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.)

A Depraved Nation?

I was happy to see President Obama take some action this week to tighten US gun control laws, if only moderately.

Somehow in America, with 10 times more gun homicides than most other industrialized countries, taking even these small steps is considered a bold move. (Obama’s opponents consider it tyranny, but such thinking belongs to a wholly different realm of reality.)

For folks in Finland (with only one-sixteenth America’s level of gun violence) it’s probably almost impossible to comprehend what a big deal the gun issue is in the US, and how passionate – sometime hysterical, in my mind – supporters of gun rights can be. Just check the comment section of any on-line article on gun control. They are rife with excessive anger and alarm and well-worn arguments against gun control.

One pro-gun argument that you will always run across is that it’s not, heaven forbid, the easy access to guns that accounts for the high number of gun deaths in America, since guns by themselves cannot do anything.

This line of reasoning is summed up by the pithy phrase, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”.

Well, duh.

Of course, in most cases, a person does have to pull the trigger, though that has been known on occasion to be done instead by, for example, a hunting dog. Dropping a loaded gun on the kitchen floor might also do the trick. Such things happen often enough.

Fleshing out the “people are the problem” argument a bit more, gun lobby groups like the all-mighty NRA would say that the real issue lies somewhere else. In a culture of violence inspired by Hollywood or the makers of video games. Or in the general erosion of society. Or – a new favorite nowadays – they would say the problem lies in the abysmal level of mental-health care that America has found itself saddled with.

To me, most of these alternative arguments are weak deflections, especially since I tend to see the problem from a more international perspective.

Countries with much lower rates of gun violence, such as most European nations, are also awash with violent Hollywood films and video games. They’re not so different from America in that sense. What they are not awash with, however, are easily available firearms, and that to me seems more likely to be the differentiating factor.

Let’s take for example a recent story in the Washington Post highlighting how on this past Christmas Day in America 27 people were intentionally killed by guns, a number that equals the number of gun deaths in eight other countries. Eight other countries combined. For one entire year.

To spell it out more clearly: a year’s worth of gun deaths in Austria, New Zealand, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong, and Iceland (let’s call them “the Peaceful Eight”) tallied all together match America’s gun death toll from a single day, Christmas Day.

And this doesn’t include accidental shootings or suicides. Also, Christmas, being a holiday celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace, was a slow day for killing. Normally, on an average day, it’s more like 36 homicides from guns.

When I saw that dismal statistic, I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (well, actually, I used excel, but you get the idea) in order to get a better comparison.

Naturally, you’ve got to account for the fact that the US is a much bigger country than all those eight nations (Bermuda? Are you kidding?) put together. The per capita gun death toll for the Peaceful Eight, comes to about 91 per 100 million inhabitants, compared to the US figure of 8 deaths (based on last Christmas’ death count).

But, of course, that’s 91 deaths spread over 365 days. When you annualize the US figure, you’re looking at a yearly toll of 3055 killings per 100 million Americans. That’s 33 times the number of people killed by guns in the Peaceful Eight. If you use the more typical daily average of 36 Americans killed by guns (a yearly sum of 4073 per 100 million population), it’s more like a 45-fold difference.

That's 45 times more gun deaths in America than in these eight otherwise similarly civilized and advanced nations. I’ve visited four of them, and they seem normal to me. Happy, even.

I should point out that the Washington Post didn’t just randomly pick those eight disparate nations to compare to the US. The Post article links to a chart produced by GunPolicy.org, a gun-control advocacy group. The chart compares annual gun deaths in 22 developed nations*.  (Of course, anti-gun control folks will immediately howl that you can’t trust data from any such site. I’m willing to believe the data are accurate enough.)

As it happens, the less-violent right-hand end of GunPolicy’s chart is occupied by the Peaceful Eight, whose total yearly output of gun murder victims conveniently (for the Post article) exactly equals 27, the US Christmas death toll. On the other end of the scale, France is noticeably bloodier, with 140, based on data from 2012, which naturally doesn't include the horrific November terrorist attack in Paris.  

Some might accuse the Washington Post of cherry-picking the data, though the fact remains that France’s "typical" 140 deaths from gunshot (210 per 100 million) is still better than America’s 4073.

