{"id":64775,"date":"2017-10-12T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2017-10-12T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=64775"},"modified":"2017-10-11T22:41:29","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T03:41:29","slug":"animals-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=64775","title":{"rendered":"Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve told the story before<\/a>; one of the most illuminating lessons I\u2019ve ever gotten on human nature was from my 11th grade history teacher, Mr. Dudley Butts \u2013 who was perhaps the most \u201cBig Lebowski\u201d-ish football head coach I\u2019ve ever met.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d been drafted during the Vietnam War; he was proud to point out that he\u2019d been stationed in Washington DC, and the Viet Cong never attacked the Capitol on his watch; mission accomplished.<\/p>\n

And he told us that during basic training, as they were doing any of the things that mimicked killing people \u2013 at the rifle range, while doing bayonet drills and hand-to-hand combat practice \u2013 the drill sergeants never referred to their targets as humans.\u00a0 They were always collections of not-quite-human memes; \u201cgooks\u201d and \u201ccharlies\u201d and \u201cslopes\u201d and so on.\u00a0 It took him a while to realize this wasn\u2019t just the mark of a bunch of bigots with sergeant stripes; there was a method to it.\u00a0 It was much easier to train people who\u2019d spent 18 years of their lives being taught \u201cthou shalt not kill\u201d\u00a0to\u00a0<\/em>kill if you taught them to kill something that wasn\u2019t really human.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the theory goes, it\u2019s easier to convince people you\u2019re right if you get them to believe that your opponent isnt\u2019 operating from rationalism or intelligence; in short, to get them to believe they’re not really human.<\/p>\n

I’ve personally fought this over the years<\/a> by trying to get people who disagree together over a beer and a cigar and to see each other as hiuman beings rather than collections of stereotypes.<\/p>\n

But the problem is worse than it’s ever been; Big Left actively dehumanizes conservatives, flyoverlanders, and anyone Not LIke Them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wanting to kill someone because of his politics is now sort of pass\u00e9. So is the chilling habit of calibrating empathy for the dead on the basis of their perceived ideology. The now-fired vice president and senior legal counsel at CBS Hayley Geftman-Gold posted her feelings after the Las Vegas massacre: \u201cI\u2019m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson tried to assassinate Republican legislators during a baseball practice game, and almost killed Republican majority whip Steven Scalise, MSNBC host Joy Reid seemed to all but suggest that Scalise had deserved to be killed, given his conservative politics. She tweeted: \u201cRep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0\u201d And then she followed that outburst with a list of Scalise\u2019s conservative agenda items, such as his vote for a GOP House bill on health care, that apparently were meant to minimize the horror of his near-death. Reid\u2019s commentary was not unusual; the Washington Post reported recently on liberal anger that a recovering Scalise was honored by being asked to throw out the first pitch at a Washington baseball game. His opposition to Obamacare and support for the Second Amendment should evidently have disqualified him from receiving sympathy for his near-fatal shooting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are times when I think it’s high time this nation called a divorce lawyer.\u00a0 Those times are getting more and more frequent.<\/p>\n

PS:\u00a0 For those who say “Hey, Republicans do it too!”?\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Republicans on the fringe certainly do.\u00a0 Republicans in the mainstream do not.\u00a0 \u00a0Saying they do marks one as unserious.\u00a0 And while being serious is overrated, being unserious is rated utterly correctly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve told the story before; one of the most illuminating lessons I\u2019ve ever gotten on human nature was from my 11th grade history teacher, Mr. Dudley Butts \u2013 who was perhaps the most \u201cBig Lebowski\u201d-ish football head coach I\u2019ve ever met. He\u2019d been drafted during the Vietnam War; he was proud to point out that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entitled-america","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64776,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64775\/revisions\/64776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}