I Am Outraged

I'd like to propose a little thought-experiment. Einstein and the boys a century ago would imaging things like passenger trains hurtling at one another at thousands of miles per second to work out the details of Relativity.

So, I want you to suppose you are one of the folks on Storage Wars bidding on abandoned storage lockers. In the first locker you and your frienemy bid each other up because you both see a box for a rare collectible Star Wars toy. One of you wins, but pays through the nose for it. The next locker you see a similar box for a similar item of value and that locker sells at a premium, too. At the end of the day, a locker goes up for auction, and inside is a priceless 1935 Duesenberg convertible. You and your frienemy each check your pockets and find you've spent all your money. The locker then goes for a song as you look on helplessly. When you inspect your locker, you find the box is empty.

Your actions are reasonable because storage lockers containing priceless objects d'art are as rare these days as KKK lynchings.

Great crimes should be suffered with great outrage and small crimes should only warrant small outrage.

Yet, we've seen a reversal of this in our society. Decades-old thought-crimes are spun into "the worst form of racism." Morning-after regrets can occasion accusations of rape. And so on.

This lack of perspective comes about because a lynching is so rare these days. Society has advanced morally. No civilized person thinks it's OK to demean a person for the color of his skin. No civilized person thinks the victim of rape "was asking for it." No civilized person thinks that being a girl is inferior to being a boy.

Why is even the barest hint of transgression in these areas met with such fury? There is only a finite amount of outrage that a person or a society can muster. Why do we spend it so foolishly?

It could be that the activists don't really believe their own rhetoric about having won and they overcompensate to deny their insecurities.

More likely it's the rice bowl.

Suppose I held Aladdin's Lamp with infinite wishes and used the first one to end racism. What would this do to the people crying the loudest about racism? If I used the second wish to end poverty, think of the social workers who'd be tossed out of work.

The righteous work of the activist is to find the largest social problem in his/her area of interest and solve it. Then move on to the second-largest, and so on. But nobody is enslaving blacks, or lynching them, or segregating schools, or red-lining mortgages, or using the n-word. Now we have claims of subliminal racism.

At some point, the activist should admit victory. But admitting victory hurts fundraising.

You Are Not Safe

I had a friend who got high in Democrat circles. He was the kind of guy who actually owned a copy of Speaker of the House Jim Wright's book. The one he fraudulently published in a money laundering scheme

. My friend knew I was Conservative in some issues and Libertarian in others. I think this is what gave him the feeling he could make remarks that were disrespectful of gay people. My response was a lifted eyebrow, because that was the sort of thing Democrats always accuse Republicans of. He'd be crucified if he made such remarks publicly today.

For the record, I am a libertarian who believes Government should be small enough so that what goes between your legs is of no interest to it. Government should also be color blind and indifferent to whether you have boy parts or girl parts.

In recent days I've watched on with detachment at the sound and fury directed at people with good Democrat credentials. They are being mau-maued for remarks that have been spun into thought-crime. I'm not a fan of Paula Deen and I have never heard her utter a racist remark, yet I have heard accusations that she has done so in the past and that she botched her apology. Did she campaign for the white half of Barack Obama?

There is no statute of limitations on thought-crime and I have heard her called the worst kind of racist.

This should be good news for those fellas in white hoods with a penchant for carrying torches and lynching.

Then there's the flap I just learned about at the SFWA. I don't haunt those precincts very much and so I'm not the best guy to assess guilt. It turns out two old guys, Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick, said some things that could be spun into anti-feminism.

Apparently, they wrote in the SFWA newsletters referring to females as "ladies" and their fetching appearance was noted in complimentary terms. This was spun into thought-crime most foul.

This should be good news to those fellas who make girls wear burqas and practice female genital mutilation.

For the record, when I use a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more and nothing less. If you are a lady, you are a superior woman. Just as a gentleman is a superior man. I find humorless scolds abhorrent without regard to sex, creed or color.

The frightening thing about this story is that the perpetrators were Liberals in good standing who merely reflected the values of Democrats in the 1960s. A generation and a half of multicultural political correctness has turned large swaths of the academy into cultural Stalinists.

What I found most appealing about the liberalism of the 1960s was its tolerance and acceptance of diversity. But today it seems the only diversity that can be tolerated is the kind that uses rainbow logos to tell religious people to shut up.

Anything can be interpreted maliciously by someone intent upon using the politics of personal destruction. Moreover, when charges of racism or sexism are trivialized as we've seen recently, our society has no moral outrage left over for the fellas in white hoods, etc.

Will you tolerate mau-mauing?

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.