A friend sent me an email recently and linked to an article in a magazine like The New Yorker or Atlantic. The author of the article was wringing his/her hands over the rise of right-wing populism.
The writer then went on to dissect what they perceived to be the "pathology" of populism.
"False Binary Choices"
One of the writer's key points is that we face very sophisticated and confounded and interlocking problems. The writer claims that right-wing populists present "false binary choices" that serve to give followers false confidence.
The writer undoubtedly typed the article on a computer workstation. They used a word-processor with spell-check and grammar aid software. Then emailed the article to their editor over the internet. After being published, 90% of the readers accessed the article on-line and read it on their hand-held super-computers. The check to the writer was delivered digitally to their bank-account which was a bunch of zeroes-and-ones stored on a cloud somewhere.
The supreme irony that the massively sophisticated arrangement that allowed the writer to compose an article about the deficiencies of binary-thinking, and then distributed to article to readers who uncritically accepted the writer's starting assumptions was flawlessly enabled by systems that run and communicate at the "binary" level never entered the writer's thoughts.
So may I be so bold as to suggest that the writer's starting premise, that sophisticated and confounded problems cannot be addressed with a series of "binary" decisions is patently false and poisons everything else they wrote?
Binary choices are only bad when they are offered by the other side. Their binary requirements are just fine. Men can become women because they feel like it? Great, now we can have men at women's rape shelters and women's prisons and if a biological women objects she is attacked for being a TERF.
ReplyDeleteLeftists don't like binary choices. They prefer to make only one choice available. Life is much simpler that way. It's why places like the USSR in the past and Russia now hold elections...with only ONE viable candidate. It offers the ILLUSION of choice. Leftists actually hate choice.
ReplyDeleteit's bizarre how wanting to be left alone makes one an extremist..
ReplyDeleteI no longer read many opposing viewpoints.
ReplyDeleteThey are liars and disingenuine. Everyone of them, will fib to fit their desires. They are not adults.