CSotD: Trace Amounts of Facts
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This morning's Barney & Clyde fits in with several discussions I've had recently and a couple I've avoided because it would be futile.
The specific key-in is a conversation about dog food, because the plethora of "this brand will kill your dog" postings on social media suggests a little corporate meddling in things. People who champion small makers are (heh heh) doggedly loyal, and also doggedly proud of using something other people don't, but I find it hard to believe the rumors against major brands, given how frequently they appear, are being started by individuals acting on their own.
Passed along, yes. It doesn't take much of a push to get users of "All Natural Organic Gluten-Free Kanine Kale" to pass along a rumor that Purina or Iams or some other mainstream company is selling toxic, contaminated dog food.
Some dogs do better on one food than another, but dogs are scavengers and their systems are pretty much set up to process anything that stays down and to bring up anything that doesn't meet their very flexible standards.
Unlike the children of vegan parents, they can't quietly grab a burger in the school cafeteria, but I've seen plenty of pups whose owners pay big bucks for all-meat kibble happily eating grass at the park.
Not to mention what else they will chow down if you don't catch them in time.
Dog food is hardly the only place pseudoscience and purposeful rumor-mongering rear their heads.
Since Flint, we don't see as many postings about how the water at your tap is just as good as bottled spring water, but a group pushing organic food detected trace elements of a pesticide in Ben & Jerry's, which proves the stuff will kill you.
Or not. Smithsonian wasn't falling for it.
If you eat 145,000 eight-ounce scoops of ice cream a day, it might kill ya, though probably not, since that only brings you to the warning level.
The fact that we can now detect meaninglessly small amounts of just about anything in just about anything feeds the fears of people inclined to be fearful, but I have to believe the people who put these things in motion know the difference, and know that finding it in a semi-groovy product like Ben & Jerry's will spark more shares than finding it in a store-brand that nobody expects to be healthy.
Anyway, if your dog gets sick, it's probably not the Iams or Purina.
It's because you had him vaccinated.
No rumor-mongering there
If anyone starts posting pseudoscience poison-pen rumors about Great Leap Forward Dog Chow, it won't take long to track them down. Tjeerd Royaards notes China's crackdown on anonymity, and Apple's agreement to stop making anonymizing apps available in that country.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. One of the benefits of globalization is that thing of how two countries with McDonalds franchises don't go to war against each other, which sounds like having a KFC in Beijing means we learn about each other and love each other, but actually means that, when you start intermingling your economies, you hesitate to blow each other up.
So having Apple in China adds to the entangling, and any mutual understanding that happens is simply a side benefit.
And besides, Apple has long since accepted China's laws about workplace safety and minimum wages, so why not accept their restrictions on anonymous posting?
I mean, we're not even talking about trace amounts of hypocrisy, given that Apple isn't the company that promises not to be evil. Or used to.
It is, however, important to point out — as Dan Wasserman does — the fact that Apple has kowtowed to Chinese restrictions, if only to counter the suggestion that having that KFC means we're all one big happy family.
We're not, and, while we should do whatever we can to bring China out from behind its Great Wall, we can't expect them to suddenly become an open society like ours any more than they should expect us to begin providing medical care to our people like they do.
The comforting notion being that people truly dedicated to samizdat don't need to download their tools from Apple and I'm sure will discover ways to persist.
Wad Some Power the Giftie Gie Us Department
Zapiro takes time off from his country's own convoluted, disastrous politics to comment on ours.
On one of my recent plane rides, I was next to a South African, an Afrikaaner from the Free State, and confessed to him that I'd lost track of their political system along about the time when oligarchs began eating sushi arranged on the bodies of girls in bikinis and building elaborate residences for Jacob Zuma and that it was simply too complex for me to understand most of the cartoons coming out of that corner of the globe.
He was totally sympathetic and I gather that keeping up with the latest scandal and disaster isn't much easier from the inside.
The difference between our countries being that, while no man is an island and all that, South Africa does not have the sort of presence in the world that requires everyone to fret over their internal foolishness.
The whole world is watching us, as it bloody well better.
While Trudeau pere delivered the famous aphorism about sleeping with an elephant, globalization is such that you don't need to be right next door to be aware of every twitch and grunt, or to worry about what happens if it rolls over.
Trace amounts of human decency
Mike Thompson sums up the latest twitter-pated crusade from the White House.
I've often said that I don't think Trump has the patience or wit to launch active distractions, but I do think his recent attacks on transgender military personnel and, now, minority recruitment by colleges is a cynical attempt to shore up his standing with the bigoted screwballs who are his core constituency.
Bonus! One of my favorite gotchas
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