Hello, everybody! Welcome to Peter's Thoughts from the Shower, Episode God Only Knows What Number.
In conversation and politics these days, I've noticed a few things: a general lack of critical thinking, refusal to do research, and general reactionary venomousness. This isn't an indictment of any particular group, to be clear; people on all sides (and especially ends) of the political spectrum are slinging some pretty overcooked spaghetti in recent years. As such, I, a perfectly ineffective emissary of the political center, have devised a few simple steps to help you tell if something you're reading, watching, hearing, or otherwise consuming is bullshit.
The trick I use is to pull the rug out from under the situation context-wise and just examine what it is that's being said. This is not to say all things should be deprived of their appropriate context, but hear me out for a second here.
We'll start fairly innocent. Consider the Nicholas Sparks novel The Lucky One's film adaptation, a movie that had commendable financial success and remarkably lukewarm reviews, considering the amount of OH YEAH I heard on its release. To be clear, I'm not after this movie or the people who produced it, I just kinda... picked. There are many.
But here's the premise: astonishingly handsome Marine Zac Efron gets ambushed, blown up, and otherwise kicked to shit, surviving by repeated turns of slim probability in his favor. Through all this he's carrying the picture of a young woman he found on the ground, the running joke becoming that she's his "guardian angel."
Returning to the United States, Marine Zac proceeds to find said young woman through more remarkable feats of unlikelihood, but can't explain why he's arrived, and signs on at the farm she works at. There are then some old Nicholas Sparks mainstays, including a treehouse, abusive ex-husbands, and severe weather, ultimately ending up with Marine Zac Efron and the pretty blonde female lead together. No surprises, just a slightly cheesy but also vaguely heartwarming romance story.
Now, pretend Marine Zac Efron is instead played by Steve Buscemi or Christopher Walken or someone to that effect. This movie is now about a traumatized combat veteran who, having difficulty readjusting to civilian life, takes his dog (for some reason?) and stalks a pretty blonde female lead across several different states, cohabitates with her family under false pretenses, and maybe-kinda-arguably murders her ex-husband, and we no longer have the warm sunset lens flares and piercing good looks of Marine Zac Efron to nurse us off that fact. Well, shit. It seems I don't approve of this movie anymore, when you take it down to its core features.
I promised up there that this was about politics, so... smooth transition.
Let's pick alt-right firebrand Milo Yiannopolous, since he's in the news again recently. Big, big catalyst for controversy: due to various matters of who he is and what he says, nobody seems quite able to agree on what to think of him. So, let's pretend for a second that Milo isn't Milo. Take the exact words out of his mouth and pretend for a moment that they came out of someone else's.
"Muslims are allowed to get away with almost anything. They can shut down and intimidate prominent ex-Muslims. They’re allowed to engage in the most brazen anti-semitism, even as they run for office in European left-wing political parties. And, of course, politicians and the media routinely turn a blind eye to the kind of sexism and homophobia that would instantly end the career of a non-Muslim conservative — and perhaps get the latter arrested for hate speech when he dared to object."
From the article The Left chose Islam over Gays, 12 June 2016 A.D., in Breitbart.
Okay, so, probably certainly offensive if you're on the leftish side, and maybe if you're right-leaning you see a kernel of truth behind the blatant over-generalization. He did say this intentionally to be provocative, in fairness. That is his function; he is an offense machine, a generator of ferment and heated Facebook comment wars.
Now let's take that quote, and just pretend that someone ordinary said it. It's not Milo Yiannopoulos, with his classical good looks and immaculately curated hair (not to mention his gorgeous accent) saying this thing; rather, it's an uncle at a family barbecue who you only kind of know, or better still, someone who just walked up to you and struck up a conversation on the subway.
Re-imagined this way, this is no longer political commentary; it's the ravings of a fucking madman. There's no facts cited to establish a topic, no framing of a narrative or preface of "the way I see it," or anything to that effect. It starts as a generalization that one group of people are vaguely absolved of wrongdoing, with no example cited, then ends up fumbling into a critique of the laws governing hate speech(?). It's not even about anything; no issue prompted this comment, and I very much doubt anybody asked specifically for it.
I could labor on about this on and on, but I think you get the idea. If you can take something and alter it very slightly, whether by replacing a key actor or imagining the words from a different speaker or whatever else, and have the thing in question end up sounding like a fuckin' lunatic produced it, there's a very high chance you ought to avoid consuming that particular content.
Trust me on this one. I'm a fuckin' lunatic.
Okay, that's all the time I've got for today. As always, if you enjoyed the read, the second-best thing to do is show people (a joy shared is... doubled[?!]). The very best thing to do is to share said joy with me; leave me a comment of what you think of my tests. Does this lead too sharply into extreme skepticism and cynicism? Does the mental move of altering the content in this way violate the agency of its author, or something to that effect? Let me know; I love reading any and all comments, and I hope you all have a lovely afternoon C:
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