Oh, Neil...

[kiaa]

Neil deGrasse Tyson apologized yesterday following a tweet Sunday deemed “insensitive” about the weekend mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton that sparked a fierce reaction on social media, but not everyone is accepting his apology.

He tweeted out some statistics on Sunday that didn’t go over as well as he planned. While telling us that far more people die from things like the flu or medical errors, he appeared to downplay the significance of the problems with mass shootings. He later apologized for the tweet, but the damage had already been done at that point.

While he may technically have a point about statistics, human life isn't solely governed by statistics. His intentions may've been good (as always), but yeah, he misspoke in this case.What I have noticed with highly intelligent people is that their perception of a situation can be a little different than what the average IQ'd person experiences. People like Tyson see everything in terms of data, scientifically driven... and often lack the emotional intelligence, which may be just as important than intellectual one.

In a nutshell, the flu doesn’t commit pre-meditated murder based on the victim’s language or skin color. The flu is more humane than Trump and his storm troopers. By downplaying the impact of the hate rhetoric spewed by Trump from day one, and the resulting race-based violence in US society, Neil is not helping tackle this problem. I love the guy with a passion, but in this case he was wrong.

Comments

[fridi]

Wasting time discussing Tyson. He's not the problem.

[kiaa]

There are all sorts of problems, big, medium, small, and tiny. While this one may not be among the former, many of the latter tend to pile up to form a larger one. Just because he's not a big problem, or because we all love him, doesn't mean we're not to hold him accountable for the things he does and says publicly. Especially because we love him, and because he exercises a certain amount of influence on the public, and thus, society. The same way we like to hold politicians, celebrities and people of power and authority accountable, we should approach him likewise, too.