THE MEANS DON’T JUSTIFY THE LOGIC. Logic is more than deduction, it’s also context. Thinking needs to be more protected than these “groups” which divide us for our masters’ convenience.
It’s a well-known proverb: the ends don’t justify the means. However, the means do not justify the ends either. Yet, that the means justify the ends is one of the most pervasive logics out there.
It is, in particular, the foundation of Political Correctness, and that makes it into Perfect Cretinism.
The term “political correctness“ (adjectivally: politically correct; commonly abbreviated to PC) is used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. Ironically, PC offends thinking itself. By saying thinking should be offended rather than an ethnic, superstitious religious, skin color, sex and games group, PC is saying that ethnicity, superstition, skin color, sex and games, are more important than thinking itself.
Thinking is the hardest, but most specifically human activity. Putting a clamp on it is inhuman, a call to barbarity.
Political Correctness in the very context it uses to exist, is an aggression against what, or whom, it pretends to protect, and care about. Political Correctness’ essence is “Divide Et Impera”: it assumes there are “groups” in society. So this absolute good, Political Correctness, rests on an absolute potential evil, the existence of “groups” in society. It admits division as a legitimate basis of society, thus to be mastered by rulers (our beloved plutocrats and their even more admired enablers, such as the elected political representatives).
The very foundation of PC is to be afraid to “offend”. But what is offensive? Anything worth doing will always offend, and that starts with complacency. Being offensive offends complacency.
Personal example: I planned to go on a big mountain run yesterday, offending many people in my environment, who naturally worry about my shenanigans, including running in tank top on the snow for a marathonic distance, out of phone range, where 25% of the oxygen is missing, while a storm is incoming, the bears are desperately looking for a last few juicy morsels to share with the ravenous mountain lions, and there is not enough snow at low elevations for long-range skiers to venture. They in turn offended me by trying to resist this glorious flight of fancy of the human spirit, doing in winter conditions what is already a very serious mountain run, in summer conditions.
I also offended myself, because nobody can sincerely like running with frozen feet in tank top when the wind is beginning to howl, on a mountain top where not even a helicopter could get, because of the incoming storm and night. However, it went well: the mind was appropriately concentrated, gliding over snow was achieved, and the feet got warm enough, much lower. I was able to sustain snow running in often sinking snow for twenty miles (no choice: the night and the snowfall were looming ever more). So here I am, enriched and fiercer than ever from this appropriately apocalyptic experience (forget books, get to know the real thing). Not seeing anyone for twenty snowy miles, in the total wilderness, made me more cognizant of the true place of Homo Sapiens in the universe, and the human spirit which gives it sense. The universe was suitably gloomy, when the azure sky was replaced by black clouds (I hope I offended plenty of people by using the word “black” in the context of a cloud) The universe was gloomy, but the spirit was indomitable, as it should!
The means don’t justify the logic: a logic is made of means (from the axioms), but also from a context, a universe. And the ends can be part of that. Yet the means, as yesterday’s run, can bring new logic to bear. (And not just on the bears.)
So not offending people? Give me a break: being human in full is about being offensive, since there are humans and they think. Thinking itself is an offense. Offend yourself, and learn something.
Patrice Ayme’
Tags: Human Condition, Offense, PC, thinking
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
November 25, 2017 at 3:23 pm |
Bravo!
But until every shred of identification with either of our totally corrupt political parties is extinguished, the “political” will still be a weapon of the ruling class.
The only political dimension that matters now is “up” vs. “down.”
cheers,
benign
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November 25, 2017 at 4:11 pm |
Thanks Benign! I appreciated the appreciation always, I am like one of these “converter” animals in “Valerian, the city of 1,000 planets”.
I had dubious pleasure reading some of the lamentable, actually disgusting, justification of Paul Krugman for his friends and colleagues, the sexual harassers. He actually wrote they were “redeemed” by their other qualities. Some of these (like Charlie Rose) are outright plutocrats posing as “liberals” (whatever that means).
You are very right that only “up” versus down “matters”.
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December 2, 2017 at 8:38 pm |
[Sent to Picard, Dec 2, 2017. Picard ponders: The Sexual Left Devours Itself. Posted by Picard578 on December 1, 2017
The Great Sex Harassment Witch Hunt of 2017 is mostly hitting liberals. It is leaving conservatives largely unscathed (at least so far). Why should this be?]
***
My answer:
There is a grave confusion going on between proposing and seducing, which is, and should be legal with harassment. Harassment is violence that one has been told, one way or another, to cease and desist.
Much of the so-called “left” is not a “left” at all. Nor is it “progressive Many of the policies pursued by Bill Clinton were more on the right than those of Nixon, Reagan, and G. Bush. He irreversibly destroyed FDR’s financial, anti-plutocratic excess laws. Obama wasn’t any better. After he finished, inequality was greater than ever, and Saudi princes were secretly put back in control of, say, Citigroup.
So what is finally changing, on the left, is that those who don’t like the established order realize that they have been led by fakers and fraudsters. It’s a good first step. When Trump calls Dem Senator Elizabeth Warren, a tall blonde who pretended to be an Indian to get top jobs, “POCAHONTAS”, he makes a point which the true progressives should applaud.
PA
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December 2, 2017 at 9:36 pm |
December 2, 2017 at 9:45 pm
Problem is that it has become very hard to define what is left and right nowadays. As I have written in an article I wrote for a Croatian newspaper, modern political ideologies are very confused. Classical ideologies go from one basic idea which is then logically extended into an organized system of ideas (hence, ideology). Modern ideologies are much like modern art: heaps of trash with no logic, no system and no purpose. And since physical confusion is a product of mental confusion, it is no wonder we live in such a screwed-up world.
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December 2, 2017 at 9:38 pm |
Indeed. “Left and right” have meant nothing since the 1930s…
Right and wrong in the sense of true versus not true should replace them, in first order. Put equality and empathy next.
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