Notes from Evil Bender

Sera over at Lipstick Explosion has (gasp) posted a political entry to her blog. Writes Sera:

Perhaps a writer for the BBC should have attended my class. This morning, I read:

“Iranians are Shias; this is a sect of Islam based on the principle of martyrdom and sacrifice for one’s beliefs. Iranians always support the underdog and adore those who are oppressed and have been wronged by powerful individuals or governments.”

. . .

Perhaps the writer has forgotten that generalizations are like stereotypes: they are impossible to prove, which makes them unfit for academic or popular fact-based writing, and they are harmful, regardless of the “kind content” they seem to contain.

Evil Bender thinks Sera's analysis is excellent, and recommends you check it out. He would also like to add that, while generalizations and stereotypes are certainly harmful, it's no surprise they still exist. They make the world easier to understand, and let us believe that things are more simple than they really are. From religious extremists who refuse to admit the possibility that they might not have all the answers to politicians who reduce every debate down to straw men, to anyone who refuses to consider the complexity of an issue, these people find comfort in a false sense of simplicity. Since Evil Bender's blog was founded to resist just such over-simplicity, he'd like to point to an exampe of the dangers of this thinking.

We may be on the verge of war with Iran, and the president's "logic" runs like this:

Iran's leadership is evil. They might be trying to make nukes. We don't want evil people to have nukes. Therefore we should invade.

Sounds very persuasive, right? A nice little soundbite. But it ignores basically every reality of the situation. It ignores the huge unpopularity of the Iranian leadership, unpopularity which is undoubtedly behind much of this saber-rattling. It ignores the fact that Iran might not be trying to get nukes at all, and is probably years away from any such nukes. It ignores that there are other options besides violence, and that we probably don't have the resources to be successful in an invasion, and certainly we can't run another occupation at present. It ignores that such an action would garantee the continued animosity of even those in the middle east who might be our friends…

Like such phrases as "always" and "never," phrases that are–or could be–prefaced with "it's as simple as this" should always be distrusted. Few things are ever simple, and the more someone wants to convince you they are simple, the less simple they're likely to be.