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| Merciless Sympathy |
| 2019-02-19 |
| h/t Instapundit [NationalReview] Jussie Smollett’s phony hate-crime story could have been taken apart in 24 hours, except for one thing: Nobody wanted to be the first to call bullsh**. Who will bell the cat? Not the police, and I don’t blame them. Smollett is a vocal critic of President Donald Trump who checks two protected-category boxes: He is gay and he is black. No police officer comes out ahead in any encounter in which he has to explain that he isn’t a racist or a gay-basher. ...Merciless sympathy is the stratagem by which our natural solicitous feeling toward those who have suffered some wrong or some injury is forcibly reconstituted into support for a particular political agenda grafted onto the unhappy episode. Those who don’t support the politics are treated as though they were victimizing the victim (genuine or hoax) rather than disagreeing about a policy question. Merciless sympathy is how declining to oppose Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is transmuted into callousness toward rape victims, how support for the Second Amendment is recast as contempt for the children killed in Parkland, how doubting the breathless accounts of the Covington Catholic matter becomes racist hostility to an elderly Native American veteran. As rhetorical stratagems go, it is obvious, shallow, and stupid ‐ and therefore effective in the era of Twitter-dominated discourse, in which shallowness and stupidity are weaponized. ...Merciless sympathy is simply one more weapon in the arsenal of contemporary mob politics. ...We have seen this often enough. The plague of phony hate crimes on college campuses, often coinciding with controversial political events, isn’t the product of coincidence. It is a strategy. Fictitious, politically charged stories of rape ‐ Lena Dunham’s encounter with "Barry" the College Republican, the lies published by Rolling Stone, etc.‐are not the products of coincidence. These things happen in clusters for a reason. That is not to say they are being centrally directed as part of some kind of well-tempered conspiracy, but rather that they are the natural result of a certain kind of politics attached to a certain worldview. Merciless sympathy is used not only to silence doubters but to silence dissent. That is the purpose of conflating victims with political agendas. And if there aren’t any particularly useful victims around, you can always make something up. Jussie Smollett wasn’t the first. He won’t be the last. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |