Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
Showing posts with label immigrants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigrants. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Acting on absurdities

My grandma used to say, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them -- the first time."

It's good advice, and when I haven't heeded it, I've almost always lived to regret it.  It's not that I think people can't change; it's just that most of them don't.

In the particular case I'm thinking of, though, it's not the first time, nor the tenth, nor (probably) the thousandth time that we've been shown precisely who someone is.  And it will come as no shock to most of you that I, once again, am talking about Donald Trump.

What brought me back to this distasteful topic is the ongoing nonsense about migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's pets.  There has been, says both Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance, a "flood" of over twenty thousand Haitian immigrants into Springfield, overcrowding schools, triggering a crime wave, and overwhelming both police and the prior (read "white") residents.

There is not a shred of truth to any of this.  The most recent data shows that there are about 5,200 people from Haiti in all of Ohio.  There is no credible evidence whatsoever that anyone's pets have been killed.  There's no crime wave, no swarm of refugees into schools, no... anything.

But confronted by these facts, both Trump and Vance simply doubled down on the rhetoric, as they always do.  Interviewed on CNN, Vance told Dana Bash that he knew it wasn't true, but that he was allowed "to create stories so that the… media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people."

Funny how when I was little, that was called "lying" and was frowned upon.  When I was a few years older, I found out that's what "bearing false witness against thy neighbor" meant.

You know, that thing in the Ten Commandments?  The same Ten Commandments these people want plastered on every public school classroom wall?

Or does that commandment not apply if thy neighbor has dark skin?

But because anything that comes out of Dear Leader's mouth (or his cronies' mouths) is automatically considered true by his followers, the result has been the college in Springfield holding virtual classes because of malicious and threatening calls, public schools (including an elementary school) on lockdown, and the mayor getting death threats because he had the temerity to state publicly that Trump and Vance had lied.

The reality of Springfield.  Not that you'll hear about this from the Republicans.

It doesn't end there.  The second abortive assassination attempt on Trump led both Vance and Donald Trump Jr. to blame "radical leftists" (despite the fact that neither of the would-be assassins were leftists by any stretch, much less radical ones).  Elon Musk, who just will not keep his fucking mouth shut, commented that it was funny how no one had attempted to assassinate Kamala Harris or Joe Biden, then Vance followed it up with saying that it was the Democrats who need to tone down their rhetoric. 

It's right from Joseph Goebbels's playbook; accuse your opponents of what you're doing yourself.

At this point, if you still support Trump, you own all of this.  Every last scrap of it.  You know who he is, and chances are you've known for a long while.  And if -- every god ever worshiped forbid -- he wins reelection in November, you will own every last thing he does.  Because he's told us, you know?  He's told us over and over and over again.  Here are a few of the things he's said himself -- i.e., this is not me speculating.  This is right from his own mouth.

  • There'll be the largest deportation of immigrants (legal and illegal) in American history.
  • There'll be sky-high tariffs on imported goods, especially anything from China.  (He seems not to understand that tariffs are not paid by the country the import came from, but by the consumer in the recipient country.)
  • He will withdraw all U. S. support for Ukraine.
  • He plans to get rid of U. S. military leaders who are "woke" -- defined, of course, however he wants to.
  • He will cut funding for any schools that have support systems in place for LGBTQ+ students, and those that have vaccine or mask mandates.  That, too, is "woke."
  • He will jail his critics in the press -- and even went so far as to say he'd find a way to silence ordinary citizens who oppose him.

If I wake up on the morning of November 6 and find that Trump has won, you -- his supporters -- will bear the blame for every last horror he perpetrates, everyone whose voice is silenced, every legal asylum seeker who is sent back to face imprisonment, injury, or death.  You will be responsible for every freedom lost to Americans because Donald Trump's fragile ego can't handle being contradicted.  You will be responsible for every queer child who is denied help and who ends up committing suicide.  (And don't @ me about how "this never happens."  The suicide rate among LGBTQ+ teens is four times the average for straight teens.  And I was -- twice -- very nearly one of those queer teens who succeeded.)

If he's reelected, you will swallow the responsibility for all of that, swallow it down to the last vile-tasting drop.

