I've noticed recently a tendency amongst people on RW to slag off "Daily Mail readers". I'm not a Mail reader myself; in fact, I tend not to read any newspaper, other than the crossword and horoscope parts and "Nemi".
I just find it amusing and paradoxical (those two often go together) that people I count as friends, and who regard themselves as liberal in orientation, react like this. They decry the Daily Mail for its racism and classism and general prejudice -- perhaps rightly so! They decry, for example, its anti-immigration stance. (For the record, I am anti-anti-immigration, of course, as I believe in free trade).
But in decrying not only the Mail, but "Daily Mail readers" as a generic collection of bad people, they are committing exactly the same fallacy. Lumping a highly diverse group of people together as if they were all the same, and deriving pleasure from labelling them as the bad people.
People who would pronounce themselves totally and committedly against "racism", for example, often seem happy to apply huge generalisations to "Americans". They can't see that it's the same dangerous thought pattern. Or they will apply a description to "bankers" and "top bosses" (they all look out for each other, they're rich and greedy, they pull the strings of the government behind the scenes...) which are exactly the same things the Nazis said about the Jews.
"But this time it's true!" they all say.
(Late breaking story from John Matthews: the proportion of Americans (boo, insular!) without passports is roughly equivalent to the proportion of Europeans (yay, cosmopolitan, accepting) who've never been outside Europe.) LOL. Thanks John.
Yeah, sure, you're dead against repeating the mistakes we made in the past: stereotyping women, black people, jews, gays.... But are you against stereotyping? Of Daily Mail readers? Do you fight vigorously against that whenever you see it? Or do you join in with the crowd like a sheep?
