Net Stupidity - The Voter Fraud Edition

A few weeks ago, I saw on the Internet one of those provocative memes about all the voter fraud that supposedly took place in the 2012 presidential race.

At the top of a list of "very suspicious" voting "irregularities" was the fact that in 59 districts around Philadelphia, not a single vote was cast for Mitt Romney. Not even one.

This, the "author" of the meme informed the Internet universe, was a "statistical and mathematical impossibility". 

Now, I'm pathetic at math (ask my wife), but even I realized that that was a dumb statement. "Impossibility" is a strong word. The rest of the list of alleged Democratic transgressions was even more sketchy.

I really don't understand why people who are trying to make a point have to resort to making stuff up. I guess it's because the facts, in some cases even reality, are otherwise not on their side. Sad.

Net Stupidity – The Mexican Wall Edition

The Internet meme below has recently popped up in my Facebook feed. As you can see, it shows a fence, topped with what looks like razor-wire, identified as “Mexico’s Southern Border”.

The point the meme is trying to make (in mostly fluent English) is that Americans should not be demonized for wanting a big-ass wall on the border with Mexico – the kind of wall that Donald Trump can’t stop talking about – since Mexico protects its own southern border with a “full border fenceline” complete with “barbed wire, armed guards, and towers”. In other words, the fence in the photo.

I can’t say I’m familiar with the Mexican-Guatemalan border, but the photo didn’t quite look right to me. You might expect a lusher, tropical look to the surroundings. But, what do I know?

So, I Googled the meme. What I found was an article on Snopes.com, the web site dedicated to fact-checking various dubious political claims. (Conservatives love to trash Snopes as being, from their point of view, liberally biased. I don’t know, maybe it is, though that doesn’t make it wrong.)

Snopes had not fact-checked this particular meme, but a similar one featuring a photo of a different kind of border barrier. 

Now, this photo is instantly recognizable as fake, in the sense that the fence is stretching across a parched, desert landscape, nowhere near the verdant Eden of Guatemala.

The ironic thing about this meme is that the “gigantic WALL” allegedly built by Mexico on its southern border – a formidable wall that the US should get off its ass and start building – is actually a section of the border fence the US has already built along the Mexican border.

(A murky detail about this meme: it was supposedly posted on the Facebook page of a “group” called “Americans for Common Sense”, which appears to me to be decidedly liberal-leaning. Also, the meme is no longer to be found on that Facebook page. Was someone punked?)

Anyway, to return to the first meme, it turns out someone on Facebook did some fact-checking of their own and identified the photo as originating from a Chinese manufacturer of wire-mesh fences.

Wire-mesh fences for prisons. Heavily guarded prisons. Let’s be honest, how unassailable would a wire-mesh fence like that be on the lesser-observed stretches of the Guatemalan border? With a decent pair of bolt cutters, you’d be through that thing in a Tijuana minute.

So, according the meme, America should follow Mexico’s example and secure its border by, if nothing else, erecting a mickey-mouse wire-mesh fence. Made in China, no less.

Now, you may argue that the real point of the meme is that Mexico has stricter immigration polices than America does (I don’t know), and this fact is represented by a photo of a fence, some fence, any fence.

Or the creator of the meme may be trying to highlight that Mexico has taken the issue seriously enough to at least build some kind of physical barrier along its entire southern border, though sadly you can’t find a decent enough photo of the actual fence to illustrate that point. At least they have a fence.

I’m not even sure that’s true. According to Wikipedia, Mexico has ten formal border crossings with Guatemala and 370 informal ones. In order to better stem the flow of illegal migrants, it seems Mexico is currently upgrading some of the informal border crossings to formal ones. There is no mention of a fence. Nada. A map published in the Economist last December did show a “fence” on Mexico’s southern border, but as one being “planned”, not “begun”.

So, I suspect that the US southern border really isn’t really less protected than Mexico’s.

Nice try, though, with the meme. 

Well, no, actually it was a pathetic try, but that doesn't stop it from being passed around constantly on the net. Of course, it doesn't.

The real Mexican-Guatemalan border.

Photo: Fernando Reyes

Net Stupidity – The “What Do I Know” Edition

More than anything, Donald Trump seems to be a creature of new media. He is a reality-TV show star turned presidential candidate who engages with the public using Twitter and seems to glean his understanding of the wider world mainly from “the Internet”.

It’s the gleaning of the Internet that I find the most troubling and scary. 

A case in point involves the protester who tried to jump on the stage where Trump was speaking on Saturday, before being stopped by Secret Service agents. For the record, it was a stupid, completely unconstructive act of protest. It was a stunt that did nobody any good, certainly not anyone who hopes Trump doesn't become president.

Still, it did serve to reveal something truly bizarre, and pernicious, about Donald Trump.

Trump immediately afterward referred to the protester, Thomas Dimassimo, as probably being “an ISIS supporter”. This was apparently based on a video of Dimassimo that was crudely edited by someone to make it “look” like Daesh propaganda.

That is, if the editing had been done by Eric Cartman. 

