Views from the Abyss #62: Man-Steak Monday

There is a relatively unknown bar and grill in a highly populated part of town near some very long term building works. The owner, lamenting the lack of customers, observes that every Monday evening, lots of men walk past the bar looking miserable and depressed, no doubt tired and aware they have a long week of work yet to go. 

Sensing a business opportunity, he works out a profitable but high value deal, which he calls “Man-Steak Monday”. The offer comprises a heavily discounted 800g steak, garlic and onion gravy, roast potatoes, and one beer included. The beer comes out straight away upon ordering, while the steak takes a little time to prepare and cook, so the idea is that many customers will order a second drink when their steak arrives. A variety of well advertised sides are available, including instant snacks that can be enjoyed while waiting for the steak, which it’s anticipated will also be popular.  

Right from the get-go, the response is phenomenal, and puts the bar on the map. Men and women are literally queuing down the road for their Man-Steak Monday treat, and there’s an overall increase in business on other nights too. Profits have never been higher, and after a decade and a half the owner finally decides to retire and sell the business.

An umbrella company that owns a well known chain of restaurants sees the thriving business up for sale and grabs it up quickly. A new manager who has a degree in Gendered Business Studies is assigned to take over, and the first thing he notices is that while Man-Steak Monday is their most popular offer, women only make up 30% of the customers. 

He performs some market research, and concludes that there are a number of details putting women off from taking advantage of it. First of all, the steaks are too big. The women interviewed said they’d prefer a steak to be around 300g. The garlic and onion gravy isn’t really to their liking as it might make their breath smell, and a wine based sauce would be preferred. Instead of roast potatoes, corn and broccoli seem popular, and that should be topped off with a side of salad and soup. Beer is less popular with women, so a cocktail would be preferred. Women feel more pampered when they spend more money, so there’s no quibble about the price, even if the steak is smaller. Also, women tend to prefer Wednesdays as treat night.

The answer, it seems, is simple. Devise a complementary new offer provisionally called Women-Steak Wednesday based on the above research, to run in conjunction with the existing Man-Steak Monday.

But our new manager doesn’t want to do this, as Man-Steak Monday would still be catering to around 70% men, and he wants a one-size-fits-all solution for the sake of inclusiveness. So with that in mind, he takes the Man-Steak Monday offer and changes the steak size, the sauce, the included vegetables, adds the sides, changes the drink to a cocktail, and moves it to Wednesday. He decides that as people are already familiar with the Man-Steak Monday naming, this should stay, despite it not technically being on a Monday anymore (any customer who feels the need to niggle over this is probably not welcome anyway).

The response to this is perhaps as one might expect. Most of the men who used to eat there on Mondays have seen the new offering and decided it’s not for them. Most of the women that used to eat there Mondays have also turned their noses up at it—they liked the original offer because enormous steaks and beer is something they enjoy. It’s mostly new customers coming in, and in much smaller numbers. Their dining habits are a little different too—the cocktail is normally sufficient for the duration, so they don’t order a second drink, and as soup and salad is included they don’t order any sides either. The soup, salad and cocktail actually cost the bar more than they’re saving by the reduced size of the steak, so profit margins are much thinner than they were before. Additionally, many of the new customers are quick to voice their disappointment on social media, giving it a 1 star rating because the steak was too small, or too big, or it wasn’t stated clearly enough that the steak contained meat, which prompted a lot of angry replies from the manager suggesting they take their business elsewhere. 

However, around 80% of the customers taking advantage of the offer are now women, just 20% shy of true equality, so the manager considers these changes to be an undeniable success. The Man-Steak Monday offer is now more accessible to a much wider and diverse segment of the population. 

When he reports the bar’s finances though, the stockholders instead see a business that has been absolutely run into the ground, with profits in the red for the first time since the business was established.

The manager, feeling that finances were not the best way to judge the success of a business, blamed the losses on misogyny and intolerance.

And this is why a lot of people don’t like the new Star Wars movies. 

