The Chickens And Colonel Sanders
Source: Iranian General Accuses Israel of Causing Drought by Stealing Clouds | Breitbart
Well this is a new one. Over the past while, especially in the world of politics, no claim is too preposterous or accusation too unhinged to level against ideological foes. Stealing someone’s weather is actually quite novel and creative. It hasn’t quite acquired the traction and mass hysteria concerning weather that Al Gore has wrought with his inventive and mercantile mind, but you know what they say about imitation and flattery. But for creativity and the “way out there” factor, it’s a good one.
By now, invocation of the “N” word, that word being Nazi, to characterize anyone who happens to disagree with a preferred point of view, is as cliché as lisps and facial hair on hipsters. That “N’ word is applied like cheap olive oil onto most every social and political issue. Anyone resorting to that smear to silence their opponent has already lost the argument. Closely following on the list of toothless barbs are the epithets of “racist”, “misogynist”, “sexist”, “Islamophobe”, “homophobe” all the way down the list to “anti-dentite”.
In my view, these supposed slurs expose two enormous and dangerous issues threatening civilization. The first is the obvious absence of originality. It’s like calling someone a fatso. Rather than accurately portraying opponents in any articulate way, the smear industry lazily resorts to recycling tried and true monikers in their campaigns as if they were the next in the series of Rocky movies; or Star Wars; or Fast and Furious. We know that numbers are important to successful films, you just don’t expect it to be the number in the film’s title. It all becomes just noise, analogous to the cacophony of crying babies in a hospital birthing ward. As we know, the entertainment industry is seemingly bereft of any new creative ideas and thus depend solely on retreads of the same tired franchises to pay the bills. This represents an intellectual laziness that is also reflected by social justice warriors in their tired clichés and characterizations, contributing to the blunting of intellectual thought.
Which brings us to the second fatal issue. People willingly consume this crap. Like most Hollywood drivel and that includes the “music” industry, the wholly unoriginal social justice smear warriors can only exist if there’s an audience for their banalities. We can postulate that there may be an almost chemical like dependency of a large swath of the population to consume the same drivel over and over again. We expect to see this kind of behavior in adolescents, as epitomized by an entire generation hooked on video games and Facebook. But people generally grow out of this groupthink behavior as they mature. Incredibly, large segments of the populace seem to be zombie-like consumers of…crap.
Unfortunately, the present state of public discourse shows that lack of critical thinking, normally hallmarks of adolescents, has been pushed farther into adulthood than in previous generations. People with wholly illogical and preposterous notions are given audience that rational people would dismiss as utter nonsense. We are all familiar with the notion of the popularity of anti-heroes, but the embrace by much of the public of the moon bat ideas offered by many recent political demagogues is analogous to chickens embracing Colonel Sanders. Right now, there’s a lot of willing chickens.