Names, slurs, insults, labels...call them what you will. They're all schematic shorthand, boxes into which we dump the world. The more we can reduce complexity to a label, the simpler life becomes.
We get to think less and react more. It saves us time and energy. A large umbrella of a category phrase that we can drape, carelessly, atop 'whatever', the more we can, Beatle-like, turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream. We surrender to the void. (It helps if we can drop acid at the same time, but it's not necessary)
A very human thing to do, no doubt. We're all guilty.
But doing it is not reason; it is not argument. It proves nothing save the hollow weakness and terminal laziness of the label-thrower. 'Trump is a fascist!' UnHuh, and what is that? The syllogistic answer, inevitably, after much sputtering & hand-waving is...'Trump! A fascist is Trump! And he's, you know, unlikable, and orange-haired, and egotistic, and bombastic, and he does mean tweets, and he's gonna put everyone in Concentration Camps, and Secret Police, grabbing women's body parts, and the Disappeared, and Censorship....and did I say the magic words, Racism, Sexism, Misogyny, Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity, Colonialist, Capitalist, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad?!'
'My mom says some fascists are like that.'
In total, wrapped up with a bow, and given some really cool illustrations (as in 'Alexander and his Terrible, Horrible, No Good', this Void Surrendering process can be moderately entertaining, but it leads exactly nowhere, and accomplishes nothing. Well, except for the fact, that it seduces others into the same Non-Thought Kneejerk Zombie Dance of Outrage.
Thus the insane, but entirely & predictably 'joyous' reaction of the terminally Woke to the cold-blooded slaughter of Brian Thompson... as given voice most recently by Ethics Professor Yolanda Wilson, "So, while I’m not rejoicing about the UHC CEO being shot dead in the street, I’m not sad about it, either. People deserve better than the US health insurance industry, and chickens come home to roost."
She's a professor, with a Phd, who teaches Ethics, for God's sake.... she's a middle-aged adult, presumably with a family, raised in the lap of First World luxury, working at a prestigious university, who has drunk so much of the KoolAid, and swallowed so much of the True Believer Progressive dogma that she has become utterly incapable of even understanding, let alone empathizing with the tragic, homicidal destruction of a man's life, and his family's lives in a pool of blood on a city street. No tears here; not even a coldly pro-forma 'Gosh that's too bad'. Yolanda gives us only a sneer and the inhumane assertion: 'he had it coming'. Taylor Lorenz, minor journalistic celebrity, tells Piers Morgan she was 'celebratory' ('joyful' she says was the wrong word) when she heard the news.
No God... no heaven, no hell, and everything becomes not just permissible, but embraced if and when IT serves our purpose and feeds our appetites. No need to think; no need to question, rather we reduce the entirety of the world, the universe which is a human life to a label, a cipher, a cruelly malicious caricature of 'evil' -- 'Healthcare Insurance CEO' -- and throw it and him, bloody and despised into yesterday's trash.
These people should be ashamed, but that would require self-awareness...and that requires thought & humility. They have none of that. But they do have hate, and a handful of labels, and they see the world only as Victim & Fascist Victimizer. No one should be surprised that in this horrific sleep of reason we have birthed monsters.
Names, slurs, insults, labels...call them what you will. They're all schematic shorthand, boxes into which we dump the world. The more we can reduce complexity to a label, the simpler life becomes.
We get to think less and react more. It saves us time and energy. A large umbrella of a category phrase that we can drape, carelessly, atop 'whatever', the more we can, Beatle-like, turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream. We surrender to the void. (It helps if we can drop acid at the same time, but it's not necessary)
A very human thing to do, no doubt. We're all guilty.
But doing it is not reason; it is not argument. It proves nothing save the hollow weakness and terminal laziness of the label-thrower. 'Trump is a fascist!' UnHuh, and what is that? The syllogistic answer, inevitably, after much sputtering & hand-waving is...'Trump! A fascist is Trump! And he's, you know, unlikable, and orange-haired, and egotistic, and bombastic, and he does mean tweets, and he's gonna put everyone in Concentration Camps, and Secret Police, grabbing women's body parts, and the Disappeared, and Censorship....and did I say the magic words, Racism, Sexism, Misogyny, Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity, Colonialist, Capitalist, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad?!'
'My mom says some fascists are like that.'
In total, wrapped up with a bow, and given some really cool illustrations (as in 'Alexander and his Terrible, Horrible, No Good', this Void Surrendering process can be moderately entertaining, but it leads exactly nowhere, and accomplishes nothing. Well, except for the fact, that it seduces others into the same Non-Thought Kneejerk Zombie Dance of Outrage.
Thus the insane, but entirely & predictably 'joyous' reaction of the terminally Woke to the cold-blooded slaughter of Brian Thompson... as given voice most recently by Ethics Professor Yolanda Wilson, "So, while I’m not rejoicing about the UHC CEO being shot dead in the street, I’m not sad about it, either. People deserve better than the US health insurance industry, and chickens come home to roost."
She's a professor, with a Phd, who teaches Ethics, for God's sake.... she's a middle-aged adult, presumably with a family, raised in the lap of First World luxury, working at a prestigious university, who has drunk so much of the KoolAid, and swallowed so much of the True Believer Progressive dogma that she has become utterly incapable of even understanding, let alone empathizing with the tragic, homicidal destruction of a man's life, and his family's lives in a pool of blood on a city street. No tears here; not even a coldly pro-forma 'Gosh that's too bad'. Yolanda gives us only a sneer and the inhumane assertion: 'he had it coming'. Taylor Lorenz, minor journalistic celebrity, tells Piers Morgan she was 'celebratory' ('joyful' she says was the wrong word) when she heard the news.
No God... no heaven, no hell, and everything becomes not just permissible, but embraced if and when IT serves our purpose and feeds our appetites. No need to think; no need to question, rather we reduce the entirety of the world, the universe which is a human life to a label, a cipher, a cruelly malicious caricature of 'evil' -- 'Healthcare Insurance CEO' -- and throw it and him, bloody and despised into yesterday's trash.
These people should be ashamed, but that would require self-awareness...and that requires thought & humility. They have none of that. But they do have hate, and a handful of labels, and they see the world only as Victim & Fascist Victimizer. No one should be surprised that in this horrific sleep of reason we have birthed monsters.