The story behind this (which may be apocryphal and I’ve never been able to source this) is that a French student was sending a package to their Russian friend based on an address that was e-mailed to them. The address in the e-mail misencoded (due to a phenomenon called mojibake) so rather than being written in Cyrillic, it was instead sent using mangled Latin characters.
It was up to a postal employee to hand correct it so it could be delivered.
And this is one part of that stuff.
[quote]The metaphor of poison in a bowl of candy has gotten a lot of traffic since 1938 - if you’d asked me what I most associated it with, I would have said schrodinger’s rapist
[/quote]
It was a racist metaphor created by a Nazi to justify terrible treatment of Jewish people, now recycled as a racist metaphor used to justify terrible treatment of Syrian refugees. Reporting the fascist origins of this metaphor isn’t taking it out of its proper context, it’s putting it into its proper context.
Think back through all of American history. Was there even one decision the American people were faced with that we can look back and say “you know, we really should have shown less human compassion in that situation”?
On a related note, has anyone coined “the orange doesn’t fall far from the tree” yet?
Just a few weeks ago there was a story on Boing Boing about Trump’s father being arrested as a Klansman (unconfirmed at the time, but since confirmed).
There were a number of comments saying that there was so much legitimate racism to tie Trump to we didn’t need to try and link him to the Klan.
Now we’re down to “there’s so much legitimate Nazism to tie him to, we don’t need to point out his campaign propaganda is getting ripped out of the story books of a man hanged as a Nazi war criminal”.
Things are moving fast.
But it’s so pretty!
I’ve met a few Natives that have sarcastically commented about how they shouldn’t have shown the Pilgrims how to handle crops. That bit of well-deserved bitterness aside, in utter and complete agreement with your point; the USA is a country founded on high ideals… and has always and consistently failed to live up to them.
I’m honestly surprised that people didn’t know of that metaphor’s history. Of course, my perspective is skewed–my family only has a picture of my great-grandfather because Der Stürmer put him on the cover for propaganda purposes.
I like to think we’ve gradually moved closer to realizing those ideals, at least as far as the rights of people who aren’t straight white Christian men are concerned. That was one reason Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC was so powerful (the most recent one where she talked about the White House being built by slaves, not the one Melania ripped off).
But that progress sure would be a lot faster and a lot easier if it weren’t for people like Trump constantly trying to drag us backwards and bring out our worst instincts instead of our best.
Living in the Sunshine State, it should be something more like “the orange rots as a stinking mass covered by fruit flies at the foot of the tree.”
If you strive to do better than you’ve done, without condemning others, then it is the tribute that vice gives to virtue.
If you condemn others just because they haven’t done better than you’ve done, without striving to do better, then it is just hypocrisy.
If I were to suggest an inspirational slogan for a national political campaign it wouldn’t be “make America great again,” it would be “we can do better.”
“genetic devil”?
“Like mushrooms under an autumn moon”?
Sounds like drumpf jr’s not the only taking influence from Streicher.
It was a racist metaphor created by a Nazi to justify terrible treatment of the Jewish people, certainly. But the one Trump used is simply not that metaphor. The original metaphor explains how even a single Jew is enough to destroy somewhere (i.e. it equalizes Jews, all Jews, with poison), while this metaphor, equates terrorists with poison and the Syrians, in general, with wholesome candy.
Basically, the metaphor is a cover for the argument that while, yes, most Syrians are perfectly welcome, there is among them a minority which is so harmful and so difficult to separate out, that it is too dangerous to admit the Syrian refugees, despite a great majority of them being fine.
It’s explicitly not a racist argument. It’s a bad argument that abdicates responsibility for charity and compassion (not to mention the responsibility America has towards a mess it helped create) but it isn’t racist. Not all bad arguments are racist and fascist, it turns out, and Trump’s capable of those too.
And yeah, I agree with the OP, I originally head the skittles analogy in connection to the Schrodinger’s Rapist trope and it is exactly the same argument: Most X are good, but among the X, hidden, are enough Y who are terribly bad enough that it justifies treating X less well than most of them deserve. In the case of Schrodinger’s rapist, it means that men are due a bit less trust and courtesy than would otherwise seem reasonable because the utility cost of trusting one of the dangerous minority is so vast that it overpowers the utility cost of the men feeling put-upon and hurtfully distrusted.
Indeed, it’s the needs-of-the-many vs. needs-of-the-one-or-the-few argument, just with weighting. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it isn’t. It depends on your estimate of the weights used to do the sums of relative harm. And if you buy consequentialist metaethics, I guess.
If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?
Trump projection again. He’s describing his daddy’s supporters.
Late edit - stumbled onto this:
Yes it is. It’s using fearmongerong to justify horrible treatment for a GROUP of people under the assumption that we have no way of differentiating the good from the bad. It’s exactly the same logic that was behind the internment of Japanese Americans.
Worse still, his original photo on Flickr is tagged “All rights reserved” so unless the photographer changed that in the last few days, Trump used a copyrighted image without permission for his hate-mongering.
Read Streichers wiki article. Quite the lunatic. Interesting though that he was sentenced to hanging for what we today would call hate speech …
Julius Streicher was not a member of the military and did not take part in planning the Holocaust, or the invasion of other nations. Yet his pivotal role in inciting the extermination of Jews was significant enough, in the prosecutors’ judgment, to include him in the indictment of Major War Criminals…
And more. Including Scott Lively-inspired imagery implying teh gayz and teh Djuuz were the real Nazis:
The judgement has a more elaborate version of your two word summary. This is even more compressed than the 24/7 Lectures*.
* Don’t miss the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony tomorrow!
The lowercase b and lowercase l are dyslexic hell, as are the M and N in both cases.
Sometimes I think this sort of shit was done deliberately to discriminate against people.
