When they say they want us dead, believe them; a refresher on what we’ve long known
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Let's Discuss The Left-Wing Psychopaths Who Think The Titanic Tourists Deserve [d] To Die
As you probably know by now, on Sunday, an underwater tour group heading to visit the wreckage of the Titanic went missing. The news went wide Monday as US and Canadian maritime authorities steamed East of Cape Cod to aid in the search for the missing submersible.
When you found out about this, you probably thought, “Wow that’s awful. I hope they find them.” And then, as you thought more about it or read further coverage, you probably realized that the chances of recovering the vessel (or even finding it in the first place) were not great, and you probably then felt quite a bit worse about it. And by then, you probably knew some now familiar details about the situation: the Titanic is really far down there; going to those depths is very risky; they don’t go down there a lot; it is very expensive and dangerous, and the people who do go down there have to pay $250,000 a ticket; only five people can go on the experimental submersible at a time; it has a 96-hour reserve supply of oxygen which means if it is still intact and the five people are still alive that the search parties have at most until Thursday to find and rescue them before they asphyxiate.
Armed with these details and perhaps an actual image from the news of the wayward vessel, you probably couldn’t help but imagine what it is like down there in that situation. You may or may not have gotten physically queasy and claustrophobic just thinking about it, but you almost certainly got a little more horrified. Imagining the darkness, the cold, the fear; putting yourself there; empathizing with the passengers.
That’s what you were doing: empathizing.
And then, for the third time in two seconds, you probably thought, “Wow, this is awful,” and that time, you probably meant it more. You probably felt it more. The awfulness is something you probably at that point felt in your bones. Because that’s one of the things that happens when we empathize with people. At the outset, you can know something is bad on paper, but it’s through this mental act of mounting the show, casting ourselves in it, and thinking how we would feel in the shoes of others that we really get closer to touching some sort of shared humanity and feeling the real feelings.
…. There is a ticking clock emergency going on with lives on the line in one of the most remote places on Earth that also happens to be the resting ground of the most infamous shipwreck in history, which (wouldn’t you know it) still fascinates the world more than a hundred years after it sank into the great abyss! The situation at hand as a news story has got a lot of compelling, sensational elements!
So on Monday you probably ended up thinking about it a bit and felt sad.
I assume that is true of you because I assume you’re a normal human being. This is how people process things. It’s how normal people process things. It is unremarkable.
The thing about normal people, though, is that they aren’t all of the people. There are also other people who are not normal—Qu'est-ce que c'est: abnormal—and the thing about those people is that a lot of them are fucking psychopaths.
The abnormal psychopaths, refusing to admit that they are indeed psychopaths, would argue that their empathy machines are, in fact, the ones that are doing the purest evolutionary function. They are caring about people like them because a world that cares about people like them is easier to live in for people like them, and they are a person like them. History has shown us that this can lead to very bad things like war and death and prejudice and those travel adapters you have to bring with you when you go to Europe, but there is a bit of a certain “ok, sure, in some limited ways,” you have to hand them.
But one of the defining characteristics of normal people is that our empathy machines, fortunately for society, are not so singularly transactional. We care about people even when it isn’t immediately obvious that there is something in it for us.
The normal people on Monday did what the normal people do. But the abnormal people didn’t do that.
They heard the news, read the stories, took in all of the information that made you sad, and their first reaction was: anyone who can afford a $250k tourist trip deserves to die.
…..
In the rest of his essay, Dreyfus shows a tolerant, almost forgiving, and sad tone of regret that these people are the way they are, and seems to hope that at least some of them can be called back and redeemed from their savagery. I don’t share those sentiments, which I’m sure makes him the better man, but I say F**k these people.
AND THIS:
The New York Times editorial page, a division of the New York Times Co., on Saturday endorsed Common Cause’s personal attack on Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. . . . That campaign took an even more sinister turn at a Common Cause protest Jan. 30, as we noted Thursday. Participants in the rally were captured on video advocating the assassination of Scalia, Thomas, Thomas’s wife and Chief Justice John Roberts. Two of them explicitly called for Justice Thomas, the court’s only black member, to be lynched. One man also asserted that Fox News president Roger Ailes “should be strung up,” adding: “Kill the bastard.”
A statement from Common Cause made clear that what it called these “hateful, narrow-minded sentiments”–rather a delicate way of describing lurid calls for murder–were contrary to the corporate position of the self-styled “grassroots organization.” But the Times editorial expresses no disapproval of the Common Cause supporters’ racist and eliminationist statements. . . . This is the same New York Times that, as we noted Jan. 11, seized on the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona to announce that “it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible” for a “gale of anger” that the Times claimed had set “the nation on edge”–even though it had already been established that the vicious crime in Arizona had nothing to do with Republicans or their “supporters in the media.”
By the Times’s standards, surely it is legitimate to hold Common Cause, and particularly its most virulent supporters in the media, responsible for the depraved sentiments expressed at the Common Cause rally. That the editorial said nothing at all about the subject is further evidence that the paper’s pieties about “civility” are fraudulent–a cheap exercise in partisanship and a thuggish attempt to burnish its own reputation by tearing down those of its media competitors.
(Glenn Reynolds): “Thuggish but ineffectual.’
That’s likely to be the epitaph for Pinch Sulzberger’s version of the New York Times.
