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by pragerfan July 7, 2020 A friend of mine asked me to comment on the following passage he noted on social media. Okay, friends, I'm putting myself out there.My friend cited difficulty in responding to this because it comes from someone he knows. He wants to respond but doing so would expose his conservative leanings and he fears being stuck in a losing argument. In my view, however, he would not be stuck in a losing argument because the passage makes no argument; it emotes. Let's review this word-by-word, line-by-line. Okay, friends, I'm putting myself out there. I have a hard time thinking on my feet when confronted with disagreements, so I tend to shy away from political or racial arguments. But I can't do that any longer.While this may — or may not — be true, more often than this is a set-up in order to bamboozle the reader into believing the speaker is acting from a position of higher moral authority than he otherwise would if he played in the muck of those political and racial debates. In other words, he flies high above the fray, and he only swoops down from the sky when things get so bad that we need his enlightenment regarding how we should feel and why we should feel that way. This however is not the exercise of moral authority but rather the stench of hypocrisy. He wants to tell us how we should feel about major issues of the day but then admits that he "has a hard time thinking" when confronted with disagreements, and so he just doesn't want to argue. He wants others to do his arguing for him — we have to do the dirty work of putting forward arguments but he doesn't. That's hypocrisy. I've watched the morning news today. And now my heart just hurts. Top headlines include: masks as a political issue, a black man being pinned by white people and called racial slurs, a President who blatantly supports racist comments, and just overall discord in our country.I'll look at each of these juicy pieces of veritable doom and gloom in a moment, but where does this person get his news? If I got my news from the mainstream media, I'd weep too. Maybe it's time to read an alternate news source, such as OANN, or listen to or watch an alternate show like Hannity or Rush. Injecting yourself with a dose of optimism isn't a bad idea once in awhile, so long as you don't overdo it. I don't understand why masks are such a big deal.Masks themselves aren't a big deal. Or at least they weren't until they were imposed by fiat on otherwise healthy people. Before the China Wuhan virus, Americans understood that there was a time and place for masks, usually confined to a hospital while treating sick patients. So why have masks become such a big deal? They're not. The big deal is coercion — whether by Governors or businesses as a condition of doing business. In America we have this little thing called freedom, and we don't like it when people tell us what to do. The British learned this lesson the hard way in 1776. Sometimes Americans will do what we're told if there is a very good reason, but so far arguments for compulsory masking have fallen short, while solid arguments exist against such mandates. But, you may object, shouldn't I wear a mask to protect myself and others? Common sense dictates that you probably should under certain circumstances, such as the hospital example just cited. Otherwise, a free society means you're free to make that risk-based choice for yourself. If you're coerced, you're not free. And freedom doesn't end where fear begins. If I wear a mask, I do so to protect myself, and I expect you to protect yourself as well. I don't have an obligation to protect you from a virus, and you don't have an obligation to protect me from a virus. I tend to agree with Randians who hold that there is no such thing as "the common good" or the "public good" because these goods aren't definable nor quantifiable. There are only individual goods and society is comprised of inviduals. Government should seek to maximize individual goods, not to maximize some amorphous "common good" or "public good." We don't sacrifice our freedom on the twin altars of collectivism and altruism. You may further object on the basis of moral values. Aren't we supposed to "love our neighbor?" And doesn't that love include protecting our neighbor? Yes, to a certain extent. If I see you getting beat up by someone else, I ought to intervene to stop that act of evil. The Scripture says "do not stand by [while] the blood of your neighbor [is shed]" (Leviticus 19:16). However, no one forced the Good Samaritan to intervene to rescue the man left for dead on the road to Jericho — the Good Samaritan freely chose to take this obligation upon him. It has been a point of law for centuries that people cannot generally be held liable or responsible for failing to intervene, except in some narrowly-construed circumstances. It is up to God, not government or law, to judge each person's response to parable of the Good Samaritan. What is the difference between "protecting" others by wearing a mask and protecting someone by intervening to stop him from being beat up or killed? Well the latter protection is willfully stopping an act of evil perpetrated by another person upon the innocent. The former "protection," however, is largely indefinable. When I say I "protect you" by wearing a mask how exactly am I doing that if I'm healthy? Even if I am sick, your chances of getting infected if you are not standing close to me are miniscule, and if outdoors, practically nil (Heather MacDonald analyzes this in more detail here). So wearing a mask doesn't really protect you, except maybe 0.01% of the time, whereas stopping the guy who's beating you up protects you 100% of the time. Why should I give up my freedom (and quite possibly do harm to myself) for 0.01%? So the argument isn't persuasive, especially as there is now ample evidence that compulsory masking may pose a significant health risk. The exercise of googling the risks of compulsory masking is left to the reader. Most importantly, man is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). The image of God shines the brightest through the human face. When you talk to someone, you don't look at his hand, or leg, or arm, you look at his face. When Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone, he didn't place a veil over his hands or his feet or his kneecaps. He placed it over his face, because it was his face that reflected the glory of God, that had seen and had partaken of the Shekinah. When otherwise healthy people compelled by the power of law — or of social shaming, or as a condition of employment — to wear masks to enable political or corporate virtue signalling, this not only abrogates freedom, but it also denies the image of God in man. For these reasons I oppose coerced masking. People must be free to decide for themselves whether or not to wear masks — common sense without coercion. I don't understand why we can't have conversations with people different from us instead of choosing to be mean and hateful.Research shows that most of the meanness and hate comes from the Left, not the Right. Get on Twitter and look at just any hashtag critical of the