I have no bumper stickers on my car, I do not read or post to Twitter. This is because I feel it’s very unlikely that any actual wisdom can be expressed in so few words. There is always context that goes beyond the pithy quote, often rendering it useless, untrue or at least incomplete.
On Facebook, which I look at infrequently these days, I am sometimes exposed to memes. Lots of times I skip over them. But if I do read them I generally engage my skepticism filter and assume that, even if it sounds plausible, I need to look up whatever it’s talking about and research the context.
Today I saw one that said, “The formula shortage is an example of how free market capitalism does exactly what right wing fear mongers think socialism will do.”
I haven’t looked this up yet. Sounds plausible. But a much better chance that it’s a straw man argument that applies to just a few hard liners. But I am aware that there’s a difference between skepticism and cynicism. Am I filtering too hard and disregarding some good points?
What are some examples of short, meme-like statements that actually hold water, and why? What percentage of such statements we see do you suspect withstand skeptical scrutiny?
I’ve had exactly one bumper sticker in my life (if you don’t count very subtle Grateful Dead icons). It was during the George W. Bush administration (and the two US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan).
I had a '65 Ford with a bumper sticker that read: “Dick Nixon, before Nixon Dicks you”. I was not yet 21 and tried to cross the border into the US in 1973 at the height of Watergate news. Unlike me, the US border guards did not at all appreciate the humour in that sticker and made me scrape it off before they’d let me cross.
One of my favorite memes show a picture of the Pope riding around in the Popemobile captioned “Nothing says ‘I trust you GOD’ like 3 inches of bullet proof glass.”
I think this one is particularly good because the point is obvious. But those with diminished cognitive capacity who are the supporters of the target of the barb would not necessarily follow the chain of reasoning to a point where they might try to tailgate you and sideswipe you with their pickup truck. After all, you’re saying you like a Republican president. Maybe you just think Biden’s senile and there’s a pedophile conspiracy, right?
(And I’m not kidding about the safety issue with political bumper stickers.)
I’ve seen multiple iterations of this and can’t remember what the first one was about, but it pops up whenever there’s someone who is a popular topic of discussion/ridicule, especially if a lot of people are focusing on some aspect of them that isn’t actually part of what makes them legitimately despicable, such as their weight, disability, or sexual history.
The basic structure is “when you make fun of X for being [fat/old/disabled/a slut], you’re not hurting them because they’ll never hear it. But your [fat/old/disabled/female] friends and family will.”
