Hate

I just banned another commenter.  This pretty much never happens unless the commenter is a spammer.  That’s not the case this time.  This time the commenter was banned because he advocates killing police officers.

I find it interesting that this happened on the same day that I was pointed to this article:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating An Entire Generation Of Fascists. Excerpt:

Like the far-right that they claim to be so staunchly opposed to, the far-left is based entirely around hate. Humans are perpetual morons who always need a bad guy. To neo-Nazis, the bad guys are Jews, “degenerates”, and non-whites. To SJWs, the bad guys are people like Communismkills: not only is she a white person who isn’t self-flagellating, but she’s also a woman who doesn’t see herself as a victim of some evil patriarchal conspiracy. To an SJW, that’s heresy: all white people are evil and all women are victims. If a woman doesn’t think that she’s a victim, then she has “internalized misogyny” and she just doesn’t know any better, so she needs SJWs to speak on her behalf. Likewise, if a black person doesn’t tow(sic) the SJW line exactly, then they will be immediately labeled an “Uncle Tom” or “house nigger” by the extremely patronizing SJWs who see minorities as nothing more than political props and tools and who view all races as monoliths with intrinsic characteristics (which, ironically, is the absolute definition of racism).

Read the whole thing.  It’s sickening, but informative.  I’m reminded once again of philosopher Eric Hoffer’s seminal work The True Believer, and his observation on hate:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”

Another example of this came today in another article, Salem on the Thames: What Connecticut College’s Andrew Pessin Affair Teaches Us. Dr. Andrew Pessin’s story is an illuminating example of one college campus fusing and coalescing into one flaming mass of hatred. He’ll be lucky to get another teaching job anywhere. He’s been made an unperson, much like Dr. Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed a lion in Zimbabwe.

This all goes back to the piece I linked in this morning’s post, Balkanization Part II, and even more to a piece I wrote the better part of ten years ago, Reasonable People.

The fabric of civil society is has been fraying noticeably for a while.  How much longer before it begins to shred?  I’m not taking any bets.

Balkanization, Part II

Awhile back I wrote a post entitled Balkanization about how the Tucson Unified School District was running elementary and secondary education courses in “Race studies.”  What it appeared to be was advanced indoctrination in “The White Man is Keeping Us DOWN!

This kind of stuff dates back to the 60’s radicals – many of whom occupy (or have occupied) teaching positions in the schools of education across the country – Howard Zinn, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn being only the most “famous.”  First you teach the educators, then they teach the pupils.

And the end result?  Balkanization – defined as

to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units

Note with particular attention the word “hostile.”

Perusing Gerard Van der Leun’s site the other day, I came across this really excellent essay: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules. Excerpt:

(America is) becoming a nation where an elite that is certain of its power and its moral rightness is waging a cultural war on a despised minority. Except it’s not actually a minority – it only seems that way because it is marginalized by the coastal elitist liberals who run the mainstream media.

Today in America, we have a liberal president (who) refuses to recognize the majority sent to Congress as a reaction to his progressive failures, and who uses extra-Constitutional means like executive orders to stifle the voice of his opponents. We have a liberal establishment on a secular jihad against people who dare place their conscience ahead of progressive dogma. And we have two different sets of laws, one for the little people and one for liberals like Lois Lerner, Al Sharpton and Hillary Clinton, who can blatantly commit federal crimes and walk away scot free and smirking.

Today in America, a despised minority that is really no minority is the target of an establishment that considers this minority unworthy of respect, unworthy of rights, and unworthy of having a say in the direction of this country. It’s an establishment that has one law for itself, and another for its enemies. It’s an establishment that inflicts an ever-increasing series of petty humiliations on its opponents and considers this all hilarious.

That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot expect to change the status quo for yourself and then expect those you victimize not to play by the new rules you have created. You cannot expect to be able to discard the rule of law in favor of the rule of force and have those you target not respond in kind.

RTWT. It’s a cautionary tale that I don’t think the Left on the whole is capable of learning.  But a few can.

Tough history coming,” indeed.

Quote of the Day – Top Gear Edition

Unless you’ve been living under a stump, you’re most likely aware that Clarkson, May and Hammond will be returning to the small screen via Amazon Video next year.  (And there was much rejoicing!  Yeaaaa!)

I stumbled across this QotD over at Quora.com under the question “What is so special about Top Gear that it has 385 million viewers worldwide?”

The secret is that Top Gear is not about cars. It’s about joy. About unabashedly, unashamedly enjoying life.

It also presents a positive image of masculinity, which is something that is entirely missing from everything else on television.– Rúnar Óli Bjarnason

Abso-fricken-lutely.