Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Years ago I had the pleasure of taking a class at a state college in beginning Greek logic.  I was not terrifically good at it, but it did open my mind toward doing some critical thinking of my own.  This is a really good thing to be able to do with all of the illogicalities one can either read or see every day.  There are three illogicalities that have really struck me lately.  A couple are serious – one is not, but is none the less instructive.

The first one is the Mike Huckabee commercial that airs almost nightly on MSNBC, and regards his petition to the Senate to urge the Senate to overturn what is unofficially known as “Obamacare”.  He urges viewers to sign the petition because to not do so will cause us all to be overrun by some socialist plot, or something on that order.  But the final clip states, and I quote, “Even if you have signed before, call and sign again”.  Really?  This is obviously not an official petition of any kind.  This sort of thing used to be known as stuffing the ballot box, or in this case, stuffing the petition.  Since this is not an official petition, this urging to sign more than once is probably not illegal, but it certainly strikes me as being unethical.  When these signatures reach the Senate it purportedly will infer that all of these people are opposed to Obamacare, when in actuality many of the signatures will be duplicate.  Rather than having a million people sign, it may be a lesser number signing a million times! 

The second illogical incident was actually an article I read for home beauty.  It was indicating that one needs to look one’s best when attending Christmas parties, but that having one’s hair “done” at a sylist could be as much as $45.00 a visit.  It suggested purchasing items that would allow one to style one’s own hair at home.  I totaled up the amount all of the hair products would have cost and they came to some $170.00.  Now since I have short hair and don’t really need more than a good cut every month, this was all sort of academic to me, but unless one had to go to the stylist more than four times, it was about the same as buying all of the various products.  It seemed to me the article was more interested in selling hair products than in saving the harried woman money.

The third illogicality was a discussion I had concerning the pepper-sprayed students at UCDavis.  If any reader has not seen that clip, it was of a group of students, about 12-15, sitting blocking a sidewalk, and they had their arms intertwined.  The students were ordered by the police officer in charge, a Lieutenant, to disperse.  They refused to comply, at which point they could legitimately have been arrested.  There were numerous officers there, sort of standing back, but there were enough that four officers could have separated two of the students each, probably having to drag them off since they undoubtedly would have gone limp, but doing so without harming the students.  Now comes the illogical part.  The students were wearing hooded sweatshirts or had bandanas covering their faces, and there were several standing by with video cameras.  The Lieutenant walked up to the students about 3 feet away, and began shooting streams of pepper spray at their faces.  His body language was that of someone spraying bugs on a hedge.  He went up and down the row of students, spraying away.  The discussion I was involved with indicated he had the right to use pepper spray because the students had not only disobeyed an order, but were wearing hooded sweatshirts and bandanas, which indicated, along with the other students with cameras that they expected to be pepper sprayed.  Well, as far as I know, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and a bandana over one’s face is not illegal.  Nor is having someone there to video an incident, so long as one is not interfering with the action, which none of the camera people were.  Nor is expecting something unpleasant to happen illegal.  Therefore, using the sweatshirts, bandanas, cameras and expectations as an excuse to pepper spray non-violent protesters is illogical.  The majority of the officers, I must add, were acting in a totally appropriate and professional manner.  It was just one, apparently rogue, officer.

Relative to this last incident, which by far is the most serious, was the thought that since the majority of these supposed police brutality incidents at Occupy events have been perpetrated at the instigation of the politicians in office, or at least by the upper management of police departments, if they are not a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the actual reasons for the Occupy movement by throwing police under the bus.  For some even so-called liberal pundits, it has worked.  They spend an inordinate amount of time talking about so-called police brutality and not nearly enough on the corrupt system that pits the 1% against the 99% in the first place.