The chart also indicates that Finland suffers 17 gun deaths a year*. That comes to 309 per 100 million, and 13 times fewer than in America.

So, let’s assume, as the NRA and their ilk would have us do, that the overwhelming presence of guns in America doesn’t explain the 45-fold difference in deaths compared to the Peaceful Eight. What if we take the "guns don't kill people" argument at face value? 

If we assume people are solely to blame, not the guns, then my only conclusion is that Americans are 45 times more violent than the citizens of Austria, New Zealand, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong, and Iceland. Forty-five times more bloodthirsty than those other folks. Forty-five times more depraved. Americans apparently value human life 45 times less than people in the Peaceful Eight or, if you will, 13 times less than Finns do.

Given the history of the US, I have to concede this might be the case. America is violent place. As one of my favorite writers, Edward Abbey, once said, “There is nothing more American than violence”. Maybe that explains it all. Still, that is not a happy thought.

Or, maybe Americans aren’t really so exceptionally violent after all, at least not 45-times more violent. 

Maybe the average Austrian or New Zealander, or Finn for that matter, is actually just as bloodthirsty or unhinged as the average American. It’s just that they, unlike most Americans, can’t so easily reach for a gun whenever they get the urge to kill. 

I'd like to think that was true, and that Americans aren't actually that depraved. But that's not what the NRA would like you to think. 

© GunPolicy.org 2016

*The data in the GunPolicy.org chart for different countries are derived from different years, so no one single year is used for all of the comparisons.

Wide Open Shopping

The first year I attended the University of Georgia, in Athens, I lived in an apartment complex called Callaway Gardens near a busy four-lane highway lined with fast food joints and other roadside businesses. To me, this was city living. With some 50,000 inhabitants at the time, Athens was the biggest town I had ever lived it – and with the exception of Helsinki, it still is.

On the other side of the highway from my apartment, at the bottom of a hill, was a Kroger supermarket. It was the closest big grocery store and was open 24 hours a day. I recall once going there with my roommates at 3 o’clock in the morning to do our food shopping because...well, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was just because we could. Maybe we were pulling an all-nighter. Who knows? As you might expect, the place was practically deserted. No waiting at the checkout lanes.

Anyway, I was thus introduced to the convenience of 3 a.m. shopping, something that Athenians had perhaps been enjoying for years. That was in 1976.

It was very different when I moved to Helsinki a few years later. Like many European nations, Finland had always imposed strict limits on when stores could open their doors, the result of the combined influence of the national churches and the labor unions. I’m not quite sure why the clergy and unions should object so strongly to Sunday shopping, since almost no one goes to church anyway and retail workers get paid extra if they work outside regular weekday hours.

In any case, when I came here in the 80s, Sunday opening was still strictly verboten, except for service stations and kiosks. Other days of the week, stores were allowed do business only beginning at eight in the morning and had to close by eight in the evening (or six on Saturdays).

Opening hours were gradually expanded in the 1990s by two hours to between seven and nine (but still only to six on Saturdays). Even then, no shopping on the Sabbath for the Finns.

It feels like only yesterday (okay, it was in fact in 2000) that larger stores were finally allowed to open on most Sundays (between noon and six), much to the relief of hordes of working parents. Suddenly, we didn’t have to squeeze our major weekly shopping into Saturdays. Oh, the luxury of being able to push an overflowing cart of groceries around a big box store until 6 o’clock on a Sunday!

That’s the way it has stayed for most of this century, with some additional gradual loosening of opening hours in recent years for smaller stores (under 400 square meters in size) and even for bigger ones on certain religious holidays, mainly Epiphany (loppiainen, in Finnish), when stores have the chance to harvest extra business from Russian tourists making Christmas holiday visits from across the border.

(January 6^th, which in Finland is Epiphany, the day the Magi brought presents to Baby Jesus, is celebrated as Christmas Eve in Russia, due to the Russian Orthodox Church clinging to the old calendar created under Julius Caesar. No fancy 16^th-century tinkering around with the calendar by Pope Gregory for them!)

Even with expanded opening times, some other public holidays have remained sacred. An American tourist making a port call from a cruise ship this summer was interviewed on a Helsinki street by a TV reporter. He complained bitterly how on his one and only day in the Finnish capital absolutely no shops were open. It was Juhannus, Midsummer’s Day, a day of relaxing and partying in the countryside. Who would want to shop then anyway?

