Here comes Part III, the final and my favorite one of my 3-part ZGram series.
I now give you David Thomas, whom many of you also know - as you know Ehrlich's Middle-Ground Chic and Slade Farney's Salsa Style.
Here, David is responding to the content of the two previous posts with what I call the Maddened Mode you might find in a tiger, caged and prodded with a stick:
"Something in the two messages quoted before hit a common chord in me, I think they complement one another.
Ehrlich is taking a detached view and Slade is upbraiding, rightly so, some combination of Ehrlich's "bad people" and Samuel Pepys' aberrant depositor of tears into the fountain of eternal morbidity, with the poor taste to do it in public - unless he had been in a situation, say, where he watched wife and children burn to death within his sight and hearing but beyond his reach? In which case, are we talking about a normal person with a heavy tragedy to bear? Whose pain we should share?
No - we are talking about a person with a damaged psyche, and pardon my unsympathetic sounding description, but in lay terms we are talking about a nutcase. You extend pity and some amount of forbearance to nutcases, but you do not allow them to compel any sort of behavior from you, for reasons that we all pretty much understand. They tend to be, shall we say, unreasonable - or in Coppola's terms, "unsound." Yes sir, very much so, sir.
We have somehow come to not only allow the nutcases to dictate our behavior in increasingly obtrusive and important ways, but to consider this gross societal aberration an exercise in high moral behavior, so much so that our children should be propagandized to assume their morbid burdens starting at the age of 4 to 5 years!
Detach this from all the hoopla and look at it for what it is - we are becoming one huge death cult, and the congniscenti, such as pass for that in our stumbling culture, assail us daily in somber tones of the goodness of toeing that awful line and the evil of any who say otherwise.
("Any" because there is not as yet an admissible concept of an "all." That would serve no purpose except to lend legitimacy to neo-Nazi psychotic hatred dressed in thin pseudo-intellectual disguise -- Funny, idnit, how the evil ones are at once an insignificant few fringe crazies who should not be dignified with even an acknowledgment of their existence, and yet they lurk behind every bush and should be the foremost concern of all people everywhere all the time? Have you ever spent any time trying to communicate with a serious paranoid?)
Ending on a side note, you're damned straight that free speech gives you the right to tell lies and promote hatred if that's your cup of tea. That is _exactly_ what makes free speech so vital to a free society, to provide a benign method to rein in lies and hatred that are becoming institutionalized, and to do so without having to resort to the ultimate resolution of physical conflict. Because one man's faith is another man's blackest blasphemy, and a goodly man, a godly man, hates evil, says so, and well he ought!
One out of a thousand times he'll be right and we'll all be better for the early warning. If a society is so weak that it will buy into any one of the 999 purveyors of irrational thought, then that society is in need of the corrective measures whose occurrence the weakness leads to, even mandates. That is the way our minds work and we suppress the means for correction short of war at the same peril as sitting on the safety valve of a pressure cooker that we fear is overheating.
You don't avoid the inevitable corrective that way, you only insure that it happens sooner and that when it does it gets jammed straight up your (___ fill in the blank)!
This practicality is quite beside the more fundamental observation that human efforts at thought control, inept by default, are as laughably out of place on the mental evolutionary scale as an earthworm trying to slip on a pair of Nikes would be on the physical."
Thought for the Day:
""Some prefer the risks of freedom to the chains of slavery."
(John Bell)