Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Red Herring



This is really just echoing CaTHY's point from another forum, but can people stop declaring that whatever Trump outrage is under discussion is really just a "red herring" or a distraction for some other allegedly more important outrageous act he took? The #MuslimBan was not just a distraction from Trump's appointment of Bannon to the National Security Council. While I agree that the NSC appointment was terrible, the #MuslimBan is also terrible in its own right. Neither is a distraction from the other. They are both bad things on their own.

A red herring is when something that doesn't really matter is done to distract you from something that does matter. By calling the #MuslimBan or anything else a red herring or just a distraction you are saying it does not matter. If we have learned anything over the past week and a half, the Trump administration is capable of doing multiple terrible things on the same day. There is no rule that there can only be one true outrage at a time. Also, it is fine if different people rank the outrages differently from each other.

All the terrible things matter. The real distraction are all these claims that dismiss actual awful things as mere distractions.