Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Tucker Carlson on the Tulsi Gabbard Show

Long, but good.  

Tony Flood comments:

Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.  

Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction.  I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.'  Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.

There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention.  The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.

One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:

Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.

The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.

Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.

And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.


Posted

in

, ,

by

Tags: