Somebody (somebody I’ve known for a long time – though I haven’t really seen or communicated with this person much in quite some time – who I’ve always liked, and who I don’t think is an idiot) forwarded me a “funny” e-mail the other day with a subject line of Fwd: Irish diplomavy (I’ve been known to make a typo or two, plus the “v” is right next to the “c” so I’ll cut the originator some slack on that part):

If you think Trump is blunt . . .

One thing about lads from Ireland is that their hearts and humor are always in the right place! Jimmy Murphy, a City Councillor from Dublin, was asked on a local live radio talk show, just what he thought about the allegations of torture of suspected terrorists. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but to thunderous applause from the audience.

HIS STATEMENT:

If hooking up one fookin’ rag-head terrorist’s testicles to a car battery gets the truth out of the lying little camel shagger to save just one Irish soldier’s life, then I have only three things to say; Red is positive, Black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet.’

Har!

I’m not sure why anybody would find that funny (or, more to the point, why anybody who knows me would think I would find that funny). The person who sent it to me has, on occasion, passed along some of these stupid types of things but since when I do respond, it’s in a way that makes it clear that I’m not into that sort of thing, he tends to leave me off the list. A while back, as we were discussing SU basketball and the connection to my old high school, which has provided a few pretty good players over the years, I happened to send a link to a newspaper – if you can still call them that; I suppose that term will be in existence long after anybody remembers what a “paper” was, like “dialing” a phone or “filming” a movie – story about a kid who had been suspended from the team for (allegedly) strangling a woman. It wasn’t exactly a first offence for this kid, who happened to be a black kid from the inner city (at some point high schools in the ‘burbs apparently began “recruiting” kids from outside the district, which, in my opinion, is a good opportunity for the kid because the Syracuse City School District is arguably one of the worst north of NYC, but of course not all kids are exactly angels and it would be a lot better if the quality of your education didn’t depend on your athletic prowess or the neighborhood you live in).

Anyhow, the response from the person in question was a fairly predictable diatribe about affirmative action or something like that. My response was that if the kid came from money, daddy’s lawyers would have made it all disappear. And that reply seemed to initiate a bit of a lull in our communications. Until this “Irish diplomavy” e-mail.

Besides being, well, dumb, it also smelled like bullshit to me (as so many of these things do), and so I did what the people who forward this shit back and forth never seem to do – I spent about 12 seconds checking it. You can look at the Snopes story here, but the short story is that this has been floating around for years, attributed to various nonexistent people, and is actually based on a mid-1990s “joke” by Nick DiPaolo about torturing monkeys for medical research.

Funny stuff, indeed.

I thought about passing that along but, well, what’s the point, really? Even if you can convince somebody that one specific item is bullshit, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not as if they’ll bother questioning the next stupid e-mail that gets passed along to them (assuming it reinforces their world view), and the point, really, is that they find torture to be acceptable, effective, necessary, and – most important of all – amusing.

Which I do not.

I’m not sure when this guy turned into “one of those people,” but I think it was a combination of things. He’s lived on Long Island for a long time, and let’s just say that’s not exactly known for being a liberal oasis. He’s also been in IT for a long time, and has seen a lot of his colleagues lose their jobs to “foreigners.” And he knew people who died in the Twin Towers, which I think had an effect on a lot of otherwise normal human beings.

We all have an inner asshole, and, if properly fertilized and nurtured, it can grow rather impressively. And once it gets going, it’s harder to kill than kudzu.

So, yeah, people believe what they want to believe no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary (or, as Paul Simon once said, “…a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”).

It would be tempting to right that sort of thing off to racists, misogynists, and the mentally defective, but of course there’s at least a little bit of that in all of us.

I was on the Internets the other day, and saw that Bernie Sanders (who we all know is a horrible human being because he was mean to Hillary Clinton by running to be the Democrat’s candidate for President AND HE’S NOT EVEN A DEMOCRAT!! HE SHOULD RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT!! You mean like Howard Schultz? HOWARD SCHULTZ SHOULDN’T RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT HE SHOULD RUN AS A DEMOCRAT IF HE WANTS TO RUN!! I mean, I get it, but, really, change the rules about who can run if you want to prevent certain people from running) released a rather innocuous sounding response to this WSJ article about robotics and automation disrupting jobs in Lakeland Florida (among other places). Sanders said that AI and robotics “should be used to improve the lives of working people, not just to increase corporate profits.”

Responses (from some folks, anyway) were predictable, and can be summed up in about four words – “shut up old man!” Interesting how a bunch of people using the Internet can turn into Luddites (though I suspect the same folks would have lauded that statement, had it come from someone else). A lot of people expressing the opinion that “the only purpose” for technology is to replace humans with our robot overlords. And while that’s certainly a danger, there are a lot of uses for AI and robotic technology beyond replacing humans. With, in fact, the potential to make things better for humans. Limb replacement comes to mind (OK, I guess that is PARTIAL human replacement). As does more accurate weather forecasting. And the ability to go into environments that are too dangerous for humans. Plenty of current and future uses in healthcare. And presumably a lot of things that I have no idea about, because what do I know?

And, yeah, a lot of potential to put people out of work and make a lot of money for people who already have too damn much money (which is why I have no problem with the idea of taxing billionaires a little bit more). And some things are gonna happen whether we want them to or not. Workers need to be retrained and educated and given everything they need to prosper and live what we used to call the American Dream.

And give old farts like me the ability to retire and be replaced by the next generation (of humans, that is).

Anyhow, I thought about replying to some of these people about how AI and robotics (like any technology) have potential for both good and bad, and then I thought, eh. Why bother?

A man hears what he wants to hear.