Views from the Abyss #61: Free Will

Q. Do humans have free will, or is everything we do biologically determined?

A. Both, kinda.

It's often been suggested that free will is an illusion, but that's very unhelpfully misleading.

Free will at its core is an analogical conceptualisation of a specific perceived phenomena. It is a cognitive shortcut that allows us to describe a subjective experience in a meaningful way. And as with all analogies, it is only useful for superficial description as it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. Discussing it as though it were the phenomena itself would be pointless, as there is simply no deeper meaning to be found there.

There is good reason that we use an analogical conceptualisation in this instance though: the reality we experience is simply not consistent with objective reality or established fact at any level. Humans instinctively perceive their mind, their sense of self, the thing that makes them special and unique, as being something separate from the flesh and bone vessel they occupy. Even when we know rationally that this is not the case, the perception persists in religion, in fiction, in metaphor* etc. to an extent that suggests it really is an integral part of how we function. From an evolutionary vantage point, it has obviously served us well so far, but don't expect to find any good reason for it beyond that.

* For related examples, even astrophysicists describe morning and evening in terms of sunrise and sunset, in spite of knowing full well that the sun does no such thing.

As an aside, this perceived awareness that the real you exists as a separate incorporeal entity results in everybody at some point seeking answers to the ultimate question: what happens to the real you after the body dies. This may be why humans are hardwired to seek out religion, but that would be a discussion for another day.

Q. OK, so in the absence of an incorporeal 'real you', all actions must therefore be biological determined. How then is free will 'kinda' true?

A. Because what we think of as 'free will' describes acts of agency, with a special focus on instances where the choices and the potential ramifications are understood at an intellectual level.

A newborn baby expresses agency right from the get go. Feels hungry, wants to not feel hungry, cries for attention, made to not feel hungry anymore, sorted.

It cannot conceptualise intellectually what the issue producing the stimulus is, what it's doing to remedy the issue or why, but it still knows exactly what it's doing, and it's learning this whole time.

As the brain develops a little, it starts to comprehend these things intellectually. It starts to make connections with predictive capability. It becomes able to anticipate an issue before it becomes an issue and counter it in advance. It can envision a desired outcome, and determine the necessary steps required to make that outcome a reality. It can, in these and many other ways, enjoy the experience of exercising choice.

But at a biological level, it is merely a more sophisticated expression of the agency it was already demonstrating more than adequately on day one.

One could argue that 'free will' requires that one be capable of understanding rudimentary cause and effect in terms of choices being made.

But it would be a waste of everybody's time.

Views from the Abyss #60: Order of Operations

In a recent bulletin, there was an hilarious joke about a programmer, and his wife's inability to communicate simple instructions. It served as an introduction to how our ability to think evolved in service of our ability to communicate, or how both were byproducts of a more useful ability to conceptualise, whatever it was we finally concluded. Ian Dury is still out on that one.

It occurs to me in hindsight that it also serves to illustrate the importance of mathematical orders of operations.

Consider the following simple maths puzzle:

2 + 3 x 5 = ?

If you answered '25', then congratulations, you are the programmer in the joke. You can follow simple instructions pedantically, even if they make no sense (you see, in this scenario, the programmer is the one who is foolish).

If you answered '17' (as my six year old niece correctly did), then congratulations, you can pedantically follow slightly more complex instructions, even without understanding their reason for existing.

But there is a reason for this order of operations to exist—real world application. How so? Because in any real world situation, there would be no left to right calculations of abstract numbers—each of those numbers would represent something real, and the order they appear would not be important.

As such, the order of operations makes the actual order irrelevant.

Think of it this way:

2 + 3 + 5 = 10
3 + 2 + 5 = 10
5 + 2 + 3 = 10
etc.

With addition, the order is irrelevant. Now let's try another:

2 x 3 x 5 = 30
5 x 3 x 2 = 30
3 x 5 x 2 = 30
etc.

With multiplication, the order is irrelevant. Let's try mixing them the wrong way:

2 + 3 x 5 = 25
2 + 5 x 3 = 30
5 x 2 + 3 = 23
etc.

