The Daily Insult

Anything approaching a fully satisfactory explanation of the phenomena of knowledge requires the co-operative efforts of all those who believe that there is a world of real existence independent of human minds and that this real existence can be truly known as it really is.

— Francis Parker, “Realistic Epistemology”

In this section, I shall post brief discussions of errors in logic in commercials, news items, fiction — errors that just vex me. I just need a place to get this stuff out of my system. [Note: “Daily” in this context should not lead the reader to expect that I will be posting something every day.]

May 8, 2018

The University of Florida is the setting for today’s insult to intelligence — yours and mine.

During a graduation ceremony, some of the students — black and unidentified minority — celebrated their success with a bit of victory dancing. They were pushed off the stage by a white faculty member, who seems to have been concerned that they were holding things up.

Of course, screams of “racism!” followed. After all, he was white, and they weren’t. As the Daily Mail reported, “parents and current students ... claim the staff member was only physical with black and other minority students.”

Does it seem to you that that claim has any merit? It’s supposed to seem that way to you, but that’s because you’re supposed to be incapable of thinking about what you read in the newspapers.

The problem here may not be the parents’ and the students’; it may just be a case of the sloppiness and incuriosity that characterizes so much of what we are given to think of as journalism. (What do they teach them in those schools?) Surely the claim of the parents and the students has merit only if there were some non-black or non-minority students similarly holding up the proceedings and if they were not manhandled.

Well ... were there? How is it racism to be “physical” only to non-white students, if no white students were engaged in the behavior that elicited the “physical” response? Should the faculty member have “gotten physical” with people who were not holding up the proceeding? Would that have made everyone happy?

Quite frankly, I don’ give a tinker’s dam whether the faculty member was racist or not. Who knows what that term is supposed to mean, anyhow? What I do care about is that when reports are published they actually convey information, not merely guide us readers to have the proper feelings about it. It’s not that hard, you know, to ask relevant questions or to report relevant facts. In this case, anyone who saw the incident could have supplied the answer to anyone who was curious enough to ask the question.

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