Image Source: Allriot
By Irene F. Starkehaus -
If you don't believe in "X" then you are an idiot. If you don't believe in "Y" then you are a criminal. If you don't believe in "Z" then you don't deserve to live.
On and on the narrative goes as the rhetoric of the Left devolves into a muddled mess of ghoulish and insincere imperatives.
The reason that the employment of such dishonest absolutes is so nefarious is because when they are spoken by the right people in the right positions of authority, they excite mass delusion or worse; mob action.
In short, through the propagation of political correctness, we are now seeing an uptick in contrived thought crimes. We may surmise the growing trend is toward the idea that what you are thinking may actually be unlawful.
In the case of Governor Jerry Brown of California for instance, what do the words Brown spoke to an international gathering of political leaders in Quebec, Canada invite listeners to assume about the people he represents?
"In a speech Wednesday to government officials and environmental advocates that capped his trip, the governor took aim at "troglodytes" who deny the threat of climate change, and insisted that all aspects of modern life must be scrutinized to save the planet."
To be specific, he said:
"We have a lot of troglodytes south of the border."
In making his argument on climate change in front of a group of likeminded peers, Gov. Jerry Brown could safely assume that there was a consensus in the room with regard to climate change because everyone knows that if you don't believe in climate change then you are an idiot. Neither did his audience demand any conjectural data that the climate is being altered by human activity because, again, the science has been settled. He was preaching to the mob.
The central point of contention to his denunciation of opposing views is that Brown didn't feel compelled to represent his whole constituency of California before an international audience by offering an objective reflection of divergent opinions thereby giving them the respect that they deserve. He was, in fact, disrespectful. In a community that is the size of California, does it follow that the whole population goosesteps to Jerry Brown's cadence, or might there be people who don't agree with him? Do they matter? Do their hopes and dreams matter? Do they deserve representation, or are Leftists thinking about reinstituting the 3/5 clause?
Per Governor Brown's glib dismissal of his constituents' concerns, his representation would appear to be conditional. The debate is over, and if you don't agree then you are a troglodyte. Do the opinions of troglodytes bear consideration or is he free to ignore them until they start thinking as they ought?
Mind you, when elected representatives invite the international community to despise large portions of the population, how long will it be before the international community justifies targeting that population for persecution? Could Governor Brown's derision be worse than McCarthyism, which we all learned long ago was the worst kind of political suppression?
Remember, McCarthy began his particular crusade with the question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party." The Communist Party had already advocated the overthrow of American economic and political systems as its primary objectives. This propagated the Cold War against the United States.
Jerry Brown, on the other hand, begins his crusade with the question, "Are you less than human?" Within that context, your right to free expression even within your own mind is limited by Jerry Brown's value judgments. He reinstitutes the Cold War. His absolutes require us to defiantly examine; what questions are we not permitted to ask with reference to climate change? Is there a list of inquiries that are so subhuman in their relevance that to utter them is to expose one to the harassment of our self-appointed oligarchs? Questions like…
Seeing as how there has been no increase in global temperatures for over 15 years, why are we still discussing this?
Seeing as how scientists believed just 40 years ago that the planet was headed for a manmade ice age, why are we still discussing this?
What does the permanent reversal of so called manmade climate change look like on paper? What are target temperatures and benchmarks for each day of the year, so that we can discern when we have achieved your climate change goals?
Do we actually have any goals or is this merely about restricting human activity until we truly find that we are troglodytes? We - that is. Not you. You will still be flying around on your personal jets, offering scathing speeches about the genetic deficiencies of conservative thinking people to your international cohorts.
Exactly. There are no goals. There is no way of determining what climate the planet ought to be experiencing. There is nothing that would show us movement to or away from an ultimate objective. What we are therefore required to embrace per the Governor of California is an intense self-loathing and almost psychotic delusion of either grandeur or negation depending on how we perceive our so called global destruction.
We are being asked to step outside our homes, deny the beauty and wonder and vibrancy of our planet and see death and destruction everywhere we turn. We are supposed to breathe in our planet's air and hallucinate that it is poison. We are supposed to nourish ourselves with the bounty of the earth and imagine that each bite is cancer. We are supposed to look upon our waters and pretend that they are boiling. We are supposed to see every new advancement as the murderer of a species.
And for the record, I'm not suggesting that there are not places in the world where people walk outside their homes and see death and destruction. I'm proposing that more often than not, those places are ruled by the very oligarchs that are seizing control of your mode of living through regulation, over taxation and oppression of free expression. This brings us full circle where we land before the altar of progressivism:
If you don't believe in "X" then you are an idiot. If you don't believe in "Y" then you are a criminal. If you don't believe in "Z" then you don't deserve to live.
To be as smart as Jerry Brown, we must delude ourselves that we are in the midst of the ecological apocalypse.
Per Wikipedia, the Cotard delusion for instance (also Cotard's Syndrome and Walking Corpse Syndrome) is a rare mental illness, in which the afflicted person holds the delusion that he or she is dead, either figuratively or literally.
Believing that we are killing the planet or have killed the planet sounds a lot like delusion, and at least seems to indicate Cotard's Syndrome. And so we must decide. Do we throw our lot in with people who are determined to self-destruct, or will we step outside the lunacy and see the world as it is.
The world is beautiful. Refuse to fear it.
