Scott Alexander: "Against Murderism"
link:
A digression, from an alternative universe.Definitely worth a read. Racism is a much more complicated concept than people tend to think. And the concept forms, basically the cornerstone of the progressive worldview. And it is routinely deployed as the first, last, and sometimes only argument they offer. So it does bear thinking about.
“Murderism” is the ideology that murdering people is good and letting them live is bad. It’s practically omnipresent: 14,000 people are murdered in the US each year. That’s a lot of murderists, and a testament to the degree to which our schools teach murderist values.
But not all murderism is that obvious. For years, people have been pushing “soft-on-crime” policies that will defund the police and reduce the length of jail sentences – inevitably increasing the murder rate. Advocates of these policies might think that just because they’re not gangsters with knives, they must not be murderists. But anybody who supports murder, whether knife-wielding gangster or policy analyst – is murderist and responsible for the effects of their murderism.
Our two major parties have many differences – but both are united in their support for murderism. Republicans push murderist policies like the invasion of Iraq, which caused the murder of thousands of Iraqis. Democrats claim to be better, but they support openly murderist ideas like euthanasia, promoting the killing of our oldest and most vulnerable citizens. There’s no party in Washington that’s willing to take a good look at itself and challenge the murderist ideals that our political system is built on.
Murderism won’t stop until people understand that it’s not okay to be murderist. So next time you hear people opposing police militarization, or speaking out in favor of euthanasia – tell them that that’s murderism and it’s not okay.
…okay, done. Back in our own universe, we recognize that “murderism” is silly: it confuses cause and effect.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:51 AM
1 Comments:
Related posts that I think are insightful and are cause for despair.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
and
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
They, like murderism seem to do a good job of cleaving reality at the joints, or at least what things look like when you look around these days. I think we as a civilization need to come up with a way to talk about perverse incentives and what social media is doing to us but all we can focus on is privacy and "hate speech".
It isn't the internet, because I remember Usenet and IRC, and all of the crazy was there then too, but smashing all of these disparate communities into contact with each other (as well as lowering the barriers to finding and joining such groups) has been a force multiplier in social division.
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