Logical Fallacies Inherent in Political Discussion

[florilegia]

Recently watched a video on the situation in Haiti, just to update my facts. Apparently, I got a biased presentation of the problem. The video started out fine, simply stating facts about poverty in Haiti. Among these facts the authors of the video thought it appropriate to also mention that 75 percent of Haitians practice voodoo. This is a

Comments

[sdemory]

The secret message in dealing with things Haiti-related has always been Oh, those people are so backward, there's nothing to be done for them. They practice voodoo, for god's sake!

Makes it very easy for the rest of the world to shake its collective head and discount what happens there. We can give them money, after all, but we can't expect them to do anything rational with it. They practice voodoo, after all.

At this point, my biggest concern is how few people are around who remember the excesses of the Duvaliers. Given the fact that a significant portion of the population is too young to remember what the Duvaliers did (about 4 percent of the population are 65 or older, the age that would've been in their prime during the Duvaliers' reign and, thus, could give some insight as to what they did), the possibility that they could come back unquestioned gets much more likely. I think that "3.5 percent of the population were alive for the horrors of the past" is a much more telling statistic than "75 percent practice a belief structure that's no more suspect than any other Catholic folk-faith."

[florilegia]

How right you are. I chalk Duvalier's success up to another catastrophically bad decision by the Reagan administration. Hope that Obama has more sense and will allow Aristide back into the country. Though Aristide leave some things to be desired, at least he was democratically elected!