Good Ol' Fashioned Hatefulness

Dear Overtly Hatemongering Asshole:

People are going to disagree with you so you should learn to accept it. You don't have to like the person and you certainly should be adamantly opposed to her or his ideas if you find them to be illogical or unsubstantiated but as a citizen of a free country you must accept that there will be differences of opinions. Even a person who believes the same things as yourself will interpret it and represent it in a different fashion than you simply because her or his life experiences, neurology, genetics, and choices are different.

If you are like myself then you believe in the free market of ideas. I don't want to silence those that disagree with me because I feel strongly that my beliefs are supported by rational argumentation and that the person who posits an opposing view will, in the long run, be proven either right or wrong. Germ theory wasn't immediately accepted but as it stood up to repeated testing and scrutiny it eventually became the accepted explanation of disease transmission. Freedom of speech is essential to the liberation of thought and the advancement of society. I may think that much of FOX News is propaganda for their agenda. But I also think that when a person calls for their "satanic death" like John Cusack has recently it shows a lack of confidence in the logic behind his or her arguments.

But what it also demonstrates to me is that some people are hate mongers. It used to be that when a person was a hate monger you expected that individual to be wearing white robes and burning crosses. From the extremists on the right I hear is how Barack Obama is a simultaneously a communist and a fascist (which is like being fire and water) and that they want him dead. From the left I hear people openly hoping that something awful befalls the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Yes, many of their ideas are wrong. Yes, they have made personal life choices that you or I would not make. But they are still human fucking beings. Palin isn't chopping up homosexuals with chainsaws. Obama isn't blasting bankers with a tank. Beck's politics may be influenced by a fraudulent religion but he isn't financially defrauding people. They all endorse ideas and policies that may be harmful for society but they aren't bad people. Say you hate their ideas. Call them assholes. But being an asshole is not immoral and it doesn't mean that wishing a person harm is justified.

Personally, I have no room for this in my life. I am war with ideas not people. If a person wants to place position themselves on the side that advocates or wishes physical harm to come to another person for expressing ideas then I do not want you to be my friend. If you cannot be civil don't be in my life. A grown up doesn't want Glenn Beck to die. A grown up tries to find the most compelling argument and lets the free market of ideas to take over.

What I was thinking while the guy on the other end of the line was blowing a gasket...

I got super pissed off yesterday when I was listening to NPR and they started talking about public policy and obesity. According to NPR and the federal government I'm borderline obese because if I add 2 pounds to my body, whether it be derived from fat or muscle is irrelevant, I become obese. They also said it wasn't my fault but probably the environment I live in so somebody, and since they said public policy and Federal government I suspect it means that they need to change the world around me instead of me changing my behavior. What it boils down to is the government wants to be god. Well, Uncle Sam, I'm a motherfucking atheist and I don't have, don't need and don't want a master in the fucking sky.

It's not that I don't believe in a space Santa raining us with blessings. It's that I don't believe anything in the universe or the universe itself gives a shit about any of us. This isn't a benevolent cosmos. It's an indifferent cosmos. If it has anything to offer it is nothing but emptiness and, as we humans seem to understand, pure fucking misery. And the only reason we have anything that appears to be good in this world is because humans are fucking good, fucking animals and when we aren't busy doing things for ourselves we're usually doing it for somebody else. So catch this fly ball: we humans don't deserve shit. Not from our family, not from our friends, not from our peers, not from any fucking body or any fucking institution. I hate it when people demand that the government try to fix everything like A) they've been blessed with some knowledge on what life for individuals or society is supposed to be like and B) they have the fucking right to do it. The improvement of this world, the so-called bettering of our society is achieved by letting humans just be what they are: good. And if they aren't good, if they tear apart everything, they destroy everything, they exploit everything, they devour and destroy the entire planet and every living thing on it they still aren't being bad. They are just following in what appears to be a teensy weensy itsy bitsy part of this impending thing that looms billions of years in our future called the Big Rip.

So in conclusion, if you don't think people are good then you can go fuck yourself. Stop being such a fucking asshole and realize that these people sitting around are just as self-centered as you are and have their own shit to deal with.