Those of you who have hung around here for a while (which I think is exactly one of you) know that I lean right. I have absolutely no respect for wokism or any of that tripe. I’m not a Republican, though, and I’m about to tell you why.
This is a post where I, sort of, eat my own.
Fox news comments are fascinating to watch, because they’re utterly useless half the time. About 95% of the comments fit these tropes:
- Life was so much better when I was a kid, and now everything’s gone to shit.
- Life was so much better when Trump was president, and now everything’s gone to shit.
- [criminal of the day] should just be put to death and spare us all the cost.
- If [criminal of the day] had tried that with me, I’d only call 911 to have them remove the body.
- Biden stinks.
That’s pretty much everything. There are a few independent thinkers there, they get downvoted to hell and back, because as I said, Fox News Commenters are Idiots.
I’ve come to believe that most of the commenters there are in their 70s, and are desperately hanging on to a world that no longer exists.
I think tropes 3 and 4 are the worst, though. I’d be willing to bet that about 60% of the people who write those kinds of things would just fold if they were ever actually confronted by a criminal, and another 36% or so are just waiting for a chance to actually legally take someone’s life. The other 4% actually are exactly what they say they are.
And they think they’re all that.
They’re keyboard warriors. Nothing more.
There’s a fundamental issue here, and it comes down to the concept of justice. There is a certain brand of person out there who thinks justice and punishment/revenge are the same thing. They’re mostly the types of people who comment on Fox News. Now, to be fair, there is a certain value to deterrence. But that’s not justice, it’s deterrence. When someone does an awful thing, and they’re punished for it, no one ever feels like they actually got justice. No one can take back what they’ve done, no matter how big or small it is. They do, often, feel like they’ve gotten revenge. And our entire criminal justice system is based on revenge, not justice.
This is one thing – and maybe the only thing – that there is a small grain of truth in the left’s philosophies, as stupid as they otherwise are.
And people, like the idiots that comment on fox news, don’t understand this. They never will understand this. Because they’re just as ideological and just as unintelligent as the woke idiots who hang out on Daily Kos and Raw Story and bemoan the idiots on the right, as they see them. And they’re bloodthirsty, too. They’re bloodthirsty and call themselves Christians.
Yeah. Umm.
The other fundamental issue is a lack of nuance. The extremists on both sides have this issue. Take abortion, for example. It’s a nuanced argument that by necessity has to take into account the rights of both the mother and the child. The extremists on the right would have you believe that it’s never appropriate and that a child should be taken to term no matter what, even if it kills the mother. That’s a lack of nuance. Yes, those kinds of circumstances are rare, but they do happen, and to make the value judgement that the child is more important than the mother only serves to devalue women. Yes, it does. While I think conservatives generally have the right of the argument when it comes to gender roles and the role of reproduction, there does tend to be a certain antipathy towards women that shows loud and clear when it comes to the abortion argument. Because it’s hard to argue that they don’t value the child more.
On the left, of course, the lack of nuance goes in the other direction. They don’t value children. They value the woman instead, because, well, the child is just an “unwanted parasite” and the mother is the one who gets to make the decision, so… the child dies. That’s also a lack of nuance.
But I’m not here to rail on the left, just this once.
Thankfully, the types of people who comment on Fox News are dying of old age. They’ll be gone in twenty years. What replaces them, well… that’s an entirely different kind of stupid.
If you want to argue with me (Fox News style)… don’t. Keep it over there, please. If you want to actually be intelligent and nuanced, well, comment away.
I don’t expect comments.