Monday, April 13, 2009

Is decoy effect the right word?

While i was championing the sport of wasting time i came across a blog that i would have enjoyed a lot more up until a month ago - back when i shared the writer’s frustration with the J O B.
My guilty confession is that i came across it while trying to find this particular American Idol's twitter. (yes, yes, i know - Olympic Gold Medalist in Waste of Time) I will remember to keep my AI obsession off my Harvard application...

So the blogger writes about what he calls the decoy effect, and when i read it I remembered a random thought.
Last year when the world’s worst boss stopped giving me work to do i started staying home more than ever. In the mornings you get old shows. So i started following this show called "American Dreams" which isn't an old production but place during the war in Vietnam. I remember thinking to myself, that show can be about today if only Vietnam will be renamed Iraq and the Russians would be renamed the Muslims.
Things haven't changed much, really. An old evil is replaced by a new one, hate is just shifted from one place to the next. For the old evil life is good, next to the man with the beard in a funny dress the black man with a scar on his cheek looks far less threatening.

I actually have no problem with that theory - if you think the world is, or even should be, fair then you're incredibly disillusioned, it isn't and it won't.

But the thing is that hate breeds hate. Before 9/11, there were much less people willing to strap on some explosives and go bomb some white ass. You can totally see the proliferation of hate over the last 8 years. Every person is shifting one inch closer to hate. Those who love the west, now only like it, those who liked it, now only accept it, those who accepted it, don't want to tolerate it, those who tolerated, decided not to verbally object, and those who verbally objected started organizing demonstrations and those who were already demonstrating have been pushed to the deep dark side. 8 years were enough for one person to keep shifting inch by inch.

And because this time we're not talking about a single country with borders, we're talking about people scattered over the world who can easily escape from the eyes of the law, the hate cannot be stopped overnight. It would take years to un-hate.

So you look at how things went down in these recent years and think, couldn't this have been handled better? The west reached the right root cause of the problem - lack of democracy, poverty and ignorance. Not to take away our responsibility in this whole thing, but couldn't the west have done better?
That said, I don't really disagree with the fact that Muslim extremism is something that needs to be dealt with, and if i were the one having to deal with this - I’d be pretty annoyed having to deal with the mess that my retarded little brother let grow out of proportions because of his mere incompetence and greed.

I think that's probably my first pro-Arab thought ever (minus the incompetence and greed bit - wouldn' want to get too carried away, would i)

2 comments:

Ibraheem said...

oh, your three blogs are hilarious!, definitely on my reader!

Superluli said...

why ibraheem, you made me blush :)
thanks