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Sep. 2nd, 2017 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lliiraSo Alice Walker is a big David Icke fan. She compares him to Malcolm X.
The link is years old. But it's probably the best example I've ever seen of the fact that being even a great writer of fiction does not make someone qualified to do political analysis. At all. AT ALL. Yet we keep demanding not only writers, but also actors and pop artists, get deeply involved in politics. Then listening to them, then getting angry when they don't live up to whatever standards we have for them this millisecond, and so on. (When I say "we" I do mean "we" -- I've been pretty damn guilty of this myself.)
It's kind of like asking a cat to tapdance. It's possible a particularly skilled cat could tapdance. I'm not discounting the possibility entirely. But it's pretty awful to be mean to a cat because they can't tapdance.
The link is years old. But it's probably the best example I've ever seen of the fact that being even a great writer of fiction does not make someone qualified to do political analysis. At all. AT ALL. Yet we keep demanding not only writers, but also actors and pop artists, get deeply involved in politics. Then listening to them, then getting angry when they don't live up to whatever standards we have for them this millisecond, and so on. (When I say "we" I do mean "we" -- I've been pretty damn guilty of this myself.)
It's kind of like asking a cat to tapdance. It's possible a particularly skilled cat could tapdance. I'm not discounting the possibility entirely. But it's pretty awful to be mean to a cat because they can't tapdance.
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Date: 2017-09-05 06:36 pm (UTC)But yeah. I've said the same thing - except in regard to Bill Nye, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. They ask for their political opinions or opinions on historical matters even though they have no expertise in those departments. Or even trying to make them both spokespeople for GMOs. Neither of them are biologists. Neil in particular is an astrophysicist. And they distract people from the real issue about said topics, too (e.g. emphasizing that GMOs are not inherently dangerous, while ignoring the problem of corporations being able to patent gene sequences or agriculture and livestock.)
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