It all boils down to what Voltaire said, almost three hundred years ago -- a quote I had on my own classroom wall: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

****************************************


Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Signs of the times

I'll be right up front with you.  I have no idea what to do about the problem of immigration, illegal and otherwise.  In my admittedly rather apolitical brain, this whole issue seems so intractably complicated as to admit no reasonable solution at all.

Do I feel sorry for the immigrants, most of whom are coming from corrupt countries with horrific standards of living, with no access to medical care, decent housing, clean food and water, and education for their children?  Of course I do.  In their place, I'd almost certainly be trying to get out, too, whatever the risk or the cost.  However, I also recognize that illegal immigration is... well, illegal.  And if it's against the law, we should either enforce it or else change it.

I also sympathize with the concerns of a birdwatcher/naturalist friend of mine who lives in Sierra Vista, Arizona, only fifteen miles from the Mexican border, who says, "We're being overrun.  This used to be a safe community, but the people trucking the illegals across the border are criminals, pure and simple.  Many of them run drugs and guns along with their human traffic.  I love this place, but not a day goes by that I don't think of getting out, moving further north."

I understand as well the concerns of people who see their culture changing more in a decade than it had in the preceding two hundred years.  This is especially striking in western Europe, where the influx of Muslims has led to some areas coming under something very close to Shari'a law -- people drinking alcohol, women dressed "immodestly," couples displaying affection, anyone showing signs of being homosexual have been harassed, and in some cases, assaulted.

Yes, I know that those incidents aren't as common as the media coverage would lead you to believe, and that for every clash there are thousands of white Europeans and Muslims living side by side in peace.  All I'm saying is that I can see where the fear comes from.

Unfortunately, we humans have a bad tendency, which is to pretend that impossibly complex problems have easy solutions.  "Build a wall."  "Deport 'em all."  "Seal the borders."  And as tempers get high, the rhetoric on both sides becomes increasingly vitriolic -- to the point that desperation sets in, and people are willing to lie to hammer their point home.

The whole thing comes up because of some photographs of street signs in England that have been making the rounds of social media in the last few weeks.  I've seen three so far:




The photos are usually accompanied by a hysterical caption to the effect that them Mooslims are infiltrating everything, to the point that even the street signs have to be captioned in Arabic.  And because the idea here is to engage the emotions and disengage the brain, the response has been uniformly horrifying, condemning the government officials who agreed to the sign change, railing against the immigrants who pushed for its necessity.

The problem is (well, one of the problems is) that the signs are photoshopped.  Put more bluntly, the claim is a bald-faced lie.  How do I know?  Well, a couple of reasons.  First, the Arabic script below the signs doesn't spell out the names of the towns; it's pretty clear that whoever Photoshopped these simply grabbed whatever Arabic text they could find and spliced it in.

In fact, not only does the Arabic below "Harrogate" not say "Harrogate," it says "salaam alaikum."  Which, you have to admit, would be an odd thing to put on a street sign.

Some of the people who have been forwarding the photographs around have further muddied the waters by claiming that the script is Urdu, presumably to stir up sentiment against Pakistanis.  It's not Urdu, it is (as I mentioned earlier) Arabic.  Not that facts seem to matter much, here.

Most damning of all, the photos themselves are simply downloads from Google Street View, and in the originals, the signs have no Arabic subtitles.  Take a look, for example, at the original of the top photograph:


This is clearly the same photograph -- the intrepid Photoshopper simply cropped it and spliced in the Arabic text.  In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that even the clouds are in exactly the same position in the two photographs.

What appalls me most about this is not that some hate-mongering bigot lied.  Hate-mongering bigots tend to do that, after all.  What appalls me most is how easily people fell for it.  We have become so terrified of The Other that when presented with further evidence of a takeover, we don't even stop to consider whether it makes any sense.  We swallow what we're given, and it further bolsters the fear, further squelches the rationality.

It'd be nice if we had answers, if these horrible problems our world is facing did have simple solutions.  The harsh fact, however, is that if they have solutions at all, they will be ones that are costly and require sacrifices.  But one thing I am certain of: your position is never strengthened by lying.  And to the people who are circulating these photographs, just stop.  What you're doing is making an already awful situation worse.