Friday, March 15, 2019

Terrorists Kill 49 In New Zealand

posted by Winston Smith at 6:57 AM

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Insanity" is one word for this. The far left may have its annoying elements, you may disagree with the Green New Deal and a lot of their views as absurd. There is an intolerance for differing positions on the left (not to say that the right is tolerant of disagreement). But members of the far right are murdering people each year on a growing scale. These types of killings are called "insane" but then you hear people say they having understandable causes--see, e.g., Muslims being blamed for this atrocity by a right-wing politician in Australia. Trump can't even muster a condemnation of white supremacism after mass murder that is explicitly inspired by white supremacist ideology. He says it's just a small number of insane people. Ideology has nothing to do with it, we are supposed to believe.

I don't see how anyone can reasonably view the far left as an even approachable threat to society as the far right in this context. And yet, blogs like this one have long commentaries on fake hate crimes but one word reactions to mass murder.

12:39 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, it's a point. Though, for the record, I'll point out that I just posted two things before I saw this comment, and deleted a lot of ranting and raving from them because I sounded a little crazy.

Everybody knows that the far right is crazy and dangerous. Nobody doubts it. It's part of the taken-for-granted background. Even the right knows it. You're not going to find RedState or someplace defending them. The crazy left, OTOH, is in power.

And I personally don't have anything new to say about psychotic right-wing racists. They've proven that they're murderous, but we--in the States--had them under control for a long time. They'd dwindled to almost nothing. Though that may be changing...

As for whether it's insane or ideology: well, it's probably both. But crazy seems to me to predominate.

You get a one-word response from me because I had nothing else to say. I nothing much to say immediately after 9/11, either, other than "this is insane." So sue me. This is bigger than Drag Queen Story Hour. It's sobering, and I don't feel the need to gratuitously spew verbiage about it.


I did actually write a bit, but it came out pretty f*cking murderous itself. So I deleted it.


Also, you might reflect on the fact that there are even greater tragedies than this every day that almost none of us say a word about. I don't write about them because I have no special insight into them. What do I know about ISIS? Or North Korea? I've got nothing even vaguely intelligent to say about them.

And there's normally nothing to say about such people, from my perspective, because, IMO, there's nothing really new to say about racism. The new stuff that does get said is, IMO, far inferior to what has already been said.

Furthermore, of course: just about everyone on the face of the Earth has already condemned these assholes; as opposed to the PC left, they have no cultural power / authority. And criticism of them can't be suppressed. The battle against these guys, IMO, is mostly about shooting them before they shoot anybody else. There are basically no ideas there to oppose with other ideas. IMO.

Now, it does turn out that they have a manifesto, and I poked around a bit to try to find it, but even Reddit won't link to it. So it looks like it'll be awhile before I can read it without investing more time in it than I have available.

So, yeah, I'm not unsympathetic with your anger. But don't presume to know what I think about this from one speechless post the day this madness--and whatever else it is, it's also madness--happened.

And none of that is apology. It's a dispassionate explanation of what's wrong with your comment. Because, though I sympathize, you're off the mark.

2:00 PM  

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