Andrew Foltz-Morrison

adailyriot:

Bernadine Dohrn fucking badass!

Vietnam war-era US: more violent than Nazi Germany, the USSR under Stalin, or the Mongol Empire. This is what I like to call ‘reactive radicalism.’ Make any assertion that might sound good to people sufficiently critical of the status quo in order to give yourself rhetorical ammunition against your opponents. It sounds snappy, grabs attention, and clearly marks your position as a radical one. You also don’t really need to worry about whether your assertions are true, so long as they sound sufficiently revolutionary.
Making claims like this is facile and foolish, and robs us of the perspective we need to really change things for the better. While it’s no longer as common for those on the left to make claims like this, many are happy to indulge in alarmist rhetoric when it comes to environmental issues. I think a simliar disregard for the truth is often employed there. Science is used to back the appropriately dire warnings, and often ignored when it might support a more optimistic view.
I think one major factor that contributes to assertions like these being made is the media, which when combined with the cognitive bias known as availability heuristic: we judge the frequency of events based on the examples we can readily call to mind. One more quotidian example of this is the commonly-held belief that airplanes are more dangerous than cars, even though cars kill more people. Because plane crashes are much more prominent in the news than car accidents, it becomes easy to get a skewed perception. Similarly, because horrible events like those we see in war are now widely televised and reported, we can get the false impression that they are more common now than they used to be. Likewise with ecological disruptions: it’s much more common to hear of ecological collapse than ecological recovery in the news, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s actually more common.
We ignore this bias in our perception of events to our great detriment. When we actually do tell the truth, sweeping assertions like these can do a lot to undermine our credibility.

Bernadine Dohrn fucking badass!

Vietnam war-era US: more violent than Nazi Germany, the USSR under Stalin, or the Mongol Empire. This is what I like to call ‘reactive radicalism.’ Make any assertion that might sound good to people sufficiently critical of the status quo in order to give yourself rhetorical ammunition against your opponents. It sounds snappy, grabs attention, and clearly marks your position as a radical one. You also don’t really need to worry about whether your assertions are true, so long as they sound sufficiently revolutionary.

Making claims like this is facile and foolish, and robs us of the perspective we need to really change things for the better. While it’s no longer as common for those on the left to make claims like this, many are happy to indulge in alarmist rhetoric when it comes to environmental issues. I think a simliar disregard for the truth is often employed there. Science is used to back the appropriately dire warnings, and often ignored when it might support a more optimistic view.

I think one major factor that contributes to assertions like these being made is the media, which when combined with the cognitive bias known as availability heuristic: we judge the frequency of events based on the examples we can readily call to mind. One more quotidian example of this is the commonly-held belief that airplanes are more dangerous than cars, even though cars kill more people. Because plane crashes are much more prominent in the news than car accidents, it becomes easy to get a skewed perception. Similarly, because horrible events like those we see in war are now widely televised and reported, we can get the false impression that they are more common now than they used to be. Likewise with ecological disruptions: it’s much more common to hear of ecological collapse than ecological recovery in the news, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s actually more common.

We ignore this bias in our perception of events to our great detriment. When we actually do tell the truth, sweeping assertions like these can do a lot to undermine our credibility.

(via bbcity)

Source: goodleftund0ne