Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job...This reminds me of the story of the Battle of the Bannockburn. You know the one: “They fought like warrior poets... and won their freedom.”
I... can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.
At the beginning of the second day of the battle, the Scots advanced on the English army. Then, they suddenly knelt to pray. The English king saw that and proclaimed, “They kneel to seek mercy!” His comrade answered, “Yes, my lord, but not from you.”
8 comments:
It is remarkable that this person would want to illustrate how petty, arrogant, and evil he is. Most of us try to hide our unattractive selves from the public. It's because he doesn't know, of course. He doesn't see. His comment "just not the same currency as justice and truth" is revealing, because he is only pretending to those things, making a display of them. What he thinks of as revealing his moral superiority is exactly what reveals his vacancy. All he brings is hatred, and he thinks that is enough.
Let us look one step deeper, however. That such people exist we have always known, and we just hope they are part of our lives as little as possible. But a major newspaper has given him a forum because it considers this a valid point of view. Not that they necessarily think it good or right, but they consider it within the bounds of acceptable variation. That is more worrisome, that in their decision-making process no one said "This guy is just being a complete prick here. Let's not encourage this." They also do not see. They likely predicted that there would be controversy and anger and delighted in the prospect, not merely because it would increase readership - hey, everyone's got to make a living and I wouldn't mind that too much - but because the people they hate would be angered, and it serves 'em right, the bastards.
And that viewpoint is becoming normalized among the left. Even Emmanuel Goldstein only had to put up with 2 minutes of hate a day- Trump had it 24/7 for four years- the hate is not going away, just because the focal point is gone-it is getting re-directed at anyone with the slightest bit of what was once normal.
As the Dread Pirate Roberts was fond of saying,
"Sleep well, Westley, most likely I'll have to kill you in the morning...."
It's a she. It's times like this that one begins to understand the merits of stoning, and other atavistic practices that we used to think civilization had sworn a compact against. You know, Dutch, some people just can't stand to be wrong"
It is remarkable that this person would want to illustrate how petty, arrogant, and evil he is.
It may be more remarkable yet that this person thinks she is illustrating how virtuous she is.
She's unbelievably un-self-aware. Ross Dreher did a good piece on this.
Late in the article Dreher says this:
"A friend of mine lives in a country resort town that has been overrun during Covidtide with rich coastal liberals escaping the plague. He says that they have made life there miserable. They are snotty, entitled, and treat the locals as exotics to be patronized. He says they are bringing with them the same attitudes toward life that ruined California. "
My mom told me I should always be nice, 'even if it kills you'. The problem is, our world is becoming exactly this, in a literal way. Once, you could bite your tongue and be nice in situations like this, with the confidence that eventually you would appeal to a person's better nature.
The problem now is, these people don't have a better nature. As we have seen these past 5 years, continuing now, they are fueled by an unreasoning, unreasonable hate, and nothing short of expungement will suffice.
Why would anybody tolerate trying to absorb that into a community?
This thing you're talking about is actually one of the biggest philosophical problems with contemporary civilization. It plays out at every level of society, and we mistake it by giving it many names instead of one name. Thus, people say that those who oppose mass immigration are racist; people who oppose gentrification are motivated by issues of race or ethnicity or class; people who oppose this kind of in-migration by fellow citizens of another ideology are populists or whatever.
The real issue is this: almost all human meaning is drawn from relationships with others, who are connected to you via your common way of life. This "common way of life" is a culture. Cultures are disrupted by in-migration of any kind if it is large enough in scale, because the newcomers aren't part of the common way of life. They're brining their own ways. As this disruption fragments the existing culture, the loss is immediately a loss of those ties, connections, relationships.
Notice, though, that it is also a loss of most of the meaning of life. Most of the human meaning in anyone's life comes from being part of a culture. Cultures are being destroyed by all of these kinds of things. It's not a species of racism or nativism or, or discomfort with the rich or the poor; it's distress at seeing the most basic connections of life destroyed, and almost all of the meaning of life washed away.
This is a universal human problem, and because of the flatness of the current world, a problem at the forefront of life for many people. Yet all attempts to address it are charged as immoral acts of one sort or another. Our systems for restraining this disruption are continually weakened -- national borders are undefended, immigration opponents are labeled racists, neighborhoods are left open to just anyone moving in with the cash to buy land or housing, no forms of defending cultural stability are permitted.
Ultimately it doesn't matter, though, if the people moving in are exactly the same race and nationality and all that; what matters is that they don't share the culture of the natives, and are coming in numbers or with power or wealth that will fragment and destroy the culture.
When I see these sorts of pieces, I suspect, but cannot know, that the editor involved is publishing it on purpose for a kind of sadistic kick, knowing full well that the writer is going to get mocked and laughed at.
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