the candy is loaded with sugars that contribute to the diabetes and heart disease that are more likely to kill you than terrorism despite the "good" label applied to them.
And it certainly doesn't acknowledge that there is no binary "safe vs. unsafe" activity in life. I often wondered this when a religious person would talk about the evils of gambling...isn't life a gamble? You're getting out of bed without thinking that the shift in blood pressure could trigger a stroke, and taking a morning shower without acknowledging that you could slip and fall and crack your head. The act of taking a number two can strain your heart and cause a heart attack. Eating a meal can cause you to choke to death. There is no %100 safe activity for which you're not betting that you'll be okay performing a relatively common thing, and if gambling is the act of wagering on an uncertain outcome, life is filled with uncertain outcomes.
In the end, I'm not indicting the social movements that led to these memes. My post is an indictment against the type of thinking that leads people to treat these thought-bites as if they were entire arguments for or against an idea instead of the bullet points they really are; we are a culture that mistakes sound bytes and headlines for actual news items, when the actual story requires actual research of some depth to even begin to understand and empathize with.
Worse, we have so much information, so many sound- and thought-bites begging for our attention that people (and media outlets) treat stories like the recent Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt divorce filing as something more deserving of headlines than a gossip-column footnote.
Perhaps this is also a reflection of how people process information; perhaps before, we didn't have the technology to indulge in sifting through a plethora of visual clickbait and having the luxury of ignoring nuance. Or perhaps people have always been full of uninformed opinions, but now we are graced with social media giving a voice by which to proclaim these ideas. How much we are shaping our information and media tools versus how much we are shaped by them is an exercise for philosophers and time to measure.
Unfortunately I can't pretend to be above the influence; I can only try to acknowledge that it happens and try to limit the degree of validity I assign to the resulting fallacies. The best thing I've done is limit my exposure to social media, and even popular news outlets. I've gradually cut things out that others take for granted; as satellite (and cable) TV grew more expensive and we tried to cut bills, we stopped watching TV (and I am still amazed at how little tolerance I have for commercials as a result). I configured Twitter to dump tweets directly to Facebook, eschewing having to sift and post there in order to update virtual relatives and friends of life events and thus limiting the amount of regurgitated cruft from the FaceBook timeline that inevitably led to a "Here's a Snopes article that had you spared 5 minutes to Google you'd have known what you just said was pure crap" reply.
So take a minute and reflect on the true meaning of a soundbite. What is the truth behind it? What is the possible true motivation behind the meme? And most of all, why are you willing to support, or fight, that meme?
