Why Slate Mag Is "Baffled" By Tsarnaev Jury & Anyone Not Like Them

How can you not be amazed? It's dominance-by-whining!

Just can't even is a weapon. It's an amazingly effective weapon, and I can't even be mad.

Seth Stevenson at Slate Magazine is baffled at the reasoning of the jury in the Boston bomber case, because they bafflingly decided in 14.5 hours that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should die. According to Stevenson's column, which is one big emotional appeal punctuated by petulant remarks efforting to be snarky, this is less time than it takes him to choose new pants online. Perhaps he would have been less baffled if the jury's decision had taken more than pants time. Pants time is, like, the threshold of human decency, come on you guys.

This "was a tragically misguided political statement from a 19-year-old idiot", and Stevenson opined that "Dzhokhar is three bong hits deep and playing Xbox this afternoon" if not for his older brother Tamerlan.

The people who have been busy establishing the current illiberal thought narrative have made such a virtue out of toeing the party line that they have lost the ability to empathize with or understand different ways of thinking. They look at the freaks on the other side of a gap they themselves have created, and just can't even. That's right. They just can't even.

Because those who disagree with the dominant mode are ridiculous and insane.

The inanity (note: not "insanity", "inanity") of this generation of illiberals is greater than the destructiveness of their grandparents. One of Stevenson's lines in particular stuck out as quintessentially This Generation: "That’s nuts. Tamerlan was clearly in the driver’s seat, in my view."

That's right. He starts off with an absolute declaration: that's crazy, y'all. You don't even know. These bitches be crazy. NUTS, y'all! And he ends the very next sentence, talking about the same thing, with as subjective and pussified a phrase as has ever existed: "in my view".

Id est, you people are insane, but that's just IMHO. But no seriously you're crazy.

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The alienness Stevenson establishes is very important to the dominant mode of discourse. ("Discourse." Pshaw.) The alienness is a weapon.

Since most people in most places in most times have actually thought like people, more or less rigorously and more or less correctly, but always like the people they are, the dominant mode has had to create this bafflement artificially. And they have to be pretty violent about it, because most of the thinking they attack is the way their great-grandfathers thought, and is the way many of their countrymen think today.

This alienness is created through emotion. Anger, fear, contempt. All the classic alienation emotions are deployed is this propaganda campaign. We have met the enemy, and he is less than human.

This meme is about computer games.

Is it a conspiracy? Of course not. It's a bunch of people trying to rebel against God, a bunch of people who lack the balls of the Greeks or the ruthlessness of the East. For two hundred years they have abused the Christian mercy built into the fabric of Western civilization to, with gathering numbers and momentum, whine and emote their way to dominance. And make no mistake, dominant is what they are. Not in numbers, but in political and cultural power.

Every once in a while there's a hiccup in the narrative, like a New England jury sentencing someone to death. These are frustrating, and the response must be I just can't even.

But usually those who go against the illiberal narrative were already fit into the enemy box, and they behave as expected. These people are to be spit upon, mocked, and reviled. Only after the righteous expense of emotion, after the cathartic scapegoating, is the law deployed. And the law itself is now part of our emotional fabric. People are made to bake cakes, apologize for sermons, beg mercy of child services, and forced to pay fines.

The logic behind the death penalty in a society is not difficult to understand. In fact, it's about as easy to follow as anything that has ever existed among men. An eye for an eye. There are many reasons to disagree with it, but no reasons to not understand it.

Our society has lost the ability to disagree rationally. It is unacceptable to the dominant mode that their enemies display any logic. Gone is the liberal idea that two people could have logically consistent arguments yet one of them be wrong because his premises were wrong. Now anyone who disagrees with the dominant premise is insane, and there will be no argument.

Now the dominant mode is baffled, and this bafflement is a weapon with which to make the others Other. When alternative thoughts arise, the dominant mode will just can't even. There will be no understanding. There will be no mercy.

There will be no tolerance.