President and you will see that he is called the most vile, hateful, mean labels that one could think of. I won't repeat them all here. That doesn't mean of course that there aren't jerks on the Right. There are jerks on both the Left and the Right. But the Left is as a rule meaner and far more hateful, and this meanness and hate tends much more to be personal rather than tied to a specific policy or issue. Why? There are several factors, but right now what principally animates Left-wing hate is bitterness and hatred which arose because the Left lost in 2016. Nothing is so bitter as to lose that which you believe and were told by everyone supposedly "in the know" was rightfully yours. The Left fought hard in 2016, and they were told over and over again by their cherished media outlets that Hillary was destined to win. In fact, the New York Times at one point said she had a 98% chance of winning the election 1-2 days beforehand. In a word, there was supposed to be a coronation. It turned out, however, that Hillary Clinton, the Left, and the mainstream media became victims of what Alan Greenspan would describe as "irrational exuberance." A black man being pinned by white people and called racial slursWhich black man was pinned down by which white people and called racial slurs? Is evil only evil when whites perpetrate it? It is rank hypocrisy to call out crimes committed by whites but turn a blind eye to those committed by blacks — What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Statistics for decades have shown that as a proportion of the population, blacks commit far more violent crime than whites — but of course saying this is verboten, as is saying that the problem in the black community is not that there are too many guns, but that there are too few fathers. a President who blatantly supports racist commentsThe claim that Trump is a racist is false. I offer three reasons. First, most people who claim Trump is a racist do so on the basis of remarks he made about the Charlottesville rallies in 2014. He said, referring to those who supported keeping the Confederate flag and those who did not, "there are good people on both sides." This of course was taken completely out of context by the mainstream media who twisted the truth and reported that Trump said this in reference to Neo-nazis. Trump has never supported neo-nazis or racists. Everyone deserves the basic courtesy of having their comments interpreted in the context in which they were made. The media failed here — or perhaps succeeded depending on how you look at it. Second, Trump has done more to live blacks out of poverty than any president perhaps ever, or at least since Lincoln. Under Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, black poverty was at all-time highs. Under Trump, blacks had as of February 2020 their highest employment rate in U.S. history — more blacks making more money than ever before. The Trump economy proves that a rising tide lifts all boats, as Reagan said. If Trump really is a racist, and really does hate black people, then why would he create a playing field where blacks could thrive and excel? Third, supposing Trump had said some derogatory things about blacks, a leader cannot be judged in this regard by what he says, especially in private, but must be judged by what he does in public: the actions he takes and the policies he implements (or chooses to let lapse). For example, President Harry Truman on several ocassions used the derogatory term "kike" to refer to Jews, but were it not for Harry Truman, the state of Israel and the subsequent Aliyah would not exist — by this we know, his use of derogatory terms notwithstanding, that Harry Truman was a strong supporter of the state of Israel and of the Jewish people. So a political leader's personal opinions of this group or that group are of little import when weighed against the actions he takes and the policies he promulgates. Quite often, the personal character of a world leader such as President of the United States is of less importance than his policies. I don't understand why people think a President who hides behind tweets is what our great country deserves.The claim is that "President Trump hides behind tweets." Before we can analyze the claim, we have to interpret what it means. Honestly, I don't know what this claim means. Obviously, Twitter has a love-hate relationship with President Trump. They hate his politics but love the traffic he brings to their platform. If Donald Trump ever left Twitter, say for Parler, Twitter would lose half its accounts within a fortnight and become a true echo chamber of the Left. It's hard to argue that even Jack Dorsey would want this, because most people — except for the hard-core ideologues — don't want to live in an echo chamber but want to be exposed to different points of view. So, to say that Trump "hides behind tweets" is sort of misleading. By this argument, Obama hid behind a teleprompter, presidents before him hid behind the television screen, and perhaps FDR even hid behind radio signals. But so what? Ultimately, all of these claims are meaningless. We therefore conclude that this person really didn't mean "Trump hides behind tweets" — at least not in the literal sense. But in any other sense the statement seems prima facie fallacious. Twitter is Trump's primary communication tool to the American people and to the world. It allows him to reach the American people and the world unfiltered by the mainstream media who — rightly or wrongly — he castigates as "fake news" and an "enemy of the people." I hardly would call either "hiding." Trump has tweeted or retweeted over 53,000 times, roughly 40 tweets a day since becoming president. People who are trying to hide don't tweet 40 times a day to tens of millions of people, supporters and detractors alike. Finally, even if the claim "Trump hides behind tweets" were true, he is among the most active Presidents I have ever seen. Until recently Trump was holding campaign-style rallies practically every two weeks or every month, traveling to visit citizens all over the country. At each of these stops he speaks to tens of thousands of people. Again, I hardly would call this hiding. So it seems that this notion that Trump hides behind tweets is simply emoting: the person doesn't like Trump and is trying to articulate why. I'm sad.This is a giveaway that this person is likely on the Left and his entire statement is largely emotion rather than reason. Earlier, I made the point that for the Left politics is life and life is politics. I look at what's going on in the country, and I'm not generally "sad." I'm sad when family member is diagnosed with a bad health condition. I'm sad when a pet dies. I may be peeved with this or that, and obviously looting, riots, and protests aren't my thing, but that doesn't mean I'm going to mentally go curl up into a ball and be sad. Only people for whom politics is life and life is politics do this — because they have little else to live for. Rather than being sad — and bellyaching — about temporary strife in America (largely made up, by the way), instead count your blessings that you are a part of the greatest experiment in human freedom ever conceived. |
