Professor Fox 
Alpha Male
Posts: 1,187
Joined: May 2013
Reputation: 12
|
RE: Kimmel chokes up over Cecil the lion
One of my favorite auto journalists wrote a superb column about this, which I will repost here without permission (hello Jack! love your work at TTAC):
Quote:The Day Social Media Decided That Black Lives Didn’t Matter After All
![[Image: bachmann.jpg]](http://jackbaruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/bachmann.jpg)
Two years ago, I explained to you why Sheryl Sandberg was more important than everybody who actually died on Asiana Flight 214. Today, we’re going to do some more of that painfully uncomfortable moral calculus, that depressing measurement of “small souls”. We’re going to do it because it is painful, because it is depressing, because it is the right thing to do in the eyes of God and Man.
I’m going to explain to you why black lives don’t matter. Or, more specifically, why black lives don’t matter as much as a few other things.
Do you know who “Cecil The Lion” was? Here’s a precis of the situation if you don’t: An American dentist shot and killed a lion, supposedly after luring him off a protected reservation. The lion turned out to be a “famous” lion with a tracking collar and a name. In the weeks since it happened, the dentist has received the usual death-by-social-justice, with “SJWs” doing everything from vandalizing his Facebook page to researching various civil-courts cases to which he’s been a party. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition demanding that the dentist be extradited to Zimbabwe. A rumor was spread that the lion’s “brother” was also killed, said rumor turning out to be false.
In the wake of the outrage, most major US airlines declared they would no longer permit their customers to transport game trophies of any kind on their airplanes.
“#CecilTheLion” has been a major trending topic on Facebook and Twitter and the killing of the lion has raised worldwide attention. In Cecil’s home nation of Zimbabwe, however, people don’t seem to care about the lion’s death nearly as much as they do in the United States. Instead, Zimbabweans want to know why Americans have given an implicit stamp of approval to “pressing issues including a failing economy, a repressive regime that has been abducting its opponents, stifling the press and arresting activists”.
More hilariously, Zimbabweans seem to feel that Americans prefer lions to Africans:
Quote:“Why are the Americans more concerned than us?” said Joseph Mabuwa, a 33-year-old father-of-two cleaning his car in the center of the capital. “We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange.”
Tell me that quote didn’t make you laugh, or at least smile, a little. Of course Americans don’t give a shit when lions kill Africans. We are socialized from birth in this country to hold animals as equal to or superior to people. We watch ten years’ worth of talking-animals cartoons as children then the Internet drowns us in a sea of LOLcats and baby-animal pictures. Africans, on the other hand, rarely enter into the childhood-media equation. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is an active embarrassment to American progressives. When it was Rhodesia, it was the jewel of Africa. When white rule fell after years of Soviet fifth-column antics and outside agitation by European countries trying to atone for the sin of colonization by using the same ruinous power they’d used against black Africans on white Africans, the world cheered to see black Africans finally granted control of their destinies.
“Peace has come to Zimbabwe/Third World’s right on the one,” Stevie Wonder sang in 1980, conveniently forgetting (or perhaps never knowing) that the three-way war in Rhodesia was financed and supported by the Eastern Bloc for the purpose of eventually obtaining access to Zimbabwean resources. The strongman who took control of the country, Robert Mugabe, has been an utter nightmare for decades. After killing or displacing every white farmer in the country, a policy that turned Zimbabwe from “the breadbasket of Africa” to a recipient of foreign food aid and cost the impoverished country over twelve billion dollars, Mugabe is now talking about inviting the farmers to return. Were I a white Rhodesian, I’d think long and hard before going back.
The lesson of the Zimbabwean famine — that white Africans are people too — has been too hard for Western progressives to swallow. The descent into hell experienced by South Africans of all colors under the administration of the African National Congress has been equally embarrassing. So our media has decided to deal with the problem by ignoring it. Which means that Americans never hear about conditions in Africa, particularly not in the continent’s southern half. Out of sight, out of mind.
Which leads me back to the idea of “small souls” as previously discussed a few times on this website. The souls of black Africans feel very small to us indeed. We know nothing about them. If we have an image of a black Zimbabwean, it’s probably something out of a Disney movie or District 9 or The Economist. I’d bet a thousand bucks that if I asked the next fifty people I met to show me Zimbabwe on a map, they would point vaguely to West Africa. Nor do many Americans have any positive personal experiences with Africans in this country. I’m an exception; my day job keeps me in close contact with some pretty brilliant African immigrants. But unless you live in New York, chances are you don’t know very many people who were born in Africa. It doesn’t help matters that some of the African migrant communities in this country have organized human trafficking and slavery rings with the same kind of vicious enthusiasm their ancestors showed five hundred years ago during the era of the Triangle Trade.