Bollocks. The order totally changes things. That's no good, but how did it happen? Well, it wouldn't happen in the real world.

Let's pretend the numbers are bananas. Actually, no. Let's pretend they're strawberries.

You have a small tub with 2 strawberries in it, another with 3, and another with 5. If you pour all of them out on the table, it doesn't matter which order you do so because it will all amount to the same number of strawberries—10.

2 + 3 + 5 = 10
[**] [***] [*****] = **********

Now, imagine a small tub containing 2 strawberries. You have 3 such tubs—each with the same content—sitting inside a large tub. And you have five of the larger tubs which also all have the same content. So each of the five large tubs contains 3 small tubs, and each of the small tubs contains 2 strawberries. If you pour them all out, you will find there are 30 strawberries, but you would have the same result if it was 2 large tubs containing 5 small tubs containing 3 strawberries each, or 3 large tubs containing 2 small tubs containing 5 strawberries each.

2 x 3 x 5 = 30
( [**] [**] [**] ) ( [**] [**] [**] ) ( [**] [**] [**] ) ( [**] [**] [**] ) ( [**] [**] [**] )  =
******************************

So when you see the original maths question, what you actually have is a small tub with two strawberries, and a large tub containing either 3 tubs with 5 strawberries each, or 5 tubs with 3 strawberries each.

2 + 3 x 5 = 17
[**] ( [*****] [*****] [*****] ) = *****************
[**] ( [***] [***] [***] [***] [***] ) = *****************

I don't remember ever studying them this way in maths class, because I was 4 years old at the time.

Views from the Abyss #59: In Defence of Ghostbusters (2016)

Q. What I find remarkable about the shoopdoggydogg-fest that was the "Female Ghostbusters" is its complete lack of any redeeming features. How on earth did they expect to make any money from it?

A. 'Shoopdoggydogg-fest'? I trust that was an autocorrect error?

Q. It's not outside the realms of possibility.

A. It wasn't a criticism.

Many people find autocorrect errors to be hilarious.

I promise this is going somewhere...

With regards to Ghostbusters (2016), something that a lot of people who have not seen it fail to understand is that it is a low brow, low credibility, low production value, lazy, by the numbers improvised comedy.

This should not be considered a criticism.

The story is little more than a vaguely fertile soil from which (hopefully) many seeds of mirth may flower and fruit. As such, the franchise is irrelevant. It's Star Wars porn, which is a thing, because porn. And Star Wars.

None of this is a criticism either.

The production process (whittled down) amounted to giving the characters a start point for a scene, a place they need to arrive at, and free reign to make that journey as meandering, drawn out and humorous as they possibly can. As a result, scenes go on for much longer than they need to to drive the plot, but as the plot is merely a vehicle and not a goal, the point is moot.

Then it's in the hands of the editors. The side-splitting two hour version of the scene in which the characters are sitting around, the phone rings, and they go out on their first mission is edited down to six or seven minutes by trimming the fat and leaving just the funniest moments in a way that hopefully isn't too poorly timed or haphazard.

This is still not a criticism.

This was exactly the sort of movie it was trying to be.

Q. Put like that, it actually sounds like a typical Adam Sandler movie. 

A. A prize to the pretty lady. Or gentleman. It's 2015...

Although he's not the best example, he's certainly an example. Him and other big name improvisation artists know that there are people on this planet who just find him so damned funny. And if a movie essentially boils down to him and some other big names like him being funny together, then that's something these people would happily pay to see, and they're rarely disappointed with what they get. Studios take a gamble on this each time—do enough people with disposable cash find the artist sufficiently funny that one can expect a reasonable return on an investment? With Sandler, it's a great big yes every time.

With Ghostbusters (2016) it was more of a risk. The improvisation artists were less well known, but the known franchise could help make up the balance by bringing in additional customers who enjoyed the original work. The artists would gain additional fans amongst the franchise nostalgia audience, who could then be lured back in to watch potential sequels. With clever marketing, they couldn't lose.

