I'm calling a Gladwell today.
Today on CNN I saw coverage of these 'military funeral' protesters.
Something struck me as strange. I can't put my finger on it, but I'll try: there was only a few of them visible, like five at the most. They had sunglasses on, all of them. Their clothes look like somebody made a hasty trip to Old Navy to get 'protest gear'. And they spoke with deep, deep accents. (OK, I know, you can't judge someone by an accent, and all anti-war protests are alike but I throw it in the mix with the other suspicious factors...it is strange to hear those type of accents completely dominate all members of a protest) And call me crazy but those signs, those signs look like the result of a well-funded organization, not scrappy protests.
If you are a reader of Malcom Gladwell's Blink you are aware of the concept of thin-slicing where you can look at something and it doesn't add up, and perhaps not explain why. Great art forgeries, he says, were detected this way. I'm calling a Gladwell here. This protest just doesn't 'look' real.
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