As of six days ago, however, the gates of the Finnish shopping world have been thrown wide open. A new law removes absolutely any restrictions on opening hours, leaving it entirely up to any retail businesses to decide how to arrange its business hours, even allowing them to open on any public holidays. It’s up to the store to decide if staying open late or on holidays justifies the higher salaries that employees get for those hours.

It’s a huge change for Finland, and probably quite unusual in Europe. For example, the EU capital Brussels still closes shut at six, eight at the latest.

Our local suburban grocery is open today, though not for the first time on Epiphany. Thanks to the new law, it will soon introduce new hours, staying open until ten, even on Saturdays and Sundays.

Will I ever be able to walk over there at 3 a.m. to load up on fish sticks, cheese and potatoes? For that store, as for most others in Helsinki, I doubt operating around the clock would ever make economic sense. And anyway I doubt I’d want to shop again in the dead of night. 

But you never know. 

Finns bustling at the Sello shopping mall near Helsinki. Photo by Skorpion87.

A Sentimental Journey

A couple of weeks ago, I made a slightly weird trip to America, to my home state of Georgia. It wasn’t exactly an impromptu trip, but it was unexpected in some ways, even extraordinary.

In the past, I usually traveled to my native land with my family during the summer, when the kids were out of school, back before they were all grown up. This time I went alone, and this time it was in autumn, a season in which I have found myself in America only once in the past quarter-century.

As odd as the timing was, the route I took was also unusual. It was convoluted, you might even say highly impractical and in some small way adventurous. I hope to share some impressions from that trip in later posts, hopefully before they fade. We’ll see.

Ever since my father died in 2006, I have had some unfinished family business back in Georgia that I’ve kept putting off, especially as my visits back there became less frequent. I am even now a bit shocked to realize I have been to Georgia only twice in the past ten years, and the last time was over five years ago. I guess that’s how things go.

Anyway, feeling that I finally couldn’t put off making a short trip to Georgia any longer, I jumped at the chance when I saw that SAS was offering super cheap flights to the States this autumn. Only, none of these flights was to Atlanta. The closest destination was, in fact, Washington, D.C.

Still, I convinced myself that Washington, on the edge of Dixie, is not that far from North Georgia. And, I’m always certainly up for doing a little road trip, although doing one solo was a completely new experience for me.

Anyway, that’s how I found myself in the States, road tripping on my own some 500 miles (800 km) to Georgia, not exactly on holiday, but driven by a need – a need tinged with profoundly bittersweet expectations – to wrap up some personal affairs.

One item on that agenda was the bringing back to Finland of an heirloom, my father’s guitar. That was a small challenge in itself, considering how we are long past the golden age of passenger-friendly air travel when you could bring all manner of luggage onto planes without incurring extra charges.

I was also acutely aware that wrapping up things, finally, at the old homestead meant I might not be coming back again for some time. Or maybe I will. Who knows? In any event, when you leave any place there is never a guarantee that you will ever return. 

So, my quick trip Stateside had all the makings for a very sentimental journey, and it was. 

I was able to re-connect with some places from my previous life. I was able to spend time with close relatives I don’t often see, though sadly only a few, so short was the time. And I was able to get some superficial feeling for what’s going on now in that part of America – on the ground, as they say.

It seems I should be able, after such a trip, to sit down and reflect on all the places I went and all the things I did, process it all and then discover one or two gems of understanding, of revelation, of self-awareness that sums up the whole experience. If there are such "gems" to discover, that is.

The best I can come up with is this:  We should try as hard as we can to hang onto family, no matter how distant and different we might be. The passage of time is relentless. It can be a brutal reality to face. The past really is past – sometimes a hard, but necessary, truth to grapple with. And the landscape of my own past life, still familiar from so many memories, is moving on without me, making me feel less and less a part of it. 

With each long-delayed visit back there, America seems increasingly to me to be a weird place in some ways. More than ever, the country I grew up (especially the South) and I seem to be diverging, moving further apart. Traveling to my hometown, I felt more than ever like a mere visitor there, a foreigner. I guess that's natural after so long. 

To quote the writer Thomas Wolfe, whose own hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, I paid a quick visit to during this trip: “You can’t go home again.”

