Crow posted:

Not true

tpaine posted:

gyrofry posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Since everyone else is discussing morality can I just say this: It strikes me as ridiculous to pretend we “care” about these kids or their deaths in any real sense.

Does this make me sociopathic? I don’t think so, mass shootings are just a seasonal media event like the Superbowl or the Macy’s thanksgiving parade and the idea that you should feel morally compelled to “care” or feel sad about these particular 20 deaths on a day when thousands of people died does strike me as over-egging the empathy pudding.

Can someone read this for me

Goethestein posted:

EmanuelaOrlandi posted:

i agree w/ goatstein. caring about people is stupid, i personally am a communist bc im a sociopath, but a lazy one and i want my lot in life to be better but without me having to work a lot or even exert the minimal effort necessary use my advantages as an upper middle class white man in the first world and become rich

there's no reason to call yourself a communist unless you're basically sociopathic and consider the deaths of millions at best a sad side effect of rapid industrialization and anticapitalism

when deaths occur under capitalism they don't even register; it's not /people/ who die, but rather a reduction in commodity levels. at least when a kulak gets purged he becomes a person posthumously--what more could someone ask for?

babyhueypnewton posted:

getfiscal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Why did you almost cry?

twenty children were killed in a mass shooting

they're still looking for missing people in the philippines, yesteday the death toll went over 900. I didn't notice any tears.

The first is a utilitarian nihilism, unable to identify the meaningful difference between different kinds of deaths. Surely lives are reducible to one another, interchangeable, measurable, quantifiable, surely they are, if we allow them to be. This is a problem that begins with the rhetorical question, “What’s the difference between this dead child and that one,” and the ugly sneering tone it takes, as the speaker tries to cover up a very real and important question. What is the difference, because there is one, why is there a difference, because there is one, what does that difference mean for us, because there is a difference after all between incidents of mass starvation and mass murder, between those who die of illness and those who are shot to death in their classroom, between those who die in war and those who are gunned down behind their desks. A specious distinction? Truly. But our specious distinction, the one that is evident to us, as long as we haven’t been thoroughly disciplined, to negate our instincts, to hate our emotions, or to feel adequately, correctly, appropriately, simply.

And yet of course, it’s always another submission, either to the instinct and its failures, failures to draw coherent, clear, pure, consistent, rational conclusions, or submission to the mechanism of a rhetorical device, something clean, prepared, thought through, something to do the work of thinking for us, to ensure we have the same response to every so-called similar circumstance— what a stupid posture. To submit to the latter, that pretense of right-thinking, all while feverishly cutting away from your mistake-filled body. Utilitarian nihilism, the ugly little story that the only values that matter are the ones that you can’t feel.

The second is a political nihilism, a nihilism of inertia and simplicity. There were more variations of this sentiment, from the creepy gun-owners brigade who hung their mouths open and let talking points pour out of them like shit, or the articles that said, knowing almost nothing about the actual circumstances, that the real problem was mental health access or white male privilege or school security or whatever it is that person writes on the rest of the year, which is amazingly the answer to this specific tragedy. It should be obvious why that shit is worthless. I chose instead the sentiment of Obama’s tears. This simple complaint, a retort to a person’s sadness, conveys the whole bleak emptiness. There’s the self-satisfaction, unable to cry, we scorn those who do for never crying enough. And the cold-bloodedness, able to see a person in a moment of pain and deep empathy and still work up a sneer. It retains the small and single-mindedness that views all events as happening in the light of a single struggle, always narcissistic, always our struggle (Imagine for a moment, someone saying “This shooting doesn’t involve any issue I care or know about, I leave it to others to figure out what is to be done.”)

Worst, most embarrassing perhaps, is the weakness of it. To hate Obama, or his government, or their war crimes, is neither unusual or misplaced. But the need to remind oneself of that hate constantly, particularly at times of that person’s sorrow, gives that hate a pathetic quality. Are they worried that they won’t be able to speak out against american war crimes tomorrow, if today they understand that their “enemy” is a person who weeps for dead children? What kind of hate is so simple that it needs constantly to be reminded of itself. To hate someone isn’t to erase their human being, isn’t to ignore when we feel close to them, when we identify with them, it’s to hate them appropriately, when they commit the wicked act, cover up the war crime, excuse and aid apartheid, all of it.

These are not the nihilisms of potential, that enliven us, that shake off moribund patterns and values whose persistence is only in having-previously-persisted. These instead are nihilisms of consistency, preemptive attacks on meaning designed to regulate a conversation. They’re unthinking, and simple-minded, idealized and abstracted, but worst of all they’re cowardly. Scared to have a mistaken thought, scared that a thought might not advance a rhetorical device adequately, scared that in a painful moment we might empathize wrongly or with the wrong people or in the wrong way, scared that we might empathize today and not tomorrow, scared fucking cowards, scared, consistent fucking cowards.