by John Galt » Mon Nov 16, 2015 12:15 pm
well a few hours before the attacks obama called ISIS "contained"
and while there are people that want to continuously point to other victims of tragedy and try to guilt us into recognizing them, you should realize when you do this you are actually lessening the value and impact of the other tragedy, the one you are directing attention from.
that area of the world has been warring each other over for recorded history. when some tragedy happens there, it's expected. it WAS covered in news, you can find it everywhere (go to google, search news, with a custom date range for Nov 12, and look for "beruit bombing", and find several thousand articles). now, such a thing in lebanon itself isn't as common (today) but it's still in the general area where they fight over scraps of desert, generation after generation. what it didn't get was wall-to-wall coverage because it's not shocking, and something shocking and horrifying happened in the western world. i'm tired of hearing about people like the blacklivesmatter f**k complaining that paris tragedy is taking away from them (since we all know all frenchmen are white; not like france had a huge colonial empire in africa or anything).
the paris attacks hit home because they are horrible and happened to westerners like us, in a setting that we might ourselves find ourselves in: at a restaurant, at a show, at a game. they were brutal and terrible. yeah, lots of times, bad things happen to other people. so what? we are groupish animals who care about our own groups. we feel more empathy for people who share our values, and france shares a lot of our values, way more than some arabs, that's clear enough. lebanon is closer than many muslim counties, because it's a third chrisitan, but it's still far away and far removed.
in fact, i would say we shouldn't be so open as to feel for people who are so far removed from our group. part of rooting for the packers is about despising the bears and the vikings. yeah, i might feel empathy for a player of the game on those teams who gets hurt if i'm watching the game, but i really don't care about those teams themselves, i don't follow them outside of knowing basic information like their record, and hope they lose
Americans learn only from catastrophe and not from experience. -- Theodore Roosevelt
My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.