Politics

Medellín, Colombia

I recently took a Myers-Briggs personality test and came out as INTP-A, a.k.a. the Logician. I guess these sorts of tests are useful for self-reflection, but I already knew that I like arguing politics when I'm drunk.

In Medellín I got in a few memorable political arguments.

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This first wasn't so much an argument and was more like me spit-balling some political analysis.

I had gone on a couple walking tours with a cool Swiss woman named Sabrina and afterwards we went out for drinks in Poblado, the hip and hopping tourist area of Medellín.

Sabrina was telling me about a week she spent with a family in a tiny village on the Caribbean coast in Colombia. She said it was her favorite experience of her trip so far. She showed pictures from a celebration for some teenage girl's name day where she would become a woman. The villagers roasted a pig outside. I believe the village had no electricity. I'm not sure about running water.

So my thing is that traveling I often see tourists fetishizing the simple lives typically of indigenous people living without modern conveniences. The tourists accept native customs without judging and feel privileged to get a peek into another way of living.

Yet these same tourists are extremely judgy and dismissive of uneducated rural people living in their own countries. I have never heard a liberal urbanite express a desire to visit for example backwoods Louisiana. Certainly you find people living simple lives on the bayou. But because they are uneducated and poor in a civilized country, they are rednecks and have nothing to teach you.

I have nothing against indigenous Colombians nor Cajuns in Louisiana. But I don't fetishize their cultures, and I really don't think it's fair to glorify one and vilify the other.

According to 16personalities.com I as a Logician need to bounce half-formed ideas off of people in order to come up with this crap. Sabrina was apparently not a Logician and not really interested in debating theories of rural cultures. So we drank a couple micheladas and then dipped.

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Another night I stayed up till 6am at the hostel drinking beers with an American quality assurance guy who was living in Medellín and working remotely. We were watching movies on Turner Classic Movies (In The Line of Fire, Candyman, and The Thing). We also had a couple beer-fueled political debates.

The first argument we had was about nutrition. I claimed that lowering your calorie intake would make you lose weight. That in general, if you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. Which you know, seems not all that controversial.

But QA guy insisted that calorie intake didn't matter and that what types of food you ate was more important. One of the infuriating things about this guy is that he would dismiss any simple theory because he claimed simple theories obscured a more complex reality.

I said nutrition is important, but come on, if you starve yourself you're going to lose weight, and if you overeat you're going to become fat. He wasn't convinced.

The second argument we had was about global warming. I got really heated over this one.

He tried telling me that "global climate change" didn't necessarily mean the planet was warming. He challenged me to site sources to prove to him that the planet was warming.

For one thing I don't carry around a list of links to scientific papers about climate change. But for another this guy was a "fake news" subscriber and so any news articles from the mainstream media he would just casually toss aside as irrelevant.

Instead of citing sources I tried arguing the science behind the greenhouse effect. I said look, children do science experiments showing how certain types of gases in the atmosphere trap heat. You have to at least except that this is a real phenomenon. But no, he didn't. That was too simple of a theory.

So here was a guy who refused to take the word of mainstream media and preferred complex conspiracy theories to simple explanations. I suppose people like that have been around forever. But in a time where the American president accuses any journalist who criticizes him of being "fake news," I think it's becoming more accepted to shop around for the truth you prefer rather than the more popular one.

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I remember the week before I left Minneapolis I was talking to a guy who had just come back from Mexico. He said he avoided political discussions at all costs when he was outside of the country. He thought it was dangerous as an American abroad to share your political opinions.

Where's the fun in that?