I keep complaining that students and fellow bloggers keep trying to reduce the world’s complexity to their very limited experience and knowledge. But this is what’s offered everywhere in lieu of analysis, so how are they to know any better?
At the gym today I saw a discussion of Ukraine on CNN, and it was just sad. First of all, the closest thing to a Ukrainian that CNN could find in this enormous country was Kristoff whose father stood next to some Ukrainians back in the 1940s. There was also a woman who wrote a book about the Arab Spring because that’s “just like” what is happening in Ukraine. This woman informed the audience that “if you take the most chauvinistic Texan you can imagine and add 5,000 years you’ll get an Iranian.” I think this is insulting to both Iranians and Texans, but this is what passes for insight on the CNN.
Then there was some fellow called Remnick or Resnick who said that “Putin came to power 2 years ago when there were hundreds of thousands if people protesting in defense of gay rights. Or human rights. Of which, of course, gay rights are a huge part.”
This is absolutely ridiculous because the 2011-12 protests in Russia were decidedly not in favor of gay rights. There was a tiny group of people who raised the rainbow flag but they were immediately vilified by the protesters and blamed for sabotaging the protests. Anybody who thinks that those protests in Russia were defending gay rights or revolved around the concept of human rights is just ridiculously unaware of what’s going on.
The journalist who directed the discussion repeated, “But isn’t this just like. . .” so many times that it was scary.
People, why is it so hard to accept that one’s experience is not completely exhaustive and that things might conceivably happen somewhere in the world that are not “just like” something you have already seen or heard about?
Clarissa's Blog 
I think what most people mean by “Its just like” is “Same shit, different stink”. The culture may be different but I would imagine the feeling that is invoked during crisis is pretty damn similar across the globe.
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Yes, that sounds like a very profound analysis. 🙂 I’m not sure you’d get paid if you did your job as poorly as these analysts do theirs.
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Yeah, because feelings like anger, resentment, hate are totally different based on your culture. But, like you, its a good thing Im not an analyst.:)
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People feel extremely vulnerable when encountering something they have never experienced before, so there is always a rush to reduce it to something already known. That is also, by the way, why reading what I term, ‘shamanic texts” is such a psychological challenge, even for me.
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People, why is it so hard to accept that one’s experience is not completely exhaustive and that things might conceivably happen somewhere in the world that are not “just like” something you have already seen or heard about?
I think the first step in attempting to understand something new is to relate it to something one already knows. This is only the first step, of course. It needs to be followed by studying the differences that are not included in the first simple insight. These, in time, dominate the thought patterns which lead to more profound understanding. I doubt very much that there is any other way to learn something new.
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It WILL BE just like the time I had a cerebral aneurysm after watching mainstream media news. Turn off the television and spare my intracranial apparatus!
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