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Steve Cheung's avatar

For those who have a tenuous grasp of intellectual consistency, here is a brief guide:

If you contend that all Israelis (or all Jews) are culpable for the actions of the Israeli government, then…

1) all Gazans are culpable for the actions of Hamas (ie the Gazan government)(and yeah, that includes Oct 7 cuz duh);

2) all Russians are culpable for the actions of the Putin regime;

3) all Syrians were culpable for the actions of the prior Assad regime;

And as the cherry on top…

4). All Americans are culpable for the actions of the US government.

This should clarify things for the terminally stupid.

I’m generally not for the death penalty unless certain specific conditions are met. One such condition is incontrovertible evidence of guilt. And the f-wit shooter deserves a needle in this case.

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Frank Sterle Jr's avatar

All lives and needless suffering should matter. But that’s much easier for a conscience to dismiss when one considers another an innately much lower lifeform. Human beings are being seen and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and supposedly Christian nations. And it’s not hard for a conscience to do when one considers another an innately lower lifeform.

A somewhat similar reprehensible inhuman(e) devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in prolongedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken regions. In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news. It’s an immoral consideration of ‘quality of life’.

With each news report of the immense daily suffering and civilian death toll from unrelenting bombardment, I feel a slightly greater desensitization and resignation. I’ve noticed this disturbing effect with basically all major protracted conflicts internationally since I began regularly consuming news products in the late 1980s.

_____

WITH news-stories’ human subjects’ race and culture dictating

quantity of media coverage of even the poorest of souls,

a renowned newsman formulated a startling equation

justly implicating collective humanity’s news-consuming callousness

— “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus

make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames.”

.

According to this unjust news-media mentality reasonably deduced

five hundred prolongedly-war-weary Middle Eastern Arabs getting blown

to bits in the same day perhaps should take up even less space and airtime.

.

So readily learned is the tiny token short story buried in the bottom

right-hand corner of the newspaper’s last page, the so brief account

involving a long-lasting war about which there’s virtually absolutely

nothing civil; therefore caught in the warring web are civilians most

unfortunate, most weak, the very most in need of peace and civility.

.

And it’s naught but business as usual in the damned nations

where such severe suffering almost entirely dominates the

fractured structured daily routine of civilian slaughter

(plus that of the odd well-armed henchman) mostly by means

of bomb blasts from incendiary explosive devices, rock-fire fragments

and shell shock readily shared with freshly shredded shrapnel wounds

resulting from smart bombs often launched for the

stupidest of reasons into crowded markets and grade schools. …

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