Q. But didn't the marketing consist of alienating the franchise fans and an entire half of the global population by insulting them and calling them terrible awful people? Wasn't it a box office flop?

A. In fairness to marketing, the preview trailers did a very good job of telling the potential audience exactly what kind of movie they were going to be watching. Nobody paid to see that movie expecting a faithful remake/reboot/homage to the classic. They paid to see the movie I've spent this review describing, and that's exactly what they got.

The director on the other hand... He set out to antagonise the audience from the get go. He didn't choose four women to play the titular characters because he felt they would bring something new to the role, he did it to flip the bird at kids who used to bully him at school.

Perhaps he missed the memo about the need for clever marketing to attract franchise fans, and to give it as wide appeal as possible. Or perhaps the memo itself was the problem; most of the intent was likely inferred rather than stated outright, making it far too subtexty for self-professed male director Paul Feig to fully appreciate.

They probably should have gotten a man to write it.

NOTE: The author of this review has not actually seen the movie in question. In fact, if it appears on Hulu the author may be tempted to cancel his or her subscription, as he or she would hate to think they were in any way funding the movie by proxy. 


Update
I asserted above that the director had deliberately antagonised fans of the original franchise. This was based on comments he'd made in an unrelated interview that would reasonably lead to this conclusion. However, while searching for this interview, I found myself reviewing numerous other interviews and commentaries from both before the film's production and after its release. In them I noticed certain incongruous consistencies with his attitude, that have led me re-evaluate his intent.

What many of us living on earth understand full well is that we find ourselves in a volatile time of gender, race and sexuality politics. Gender swapping the leads of a beloved major franchise as recently as a decade ago would have been considered a bold and adventurous move. Now, it can only be interpreted as political: antagonistic and pandering to one kind of person, a victory against the system to another.

The change however is with us, the beholders, and it would make no sense to assume that a director of his stature (heard of in mainstream circles) would have his ear this close to the ground.

To date, he has been entirely consistent in his assertions that:

1) He has more experience directing female leads; that
2) There was no way he could improve on the classic within the existing paradigm, so
3) An all female cast meant he could approach it from an untried angle producing something new that wasn't in competition with the beloved classic, while also working with what he knows.

That he foolishly accepted the job at such a volatile period is unfortunate, but I cannot in good conscience say that he approached this low brow, low credibility, low production value, lazy, by the numbers improvised comedy with anything but the best intentions.

We did the rest.

Something else that can be understood about Paul Feig is that perhaps he shares something in common with Kwon Soon Kuen, the notorious Korean drummer. He has stated before (paraphrased) that he spent decades playing the drums in public performances genuinely believing that his performance style was normal—if it wasn't, then why would he keep getting high profile gigs? Feig no doubt similarly believes that his way of making films is a good way to make films, because the studios keep asking him to come and make more. He genuinely believes he is creating a quality product.

I still have absolutely no intention of ever watching it though.

Views from the Abyss #58: More Chickens and Eggs

From the comments:

Q. I am an avid reader of your bulletins, and in no way a rhetorical device crafted for the convenience of your narrative approach. I see where you're coming from in the whole "thinking for the purpose of communication" is concerned, but wouldn't observed and organised processes such as farming basics be more about learning for the sake of knowledge, communication largely put on back burner?

A. Yes. This is a valid point.

Learning and communicating are both byproducts of conceptualisation. As such, neither spawned the other, so it really doesn't matter which came first. Both would have offered an evolutionary advantage.

Views from the Abyss #57: On Chickens and Eggs

There is an old joke, that goes a little too much like this:

A programmer is asked by his wife to go to the local store. "Buy a frozen chicken, and if they have eggs, get six," she instructs him. The man duly complies, and returns twenty minutes later with six frozen chickens. "Why did you buy six frozen chickens?" asked his wife. "They had eggs."

Why, that foolish programmer husband! If only he could relate to real people and the way that real people speak; if only he could get his head out of the mountains of code that regularly put food on the table for them both, then such mistakes would not happen so readily. I'm sure this was exactly what you were all thinking.

But why? Is the true fault not with his wife for not having communicated her intent less unclearly? There are too many negatives in that question for a simple yes or no answer to make any sense, but rest assured, she is the one at fault.

Perhaps if she had learned to code at a young age, such problems would not arise. Coding is not just for coders, people—start 'em young!

However, it leads us naturally to another quandary of a chicken and egg variety. In terms of human evolution, was our ability to communicate complex ideas a natural byproduct of our emerging advanced cognitive functions, or did our advanced cognitive functions develop in order to facilitative more meaningful communication of what would otherwise be entirely chemically based emotional reactions to stimuli that would mean no more to anybody else than listening to a lion fart?

It is the latter. Google it if you don't believe me, and if you find any meaningful results supporting either conclusion, do let me know in the comments.

The ability to conceptualise is what allows us to articulate feelings in a way that can be understood by others, and if that feeling happened to be "danger evident!!!!", being able to abstract the nature of the danger into something more meaningful such as "superior size sand coloured quadruped, sharp in tooth and claw, two instances thereof" would be next to worthless by itself, but communication to the tribe of this abstract could well be the difference between winning at evolution and being eaten alive by one of two instances of a superior size quadruped.

It also means our thoughts are largely useless in and of themselves.

A wall one often runs into is that the act of thinking is necessarily an abstraction of what one really understands, a representation stripped of nuance, little more than an analogy. Invariably, if you stretch the metaphor too far, you end up chasing your own tail, and to what end?

Some things are better understood in their native format, and do not need to be conceptualised.

Q. By 'native format', are you referring to the 'fantasy bubble' comfort zone you described previously.

A. Yes.

Q. So you're saying that we should just stop thinking about politics and instead focus on things that are real?

A. That would certainly be a most beneficial byproduct; and another chicken and egg scenario to ponder!

Views from the Abyss #56: 2001—A Space Bible

The Bible, or the Word of God as it’s also known, is (should its PR be believed) the whole truth as written by the great I Am. But given how what we understand as 'truth' is crippled by our own limited human ability to conceptualise, and that the presentation of the almighty is anthropomorphised to an absurd degree throughout, it would make sense that 'truth' as we understand it probably differs from the somewhat broader meaning of truth as defined by an omnipotent deity who, in all fairness, is probably a better judge of such things.

Instead, the Bible represents truth in terms of what we need to hear to reach the next stage of our development as a civilisation. It serves a similar purpose, one could say, to the obelisk in the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In more savage times, the early covenants of the Old Testament made perfect sense, much as Sharia Law still does in some societies today. "You stupid; God scary; follow simple rules or lose testicles/life". It was a 'truth' people needed to hear to tame their wilder instincts. Instil the fear of god into a society of savages and give them simple rules to live by, and you have yourself a primitive but effective social contract.

This pattern repeats itself numerous times throughout the Old Testament, the rules becoming increasingly sophisticated with each iteration, and each assisting civilisation in reaching its next step of development.

Until finally (so far), along comes Jesus and the New Testament. Gone are the rules, and in place we have virtues. Adherence to the virtues is godly and pleasing, ignoring them less so, but there are sufficient consequences either way (both personally and socially) right here on earth that God need not get involved. He is no longer in the driving seat—we are. In fact, he's not even in the car. He's up there, in outer space, waiting for us to call to let him know we arrived at our destination safely. He still worries, and so does your mum—call her sometimes!

Jesus not only preached these virtues, but he lived them also, by all accounts. To say he was centuries ahead of his time is an understatement—he was around 18 centuries ahead; he was a crude template for the enlightenment. The people were not ready for it, but that was exactly the point. The New Testament was the 'truth' we needed to hear to advance to that next level.

Anybody that claims religion is irrelevant in the modern world is like the people who use their smartphones to post to social media about the evils of capitalism, or the women who stand up in front of millions of people and proclaim without irony—and to thunderous applause—that women are oppressed. Religion wasn’t the cause of problems, it was the solution, and it’s little surprise that everything has gone to shit since it’s been thrown to the sidelines. 

