Coddling lunacy
“ The paradox at the heart of the root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances.”
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Welfare Queen, meet your successor: the Evil Terrorist. Old and new conservatives alike have their bogeymen: the dregs of society too stupid, lazy or evil to be productive members of the dominant paradigm.
Read On! |
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| Liberals only look for root-causes when people do evil. “They acknowledge free will and human agency if -- and only if -- adaptive actions are involved.” | The search for root causes can unearth both the source of good and bad deeds. To look for root-causes is merely to acknowledge that social circumstances FACTOR into the way people act. |
| Liberals reject free will and refuse to acknowledge poor moral choice. | Nonsense. Ilana Mercer clearly exercised her free will and made a poor moral choice to write this article. The problem is that conservatives reject reality. |
| Liberals hate men and write them off as violent dominators, while giving women the benefit of the doubt when they commit wrongdoing. | Those crazy Liberals. I thought they were FOR gender equality! |
| Terrorists kill us because “they hate us,” not because of “the Three P’s – poverty, patriarchy, and powerlessness.” | Ms. Mercer spends so much time debunking the first two P’s, she forgets the last P. Harvard terrorism expert Jessica Stern found in her interviews with terrorists that when asked about causes “the variable that came up most frequently was… perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied — leaders and followers." |
| Doing evil is a direct result of a “rotten immoral character.” | Ms. Mercer Ph.D.? M.D.? Don’t think so. Modern psychology places human action at a complex nexus of genetics and external factors such as upbringing and social pressures. |
| Free will means that no human action has a cause. | Ms. Mercer fails to realize that “rotten moral character” is a cause in itself. Any factor that contributes to an action can be seen as a cause. Root-causes go beyond the arbitrary decisions of individuals and look to underlying factors that constrain or direct human action. |
| Looking for root-causes justifies crime and excuses the criminal. | Root-causes neither justify or excuse bad deeds. The search for root-causes is an effort to find a long-term solution for the ills of the world. On the other hand, blaming abstract forces like “evil” or “rotten moral character” excuses conservatives from doing anything to make the world a better place. |
Welfare Queen, meet your successor: the
Evil Terrorist.
Old and new conservatives alike have their bogeymen: the dregs of
society too stupid, lazy or evil to be productive members of the
dominant paradigm.
Old conservatives worhip at the altar of personal responsibility.
As the myth went, the Welfare Queen abused the system, claiming
kids and disabilities she didn’t have in order to squeeze
the entitlement system dry. The right screeched about a culture
of dependency and pushed through welfare reform. If only the myth
were true. Instead, single mothers now work 80-hour weeks and still
get evicted.
The Christian right and their NeoCon sidekicks don’t do responsibility
so much (do you remember the last time George W. Bush took responsibility
for anything?). They prefer evil. Evil is a useful tool. It makes
things real simple like, so folks can unerstand ‘em. TERRORISTS
attack us because they are evil. 9-11 happened because of those
evil sodomizing New Yorkers. Satan is behind the Tsunami. Find this
logic troubling?
Even more brilliantly troubling is the wedding between the old and
the new. The combination of the Christian right’s obsession
with evil and the Old Consvervative fixation with personal responsibility
is the perfect formula for doing nothing about human tragedies.
Says the right: If humans do bad things purely because they are
evil and incapable of making good moral choices, then we can forget
about improving the world and just throw the evildoers in jail,
or better yet, execute ‘em.
So, while the Right weedles its way out of doing anything positve,
the Left takes action, searches for the root-causes of “evil,”
and works towards long-term, lasting solutions.
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