February 14, 2010

Filtering Out the Stupidity

I was just reading the article on Huffpo about the professor who went crazy and started shooting.  She killed three people and put three others in the hospital, two of whom are in critical condition

Of course, there was a wide range of opinion in the comments in the comments section, including this gem:  She could of (sic) done the same thing with any other weapon.

Now, as a disclaimer I would like to say here that I am anti-gun.  However, that is not the point I want to make in this article.  In fact, I agree with the implied point behind his post, which is that the woman in question is guilty as hell and should spend the rest of her life behind bars regardless of any arguments about guns, or sanity, or provocation or anything.  Murder is murder and guilty is guilty.

However, she could not have done the same thing with any weapon.  I have been in meetings where people picked up chairs and hit other people with them.  It is non-lethal.  If her only weapon had been a pair of scissors or a baseball bat, she undoubtedly would have been swiftly subdued.  Even a knife, although it was used to great effect by O.J. Simpson, would not have done nearly as much damage as the gun.

So, the commenters argument was a really stupid argument.  (He’s in good company.  Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s husband, once said something similarly stupid after a mass murder, saying the perpetrator could have done just as much damage with a cricket bat).

My point is that, if you want to have an intelligent conversation, one which actually examines the pros and cons and various angles of an issue, one from which we come away better informed than we went in and one which actually generates ideas and proposals, comments like this don’t help.

We need some way to filter out the stupidity.  Over at Huffpo they have a relatively strict comment policy.  There are a lot of words they won’t let you use.  Pejorative words about race and gender, words which you wouldn’t use in polite company anyway, things like that.  I think they are a bit over the top with the political correctness, but their comment boards are a lot more readable than before they instituted the policy.

If I were running the show, however, there are certain points of view that I would ban just because they are so unbelievably stupid that they don’t move the conversation forward at all and waste the time of everyone who reads them.

1. Other weapons are just as bad as guns.  Since the average person does not have access to tanks or nuclear weapons, this argument falls flat.
2. Why should we be spending money on space when we still have problems to solve on Earth.  If you aren’t interested in outer space, then you probably lack intellectual curiousity altogether.  If people like you had determined the course of history, we never would have descended from the trees.  Also, the people who make this argument will not hesitate to support a war which costs trillions of dollars.  It is absurdly petty that they would deny a few hundred million to a research project which may benefit mankind in countless ways.
3. It’s snowing.  Global warming is a myth.

Everybody is entitled to their own opinion.    But if your opinions are as glaringly stupid as those listed above, nobody is required to take them seriously.