Ace over at The Ace of Spades HQ has a post up that pretty well completely wraps up whats wrong with the far left. The inability to afford primacy to their fellow citizens or, in extreme cases, even their own species.
I've had this argument with a dozen leftists and hard liberals. They insist, among other things, that Americans should not be afforded by other Americans any special regard as concerns matters of life and death; they will insist, for example, that the collateral deaths of foreigners on a battlefield are just as important, if not more important, than deaths of American soldiers, and that the rules of engagement should be much more strict to avoid causing any foreign civilians harm, even if it results, as it must, in an increased death toll among American soldiers.
They do not see this as a question of American lives versus foreign lives. They only view it "objectively" as a question of soldiers versus civilians, with no weighting of soldiers' lives due to the fact they are their fellow American citizens.
Imagining they can and should remove natural human irrational and subjective sympathies from the equation — i.e., first duty to self and family, second duty to friends, third duty to community, fourth duty to nation, fifth and final duty to all others — they fetishize their own "enlightment" by refusing to prioritize the safety of their countrymen over non-countrymen.
This is, indeed, where the left departs from the majority in this country. It becomes particularly extreme in cases where someone refuses to put the human race itself ahead of the rights of non-humans. Ace cites the example of shark apologists:
The amateur webzine Slate had a good piece about an extreme form of this psychotic condition. Remember back during the "Summer of Shark" attacks, before 9/11, when all we thought we had to worry about was a spike in shark attacks (which really wasn't a spike at all; it was just a spike in news coverage) and Gary Conditt?
Some people actually chose to become, as Slate dubbed them, "shark apolgists." In a territorial dispute between sharks, which wanted to eat people, and human swimmers, who wanted to not be eaten, some biologists and environmentalists actually argued in favor of the sharks' "right" to chow down on 11-year-old boys. After all– it's their territory. They have to eat too, right?
There are even more extreme examples I think. The people who cheerfully argue that 90% of humanity needs to die off to save the earth. PETA and ELF both take these extremes to a whole new level. I think Ace makes a lot of sense.
At some point, we just don't have the luxury of decadent philosophical inquiries as to who the real monsters are, us or them. When someone's trying to kill you, you don't have the luxury of exploring whether or not your would-be killer feels justified in his efforts at murder, or has legitimate grievances against the US or Israel, or whether there are "root causes" which mitigate his evil. You either defend yourself or die.
A lot of people in this country just don't seem to understand that. They are unwilling to simply say, "We are at war; it is time to defend ourselves." And by rejecting that simple, unnuanced, "jingoistic" notion, they instead choose death.
And not just their own deaths, of course; they choose death for their fellow Americans, to the extent they can put their desires into practice.
And while these peacocks strut about to show off the pretty feathers of their "enlightened morality," men of real morals and genuine courage are, of course, dying in order to protect them. Better men die so that they can wallow and luxuriate in their presumed righteousness and then scorn those who make their decadance, and very continued existence, possible.
I choose to support the people who protect us. Who do you support?