Someone took a video of Dimassimo (who happens to be originally from Georgia, like me)  at an earlier anti-flag protest, then simply added a weird Daesh graphic at the beginning and overlaid it with authentic Daesh music.  

While people who know something about these things declared the video to be a hoax, Trump jumped on it as one more reason Americans should be scared out of their minds (and, based on the level of support for Trump, apparently they are).

Now, what scares me more is this: someone who might be soon be president promptly labels a random, though more energetic than average, protester as a jihadist terrorist, based solely on a half-assed hoax video posted on some fringe website (it might have well been this one).

That was Trump’s first instinct, to elevate a ham-fisted protest act into a terror threat. That is not a sign of a calm, measured, stable temperament, the kind of temperament you’d want in someone controlling the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Or even its postal system, for that matter.

Not only that. When confronted with the fact that the video Trump had overreacted to had been a hoax, he explained his rush to judgement this way:

“And, supposedly there was chatter about ISIS. Now, I don’t know. What do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the Internet.” (Emphasis mine.)

Yes. All he knows is what’s on the Internet. And, if it’s on the Internet, well, there must be something to it then. Right? Like the thousands of cheering Muslims he imagined seeing in New Jersey on 9/11. Or, the Birther conspiracy that President Obama was born in Kenya.

Now, maybe he’s completely cynical and doesn’t believe any of this. Maybe his actual first instinct is to know what kind of nonsense will rile up his supporters, truth be damned, and then stoke it for maximum pandering effect. Maybe there’s some comfort in that notion.

But if not, and he really is so gullible as to chase almost any scary-sounding Internet conspiracy down a rabbit hole, then heaven help us all if he does become president. 

Dumpster.

(Photo: Niteowlneils)

Net Stupidity – The Isis Coke Edition

The internet is a double-edged sword. With just a few keystrokes or mouse clicks, you have a world of information and experiences available to you. And photos of cats. So many cats.

At the same time, the net can be a portal to a world of stupidity that you would otherwise never know existed. Okay, of course, we all know stupidity exists, often in the form of someone running for political office. But without the internet you might never realize the truly breathtaking extent of all the stupidity.

I ran across one prime example of this a while back. Someone had posted an image of a bottle of Coca-Cola with the word “Isis” printed on it, setting off a small viral firestorm. I saw where some people on Facebook in the States had even immediately started pledging to boycott Coke, for what I guess they saw as the soft drink company's insidious endorsement of a terrorist group of unspeakable cruelty.

Jesus, is that really what these people thought was going on here?

There were a few different building blocks leading to this nitwit internet outrage.

»       A couple of years ago Coke instituted a marketing campaign, “Share a Coke”, whereby the name “Coke” on bottles of the soft drink was replaced with some 250 personal names common in a given market, such as “John” or “Alice”. By all accounts, this kind of mass personalization of a consumer product was a big hit and was implemented in various countries.

»       The name “Isis” is an actual girl’s name in some nations – and presumably not only in Egypt, where it originated as the name of the ancient goddess of health, marriage and wisdom (all good things). For this reason, the name Isis has appeared on some bottles of Coke in those countries. Hence the photo that shot around the internet.

»       Meanwhile, the ultra-violent militant Islamist group that has arisen to now occupying swaths of Iraq and Syria has named itself something in Arabic (“ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fīl-ʿIrāq wash-Shām”, according to Wikipedia), which translates in English to “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. I'm guessing they don’t call themselves ISIS. Only the English-speaking world does that.

»       And it’s not even all of the English-speaking world. The US government resolutely refers to the group by the acronym “ISIL”, which is a little harder to pronounce, but is more a correct rendering of “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. 

»       On the other hand, the western media, which is where most American Coke drinkers get their news, prefers “ISIS”, derived from the alternative name for the group “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. (There is an argument for, rather than using any English acronym, referring instead to the group as "Da'eesh", the apparent Arabic abbreviation for its name. It seems that, for some reason, they hate that, which is all the more reason for doing it.)

»       Many Americans, perhaps not being so familiar with "foreign" names, would not normally recognize “Isis” as possibly being a person's name, leading some of them to jump to the conclusion that Coke was somehow promoting the brand of a terrorist group. Being hyper-jittery about Da’eesh also no doubt helped them make this leap of logic.

So in summary: Because the Arabic name of the world’s scariest terrorist group at the moment happens to translate into an English name that happens to often be referred to by a four-letter acronym that also happens to be such an ordinary name in some parts of the world that it happens to be printed on a soft-drink bottle as part of an international marketing campaign – because of all that, a series of "happens to" coincidences – some people reading the internet were outraged and, as a form of protest, ready at the drop of a hat to forswear ever again drinking their favorite soda. Ever. 

That is truly stupid. Internet stupid. 

(Post script: I’m also aware that the producers of the otherwise very intelligent and highly acclaimed British TV series “Downton Abbey” might have killed off the show’s canine character “Isis” because the lovable yellow Labrador’s name was unfortunately too closely associated with Da’eesh. If true, that was also stupid, in my mind.)