Skittles are candy
The Times reports that Trump Junior is a nasty man just like his darling papa.
Donald Trump Jr. is facing intense backlash on social media after he posted a message on Twitter Monday night that compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles sprinkled with a few that “would kill you.”
“This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first,” the post said.
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/778016283342307328
The image doesn’t “say it all” of course. Quite the contrary – the image says nothing. It’s the language above the image that says what Trump means.
It says that three toxic Skittles in a bowl of sixty or so make it dangerous to sample the Skittles. Analogously, just a few killers or jihadists in a larger group of refugees make it dangerous to let them in.
But you can say that about anything. There are a few potential killers anywhere you care to look, but we go on living in cities anyway. Risks are everywhere, but we take them anyway, because to avoid all of them means paralysis. People pointed out that singling out Syrian refugees looks just a tad racist.
Social media users shared images of displaced residents in the region. President Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, invoked Omran Daqneesh, the bloodstained, dust-coated boy who was shown sitting in an ambulance after an airstrike and who became a symbol of the suffering in Aleppo, Syria.
The post also spurred a strong response from Wrigley, the owner of Skittles: “Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing,” the company said in a statement.
Skittles are candy, refugees are people, and the Trumps are dangerous racist hate-mongers.
And of course, these are also the people who howl at the moon every time someone introduces the idea of Schrodinger’s Rapist, which usually is just about how women have to take additional precautions against guys with ill intent. Applying junior’s logic, all us dudes would be required to be confined to our homes, only allowed out with shock collars (presumably with remote-control capability, and all women getting their own personal controller).
There’s another image comes to mind: a small child, dead, face down on a Mediterranean beach. Also not a skittle.
I expect it’s been pointed out elsewhere, but his math is probably way off in just how many bowls you’d be talking to get three dangerous skittles. I figure you’d probably succumb to instant diabetes, eating enough to get to any appreciable risk of hitting a poisoned one…
Which, by the way, I figure is _always_ something to keep in mind about terrorism. Among the reasons you should: the people that employ it do so precisely because they’re few in number, and hope to gain influence beyond their numbers with dramatic violence that arrests the attention. Overreacting to this, imagining they’re a larger force than they are, is, very literally, letting them win.
Most of the terrorist attacks in this country have been white males. Perhaps that makes it too dangerous to allow Donald and Donald Jr. to freely roam around in the country. After all, they might possibly blow up an abortion clinic, or shoot up a school. They might not, but, well, can we afford to take that chance?
John Oliver also made this point, in his inimitable style, just recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kZsOISarzg&t=422s
What the analogy also omits is that there are already “Skittles / people that will kill you” within the nation. The response to pointing this out would most likely be something like “why add more criminals to the ones we already have?” which completely misses the fact that you’re also adding decent people to the ones you already have, and you’re being a decent human being in the process by saving people from war.
But of course the people that want to bar all Syrian refugees are horrible people, so the chance to be decent will commend itself to them.
Suddenly I have a craving for Skittles. What a great response. :)