May 3, 2006Harper Doesn’t Eat Babies
It must have been a practical joke. A scrolling electronic advertising sign on a Canadian train was hacked to say: “Stephen Harper eats babies.” Harper is the Canadian Prime Minister.
When asked about the message, a former colleague said:
- “I worked with Stephen Harper for five years and never once did he in that time eat a baby.”
Shouldn’t that go without saying? When people defend a ridiculous accusation, it reenforces accusations. Like Nixon saying he was not a crook and the Madame who doth protest too much, denials can bring up questions. Stating an accusation with a denial acutally reenforces the image of the accusation in the minds of the listener. If I tell you, “I did not humiliate myself in front of three thousand people,” you will automatically picture me humiliating myself in front of three thousand people. That image is likely to overshadow my denial. I am better off saying, “My presentation went well.” I now have a more vivid image of Harper eating babies thank I did before I heard the denial.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
Dear Meryl,
As a Canadian ex-pat living in Maryland I was amused when I read about Toronto Go-Train message boards being ‘hacked’. My initial response was that this was related to the harp seal hunt in during which a small percentage of quota is for excessively cute seal pups. Animal rights protesters, in my opinion, similar to the right to drink beer advocates; are driven by emotion rather than logic. Prime Minister Harper and Newfoundland’s Premier Danny Wells did an exemplary job of presenting the facts yet advocates like Heather Mills-McCartney were rude and boorish during a Larry King live debate refusing to even acknowledge scientific evidence.
Scientists and the vast majority of Canadians support the seal hunt. Why is it that emotion grabs so much of the spotlight?
Message boards were reproted to be unavailable until the breach was corrected, in Canada’s largest city how many folks were inconvenienced by this?
Thanks for attempting to increase sanity in our lives.
Cheryl Abbott
Comment by Cheryl Abbott — May 4, 2006 @ 6:36 am
My initial thought when reading the phrase was that you were going to give accolades to the colleague for having a sense of humor and defusing the situation by making light of it. Then I realized that I was in the Poison Phrase section. Readers often don’t have the whole story and come to wrong conclusions … I think that the colleague’s response was witty and humorous; a good example of a power phrase, employed to show the ridiculousness of the accusation.
Comment by Stacy — May 6, 2006 @ 7:44 pm
Stacy, you may well be right about the comment beng intended as humor. And if you are right about that, I agree, it was clever. I am certain you are right about context making the difference between a PowerPhrase and a Poison Phrase. Thanks for your comment.
And, Cheryl, I appreciate your observation about the emotional approach to winning an argument applying here.. I hadn’t thought about the hacking being a protest…I thought it was simply a practical joke. Thanks for posting.
Comment by merylrunion — May 6, 2006 @ 9:29 pm