Views from the Abyss #55: The Ship of Theseus

Q. I was watching some classic British comedy, and it got me thinking. If I had a broom, and I replaced the head 17 times and the shaft 14 times, would it still be the same broom?

A. Yes.

Q. Really? It's that simple?

A. Yes, it really is that simple.

Q. But... None of the constituent parts of the original broom are part of it anymore. How can it still be the same broom?

A. When you attempt to apply objective standards to conceptual reality, you will often come across these pseudo-paradoxes. Put simply, a 'broom' is a conceptual identity, and is considerably more than the sum of its physical parts.

If we were to approach the question objectively, we could say that if so much as a single atom had changed, it would no longer be the same. However, it would also not be a 'broom'. It would be a bunch of atoms floating about in the ether, together with all the other atoms in the entirety of the universe. In fact, even that description is partially conceptual—the reality is much more depressing.

Objective reality is not meaningful to us, and that is why we apply our own meanings. A 'broom' cannot exist objectively—it can only exist as an application of conceptual identity, and that means it comes as part of a package: it has a name, a form, a history, a function, an assignment of ownership, and sometimes even sentimental value.

Changing any individual facet does not affect its conceptual whole, providing too many changes are not made simultaneously. So for example:

• Calling it a '箒' instead of a broom
• Never using it for its intended purpose
• Giving the broom to somebody else (changing its ownership)
• Swapping out a physical constituent part with another part that is conceptually equivalent

Every time an individual facet is changed, the identity of the broom adapts to accommodate the change. It does not become a different broom, because the bulk of its identity remains unchanged from the previous instance. As such, it can claim to maintain continuity over time.

* Now, if you were to take the original discarded shaft and the original discarded head and reassembled them, then that would be a new broom (of presumably limited value). I don't make the rules...

This is of course a rationalisation of an emotionally based claim. It doesn't matter though: objective criteria do not apply, because conceptual reality is whatever we collectively agree that it is.

Views from the Abyss #54: The Comfort Zone

Q. You’ve talked a lot about fantasy bubbles, and how people filter the information they receive to maintain the integrity of the bubble. How is it that a bubble gets formed in the first place, and how does it become so sturdy?

A. All fantasy bubbles, whether they’re political, ideological, religious, or just plain old insane in nature, have the following in common:

1. They are each formed around an emotional core.
2. Facts, truth and knowledge are irrelevant, once the emotional core is established.

The process will vary from person to person, but generally follows a similar pattern:

Establish a Receptive State
Children up to their late teens and even their early twenties frequently have not yet established a robust fantasy bubble. As such, they remain in a receptive state—they are still able to consume new information raw, unfiltered.

A receptive state can also be induced in numerous ways, such as enrolment in a college course that requires one to accept new information unfiltered in order to pass an exam. Personal tragedies or general malaise often end up pushing people towards religious institutions in a similarly receptive state.

Introduce New Information in Bulk
These can be ideological or politically based college course teachings, religious learnings, paranoid whackjobbery, or simply one’s own parents discussing current affairs over breakfast. It doesn’t matter. When the subject is in a receptive state, it will all be taken in unfiltered and unchallenged.

Make it All Make Sense
A bulk of new information swimming around in your head can be daunting. Don’t worry though—if there is any degree of consistency to any of it, any hint of a common thread at all, your brain will find it and internalise it, often without your help or knowledge.

This is how the emotional core is formed. You develop a comfort zone—an intrinsic feeling which makes all the new information seemingly fall into its “rightful” place. In fact, you’ll find yourself surprised that it didn’t make sense in the first place.

Filter Filter Filter
Once a fantasy bubble has been established, new information can no longer be treated equally. New information that supports the fantasy will instinctively feel true, and can be freely added to what is already there. New information that contradicts it will instinctively feel false, and it isn’t hard to find rational sounding reasons to reject it, even if they do sound utterly ludicrous to everybody else.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a hardcore ideologue, or a self-professed “neutral", your fantasy bubble defines your comfort zone, and it will reject on your behalf any new information deemed likely to cause discomfort.

