Earlier today I talked about how fear can (as +George Wiman put it) trigger your lizard brain to act irrationally, frantically, desperately, and not necessarily in your best interest.
It sure seems that getting worked up to violence — against property or, worse, people, because someone in some other tribe has dissed your flag, your prophet, your mother, your own tribe's precious identity — is kind of a lizard-brain kind of reaction. _Those Thems! They insulted Us! They made themselves even more Them, and are existentially threatening Us!_
(And for all of us oh-so-civilized Westerners, consider such little foibles as how some of us react when American flags are burned. Or when Christ is supposedly insulted. Or racial violence. Or anti-religious violence. Or anti-gay violence. Consider how recently the Klan was outright killing uppity blacks. Or how recently we were persecuting Jews, or holding our own interdenominational Christian wars?)
And, for that matter, I talked about how that whole lizard brain phenom can set you up for other people to exploit you. And it's not clear to me that in this current violence, there aren't folks taking advantage of the anger of the crowds to do their own dirty work and pump up their own power base.
Oh, and that whole anger thing? For all I think it's unjustified, the particular yahoos who put this film together (more charming details here: http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/us-embassies-in-egypt-and-libya-attacked-after-terry-jones-posts-film-depicting-mohammad-as-gay/politics/2012/09/11/48845 ) almost certainly knew what sort of reaction it would provoke. I don't know if it quite reaches the "fighting words" exception to free speech rights, but I have absolutely no doubt that the folks who are producing this film hold some moral responsibility for what's happened. They wanted anger. They wanted violence. They wanted to prove it's Us against Them! That makes them not much better than the folks they provoked.
Embedded Link
American dies in Libya protests
A US official died when Libyan militiamen stormed the consulate in Benghazi, security sources say, hours after a big protest at the US embassy in Cairo.
Google+: View post on Google+
Funny how numbers can be used to mislead. Stories like this remind me of that Abbott and Costello routine where A. poses a hypothetical situation to C. (I’ll paraphrase):
Say you’re 40 years old and you’re in love with a little girl of 10. You can’t marry her; you’re four times as old as she is, So you wait five years. Now you’re 45 and she’s 15; you’re only three times as old as she is. But that’s still too much, so you wait another 15 years. Now you’re 60 and she’s 30; you’re only twice as old. Now here’s the question: how long will you have to wait until you and that little girl are the same age?
The numbers are all correct, but they’re erroneously used to illustrate a situation in which the numerical relationships described are irrelevant. It’s deliberately misleading, but how many people will analyze it and realize that ? OK, the A&C routine, sure, because it’s patently impossible for the girl to catch up, but subtler misuses of numbers are going to convince a lot of people, I’m afraid.
Oh, that Terry Jones. 🙁