Teaching Them A Lesson

by digby

I got a very interesting trackback from “Right Thinking From The Left Coast” to my post “haters vs haters” that was unfortunately zapped when blogger deleted posts and comments.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sully’s got an interesting post up about how the left is more hateful than the right. First read this post, then this one. In the second post Sully links to this leftie blogger who disagrees, saying the right is more hateful.

[…]

In support of his assertion of Limbaugh’s “hatred” he offers this quote.

I said at the conclusion of previous hours—part of me that likes this. And some of you might say, “Rush, that’s horrible. Peace activists taken hostage.” Well, here’s why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.

[…]

Okay, a few comments here, if I may. I’ll preface my remarks by stating that I’m not a regular Limbaugh listener, though since Howard Stern has gone off the air I have found that I’ve tuned in to him a lot more during my ten minute morning drive. I’ll also stipulate that you could very reasonably make the argument that Michael Savage and Ann Coulter speak hatred. But Limbaugh? He’s always struck me as being provocative and opinionated, but I’ve never heard anything from him that I would consider “hatred.”

Take the quote above, which the leftie blogger has taken totally out of context. He’s not cheering the fact that people have been kidnapped. What he’s saying is that he likes the fact that, because of their own actions, these “peace” activists are being forced to deal with the consequences of their own stupid beliefs. It’s like when you have a guy who makes a living sticking his head into the mouths of alligators, and the alligator chomps down on his head. Can anyone really look at the guy with sympathy? He voluntarily stuck his head into the mouth of an alligator. Would it be “hateful” for someone like me to come along and say, “See? This is why you shouldn’t stick your head into an alligator’s mouth.” So when some raving moonbat “peace” activist assumes a haughty air of moral superiority and goes to where the Islamists are, and then the Islamists capture them and hold them for ransom, it’s not hateful at all to then say, “See? This is what your lofty ideals of peace get you.”

There is nothing hateful about enjoying the suffering of other people when that suffering is due to their own stupidity. We do this all the time. Some dumbass climbs an electricity tower and gets electrocuted. He had to climb over fifty signs warning him of the danger, telling him to keep out, yet he did it anyway. Most pragmatic people would say, “Let this be a lesson to everyone else.” I remember a story a few years back about a protest over a ban on BASE jumping off Half Dome here in California. The park service banned it because it was unsafe. To demonstrate how safe it was a bunch of jumpers climbed up there and began jumping off. One of the jumpers leaped off the edge, her chute failed to open, and she plunged to hear death. The less on to be learned here is that BASE jumping is indeed unsafe, and those who engage in it run the very real risk of dying from it. Such is the case with the peace activists.

I had a friend once a few years ago, a die hard leftie, an admitted capital-S socialist. We were discussing the situation in the Middle East, and I referred to the Islamists as our enemies.

[…]

He simply refused to recognize the fact that the Islamists would hate him simply by virtue of being who and what he was. He honestly believed that, if he had the chance, he could convince the Islamists that he was not their enemy, that they could peacefully coexist with his kind. He steadfastly refused to believe in the concept of enemies. The peace activists suffer from the same delusion. So, when people on the right say “These people hate you and will kill you,” and the lefties subsequently get kidnapped, how is this substantively different from a guy who voluntarily sticks his head into an alligator’s mouth and expects nothing bad to happen to him?

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s hateful to enjoy the suffering of others regardless of how “stupid” they are. (Psychologists would call it sociopathic.) Let’s just say that I think it’s cold and inhuman and leave it at that.

But there is a leap of logic here that’s worth exploring. If it is true that this suffering and death serves as a sort of teachable moment, we should also “kind of like” the beheadings of the other civilians captured in Iraq and Pakistan. They are dead at the hands of the same people who are teaching those peace activists a lesson. And they too were told that it is dangerous to do what they did and they did it anyway.They jumped off the same cliff as the peace activists. Of course they did it for different reasons. One did it purely for money. Another lived there for years working for Lockheed. One did it to tell “a story.” Another was there for decades doing humanitarian work. Should the lesson we take from their deaths be that they deserved what they got because they were too stupid to know that they might be killed?

Do soldiers deserve to die forbeing soft and doing good deeds in a violent war zone?

“When he got to Iraq, one captain was telling us that you were trained not to get out of your vehicle,” said his father, James McGaugh of Springdale. “He said he looked over and Dustin was out giving candy to a bunch of kids.”

Their commander in chief’s stated motivation is to “help the Iraqi people” because “freedom is the Almighty’s gift to each person in this world.” How earnest and naive is that? Perhaps he needs to be taught a lesson about war and killing and violence too.

These enjoyable teachable moments get complicated, don’t they? You really have to delve into people’s minds to be able to figure out whether it’s ok to enjoy their suffering or become enraged. Peace activists are easy. The right knows that they are putting their hands into the fire and deserve to get burned so they’ll understand that being a peace activist in a war zone is stupid. They can’t help but “kind of like it.” The kidnapping and beheading of the kid who went over to build satellite towers, on the other hand, made everyone crazy with anger. But it certainly appears that he quite stupidly put his head into the alligator’s mouth for no good reason at all. And the soldier who gets killed because he gives candy to children — well, he’s a hero, isn’t he?

It’s a good thing the right doesn’t believe in moral relativism or they might really get confused.

BTW: They are still threatening to kill the four Christian peace activists.

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