Facts and reason are no longer welcome in your head.

Views from the Abyss #53: The Lie that Wasn't

Q. With regards to the recent terrorist attack in Manchester, a journalist knowingly took a story about a Sikh taxi driver giving free rides and presented him as a Muslim. Is this a smoking gun of journalistic dishonesty?

A. That is certainly one interpretation.

However, I would propose an alternative scenario, that is equally consistent with the known facts, and expands on our recent discussion of fantasy bubbles. In addition, it offers the possibility of actually engaging in discussion, rather than firing condemnation snipe shots across the Twazzer.

In this proposed scenario, the journalist did not lie. To call it a liar over such a minor detail would be hand waved as derailment.

What the journalist is, however, is a racist. But you won’t get very far with that approach either.

So let us transport ourselves into the fantasy bubble of our hypothetical modern ‘progressive’, and see what we find lurking in the cobwebs.

The race problem

The West has a major problem with racism. It is a definitive property of the Western mindset, always has been, and is no better now than it ever has been in the past. And when we say 'Western mindset', we’re obviously talking about white people.

Racism is a problem caused and perpetuated uniquely by white people, and only white people are capable of fighting it. In any other circumstance, this very mindset would be called ‘racism’, as it not only condones the condemnation of one race, but combines it with low expectation bigotry towards all the others. However, the intent is benevolent towards the ‘right’ races, which makes this the ‘right’ kind of racism. Which isn’t really racism at all at the end of the day. My conscience is clear. 

So how do we know that there is a problem with racism? Because we have perceived evidence that supports this conclusion, and ignored all evidence that doesn’t. 

In recent times, brown skinned people, especially those from Middle Eastern countries, have been under repeated and constant attack by hateful bigots. We know this also, because we have perceived evidence that supports this conclusion, and ignored all evidence that doesn’t. 

What makes this particularly hard to stomach is the constant need to rationalise their bigotry on cultural and ideological grounds. A reprehensible individual who happens to be of the Islamic faith causes an atrocity, and so they claim the whole religion is bad. A tiny minority of migrants/refugees fail to observe social niceties in a host country they’ve only recently entered (sometimes more seriously than others, admittedly), and so they claim that all immigration is bad. 

A handful of incidents couldn’t possibly represent the peaceful majority. It’s all just a weak excuse to justify their personal hatred of an entire population of people based solely on their skin colour. 

‘Islamaphobia’, as they call it, is just targeted racism under an intellectual sounding name. 

This week, a Middle Eastern man caused an atrocity in Manchester, and the bigots were quick to condemn his entire race over it. We’re trying to show these bigots that the majority of Middle Eastern men are as helpful and generous as you would expect any well adjusted British person to be. 

In some of the examples, sure—they weren’t technically Muslims, but sometimes you have to speak the bigots’ language in order to get through to them. So what do they focus on? Of course, they focus on that one word, as if it invalidates the entire rest of the message, the message being that these people they hate so much are demonstrably doing a lot more good in the community than they are.

Meanwhile...
Well that was unpleasant—the progressive fantasy bubble reeks of stale patchouli and avocado toast.

One might observe at this juncture a number of issues with the logic. For example, taking an absolute minority as representative of the norm, while condemning others for doing the same; cherry picking evidence that supports a conclusion while ignoring that which doesn’t. You may have even spotted the assertion of concealed motives into entire populations of people you’ve never met, and we all know how harmful that can be.

Do not make the mistake though of thinking that these people are merely deluded—these are things that we all do, and the ‘progressive’ view is remarkably consistent with known facts when compared to other common world views.

What is important to understand though, is that while the apparent lie about somebody’s religion appears to be some sort of Gotcha, you will never convince anybody on the other side of this, because you’ll just end up having two completely unrelated conversations with neither of you any the wiser by the end.