It is as natural and normal for Americans raised in our media culture to value lions over people, the same way we value kittens over baby groundhogs. But there’s also a kind of cruel calculation going on, something like this: There are fewer than 20,000 lions in the world, but the supply of Africans appears to be nearly infinite. Nearly three-quarters of a million Africans shit themselves to death in 2012 and the world was in no way inconvenienced by this fact. The population of human beings in Africa reached one billion in 2009, having doubled in 27 years. It’s now 1.15 billion. To put this in perspective a bit, that means that Africa is adding people at a daily rate of 70,000.
The atomic bomb at Nagasaki killed fewer than 80,000 people.
So lions are far rarer than African humans and we’ve been taught since childhood that lions are extremely valuable. No wonder, then, that the death of one lion hits us harder than the deaths of 644,000 faceless Africans in a year from diarrhea. But the moral problem of this
African Lions > African People
value judgement is trickier than this. African People do not value the lives of African Lions, not as a rule. When an African Lion kills an African Person, the usual response of African People is to kill the African Lion. But this does not sit well with American People. Even though the American People will never see or interact with the African Lion that killed African People, it is critical for the peace of mind of American People that as many African Lions as possible be preserved. So the actual equation is:
(the peace of mind American People have from knowing African Lions are being “conserved”) > (the actual lives of African People)
We, as a society, are willing to let Africans die so our museums have an easier time sourcing lions. It’s just another one of those value judgments:
(Ted Kennedy’s career) > (justice for the family of the woman he let die)
(Woody Allen’s next movie) > (preventing Woody Allen from molesting children)
(The pleasure of watching Kobe Bryant play basketball on TV) > (America’s laws on rape)
(Facebook’s revenue stream) > (Your privacy)
The difference in this case is that it is a deeply racist judgment, to value lions over #BlackLives. So how does the Twitter SJW posse justify it? Your guess is as good as mine. I think it’s because on the face of it, the argument looks like
(Lion) > (cisgender white medical professional with $50,000-plus to waste)
without considering the fact that every penny the dentist spent to hunt the lion went into the pocket of an African. The dentist did a lot more to help African People than he did to hurt African Lions. And the African People were willing to go along with it, the same way American law enforcement professionals permitted a Saudi princess to beat a woman in front of them because said princess had taken the top two floors of the Westin Swan at Disney World. Money is power. Power is force. Force gets its way.
After a few moment’s consideration, I’ve decided to name the “hall pass” given by the Twitterati to Cecil-the-Lion-related-racism the “Foxconn exemption”. We all know that iPhones are made by Foxconn. We all know that working at Foxconn leads to suicide and depression and any number of terrible mental disorders. But you really want an iPhone, and those Chinese people jumping off the roof at Foxconn are, like, so far away. Hardly even people. So you just agree to not think about it.
This is the new morality. It’s feelings-based, not fact-based. It avoids tricky issues of moral calculus by simply declaring them irrelevant. If you don’t feel bad about Chinese workers, it doesn’t matter what happens. If you don’t feel bad about Africans, it doesn’t matter what happens. All that matter is what you feel. If you feel worse about the death of one lion than you do about 644,000 Africans, it’s okay. If you feel that gay people should be safe from harassment but you simultaneously feel that Gawker was right for doing a gay-bashing hit piece on Conde Nast’s CFO, you’re okay to feel that way.
The problem with feels-based morality is that it isn’t universal. It’s not transferable. You don’t feel bad when a gang of “teens” beats some old white guy? I don’t feel bad when an attractive woman with a great rack kills an animal (see top of article). You don’t feel bad that Americans in the Midwest have no jobs? I don’t feel bad that climate change will make your neighborhood just like Venice. Can you see why feels-based morality, rather than delivering the inclusive, diverse experience it promises, only heightens tension between differing groups?
The most charming thing is that modern young progressives think they invented Feelsville. They think that the natural human inclination was towards rigid order and unyielding law until the magic day when they were born. They think that civilization was self-assembling and that they alone have been given the gift of seeing farther than those around them. It does not help that every piece of juvenile literature on the shelves, from Divergent to The Maze Runner, reinforces the idea that some people are just extremely special and intrinsically know the right thing to do.
David Brin wrote The Postman as a reaction to what he perceived as the right-wing, rugged-individualist sci-fi of his time. The central idea of the book is that we’d miss the federal government if it disappeared. I don’t entirely disagree with him. But I would suggest that the Left in this country has made far more headway against conventional Ten-Commandments morality than the right has made against the existence of the federal government. And we will miss that morality when it’s done.
After all, who knows what the feels-sanctified “lions” of the future will be, and who knows when one might find one’s self thrown to them?
|
|
Home
RooshV.com
Search (Via Forum)
Member List
![[-]](images/collapse.gif)
The following 5 users Like Mike5055's post:
![[Image: CLXSd1hWEAArIzV.jpg]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CLXSd1hWEAArIzV.jpg)
![[Image: 11779834_1026443690708756_4175801528965029554_o.jpg]](https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/t31.0-8/p180x540/11779834_1026443690708756_4175801528965029554_o.jpg)
