Taking time to think

Building on yesterday's post, speaking differently leads to thinking differently.

After the revolution in Cuba, you were a Communist or you were a "gusano". A worm. You could do a lot of terrible things to a worm. Some examples for school children included grading them down, not letting them go to the bathroom (no matter how desperately they needed to) and allowing other kids to beat them up. That's for school children. When you use words to transform people into "other", it opens the door for abuse.

I believe that if you decide that you will not resort to "libtards" or "snowflakes" as insults for liberals, that is an important step in closing the door. The word "liberal" may still have negative connotations for you, but not relying on easy labels forces you to think more. That matters.

Russia interfered in the last presidential election. That involved spreading false information, but it also involved stoking the fires of bigotry. (To be fair, that was a central part of the candidate's platform.) It has been interesting to see two other areas of Russian interference: vaccines and Star Wars.

https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/2018-08-23/russian-trolls-targeted-vaccine-debate-to-sow-division-researchers-say

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/star-wars-last-jedi-was-targeted-by-russian-trolls-study-says-1148475

Those were not random choices. People have strong emotions about both of those issues, and can be very passionate about those topics.

Those passions can also work out in specific ways. Much of the negative response to The Last Jedi pertained to the casting of women and people of color (and even a woman of color) in starring roles. You can see that as a nice nod to the reality of a universe where women and people of color do things, or you can feel threatened, see it as Social Justice Warriors (SJWs - another slur, but possibly one that's being replaced by NPC for Non Playing Character) ruining everything, and lash out in racist and misogynistic ways.

Given the current political climate, that is a target area that works better for people drawn to the right. What could be good for people drawn to the left? Enter stirring up controversy about vaccines.

It is an interesting gambit, because it is anti-science which normally veers more right. However, progressives who are against vaccines tend to be easily seduced by purity, which is the kind of thing that can get them to reject a reasonable candidate with normal flaws and be very self-righteous about it. It gets emotional.

That sounds like a criticism, but I value emotion. When people find it useful to talk to me, I know a lot of that is simply that I support feeling the way you feel. The instinct is to comfort grief and silence fears and do away with all of those negative things, but they are real, and they need to be felt. Trying to silence the emotions does more harm than good. It is part of our humanity.

However, no matter how important acknowledging and feeling your emotions is, said emotions are usually not the best basis for making a decision.

A few months ago I read a book, You Are Now Less Dumb, by David McRaney, which focused on bias. Humans have a lot, and that is natural, but you don't have to get stuck in it.

One of the early examples was how you can use a soda vending machine without knowing how it works, and various suppositions you could make about how it works. You could believe there is a small person in the machine, but that is also something you can look up. There are online videos showing how they work. You can buy them for cheap as a business opportunity (I have recently learned via Judge Judy), but you could then take it apart and put it back together. (I'm just trying to not encouraged vandalizing someone else's machine in the pursuit of knowledge.)

So you can find stuff out, and not be mystified or caught up in a myth.

For example, with vaccines, you could research Andrew Wakefield, and why his work has been invalidated. You could research mercury and thimerosal, and you could see how it was removed from the scheduled vaccines in 2002 and it did not cause a sudden plunge in autism diagnoses. Yes, the anti-vaccine movement has responses to that, but it would still help your brain to at least do some research and branch out.

One reason it is safe to sit with your emotions is that they can change so easily, especially as time passes and more information comes. Of course, that is also why they may not lead to the best decisions. Taking that time to learn more and understand more becomes a wonderful thing that you can do for yourself and others.

Next week I will be posting about this election.