Tell me about it. 

Selfie somewhere deep in the woods of North Georgia. 
I do miss the sunshine.

Listen, Ben Carson, Always Listen!

After recently watching a video clip from Fox News, I realized that Dr. Ben Carson, Republican candidate for president of the United States, is in big, big trouble.

In the video, Carson is trying to explain to Megyn Kelly why he, like Donald Trump, has been claiming that, during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack that shook the world, he saw Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, when in actual fact he did not see this at all. It was all a misunderstanding that arose from a confusing encounter with a journalist.

I think I see where his problem lies, and as someone who has done a bit of media training in the past, I feel qualified enough to offer Carson one small piece of basic (and free) advice on how to answer questions from reporters.

And here it is. When facing down journalists, it is of utmost importance to listen to their questions and understand them fully before answering. Listen to all the words.

This is especially important if the question is a long one, say more than four words or so.

Although you may be struggling to stay awake, you must force yourself to listen to the entire question. Otherwise, you might miss some crucial detail that makes your response look foolish, and require you to appear on TV later to explain to yet another reporter what you actually meant. Failing to listen can lead to a tedious and vicious cycle of endless Q&As.

Let’s take this entirely hypothetical set of questions that a cunning journalist might throw at any unsuspecting presidential candidate.

Reporter: “Were American Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11 when the Towers fell? Did you hear about that or see that?”

Not only is the first question 13 words long, it is immediately followed by a second question that, on the surface, seems intended to clarify the first, but might only serve to confuse the candidate. This combination requires extra concentration.

Beware also of the specificity of some parts of the question, specificity that you might miss without proper listening. “Were American Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11 when the Towers fell?”

Use of such specificity by journalists is a well-known “gotcha” tactic for tripping up candidates. By slipping some specific details into the question’s “word salad” of nouns, verbs, etc., the reporter is hoping to pin you down to a concrete position, whereas you would prefer to answer in vague generalities, as is your God-given right.

Without careful listening, you may be lured into answering this question with a simple “Yes”.

This will lead the liberal media into believing that you saw American Muslims cheering in New Jersey on 9/11 when the Towers fell – when that could not be further from the truth.

Though pithy, one-word answers can pose additional problems. They may lead the reporter to badger you further with follow-up questions such as: “Can you expand on that?”

You may be tempted to answer this follow-up with the common-sense observation that:

“There are going to be people who respond inappropriately to everything. I think that was an inappropriate response.”

Still obsessed with pointless specificity, the reporter may see this perfectly appropriate statement of opinion as an evasion of the original question, and pursue you further with a new gotcha question, such as: “Did you see that happening, though?”

Exasperated, you might feel compelled to answer in detail about how you witnessed the particular incident of people cheering, an event which the reporter can’t seem to move on from.

For example, you might say: “I saw the film of it, yes.”

Then, out of the blue, a different reporter – obviously in cahoots with the first – shoots off another, completely unrelated gotcha question: “In New Jersey?”

In your haste to be done with the matter, you might be tempted not to wait to fully understand the question.

Not so fast. The phrase “In New Jersey?” conceals some dangerous specificity that could affect your response. It could be interpreted by unforgiving political observers as referring to a particular geographic area. Without carefully parsing the words “In New Jersey?” you may not recognize the reporter’s hidden “agenda” of trying to pinpoint where you claim the cheering incident took place.

In other words, being too quick to answer with a “Yes” puts you in a position of appearing to agree that the event you witnessed occurred in some place called New Jersey, and that you appear somehow to know where that is.

This might become awkward later as you find yourself attempting to clarify to Megyn Kelly on Fox News that, in fact, you had no clue what the reporter was asking, and certainly didn’t understand that she was talking about that New Jersey – where naturally enough you never saw American Muslims cheering on 9/11.

Simply listening carefully to actual words can sometime save even the most inattentive non-politician from a world of embarrassment. It’s worth giving it a try sometime.

(Postscript: I feel a bit bad about making so much fun of Ben Carson, who is doubtless a pleasant guy, but as presidential candidate comes across as a clueless and/or self-delusional huckster. If I were a Republican, I’d be extremely pissed that so many of my fellow Republicans take him seriously enough to make him a frontrunner. I’d be ashamed. I really would.)